The Paleo diet and its many forms has made quite a splash over the last decade on various internet web sites and forums, all supported by books like Neanderthin and The Paleo Diet. But new archaeological research findings have questioned the central theme of the Paleo diet — our genetic incompatibility with grain and carbohydrate foods.
If you’re not familiar with Paleo dieting, it means to eat like humans did before the beginning of agriculture prior to 10,000 years ago. This period is called the Paleolithic and was populated by emerging Homo sapiens hunter-gatherers – cave men in the old vernacular.
The premise of Paleo eating is that we should eat like a cave man because they ate in accordance with their genes, and certain new foods that we started to eat when human agriculture began are actually bad for us. Apparently we have not had enough time to genetically adapt to these foods, so we are actually poisoning ourselves. Fat, but poisoned . . .
The foods Paleo dieting supporters say we should avoid are grains and cereals, milk and dairy, starchy root vegetables like potatoes, beans, and sugary fruits. In fact in more strict versions you’re really only allowed to eat berries — yes, berries — and they better not taste any good because that means you’re getting a near-fatal dose of sugar. An apple a day will actually poison you with glucose and fructose until your pecker drops off. (If you’re a bird of course.) Who would have thought it?
Human grain eaters at least 100,000 years ago
The original and essential premise of Paleo dieting was that foods like grains are recent — adopted within 10,000 years – and we have not had time to develop genes that would render any toxic principles (like gluten and lectins) harmless. Then a discovery was made at Ohalo 2 in Israel that seemed to put grain eating back to around 30,000 years. Now, Julio Mercader from the University of Calgary’s Department of Archaeology has found evidence of consumption of wild sorghum grains and African potato and other plant foods at a site in Mozambique dating back at least 100,000 years. This revelation, published in the prestigious journal Science this month, is big news in the archaeological community that studies early human nutrition. This would put grain and tuber eating much further back than has previously been postulated in the mainstream — although in other writings I have suggested that it was almost certainly further back than 20 or 30 thousand years.
Grain consumption 4 million years ago?
In the dental record of Australopithecus, a hominid considered perhaps the earliest ancestor of Homo sapiens 4 million years ago, are found traces of C4 grass consumption. C4 plants are mostly grasses and grains. The question as to whether these early pre-humans ate grasses and grains has been somewhat undecided. Some opinion says that the C4 dental record was most likely caused by Australopithecines eating other animals that ate grasses and grains — probably grazing animals. This seems to me an avoidance of the obvious answer.
It’s well established that Gelada baboons eat grass seeds/grains. It seems that monkeys will as well. It would not surprise me if grain eating by early humans went back a very long way in the Paleolithic.
I’m well aware that modern, improved grains, and the way we process and eat them, are a long way from the wild grains of the African plains. However, first things first. Let’s not confuse dietary quality with the premise of the Paleo diet, which is to avoid all grain consumption because of a perceived genetic non-compliance. That hypothesis is just about dead in the water, or the grass, whichever you prefer.
Mercader J. Mozambican grass seed consumption during the Middle Stone Age. Science. 2009 Dec 18;326(5960):1680-3.
No related posts.
{ 11 comments… read them below or add one }
You are absolutely right. Why would paleoman NOT eat grains? My dog loves them and he is a true carnivore.
These paleo guys are frauds with an agenda at worst, misinformed at best.
The world renowned anthrolpologist Dr. Heny Harpending says we are not even the same as persons 11,000 years ago, let along paleoman. We are continually evolving and CERTAINLY evolved for grain consumption. They are useful to us.
These paleo diet proponents seem to forget anthrolopolgy is an area of science with real scientists.
I love your blog!
Yes, there’s a lot to question about Paleo dieting. Too many of the naive accept these so-called principles as if they are fact.
I am very wary of the agenda of this movement.
I doubt that there is much of an organized Paleo movement, more people who feel better. Generally though feeling like you have control over your diet makes you feel better. So that could be some of the effect.
But let’s say that grains were a substantial part of cave man diet (which I do believe and I eat a big bowl of oat meal with banana, almond butter, and apple or berries every morning) even then steel roller mills weren’t invented until the industrial revolution. Before then what we call wheat flour today was a luxury product made by sieving flour for the very finest particles. Same for rice: ask a Vietnamese chef about brown rice and he’ll tell that Vietnamese food is made with white rice (but white rice wasn’t mass produced until about 120 years ago). The weird thing, the really really strange thing, is that the poorest people in the world are eating malnutritious foods that were rare luxury items 300 years ago.
Paleo is a good way of upgrading the quality of your calories and reducing carbohydrate intake (bad for vanity, CV health, vision, and probably more when too high), reducing salt (which is bad for CV and GI health and almost impossible to get too little of), and good for people with celiac disease or Crohn’s who can have trouble with dairy or grain.
Morteng, I agree that ‘quality’ food is important and that some people have a gluten or lactose intolerance, and some are allergic to eggs, peanuts, shellfish and so on.
