Would eating a Stone Age diet make us healthier?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/thisw...098937,00.html

Would eating a Stone Age diet make us healthier?

David Adam

Thursday December 4, 2003

The Guardian

If only things were that simple. Supporters of the so-called Stone Age
diet argue that farming practices introduced about 10,000 years ago
are ultimately harmful to human health, and that if our hunter-
gatherer ancestors evolved without eating dairy products or cereals
then we shouldn't eat them either. Instead, they say, we should only
eat plenty of lean meat and fish, with fruit and raw vegetables on the
side.

The idea, also called the caveman, hunter-gatherer or paleolithic
diet, has been around for decades and is regularly recycled - as it
was in various newspapers earlier this week after the regime was
discussed at a meeting of the British Society for Allergy,
Environmental and Nutritional Medicine.

According to Lauren Cordain, a nutritionist at Colorado State
University who presented the idea to the meeting and published a book
about it last year called the Paleo Diet, those following the
meat-dominated menu "lose weight and get healthy by eating the food
you were designed to eat". He says there is increasing evidence that a
Paleolithic diet can prevent and treat many common western diseases.
Studies of islanders in Papua New Guinea who still live a hunter-
gatherer lifestyle show they rarely suffer heart disease.

But other nutrionists argue that, as with the closely related Atkins
diet, cutting out whole food groups such as cereals is just not a good
idea.

"I would recommend anybody to eat lean meat and raw vegetables," says
Toni Steer of the MRC human nutrition research unit at Cambridge. "But
what you're asking people to do is cut out a food group for which we
have a lot of evidence to show is good for your health."

Archaeologists say it's not even clear exactly how much of the various
foods people actually ate during the Stone Age (broadly defined as
from two-and-a-half million years ago until 10,000 years ago).

"There was no one Stone Age diet; diets of the past varied greatly,"
says John Gowlett, an archaeologist at Liverpool University who also
attended the conference. People in Africa probably ate less meat than
many people think, he says, while those in the northern, icy regions
were forced to eat only whatever animals they could catch.

"I'm not convinced that we know what Stone Age man ate," agrees Andrew
Millard, who researches ancient health and diet at Durham University.
"The evidence we have is heavily biased towards the meat component of
the diet. We get bones from animals they have eaten but we don't get
the remains of any vegetables they have eaten because they decay."

Millard adds that there is good evidence that later Stone Age cultures
in the Near East regularly collected and ate wild cereals and it's
possible the practice was more widespread.

Which stone age person at a low fat diet? I doubt they'd trim the fat even
though a lot of meat then had less fat then they do today. Some types of
fish are very fatty.

Ignoramus24587 wrote:
:: The diet calls for eating raw vegetables and fruits combined with
:: lean meat, and fish.

"Ignoramus24587" wrote in message
...
The diet calls for eating raw vegetables and fruits combined with lean
meat, and fish.

Let's see how much you would need to eat to satisfy this diet. You
will see that you will need to eat a lot!

Suppose that you need 2400 calories per day.

Suppose that you want to get only one third your calories from meat (which
is a lot!).

Raw cauliflower, for instance, contains 25 calories per 100 gram. To
get 1600 calories, therefore, you will need to eat, drumroll, 6.4
kilograms of cauliflower (about 14 lbs) per day.

Hard to eat so much.

Fortunately, some fruits are more calorie dense. For example, to get
1600 calories from bananas, you would need to eat 1800 grams (3.5 lbs)
of bananas. Still quite a bit of bananas!

To get the remaining 800 calories in form of eye round roast (a very
lean meat) with fat removed, you would need to eat 468 grams (one
pound) of meat.

So. Your diet would be calling for at least 3 pounds of fruits, and
that is if you choose to eat only bananas, which are some of the
densest fruits calorically. If you eat typical raw vegetables that can
be eaten raw (not starchy and do not need to be boiled), you would
need to eat upwards of 5 lbs of fruits/vegs per day, or about 14 lbs
of vegs if you eat no fruits.

To that, you would add 1 pound of meat.

