[RickLV]

Origins and evolution of the Western diet: health implications for the 21st century

This is a "most read/save" paper.

Allow the PDF to download. If it doesn't download, you can click the "Download" link.

http://www.ajcn.org/cgi/reprint/81/2/341

[seacomp]

Before agriculture the total human population at any one time was in the few million and those people lived neither long nor healthy lives. Any discussion of health implications that ignores that aspects of stone age life is scientifically incompetent.

[RickLV]

a) They are our ancestors
b) They did survive
c) Less than 700 genes have received any selection pressure and they are not fixed

[Dewey]

Originally Posted by seacomp

Before agriculture the total human population at any one time was in the few million and those people lived neither long nor healthy lives. Any discussion of health implications that ignores that aspects of stone age life is scientifically incompetent.

Do Not get me started, please. Although there are many medical breakthroughs which are now capable of identifying and treating numerous diseases (that weren't available back in the "stone ages"), there are also countless chemicals such as pesticides, herbicides, preservatives, fuels & much more that cause many of these ailments. While food wasn't abundant back in "the day," people weren't eating waxed veggies & fruits that were ladened with bug sprays & herbicides, either. If you're saying it's so much better now than before we were mass producing foods, I think you're somewhat mistaken (with regard to How these crops are Mass-produced). And, for the record, I think anyone who doesn't believe that chemicals such as herbicides and pesticides are harmful, need to have their heads checked.

[duck]

Originally Posted by Dewey

Do Not get me started, please. Although there are many medical breakthroughs which are now capable of identifying and treating numerous diseases (that weren't available back in the "stone ages"), there are also countless chemicals such as pesticides, herbicides, preservatives, fuels & much more that cause many of these ailments. While food wasn't abundant back in "the day," people weren't eating waxed veggies & fruits that were ladened with bug sprays & herbicides, either. If you're saying it's so much better now than before we were mass producing foods, I think you're somewhat mistaken (with regard to How these crops are Mass-produced). And, for the record, I think anyone who doesn't believe that chemicals such as herbicides and pesticides are harmful, need to have their heads checked.

I think he was saying the results of the paper are skewed for not taking into account how people in the stone age and dark ages didn't have access to such ammenities as high glycemic food, and yet they died earlier in life.

I have a question, after reading that paper. And I get in trouble by some for taking the Ochims Razor to everything, but: domesticated dogs have been around for centuries now, and their genome have not had time to adjust to eating well and living relatively pampered lives. I wonder if there is a similar coorelation as to these effects on canines as espoused by this paper?

[Dewey]

Originally Posted by duck

I think he was saying the results of the paper are skewed for not taking into account how people in the stone age and dark ages didn't have access to such ammenities as high glycemic food, and yet they died earlier in life.

I have a question, after reading that paper. And I get in trouble by some for taking the Ochims Razor to everything, but: domesticated dogs have been around for centuries now, and their genome have not had time to adjust to eating well and living relatively pampered lives. I wonder if there is a similar coorelation as to these effects on canines as espoused by this paper?

I may have jumped the gun (as I hadn't read all of the document at the time), but it just seemed like he is saying that it's so much better now. However, I find that like comparing apples to oranges, as many of the things we now have were not around then. We also have a much larger population now....I guess what I'm saying is that there are numerous factors to take into account.

With canines, I understand what you're saying about their genome not having time to adjust to living more pampered domesticated lives, even though they have been doing so for a long time. However, if we're looking at the foods that they are eating now as opposed to in the past, things have also changed for them - composition of the food, differing ingredients, different nutrients & again, so many more aspects.

[duck]

Originally Posted by Dewey

I may have jumped the gun (as I hadn't read all of the document at the time), but it just seemed like he is saying that it's so much better now. However, I find that like comparing apples to oranges, as many of the things we now have were not around then. We also have a much larger population now....I guess what I'm saying is that there are numerous factors to take into account.

With canines, I understand what you're saying about their genome not having time to adjust to living more pampered domesticated lives, even though they have been doing so for a long time. However, if we're looking at the foods that they are eating now as opposed to in the past, things have also changed for them - composition of the food, differing ingredients, different nutrients & again, so many more aspects.

Yeah, so are canines experiencing numerous effects of increasing debilitating diseases like humans are? That's my question. And I think they may be, if for no other reason than in the "wild", a dog with diabetes dies. No way around it. But under the care of a loving human, it can be treated. Again, a simplistic way of looking at it, I know.

