We’ve all heard of the Paleo Diet Craze, right? It makes you wonder if we should eat like our ancestors. Eating lean meats, fish, fruits & veggies, nuts & seeds is the hallmark of the paleo diet. Foods that could be obtained by hunting and gathering to help you lose weight and stay healthy. In today’s episode, we discuss the paleo diet topic and whether we should be aspiring to eat like our ancestors. You might be surprised at what researchers say! Let’s dive in and get ready to rock your wellness!
Disclaimer: This podcast does not constitute medical advice. You should always speak to your doctor before changing your nutrition or exercise habits.
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National Geographic Article by Ann Gibbons: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/foodfeatures/evolution-of-diet/
Paleo Diet: Should We Eat Like Our Ancestors – EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Lauren Chante 0:50 – Paleo Diet: Should We Eat Like Our Ancestors
Today’s expedition into understanding wellness begins in Italy in 2015. I traveled to Italy with my husband and my son and my infant daughter. I believe she was three and a half months old when we went there and we had the pleasure of exploring that beautiful country. It was absolutely incredible. Along our trip we stopped in this gorgeous mountain town called Balzano, which I absolutely fell in love with. It was actually one of my favorite places in all of Italy. It was like being in a fairytale. And while we were in Balzano something unexpected happened. We had the chance to visit this museum dedicated to Otzi who was the Iceman. He was one of the most well preserved mummies that was ever found. They have this incredible museum dedicated to him. And, guys, you know this about me, both at that point in my life and now, I was a huge science nerd.
At that point. I already had four years of education in biology, two years of education in forensic science and my master’s degree in exercise science. So huge science nerd alert, right? I had already begun coaching nutrition at that point. It was really the early days of creating the method of wellness coaching that I’ve now created. And, I have to say that, this was a really pivotal moment in my work, going to see Otzi. It really helped me to begin the quest of answering this question of should we really be glorifying the health and wellness of our ancestors as something that we shouldtry to imitate, right?
This was about the time when the Paleo craze had come out and was really gaining momentum. I myself had tried the Paleo diet. I knew a lot of people who were doing it, it had kind of attached itself to CrossFit. If you’re not familiar with the Paleo diet, I would assume that most of you guys are if you’re interested in this topic, but basically it’s the idea that you would eat the way that your ancestors would and there were certain foods that were off limits and certain foods that you could eat. So for example, no pasta, no bread, but you could eat potatoes and sweet potatoes.
In some versions of the Paleo Diet nightshades weren’t allowed so that would be no tomatoes, no potatoes. It just kind of depends on which Paleo you were following and how strict it was. And then over the course of several years, it kind of snowballed into what was called Autoimmune Paleo diet. So that was a big thing for people who had some sort of autoimmune disease like Hashimotos hypothyroidism, or some sort of autoimmune arthritis, feeling like if they ate a certain way, like our ancestors ate, it would help them to reduce their systemic inflammation. Right? So, all in all to say that Paleo was having a moment. It was having a really big moment.
I had been having some discord in my mind about it for a while. And it just so happened that I found myself in this museum and they had this incredible body sized tablet. Like literally a giant ipad that had this image of Otsi the Iceman on it to scale, and you could tap different parts of his body to learn all about the different maladies that he had. And guys, just to give you some context on Otsi the Ice Man, I want to back up here. He was about 40 to 50 years old. He’s called The Iceman because they found him kind of on ice, which basically meant that a lot of stuff on him was really well preserved. He wasn’t really like a traditional dry mummy. I mean, he lived around the Copper Age, which was about 5300 years ago, so he was kind of an old dude. Very much sort of who we think of when we think of living like our ancestors, but I do have to tell you guys that we’re not really, when we talk about Paleo and even like our ancestors, most of us don’t really understand how long humans have been around, and how much over our history of time on this planet, our bodies have changed, right? We really just kind of think of our caveman ancestors and that’s it. We don’t really understand that there’s really a lot of diversity and variability in the health of humans since the beginning of time, right? So we’re going to talk about that little bit more.
