At 4:14 +1000 13/7/1999, Wally Day wrote:

>Is it possible - and remember, this is PURE conjection
>- that grain/legume meals ARE a good replacement for
>meat?

There is a significant amount of evidence that grains are inherently
damaging to the human body. The proportion of humans that are intolerant
to the proteins in grains and in beans indicates that our bodies are poorly
adapted to extract energy and nutrients from these foods.

I suggest reading through Loren Cordain's article "Cereal Grains:
Humanity's Double Edged Sword", which Don Wiss recently offered to email
directly to interested list members (Thanks Don!).


>Let me elaborate. The cases which I am thinking about
>are situations where meat is scarce. So, in order to
>survive, the folks had to come up with a replacement
>for meat. Which they seem to do alright or even thrive
>on.

Which cases in particular are you thinking of? The only H-G peoples I can
think of that obtain more than 80% of their calories from plants are the
!Kung.

Dean Esmay forwarded a message to the PaleoDiet list on 12 Aug 1997 <http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/CGI/wa.exe?A2=ind9708&L=paleodiet&P=R2> which
is a review of a book titled "The Foraging Spectrum," by Robert L. Kelly,
associate professor of anthropology. I quote:

"Kelly has a list of hunter-gatherer societies and the approximate relative
contribution of hunting, fishing, and gathering, in relation to solar
radiation and local plant life.  The relative percentages are all over the
map, with groups such as the Comanche, Cheyenne, Kiowa-Apache, Seri
(Mexico), Anbarra (Northern Australia), Mbuti (Africa) all deriving less
than 30% of volume of diet from gathering.  These are just examples---of
123 groups, about 75 derive 30% or less by volume of food from gathering,
but these are heavily weighted to northern, extreme-climate groups.  Only
19 groups derive 60% or more (by volume) from gathering. Only 4 groups
derive as much as 80-85%, and among these are the Ju/'hoansi (this book's
designation for the !Kung)."

This suggests that the majority of hunter-gatherer peoples consume a
combination of animal and vegetable foods. Those figures also show a trend
towards sourcing foods by hunting rather than gathering. This is why I'm on
a paleo diet -- if H-G peoples do it, there's a better-than-even chance
that pre-agricultural people did it too.

 ...Richard.