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  #1   ^
Old Tue, Oct-11-11, 11:56
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Demi Demi is offline
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Default Dr Briffa: It looks like our ancient ancestors ate a low-carb diet

From Dr Briffa's blog:

Quote:
It looks like our ancient ancestors ate a low-carb diet

Posted By John Briffa
11 October 2011

I make no secret of the fact that I’m a believer in the concept that our diets should, for the most part, emulate those of our ancient ancestors. The diet we ate for long periods of our evolution is likely the diet we are best adapted to and is the best for us. There’s abundant scientific evidence to support this concept, by the way, and most agree that it makes sense too.

The thing is, do we actually know what our ancient ancestors ate? There is evidence that prior to about 10,000 years ago, our ancestors were hunter-gatherers. For the vast majority of our evolution our diet was devoid of many modern-day foodstuffs including bread, pasta, breakfast cereals, milk, refined vegetable oils and refined sugar. ‘New’ foods eaten in the last 10,000 years make up about 75 per cent of the typical calories consumed in a ‘standard Western diet’.

Until recently, in evolutionary terms, the human diet was ostensibly made up of ‘primal’ foods such as meat, fish, shellfish, eggs, fruits, vegetables and nuts. However, it stands to reason too that the relative proportions of these foods in the diet would have varied considerably as a result of availability and necessity.

Our ancestors evolving away near the equator would, likely, have decent access to plant-based foods including fruit and vegetable matter. But the further away we get from the equator towards the poles, the less plant matter there is, and the more reliant on hunting for meat and fish our ancestors would have been.

One way of getting some insight into the details of our evolutionary diet is to examine the diet of modern hunter-gatherers. Probably the best source of relevant data here is known as the Ethnographic Atlas. Within it can be found dietary information from 229 contemporary hunter-gatherer societies. This data was recently analysed by two German researchers in an effort to gain insight about the carbohydrate content of primitive, hunter-gatherer diets [1].

The percentage of calories contributed by carbohydrate varied from about 3 per cent to around 50 per cent. It will come as no surprise that they discovered that percentage of the diet coming from carbohydrate was higher in populations close to the equator than those further away. The most common percentage among all the groups came in at around 20 per cent.

Official recommendations are normally that about 60 per cent of the calories we consume should come from carbohydrate. That’s actually higher than the most carbohydrate-rich hunter-gatherer diet of all, and about three times the average carbohydrate percentage in such diets. The authors of this study conclude, ‘…the range of energy intake from carbohydrates in the diets of most hunter-gatherer societies was markedly different (lower) from the amounts currently recommended for healthy humans.’

It’s perhaps worth mentioning too that not only has the quantity of carbohydrate changed in percentage terms, but its quality too. Long gone are the days when our carbohydrate mainly game in the form of fruits and vegetables including tubers. Now, we consume much more in the way of grain-based products, many of which have been refined, refined sugar and fruit that has been cultivated to be sweeter than fruit found in the wild.

Evolution allows some adaptation over time, of course, but there are limits. Adaptation is generally slow to come, and many of us run the risk of consuming carbohydrate beyond what is good for us in terms of both quality and quantity.

There problems with such a diet are manifold, I think. We can have the blood sugar disruption and surges of insulin to start with. Peaks of blood sugar encourage damage in the body through a variety of processes including inflammation and glycation (binding of sugar to tissues). Highs of blood sugar can lead some time later to lows which can trigger all manner of symptoms such as hunger, food cravings, mental fatigue, mood change and waking in the night.

The surges of insulin that comes in response to gluts of blood sugar can predispose us to problems such as weight gain, heart disease and type 2 diabetes.

Of course one way out of this would be to reject conventional nutritional advice on carbohydrate consumption, and keep the diet as ‘primal’ as possible.

References:

1. Ströhle A, et al. Diets of modern hunter-gatherers vary substantially in their carbohydrate content depending on ecoenvironments: results from an ethnographic analysis. Nutr Res 2011;31(6):429-35.
http://www.drbriffa.com/2011/10/11/...-low-carb-diet/
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  #2   ^
Old Tue, Oct-11-11, 16:48
M Levac M Levac is offline
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Quote:
Until recently, in evolutionary terms, the human diet was ostensibly made up of ‘primal’ foods such as meat, fish, shellfish, eggs, fruits, vegetables and nuts. However, it stands to reason too that the relative proportions of these foods in the diet would have varied considerably as a result of availability and necessity.