But back to Otsi. Guys, for somebody that were supposed to be aspiring to live like, Otsi, he was in bad shape. He was in really bad shape. He had a lot of arthritis, which is not uncommon in someone like him because he was very physically active, right, hunters and gatherers, agrarians were all really physically active. Much more than we are now. And that serves and limits us. It serves us in terms of physical activity helps us to stay lean and light, helps keep our cardiovascular system healthy. It helps to build muscle mass but there is such a thing as having your joints wear down at a certain age from being very physically active, right? He had lungs that were as black as a smokers. Probably as a result of living in some sort of a shelter that had an open hearth, maybe doing fires inside of cave or something like that.
But the thing that really peaked my interest, the thing that was the most eye opening for me, is that Otzi had atherosclerosis. If you don’t know what atherosclerosis is, it’s plaque accumulating on the arteries around your heart and he had a pretty significant amount of that. So this is a risk factor or indication of heart disease and could definitely lead to some sort of a cardiac event. And he ultimately was actually killed by someone, some sort of blunt force trauma, but if that hadn’t happened, he probably would have died from heart disease, which is kind of eye opening. He was not, you know, super old to be dying from heart disease, right. And this was really striking to me because, again, if you follow the Paleo craze, this idea that we should eating like our ancestors, Otsi should have been doing everything right. He was eating that sort of caveman diet. He was really physically active. He spent a lot of time outside, but here he was with heart disease, and clogged arteries, and a bunch of other problems. And I was like, wow, if we’re saying that we’re trying to live like our ancestors to be healthy, I’m seeing this guy hobbling around with all sorts of soreness in his joints. They said he had ulcers, and then you know, heart disease. Like, is this really who we want to be aspiring to, are we just glorifying the whole Paleolithic era for some sort of weird diet culture purpose, rightSo I began to dive into this more after we were in Italy. And in my research, I discovered a couple of different things. The first thing that I wanted to research was were our ancestral humans actually healthier than us, right. Were they actually healthier than us? Because it kind of dawned on me I didn’t actually know if this whole Paleo Diet craze was based in fact, like, if I did research and found that our ancestors weren’t healthier than us, that could really mess up a lot of that philosophy, right? And what I ultimately learned is that it’s a really hard question to address.
One of the reasons this is such a hard question to address is because our ancestors died at a much younger age than we did. So basically, it means that natural selection was stronger in our ancestors. Anybody who had weak genetics, any sort of trait that would not be desirable for survival, kind of got naturally selected out pretty fast. If you had glasses and couldn’t see or needed glasses and couldn’t see rather, your obviously not going to have glasses if you’re a caveman person, you know, odds are you’re gonna have a hard time surviving. So what this means is that some of the health of our ancestors might not necessarily be attributed to them doing things more healthfully. Things like eating better or being more active, it can also just be attributed to the fact that their genetic pool was stronger. Genetically, only the strongest traits were passed on. Whereas for modern humans, if you’ve got a kid that can’t see, you go to Walmart and you get them glasses, and they don’t get naturally selected out. As someone who wears glasses and can’t see very well, I’m very grateful for this. So because of that, examining the health of our ancestors presents really skewed data that’s very hard to control for. In easier terms, because I know I’m being a giant nerd right now, it basically means that we can’t really get a super accurate picture of how we would stack up against them because we don’t have people dying left and right.
In our society, the rate of infant death is much lower than it was even 100 years ago, let alone 1000s of years ago, we have so much medical care, so on and so forth. And, you know, I did a lot of research into the genetics of this as well. And there was a great research study from Georgia Tech where they looked back at the health of our long ago ancestors within this group that was 30,000 to 50,000 years ago. So while that was the case for human beings, between 30,000 to 50,000 years ago, when they looked at the most ancient individuals, they found that they were less likely to have cancer and also neurological and psychological conditions according to their genetic profiles. But it’s also possible they didn’t live long enough to develop cancer or any of those neurological disorders, which makes the research kind of hard. They also, kind of jokingly, said in the article that therapist records from 1000s of years ago are scarce, which I thought was kind of funny, but it is true, it would be really hard to collect data on mental health, neurological and psychological conditions from a really long time ago. So very interesting! But genetically, that’s what seemed to be.