It is very, very hard to eat this much and therefore it is hard to
stick to this diet as it was described.

If you permit to eat fatty mean as well as nuts though, it becomes
easier to make meals small enough to be digestible.


Lauren's point was that wild game meats hunted then had a different fat
balance, and were leaner in general to the current hormone and grain fed
cattle.
Lauren proposes eating lean meat because the fat now found in most beef is
of the saturated variety. However, he has a range of caloric intake divided
among protein, fat and carbohydrates, with more emphasis on "good" fats and
greater portions of low glycemic index veggies.

Protein Carbs Fat
------------------------------
19-35% 22-40% 28-47%

He basically breaks the diet into a few simple rules:

1. Eat all the lean protein you want
2. Eat all the vegetables and fruits you want (save for tubers and legumes)
3. Eat a moderate amount of fat, with preference to the monosaturated
variety and good omega 3 and omega 6 ratios.
4. Cut dairy and grains from your diet.
5. Reduce salt in your diet.


I have had great success so far on this type of diet. My levels according
to Diet Power have averaged as follows:

Protein Carbs Fat
------------------------------
32% 22% 46%

All my vitamin needs are met or exceeded with diet alone (Save for Vitamin
D, which I take a teaspoon of cod liver oil for).

This diet puts me into ketosis with no problem, and I have lost 20 pounds in
the last 3 weeks. My stomach troubles have disappeared, my gluttonous
cravings for sweets have greatly diminished, my triglycerides have dropped
from over 4000 to around 400, and various other changes have occurred.

Eating this amount of carbohydrates in the form of fruits and veggies is not
difficult at all. Simply eat some fruits and veggies each meal and snack,
toss in some nuts and berries and you are set. (With the occasional cheat)

Read the numerous articles by Lauren and his book and your misconceptions
would be remedied.

Hehe! The same one that eats cauliflower (which as been around for 2000
years, but the Stone Age was 10000 years ago).

Seriously, wild game does have a different fat content than, say, grain
fed beef.

On 12/4/2003 1:43 PM, Roger Zoul wrote:
Which stone age person at a low fat diet? I doubt they'd trim the fat even
though a lot of meat then had less fat then they do today. Some types of
fish are very fatty.

Ignoramus24587 wrote:
:: The diet calls for eating raw vegetables and fruits combined with
:: lean meat, and fish.



--
jmk in NC

"Ignoramus24587" wrote in message
...
In article , Mu-Pi wrote:
All my vitamin needs are met or exceeded with diet alone (Save for
Vitamin
D, which I take a teaspoon of cod liver oil for).

This diet puts me into ketosis with no problem, and I have lost 20
pounds in
the last 3 weeks. My stomach troubles have disappeared, my gluttonous
cravings for sweets have greatly diminished, my triglycerides have
dropped
from over 4000 to around 400, and various other changes have occurred.

That's great and I can say that something similar worked for me. I
gave up all processed junk food, and sugar completely, and started
eating lots of raw vegs.

Cool! Although I do miss eating those cheddar wurst sausages!

While I was not in ketosis, I lost 47-48 lbs in 100 days and am now
maintaining.

Great!


I do however eat much more animal fat and fat in general than this
"stone age" diet recommends.

I am on the cusp myself as well.

Getting all my calories from raw vegs and lean meat would be
prohibitive due to the need to eat a huge amount of food.

If nuts were allowed (which I am not saying that they are not on the
stone age diet), it would become easier to eat a manageable amount of
food.

Thank goodness for macadamia nuts!


I call my own diet a "medieval diet", without attaching it much
significance. I just reject the 20th century advances in food
processing, for the most part.

:-) I do like the concept of irradiating food though... but that is just my
physicist proclivities in effect.


Eating this amount of carbohydrates in the form of fruits and veggies is
not
difficult at all. Simply eat some fruits and veggies each meal and
snack,
toss in some nuts and berries and you are set. (With the occasional
cheat)

I don't know, I kind of believe my calculations. You need to eat lots
of fruits/vegs, lots and lots.



