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.)