Pastoralists, who are essentially people who raise animals like sheep, had extremely healthy genomes for those areas. Particularly for allergy, autoimmunity, cancer, gastrointestinal illness and dental health, which I thought was super interesting because the Paleo movement really glorifies hunting and gathering and they kind of say that the big downfall of human beings was when we became an agrarian or an agricultural society, so kind of interesting there as well.
For the next phase of my research into this topic, I read an incredible article by Ann Gibbons through National Geographic, and she followed some nutritional anthropologists on their research. And guys, can I just tell you, this is how much of a super nerd I am, nutritional anthropology is so interesting. Essentially, through this article, which is very long, I’ll link it in the show notes because it’s really great, they went to all sorts of different cultures that are currently on earth that are still living the way that ancient people used to. Some of them were hunters and gatherers. Some of them had a combination of hunting and gathering and agriculture. And they were talking about how important it is to study the changes in these populations now to really understand how their way of life impacts their health before they change to modern ways of eating and living.
In the end, what the researchers concluded and explained at the end of this article, I’m going to share a quote that comes from Leslie Aiello, who’s the President of the Foundation for Anthropological Research, and it just sums up so amazingly something that I actually believe and have taught for years, and thank you Leslie for totally validating me! It said, or she said in this quote, “What bothers a lot of paleo anthropologists is that we actually didn’t have just one caveman diet. The human diet goes back at least two million years. We had a lot of cavemen out there.”. So in other words, there’s no one ideal human diet and the real hallmark of being human isn’t our taste for meat, but our ability to adapt to many habitats, and to be able to combine many different foods to create many healthy diets. What a quote, what a quote! This is for me, so validating, for what I’ve been teaching my students for years!
Those of you who use Your Daily Journal or who have listened to my earlier podcast episodes, you know that my belief is that there’s no one way to eat. There’s no one right way. You have to test what works for you. Take data on yourself and see how your body responds. If you don’t know how to do that, make sure you go get Your Daily Journal right now. It’s so good! But that’s literally what is supported by research into paleo anthropology and nutritional anthropology. And Paleolithic diet, as you see on bookshelves and in book stores across America and across the world is not actually the method that is supported by our research into our ancestors. So I think that this is just super cool. And I hope that you guys do too.
Oh, and one last misconception that I almost forgot was the Paleo movement is very centered around the fact that humans haven’t evolved past our ancestral roots. And that idea is actually kind of a misnomer. This idea that we have caveman bodies living in the space age, right? And I have totally been guilty of saying that phrase myself because it’s so catchy. But in this article, one of the things that’s pointed out by the Paleolithic anthropologist is that it’s actually not true. We’ve actually evolved and developed in quite a number of ways over the last several thousand years. And just like our ancestors, those evolutions are showing up as changes to our bodies, and they do impact the way our bodies show up in the modern world. So more than ever, it’s really important to let go of the cookie cutter diets, to let go of the black and white thinking about what works for you, and to really embrace the method that I teach, which is testing to find out what works for your unique body and life.
So, if you loved this episode, if you’re like beating the floor, and just being so excited, please get this episode out there and share it. I think there’s so much power in knowledge when it comes to getting rid of a lot of the diet culture thinking and the strict black and white thinking that we tend to have around caring for our bodies which after this episode, I hope you guys see just how much it doesn’t serve us and exactly how inaccurate it is. You don’t always have to be an expert in science to understand all the ways that traditional diet culture doesn’t serve us. Sometimes it’s better just to like learn a couple of things here and there, see the evidence, see the writing on the wall and and just know that’s not the way for us to be anymore. I really want this message to get out in the hands of as many people as we can because, when we do that, we can hold on to our wellness more loosely, we can work on weight loss in a loose way that doesn’t create issues with our mental health and our physical health. So please just share, share, share this episode.
Thanks for Listening to “Paleo Diet: Should We Eat Like Our Ancestors.”
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