Saturday 29 November 2014

The palaeolithic diet and the unprovable links to our past

Good account in "The Conversation" of our current understanding (or lack of it) of our ancestor's diets and how human genes did not simply stop adapting at some point in the past.

"We still hear and read a lot about how a diet based on what our Stone Age ancestors ate may be a cure-all for modern ills. But can we really run the clock backwards and find the optimal way to eat? It’s a largely impossible dream based on a set of fallacies about our ancestors."

http://theconversation.com/the-palaeolithic-diet-and-the-unprovable-links-to-our-past-34605


The Paleolithic Nutrition debate was kicked off in the 1980s with a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine (1). A recent review questioned the restricted focus on a single era of our evolutionary past(2).


1) Eaton SB, Konner M. Paleolithic Nutrition. New England Journal of Medicine 1985 Jan;312(5):283–289. Available from: http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM198501313120505

2. Turner BL, Thompson AL. Beyond the paleolithic prescription: incorporating diversity and flexibility in the study of human diet evolution.. Nutr Rev 2013 Aug;71(8):501–510. Available from: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4091895/

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