In Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Weston Price, we learn that skulls and teeth are a reliable and accurate indicator of diet and health. That's how we know they were more healthy than we are.


This entire paragraph is based on the assumption that as they (our ancestors) grew older, they also grew weaker, slower, sicker, feebler, and stupider. That assumption is unfounded because it is based on our current elder population, not on our ancestors'. Further, if cutting out carbohydrate returns us to good health, then never having eaten it never makes us sick to begin with. Thus, our ancestors, who ate little to no carbohydrate (which is confirmed by their perfect skulls and teeth), would not have grown weak or sick or stupid with age.

This paragraph is pure fiction. The Inuit don't eat the contents of the stomach of animals they kill for the simple reason that's it disgusting. Further, they didn't live a life of extreme deprivation. Or, I don't know what she means by deprivation. Maybe she means deprived of advanced technology? But they never needed it nor did they know about it thus would not have been deprived from their point of view. Stefansson speaks of the Inuit as a happy people. Deprived and happy are opposite. I believe Stefansson.

Insulin is directly atherogenic. Carbohydrate drives insulin. End of argument.

Uric acid drives blood pressure. Fructose drives uric acid. Sugar is half fructose. End of argument.

Glucose is an immuno-suppressant. Sugar is half glucose. It's not the exercise that made them vulnerable, it's the sugar.

Starvation leaves distinct and unmistakable traces on the bones during growth. If our ancestors starved during that time in their lives, we will find those traces on their bones.

Developing the diseases of civilization has nothing to do with living long enough but everything to do with eating enough carbohydrate. It may look like there's a connection between how old we are and how sick we are but it's only because in order to eat enough carbohydrate, it takes a long time. But these days, even that is challenged in view of the growing number of young people with diabetes type 2 which used to be called adult-onset. Further, those disease are merely the symptoms of carbohydrate poisoning.

Jenny obviously didn't study anthropology closely enough. Her "critique" is full of fallacies that are corrected in the modern literature.

I call bullshit

There is good evidence that paleolithic people did not suffer regular famines, did take care of the sick and the old (there are skeletons of people who had all sorts of congenital deformities and who made it to an impressive age), not all hunter-gatherers roam the way she seems to think they do, and hunter+gatherers practice birth control and spacing.

Oh, and game is stupid and doesn't flee the scene of the crime, as I found when I had a large garden and was regularly eating the animals that came and ate there. Year after year they would return and get eaten.

Her view of it seems to be science circa 1754. I hate it when people write in a sciency authoritative way when they don't have the evidence to back it up.

I don't want to disparage her totally though. She is completely right about the exercise. The idea that exercise leads to a longer life is sadly not true. I've seen many farmers, who get plenty of exercise daily, drop dead in their 50s.

As an academic researcher until a few months ago, I had access to all the peer reviewed research out there. It costs several thousand dollars to access that stuff (I miss it) and I highly doubt Jenny gets to read much of it because she is not an academic researcher and probably didn't study science in university either. She has some access to a few abstracts and decides to take down the paleo diet. But she messes up because she then uses evidence that people were unhealthy from eras when people were practicing agriculture. Working to death in a steel mill and typhoid were not hazards of the paleolithic era.

Anthropology has come to accept that paleolithic peoples were not the nicest people ever and that they frequently killed each other in various gruesome ways and sometimes even ate each other. The past wasn't idyllic, but people did not lose their feet from diabetes.

This. She sounds like Thomas Jefferson, who based most of his theories of primitive people on backwards extrapolations from what was true then about the improvements in quality of life from the Dark Ages. He thought that if contemporaries were living into their late '50s, and the Medieval British were living until their middle '40s, then if we draw the line to its logical conclusion, the pre-Greeks must have lived until their middle '30s and so pre-agricultural people must have lived until they were 10. Needless to say, he didn't get very far with this theory, although the general theory that people just kept living longer and longer since time immemorial stuck around until the 20th Century.

Poor Thomas Jefferson, eh? Must be hard to be the generation of thinkers who realize that Adam and Eve was just a story and had to come up with something else. Thomas Jefferson never really made it out, and apparently died thinking that the native people of the Western Hemisphere were descendants of one of the lost tribes of Israel.

I read the blog replies just now, and--of course--her readers confuse Paleo with TheBear on this forum and the carnivores generally. For the record, TheBear is not Paleo and never claimed to be.

