Human Ancestors Were Nearly All Vegetarians- Scientific American
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2012/07/23/human-ancestors-were-nearly-all-vegetarians/Human Ancestors Were Nearly All Vegetarians
By Rob Dunn | July 23, 2012 | 39
Paleolithic diets have become all the rage, but are they getting our ancestral diet all wrong?
Right now, one half of all Americans are on a diet. The other half just gave up on their diets and are on a binge. Collectively, we are overweight, sick and struggling. Our modern choices about what and how much to eat have gone terribly wrong. The time has come to return to a more sensible way of eating and living, but which way? An entire class of self-help books recommends a return to the diets of our ancestors. Paleolithic diets, caveman diets, primal diets and the like, urge us to eat like the ancients. Taken too literally, such diets are ridiculous. After all, sometimes our ancestors starved to death and the starving to death diet, well, it ends badly. Yet, the idea that we might take our ancestral diet into consideration when evaluating the foods on which our organs, cells and existence thrive, makes sense. But what did our ancestors eat?
Here is where the trouble starts. Collectively, anthropologists have spent many a career attempting to hone in on the diets of our most recent ancestors. Typically, they focus on our stone age (AKA Paleolithic) human ancestors or our earlier pre-human, hominid ancestors. Even if we just consider our stone age ancestors—those folks whose stories span the time between the first stone tool and the first agriculture—the sides of the debate are polarized. If you listen to one camp, our ancestors got most of their nutrition from gathered fruits and nuts; successful kills of big mammals may have been more of a treat than an everyday reality. A paper out just this month suggests even Neanderthals–our north country cousins and mates– may have eaten much more plant material than previously suspected. Still, the more macho camps paint a picture of our ancestors as big, bad, hunters, who supplemented meaty diets with the occasional berry “chaser.” Others suggest we spent much of our recent past scavenging what the lions left behind, running in to snag a half-rotten wildebeest leg when the fates allowed. Although “Paleolithic” diets in diet books tend to be very meaty, reasonable minds disagree as to whether ancient, Paleolithic diets actually were. Fortunately, new research suggests answers (yes, plural) to the question of what our ancestors ate.
The resolutions come, in part, from considering the question of our diets in a broader evolutionary context. When we talk about “paleo” diets, we arbitrarily tend to start with one set of ancestors, our most recent ones. I want to eat like Homo erectus or a Neanderthal or a stone age human, my neighbors testify. But why do we choose these particular ancestors as starting points? They do seem tough and admirable in a really strong five o’ clock shadow sort of way. But if we want to return to the diet our guts and bodies evolved to deal with, perhaps we should also be looking our earlier ancestors. In addition to understanding early humans and other hominids, we need to understand the diet of our ancestors during the time when the main features of our guts, and their magical abilities to turn food into life, evolved. The closest (albeit imperfect) proxies for our such ancestral guts are to be found in the living bodies of monkeys and apes.
I should start by explaining what the “gut” is and does; I use the term too loosely. What I really mean is the alimentary canal and all of its gurgling bells and whistles. This canal is the most important and least lovely one on Earth. It takes you from the mouth through the body all the way down to the anus. But while most canals take the shortest course between two points, the one inside you takes the longest. The longer the canal, the more area over which digestion can occur. Food enters the canal through the mouth, where it is chewed and slimed with saliva. It then hits the stomach, where much of the digestion of proteins occurs. Next, it is on down to the small intestine where simple sugars are absorbed. If you have just eaten a twinkie, the process essentially ends there. Everything worth consuming has been absorbed. But if you have eaten broccoli or an artichoke, things are just beginning. It is in the large intestine, where harder to break down carbohydrates (such as cellulose, the most common plant compound on Earth) are torn asunder. This system evolved so as to provide us with as many calories as possible (long to our benefit) and, also, as many of the necessary but hard to produce nutrients. The alimentary canal is, evolutionarily speaking, a masterwork1.
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with Napa cabbage, edamame, shredded carrot, chunks of avacado & a yummy ginger tofu dressing. You could order it with shrimp or chicken for extra, but veg was default. They changed it. Now the default is with shrimp or chicken. You frequently have to remind them to charge less for it & you always have to check your order (I do carry out) to make sure they didn't screw up & give you the default. 
