On Mon, 21 Nov 2005 11:56:23 -0500, Todd Moody <[log in to unmask]> wrote: >I don't think the mere presence of antinutrients makes a food >unacceptable, and there are unquestionably paleo foods, such as spinach, >that contain antinutrients. Good point. Nuts and seeds also contain antinutrients (lectins) though apparently at much lower levels than grains. I wouldn't be suprised if all natural foods contain some amount of antinutrients, as protection against insects and other predators, with some foods containing more than others. The dietary picture is a complicated one, not cut and dried, but I think the basic underlying model of Paleolithic nutrition is sound--that the optimal diet contains the types of foods that humans generally ate for the last 2.5 million years, and especially at around 100,000 years ago, rather than the agrarian and processed foods of the last ten to twenty thousand years. >Why, >for that matter, are there people with severe allergic reactions to >foods that seem unquestionably paleo, such as shellfish and >strawberries? Things such as oats, being seasonally available, would >have been no more rare than berries, and the carb content is >comparable. I've wondered about that too, and I've wondered if their allergies might become less severe after years of eating a Paleo diet. Would they have developed their food allergies at all if their mothers hadn't been consuming modern foods during pregnancy and they hadn't eaten modern foods during childhood? How common are food allergies among hunter gatherers today? >Yes, I think the transition must have been difficult. Foods that were >abundant in the forest were no longer available, and evidence suggests >that they had to start out as scavengers, competing with hyenas and >other animals at that level of the food chain. Gradually, they moved up >in the food chain and became hunters. > The early hunter hypothesis got a boost in recent years when scientists discovered that many chimps hunt, often in packs, and sometimes for extended periods (hunting binges). Their favorite prey tends to be smaller primates. Also, chimps will use sticks to frighten or fend off predators. Since nonhuman primates hunt today, it seems likely that early humans hunted from the beginning. The estimates of the hunting abilities of proto- human hominids has also been rising. My guess is that scavenging would have at first provided more meat than hunting, but I could be wrong. Rather than fitting into a neat box of being only s cavengers or only hunters, I think the early humanoids were likely both. If proto-humans could break open the leg bone of a large animal carcass with a rock to get its marrow, they surely could also hunt, kill and butcher small animals. It is politically incorrect, but it seems that hunting and meat eating are more common among mammals than even the advocates of the early hunting hypothesis and meat eating first believed. Evidence of chimp hunting and warring has been televised and has been so stunning that it seems to have convinced at least a couple vegetarians I know of that vegetarianism/veganism is rare or nonexistent among most primates (why they weren't convinced by primate consumption of insects, lizards, worms and other small creatures I don't know--my guess is that they never really thought this through and many vegetarians seem to think that including a small amount of nonplant foods in the diet i s still vegetarian, rather than omnivorous--which it actually is). "Among the mammal species that chimpanzees hunt, kill, and eat are lizards, bushbuck and bushpigs, colobus monkeys, and baboons." --The ABC's of Chimpanzee Behavior, http://www.lessonsforhope.org/abc/show_description.asp?abc_id=28 Even the comparatively peaceful Bonobo monkeys eat "termites, ants, worms, small reptiles and squirrels." If chimps and Bonobos can hunt and eat small animals, than surely early humans could do the same and more. >>Todd > The cultivation of grains, of all things, in the neolithic period >>makes no sense if people weren't already eating them. >> >>Somebody somewhere came up with the idea of sticking these grass seeds >>in the ground and waiting around until they came back up. No doubt >>that person or group of people had consumed the seeds before . >> > >This would be a tedious and pointless exercise unless the seeds were >seen as pretty valuable and worth the work. Why would they think such a >thing? Actually, the widely accepted hypothesis is that the first cultivation of grain happened by accident--that seeds from discarded wild grain stems (culms) grew at the fringes of camps and that people then realized that they could plant the seeds themselves and not have to go foraging for them. I think that one of Wildtrout's points was that each of the early grains, like wild einkorn, only grew in limited regions (the Nile valley and the fertile crescent in the case of einkorn)--not throughout the world. They were later transported by farmers to other regions. Do you have information that indicates that all or most wild grains were widespread across the globe from the beginning? Maybe the most salient question is, what percenta ge of the diet did grains fill for most Stone Agers? >Furthermore, it's not clear that Stefansson and Andersen showed that we thrive on meat only. It's true that they didn't become sick during the Bellevue experiment, but they were shown to be in a continuous state of negative calcium balance, which is probably not a good thing. Yes, I think that all meat and all vegetarian diets don't make much sense given that humans have always been omnivores. Even the Inuit eat more foods than just meat and fish.