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The "Caveman Diet": Should We Try to Eat Like Our Ancenstors? |
Were 'Cave-People' Healthier Than Modern Humans? The answer to this question depends upon which people in each group we choose to examine. Hunter gatherer societies that were still extant in modern times and that were studied systematically appear to be largely free of many of the modern age-related illnesses like obesity, diabetes, hypertension and coronary heart disease, so it would be tempting to argue on this basis that indeed hunter-gatherers are healthier, but one must be careful about generalizing from a small number of individual people to the modern population of the earth. It is certainly true that 60 and 70 year-old hunter-gatherers don't get fat, but how many people in that setting actually live that long? Hunter-gatherers don't tend to die from modern age related illness, they tend to die from far more traditional causes like starvation, traumatic accident, infectious disease and so on. Lest our modern focus upon diseases of affluence narrow our perspective, we would do well to remember that the average human lifespan in American society is above 70 years whereas the average lifespan of ancient humans was likely less than 30 years. Is There Evidence That a Caveman Diet Is Healthy? As I have said many times throughout this website, nearly ANY diet that causes weight loss will prove healthy for modern Americans, so yes, because this style of diet is a low carbohydrate diet, it will promote weight loss and therebye likely improve health. But remember, this is true of nearly ALL diets and that in the end, effectiveness alone is not the best way to judge a diet. One must actually be able to live that way in the long term and in the real world. Remember that agriculture, the simple idea that not eating every seed in sight but instead saving a few and putting them into fertile soil next spring to guarantee more seed next summer-- this simple idea changed the world by enabling humans to protect themselves through planning for the future. Agriculture led to the first villages and permanent human settlements which led to government, money and above all, free time for a few people who then invented writing, tool-making, copper smelting, engineering and medicine. The last ten thousand years of humans on Earth have allowed us to become the dominant species on the planet and to live far longer and better on average than any hunter-gatherer could have possible imagined. So is a caveman diet healthy? Meh... it doesn't really matter because we're not cavemen. |
One of the strongest arguments in favor of low carbohydrate diets is that our hunter-gatherer distant ancestors almost certainly had very limited access to carbohydrate and that therefore because of hundreds of thousands of years (if not millions) of evolution our bodies and digestive systems are best adapted to low carbohydrate diets. The most extreme example of this approach may be the so-called "Paleolithic Diet" or "Caveman Diet" which argues for eating as we believe ancient hunter-gatherers ate. How Exactly DID Cavemen (and Cavewomen) Eat? The simplest answer to this question is that they probably ate what was available to them that required the lowest amount of energy and risk to obtain. Obviously, climate and geography (location) must have played a big role in food choices so that people living in a rain forest likely ate more plants while people living in, say Siberia, ate more meat. With this likely variability as a caveat we can say this: hunter-gatherer diets were far higher in fiber, leafy greens and whole fruits than modern diets. They were also likely higher in animal protein (including insects) than most diets today. Because, by definition, hunter-gatherer societies preceed agriculture, one major dietary difference stands out: 'cavemen' ate far less carbohydrate than modern humans. |
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