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I bumped into a fascinating paper today by Dr. Loren Cordain titled "Plant-Animal Subsistence Ratios and Macronutrient Estimations in Worldwide Hunter-Gatherer Diets." Published in 2000 in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, the paper estimates the food sources and macronutrient intakes of historical hunter-gatherers based on data from 229 different groups. Based on the available data, these groups did not suffer from the diseases of civilization. This is typical of hunter-gatherers. Initial data came from the massive Ethnographic Atlas by Dr. George P. Murdock, and was analyzed further by Cordain and his collaborators. Cordain is a professor at Colorado State University, and a longtime proponent of paleolithic diets for health. He has written extensively about the detrimental effects of grains and other modern foods. Here's his website.

Plant-animal subsistence ratios and macronutrient energy estimations in worldwide hunter-gatherer diets. Cordain L, Miller JB, Eaton SB, Mann N, Holt SH, Speth JD. Am J Clin Nutr. 2000 Mar;71(3):682-92. PMID: 10702160 Our analysis showed that whenever and wherever it was ecologically possible, hunter-gatherers consumed high amounts (45-65% of energy) of animal food. Most (73%) of the worldwide hunter-gatherer societies derived >50% (> or =56-65% of energy) of their subsistence from animal foods, whereas only 14% of these societies derived >50% (> or =56-65% of energy) of their subsistence from gathered plant foods. This high reliance on animal-based foods coupled with the relatively low carbohydrate content of wild plant foods produces universally characteristic macronutrient consumption ratios in which protein is elevated (19-35% of energy) at the expense of carbohydrates (22-40% of energy).

When I wrote the Overcoming the Curse of the Mummies chapter in Protein Power, I wrote mainly about the evidence of disease found in the mummies of ancient Egyptians and correlated this disease with their high-carbohydrate diet. Along with all the material on mummies, which is the part everyone seems to remember, I wrote about a study done in the United States in the 1970s that persuasively demonstrated the superiority of the hunter diet as compared to an agricultural diet, which no one seems to remember. I came across that study a couple of days ago and decided to present it in a little more detail than I was able to in Protein Power. The anthropological record of early man clearly shows health took a nosedive when populations made the switch from hunting and gathering to agriculture. It takes a physical anthropologist about two seconds to look at a skeleton unearthed from an archeological site to tell if the owner of that skeleton was a hunter-gatherer or an agriculturist.

Hunter-gatherer diets-a different perspective.\nMilton K.\nAm J Clin Nutr. 2000 Mar;71(3):665-7. Review. \nPMID: 10702155

Metabolic and physiologic improvements from consuming a paleolithic, hunter-gatherer type diet. Frassetto LA, Schloetter M, Mietus-Synder M, Morris RC Jr, Sebastian A. Eur J Clin Nutr. 2009 Feb 11. [Epub ahead of print] PMID: 19209185 doi: 10.1038/ejcn.2009.4

The Paleo Diet is a way of eating in the modern age that best mimics the nutrition of our evolutionary and genetic heritage - the ancestral, Paleolithic diet. For millions of years our hunter-gatherer ancestors ate combinations of lean meat, seafood, plants, fruit, and nuts. But today in America, more than 70% of our dietary calories come from foods that our Paleolithic (Stone Age) ancestors rarely if ever ate ... and that modern humans are not genetically adapted to eat. The result is epidemic levels of cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, obesity, osteoporosis, arthritis, acne, gastrointestinal disease, and more. Professor Loren Cordain is widely acknowledged as a leading expert on the diet of our Paleolithic ancestors.

