The food we evolved for(a matter of needless disease and death, and avoiding it) | Hacker News Reader

The food we evolved for(a matter of needless disease and death, and avoiding it)

staffanlindeberg.com

10 pointsetiam18 comments

I've been living Paleo for a month an a half. I'm now down to a healthy weight for my height after losing 22 lbs. I feel great and have much more energy. Most importantly, as a type 1 diabetic with remaining beta cell function, I am no longer dependent on insulin.

What did you use to determine the healthy weight for your height?

Are you sure about that? Type 1 diabetes means you shouldn't be able to produce insulin at all.

Not so. Type 1 diabetes is simply classified as a chronic lifelong condition in which your body does not produce enough insulin for normal bodily function. This condition comes about when a persons immune system attacks the pancreas' insulin producing beta cells. Type 1 diabetes is different than type 2 diabetes which is where a person's body produces enough insulin but the rest of the cells in the body become resistant to the insulin.

In my case I think are/were aspects of both type 1 and type 2 diabetes at play. Type 1 because while I had an auto immune response that destroyed permanently most of my beta cells, I was left with partial insulin production. Type 2 because I have been slightly insulin resistant for the past 10 years and therefore not getting the mileage out of the insulin I was to produce naturally.

2) plants protect themselves with bioactive substances directly aimed at animals, substances which may have untoward effects on long-term human health.

Does anyone have a reputable journal article that supports this theory? The authors own list doesn't seem to include any. And my own litter paleo research found almost no support for this in research. (most often I found article that suggested that the levels of anti-nutrients in cooked beans and grains were too low to have any real effect.

There's a ton of great research to support a hypoglycemic diet. I would love to see that much research applied to the second claim.

Checkout this research paper. Starts talking about anti-nutrients in cereal grains around page 42:

http://www.direct-ms.org/pdf/EvolutionPaleolithic/Cereal%20S...

This is awesome. Seriously. I think you just sealed up my Saturday morning.

I don't know how that statement even supports their claim. The point of plant defense is to make whatever's eating them ill. That includes humans. Generally animals, including humans, avoid those plants unless they've found some way to either avoid the poison or use it to their advantage (i.e. the moth Utetheisa ornatrix uses poison it extracts from Crotalaria plants to defend itself.)

The plants this statement is referring to are cereal grains.

Eight cereal grains: wheat, maize, rice, barley, sorghum, oats, rye and millet provide 56% of the food energy and 50% of the protein consumed on Earth.

Such grains were at least in minor usage 100k years ago, so it's not entirely fair to say the paleolithic diet didn't include them http://jetlib.com/news/2010/10/18/the-stone-age-food-pyramid...

The grains you listed are also not poisonous. I don't see how they can argue that they'd be more poisonous than the other vegetables they advocate eating as part of a paleolithic diet. If anything the opposite is true. Poison tends to be in the leaf or stem of a plant, since this is the part most animals are likely to eat. If those grains those weren't being eaten, there's no reason to evolve defenses against being eaten!

From Robb Wolf's book:

"Let's look at this question in a way that paints the human history in a relative scale. If we stood on an American football field we could represent a timeline of human history in the following way: If we started walking from one end-zone toward the other we could walk 99.5 yards, and this would represent all of human history except the last 5,000 years or so... 99.5 of the 100 yards.

This is when our genetics were selected for survival in a hunting-gathering lifeway and we were damn good at it. We evolved and adapted to this way of living and the interaction of our genetics and our environment made us who we were, and who we are. Our genetics are virtually identical to those of our early human ancestors from more than 120,000 years ago. The last 10,000 years, the time in which we transitioned from the hunting and gathering lifeway to agriculture, is the last half yard of our timeline."

Here's a source for some of this stuff if you're interested : http://www.nature.com/ejcn/journal/v56/n12/full/1601646a.htm...

It's interesting that flour usage may date back 100k years. However the earliest use is not important. What is important is the start of widespread use. This is when our diets shifted and is the absolute earliest that man-kind as a whole could have even begun to evolve for such food sources.

I'd be interested to see if there is any reference to support grains being used as human food 100 000 years ago; as far as I can tell the Nature story seems to indicate roughly 30 000 years for the new findings. Cultivation of grains is usually said to date back about 10 000 years before present. The time perspective to see this in is at least a couple of million years of evolution as what we label the genus Homo, and in the ballpark of 65 million years of evolution as primates.

Seeds are rich in energy and nutrients to supply the plant embryo inside during the beginning of it's growth, and consequently heavily protected, be it by mechanical or chemical means. If this seems difficult to believe, consider the impact on a plant's reproductive success of getting its seeds destroyed versus receiving damage to some somatic tissues.

A lot of the stuff we eat would make us ill if we didn't cook it, I believe that's part of the point.

So when discussing the nutritional benefits of a legume. Should we be more focused on it in its raw form or the form that people eat it in (almost certainly cooked). Cooking is absolutely part of the point. Which is why any article you read about lectin in grains and legumes should discuss the effect of cooking on lectins.

Some lectins break down better than others, but for the most part lectins are extremely durable.

The lectins in legumes are a lot less of a big deal compared to the lectins in wheat (gluten).

That sounds reasonable. I wasn't trying to dismiss the effects of lectins en mass, but rather provide a reasoning to the parent that perhaps it's worth linking to actual research on the topic.

I actually have to tip my hat to you, after a couple of books and some google tinkering, the article you linked to is by far the most comprehensive scientific look at the topic that I've found.

  > No signs of cardiovascular disease in a non-western population

Seems to conflict with:

  > The working hypothesis is that a Paleolithic diet (the Paleolithic
  > is the time period 2,000,000-10,000 years BP), basically meat,
  > fish, vegetables, fruit and nuts, has benefits even compared with
  > prudent diets based on whole-grain cereals and low-fat milk.

Isn't Southeast Asia considered 'non-Western'? Hasn't rice been a staple food there for a long time?

When they said "a non-western population", they didn't mean "all non-western populations".

Rice has been a staple for a long time historically speaking. But on the evolutionary time scale, rice's cultivation is insignificant.

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