From: Greg Jordan (jordan@chuma.cas.usf.edu)
Date: Wed Apr 30 2003 - 08:50:42 MDT
On Wed, 30 Apr 2003, gts wrote:
> Our intellects have very limited knowledge of proper diet. Many questions
> remain unanswered. Nutritionists themselves cannot agree on proper diet.
> They argue on television and at national health conferences. There is
> however no way to argue with millions of years of evolution.
There are a lot of ways to argue with it. First of all, we have very
little knowledge of what our Paleolithic ancestors actually ate. It must
be inferred from very scant evidence in the remains of the period. Many of
the things "paleodieters" assume must not have been in their diet very
likely were. For example, grains and legumes began to be cultivated in the
Neolithic because they had been gathered in the Mesolithic (with many
intermediary stages, as evident in studies of Near Eastern evidence).
Secondly, our paleolithic ancestors, though they managed to survive by the
Darwinian standards of managing to reproduce, were hardly what we would
call "healthy". They had short lifespans and their bodily remains evidence
numerous diseases and malconditions.
The history of hominids is one that bounces back and forth between
carnivory, herbivory, and omnivory, like a lot of that of mammals in
general. That implies to me that our bodies are actually probably very
flexible about diet. We evolved to eat just about anything because our
ancestors had trouble getting enough of anything. No optimal, Edenic diet
was ever discovered because humans were just barely able to stabilize
their survival, given their poor resources, tech, options, available food
sources, and predation/gathering skills. IMHO.
gej
resourcesoftheworld.org
jordan@chuma.cas.usf.edu
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