There is a diary on the rec list that makes a number of ridiculous and dangerous claims, including:
- Cavemen the world over ate a diet where the caloric intake was mostly meat
- Modern people should adopt this diet.
Ridiculous.
For starters, the following should tip one off that the diary in question is not to be trusted:
Dr. Cordain theorizes that the strength, stamina and endurance of prehistoric peoples was a result of heavy consumption of wild plants, herbs, berries, nuts, fish, seafood and wild game. Our ancestors needed to be strong in order to escape dinosaurs and other predators. He claims their natural food sources made them fast and strong and gave them the stamina they needed to hunt and survive harsh climates.
In the reality based community, we know that dinosaurs and humans were separated by 60 million years, and we don't adopt people as lifestyle gurus who believe otherwise.
But on to the substance of the claims.
Dr. Cordain's aim is to try to replicate as closely as possible the original human diet, a one-size-fits-all solution every human being in the planet thrived on.
There was no "original human diet". Humans' diet changed according to the seasons, geographic locations, and macro climactic conditions. That is why we evolved as omnivores, who can eat and make use of a wide variety of foods.
But beyond that, the claim is then that meat was at the base of the "caveman's" diet. This may have been true in certain regions at certain times, but such a blanket statement could accurately not be made.
Most importantly, whatever any given hunter-gatherer's diet may have been, that does not make it appropriate for our current conditions or what we are asking out of our bodies and our planet nowadays.
Our hunter-gatherer ancestors had a lower life expectancy and were not concerned with living healthily into their 80s and 90s. They simply did not have to worry about heart attacks, strokes, diabetes, and cancer, because they usually died sooner than those kick in. Also, our ancestors by necessity led much more active lifestyles that required a higher caloric, fat and, protein intake. And they suffered from periods of famine so developed the instinct to eat a lot when they could.
On the other hand, today most of us want to live to a healthy old age. We have lifestyles that aren't as active, and have creature comforts meaning that we require fewer calories to maintain a healthy weight than they did. We want to stave off heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and strokes. Lastly, I should mention that with 6.5 billion people, the limits of our planet's natural resources have to inform our diet in a way that it didn't for our distant ancestors.
All of these factors mean that the hunter-gather diet should not guide ours, period. The other diary is irresponsible for advocating for that.
Certainly, we need to move away from the high calorie, low nutrition processed food based diet of the present, but not to some mythical caveman diet that allowed him to fight dinosaurs.
As Michael Pollan says Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.
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UPDATE: The previous diarist has apparently edited the other diary to remove the dinosaur reference. However, the previous diarist is on record as being a creationist, and advocating vaccine denialism and other assorted anti-science claptrap. So the criticism stands.
UPDATE 2: If anybody actually reads this anymore, it looks like the previous diarist got canned, at least temporarily. Kudos to whoever brought that about. Anti-science CT has no place here.