What Can We Learn from the Food Our Ancestors Ate?
February 2, 2016
2 minute read
Biological anthropologist Stephen Le explains how cuisines of different cultures are a result of centuries of evolution, finely tuned to our biology and surroundings, and what lessons we can apply from how our ancestors ate to our modern diets.
086 CC What Can We Learn from the Food Our Ancestors Ate?
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From paleo to Mediterranean, modern diets often try to glean wisdom from the history of what our ancestors ate over millenia. But how do we know the answers to questions about how people ate over time, and how can we apply those lessons to how we eat today? Stephen Le, author of the new book 100 Million Years of Food, is here to share some insights.
- Paleo isn’t just one diet. In the modern “paleo diet,” the focus is on a period of history in which early humans lived as hunter-gatherers. But in fact, hunter-gatherers lived in a variety of different environments. It’s more realistic to say that our ancestors lived in many different environments eating lots of different kinds of foods.
- An active lifestyle is key to health. Today, people are very focused on what to eat, while movement is also such a large part of health. Moving throughout the day over long distances has great positive effects on health.
- Look to traditional diets for lessons on moderation. The tendency to demonize particular foods and put others on pedestals to an ideological degree might not be the healthiest way to think about food. Traditional regional cuisines can help us find a healthy balance.
- But a regionally specific traditional diet doesn’t apply to many people. If you know exactly where your genes come from and can trace your ancestry directly to a specific region, it’s a good bet that you can eat that kind of diet and maintain good health. On the other hand, most people in the United States today have quite mixed ancestry, making it more likely that a flexible diet will work better.
- Most diets have pros and cons. When looking at different types of diets, it’s important to have the larger picture in mind. For example, eating a lot of meat has a likelihood of making a person physically stronger, but eating less protein has a high likelihood of extending lifespan. Having a nuanced view of human health is the key to gleaning insights from how our ancestors ate.
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Author image courtesy of Thuy Hoang.