At 18:39 -0500 2/1/01, Norm Skrzypinski wrote:
>A daily diet that includes 1/2 pound of game meat, 1/2
>pound of fish, 2 ounces of nuts, one pound of fruit and 5
>pounds of vegetables
Five pounds of vegetables seems more than a little unrealistic to me.
A population consuming that much vegetable matter would soon eat
their area out of plant food and have to either move away or switch
to eating meat.
If the men from the group hunted for fish and animals while the women
gathered vegetables (leaving the elderly at home to mind the
children) there would be about one quarter of the population
gathering. The USDA database lists 18% as the average amount of
refuse from vegetables and 21% refuse from fruit. Each gatherer would
have had to collect 29 pounds of fruit and vegetables per day to
obtain 1 pound of edible fruit and 5 pounds of edible vegetables per
person.
Consider that our ancestors hunted many species into extinction, and
the verve with which they hunted for meat becomes apparent. I believe
ancient hunter gatherers would have eaten a lot more meat daily than
the 1 pound you estimate. It is probably easier to kill a mammoth and
eat it for several weeks than it is to gather 28 pounds of fruit and
vegetables per day. Assuming mammoth has a similar composition to game
meat and that there is 70% edible yield, then nutritionally, one
mammoth is equivalent to 30,000 pounds of fruit and vegetables
(5,600,000 kcal each).
You should also consider that fruit and vegetables have probably
mutated just as much as farmed animals. The sight of a huge juicy
peach would have been completely foreign to our ancestors.
Additionally fruits of this type would only be available seasonally
and only in more tropical climates. I imagine an ancient fruit would
have resembled a modern vegetable from a nutritional (and probably
flavour) point of view. An ancient vegetable may have been a horrid
thing indeed.
A diet consisting of:
2 lb game meat
1 lb fish
0.25 lb seeds and nuts
0.25 lb fruit
0.75 lb vegetables
yields 2019 kcal with 60 g fat (27% kcal) and 294 g protein (58%
kcal). This breakdown is just as realistic as your estimates, yet
reveal a completely different nutrient profile. The true dietary
profile of paleolithic humans will probably never be known.
Here's a chart similar to yours. Carb %kcal is calculated by difference.
Group g/day kcal SFA MUFA PUFA Fat Prot Carb
Game 908 1144 8.44 8.44 4.27 33.05 198.22 0.00
Fish 454 513 3.81 6.17 4.22 16.84 82.63 2.27
Nuts 57 146 4.14 1.79 1.44 7.80 2.87 17.47
Fruit 113 68 0.14 0.38 0.18 0.85 0.99 16.33
Veg 341 147 0.27 0.24 0.68 1.60 8.80 29.87
Total 1873 2019 16.80 17.03 10.79 60.14 293.51 65.94
% of kcal 7.49% 7.59% 4.81% 26.80% 58.13% 15.06%
>I think it's reasonable to assume that a raw diet of wild
>game, fish, nuts, fruits and vegetables is close to the
>centre of our range of tolerances, squarely in the middle of
>nature's way -- paleo, by any measure. A regimen that
>includes fried bacon, sausages, pork rinds, porterhouse
>steaks, bottles of oil and pemmican heavy with lard is pretty
>far afield -- not exactly "naked with a stick" fare.
Wise words, indeed.
...R.
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