Diet wars: ‘Caveman diet’ is all the rage, but ignores what our ancient ancestors really ate

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Where's the bun? (Credit: dollen/Flickr)

Perhaps you too have recently dined with paleo diet enthusiasts. Some tell tale signs: ordering meat with meat on the side, a quarter of a grass-fed cow stuffed in their garage freezer, longing, side-eyed looks at toast.

These people chose a diet rich in lean proteins, nuts and non-root veggies. This is the same diet, they claim, our paleolithic ancestors ate and the diet which our bodies evolved to most efficiently process. But there are some holes in this theory. The first being that cavemen lived all over the planet, and ate literally everything they could find, including root vegetables. “What bothers a lot of paleoanthropologists is that we actually didn’t have just one caveman diet,” says Leslie Aiello, president of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research in New York City in National Geographic. “The human diet goes back at least two million years. We had a lot of cavemen out there.”

Ann Gibbons describes in a beautifully photographed story for National Geographic how scientists are looking toward the diets of the few, remaining hunter gatherer communities to help fill in the anthropological gaps about what our ancient relatives ate. As nutritional anthropologist Alyssa Crittenden said, “we have a small handful of foraging populations that remain on the planet. We are running out of time. If we want to glean any information on what a nomadic, foraging lifestyle looks like, we need to capture their diet now.”

The timing aspect is important because the last groups of people truly eating a hunter-gatherer diet are being rapidly influenced and altered by agricultural influenced food. As those groups move into sugar-heavy diets, they develop obesity, diabetes and heart disease, often at greater rates than in populations already exposed.

And although the influence on meat is definitely true of both hunter-gatherer cultures and the modern ‘caveman diet’ it’s not the whole picture. True hunters gorged on meat when they could, but there were a lot of lean times, Gibbons points out. And during those times harvested tuber veggies often filled the void. Modern hunter-gather tribes also use this tactic:

The Hadza get almost 70 percent of their calories from plants. The Kung traditionally rely on tubers and mongongo nuts, the Aka and Baka Pygmies of the Congo River Basin on yams, the Tsimane and Yanomami Indians of the Amazon on plantains and manioc, the Australian Aboriginals on nut grass and water chestnuts.

Another reason to be critical of such a meat-intensive diet  are some negative health findings, including increased rates of cancers, in people who eat a great deal of meat, particularly  cured and highly processed forms.

Food writer Michael Pollen notes that even non-processed meats that people today eat are much different than the wild game available to paleolithic ancestors. “The animals bred by modern agriculture—which are fed artificial diets of corn and grains, and beefed up with hormones and antibiotics—have nutritional profiles far from wild game. Pastured animals, raised on diets of grass and grubs, are closer to their wild relatives; even these, however, are nothing like the lean animals our ancestors ate,” Pollen told Mother Jones’ Inquiring Minds podcast.

While some evolutionary anthropologists think increased meat intake was responsible for human’s accelerated brain growth, others point to another factor, cooking. Heating our food essentially begins the digestion process, making it more nutritionally available to us, and therefore a more efficient way to get calories. All human cultures cook, Gibbons points out. And it’s a very effective way to free up time according to Pollan:

Our hefty cousins, the apes, spend half their waking hours gnawing on raw sustenance, about six hours per day. In contrast, we spend only one hour. “So in a sense, cooking opens up this space for other activities,” says Pollan. “It’s very hard to have culture, it’s very hard to have science, it’s very hard to have all the things we count as important parts of civilization if you’re spending half of all your waking hours chewing.”

Regardless of its evolutionary or anthropological accuracy, the paleo diet does encourage people to move away from processed foods towards protein, fruits and veggies, a diet shift that nearly every nutritionist would agree with. The diet’s claims that its the best because it works so well with human genetics is oversimplified, but it’s a great way to sell books.

Meredith Knight is a blogger for Genetic Literacy Project and a freelance science and health writer in Austin, Texas. Follow her @meremereknight.

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