Not sure the right way to ask this but I'll just throw it out.
You've probably seen the talk about the Paleo diets. It's essentially eating as humans did however long ago it was before we figured out how to farm grain. Mainly eating as a hunter / gatherer. For lack of a better term, eating like Grok the caveman did (Mark Sisson, author of Primal Blueprint's mascot) You're eating meats and vegetables and fruits and avoiding dairy and anything made from grain (which includes corn).
The basic idea is that our agricultural methods have evolved way more quickly than our bodies have. And that the ease of which we can obtain foods now is throwing our bodies all out of whack.
And the bigger premise is that we'd be more healthy if we ate like our ancestors did when we were hunter gatherers.
It makes sense in many ways. It's not hard to understand that a hunter gatherer wandering into a megamart grocery store is a collision of worlds.
But here's the question: Why do they assume that the "set point" of humans in the hunter / gatherer stage is the goal? Obviously, you can't compare things like life expectancy or even general health given the advantage of today's medical services. Now this likely has been addressed in the books / blogs and I've just overlooked it. But it seems like a fair question to ask - "why then"?
Do we have good reason to believe our hunter gatherer ancestors were healthier given their diet / lifestyle?
And, why that time period?
I mean, will people 500,000 years from now be looking at history saying they need to go on the 21st century diet and watch tons of TV and eat McDonalds?
Does that make sense?
J
You've probably seen the talk about the Paleo diets. It's essentially eating as humans did however long ago it was before we figured out how to farm grain. Mainly eating as a hunter / gatherer. For lack of a better term, eating like Grok the caveman did (Mark Sisson, author of Primal Blueprint's mascot) You're eating meats and vegetables and fruits and avoiding dairy and anything made from grain (which includes corn).
The basic idea is that our agricultural methods have evolved way more quickly than our bodies have. And that the ease of which we can obtain foods now is throwing our bodies all out of whack.
And the bigger premise is that we'd be more healthy if we ate like our ancestors did when we were hunter gatherers.
It makes sense in many ways. It's not hard to understand that a hunter gatherer wandering into a megamart grocery store is a collision of worlds.
But here's the question: Why do they assume that the "set point" of humans in the hunter / gatherer stage is the goal? Obviously, you can't compare things like life expectancy or even general health given the advantage of today's medical services. Now this likely has been addressed in the books / blogs and I've just overlooked it. But it seems like a fair question to ask - "why then"?
Do we have good reason to believe our hunter gatherer ancestors were healthier given their diet / lifestyle?
And, why that time period?
I mean, will people 500,000 years from now be looking at history saying they need to go on the 21st century diet and watch tons of TV and eat McDonalds?
Does that make sense?
J
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