On Thu, 28 Feb 2002, Keith Thomas wrote:

> It's hard to put yourself into the mind of a paleo.  But remeber that it's
> only within the last 150 years or so that people have understood
> scientifically what "calorically dense" foods were and what made them
> calorically dense.

I think the energy yield of a food is something that we don't
need science to understand.  Pretty much anyone can see that you
get more energy from a sweet potato than from a bunch of lettuce.
The basis of the "expensive tissue hypothesis" is that human
evolution depended on switching to more calorically dense food
sources, which means more meat and denser plant foods.  Gorillas
do well on a low-density diet of foliage, by eating almost
continuously.  We are not gorillas, have much shorter guts but
bigger, metabolically expensive brains.

> Anyway, I think they would have eaten herbs, even lettuce and celery, if
> they liked the flavour.  We can't assume they always made the wisest choice
> in terms of macronutirents.  They got their micronutrients from somewhere,
> and I'd surmise they had herbs - good, bad and indifferent.

They could get a lot of micronutrients from organ meats, and I
certainly wouldn't claim that they ignored herbs and greens.  But
the two theories, optimal foraging theory and the expensive
tissue theory, together imply that they would favor denser foods,
which would include tubers, roots, and similar concentrated
plant energy sources.

Todd Moody
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