Maybe your occasional cheat is bigger than you think.

Yeah... the orange juice can pack on the carbs (in sugar), and I do eat
LaTortilla tortillas on occasion, each packing 18 grams of fiber.

Have a good one.

On 12/4/2003 3:31 PM, Ignoramus24587 wrote:
jmk wrote:

Hehe! The same one that eats cauliflower (which as been around for 2000
years, but the Stone Age was 10000 years ago).


Does stone age diet require eating only vegetables that have been
available during stone age?

Actually, from what I have read, it does (or maybe it can depending on
your perspective). I know several people who are following this plan
and I read about it when a few of them changed their WOE. They may be
following a stricter interpretation that you are though. The refer to
these "new" foods as neolithic.

--
jmk in NC

Diarmid Logan quoted:

"I would recommend anybody to eat lean meat and raw vegetables," says
Toni Steer of the MRC human nutrition research unit at Cambridge. "But
what you're asking people to do is cut out a food group for which we
have a lot of evidence to show is good for your health."

Grains are *better* than an equivalent quantity of vegetables?

Where is all this evidence?

ISTM that grains are cheap and caloric - and are popular for those reasons.
--
__________
|im |yler http://timtyler.org/ Remove lock to reply.

Sigh. The people who invented this know nothing about archaeology
or physiology. Modern humans developed in Africa eating the same
80-90% plant food diet as our modern cousins, the chimpanzee.

Human remains on the Russian steppes were part of a culture which
built its houses around mammoth ribs. A modern elephant eats what,
5 tons of plant food a day. Mammoths were bigger. Where is a herd
of mammoths going to get multi-5 ton swathes of plant food? Not
on the tundra. In the taiga. There are lots of other edible
plants in a taiga.

So forget about justifying eating too much meat by Stone Age
peoples. It didn't happen.

Diarmid Logan wrote:

The RDA was calculated based on a diet that includes cooked food.
So eating raw food isn't going to be any more effective meeting
the RDA. The only reason cooked food would have less nutrients
is if a) the person boils everything to mush and b) the person
then throws away the boiling liquid.

Anybody who is a decent cook is not going to ruin the nutritional
value of their food.

Ignoramus24587 wrote:

The diet calls for eating raw vegetables and fruits combined with lean
meat, and fish.

Let's see how much you would need to eat to satisfy this diet. You
will see that you will need to eat a lot!

Suppose that you need 2400 calories per day.

Suppose that you want to get only one third your calories from meat (which
is a lot!).

Raw cauliflower, for instance, contains 25 calories per 100 gram. To
get 1600 calories, therefore, you will need to eat, drumroll, 6.4
kilograms of cauliflower (about 14 lbs) per day.

Hard to eat so much.

Fortunately, some fruits are more calorie dense. For example, to get
1600 calories from bananas, you would need to eat 1800 grams (3.5 lbs)
of bananas. Still quite a bit of bananas!

To get the remaining 800 calories in form of eye round roast (a very
lean meat) with fat removed, you would need to eat 468 grams (one
pound) of meat.

So. Your diet would be calling for at least 3 pounds of fruits, and
that is if you choose to eat only bananas, which are some of the
densest fruits calorically. If you eat typical raw vegetables that can
be eaten raw (not starchy and do not need to be boiled), you would
need to eat upwards of 5 lbs of fruits/vegs per day, or about 14 lbs
of vegs if you eat no fruits.

To that, you would add 1 pound of meat.

It is very, very hard to eat this much and therefore it is hard to
stick to this diet as it was described.

If you permit to eat fatty mean as well as nuts though, it becomes
easier to make meals small enough to be digestible.

i

And some mammals are fatty, also.

Cookie


"Roger Zoul" wrote in message
...
Which stone age person at a low fat diet? I doubt they'd trim the fat
even
though a lot of meat then had less fat then they do today. Some types of
fish are very fatty.

Ignoramus24587 wrote:
:: The diet calls for eating raw vegetables and fruits combined with
:: lean meat, and fish.