Let me finish this thought with a bit of an extreme example.  Just because a particular population may have regularly ingested cyanide, doesn’t ipso facto make cyanide good for humans.  The paleo standard has always seemed to me to be the types and classes of foods that humans consumed over the vast majority of our time here on earth.  Individual populations may have adapted to a wider range, including certain grains for instance.  But it seems to me you can’t go wrong with that definition of the paleo standard.  How you then go on to define then what it is that we’ve eaten is of course the more interesting problem.  Did we eat a lot of fiber over the majority of our existence?  Dunno.  I kind of doubt it.  Seems to me we ate animal based food, concentrating on the fattiest bits we could get our hands on, and supplemented with plant based foods such as naturally low glycemic fruits and the occasional sprig of paleo parsley here and there when the body signaled it needed something in that parsley.  We didn’t hunt down the yucca plant and choose it over the bison liver.


> On Jan 1, 2016, at 11:45 AM, Jim Swayze <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 
> That’s been your take since we’ve been on this list and you may be right.  While there are always outlying populations who would have had to eat what they could get their hands on, I think you overestimate scarcity of animal- and insect- based foods. And it seems to me you may underestimate the tendencies of humans to self select a range of foods that are truly required for health.
> 
> Happy New Year.
> 
> Jim
> 
>> 
>> Wally: My knee-jerk reaction is that ancient humans ate whatever they could get their hands on (that didn't kill them), whenever they could get their hands on it.