Ancestral Diet Summary & Quotes
My summary of a Paleo/Ancestral way of eating: eating a Paleo/Ancestral diet means the biologically appropriate foods available to you today that will optimize your health, due to how they interact with your genetics, epigenetics, chemistry, metabolism, current nutrient levels and any other complex factors we may be unaware of.
Nicknames for Paleo/Ancestral diets and the principles behind them:
> ancestral diet, ancestral nutrition - origin unknown (I started using this term myself in 2004--including in the blog I created on OCTOBER 30, 2004, http://tiny.cc/ja0glw--because "Paleo diet" was confusing or offputting to some people, but it likely has been used for a long time by many people)
> "human ecology" - Walter Voegtlin, MD (1975, The stone age diet: Based on in-depth studies of human ecology and the diet of man, Vantage Press)
> "our ancient, genetically determined biology," "our ancient genome," "biological discordance vs. adaptation," "Paleolithic nutrition," "evolutionary nutrition" - Boyd Eaton, MD, Loren Cordain, PhD et al (February 2005, Origins and evolution of the Western diet: health implications for the 21st century, Am J Clin Nutr, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15699220)
> "the evolutionary template" - Loren Cordain, PhD (June 2006, The Paleo Diet Newsletter Courier)
> "the Primal Blueprint" - Mark Sisson (somtime before May 30, 2009, http://www.marksdailyapple.com/the-primal-blueprint-for-busy-people-part-1-sleep-stress/#axzz27xUhel84)
> "the evolutionary metabolic milieu (EM2)," "PaNu," "Paleo 2.0," "Archevore" - Kurt Harris, MD (the EM2 and PaNu terms were retrieved June 13, 2009 at the now defunct http://www.paleonu.com/what-is-panu; Paleo 2.0 and Archevore are more recent terms)
> "The Paleo template" - Chris Kresser (June 17, 2011, http://chriskresser.com/beyond-paleo-moving-from-a-paleo-diet-to-a-paleo-template)
> Other popular colloquial nicknames include the "Hunter-Gatherer Diet," "Stone Age Diet", or "Cave Man Diet" and occasionally the "Garden of Eden diet"
> I sometimes also call it the "adaptivore diet," a term I independently arrived at sometime before March 10, 2012, because "omnivore" seemed to suggest that we can eat anything. I found that Peter Cox had used the term in his (ironically vegetarian) You Don't Need Meat book, published on November 1, 2003.
Some good summaries of the gist behind Paleo/Ancestral:
"As many of you are well aware, the Paleo Diet concept represents a powerful leveraging paradigm that provides scientists, nutritionists and lay individuals alike with an organizational template for answering complex diet/health related questions. The evolutionary basis for optimal human diet does not require a charismatic individual for its promulgation and success, ala fly-by-night popular diets that seemingly come and go with the change of seasons. Rather, the power of the Paleo Diet concept lies in its ability to simply uncover a pre-existing diet – a universal diet and dietary characteristics consumed by all humans until very recent times." - Loren Cordain, PhD on the Paleo Diet Concept: The Paleo Diet Newsletter Courier, Volume 2, No. 2, June 2006
-*-
"The Archevore diet and approach to health is centered on a simple idea - that the diseases of civilization are largely related to abandonment of the metabolic conditions we evolved under - what I have termed the "evolutionary metabolic milieu" - EM2.
I believe we can make sense of many of the diseases that are prevalent now and relate them to some simple but profound changes that have occurred with the introduction of agriculture and the more recent industrialization of our foodways. These changes are related to how the food environment, including it's cultural and biological availability, interacts with the metabolic environment in our bodies.
