I wrote last week about an incredible article written by the famous Dr. McDougall that lays waste to the idiot reasoning of the Paleo Dietput forth by the fanatical CrossFit crew.
Here again is another well written article that follows the
same line of reasoning based on strong evidence.
Titled, Human Ancestors Were Nearly All Vegetarians, this
excellent article, with good sprinkles of humor, again lays waste to the idiocy
of the Paleo Diet that is pushed by the trendy CrossFit movement. I pasted in key paragraphs below to summarize
the argument (backed up again by strong anthropological findings), but you can
read the full article at: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2012/07/23/human-ancestors-were-nearly-all-vegetarians/
If I was to sum it up, I’d say, yes, there is a paleo diet,
but those who want to TRULY follow it may not really like what it TRULY
is! Read on.
From the article:
The majority of the food consumed by primates today–and
every indication is for the last thirty million years–is vegetable, not animal.
Plants are what our apey and even earlier ancestors ate; they were our paleo diet
for most of the last thirty million years during which our bodies, and our guts
in particular, were evolving. In other words, there is very little evidence
that our guts are terribly special and the job of a generalist primate gut is
primarily to eat pieces of plants. We have special immune systems, special
brains, even special hands, but our guts are ordinary and for tens of millions
of years those ordinary guts have tended to be filled with fruit, leaves, and
the occasional delicacy of a raw hummingbird
Which paleo diet should we eat? The one from twelve thousand years ago? A hundred thousand years ago? Forty million years ago? IF we want to return to our ancestral diets, the ones we ate when most of the features of our guts were evolving, we might reasonably eat what our ancestors spent the most time eating during the largest periods of the evolution of our guts. If that is the case, we need to be eating fruits, nuts, and vegetables—especially fungus-covered tropical leaves.
Or maybe you are really paleo and you are going to focus on
insects, which might favor other bacteria (able to break down insect chitin).
Eating insects has many advantages too, albeit not for the insects. Any of
these possibilities are better than the average modern diet, one so bad that
any point in the past can come to seem like the good ole days, unless you go
too far back to a point when our ancestors lived more like rats and probably
ate everything, including their own feces. Sometimes what happens in paleo
should really stay in paleo
