Name: 【TEDx】Debunking the paleo diet | Christina Warinner | TEDxOU
Uploaded: 2017-02-07T00:35:31.000Z
Duration: 22 min 19 s
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and I study the health and dietary histories of ancient peoples

I'm here because I want to talk to you about the Paleo Diet.

It's one of America's fastest growing diet fads.

The main idea behind it is that the key to longevity and optimal health

is to abandon our modern agricultural diets,

and move far back in time to our Palaeolithic ancestors,

more than 10,000 years ago, and eat like them.

because it purports to put archaeology in action,

to take information we know about the past

and use it in the present to help us today.

Now, this idea was really started in the 1970s

It's diversified since then into several variants,

including the Paleo Diet, the Primal Blueprint,

and most of the language of these diets makes references to anthropology,

nutrition science, and evolutionary medicine.

The diet does seem primarily targeted at men,

so if you look at advertisements and descriptions,

things like "live primal," lots of red meat.

And basically, the idea behind it can be broken down into four parts.

One is that our agricultural diets today make us chronically ill,

that they are out of sync with our biology.

And two, that we need to abandon these agricultural diets

that started during the agricultural period,

and move back in time to the Palaeolithic

and eat more like our ancestors over 10,000 years ago.

Third, that we know what these diets were like,

and what they were like was they had a lot of meat, they were mainly meat based.

That was supplemented with vegetables and fruits and some nuts and oils,

but it definitely did not contain grains or legumes or dairy.

And fourth, that if we emulate this ancient diet,

it will improve our health and make us live longer.

So what I want to talk to you about today is that this version of the Paleo Diet

that's promoted in popular books, on TV, on self-help websites

and in the overwhelming majority of press has no basis in archaeological reality.

No, I'm not going to end there; I will explain.

So what I want to do as an archaeologist is go through this,

of some of these foundational archaeological concepts

and then I want to talk to you about what we really do know

and from scientific studies about what Palaeolithic people did eat.

So, myth one is that humans are evolved to eat meat

and that Palaeolithic peoples consumed large quantities of meat.

Humans have no known anatomical, physiological,

or genetic adaptations to meat consumption.

Quite the opposite, we have many adaptations to plant consumption.

Carnivores can make their own vitamin C, because vitamin C is found in plants.

If you don't eat plants, you need to make it yourself.

We can't make it, we have to consume it from plants.

We have a longer digestive tract than carnivores.

That's because our food needs to stay in our bodies longer,

so we have more time to digest plant matter.

We need more surface area, we need more microbes.

so we have big molars that are there to shred fibrous plant tissue.

which are the specialised teeth that carnivores have to shred meat,

and we do actually have some genetic mutations in some populations

that are adaptive to animal consumption, but it's to milk, not meat,

and these arose in certain populations during agricultural periods

The idea behind it is that we should eat all this red meat,

are from fattened cattle, these are domestic animals.

Anything a Palaeolithic person would have eaten

would have probably been very lean, probably small,

and they wouldn't really have eaten that much meat.

Of course there's also bone marrow and organs,

We see evidence of harvesting of bone marrow in faunal assembles

where you see characteristic cutting open of the bones,

like you see here, for marrow extraction.

and areas with long periods where plants were not available,

But people that lived in more temperate or tropical regions

would have had a very large plant portion of their diet.

and one is the inherent bias in the archaeological record.

Bone is 80% mineral by weight, it's going to preserve better and longer

over thousands of years than delicate plant remains.

But the other issue comes from some early bone biochemistry studies

that were performed on Neanderthals and early people.

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【TEDx】Debunking the paleo diet | Christina Warinner | TEDxOU

process

period

evidence

grocery