Well, there is a good reason why plants would have been less likely to have 
been eaten, given that there was no agriculture, so there would have been no 
mass-cultivated fruit-trees etc., plus in many areas of the world, hominids 
would have been unable to find certain fruits at frequent times(eg:- winter, 
near the glaciers/deserts etc.), since fruits generally appear seasonally. And 
since meats are more nutrient-dense than plants, it makes sense for hunter-
gatherers to depend mainly on meats, as a result. 

The point re tubers was that they were not a nutrient-rich food, as evidenced 
by the number of African countries suffering from malnutrition who depend on 
it to a large extent. I certainly don't deny that tubers or roots or whatever 
would ahve been eaten as emergency-rations or temporary famine-relief etc.

Also, the definition of a Palaeolithic diet is not simply any food that was 
consumed during  the Palaeolithic. That's obvious - after all the Palaeolithic 
actually started c.2.5/2.6 million years ago, according to official designation,  
which was a time  well before hominids went in exclusively for meat when 
hominids still ate huge amounts of plants. Since no genuine palaeolithic diet 
I've ever heard of is mainly vegetarian in character(the various definitions 
always suggest a paleolithic diet of  anywhere between 65% to 100% animal-
food, one can't obviously say absolutely everything eaten in that era was 
what we should eat.

Re cooking:- The trouble with cooking is that it can lower antinutrients making 
foods, otherwise inedible edible, but, at the same time, it lowers nutrient-
levels of substances such as vitamins, as well as lowering  bioavailability re 
introducing AGEs(advanced glycation endproducts) and similiar toxic 
substances such as HCAs( Heterocyclic amines) etc. etc., eg:-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_glycation_endproduct

However, that's beside the point.The actual  definition of a nature-based 
Palaeolithic Diet is a diet which doesn't use technology or where foods are only 
eaten which are edible raw, which is the interpretation that  Ray Audette and 
many others have  made:-

"My definition of nature," he says, "is the absence of technology… I eat only 
those foods that would be available to me if I were naked of all technology 
save that of a convenient sharp stick or stone." The trouble  with this term, 
while very accurate in describing what is commonly accepted as a palaeolithic 
diet,  is that it logically forbids the use of cooking, as cooking is , of course, a 
highly technological process.  In other words, once you introduce fire, you are 
dealing with an unnatural diet which is not free of technology. 

Plus, of course, given that cooked-food is such a radically different food from 
any other type of (raw) food, it's unlikely that humans could ever fully adapt 
to it, in the way that humans adapted to meat.

Geoff



On Wed, 14 May 2008 11:36:19 -0400, Todd Moody <[log in to unmask]> 
wrote:

>My question was, why would tubers only have been eaten in famine times?
>These observations, while correct, don't answer that question. Virtually
>all plant foods, including the paleo ones, have so-called "secondary
>compounds" (toxins and antinutrients) to some degree, including
>strawberries, peaches, spinach, broccoli, radishes, cauliflower,
>cabbage, and collard greens--all of which contain goitrogens.  Spinach
>and rhubarb also contain oxalic acid, another antinutrient. So the mere
>presence of antinutrients in foods doesn't make them either inedible or
>nonpaleo.  The fact that a given food, such as peaches, is devoid of DHA
>certainly isn't sufficient to make it nonpaleo.  There's no reason to
>believe that these foods would only have been consumed in trace amounts,
>despite the presence of antinutrients in them.
>
>I ask this not because I advocate a tuber-based paleo diet, or because I
>think tuber consumption is what drove the evolution of the brain.  The
>question is simply: Should a (modern) paleodiet include any tubers?  The
>answer to that questions is generally understood to be that a modern
>paleodiet should include only foods that were a normal (not necessarily
>dominant) part of the actual diet of paleolithic people.  So the
>question isn't, Did paleolithic people have a tuber-based diet.  I agree
>that the answer to that question is no.  The question is, rather, Did
>paleolithic people normally eat tubers, not as desperation famine food,
>but as part of their diverse foraged food supply?  I see no reason to
>think that the answer to this question was no.
>
>The difference between edible and inedible plants is that the edible
>ones have lower levels of secondary compounds; they are not necessarily
>devoid of them.  Cooking lowers the levels of secondary compounds in
>otherwise inedible plants to levels comparable to those in plants that
>are edible uncooked.  The only diet that would be devoid of secondary
>compounds would be an all-meat diet (but no raw eggs!).  While this is
>certainly an option, I think nobody would suggest that a paleo diet
>*requires* it.  And since cooking (not just fire) extends well back into
>the paleolithic era, to before the appearance of modern homo sapiens,
>cooking is paleo.  That doesn't mean that a paleo diet entails cooking,
>but it does mean that it includes it.  Cooking made more foods available
>by making more plants edible, and it did so in indisputably paleo
>times.  So the "edible raw" criterion of paleo doesn't line up very well
>with what actual paleolithic people were probably doing for the last
>quarter million years or so.
>
>
>Todd Moody
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