"Should you eat low carbohydrate and high saturated fat, or high carbohydrate and low fat, that is the question? This question is causing a tremendous back and forth in the medical and nutrition industry. It is unbelievable that the medical profession has not at least thoroughly tested the question. How is it that a magnificent experiment had been going on for 2.5 million years, the hunter gatherer Paleolithic life. This continued up to and until about about 10,000 years ago, with the advent of agriculture. After that time is when the diseases of the metabolic syndrome started to appear. This information is a matter of history. If a layman like me can recognize the validity of an experiment that continued for 2,5 million years, and produced healthy individuals, relative to the diseases of the metabolic syndrome, such as: obesity, diabetes type 2, cardiovascular disease and stroke, and some cancers to name just a few, then how is it, that the consensus opinion of the medical profession and nutritionists think that the hunter gatherer lifestyle of our ancient ancestors is unhealthful or dangerous? The consensus opinion says that low fat (trim all visible fat from the animal protein) and high carbohydrate food is the "healthy eating" choice for us. I personally know that instead of being healthy,it is unhealthy, because by following my doctors advice over the last 50 years many of the above mentioned diseases started to appear on my charts. "

Metabolic and physiologic improvements from consuming a paleolithic, hunter-gatherer type diet. Frassetto LA, Schloetter M, Mietus-Synder M, Morris RC Jr, Sebastian A. Eur J Clin Nutr. 2009 Aug;63(8):947-55. Epub 2009 Feb 11. PMID: 19209185 doi:10.1038/ejcn.2009.4 Conclusions: Even short-term consumption of a paleolithic type diet improves BP and glucose tolerance, decreases insulin secretion, increases insulin sensitivity and improves lipid profiles without weight loss in healthy sedentary humans.

White Europeans could have evolved as recently as 5,500 years ago, according to research which suggests that the early humans who populated Britain and Scandinavia had dark skins for millenniums. It was only when early humans gave up hunter-gathering and switched to farming about 5,500 years ago that white skin began to be favoured, say the researchers. This is because farmed food was deficient in vitamin D, a vital nutrient. Humans can make this in their skin when exposed to sunlight, but dark skin is much less efficient at it.

"Not only was meat a principal source of nutrition for developing man, it actually was the driving force allowing us to develop our large brains. For years anthropologists argued that we humans got our large brains because we had to develop them to learn hunting strategies to capture and kill game much larger, faster, and meaner than ourselves. Anthropologists Leslie Aiello and Peter Wheeler turned that idea on its head in a brilliant paper postulating that we were able to develop our large brains not to learn to hunt but because the fruits of our hunting-nutrient-dense meat-allowed us to decrease the size of our digestive tracts. The more nutrient dense the food, the less digestion it needs to extract the nutrients, and consequently the smaller the digestive tract required. (The human digestive tract, while longer than true carnivores, is the shortest of any of the primates.) "

ScienceDaily (Feb. 12, 2009) - Diet - and how it has shaped our genome - occupies much of an evolutionary scientist's time. Anne Stone, associate professor of anthropology in Arizona State University's School of Human Evolution and Social Change, will discuss how diet holds keys to understanding who we are, how we live and form societies, and how we evolved from hunter-gatherers to agriculturists, all the way to modern urban dwellers, at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting.

Robert P. Heaney is John A. Creighton University Professor, Creighton University, Omaha, Nebraska, United States. Hominid evolution took place in an environment (equatorial East Africa) that provided a superabundance of both calcium and vitamin D, the first in available foods and the second through conversion of 7-dehydrocholesterol to pre-vitamin D in the skin, a reaction catalysed by the intense solar ultraviolet (UV) radiation. Seemingly as a consequence, the evolving human physiology incorporated provisions to prevent the potential of toxic excesses of both nutrients. For vitamin D the protection was of two sorts: skin pigmentation absorbed the critical UV wavelengths and thereby limited dermal synthesis of cholecalciferol; and slow delivery of vitamin D from the skin into the bloodstream left surplus vitamin in the skin, where continuing sun exposure led to its photolytic degradation to inert compounds. For calcium, the adaptation consisted of very inefficient calcium absorption, together with poor to absent systemic conservation. The latter is reflected in unregulated dermal calcium losses, a high sensitivity of renal obligatory calcium loss to other nutrients in the diet and relatively high quantities of calcium in the digestive secretions. Today, chimpanzees in the original hominid habitat have diets with calcium nutrient densities in the range of 2 to 2.5 mmol per 100 kcal, and hunter-gatherer humans in Africa, South America and New Guinea still have diets very nearly as high in calcium (1.75 to 2 mmol per 100 kcal) (Eaton and Nelson, 1991). With energy expenditure of 3 000 kcal per day (a fairly conservative estimate for a contemporary human doing physical work), such diets would provide substantially in excess of 50 mmol of calcium per day. By contrast, median intake in women in North America and in many European countries today is under 15 mmol per day. Two factors altered the primitive situation: the migration of humans from Africa to higher latitude

