Quote: (03-31-2014 10:35 PM)Laurifer Wrote:
Two year old TED talk.
To sum up the video, he claims that the epidemic of dietary diseases in America and the West is caused by a diet that has emphasized meat and dairy. He states that all the diets of early civilizations originated on starches as their staple: corn for the Aztecs and Maya, potatoes for the Inca, wheat for the civilizations of the Levant, and rice in the far East. Meat was usually reserved for royalty whom he says almost always died over weight and diseased ridden.
I've heard this before, mostly from Vegans. Tony Gonzalez, who's a part time vegan said something similar. @Maciano, I agree. In past times our ancestors had another word for Veganism, it was called "starvation".
There's an exhibit on the Maya currently at my local museum of natural history. One part shows where they did scans of skulls of the Maya. An enormous number of them had absolutely horrible teeth from their diet of corn. There's lots of evidence to suggest that unhealthy teeth are one of the worst things for your health - really nasty infections can fester in the root canal and when they abscess and burst, you're letting a bunch of really virulent organisms loose in your body.
In addition the paleo argument is that for the almost 2 million years humans lived pre-civilization, they ate what we call a "paleo" diet. I think that probably humans discovered grains and potatoes long before they settled down, so the hard core paleo types probably have their archaeology wrong.
Personally, if grain is such a bad thing, I wonder how the rise of agriculture caused humans to create civilizations and become the dominant species on earth. There's a gigantic advantage to grains and potatoes - they store well and having good food storage ties you to one place but also is insurance that you'll still be eating through hard times.
I think the truth is somewhere in the middle. The real problem is that it's way too easy to get calories in the West today, and on top of that, the majority of work is sedentary. When I track my calories, it's easy to see how you can load up on foods that provide calories but no other nutrition. If you've going to stick to a 2000 calorie diet, you have to emphasize a paleo-ishdiet in order to get a proper array of nutrients, or you're going to need to supplement with a multivitamin, which is just plain dumb - even organic produce is cheaper than multivitamins.