Evolution for the Mad Diet Sphere
Ancient History
There’s a lot of evolutionary thinking in the mad diet space. I approve in general terms, but I don’t think we’re doing it right.
Most early human evolution happened to African animals. They don't have seasons, or at least not the same seasons as we do in the north. Forget about hibernation and winter.
Most of the great apes are mainly vegetable eaters (fruit and leaves, occasionally small animals, such as each other’s children), and so our most distant hominid ancestors probably were too.
We're not. After we got the hang of fire we seem to have adapted to our ability to cook by eating large amounts of cooked animal meat and fat.
We've lost the ability to digest cellulose, like ruminants and most great apes can. Our digestive systems are very shrunken in comparison. No leaves for us.
But we're still pretty omnivorous, capable of eating almost anything that non-grazing animals can eat as long as it's been cooked.
Most of recent human evolution has happened to farmers, and there’s probably been a very lot of it. A vastly higher population in very different conditions.
The farmers were probably mostly eating carbs. If you're descended from farmers, you should be fine eating grains and other farming products. In some sets of farmers, an ability to drink milk as adults developed and spread like wildfire. (Or more precisely the loss of an inability, which is why it could develop so quickly). Accompanied by vast population growth, migration and conquest and slaughter. That’s why Indo-European languages are spoken all over Europe and most of Asia.
The farming diet may not be optimal for modern human health, we’re probably not fully adapted to it yet, but it must have been pretty good. Not many diseases of modernity in the past. Not much obesity.
If you’re descended from Northern Europeans, then your immediate ancestors pre-1950 or so seem to have been perfectly happy with their diets of eating absolutely whatever they liked, whenever they liked, in an environment of unbelievable superabundance compared to all previous human and animal populations.
Not much obesity in Victorian times. Not many diseases of modernity. And no-one is telling me that the Victorians were short of food.
You should be happy eating what they ate. If you're not, then something recent has caused it. Maybe seed oils. Maybe some other modern curse.
But it is modern. Something that happened in the 20th century in America, and has spread round the world in recent times.
I used to think grains must be bad since we only started eating them ~10,000 years ago, but since reading about some of the groups Weston Price documented in his book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, I'm starting to rethink this. The Isolated Swiss towns he visited lived off rye bread and milk products and were perfectly healthy, as were the Gaelics he visited living off oat cakes and fish. There are countless examples of grains used as a staple in groups with perfect health.
And you make a good point that diseases of modernity weren’t common even in modernised societies until mid 20th century.
I will say though, I thought in Victorian times the people in general had terrible dental health because of all the sugar? That would seem like a disease of modernity based on the perfect dental health of the non-modernised people Weston Price documented.
> Something that happened in the 20th century in America, and has spread round the world in recent times.
You're welcome?