evolution

Really easy to find at your local garden shop or next to your sofa!

I don't understand why so many paleo dieters neglect to consume cycads. They have been a part of our diet since the stone age and numerous hunter-gatherer tribes enjoy them. I hear that their starch goes really well in a puree of herbs with salmon. Making them is REALLY simple too! First you take the pith from the trunk, roots, and seeds and grind them into a coarse flour in your Vitamix. Then you soak it for five days and wash it out carefully several times to remove toxic chemicals. Finally, bake it on some hot rocks or ferment for several days. If tribal people in the jungle can do it, you can too.

Scientists don't recommend eating this, as some nerve toxin and other assorted natural chemicals could remain, but we paleo dieters know that it's a perfectly good food that people have eaten for hundreds of thousands of years! In fact, it's so valuable to hunter-gatherers that women will spend hours and hours preparing it.

Unlike potatoes, which they did not eat and therefore they are really bad. I can't find any studies that show that potatoes cause arthiritis or anything, but if Grok didn't eat it, then it doesn't belong. Who knows what it could do it you? 

Next time you are craving potatos, reach for your nearest house plants and start processing! Stone age foods are always good and neolithic foods are always bad! 

*just kidding. There is nothing wrong with modeling your diet on evolutionary principles that posit that the stone age was when we were eating food we evolved to eat, but it's fairly shallow to think that everything that is neolithic is bad. Almost ALL our food is technically neolithic. We should evaluate each food scientifically in light of our evolution.

 Feeding off my post about what our bodies expect, I thought I'd take it to another dimension. It's a total myth that since humans evolved in the seasonless equator, seasons don't matter. They do have seasons at the equator, they are just different from what we think of as seasons. As discussed in Seasonality and Human Evolution, the seasons we dealt with for most of our evolution were just two: wet and dry.

Neanderthals show physical adaptation to cold climates, but all humans have a fairly "tropical" morphology. That doesn't mean that the northern four seasons are unimportant, especially since the duality is still present and there is the possibility of smaller, but still important, genetic changes. Particularly significant is that genes for energy metabolism show climactic variation.

Either way, no matter where your ancestors came from, eating the same diet all year is probably not natural. Eating with the seasons enables you to adapt better to your environment and to reap the benefits of two types of diets. Paleo dieters already mimic the feast and famine of early life with intermittent fasting, but eating seasonally allows you to also mimic another important duality. 

Right now many of my locavore friends are complaining about the lack of food selection in this late winter season. Most of them are vegetarians or eat very little meat and are having to buy imported foods to get by. There are a few stalwarts surviving mostly on various roots and tubers, but that doesn't seem very delicious or nourishing to me.

While they eat their potato beet rutabaga pie, I'm eating luscious chicken confit, beef stew, lamb shanks with celeriac mash, and wild boar with garlic kale. Local doesn't feel forced to me anymore, it's easy and natural.

It took me a long time to get to this point. When I was raw vegan I savored bananas. melons, and salads in the dead of December. Back then, even a teensy draft set me a shivering. I was completely miserable. My diet was full of "live" foods, but I felt dead. No matter how many layers of sweaters and blankets I put on, I was freezing. A walk along the frigid harbors of Stockholm was impossible. 

This winter I have eaten ample amounts of fat and thyroid-supporting foods like seaweed. I feel perfectly warm and no longer need five gazillion wool blankets to get to sleep. The cold north wind blowing off the Hudson river doesn't faze me. I hardly feel deprived...I LOVE the food I'm eating and I feel nourished. The best thing is that I no longer crave sweet foods like I used to. I chalk it up to adequate fat. 

December used to be for peppermint ice cream, February for gallons of heart shaped candies, and in early March I started my Cadbury Cream Egg binge. Last night I passed the Cream Eggs at the store and was briefly filled with nostalgia....but then I remembered how insipid they taste and how much better my duck confit tasted. 

I hesitate to recommend TS Wiley's Lights Out: Sugar, Sleep, and Survival, because I feel it's a little lacking in scientific rigor, but it does have some important ideas. Wiley believes eating sugar in the winter keeps your body in a constant state of summer, where you need to eat as much as possible to pile on pounds for a long winter. Her prescription is to eat no sugar in the winter, but as much as you want in the summer. A similar idea may apply to omega fatty acids-: omega-3s are a summer fat and omega-6s a winter fat according to Susan Allport (hat tip to Matt Metzgar). That makes so much sense to me. The omega-3s in meat come primarily from fresh grass and animals lay down omega-6 rich fat stores for the winter. Omega-3s in large amounts can also have an immunosuppressive effect, which could be maladaptive for a long tough winter. Another area of concern that seems to be seasonal for me is the acid-base balance, which is slightly controversial, but regardless, my diet is net acid in the winter and net alkaline in the summer. 

We can't forget the obvious thing: Vitamin D from sunlight, which probably accounts for the seasonality of some of the illnesses in the aforementioned book. Vitamin D is important in the winter, but it's even more important to go outside and get some sunlight in the summer when your body is expecting it. 

Despite the richness of my diet and exercising much less in the winter, I have no gained any weight. In the summer I expect that my desire for fat will wane and I'll fully enjoy the bounty of fruit, herbs, and fish at the farmer's market. By autumn, as the days get colder, I will yearn once again for richer foods. 

