I woke up today still pondering the question of how people could have had 50% of their calories coming from carbohydrates before agriculture. The period before agriculture is called the Paleolithic period, so what I was really wondering about is how people avoided starvation during the paleolithic period. The problem with finding an answer to this is that people tend to have their own agendas and biases when it comes to answering this question. I did find this page, which looks agenda-ized, but also tries to provide references. The author writes: “In general, the mean plant to animal subsistence ratio in terms of energy was 35% plant and 65% animal [6-9]. This suggests that humans evolved on a diet that was primarily animal based and consequently low to moderate in complex carbohydrates (fruits and vegetables- about 25% of total calories), high in protein (up to 35% of total calories) and low to moderate in fat (about 40% of total calories) [1-9].” She also makes a very important note about the nature of the fat intake, which is: “While the Paleolithic diet comprised 35-40% fat, the fat content of “game animals” and fish is mostly monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fat compared to the quantity of saturated fats and trans fatty acids fats consumed today [3, 6, 8, 9, 10,]. Their omega 6 : omega 3 ratio would have been less than 4 compared to 10 in most western countries”.
The
problem with such information is that it is mainly coming from people who
have particular opinions about the appropiate current human diet. In
trying to discover a more objective source for this information, I came
across the field of nutritional anthropology.
Neat.
posted at 15:14 on Sat, 21 Oct, 2006 |
path: /living
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