My conception of the EM2 is not derived from a single science or field of inquiry, but draws first on medical sciences like biochemistry and endocrinology, and only then looks back with history and paleoanthropology." - Kurt Harris, MD, http://www.archevore.com/archevore, retrieved 8.15.09
-*-
"There is an enormous misunderstanding about paleo diets held by scores of both proponents and detractors: That the paleo diet is about "what cavemen did". No, no, no! It is about what nature did to the cavemen. In other words, what needs to be figured out is which environmental inputs and stresses form the basis for how human physiology evolved. The answers then inform what the general dietary template for humans should be." - Christian Wernstedt on Misunderstanding the Paleo Diet: Tidbits from VitalObjectives,
TUESDAY, JULY 12, 2011, http://blog.modernpaleo.com
-*-
"While farmers concentrate on high-carbohydrate crops like rice and potatoes, the mix of wild plants and animals in the diets of surviving hunter-gatherers provides more protein and a bettter balance of other nutrients. In one study, the Bushmen's average daily food intake (during a month when food was plentiful) was 2,140 calories and 93 grams of protein, considerably greater than the recommended daily allowance for people of their size. It's almost inconceivable that Bushmen, who eat 75 or so wild plants, could die of starvation the way hundreds of thousands of Irish farmers and their families did during the potato famine of the 1840s. ....
Skeletons from Greece and Turkey show that the average height of hunger-gatherers toward the end of the ice ages was a generous 5' 9" for men, 5' 5" for women. With the adoption of agriculture, height crashed, and by 3000 B. C. had reached a low of only 5' 3" for men, 5' for women. By classical times heights were very slowly on the rise again, but modern Greeks and Turks have still not regained the average height of their distant ancestors. ....
Studies ... show these early farmers paid a price for their new-found livelihood. Compared to the hunter-gatherers who preceded them, the farmers had a nearly 50 per cent increase in enamel defects indicative of malnutrition, a fourfold increase in iron-deficiency anemia (evidenced by a bone condition called porotic hyperostosis), a theefold rise in bone lesions reflecting infectious disease in general, and an increase in degenerative conditions of the spine, probably reflecting a lot of hard physical labor. "Life expectancy at birth in the pre-agricultural community was bout twenty-six years," says Armelagos, "but in the post-agricultural community it was nineteen years. So these episodes of nutritional stress and infectious disease were seriously affecting their ability to survive." ....
Archaeologists studying the rise of farming have reconstructed a crucial stage at which we made the worst mistake in human history. Forced to choose between limiting population or trying to increase food production, we chose the latter and ended up with starvation, warfare, and tyranny.
Hunter-gatherers practiced the most successful and longest-lasting life style in human history. In contrast, we're still struggling with the mess into which agriculture has tumbled us, and it's unclear whether we can solve it." - Jared Diamond, "The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race," Discover Magazine, May 1987, pp. 64-66. http://www.ditext.com/diamond/mistake.html
Nicknames for Paleo/Ancestral diets and the principles behind them:
> ancestral diet, ancestral nutrition - origin unknown (I started using this term myself in 2004--including in the blog I created on OCTOBER 30, 2004, http://tiny.cc/ja0glw--because "Paleo diet" was confusing or offputting to some people, but it likely has been used for a long time by many people)
> "human ecology" - Walter Voegtlin, MD (1975, The stone age diet: Based on in-depth studies of human ecology and the diet of man, Vantage Press)
> "our ancient, genetically determined biology," "our ancient genome," "biological discordance vs. adaptation," "Paleolithic nutrition," "evolutionary nutrition" - Boyd Eaton, MD, Loren Cordain, PhD et al (February 2005, Origins and evolution of the Western diet: health implications for the 21st century, Am J Clin Nutr, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15699220)
> "the evolutionary template" - Loren Cordain, PhD (June 2006, The Paleo Diet Newsletter Courier)
> "the Primal Blueprint" - Mark Sisson (somtime before May 30, 2009, http://www.marksdailyapple.com/the-primal-blueprint-for-busy-people-part-1-sleep-stress/#axzz27xUhel84)
> "the evolutionary metabolic milieu (EM2)," "PaNu," "Paleo 2.0," "Archevore" - Kurt Harris, MD (the EM2 and PaNu terms were retrieved June 13, 2009 at the now defunct http://www.paleonu.com/what-is-panu; Paleo 2.0 and Archevore are more recent terms)
> "The Paleo template" - Chris Kresser (June 17, 2011, http://chriskresser.com/beyond-paleo-moving-from-a-paleo-diet-to-a-paleo-template)
> Other popular colloquial nicknames include the "Hunter-Gatherer Diet," "Stone Age Diet", or "Cave Man Diet" and occasionally the "Garden of Eden diet"
> I sometimes also call it the "adaptivore diet," a term I independently arrived at sometime before March 10, 2012, because "omnivore" seemed to suggest that we can eat anything. I found that Peter Cox had used the term in his (ironically vegetarian) You Don't Need Meat book, published on November 1, 2003.
