I think the reason he puts it that way is mostly because he thinks of people and animals adapting to their environment. But he realizes that it takes eons to adapt - Another snippet:
Quote:
Thompson:.... those ancient civilizations. They were very different from us in many, many ways. We don’t have to go back 20,000 years just to find health and happiness and flourishing in the 2020s.
Lieberman: No, but if I can just interrupt you, we did evolve. Agriculture was invented only 600 generations ago. That’s the number of generations of mice that have probably lived in my basement since this house was built. It’s been a blink of an eye that we’ve been living, eating farm food. In fact, the industrial revolution was just a few generations ago.
|
So he realizes that farm food (grains, sugars) are not something we're adapted to - I'm not sure whether or not he realizes that humans aren't likely to ever adapt to it, because in some ways he makes it sound like it's possible.
The food has changed way too fast for adaptation to occur - and the food continues to change at a rate that even if we were to fully adapt to the early agriculture food in another 20,000 years, we still wouldn't be caught up with what's out there now.
Many people have been able to *tolerate* those grains and sugars with minimal problems, but they aren't really adapted to them - they aren't really good for their health, even if they aren't showing any obvious signs of problems from those foods.
The rest of us have a low tolerance level (or no tolerance for them at all), especially as what could be considered the ongoing industrial revolution in food production has resulted in UPFs with a high addictive factor, resulting in obesity on a large scale, and all the associated illnesses.
But it does go back to we simply don't have the digestive system, metabolism, etc to really handle the current foods.
His attitude about paleo and hating the word optimal in relation to diet is silly - paleo is much closer to what our bodies can handle due to the lack of grains and added sugars, although certainly not an ideal diet for some.
And really - finding foods these days that are truly the same as our paleo ancestors would have eaten? Not likely - even without GMO everything has been cross pollinated and hybridized to produce fruits and veggies that are nothing like what paleos subsisted on. Even our livestock have been bred for certain characteristics to provide more food. As unlike true paleo as the current "paleo diet" is, it's still the closest we're going to get to it though.