If a food does not agree with you, don’t eat it. That’s not a Paleo diet, nor is it a rationale for a Paleo diet.
The quantity of carbohydrate in the diet is generally not a problem if eaten within energy constraints and mostly as a balanced diet of whole foods. The traditional Okinawan diet was more or less around 80% CHO – mostly sweet potato – and many similar diets are of similar or greater CHO content with excellent longevity in the populations.
The idea that high CHO consumption is unhealthy is a mythology perpetrated by vested interests and the naive, for the naive.
A major paleo diet proponent professor Loren Cordain has already made a rebuttal on that study here:
http://thepaleodiet.blogspot.com/2009/12/dr-cordain-comments-on-new-evidence-of.html
bucklesnarf said…
“You are absolutely right. Why would paleoman NOT eat grains?”
Because they have mostly been quite hard to collect, mill, eat and digest. That’s why. Some grains may obviously have been a minor PART of the diet in some parts where there have been some to eat. Those parts have not been too common. In addition, all grains are NOT equal and have been evolving a lot more than humans have. The main reason is of course breeding. More gluten means more usages in making different foods and the same logic has major implications in present day food industry.
I recommend making a reality check on USDA (2010) food pyramid – you should eat 6-11 servings of grains every single day to stay “healthy”:
http://www.dietaryguidelines.gov/
Do you think that we have eaten grains nearly as much in any part of our evolution ? For other primates , pigs, guinea pigs and even parrots grain-based diet has been conclusively shown to be pro-atherogenic. Similarly, atherosclerosis can be developed on many lab animals that are fed low-fat high-grain diet. Early humans who started to cultivate grains got remarkably smaller in stature (with over 10% smaller skulls!) and seemed to be less healthier than hunter-gatherers.
The evidence is just so overwhelming. We even have intervention studies on pigs and humans – take grains out and we both get much healthier – even when compared to conventional Mediterranean diet:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/h7628r66r0552222/
http://www.nutritionandmetabolism.com/content/3/1/39/abstract/%20
Sorghum in Mercader’s study does not contain gluten and it’s lectins are way different than the ones in wheat. There have been several healthy african hunter gatherer populations that have eaten sorghum for some time, yet became acquianted with diseases of civilization concurrently with wheat introduction in their diet. Sorghum IS from Africa. Sorghum can be eaten by celiacs. It IS therefore passable for “paleolithic” food. If you must.
So perhaps we should be talking about grains-that-are-out-of-Africa as a main problem.
I find intriguing that a cardiologist who evidently has reversed atherosclerosis with many of his patients considers total absence of wheat to be an absolutely vital part of his treatment regimen and can proof it:
http://heartscanblog.blogspot.com/search/label/Wheat
Oh dear, another lamb to the slaughter, Johnny (Paleo lamb of course).
1. The pig study is completely ridiculous. Comparing an unbalanced diet of mostly grains with a more balanced diet, even if Paleo constructed, tells us nothing – especially in a pig!
2. Regarding the Lindberg et al study, here is the crucial point of this study.
“Energy intake was 25% lower in the Palaeolithic group
(p=0.004; Table 6) despite similar quantities of consumed
food (by weight; Table 5). After adjustment for energy
intake, the improvement of AUC Glucose –120 was still
larger in the Palaeolithic group (p=0.02; Supplementary
Table 2), while the larger waist loss, and the tendency for
larger decrease of AUC Insulin0–120, compared with the
Consensus group, disappeared (Supplementary Table 3).”
The study is just about meaningless because of the difference in energy intake. All outcomes are suspect, even though the authors claim glucose AUC was still lower with Paleo. I could not find their referenced Supplementary tables 2 and 3. Ultimately, there is nothing here that proves anything about a Paleo diet other than it results in energy restriction, which may indeed be useful for weight loss and metabolic adjustment.
This is the same for all low-carb diet comparisons. Adjust for energy and dietary quality and there are no metabolic or health advantages.
If you really want a valid comparison, why not compare an energy matched Paleo and a high-fibre (0.5 gm/kg/bw/day) Mediterranean type diet. Ideally such a Paleo diet would also mandate a formal quantity of red and other meat, which is standard recommendation for most Paleo diets. Otherwise you end up with a vegan diet, which will probably out-perform both of the above.
By the way, when did Paleo diets start to adopt the consumption of potatoes? (Maybe when Richard Wrangham et al showed that we ate them in the Paleolithic?)
Regarding some cardiologist or other, let’s just stick to the science. If he’s published anything, let me hear it. If not, we all know that there are a zillion MDs, medical specialists, PhDs and others out there on the internet who are crazy as a snake on crack. I only take note of the science. Let me hear it. So far, you’ve got nothing.