And technology and ability. Technology and ability allows us to produce large quantities of those same primal foods. Merely gathering them doesn't allow the same quantities. Consequently, it's more likely that the same primal foods didn't constitute any significant portion of our diet at any time before the advent of agriculture. So much for the paleo idea of lots of fruits and vegetables.
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Old Tue, Oct-11-11, 21:10
Zei Zei is offline
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In most climates except maybe near the equator fruits and vegetables were naturally available just during their individual harvest seasons, then gone the rest of the year. That is until people developed innovative ways of preserving (cans, freezing), growing out of season in hothouses, storage and transportation all over the world. So now all these fruits and veggies are readily available year-round in your local grocery store with governments pushing for us to eat lots of servings of them each day. Is this how people used to be able to eat? No. Are all those daily government-approved servings a good idea for your health? I doubt it.
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  #4   ^
Old Wed, Oct-12-11, 08:16
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RawNut RawNut is offline
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Does anyone remember the Lady of Trent - the Mesolithic woman of England who ate like a wolf? http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/746001/posts

Also, this Eurasian man who ate a diet high in animal protein. http://www.pnas.org/content/106/27/10971.full
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  #5   ^
Old Wed, Oct-12-11, 10:32
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Angeline Angeline is offline
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I dunno if any of you watched I caveman, but it was illuminating in many ways. The group was dropped in a fairly temperate zone, I can't remember where exactly. They only had very basic tools at their disposition, the type that was available to our ancestors. They were given some survival skill training, which I assume must have involved how to forage for edible foodstuff. Despite the training, they found it extremely hard to find enough food. They were in effect, starving. The starvation only came to an end when they managed to bring down an elk. There was plenty of elks around, but didn't seem to be plenty of anything else. Not for the amount of calories they needed. I'm sure there was a lack of knowledge involved in this lack of success, but still, it was pretty telling. The effort to scrounge up edible stuff was both hard and rather unproductive. The effort to bring down a elk was very difficult but could feed you for a long long time. It's pretty clear which was the most efficient means of feeding your group. And it was available year round. What it boils down to, is that back in that period, game was plentiful in temperate zones, but foodstuff not as much, depending on the season. So is it really a surprise that man was mostly carnivorous ?

I'm pretty sure the situation was different for tropical environment where there isn't so much big game, but there exist a variety of seasonal fruits, vegetables and tubers.
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Old Wed, Oct-12-11, 11:10
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Angeline

I'm pretty sure the situation was different for tropical environment where there isn't so much big game, but there exist a variety of seasonal fruits, vegetables and tubers.
There must have been a lot of animal competition for the vegetables and tubers.
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  #7   ^
Old Wed, Oct-12-11, 11:17
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WereBear WereBear is online now
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Angeline
I'm pretty sure the situation was different for tropical environment where there isn't so much big game, but there exist a variety of seasonal fruits, vegetables and tubers.



The Polynesians do quite well with fish & coconut, as reported by Gary Taubes in his books. When the supply ship sank and it took months to resupply outlying islands, the people dropped the Western diet and went back to fish & coconut; with measured increases in their health indices.
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  #8   ^
Old Wed, Oct-12-11, 15:56
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aj_cohn aj_cohn is offline
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Default Citation for the study Dr. Briffa mentioned

I was curious about the study Dr. Briffa referred to in this blog post, so I wrote him to inquire. He was good enough to provide this citation: Murdock GP. Ethnographic atlas: a summary. Ethnology 1967.

What surprised me is that this information has been available for at least 40 years, and that it's surfacing just now.
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  #9   ^
Old Wed, Oct-12-11, 16:28
M Levac M Levac is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by aj_cohn
I was curious about the study Dr. Briffa referred to in this blog post, so I wrote him to inquire. He was good enough to provide this citation: Murdock GP. Ethnographic atlas: a summary. Ethnology 1967.

What surprised me is that this information has been available for at least 40 years, and that it's surfacing just now.

Well, considering that we're noting how it contradicts the current dogma now, it follows that this would have been obvious to anybody else back then too. And if I wanted my dogma to dominate, I'd bury any contradictory information. Maybe that's why.
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  #10   ^
Old Thu, Oct-13-11, 10:28
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aj_cohn aj_cohn is offline
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There have been low-carb advocates over the past 30 years: Lyle McDonald, Malcolm Kendrick, Robert Atkins, Michael Eades. What surprises me is that none of these LC allies have found this information until now.
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