Wednesday, November 19, 2008 The Fructose Index is the New Glycemic Index I stumbled upon an interesting editorial recently in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition from Dr. Richard Johnson's group, entitled "How Safe is Fructose for Persons With or Without Diabetes?" It was a response to a meta-analysis in the same journal pronouncing fructose safe up to 90 grams per day. That's the amount in eight apples or four cans of soda. Not quite what our hunter-gatherer ancestors were eating! The editorial outlined the case against excessive fructose, which I feel is quite strong. That led me to another, more comprehensive paper from Dr. Johnson's group, which argues that the amount of fructose found in a food, which they call the "fructose index", is more relevant to health than the food's glycemic index.

"As far as I can tell, MK-4 is capable of performing all the functions of vitamin K. MK-4 can even activate blood clotting factors, which is a role traditionally ascribed to vitamin K1. Babies are often born clotting deficient, which is why we give newborns vitamin K1 injections in the U.S. to prevent hemorrhaging. In Japan, they give children MK-4 to prevent hemorrhage, an intervention that is very effective. Could that have to do with the fact that Japan has half the infant mortality rate of the U.S.? Today, I found another difference between MK-4 and MK-7. I was reading a paper about SXR-independent effects of vitamin K2 on gene expression. The investigators found that MK-4 strongly activates transcription of two specific genes in osteoblast cells. Osteoblasts are cells that create bone tissue. The genes are GDF15 and STC2 and they're involved in bone and cartilage formation. They tested K1 and MK-7, and in contrast to MK-4, they did not activate transcription of the genes in the slightest. This shows that MK-4 has effects on gene expression in bone tissue that MK-7 doesn't have. That being said, MK-7 may still have a place in a healthy diet. Just because it can't do everything MK-4 can, doesn't mean it has no role. It may be able to fill in for MK-4 in some functions, or reduce the dietary need for MK-4. But no one really knows at this point. Hunter-gatherers would have had a source of longer menaquinones, including MK-7, from livers. So it's possible that we're adapted to a modest MK-7 intake on top of MK-4. "

"Last Wednesday night I gave a lecture to my clients on hunter-gatherer diets. The turnout was great and the information was well-received. I had it professionally video-recorded and will probably offer this as a DVD for sale (with the handout included). Watch for it in the future. Part of what I discussed was vitamin D3 supplementation. Since I have been supplementing with 4,000-10,000 Units of D3 per day I have noted enhanced recovery and size response from my training. Apparently, skeletal muscle has both surface receptors and nuclear receptors for D3 that augment calcium flux during contraction (from surface receptors) and have steroid-like effects at the nuclear level WRT protein synthesis. This D3 supplementation is not really "supplementation" but is instead "augmentation" to levels that would be normal if we got normal sun exposure as we did in our evolutionary past. Check out www.vitamindcouncil.org for more information. Also, check out this abstract below for your consideration. Also, check out this article."

"Can fifty thousand years of human evolution be wrong? What are we really "designed" to eat? Are high carbohydrate "Food Pyramid" diet standards a health disaster? What do paleolithic fossil records and ethnographic studies of 180 hunter/gatherer groups around the world suggest as the ideal human diet? Find out in nationally acclaimed author and nutritionist Robert Crayhon's interview with paleolithic diet expert, Professor Loren Cordain, Ph.D. "