Althouse: "Wait a minute, if I can fix my diet from ancestral health principles, what else can I fix through ancestral health principles?"

September 20, 2014

"Wait a minute, if I can fix my diet from ancestral health principles, what else can I fix through ancestral health principles?"

Asks the devotee of the paleo lifestyle.

24 comments:

Gabriel Hanna said...: What is "the" paleo diet or lifestyle? Our paleo ancestors lived in all kinds of environments and had to live according to what was there. Inuit didn't have the same lifestyle as Andaman Islanders, how could they? Pacific Coast Indians didn't live like Plains Indians or Iroquois.

Some of our paleo ancestors lived on wild wheat, which is how we got civilization. The paleo predecessors of the Aztecs had a similar dependence on the ancestor of modern corn, which is how they got civilization.

The whole thing is pig-ignorant.; 9/20/14, 10:51 PM
Anonymous said...: I thought we already had enough white racist cavemen.

It is turtles all the way down.; 9/20/14, 10:56 PM
Anonymous said...: White people, feebly trying to go back to a time of innocence where they were not yet responsible for their oppression: they'll gladly look back to thousands of years, but won't face what they have done in the last four hundred.

It is turtles all the way down.; 9/20/14, 11:11 PM
Alex said...: Paleo is another item in the "Stuff White People Like".; 9/20/14, 11:17 PM
Anonymous said...: White people: how about trying the slavery diet for a change? You only eat what the master gives you, and you get plenty of exercise laboring in the fields all day: the pounds will melt right off. And you don't have to rely on will-power: the whip will keep you in line...

It is turtles all the way down...; 9/20/14, 11:19 PM
Michael K said...: My daughter went for the "Paleo diet" a couple of years ago to deal with some irritable bowel problems. I haven't asked how it is working.; 9/20/14, 11:19 PM
madAsHell said...: Paleo diet, global warming, vegan...I'm sure I'm overlooking a few.
When do we saturate on dogmas?; 9/20/14, 11:26 PM
Joe said...: Damn, should have seen that coming; I could have had some products ready to get money from these loons.; 9/21/14, 12:02 AM
buwaya said...: I am actually on this diet, more or less, though its hard for a Filipino to stay off the rice. It works very well.
The rest is silliness.
Though I am tempted to go the ancestral route and start hunting heads. Good exercise and emotionally satisfying.; 9/21/14, 12:56 AM
Bob R said...: I've been cutting down on carbs for a couple of years now, so I read a lot of this paleo nonsense when looking at recipes and such. Great example of how a reasonable conclusion can be reached from silly premises. About as scientifically valid as young earth creationism.; 9/21/14, 7:09 AM
Curious George said...: Man, I have had a hankerin' for some woolly mammoth.; 9/21/14, 7:16 AM
Curious George said...: Man, I have had a hankerin' for some woolly mammoth.; 9/21/14, 7:16 AM
Original Mike said...: Nuts.; 9/21/14, 7:45 AM
Anonymous said...: Ancestral health principles....eschew polyester and wear more fur.; 9/21/14, 8:30 AM
Anonymous said...: I'll take these paleo white people more seriously when they start pooping paleo in the streets and eschew toilet paper...

It is turtles all the way down...; 9/21/14, 8:50 AM
John Durant said...: In the most obese era of human history, with rising rates of autoimmune and other chronic health conditions, why wouldn't we look to our evolutionary past for answers?

Unlike other dietary/lifestyle approaches, an evolutionary approach generalizes to other species -- mimicking the natural habitat(s) of a species is how the world's top zoos address all kinds of chronic health conditions.

The general mismatch hypothesis -- that many modern health problems are a result of a mismatch between our primal biology and modern lifestyles -- is well supported in the academic literature. See Professor Dan Lieberman's "The Story of the Human Body" (chair of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard). This is not fringe stuff.

@GabrielHanna

Yes, it's true that there was no single "environment of evolutionary adaptedness (EEA)" but there was still quite a bit of commonality in forager lifestyles compared to later farming lifestyles.

If you'd like a thoughtful take on paleo -- without all the goofiness that journalists insert in order to get pageviews -- I'd humbly suggest "The Paleo Manifesto" by yours truly.

Ann, I enjoy your blog!; 9/21/14, 9:26 AM
Crimso said...: "[W]hat else can I fix through ancestral health principles?"

Life expectancy?; 9/21/14, 9:45 AM
James Pawlak said...: 1. To G. Hanna, Aztecs go much of their protein by eating other people.
2. Preserving health includes killings such deadly human threats as Muslims on jihad, Nazis,such street thugs as Trayvon Martin/ Michael Brown and such politicians as meet President Jefferson's prescriptions for Tyrants.; 9/21/14, 10:12 AM
The Crack Emcee said...: "Wait a minute, if I can fix my diet from ancestral health principles, what else can I fix through ancestral health principles?"

"Breathe deep, the gathering gloom,..."; 9/21/14, 11:21 AM
Birkel said...: Progressivism:

The belief that Darwinism is correct, except when it comes to any of the inherited cultural traditions. Because inherited cultural traditions were not good adaptations that helped societies survive better than their peer civilizations.

Science is Magic.; 9/21/14, 11:22 AM
tim maguire said...: Well, it's too late to die at 26, so that's one thing the paleo lifestyle can't help me with.; 9/21/14, 11:52 AM
Unknown said...: Most things could be fixed that way actually. Most people think that ancient people didn't get as old, some say, they only became 35 years of age etc. How on earth could they then have had multiple children and raise them? What was a lot higher back then was child mortality 8though that provided a selective, without necessarily advocating eugenics in our times). But once people got past twenty, thirty, forty, they often got old and many were grandparents, even great-grandparents. Without Medicare. Also those Greek temples did not employ nauseous gases to put people into a trance (or where are these effluents today?) but simply hypnosis. The recently rediscovered Sichort ("Ultra Depth") state in hypnosis (two down from somnambulistic, the one "above" being the Esdaile state) has healing properties excatly as we can today infer from ancient scripture. So do we need to first wait for our social security systems to collapse under their own weight or can we just research "ancestral health principles"?; 9/22/14, 8:31 AM
Peter said...: ”In the most obese era of human history, with rising rates of autoimmune and other chronic health conditions, why wouldn't we look to our evolutionary past for answers”

Perhaps because evolution selected for survival and reproductive fitness in a Paleolithic environment?

Our Paleolithic ancestors were smaller and shorter than we , yet with few material goods and without permanent settlements would have needed to consume far more calories. Arguably our preference for calorie-dense, high-fat foods and for sugar and salt reflects both the difficulty of obtaining these in the Paleolithic environment and their importance to survival and fitness there (e.g., skinny people wouldn’t survive a famine). But that doesn’t make a diet high in these things optimal in our environment.

In a physically hard, dangerous and often violent environment few would have lived into late middle age, and thus evolution would not have selected for greater health in later life. Yet remaining active and healthy into later life is one of the purposes we seek in a better diet.

For that matter, with low population densities and no animal husbandry paleolithics would have been less threatened by epidemic diseases; thus, one wouldn’t expect a paleo diet to improve immune function either.

May I suggest that like most diets, this one is a fad?; 9/22/14, 9:16 AM
veni vidi vici said...: Teeth. Nothing like the dull, brown sheen of rot in lieu of the capped and whitened chompers people sport in their pie-holes nowadays.; 9/22/14, 10:05 AM