Implications of Plio-Pleistocene Hominin Diets for Modern Humans

Photo courtesy of Republican Voices

Here’s a PDF that I found linked on Art DeVany’s blog written by Dr. Loren Cordain: Implications of Plio-Pleistocene Hominin Diets for Modern Humans

A few quotes I picked out, which I think are important in looking at the proper diet for humans. This first one (from page 4) further backs up the contention that animal foods, not vegetable foods (like legumes) were the main protein source of early humans. I cleaned out the references to make it more readable; see the PDF if you’d like to check them out.

Further, similar to obligate carnivores, humans maintain an inefficient ability to chain elongate and desaturate 18 carbon fatty acids to their product 20 and 22 carbon fatty acids. Since 20 and 22 carbon fatty acids are essential cellular lipids, then evolutionary reductions in desaturase and elongase activity in hominins indicate that preformed dietary 20 and 22 carbon fatty acids (found only in animal foods) were increasingly incorporated in lieu of their endogenously synthesized counterparts derived from 18 carbon plant fatty acids. Finally, our species has a limited ability to synthesize the biologically important amino acid, taurine, from precursor amino acids, and vegetarian diets in humans result in lowered plasma and urinary concentrations of taurine. Like felines, the need to endogenously synthesize taurine may have been volutionarily reduced in humans because exogenous dietary sources of preformed taurine (found only in animal food) had relaxed the selective pressure formerly requiring the need to synthesize this conditionally essential amino acid.

And here’s a tabular breakdown of just how much plant foods contributed to the diet versus animal foods for 229 societies.

When the two polar hunter-gatherer populations, who have no choice but to eat animal food because of the inaccessibility of plant foods, are excluded from table 19.1, the mean score for animal subsistence is 59 percent and that for plant-food subsistence is 41 percent.

Percentage of Animal vs Plant Foods

% of Calories (as Animal Foods)	# of Societies	% of Societies
0-5%	0	0.00%
6-15%	2	0.87%
16-25%	6	2.62%
26-35%	23	10.04%
36-45%	30	13.10%
46-55%	35	15.28%
56-65%	45	19.65%
66-75%	42	18.34%
76-85%	35	15.28%
86-100%	11	4.8%
Total	229	100%

Note that about 65% of the societies get 50% or more of their calories from animal foods (assumption: in the 46%-55% group, 18 are 46-49.9% and 17 are 50-55%). I think that’s a very important finding.

And here’s a look at how drastically the dietary intake of modern man has changed from that of Paleolithic man.

Although dairy products, cereals, refined sugars, refined vegetable oils, and alcohol make up 72.1 percent of the total daily energy consumed by all people in the United States,….Further, fiber-depleted, refined grains represent 85 percent of the grains consumed in the United States

Table 19.2 shows that dairy products contribute 10.6%, cereal grains 23.9% (20.4% of which is refined), refined sugar 18.9%, and vegetable oils another 17.6%.

This document has plenty of other good stuff in it. It’s about 14.5 pages of reading, but goes quickly.

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Tags: animal, Cordain, fatty acids, grain, meat, modern diet, Paleo, Vegetarianism