They lost me as a customer because of that. I used to eat 3 of those salads a week & now - zero.
on edit: I've written to them three times asking them to offer baked tofu as an option & never even got a response.
& you won't want to ever eat out again.
Problem solved!
on edit: I'm veg & can relate.
Mainly for recipe ideas. 
Anything nutrition oriented interests me - as does this article. My beef with it (pardon the pun) - is that it has already been done. Look up Carol Sinclair's The Anti-IBS diet - she wrote her experience down 20 years ago. And the anti inflammatory diet concept stole from that starting about ten years ago.
It's important to note that when I refer to diet - I'm not speaking in terms of weight reduction. I'm in the realm of HEALTH.
Those of us that struggled with Auto Immune Spectrum diseases never have just one. They always come in clusters. Those clusters come with drugs - think Enbrel for my Ankylosing which causes cancer in exchange for stopping the damage to the spine and hips created by the inflammation. Follow that with NSAIDS (make your stomach bleed) and Cyclobenzaprine (which is a muscle relaxer on the market known as Flexerall) and add a bunch of other crap to your cocktail and point blank - you can't get out of your own way.
What the Paleo Diets don't touch on are the organisms in our stomaches that can get out of control. Klebsiella is a good one - or a bad one in my case. And they don't have the reader START with science of allergy and intolerance testing.
When my AS first flared after seven years of undiagnosed IBS and the diagnosis ghetto of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome I was lucky to find a Rheumy who looked at EVERYTHING. And we started with an MRI if the spine and hips and next was allergy testing. Not going to list them all but they start with corn and go all the way to preservatives and gluten intolerance.
I now no longer give myself a shot each week that causes cancer and is made of mice waste . . . I don't take any drugs other Han a Pre Natal vitamin. I treat myself under a GP and Rheumy care with food.
Our ancestors did not sit down and have a roasted grass fed non antibiotic and steroid filled roasted chicken for dinner every night! No one is saying they did in the Paleo books. But they also didn't survive on hummus and bread.
A beans, bean sprouts diet will make me inflame to the point of not being able to move my head beyond a 45 degree angle and up. They are protein - but they are also starch. Rice is pure starch - as is wheat. I can eat those things - once a week at most.
But they are staples in a vegetarian diet.
If I don't eat grass fed meats - ditto beans. A steady week of that and I ache.
There is nothing wrong with lean grass fed bison steak, spinach, and broccoli being on the dinner plate. It's hard to get people to understand that. I don't expect anyone who has not struggled with the severe effects of an auto immune disease to understand that vegetables and protein are my religion - along with home made yogurt. Or cooking from scratch. Because it is the only way to know what is truly in your food.
But I think whether one is a Carnivore or Vegetarian - we can all agree that regardless of what ancient era in the human history we select our ancestors did not die from NOT eating things like:
Hamburger Helper
Donuts
Hostess fruit pies
Yoplait yogurt with fake fruit jelly and twenty preservatives
Cheetos, corn chips, pretzels
Kraft Mac and cheese
McDonalds, Burger King, Taco Bell
Cake, cookies, brownies
Fish sticks in breading
Chik- Fil-A (never heard of it prior to this week and was disgusted by the so-called nutritional content of that garbage)
Hot pockets
Bread - show me this oven they had in any eras - didn't exist.
Add to the list! I don't think Robb Wolf is the guru of all gurus - nor do I think Carol Sinclair is. But if you go to an A.S. support group - you'll find those that live with inflammation that can kill or rather livED with it - can say there's value in what many who have said might work.
The by product of what the original post calls Paleo and I call a rip off of the anti inflammatory method is weight loss. How can you NOT lose weight when you aren't eating a sandwich, pretzels, and apple for lunch everyday and instead eating four cups of spinach, raw red cabbage, strawberries, RAW walnuts, and cubed grilled chicken (always free range) with dressing made from scratch? You are too full and full of energy for that afternoon fat, starch, preservative laden sleeve of Chips Ahoy.
