Paleolithic diet advocates find no support from genetics

We still hear and read a lot about how a diet based on what our Stone Age ancestors ate may be a cure-all for modern ills. But can we really run the clock backwards and find the optimal way to eat? It’s a largely impossible dream based on a set of fallacies about our ancestors.

There are a lot of guides and books on the palaeolithic diet, the origins of which have already been questioned.

It’s all based on an idea that’s been around for decades in anthropology and nutritional science; namely that we might ascribe many of the problems faced by modern society to the shift by our hunter-gatherer ancestors to farming roughly 10,000 years ago.

Many advocates of the palaeolithic diet even claim it’s the only diet compatible with human genetics and contains all the nutrients our bodies apparently evolved to thrive on.

While it has a real appeal, when we dig a little deeper into the science behind it we find the prescription for a palaeolithic diet is little more than a fad and might be dangerous to our health.

The basic argument goes something like this: over millions of years natural selection designed humans to live as hunter-gatherers, so we are genetically “mismatched” for the modern urbanised lifestyle, which is very different to how our pre-agricultural ancestors lived.

The idea that our genome isn’t suited to our modern way of life began with a highly influential article by Eaton and Konner published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1985.

Advocates of the palaeolithic diet, traceable back to Eaton and Konner’s work, have uncritically assumed a gene-culture mismatch has led to an epidemic in “diseases of civilisation”.

Humans are, it’s argued, genetically hunter-gatherers and evolution has been unable to keep pace with the rapid cultural change experienced over the last 10,000 years.

These assumptions are difficult to test or even outright wrong.

Read full, original article: The paleolithic diet and the unprovable links to our past

{{ reviewsTotal }}{{ options.labels.singularReviewCountLabel }}
{{ reviewsTotal }}{{ options.labels.pluralReviewCountLabel }}
{{ options.labels.newReviewButton }}
{{ userData.canReview.message }}
screenshot at  pm

Are pesticide residues on food something to worry about?

In 1962, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring drew attention to pesticides and their possible dangers to humans, birds, mammals and the ...
glp menu logo outlined

Newsletter Subscription

* indicates required
Email Lists
glp menu logo outlined

Get news on human & agricultural genetics and biotechnology delivered to your inbox.