Some good summaries of the gist behind Paleo/Ancestral:
"As many of you are well aware, the Paleo Diet concept represents a powerful leveraging paradigm that provides scientists, nutritionists and lay individuals alike with an organizational template for answering complex diet/health related questions. The evolutionary basis for optimal human diet does not require a charismatic individual for its promulgation and success, ala fly-by-night popular diets that seemingly come and go with the change of seasons. Rather, the power of the Paleo Diet concept lies in its ability to simply uncover a pre-existing diet – a universal diet and dietary characteristics consumed by all humans until very recent times." - Loren Cordain, PhD on the Paleo Diet Concept: The Paleo Diet Newsletter Courier, Volume 2, No. 2, June 2006
-*-
"The Archevore diet and approach to health is centered on a simple idea - that the diseases of civilization are largely related to abandonment of the metabolic conditions we evolved under - what I have termed the "evolutionary metabolic milieu" - EM2.
I believe we can make sense of many of the diseases that are prevalent now and relate them to some simple but profound changes that have occurred with the introduction of agriculture and the more recent industrialization of our foodways. These changes are related to how the food environment, including it's cultural and biological availability, interacts with the metabolic environment in our bodies.
My conception of the EM2 is not derived from a single science or field of inquiry, but draws first on medical sciences like biochemistry and endocrinology, and only then looks back with history and paleoanthropology." - Kurt Harris, MD, http://www.archevore.com/archevore, retrieved 8.15.09
-*-
"There is an enormous misunderstanding about paleo diets held by scores of both proponents and detractors: That the paleo diet is about "what cavemen did". No, no, no! It is about what nature did to the cavemen. In other words, what needs to be figured out is which environmental inputs and stresses form the basis for how human physiology evolved. The answers then inform what the general dietary template for humans should be." - Christian Wernstedt on Misunderstanding the Paleo Diet: Tidbits from VitalObjectives,
TUESDAY, JULY 12, 2011, http://blog.modernpaleo.com
-*-
"While farmers concentrate on high-carbohydrate crops like rice and potatoes, the mix of wild plants and animals in the diets of surviving hunter-gatherers provides more protein and a bettter balance of other nutrients. In one study, the Bushmen's average daily food intake (during a month when food was plentiful) was 2,140 calories and 93 grams of protein, considerably greater than the recommended daily allowance for people of their size. It's almost inconceivable that Bushmen, who eat 75 or so wild plants, could die of starvation the way hundreds of thousands of Irish farmers and their families did during the potato famine of the 1840s. ....
Skeletons from Greece and Turkey show that the average height of hunger-gatherers toward the end of the ice ages was a generous 5' 9" for men, 5' 5" for women. With the adoption of agriculture, height crashed, and by 3000 B. C. had reached a low of only 5' 3" for men, 5' for women. By classical times heights were very slowly on the rise again, but modern Greeks and Turks have still not regained the average height of their distant ancestors. ....
Studies ... show these early farmers paid a price for their new-found livelihood. Compared to the hunter-gatherers who preceded them, the farmers had a nearly 50 per cent increase in enamel defects indicative of malnutrition, a fourfold increase in iron-deficiency anemia (evidenced by a bone condition called porotic hyperostosis), a theefold rise in bone lesions reflecting infectious disease in general, and an increase in degenerative conditions of the spine, probably reflecting a lot of hard physical labor. "Life expectancy at birth in the pre-agricultural community was bout twenty-six years," says Armelagos, "but in the post-agricultural community it was nineteen years. So these episodes of nutritional stress and infectious disease were seriously affecting their ability to survive." ....
Archaeologists studying the rise of farming have reconstructed a crucial stage at which we made the worst mistake in human history. Forced to choose between limiting population or trying to increase food production, we chose the latter and ended up with starvation, warfare, and tyranny.
Hunter-gatherers practiced the most successful and longest-lasting life style in human history. In contrast, we're still struggling with the mess into which agriculture has tumbled us, and it's unclear whether we can solve it." - Jared Diamond, "The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race," Discover Magazine, May 1987, pp. 64-66. http://www.ditext.com/diamond/mistake.html