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Comment by leobelle | Hacker News Reader

I studied anthropology as an undergrad and learned that hunter gathers actually eat very little meat, so that link seems incorrect about eating lots of meat. Animal protein was/is at best something like 30% of their diet. A lot of us have had agriculturally active ancestors for many, many generations. I don't doubt that many modern diets are completely unhealthy, but this paleo diet stuff seems a bit silly. Although if the evidence is contrary to what I think, I'll be convinced. I'm not yet though. It just strikes me as the latest fad.

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I don't really have any training in this area (I didn't study anthropology, history, biology or nutrition in school), but while the implementation of paleo might be flawed the principle makes sense to me - eat what we evolved to eat, exercise like we evolved to exercise. At least that's how I see it. I'm not all to familiar with what it's actually like.

I think that we could probably all go for eating less meat and a lot more fruits and vegetables. The flesh of other animals tastes so good though!

Whenever I've been in shape I haven't stuck to any diet or strict regiment. It's pretty easy to loose weight (in principle, not in practice) if you do some moderate exercise (like take a run a few times a week, take the stairs, etc) and avoid restaurants and processed foods. I think when you start cooking for yourself, you'll end up eating a lot more raw "real" food and will find it hard to cook the really unhealthy stuff you might feel totally fine about ordering. It just kind of works itself out.

"will find it hard to cook the really unhealthy stuff you might feel totally fine about ordering"

Yeah, that doesn't work for me. If I'm not thinking about health, I'm happy loading up on the cheese and fried things to a probably unhealthy degree - especially when I'm making it myself.

Try to home-cook an authentic McNugget.

I don't order McNuggets when I'm out...

Humans survived because we evolved to eat literally everything. From the tiniest of seeds to whale blubber. Fruit, bugs, cows, wheat, ocelots, cactus, pufferfish. If it moves or grows humans likely survived on it at one time or another.

There are clearly diets that allow for more than survival. Just be careful saying we evolved to do X. It's easy to get your causal arrows mixed up.

We evolved to eat very few parts of the pufferfish, as I understand it.

Is the number of generations our ancestors have been agriculturally active enough to have an evolutionary effect on how our bodies metabolize food? At most is seems it has been 14000 years, whereas we've been around for several hundreds of thousands of years. I don't know the answer there.

I suspect it's enough to have small effects but not enough for complex adaptations (requiring multiple mutations to stack). Actually, I think I read that adult lactose tolerance evolved during that time? I'd also guess that it's plenty of time for a lot of evolution to have gone on in our gut flora.

14,000 years is about 700 generations. That's not a little bit.

What about the hunter gatherers that don't have access to as many non-meat options? Inuits, for example, ate mostly meat (with up to 75% of their calories coming from fat) because they were limited in what plants they could gather.

I think the more likely answer is that humans are capable of surviving on all sorts of foods, not "there is one hunter gatherer diet and it contained very little meat."

even hunter-gatherers ate mostly roots and tubers and nuts.

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