From: "Dori Zook"

> >Reason 3: Even whole grains produce an unhealthfully
> >high insulin response
> >Rebuttal: What about sweet potatoes, yams and beans.
> >Those food have low
> >glycemic indices.
>
> Glucose is just one sugar.  Fructose and sucrose also have ill effects.
> . . .
> Remaining hunter-gatherers also
> suffer no autoimmune disorders.  That tidbit sometimes
> makes them pause to ponder.

The odd thing about that is that remaining hunter-gatherers do eat roots and
high glycemic foods and, as you mentioned, still didn't/don't suffer from
autoimmune disorders...at least up to the point that the new foods were
introduced into their diet.

Here is a sample diet of some native Indians somewhere in South America,
where they eat a large amounts of bananas, a high-glycemic food, and also
eat yuca root (manioc or cassava), a food that in many cases is poisonous
until it is prepared properly (which goes against the paleo line, too. Note
many Native Americans also ate acorns, which also have to be processed to be
edible):

As found at:
http://www.riverland.co.za/book.htm

The rest of the day is taken up with walking around, eating bananas, and
talking to George. The Indians weave a type of cotton that grows freely
here. It is coloured with Mahonie tree bark. Juan shows different types of
plants to me and George acts as interpreter.

Apart from a variety of bananas, many other fruit grow here, including paw
paws, coconuts and so on. The Cocona is an interesting fruit. Round shaped
and reddish in colour, it has a strange taste that reminds me slightly of
tomato, but only slightly more sour. Each fruit has between 800 to 2000
seeds, with a smooth stiff skin covered in fine hairs. It is eaten as it is
picked, or pressed out into water to make a nice drink that quenches the
wildest thirst. Only later do I discover that the juice is also used as a
treatment for head lice. . .

Yuka (Manioc) grows all around here and makes up a large part of the basic
diet. There are many variants of this root plant and it is served in many
guises. It can be dangerous for the uninformed, as certain types are highly
poisonous and must be prepared in a special way before it can be eaten. I
shudder to think how they discovered which ones were poisonous and which
were not. Unsurprisingly, Yuka is also the source of an alcoholic drink.

Farinha, or their version of maize, is sprinkled over other food sorts. This
can be a little hard on the teeth, but is tasty. The Indians have
superstitions about the plant and it is used as a medicine. A Cashew tree
stands near to the river, its fruit not yet ripe. On each fruit, or cashew
apple, hangs a solitary nut. No wonder cashew nuts are so expensive.

It might sound as if Sawawo is the land of milk and honey. If only that was
true! The abovementioned fruit and foods do grow there, but as my luck would
have it, nothing was ripe or available while we were there. We were confined
to a diet consisting mainly of green bananas and Yuka -and believe me, you
can get pretty tired of that fare very quickly.

The Indians have a peculiar eating pattern, Every day it consists of a
watery Yuka porridge with bananas, or cooked Yuka. Every now and then they
will go and catch a wild pig - a Wangana - and even more rarely, will they
catch a fish. My impression was that it was simply too much effort to catch
a pig or a fish, even though when they hunt, they use a 410 shotgun! Fish,
when they are caught, are shot with bows and arrows as often as they are
caught with line!

Once they have exerted themselves to catch something, they overeat for a day
or two, and then revert back to the Yuka and banana diet. You can see
evidence of malnutrition amongst some of the children, especially the
younger ones.