Nutrition & Health News This Week
Vegan Food for NYC Prisoners; and Did Stone Age Humans Eat Less Meat Than We Thought?
Did Stone Age Humans Eat Less Meat Than We Thought?
Imagine you’re a reporter or a headline writer for mainstream media. Anthropologists report that some cavemen (and women) were eating a plant-rich diet a few thousand years earlier than has been commonly assumed. How do you make that news to your readers and maximize views?
Answer: Turn it into a referendum on the paleo diet. This is what happened with a report this week that a paleolithic hunter-gatherer tribe in what today is Morocco had a “substantial plant-based component” to its diet – perhaps 50% of all calories—thousands of years before the arrival of farming or agriculture.
Interest in the paleo diet informs not just the “paleo” brand, but our conception of what constitutes a natural, if not proper human diet: what we evolved to eat in an ideal world. But the anthropological knowledge of paleolithic eating has itself been evolving with the technologies available to study it. Early assumptions depended on examining remains in burial and camp sites–mostly animal bones, stone age knives and arrowheads. Anthropologists could study chemical isotopes in human remains – bones and teeth – but only the isotopes that could be analyzed. Together, these suggested that paleolithic humans lived on mostly, if not entirely meat.
Now an international team of researchers has analyzed a slew of new isotopes in the remains of humans from 13,000-15,000 years ago and concluded that they ate significantly more plant foods than previously assumed. Even the infants may have been weaned off their mother’s milk with plant foods, these researchers say. The fact that dental caries – tooth decay – was prevalent in this population suggests also “a reliance on highly cariogenic wild plant foods such as sweet acorns and pine nuts.” (The tooth decay also indicates that this population may not have been in optimal health, since declining dental health tends to be associated with other diet-related diseases and nutrient deficiencies, as the Cleveland dentist Weston Price famously observed in his 1939 book, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration.)
So does this evidence suggest “cavemen ate mostly vegan,[1] debunking paleo diet,” as the headline of The Independent suggested, or that we should “forget the paleo diet fad” as The Telegraph did? Not quite.
Humans of this era were hunters and gatherers and what they gathered, obviously, was mostly plants. The more plant-based food they could gather – as in this Mediterranean coastal region– the more they could eat. But they were gathering more, as the paper states, largely because of the “depletion of large game species,” specifically Barbary sheep in this area.
The new paper reinforces the idea that no single paleolithic diet can be defined. What paleolithic humans ate would have depended on location and climate and varied widely; the further north, and the harsher and longer the winters, the greater the subsistence on animals rather than plants.
The idea that people today should eat what humans evolved to eat makes logical sense. But one of the many critical questions in nutrition science is not whether we evolved eating both animals and plant foods, which is undisputed, but the health benefits and risks when we avoid one or the other.
Plant-based prisons, a recipe for violence?
This week, New York City Mayor Eric Adams announced a small grant to bring more plant-based foods to the city’s prison population, through a partnership with the non-profit Hot Bread Foods. The group will train chefs in several prisons to “focus on reimagining food” through new, “plant-centered culinary skills.” We can imagine that Sam Bankman-Fried, the vegan bitcoiner languishing in a Brooklyn jail following his fraud conviction, is among the few inmates psyched about this idea.
We’re also wondering if a plant-based shift is a smart move for prison populations, in which mental health issues and violence are significant problems.. For instance, a 2018 randomized, controlled clinical trial on 231 young adult inmates found that those who received a nutritional supplement for at least two weeks were 26.3% less likely to commit disciplinary offenses. This finding does not bode well for prisoners eating plant-based diets (as we’ve noted before), which have been found to be deficient in essential nutrients, including potassium, calcium, iron, and vitamins D, A, and B-12. Plant-based diets also tends to lead to lower blood cholesterol, which has been found in multiple studies to be associated with depression and violence–not qualities to boost in a prison population.
Ever since Mayor Adams reversed his own diabetes with a plant-based diet (and occasionally fish), he’s been on a campaign to shift the diets of New York City residents also to plant-based. He instated obligatory “Vegan Fridays” for children in public schools, vegan meals as the default option in all of the city’s 11 public hospitals, and “lifestyle medicine” training for New York doctors. This last effort is happening thanks to a $44 million grant from the American College of LIfestyle Medicine, a group closely tied to the Seventh Day Adventist Church, which has promoted a vegan diet globally as a matter of faith. Whether these plant-based programs result in better health has not been tested. This means that some of New York’s most vulnerable populations have unknowingly been enrolled in a city-wide experiment on how nutrient deprivation affects school performance, hospital stays and now, the mental health of prisoners. Watch this space for more on this story.
Thanks Nina and Gary for your continued focus on the human stupidity games 🐼🐼
This research confirms that some groups of people whether 15,000 years ago or today, make bad dietary decisions.