I'd like to invite some comments on the question of human adaption to spice herbs. First, let me set this up. I'm accepting as a premise the proposition that the less exposure a population has had to a given food, the less likely that population is to be well adapted to it. This, I take it, is the basic premise of attempts to emulate or implement paleolithic diets in the modern world, for health purposes. It implies a second premise, namely that lack of adaptation to a food makes it more likely to cause health problems. Now, there appears to be general agreement that paleolithic humans didn't eat *much* in the grain and dairy categories, but they might have eaten small amounts of each. For example, raw "green" wheat kernels are edible for a short time, before they fall off the stalks. The rennet-fermented cheese in the stomach of a young killed animal would also have been eaten occasionally. But, as I understand it, these foods would have been a very small part of any paleolithic diet. Optimal foraging theory indicates that hunter-gatherers will always favor calorically denser foods when they can get them, and certainly avoid foods that require more energy to gather than they actually provide. This brings us to my question. The various spice herbs are mostly vanishingly low in calories, and are pungent enough in taste that it seems doubtful that anyone would eat very much of them at a time anyway. Many spices have potent health-promoting effects, it seems, because of antioxidants and other ingredients present in them, but prehistoric humans wouldn't have known of that. Indeed, it's hard to see why they would have bothered with these plants at all. If that is correct, the contribution of these plants to their diet would have been at least as negligible as that of grains or dairy foods. Therefore we shouldn't be very well adapted to them. Nevertheless, they seem to be good for us. What is the explanation? Todd Moody [log in to unmask]