Human Ancestors Were Nearly All Vegetarians

An interesting article. Please see the whole article if you are interested in this.

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2012/07/23/human-ancestors-were-nearly-all-vegetarians/

By Rob Dunn | July 23, 2012

Right now, one half of all Americans are on a diet. The other half just gave up on their diets and are on a binge. Collectively, we are overweight, sick and struggling. Our modern choices about what and how much to eat have gone terribly wrong. The time has come to return to a more sensible way of eating and living, but which way? An entire class of self-help books recommends a return to the diets of our ancestors. Paleolithic diets, caveman diets, primal diets and the like, urge us to eat like the ancients. Taken too literally, such diets are ridiculous. After all, sometimes our ancestors starved to death and the starving to death diet, well, it ends badly. The past was no panacea; each generation we made due with the bodies and foods available, imperfect bodies and imperfect foods. Yet, the idea that we might take our ancestral diet into consideration when evaluating the foods on which our organs, cells and existence thrive, makes sense. But what did our ancestors eat?

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So, what should we eat? The past does not reveal a simple answer, ever. The best we can hope for is that it might shine a useful but flickering light into the darkness of our understanding. Our bodies are filled with layers of evolutionary histories; both recent and ancient adaptations influence how and who you are in every way, including what happens to the food you eat. The recent adaptations of our bodies differ from one person to the next, whether because of unique versions of genes or unique microbes, but our bodies are all fully-equipped to deal with meat (which is relatively easy) and natural sugars (also easy, if not always beneficial), and harder to digest plant material, what often gets called fiber.5 Our ancient evolutionary history influences how we deal with these foods, as does our stone age past, as do the changes that occurred to some but not all peoples as agriculture arose. With time, we will understand more about which diet makes the most sense for each of these histories, though we should use these histories to understand the ideal diet. Just like us, our ancestors made the best of their circumstances. They were not at one with nature. Nature tried to kill them and starve them out; they survived anyway, sometimes with more meat, sometimes with less, thanks in part to the ancient flexibility of our guts. As for me, I’ll choose to eat the fruits and nuts like my early ancestors. I’ll supplement them with some of the great beans of agriculture, too much coffee, maybe a glass of wine and some chocolate. These supplements are not paleo by any definition, but I like them. Maybe you are “new school” and will choose to eat only the meat of giant sloths and mastodons. I won’t fault you for it; it has its advantages, though giant sloths can be hard to come by. Or maybe you are really paleo and you are going to focus on insects, which might favor other bacteria (able to break down insect chitin). Eating insects has many advantages too, albeit not for the insects. Any of these possibilities are better than the average modern diet, one so bad that any point in the past can come to seem like the good ole days, unless you go too far back to a point when our ancestors lived more like rats and probably ate everything, including their own feces. Sometimes what happens in paleo should really stay in paleo