Paleoanthropologist and population geneticist John Hawks takes one look at a… questionable trend piece in the New York Times about “paleolithic diets” (notable quote from one practitioner “‘I didn’t want to do some faddish diet that my sister would do,’ Mr. Durant said.”) and finds the notion wanting. (Emphatic emphasis his.)
I’m the last person to promote gatekeeping in science. But a piece of free advice: Don’t get your information about human evolution from non-anthropologists who charge you money for subscriptions and seminars!
I think that’s actually pretty good advice by the way. And by profession Hawks pretty interested in ancestral diet and dietary practices. (See for instance You are what your ancestors ate, part 1 or Average diet versus extreme diet in robust australopithecines, although if you’re into that sort of things most of his posts on diet are fun to read.) And yet you don’t see him selling, or even offering, dietary advice.
Another one of his posts on food gets why that might be harder than it sounds. It also gets to the heart of the general problem with “ancient ancestors adapted for…” lines of reasoning.
[T]he idea that we are adapted to the Pleistocene can’t literally be true. [NYT science writer Marlene Zuk hits on the reasons very well: (a) the Pleistocene encompassed huge temporal and ecological variability, so that no human population was ever optimally adapted to any given time or place; (b) various historical and structural constraints make such optimization impossible; and© we’ve been evolving rapidly for the last few thousand years.
Proponents of evolutionary psychology bristle at accusations that their methods are “reductionist.” Which would be a bigger problem if a) they were all reductionist and b) there was anything wrong with a little reductionism in science. Instead, like proponents of “cave man” diets, the problem is more about radical oversimplification.
i dunno, the “cavemen” diet
Submitted by nekobawt (not verified) on Mon, 2010-01-11 23:25.i dunno, the “cavemen” diet sounds A LOT like the atkin’s diet (my only experience with such being an acquaintance with someone on the diet, mind you). i mean, no breads, eat only meat and vegetables? is it just me or does that ring a gigantic bell? and this guy doesn’t want to follow a “fad diet his sister would do”? i call bullshit. “i don’t want to follow a fad diet SO I’LL JUST START ONE.”
sigh. people.
[According to Hawks there’s some diet/lifestyle guru who’s pushing it. Based on “evolutionary ancestor” principles. And yes, it does sound quite a bit like Atkins. Which, by the way, I think is a great diet in the sense that pushing 5 years ago now I lost 45 pounds and haven’t gained it back. But the guy’s not only following a fad diet, he’s following one based on a lot of imagination and not much paleontology. Thanks, Nekobawt. —fl]
I think eating almost ANY
Submitted by Holly Pervocracy (not verified) on Tue, 2010-01-12 00:05.I think eating almost ANY conscious diet is better than random eating, so pretty much any roughly-balanced fad diet will produce some nice success stories.
But I think it’s a fallacy to say that eating like a caveman will produce perfect health. First, because I suspect a lot of cavemen were chronically malnourished (and I KNOW they would’ve jumped on a Big Mac like starving wolves if they’d ever had the chance, they weren’t dumb). And second, because my ancestors have had agriculture for maybe ten thousand years. That’s quite a lot of time to adapt to grains and cooked foods.
And finally, if eating like a caveman worked so much better than eating like a civilized person, we’d be doing it already. Farming didn’t replace hunting/gathering because everyone got lazy and decadent; it outcompeted it because it meets human needs better.
Not necessarily. It could
Submitted by Nightfall (not verified) on Tue, 2010-01-12 01:20.Not necessarily. It could have out-competed hunter/gathering not because it was better (and some believe that it was actually worse than h/g for the first few hundred years, before specially bred agricultural strains took off) but because somewhere in the world the population simply became too dense to wander off to some other area once food supplies became too low, so there really wasn’t much choice in the matter.
[You’re right that agriculture, which on average isn’t as beneficial for any one individual, nevertheless supports way more individuals than hunting and gathering. Where factors allowing agriculture are possible anyway. Which brings up a point Hawks returns to a lot: shifting to an agrarian lifestyle has put humans under tremendous adaptive pressure, and expanding population permits a lot more variations to develop. Which in part makes it harder to argue there’s a “back” to go back to. (Though of course there’s nothing wrong with tinkering with our diets. Not least because humans are astonishingly omnivorous.) Thanks, Nightfall. —fl]
Actually what’s been
Submitted by Red (not verified) on Thu, 2010-01-14 04:53. Actually what’s been suggested more recently is that not only was “hunting and gathering” something of a misnomer, but that either early or later agricultural societies were a monolith. Some argue that agriculture actually grew more slowly out of horticulture and that early animal husbandry was an accident. My suspicion is that what transpired was a lot more complicated than we know. Also it’s questionable whether today’s “hunter and gatherer” people are anything like what existed before agriculture was invented or whether most of those folks are actually marginalized and poor, from falling through history’s cracks. For example the Yanomamo (a people living in the Amazon) were studied extensively to draw conclusions about human nature. But in reality they turned out to be descended from a civilization that was at least on the same level as ancient Rome in terms of population and social organization, but had been devastated by smallpox and had fled to the rainforest to escape enslavement by the Spanish. As for other people such as the Pygmy they aren’t far from a lot of ancient civilizations (Sudan, Axum) , and I suspect that there was more to the ancient world than we really know about. As for assuming that pre-Agrarian people ate an “Atkins Diet” that is just wrong. There’s a lot of evidence now that they depended heavily on tubers and dandelion roots (quite starchy) in many places.