On Tue, 3 Nov 1998 13:49:51 -1000, Nieft / Secola <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:

>Take your pick, Amadeus. Is paleo-nutrition 30 million ya? 10 million ya? 2
>million ya? 200,000 ya? 20,000 ya? 2,000 ya?
>Ironically, I agree with you that "real adaptation" didn't occur to any
>particular diet since we have been flung around (genetically) by cultural
>eating practices for tens of thousands of years. Perhaps hundreds of
>thousands of years regarding cooking. For you, or Ray for that matter, to
>claim to propose the true human diet is preposterous. There is no such
>creature.
Thanks you for your reply Kirt,
it made clear to me that i still failed to get
my a
pproach through to you and i see better what i missed.

I think the main approach of paleo-nutrition is, that we
assume that over our history we have developed a digestion system
that has some kind of adaption to the food items that were available.
How long back these times have to be considered is still disputed.
Some very basical things like dentition, length of gut... may change
only over millions of years, while others may require only a few
dozend
generations.
I also agree to you - as i understand your arguments -
that there isn't a sinlge "human nutrition". Humans are very versatile
beeings, able to subsist very different and sometimes astonishing
sparse
bases.
However there are two things which i think we can fix as a base of
debate:
1) The changes on the average nutrition in western countries
   _in_the_last_few_decades_
   differs dramatically from the nutrition any centuries back.
   Main differe
nces are: The big part of sugars and empty starchs
   and a big part of processed food containing conservants and
   alteration through heating, milling, storage and so on.
   These differences can cause sickness and desease.
2) There are a few basic constraints (dependencies) humans may not
deviate
from
   and that are vitamins (that's a vitamins definition)
   and some other essential stuff.
   Water, the essential amino acids,
   the vitamins a,b*,c,e etc..., the minerals.

A problem in our discussions is, that we don't agree what
the actual paleolithic nutrition was, and how far adaptions
on it have built up that are in effect for us rhight now.
Now I made this attempt to find out about the real paleolithic
adapted food:
I look at possible paleolithic food compositions and test them
against presently known requirements of the essentials.

>What vitamin requirements? I
t seems you read the (supposedly) latest
>database of whatever the up-until-no-discovered nutrients are in
>(supposedly) "proper" amounts and use that as some final barameter of what
>we should be eating. Besides being pedantic, this method is sure to be
>"false" since the modern RDAs as well as the guesstimates of paleo nutrient
>consumption levels are in _flux_.

Of course the most debatable thing in such an attempt is, how
valid the RDA-values are.
After *much* reading about vitamins, my impression is, that most
values are more conservative (low) than the opposite.
Most vitamins were discovered by deseases that could be helped
through a single food-factor (the vitamin). And the rda's were
specified by taking the minimum amount, that could prevent one
specific desease and adding a safety factor then.
That could be easily miles away from an optimal value.
There are signs that a far
higher supply than RDA has *very*
beneficial effects on health. Especially with the vitamins C , B1,
folic.
I remember Pauling, and i remember the following facts:
A rat (able to produce vitamin c) encountering an illness *tenfolds*
its vitamin-c production.
Rats set up to do learning experiments have "superb results"
with an increased vitamin-b1 supply.
Toxididy is annother, less dabatable thing.

The result of this experiment?
It's not all that bad or impossible for that high meat diet,
but there are some critical points like calcium,b1 and iron.
It simply didn't look as to be well matching to me,
meaning something we really did adapt to.
Maybe you have a different look at this numbers.

... continued ...