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Paleofantasy

What Evolution Really Tells Us About Sex, Diet, and How We Live
Mar 24, 2018gaetanlion rated this title 5 out of 5 stars
This book has so much impact. Nowadays, any best-selling author/nutritionist advancing a specific protocol will ground his findings based on what he feels is solid backed science regarding what we ate during the paleolithic era during a pre-agricultural time over 10,000 years ago. He will advance that what he recommends is what our human body was designed to ingest as the healthiest fuel. A basic premise is that human evolution is really slow, typically measured in 100,000 of years, and that over the past 10,000 years our genome has not had time to adapt to our unfavorable post-agricultural nutritional changes. Overall, the above seems reasonable. The one problem is that authors/nutritionists using the same set of anthropological arguments contradict each other. Some advance that 80% of our calories during pre-agricultural times came from fat plants (more gathering than hunting), others state the same 80% came instead from starch-plants, and another group (the classic Paleo diet clan) opine that the majority of our nutrients came from animal protein (more hunting than gathering). In another domain, history, it is in vogue to denounce the first agricultural revolution (about 10,000 years ago) as the worst invention in the history of mankind. Supposedly, this revolution affected in nefarious ways our lifestyle, our health, and the quality of our nutrients. And, to this day we pay a harsh price for this cataclysmic sociological event of our distant past. Common assumptions that both nutritionists and historians make is that during the pre-agricultural era, human beings were perfectly in tune with their environment. And, that agriculture triggered a set of unfortunate changes culminating with our sedentary lifestyle, bad nutrition, and chronic diseases. However, Zuk, an evolutionary ecologist shares several concepts that negate all the above narratives. I’ll share with you a few. Human evolution can be fast. Throughout the book, Zuk mentions examples of fast human evolution: 1) the ability to digest lactose as an adult (lactase persistence); 2) the ability to digest grain with the enzyme amylase; 3) adaptation to live at very high altitude; 3) resistance to Malaria in certain African population; and 4) emergence of blue eyes in Northern European population. Those changes occurred within the last 10,000 years or much faster. The agricultural revolution was good for mankind. As soon as trades took place, the abundance and diversity of food provided a source of nutrient far superior to the bare survival level of hunters-gatherers society. And, the rest is history as they say. Agriculture facilitated our information age civilization. With no agriculture, you would not have gotten to the IPad. Another thing to keep in mind is that humans ate grains long before the agricultural revolution. Small-scale agriculture was prevalent even among our ancestors the Neandertals. We have never been in a perfect harmonious balance with our environment. There is a chronic arms race between pathogens and our own genes and antibodies to fight them. And, that is evolution at work on both sides of the battle (pathogens and genes). The humans living during the Paleolithic had their own survival struggle. Documenting their rate of chronic modern diseases of old age is difficult and maybe also futile. Given their challenging lifestyle they suffered fewer disease of “old age” because they did not experience “old age” Attempting to replicate some form of “Paleo diet” is futile. That is because there is no such thing as a Paleo diet given the diversity of what people ate; and, there is no evidence that ancestors were that adapted to their foods.