It’s proving to be a bit hard to get uncontested information on the diets of people who are currently classified as non-agriculturalists. This is certainly an area where people have their own agendas and are looking for evidence to fit their agendas. This appears to be the case with both academic and non-academic sources. However, trying to read between the lines and extract the statements that are somewhat agreed upon, it seems to be the case that humans can survive with widely varying proportions of macro-nutrients, as long as both the total calorie requirements are being met (and not exceeded), and also that a certain base-line amount of each type of macro-nutrients are obtained. But what is this baseline?
Looking at some rather extreme diets (resulting from some rather extreme environmental conditions), it seems like it’s not a good idea to go below 15-20% calories from carbs or 15% calories from protein (see, for example the diet of the !Kung, as presented here). It also seems like it’s a bad idea to go below certain levels of fat in the diet, especially when these fat calories are only replaced by protein, since this can result in a strange phenomenon referred to in Canada as rabbit starvation. Basically, even though technically your body is getting enough calories from the protein it is ingesting, you still starve. In terms of how low is too low, even most ‘low fat’ North American diets don’t recommend dropping your percent of calories from fat below 30%. Diets termed ‘very low fat’ recommend 15% of calories from fat, and it appears that there is research data on groups of people (e.g. some groups of Japanese people) whose diets have 15% of their calories come from fat.
So- this all suggests that humans can survive on a pretty wide range of macronutrient relative percentages, although there’s a baseline of (roughly) 15%, 15% and 15%. So that leaves 55% percent of calories up in the air. In terms of upper bounds, I have yet to come across a group that had a protein intake higher than 35%.
So, if we put protein intake at 25%, That’s 45% that can come from either carbs or fat.
I’m tempted to now launch into an
extended repeat of all of my discussions of different types of fat, and
the importance of balancing omega-3 and omega-6 ratios, and avoiding
transfats and corn fed saturated fat but… I won’t rehash that whole
issue again at this time.
posted at 11:05 on Fri, 17 Nov, 2006 |
path: /living
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