Apologize, Geico!

"So easy a caveman can do it!", says the Geico commercial. Well, I have news for Geico. An article about the Paleolithic diet (see 'Consumption of Trace Elements and Minerals by Preagricultural Humans' by Eaton and Eaton in 'Clinical Nutrition of the Essential Trace Elements And Minerals') tells us that cavemen were far from stupid: they had a smart dietary regimen. In fact, their diet can tell us what is wrong with the modern one.

Meat was very important. They especially ate the organs, bone marrow and brains of animals, which are the most nutrient-dense parts. They also ate wild plants and berries but rarely grains. Stone Agers lived in small groups as nomadic hunters and gatherers. The time and energy needed to gather and mill grains into digestible forms with primitive technology was not worthwhile for them.

The authors list the nutritional advantages Stone Agers had over modern people.

They got their energy from foods with far more nutrients per unit of energy than do modern humans. They consumed no 'empty calories': energy intake without associated nutrients such as you find with soda, sugar and white flour.

They probably took in two to 8 times more minerals than us. Uncultivated plants and wild game usually have more nutrients per unit of energy than similar foods in the local supermarket. The authors compare wild honey with commercial honey. Wild honey has far more iron, calcium, phosphorus and magnesium, as do uncultivated fruits and vegetables compared with cereal grains or wild game with commercial meats.

Stone Agers generally consumed more energy per day than most modern humans because of their need to wander and hunt, so took in an absolute higher number of nutrients. Most modern people are not as physically active as they were.

Our diet is so different because two revolutions have taken place in nutrition.

The first is the transition from nomadic hunting and gathering to an agricultural lifestyle. Grains such as wheat became the main source of energy in the first agricultural civilizations. Humans lived in larger groups than the Stone Age bands of hunters and gatherers. They built city states such as in ancient Greece and Mesopotamia or river-mouth states in ancient Egypt and China. It became more worthwhile to cultivate large crops of grains and gather and mill them in established land with better technology and a division of labor.

I have not seen a definitive account of how much the health of the population changed because of the transition from a diet of predominantly wild game and wild plants to cultivated cereal grains. We can only look at modern research and opinions about the role of grains in our diet and health to guess how our newly-civilized ancestors fared on their new diet. Some, such as Dr. Mercola, say that a no-grain diet is optimal while others, such as Dr. Hark, recommend a whole-grain diet which is presumably what the ancient Egyptians, Sumerians and others ate.

I do not believe we know whether intolerance for many grains such as wheat, oats, barley and rye, but not corn or rice, is purely a modern health problem or not. For example, is wheat intolerance caused by the properties of wheat itself so that ancient populations in agricultural societies would have experienced it even if they did not know the cause or is it a modern phenomenon caused by the treatment and processing of wheat as part of industrial agriculture?

I lived in Morocco for a year in the eighties. It is an agricultural country where farming is done with far less use of fertilizers and pesticides than in western countries. The population eats bread as a staple and appear very strong and healthy. Their wheat is usually unadulterated, so I think it is the quality of the wheat rather than the attributes of wheat itself, such as gluten, which cause intolerance.

The second revolution in nutrition is the transformation of diet during the Industrial Revolution when people left the land for factories and cities. Humans lost their connection with the land. Agriculture became mechanized and industrialized as described in Thomas Hardy's novels, designed to feed large urban populations as cheaply as possible. The effects of this second revolution on health are much clearer and negative in many ways.

Affluent Western nations now consume categories of food which never existed before: refined flours, sugar and other sweeteners, cooking oils, and pasteurized milk. Many of these only provide 'empty calories' while accounting for possibly two-thirds of our energy intake and contain preservatives, taste enhancers and coloring agents never used before. Chronic degenerative diseases such as cancer, arthritis and diabetes are the consequence.

It is difficult to know for sure whether cavemen were healthier than humans in agricultural societies or modern times. However, the article takes the position that we can see Stone Age nutrition as the gold standard because human biology evolved as an adaptation to the circumstances of preagricultural times.

The first human lived maybe 2 million years ago. The first agricultural civilization came into existence maybe 10,000 years ago in the Middle East. Human biology takes many generations to evolve and could not possibly adapt to changes in diet in the short time since the founding of agriculture. Our bodies are built to thrive on the food that was available before then. We remain very similar genetically to our Stone Age ancestors of 20,000 years ago or more.

This theme is explored in another interesting article: 'The Late Role of Grains and Legumes in the Human Diet, and Biochemical Evidence of their Evolutionary Discordance' by Loren Cordain, Ph.D. on www.beyondveg.com. We now suffer from what Dr. Loren Cordain describes as 'evolutionary discordance' - negative results of having genes adapted to a different environment from the current one. Many suffer from living on a modern diet with a body built for a preagricultural diet. To the extent that modern life and diet is different from that of the preagricultural era, we are exposing ourselves to ill-health and chronic degenerative diseases.

The most practical remedy is to avoid processed foods and just stick to the food you find around the periphery of a supermarket: fresh fruit and vegetables and fish and meat (organic if you can afford it). That is probably the closest you can get to the cavemen's diet and eating in harmony with your genes. So, Geico, you owe cavemen an apology!