Paul,
There already are studies that show how people even on vegetarian diets fare better when taken off grains. In addition, we have a convincing showcase against adherence of vegan based diet when put against more paleo-like diet:
http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/297/9/969
Grains simply offer no superior nutrition value whatsoever that couldn’t be gained through proper paleo-esque omnivory diet. It’s of no use even discussing about a [rather redundant] sorghum study as a proof for evolutionary grain based diet. Agriculture simply meant that people’s health and stature went down the toilet. Perhaps many of them simply became crack-heads because of wheat’s powerful opioids, who knows ? Brewing beer of grains also seems a good theory to me, when compared to the laughable “grains improved our nutritional status” argument. Opium also became very popular, even tough though its nutritional value is abysmal. Lots of animals get stoned just for the pleasure of it. I claim that humans are no different.
Autoimmune disease connection alone is in my opinion a reason enough to avoid grains and their disastrous effect by mass agriculture put the final nails in the coffin.
I bet you already have read Lindeberg’s recent paper on grains & leptin resistance:
http://www.biomedcentral.com/1472-6823/5/10
On wheat’s WGA as insulin analogue:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6T2M-47N64XS-1V&_user=10&_coverDate=12/31/1990&_rdoc=1&_fmt=high&_orig=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_searchStrId=1402807533&_rerunOrigin=google&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=cb90bb9ed0df290d3203b16e61567f25
Dr Davis paper here:
http://www.fasebj.org/cgi/content/meeting_abstract/22/1_MeetingAbstracts/1092.15
I’m sure that modern strains of wheat are far worse than older strains like Einkorn in many ways and that wheat can be made nutritionally tolerable by soaking and fermenting procedures which are seen in various cultures, yet the main point remains – why bother ?
Paul, you wrote:
“The study is just about meaningless because of the difference in energy intake.”
Fulltext with the tables you missed above:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/h7628r66r0552222/fulltext.pdf
The weight difference between Mediterranean and paleo was an almighty 1,2 kg, so your calories argument simply fails. It must be the _quality_ of the calories, otherwise why the paleo group lost twice (5,8 cm versus 2,9 cm) of their waist circumference ? Moreover, there was no relationship between weight and AUC or between waist circumference and AUC.
We both should know that people generally suck at counting calories. You do believe in laws of thermodynamics, don’t you ? So again, it pretty much must have been the quality of calories.
Regarding metabolic changes, dairy is generally known to be insulinogenic, yet I think that since the absolute consumption of protein was the same, we again must look at grains. At least partially grain-related leptin resistance may well be one piece of the puzzle:
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/118993411/abstract
It’s rather amusing that you say the diet in pig study was “ridiculous”, since current US nutritional guidelines recommend rather comparable consumption of grains daily (9-11 servings).
I’d guess the rematch between paleo and Mediterranean would again show MD blow hard, esp if Lindeberg or anyone up to it would be more vary of carb content while adding (grass-fed) ruminant flesh to the diet. We could do it with fish-based if we like, too, since northern, lighter skinned dwellers ate it a lot more anyway (according to Cordain et al. AJCN 2000 paper).
I dont’ base my assumptions on labels like “standard paleo diet recommendations”. I base them on presumable health effects.
Johnny, you are posting trivia. Not one of those references proves anything about Paleo as a healthy-eating lifestyle based on long-term human studies. For example, if you want to know about vegan diets and health markers, try the Oxford vegetarian study, which studied 6000 vegetarians and vegans and a comparable cohort of meat and fish eaters. I’m not necessarily recommending veganism, but we’ve known for over 30 years that long-term vegans have average total cholesterol under 160 mg/dl, with quite good HDL, and of course, more or less ideal BMI. Most vegan diets aren’t even very low fat, usually around 30% fat.
http://www.ajcn.org/cgi/reprint/70/3/525S
Here is an extract:
“After 12 y of follow-up, all-cause mortality in the whole cohort was roughly half that in the population of England and Wales(standardized mortality ratio, 0.46; 95% CI, 0.42, 0.51). After adjusting for smoking, body mass index, and social class, death rates were lower in non-meat-eaters than in meat eaters for each of the mortality endpoints studied . . .”
And don’t bother giving me that low-carb crap that low cholesterol causes cancer or depressive illness, because it doesn’t stack up, and in any case I would quote this to you — and at least one of the authors you will recognise:
Optimal low-density lipoprotein is 50 to 70 mg/dl: lower is better and physiologically normal. O’Keefe JH Jr, Cordain L, Harris WH, Moe RM, Vogel R. J Am Coll Cardiol. 2004 Jun 2;43(11):2142-6.
And, by the way, you are trying to cheat. That reference from Davis et al is nothing about wheat, but a statin study and coronary calcium score, which is nothing to do with our discussion.
You still have nothing, and, in fact, you have demonstrated admirably the paucity of the science on which you base your dietary preferences.
Paul,
That study by Davis is not just a “statin study”, but a quite modified TLC diet (without grains) and with potent additional agents like niacin, Vitamin D and Omega 3 supplementation. By all means, wheat cessation was not the most important factor according to Davis himself – it was another important paleo factor Vitamin D:
http://www.trackyourplaque.com/library/fl_06-027faseb.asp