Man's World Issue 1

'Bro, just stop eating bread: our
ancestors never did' is one of the most
common lines thrown around when
anyone talks about diets, health and
nutrition online. Variations include, ‘no
wheat’, ‘only sourdough’, ‘no sugar’,
‘no fruit sugar’, ‘only raw honey’, ‘only
eat meat’ and so on.
The idea that there is an optimal or
perfect human diet, stretching back to
the dawn of our species, is widely
accepted, but no-one can agree what it
really means. Do we stop drinking milk,
or just those without the genetics to do
so? What about the Inuit? They only
seem to eat meat and fat, so is that a
diet we should follow?
Even when I’ve presented evidence that
Paleolithic hunters and Mesolithic
foragers ate wild grains, nuts and
roots, the response is often anger,
mainly accusations that I don’t
understand my subject or that hunters
just made use of them as a back-up in
case hunting failed. The other extreme
is that I must be defending eating
processed oil and pea protein sludge –
a fine example of the nuance most
online discussion displays.
The reality is that several issues have
become confused. The first is that the
last few decades have seen ancestral
eating diets explode in popularity,
including variations of the ‘Paleo’ diet
and forms of ketogenic and now
carnivorous diets as well.
Many of these are well thought-out
approaches to increasing our health
and refusing the toxic gruel that most
Western populations consume.
However, these should not be confused
with the archaeological and
anthropological understandings of
hunter-gatherer diets.
As any prehistorian will tell you, there
is no one standard hunter-gatherer
diet, but many different ways of
making use of nearby resources. This is
the second issue: the evidence for
ancestral diets.
So which is correct:
the science or the
anthropology?
The third issue is the loose systems of
understanding around what should and
should not be consumed - ancestral,
traditional, Lindy. Clearly coffee, wine,
milk, chocolate, glycine and whey are
not foods found in the deep Ice Age
past, so we need heuristics to easily
bypass the confusion of nutrition
‘science’ and ‘peer-reviewed’ papers.
Together, these three elements are not
readily combined. There is no evidence
for ancient hunters eating a carnivore
diet; but it seems to really help today in
the short term. Eating domesticated
animals is hardly paleo in the true
sense; but are some animals good
approximations for aurochs perhaps?
Studies show that our microbiomes
respond positively to a diet rich in
different plants, but some huntergatherers
don’t eat many plants at all.
So which is correct: the science or the
anthropology?
MAN'S WORLD 110