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Hadza Hunter Gatherers
You are super adventurous, Sarabeth! 🙂
Tim and Gravy argument:
Hmmm...yeah, paleolithic humans, yada-yada. But anyway, let's talk about modern hunter gatherers. You're saying humans eat a lot of starch? They do eat more carbs the closer they are to the equator. In fact, there are modern day hunter gatherers that live in the Amazon rainforest near the equator that eat 70 different varieties of fruit. Their diet is fruit and meat only...and that's all year around...they don't eat starch. And you're telling me they're avoiding cartenoids? I highly doubt that. How about the nomadic agriculture group the Yanomami, they grow crops and hunt and gather...they grow sweet potatoes and also plantains, and wait for it...the only grain they grow is corn...? That's not low in vitamin a, what the? 🙂 So, I don't think these theories hold up to what you're saying tim...while what gravy is saying is true to some extent...it's about where ppl live on the globe that dictates diet, but despite that please show us the evidence of MODERN day hunter gatherers eating grains and legumes...I mean, the kitavan also grow crops they don't eat grains afaik? Here's a link that outlines the basic foods of modern day hunter gatherers, you will not see grains or legumes. It's all right here in this link in black and white. Loren Cordain has studied these groups since the 80s, no one rly listened to him though, and his diet has been perverted...he never said eat salt or bacon...but I digress.
Here: https://www.marksdailyapple.com/how-hunter-gatherer-diets-varied/
Tldr: the basic diet of modern day hunter gatherers is meat/organs, bugs, honey, fruits, roots, and nuts. And if this is true now, it probably was true millions of years ago, that's Cordain's argument. That, and glycemic load of starchy foods.
Edit: I'm not against grains and legumes, I just don't see humans in nature eating them.
I think that we are overthinking the whole eating paradigm for many and various reasons:
*we got sick eating manufactured, poisoned ‘food’, took toxic drugs and now we search for better ways
*we have followed others who developed a protocol/program/diet, thinking they knew better
*we lost ability to hear our body’s innate intelligence
* we believe in scientific studies and lab results not realising that in 21 century we still don't know that much about human biology
*we are messed-up humans living toxic, stressful lives and often think that the only answer to our woes is a change in diet
Food is much more than the macro- and micronutrients.
Food contains the energy of sun, soil and people that grow it and prepare it.
Personally, if I could go back in time to my teens, I would have stopped manipulating my food to fix my family’s broken life and felt good about my body realising that my discontent was simply a body dysmorphia. I would have eaten local, seasonal, organic, ancestral diet and not put everything I eat under the microscope of calories, nutrients and scientific studies.
But since I have not been able to do so, I am now trying the best ways to get back to that which I lost along the way - successfully I must say - as my health is improving way beyond good digestion and perfect bowel movements.
If you quote what you disagree with I can respond to it, I don't know what you're referring to.
If plantains are included as fruit then maybe some tribes live on fruit and meat, give us a source for the meat and fruit claim please.
With regards to consumption of grains and legumes it doesn't take much digging to see that this didn't start in the Neolithic.
Mozambican Grass Seed Consumption During the Middle Stone Age
Abstract
The role of starchy plants in early hominin diets and when the culinary processing of starches began have been difficult to track archaeologically. Seed collecting is conventionally perceived to have been an irrelevant activity among the Pleistocene foragers of southern Africa, on the grounds of both technological difficulty in the processing of grains and the belief that roots, fruits, and nuts, not cereals, were the basis for subsistence for the past 100,000 years and further back in time. A large assemblage of starch granules has been retrieved from the surfaces of Middle Stone Age stone tools from Mozambique, showing that early Homo sapiens relied on grass seeds starting at least 105,000 years ago, including those of sorghum grasses.
Both modern and paleolithic hunter gatherers consumed thousands of different plant species as part of their diet and a variety of grains and legumes were often consumed. Wild millet, buckwheat, rice and sorghum were popular.
Were Indigenous Australians the world's first bakers?
“That puts Australian baking way beyond anything that’s ever happened anywhere else in the world,” says author Bruce Pascoe. He’s talking about 36,000-year-old grindstones discovered in New South Wales, used by Aboriginal Australians to turn seeds into flours for baking. That’s well ahead of other civilisations that started baking early on, like the Egyptians, who began making bread around 17,000 BC.
Food Culture: Aboriginal Bread
The First Australians were iconic hunters. An extreme theory makes them even responsible for exterminating giant prehistoric animals. Yet, they spent a good part of their time baking bread.
Sure, this was bush bread, resembling damper in method and pita or Egyptian bread in its form. Ethnographic and archaeological evidence show the baker’s tradition well entrenched in Aboriginal cultures, especially in the arid regions, which make up about three quarters of the country.
In Central Australia, for example, native millet (Panicum) and spinifex (Triodia) were commonly used, supplemented by wattle-seed. Elsewhere pigwig (Portulaca oleracea), prickly wattle (Acacia victoriae), mulga (Acacia aneura), dead finish seed (Acacia tetragonophylla) and bush bean (Rhyncharrhena linearis) were mixed into flour.
