category: Health
Late Life Benefits of the Paleo-Diet.
Author: Peter Turchin
Source: Social Evolution Forum
One way people talk about the price of civilization is in terms of evolutionary mismatch (
which is one of the focus areas at the Evolution Institute). The idea is that our bodies and minds evolved during the Pleistocene, when we lived in small groups of hunter-gatherers. Now we live in a dramatically different environment, and that causes all kinds of problems. The psychological aspect of the problem was recently discussed by Robin Dunbar and commentators on his Focus Article. The physiological problems include rampant obesity, heart disease, and diabetes.
There is currently no consensus on the role of changing diet and other aspects of lifestyle, most notably exercise, in causing modern-day health problems. Some people argue that our Plestocene bodies are not adapted to high-calorie diets and sedentary life-styles of today. On the other hand, agriculture was invented roughly 10,000 years ago. 400 generations is not an insignificant length of time for evolution to do its thing. Some anthropologists (including another participant of the Consilience conference,
Henry Harpending) argue that humans evolved very intensively during this period. One famous example is the evolution of lactose tolerance, that is, ability to digest milk.
Read more at
Social Evolution Forum
Comments
Post: May 17 2012 7:03 pm By: Sp
However, the is pretty good consensus that ever you can eat milk without dying, it’s still not good for you and can cause gut issues. So while evolution might be working, it hasn’t quite ‘solved’ the issue yet. I agree with harpending, that our species had to undergo rapid evolutionary change bc of ag rev, but that does not mean that because we can tolerate some modern foods they are optimal for our well being.
Post: May 18 2012 11:53 am By: Gonçalo Moreira
Unfortunately, concensus might not be the best measure when we’re trying to find the truth. And when you read the literature with a strong willingness to discover the truth because the only thing you want is to achieve the best results in terms of health and well-being, then, in my case at leat, I’m seeing that the paleo/ancestral framework works remarkably well, even though it needs more studies. Who’s going to fund these? I don’t know.