More than a decade ago I was compiling research on our hunter-gatherer ancestors’ diets. Outside of nutrition research circles no one was particularly interested in the topic.
Fast-forward to today and everyone seems to talking about Paleo. So is it as fab as claimed, or just another passing fad? The basic premise of ‘paleo’ is that since our genes have not appreciably changed since Paleolithic times, the diet of ancestors from that era is the one that we evolved on, and is best suited to our genetic makeup.
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The argument goes that many of our current health woes, including cardiovascular disease, diabetes and obesity, are caused by the mismatch between our modern diet and our ancient bodies.
The truth is there was no one paleo diet.
The first question therefore is what did our paleo ancestors eat? The truth is there was no one paleo diet. As a species we have been remarkable in our ability to adapt to the diet available to us.
The "true" paleo diet therefore varied depending on geographical, seasonal and climactic changes. Flexibility when it comes to food has been part of our success as a species.
Nevertheless we can make some broad conclusions. Essentially paleo men and women ate more protein and less carbohydrate than modern diets, but importantly they were not on low carb diets.
In fact the author of the original Paleo Diet book, Dr Loren Cordain, published research showing that paleo is closest to the Mediterranean Diet than to modern low carb or low fat approaches. Yet for some reason I see many people claiming to follow paleo when in fact they are just cutting carbs.
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"True paleo diets are estimated to have been a whopping 60-70 per cent lower in saturated fat than our typical diet today."
Would you cite a source for this claim, please?
It gets tossed around quite a bit in the nutrisphere, but most of these people seem to think that the fat content in muscle-meat defined fat intake in early man. In fact, we know that early man prized fatty animals and hunted them preferentially, he also ate the fattiest parts preferentially, including solid fat pads, internal fat deposist around organs, the fatty organs themselves and fatty bone-marrow, all quite rich in saturated fatty acids. An average of 65% of their animal food calories came from fat, not protein. Lean muscle meat was the last thing they ate and many traditional peoples had preparation methods that added fat to lean muscle (like the Native American's pemmican.)
Explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson, wrote (Vilhjalmur Stefansson, The Fat of the Land, MacMillan Company, 1956) that
The natives he lived with preferred “the flesh of older animals to that of calves, yearlings and two-year olds-- It is approximately so with those northern forest Indians with whom I have hunted, and probably with all caribou-eaters. In an animal of 1000 pounds, the back-fat slab could weigh 40 to 50 pounds. Another 20-30 pounds of highly saturated fat could be removed from the cavity. The fat was saved, sometimes by rendering, stored in the bladder or large intestine, and consumed with dried or smoked lean meat. When eaten like this, fat contributed almost 80 percent of total calories in the diets of the northern Indians."
When you consider that modern humans rarely eat these parts of the animal it's easy to see that modern diets are much LOWER in fat than early and traditional diets.