My ancestors have lived in the North for a long time, perhaps this is what my body expects. Either way, eating seasonally has allowed me to feel better and to truly enjoy local food in a way I never did when I forced myself to eat low on the food chain. 

The gate of knowledge is closed!

Oh how ungrateful I was back then when I was enrolled in a big university. I didn't realize how annoying it would be to not have access to a large academic library. Sciencedirect now asks me to pay five gazillion dollars for the studies I want to read. It almost makes me want to enroll in school again. 

I live in freaking NYC, but the library here doesn't have the richness of that library in the middle of Illinois. 

When I did have access to the wonderful online research databases, I remember seeing that some misguided nutritionists and anthropologists cited papers by S. Boyd Eaton when they tried to say the paleolithic diet was plant-based and low-fat. So it's nice to see Eaton himself in this recent article about the paleolithic diet in Macleans eat his hat:

He says he had failed to consider the contribution of non-muscle meat like brain and fat depots, and thus underestimated the amount of fat we need. “It makes me feel stupid!”

Oops. Also on display is tehstupid 

Konnor still thinks that was the right call, and believes his original concerns about fat were prudent. “You can’t just go to the supermarket and buy meat loaded with fat and say you’re doing the Paleolithic diet. You’re not.” 

Ugh, such an annoying misconception perpetuated by restaurants that serve miserable cuts of miserable game for miserable prices. Yeah, that wild boar tenderloin roast at terrible overpriced restaurant is lean because the company that sold it is feeding the public's desire for "lean" healthy game. Any real hunter can tell that that game varies in fat content by species and season. Some game is very very fatty! And the cuts served at Green Meadows Fancy Golf Course Grill, typically lean cuts, are not representative of the real richness of game. This Hazda article speaks more to traditional consumption

Bones are smashed with rocks and the marrow sucked out. Grease is rubbed on the skin as a sort of moisturizer. No one speaks a word, but the smacking of lips and gnashing of teeth is almost comically loud.

Speaking of bones, I just finished reading the excellent cookbook Bones, by Jennifer McLagan. A full post on this excellent book is due, as bones are absolutely essential for a successful paleo diet, providing ample amounts of fat, calcium, and other important nutrients. 

Also, what's the deal with lacto paleo? I must say I'm not a fan of this trend or term. A paleo diet with dairy is not a paleo diet, it's a nomadic pastoralist diet. Such pastoralists are pretty healthy, but they are not representative of stone agers. There is absolutely no convincing evidence that dairy is paleo. That doesn't mean it's bad, but it does lead to some dilution of the paleo terminology. 

Also annoying is this NY Times article about some who argue that depression is somehow an evolutionary adaptation. In my opinion it's like arguing that heart disease is an evolutionary adaptation. I think it's fairly clear that depression is a disease of civilization caused by living inappropriately to our evolutionary heritage whether it's working inside all day staring at a glowing rectangle or not getting enough omega-3 fatty acids. Unfortunately this viewpoint is not in the article. The opposing view is that it's a hopeless disorder that can only be treated with modern drugs. 

I thought about that when reading the graphic novel bio of logician Bertrand Russell. He is devastated by the schizophrenia that seems to be an inevitable part of his bloodline. But there is increasing evidence that omega-3 fatty acids play a role. That this type of research is being done in the age of drug fixes is very hopeful and I would bet that scientists will eventually find even more nutritional factors that govern mental illness. 

Gene Expression has a facinating post on the transition from foraging to agriculture and how it affected human welfare. The graph Razib drew is interesting:

Thinking about it in a dietary context, I added a green line. Of course it is a rough approxamation. It would certainly be interesting to do a really well-researched version of this graph taking into account the archeological evidence, but this graph does show some important things. We in the modern era (well, some of us in 1st world countries at least) are lucky in many ways, as mortality is pretty much lower than its ever been. We don't have to worry very much about ourselves and our children getting felled by a random infection or being eaten by wild animals. But the so-called diseases of civilization really keep us from living up to our full genetic potential.

Where on this timeline do you want to eat? There are actually several good choices that seem to allow one to avoid diseases of civilization.

• The paleolithic diet, emulating hunter-gatherers.
• The mesolithic diet, emulating peoples who would have eaten small amounts of agricultural products, but also would have supplemented with wild foods. I think some diets that are similar to this would be the acorn-based diets of some Native west coast cultures or the reindeer-herding Sami. Many foraging cultures that survived beyond the paleolithic, don't really eat a diet that would be considered paleolithic. Reliance on nuts as a major food source, for example, seems to start after the paleolithic period.
• and traditional nutrition, which emulates the diet of healthy peasant societies. The modern Weston A. Price society aims for this diet.

I suppose it all depends on that dotted line from this graph on Demeter's Legacy. Certainly, there are both cultural (soaking and fermenting grains) and genetic adaptations that make agricultural food less harmful to humans. Eliminating the basic poisons of the Industrial Revolution like refined sugars and grains is often enough to restore health. I suppose it is up to you as an individual to decide if you are experiencing maladaptation from an agricultural diet. The cause of maladaption could be genetic, but it also could be that the illnesses developed on an inappropriate diet require going back to the basics. I feel that is certainly the case for me.