Here's the abstract from the paper for those who wonder what we're talking about:

ABSTRACT
There is growing awareness that the profound changes in the environment
(eg, in diet and other lifestyle conditions) that began with
the introduction of agriculture and animal husbandry
10 000 y ago
occurred too recently on an evolutionary time scale for the human
genome to adjust. In conjunction with this discordance between our
ancient, genetically determined biology and the nutritional, cultural,
and activity patterns of contemporary Western populations, many of
the so-called diseases of civilization have emerged. In particular,
food staples and food-processing procedures introduced during the
Neolithic and Industrial Periods have fundamentally altered 7 crucial
nutritional characteristics of ancestral hominin diets: 1) glycemic
load, 2) fatty acid composition, 3) macronutrient composition,
4) micronutrient density, 5) acid-base balance, 6) sodium-potassium
ratio, and 7) fiber content. The evolutionary collision of our ancient
genome with the nutritional qualities of recently introduced foods may
underlie many of the chronic diseases of Western civilization.

[Roy Gardiner]

The message hidden in the dense text seems a simple, well known one. As well as not eating our normally proscribed things, we should stick to simple, unprocessed, primitive food as much as possible.

But maybe I fail to understand; there are lots of words neither I nor Mr Google understand; what, for instance, does 'insulinotropic' mean? A pointer to a medical dictionary would help me, I think, if anyone has one.

[WordJames]

Originally Posted by seacomp

Before agriculture the total human population at any one time was in the few million and those people lived neither long nor healthy lives. Any discussion of health implications that ignores that aspects of stone age life is scientifically incompetent.

Stone-age women and children showed the effects of poor nutrition when they died. Stone-age men usually died from some form of violence, living healthy enough lives until the violence did them in.

[WordJames]

Originally Posted by duck

I have a question, after reading that paper. And I get in trouble by some for taking the Ochims Razor to everything, but: domesticated dogs have been around for centuries now, and their genome have not had time to adjust to eating well and living relatively pampered lives. I wonder if there is a similar coorelation as to these effects on canines as espoused by this paper?

Domesticated canines didn't eat all that well, nor were they pampered, until the last couple of hundred years. Previously, they were scavengers on humanity, tolerated because they helped protect the places people gathered.

[lesley]

I think that I remember reading somewhere where survivors of the terrible concentration camps involved in the wars we seem to enjoy getting into showed that many of the survivors were actually quite healthy and many of them at a better health level than many of the general public who had not had to survive such horrors.

In some respects this doesn't surprise me. I live in a major farming area. I have a small 20 acres as organic as I can make it in the middle of commercial (what I regard as unsubstainable) farms. I see the farmers spray pesticides on everything that moves (and doesn't move!) I see them adding tons of super phosphate to the ground without ever testing to see how much is actually needed. In this area we have a higher than the normal population rate of motor neuronedisease and cancers. Then when I look at the processed foods that are available in supermarkets, etc. really really look at the labels and realise all the junk that most of us do eat, I just can't see how anyone can say that our food is better.

Sure we know more what we should eat, we have medical care and hospitals available, guess they didn't take out appendices in the stone age! Our teeth are better so we can actually eat the foods we need. It is really, to me, quite impossible to compare what was available then with what is available now.

I really do feel, however, that we need to get back to basic UNPROCESSED foods not saturated with pesticides, etc. I would not be surprised if many stone age people were actually healthier than many of us!

As I watch my farming neighbour losing cows in winter to grass tetany when he shifts them to a new paddock, or see him trying to get a cow with milk fever to her feet and think, touch heaps and heaps of wood!!, that I have not had this happen with my cows. Same soil (without lots of unnecessary chemicals) same climate, I actually probably feed my cows more than him in winter. I always feel that this shows what happens when you tinker too much. When you think further along the food chain, the average consumer is buying the vegetables (and ultimately all those fancy processed packets) of food grown from these very soils which have out of balance nutrients and pesticides and probably the meat from animals grazed on these soils. How could so much of our commercially grown food be balanced???? What is going to happen to you when you eat meat from beef that has been grown in a feedlot and is probably fed a diet which has included meat from various sources in it - fed to an animal which is not meant to eat this type of diet anyway) how can this food be balanced, and good for you?

Insist on organic and responsibly produced food!!!

OK, I've had my favourite rant - just my thoughts on this contentious subject!