"Flashback Friday: The Problem of the Paleo Diet Plot" Our epidemics of disease caused by diet have led to a great deal of research what humans are supposed to eat for optimal health. In 1985, an influential article was published proposing that our chronic illnesses are due to a lack of connection between what our bodies evolved eating during the stone age over the past 2 million years, and what we eat today, advocating a return to the hunter-gatherer diet type: low-fat meat, fruits, vegetables, and nuts. Although it might be reasonable to suppose that our nutritional requirements were established in the prehistoric past, We must ask ourselves in what prehistoric past. Why only in the last 2 million years?
We have been evolving for 25 million years from the great ape, our common ancestor, time in which our nutritional requirements and our digestive physiology were established, that were probably little affected by our hunter-gatherer days at the end of that trajectory. So what did we eat during the first 90% of our evolution?
What the rest of the great apes ended up eating: more than 95% of plants.
This could explain why we are so susceptible to heart disease. For most of human evolution, cholesterol may have been virtually absent in the diet. Free from bacon, butter, trans fat, and high amounts of fiber, which removes cholesterol from the body. Now this could have been a problem since our body needs a certain amount of cholesterol, so our bodies not only evolved to make cholesterol, but to preserve and recycle it. Our bodies evolved to maintain cholesterol.
So if you think of the human body as a machine to conserve cholesterol and we put it in the modern world with bacon / eggs / cheese / chicken / pork / pastry, So of course, it is not surprising that heart disease due to obstruction of the arteries is our main cause of death. What used to be such a good fit for 90% of our evolution, clinging to cholesterol at all costs since we weren't getting much in our diet, Today it is a poor adaptation, a problem that leads to blockage of the arteries. Our bodies simply cannot bear it. As the editor-in-chief of the American Journal of Cardiology pointed out 25 years ago, no matter how much fat and cholesterol carnivores eat, they never develop atherosclerosis. You can give a dog the cholesterol equivalent of 500 eggs and a stick of butter, and it will just wag its tail.
Their bodies evolved from wolves, and they are used to eating cholesterol and getting rid of excess, whereas, in a matter of months, a fraction of that cholesterol it can start to clog the arteries of animals adapted to eating a more plant-based diet. Even though our bodies were designed through natural selection to feed mainly on fruits, vegetables and seeds for 90% of our evolution, Why don't we adapt better to meat consumption in the last 10%, during the Paleolithic?
We've had almost 2 million years to get used to all that extra saturated fat and cholesterol. If a life of eating like this clogs the arteries of almost everyone, Why were the genes of those who had heart attacks not extinguished and were replaced by those who could live to an advanced age with clean arteries, regardless of what they ate?
Because most did not survive until an advanced age; they did not live long enough to have heart attacks. When the average life expectancy is 25 years, the genes that are passing are those that simply allow us to reach reproductive age at any price, And that means not starving. So, the more concentration of calories in food, the better.
So eating a lot of marrow and brains, human and otherwise, would have had a selective advantage, as it would have been to discover a time machine with reserves of cream cakes. If we just have to live long enough to get our kids to puberty to pass our genes on, we do not need to develop any protection against the ravages of chronic diseases. To find a population almost free of chronic diseases in old age, we don't have to go back a million years. In the 20th century, missionary hospital networks in rural Africa They discovered that coronary artery disease is practically non-existent there. And not just heart disease, but high blood pressure, strokes, diabetes and common cancer, among others.
In a sense, these populations in rural China and Africa They were eating the type of diet that we have been eating for 90% of our last 20 million years: an almost exclusive diet of foods of plant origin. How do we know that it was their diet that protected them and not something else?
In the 25-year update to his original article on the paleo diet, the authors tried to clarify that neither then nor now they propose that people adopt a specific diet solely based on what our ancestors ate. Diet recommendations should be tested. That is the reason why the pioneering research of Pritikin, Ornish and Esselstyn is so important because it shows that plant-based diets can not only stop heart disease, rather, it has been proven to reverse them in most patients. In fact, it is the only diet in history that has achieved it, perhaps because that's what we ate for most of our evolution.
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Video Description:
The Paleolithic period represents just the last two million years of human evolution. What did our bodies evolve to eat during the first 90% of our time on Earth?
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For more on “paleo” and low carb diets, see: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5TLzNi5fYd9Bn61b8235QCqr0QwMEfR9
What about the keto diet? I recently did a 7-video series on that. Check it out here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5TLzNi5fYd8H9nNYTHuxVBTCNP0hZDu3
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-Michael Greger, MD FACLM
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