And I recognize some repliers as former members of this forum. One of them I missed having around here until I read her replies to the blog. Man.

A bit of math: A 1% advantage will spread thoughout the human population in about 1000 years. We have been living with grains for several thousand years.

Agriculture undoubtedly allowed populations to grow greatly. None of us, as individuals, would be here without agriculture. The course of history would be so different that only actual hunter-gatherer cultures would be the same, and even they often have a lot of indirect influence from the rest of the world.

The continued life span increase, and even more importantly the continued good or pretty good good health into the ninth decade speaks for itself. Grains are not bad for most people - but they sure aint good for me.

What makes you think this?

Thanks for the numbers. It sounds like the Medieval British did no better than the Paleos, then. But I still want to know why we're living longer now. I'm not sure I buy the standard arguments about hygiene, technology, modern conveniences, etc.

What's wrong with that argument. I don't think much else could possibly make as much impact. Lots of things can go wrong with population densities rise.

Look, even having screens on our windows has helped. Infectious diseases spread by mosquito and other insects is almost a thing of the past. Having drinking water without pathogens in it is hugely important. That's a major problem still in some undeveloped countries. Look at how many people were killed in cholera outbreaks, like from that contaminated well-pump in London. And then there's parasites.

You could argue that these things wouldn't be problems to people with healthier immune systems, like we think Paleo people have. I don't have really know if even the healthiest immune system can withstand onslaughts from cholera, epidemics, food or water or insect borne pathogens.

One word. Antibiotics.

Patrick

So technological solutions like clean water, antibiotics, and living indoors can help us in crowded conditions. But what about people who are not overcrowded? Presumably they're not subject to massive epidemics of disease, but they still don't live as long as we do. Or do they?

Mike, I was describing a broken theory that held sway for far longer than it needed to. I was not giving you numbers that exist as physical data; I was giving you the line of thinking that predominated in the early days of scientific thought on the subject. Jefferson was wrong.


It's not that Paleo people had stronger immune systems; it's that Paleo people did not live in conditions that made them sick. Without domestic animals and open sewers and polluted water, the risk drops considerably. Funny how we have to recreate the Paleolithic environment in order to not die of plague disease.


There is no biological theory that explains why Homo would spend millions of years living only half of its possible life span. There is no animal example of anything remotely similar, and the idea violates much of what we know of evolution by natural selection.

Without antibiotics a lot of people who lived to become obese would die before they could reproduce themselves. Your metabolism controls your effectiveness against infections of all sorts. If your metabolism was less efficient (slower), you would die more easily.

It's not a bright picture, but our current common diet is also a big factor in breaking our metabolism and preventing proper expression of some genes. Thus making it worst for our children.

Patrick

Are you saying that Paleos lived longer than we think, or that we don't know why they didn't live longer?

I'm not sure what you mean by animal examples. I mean from http://www.fs.fed.us/database/feis/animals/mammal/for example:

(but in captivity are known to live up to 10-12 years)

Or as it says at: http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/natbltn/400-499/nb486.htm

It seems the majority of animals in the wild are lucky to live half their possible life span. I've read elsewhere that feral cats rarely live beyond two or three, but house cats often live into their 20s.

As for humans living half their potential lifespans? I have no numbers on the issue. But if you are still fit and healthy when you become the dinner of a saber-toothed tiger when you are 40 you may have had a good quality of life (until those last few minutes!) but you've still lived only half your potential lifespan. I suspect those sorts of "opportunities" were more common for paleo man. Surely "infant mortality, diseases, predators, bad weather, accidents, or competition for food and shelter." would be major issues for them too?

It seems to me that this is backwards.....or incomplete. Animal based food WOULD be available year round, while PLANT based food would NOT. So perhaps her argument should be agriculture AND food preservation. Unless she can tell me how the heck to grow a good crop under the snow, in which case, this gardener is very interested!!!

Now we're talking!

I should have been more clear, and said that most of the plague disease that historically decimated human populations did not exist in the Paleolithic. The sources and vectors did not exist. So we must consider what actually might have existed to shorten any single life of a Paleolithic person.

Predation is a good place to start. A sabertooth was a predator to humans, but was not a predator to humans with spears.

Debbie, of the sources you listed (or any other), what ARE the specific causes of death of those animals in the wild?