Paleo diet

We also don't have the same type of grains and vegetables and meat as we did 10000 yag. Everything is all fucked up from hybridization and domestication and ****.

What I've always wanted to know the answer to is at what point (or if at any point at all) man will have adapted to be able to freely consume a diet of nothing but cereal and grains. Can it be possible someday for humans to subsist, disease free, on such a diet, or will we all have died from malnutrition before we ever get that chance?

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i dont think humans will die out from malnutrition from all the grains we are eating...


nobody wants to or does eat 100% cereal and grains

What about people living in the third world and the rapidly increasing world population? Won't it be necessary, at some point in time, that people live primarily off of nothing but grain?

third world countries =/= all of mankind

Right, but putting that aside, my question is: is it biologically possible for man to one day adapt to a diet of nothing but grains?

Originally Posted by mm84321

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What about people living in the third world and the rapidly increasing world population? Won't it be necessary, at some point in time, that people live primarily off of nothing but grain?

people in much of the 3rd world live off primarily nothing but grain. the "primarily" is what saves them. you need a little animal protien, and you need vitamins that come from fruit and vegitables.

the way a poor indian eats is a lot of rice or bread, with a little bit of vegitables and pickles and chunties. the last bits add the vitamins. then, periodically, he will have some milk.

in a lot of africa, it is similar, with corn instead of rice.

in the 19th century, the irish suffured the potato famine, due (aside from a lot of the political reasons) to the fact that their diet was almost intirely made up of potatos. around the same time, huge epidemics of deseases hit parts of the balkans and parts of italy, because people were living off of corn, and didn't have enough supplementary products to cover their vitimin needs.

beans and rice (or corn), with the occasional egg, meat or dairy, will keep people alive pretty much indefinatly.

Originally Posted by JMRouse

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I mentioned it earlier in this thread, but there is plenty of evidence that they did eat grains. The thing to remember is the majority lived in a constant state of starvation. Disease and famine were rampant. I'm not sure were people got the idea that they were healthy by modern standards and should be idealized.

Wait, you forgot the part of spending seven hours a day gathering and hauling firewood to have enough to get your family through another winter's night. Backbreaking toil tends to burn calories.

Good to hear a voice of reason in this thread, btw. Keep it up.

Originally Posted by Sazerac

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Wait, you forgot the part of spending seven hours a day gathering and hauling firewood to have enough to get your family through another winter's night. Backbreaking toil tends to burn calories. Good to hear a voice of reason in this thread, btw. Keep it up.
If you have to devote seven hours a day solely to gathering firewood you might as well just be eating ding dongs and ho-hos. Nothing nature can provide will save you from your own ineptitude.

Originally Posted by mm84321

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If you have to devote seven hours a day solely to gathering firewood you might as well just be eating ding dongs and ho-hos. Nothing nature can provide will save you from your own ineptitude.

These people had primitive tools not chainsaws. While 7 hours might be an exaggeration, depending on where you lived it could take a long time and a lot of energy.

Originally Posted by mm84321

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What I've always wanted to know the answer to is at what point (or if at any point at all) man will have adapted to be able to freely consume a diet of nothing but cereal and grains. Can it be possible someday for humans to subsist, disease free, on such a diet, or will we all have died from malnutrition before we ever get that chance?

What a pointless question. You can't live off a diet of only meat either. That does not mean we shouldn't consume it.

there have been a lot of interesting studies about how hunter gatherers and early farmers worked and lived. what it seems is that they actually worked a lot less hours than we do now, over the course of the year. in some cases, literally just a few hours a day.

here is the catch - almost no ability to plan and save for hard times, in my opinion, this was probably the thing that really pushed people into agriculture. very poor health in relation to things like hiegine, infection, etc - so while people might not have had the constipation and high blood pressure that we get, they were dying in from small cuts and wounds and such. extremly high child mortality - we see farmers and getherers working hardest where the population is high, but the populations didn't grow because kids were dying like flies. no dental care, no pain control, no flavor - while there was good variety of food eaten over the year, it was seasonal and regional and there were no flavorings.

and of course life wasn't comfortable - no climate control, no way of keeping fully dry and warm. and, if people who live off of firewood in todays world are agood example, a lot of lung desease caused by fire.

that doens't change that I still believe that there are health advantages to trying to copy the components of the diet that we evolved on.

I think globetrotter is probably one of the most reasonable members on this forum.

If by flavourings you mean spices one of the reason for spices is to hide the taste of rotten meat.

Originally Posted by globetrotter

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there have been a lot of interesting studies about how hunter gatherers and early farmers worked and lived. what it seems is that they actually worked a lot less hours than we do now, over the course of the year. in some cases, literally just a few hours a day.

here is the catch - almost no ability to plan and save for hard times, in my opinion, this was probably the thing that really pushed people into agriculture. very poor health in relation to things like hiegine, infection, etc - so while people might not have had the constipation and high blood pressure that we get, they were dying in from small cuts and wounds and such. extremly high child mortality - we see farmers and getherers working hardest where the population is high, but the populations didn't grow because kids were dying like flies. no dental care, no pain control, no flavor - while there was good variety of food eaten over the year, it was seasonal and regional and there were no flavorings.

and of course life wasn't comfortable - no climate control, no way of keeping fully dry and warm. and, if people who live off of firewood in todays world are agood example, a lot of lung desease caused by fire.

that doens't change that I still believe that there are health advantages to trying to copy the components of the diet that we evolved on.

But that's the kicker. Why this period? At what point in this period? I brought up the point earlier that it was not till the Middle Paleolithic/Middle Stone Age that the majority of societies used fire. This spanned 300,000 to 30,000 years ago. So why not make a case that we didn't evolve to eat cooked meat?

It seems kind of arbitrary to me to me to pick the time frame towards the end of the Paleolithic age and say that the diet they ate was what we evolved to eat. Our diets have changed in one way or the other, many times over history and has differed across many continents, climates and cultures. It seems to me that we have been adapting just fine to a variety of foods.