Humans were eating refined starches 20k years before agriculture

http://jetlib.com/news/2010/10/18/the-stone-age-food-pyramid-included-flour-made-from-wild-grains/

by araneae • 16 years ago

3 4 16 years ago

smalter• 16 years ago

question: is this a counterargument to the paleo/caveman diet?

jpschorr• 16 years ago

If it were, it would have to account for somewhere on the order of 3 million years (or more, depends on who you ask), rather than 30k.

Also it would need some evidence of granaries or the like for winter storage.

araneae• 16 years ago

Yes. The paleolithic diet excludes grains for the reason that it was not included in the Stone Age human's diet.

If Stone Age humans did have refined starches in their diet, then if you wanted to follow a truly paleolithic diet you would eat flour.

Of course, I never bought the diet to begin with for totally different reasons, which is that 10,000 years is plenty of time to adapt to a new diet. I prefer the pre-industrial diet. It's obvious that fast food is bad for us, it's not obvious that pasta is generally evil.

tassl• 16 years ago

I started eating paleo around 10 months ago, so I guess my opinion can be a little bit biased regarding this topic.

In any case, after reading the article, I am not sure about the conclusions done by most of the newspapers that I have read.

1. Most of the flour that they are talking about is referred to roots, which in most cases are encouraged in the paleo diet. 2. I miss a more detailed study about the grains that they found: amount of phytates, lectins, gluten... 3. I am also curious about the methods that they used to cook/processing the grains to avoid poisoning. In the study they talk about the process prior to eating as: "The flour would have undergone a multistep processing involving root peeling, drying, and finally grinding using specific tools".

Humans were eating refined starches 20k years before agriculture

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