Atkins Takes On The Cave Man Diet -- And Forgets His Facts
See my main article about diet HERE.
Who
are we in reality? Perhaps you think yourself the
civilized, well-dressed individual who after breakfast
takes the car or the train to work. Or it may be you’re
the caregiver who shops and prepares meals for your
family. But what if the real you is the cave dweller who,
having had a nibble of berries, goes forth to hunt the
wooly mammoth? And with a touch of luck is grilling
mammoth steaks by evening?
Biostatistically, there's no argument. It’s been
calculated that 99.99 percent of our genetic code has
been unchanged for 40,000 years. Therefore, our
bodies are all still pumping rich, pure caveman blood.
Now cavemen and cavewomen, I'm sure, had all sorts of
characteristics, but the one I'm interested in is the way
in which they ate. What happened to the caveman diet? And
why don't we eat that way today?
Blame or credit our progress through history. Ten
thousand years ago, give or take a few, we invented
agriculture. It was the only way to provide people in
growing numbers with a regular place on the chow line.
The starchy staples of wheat, rice and cornmeal largely
replaced a diet plucked from the trees and hunted in the
forests. Crops were soon feeding big populations. Then as
the food supply became more regular and less dependent on
the spear and slingshot, the first cities began to crop
up.
[Karl Note: So
far he is mostly right, but cavemen had little access to
fruits or vegetables. Meat yes. ]
Whatever
benefits our grain-based civilization provided, students
of the Paleolithic have concluded that improved health
wasn't one of them. When researchers from Aalborg
Hospital in Denmark studied Eskimos (who were still
eating their traditional diet) from 1968 to 1978, they
recorded not a single heart attack among their
2,600 subjects. Sixty percent of the Eskimo diet was meat
and fish. Caveman diet? Yes, or at least a variant of it.
Cavemen—and that includes you—are well adapted to a diet of meat, fish, fowl, nuts, seeds, vegetables and fruits. After all, for several million years our forbears—the folks that we always see pictured clad in furry hides—adjusted their physiologies with evolutionary precision to the food niche that lay before them. Microanalysis of fossil teeth shows that our ancestors were eating meat 2.5 million years ago. Pasta, bread, rice, doughnuts, and tacos weren't on the menu. Our ancestors survived the hardships of their lives without houses, without heat and without modern medicines because they ate good food—nature's bounty, not the overprocessed, nutrient-deficient stuff that populates the endless aisles of the supermarket.
[Karl Note: Again, what he omits, a fatal flaw, is that these people were eating raw food -- fire was only "discovered" a few hundred thousand years ago. The Caveman diet is a raw meat diet -- with as much fat as they found in the meat and a very, very few berries or the odd root food. Raw is the big difference between Atkins and Karl Loren.]
In modern times, the Eskimos have not been alone in their immunity to the diseases of modern civilization. Anthropologists have been studying hunter/gatherer societies for 150 years. Forty to 60 percent of their caloric intake comes from meat and fish. Although their supply of game is generally leaner meat than what our grain-fed cattle give us today, it is still not by any understanding of the words a low-fat diet; nor does it come close. Consequences? You bet. These populations are virtually completely free from diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease. Logical? I think so.
Life in the shadow of grain is very different. Stretched out at the base of the Food Guide Pyramid, we lie gorged and miserable, victims of the humble grain. It's a food to which, at best, our bodies are but partially adapted. Ten thousand years in evolutionary terms is but a blink.
We know from the study of bones and teeth that after the agricultural revolution people began to suffer vitamin and mineral-deficiency diseases, had less resistance to infection and shrank in height. Grain is difficult to digest and its nutrients are not as available to the human digestive tract as they are in many other foods. Moreover, the chemicals that grain plants create to protect themselves from predators result in a wide range of adverse reactions in humans, promoting arthritis, causing disruption to the gut wall and contributing to a diverse bundle of allergies and auto-immune disorders. But even these maladies are not the core of the problem with grain.
Grain, specifically wheat, is the bedrock of our food culture of refined carbohydrates—the malign combination of stripped-down white flour, sugar and salt that is the prime agent of our devitalization once we pass out of our rambunctious teens and twenties. The blood sugar and insulin imbalances that soon result from such a diet instigate the very disease processes that low-fat gurus sought to protect us from. As you know, I've made a career out of slamming this dietary style, so I won't belabor the point.
Simply put, cavemen, cavewomen and cave tots don’t do well on the grains, sugars and refined carbohydrates that make up so much of the standard American diet (or SAD, as it is so aptly abbreviated!). Is it any surprise that kids are now being diagnosed with adult-onset diabetes at age 13? Or that 60 percent of American adults are overweight or obese? It seems to me that if the evolutionary biologists have correctly traced our DNA back to the bones of prehistoric man, then we are confronted with a fundamental disjunction between the bodies we're born with and the civilization into which we have been born. I am dedicated to helping the latter change as fast as ever it can, but if I were you, I wouldn't risk waiting. Things will change, but lots of people have a deep investment in the myth of the good grain. The battle of the American menu has many decades yet to run. While the volleys continue to be fired, go forth and do your own healthy caveman thing. Don't be shy. Hunt yourself a mammoth—or a reasonable facsimile thereof at the supermarket—and serve with a side of greens. Bon appétit!
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