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Ancient Oat Discovery May Poke More Holes in Paleo Diet https://www.nationalgeographic.com/...-in-paleo-diet/

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Our Stone-Age ancestors didn’t gorge themselves on grains and other starchy fare, the thinking goes, and neither should we.

But now evidence has emerged that people enjoyed their carbs even during the Paleolithic era, a period also known as the Old Stone Age that stretched from roughly 2.5 million to 12,000 years ago. A new analysis of a Paleolithic pestle shows it was dusted with oat starch, suggesting that ancient humans were grinding oats into flour and, presumably, dining on oatcakes or some other oat-based delicacy. ...

Scientists still debate what exactly our forebears ate and in what proportion, but a growing number of archaeological finds show that ancient people ate just about everything–including the high-starch foods forbidden by more stringent Paleo diets. ...

Survival may have hinged on oats some 33,000 years ago at the Italian cave called Grotta Paglicci. Inside the cave, archaeologists have uncovered paintings and what must have been a cherished tool: a sandstone pestle about 5 inches (11.8 cm) long. Analysis reveals the pestle was studded with starch granules from a cornucopia of plant materials, including grasses similar to millet and what might be acorns, the researchers report in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. But the most common starch was from oats. ...

The pestle provides the oldest evidence for human oat consumption, adding to other evidence that “people were using grasses much earlier than we thought and in larger quantities than we thought, at some times of year,” Barton says. Pre-agricultural people also carbo-loaded on the tubers of the purple nut sedge, a noxious weed; underground stems of the cattail, which may have been ground into flour; and the seeds of wild wheat. ...

Stone-Age humans weren’t shoveling in large amounts of grain. But researchers generally agree that there was no single Paleolithic diet. Before farming began about 12,000 years ago, the human diet was absurdly, wildly variable, and fluid. How people fended off hunger depended on where they lived, the season of year, weather, and countless other factors. ...

For many Paleolithic people, the bottom of the food pyramid wasn’t red meat but plant food, such as tubers or starchy plant stems, says paleobiologist Amanda Henry of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. The relatively complex recipe used to prepare oats at Grotta Paglicci shows they were an important food to the people there, archaeologist Anna Revedin of the Italian Institute of Prehistory and Early History, a co-author of the oat study, says via email. Humans also ate snails, worms, grubs—“all kinds of little things that we would never think about now … would have been consumed on a daily basis,” Barton says.

Even some Paleo advocates don’t necessarily disagree. “The current food supply can’t hold a candle to Paleolithic man’s diet in terms of diversity,” Sarah Ballantyne, who blogs as The Paleo Mom, says via email. For her, Paleo diets are about improving nutrition, not about slavishly emulating the caveman’s eating habits.

Dr. Ede once described an onion as a "fruit wearing a vegetable suit" which is just ridiculous, imo, and the kind of thing that turns ordinary people completely off the idea of a low carb diet, which yes, I believe would help many people with mental illness. The question is "low carb/paleo" to what degree? Research is just trickling in about the microbiome and the brain/mental health connection. Is some amount of starch (as per Paul Jaminet) optimal? Or how about resistant starch?

My experience is that I feel pretty crappy (more depressed, insomniac) on a very low carb diet but I feel even worse on the SAD.