Reliance on the seeds became more pronounced in the Holocene – the recent, post-ice-age period - but some archaeological sites, such as Cuddie Springs contain grinding stones dated to about 30,000 years. These stones were used to grind wild seeds into flour which in turn was baked as bread. They were and continue to be found in large numbers on numerous Aboriginal sites across the country.
But the reliance on seeds required an ample investment of labour and forward planning that would challenge our superficial idea of the ‘nomadic’ way of life.
However, humans cannot digest most of the raw seeds. So, they need to be mechanically crushed to small particles (flour) and cooked, and only then can we absorb their nourishing matter.
Women and children would spend a large part of a day collecting seeds, often very small, to provide a meal for the family. Separating seeds from the husks and winnowing would take considerable skills and practice.
Grinding seeds into flour on the large stone slab (grindstone) was a hard physical task that would take about two hours to produce about a half kilogram of flour. Bread-cakes were baked in the ashes or on the hot charcoal of a campfire.
The use of seeds in this form required not only suitable equipment but advance planning and indeed constant provisioning of seed-grinding tools. For grinding hard seeds into flour the large oval slabs of sandstone were essential. It’s estimated they could last for up to 9 years, but grinding stones needed to be provided for each adult women on each major campsite, possibly four or five, used frequently in a cycle of coming and going by the local group in its homeland.
Bread was made, on average, 90 days a year in arid regions. The grindstone’s surface would get smooth and need to be roughed by gently dressing with a hammer. A combination of grinding and dressing would eventually make the slab too thin for further use.
Such slabs, often weighing nearly 30kg could not be found anywhere. They were carefully cut from the quarries and shaped nearby to reduce their bulk before the long journey home. The outcrops of suitable materials for grinding stones are relatively rare, so obtaining the slabs often involved long travels and complex negotiations or other arrangements with the group on whose land the quarry was located.
This was men’s major contribution to a benefit of ‘daily bread’ and the most compelling illustration that feeding family was not a lucky chance but systematic, well-planned labour, supplemented by technical knowledge, specialised equipment and complex maintenance of, what we would call, infrastructure.
Essentially the same technology of making flour was used in all civilisations, until the water and windmill constructed a little before the beginning of the Common Era made this job a lot easier. Yet, in many poor communities, the hand-milling of seeds persisted for many more centuries.
Is there a free ride from VA for people who are eating mostly fruit? (as our resident frutarian has noticed?)
I don't know about you guys, but I'm descended from Goat Herders and Agriculturalists. No hunter gatherers there.
There is no vitamin A free lifestyle, although my Germanic grandmother's diet was pretty low and she lived a LOOONG time.
Here's a link with a timestamp where Loren Cordain's former student mentions the fruit and meat only tribe just listen for like 10 secs then they start talking about it: https://youtu.be/ts91ii01Up4?t=2970
"A large assemblage of starch granules has been retrieved from the surfaces of Middle Stone Age stone tools from Mozambique, showing that early Homo sapiens relied on grass seeds starting at least 105,000 years ago, including those of sorghum grasses."
So if this is true, why is it not more prevalent today? I want to believe that humans in nature eat all the grains, haha, I just really don't see it that often. If you look at the link I posted in my previous post, there are no grains listed.
“That puts Australian baking way beyond anything that’s ever happened anywhere else in the world,” says author Bruce Pascoe.
So, from your link it looks like the aborigines make bread...that's one group...they also have a history of being cannibals. 🙂 That's pretty interesting, though, didn't know that. But just to mess with you some more, anywhere else, can you show me another group? I haven't found a single hunter gatherer group that relies heavily on grains or legumes. The Kitavan are high carb and they rely on sweet potatoes and cassava as their main carb sources. And they farm, like I said, they farm and hunt and gather. Seems if it was a natural proclivity they would grow that and make bread, too. 😀 I agree with you in some sense...but it is weird that you don't see it in hunter gatherers, my point is that if it was the way we're supposed to eat, you would see it everywhere, all the groups would seek out grains...especially the ones that use agriculture, like the Yanomami Indians(Native Americans), you can look them up, their main carbs are sweet potatoes, cassava, bananas, and plantains, and honey but we're talking about starch.
Also, with taste, humans have taste buds that identify sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami. Bitter tells them to avoid foods that are bitter, mostly because they are toxic/low calorie. Like kale, and this goes into Optimal Foraging Technique. I think this is what was being eluded to, if you live in the wilderness you're not going to walk 5 miles to go pick asparagus bc that would give you 35 calories. So, it's not about vitamin A in that sense, it's about survival, and humans are attracted to high calorie plants...even grains and legumes fall into that category, considering they are more calorie dense per pound than roots, they're 600 calories per pound, where roots are 500 calories per pound. That is why kids don't eat vegetables(bitter taste/low calorie), but you give a kid some strawberries, they're going to eat those, or w/e fruit. So, I don't think kids naturally avoid vitamin A. In fact, my niece and nephews hate bananas...and those are low in vitamin A, right?