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.