Now that it's been over four years since I first heard about "paleo" diets, I have been reflecting on how such diets have worked for me. When I first heard about paleo, I definitely thought it was a solution to all my problems and it worked really well for most of them. The original bane of my life in the pre-paleo era, GERD, is gone. But my IBS symptoms were harder to fix and even now I find myself experimenting. In the beginning, I often thought the solution was more "purity" in my diet. I thought if I just were better at my diet, then my problems would go away. But IBS is too complex for that. And it doesn't seem to care about evolution all that much. While evolution can be useful for hypothesizing, my gut is the product of a C-section birth, a subpar diet for almost two decades, and many many courses of evolution. I think of my maternal grandmother who is in her nineties and claims to have only had a stomachache once in her life. Compared to her stomach, my own stomach is a rather unfortunate thing. 

So when I ate a pure "paleo" diet, what happened? My stomach problems got WORSE. 

Luckily I found the SCD (specific carbohydrate diet). It's really for people with worse problems than mine, but it clued me into some of the things that were going on, namely that there was something wrong with how I process certain carbohydrates. Well, not just me, but my own microbiome in my gut. They were taking something I was eating and having a party consuming it and belching out all kinds of bad things. Bloating, cramping, gas, bouts of IBS-C and IBS-D were the result. 

Unfortunately SCD is both too strict and not strict enough. The "legal" list of SCD foods, like the typical "paleo" list, contains foods I cannot digest properly. The specific carbohydrates I'm sensitive to are not the same as those that the SCD concerns itself with. I ended up just going carnivore for awhile, which helped with a great many things, but I had other symptoms on that diet (like extremely low blood pressure) and it is on the pretty extreme of restrictive. I also think that some products of carbohydrate fermentation are important.

I have no idea where I first encountered FODMAPs, which stands for 

• Fermentable
• Oligosaccharides (eg. Fructans and Galactans)
• Disaccharides (eg. Lactose), Monosaccharides (eg. excess Fructose) and
• Polyols (eg. Sorbitol, Mannitol, Maltitol, Xylitol and Isomalt)

But the theory is similar to the SCD, which is that for certain people, certain carbohydrates aren't processed correctly by the gut and end up feeding bad bacteria. But I think it was more useful for me because it breaks down the issue into a variety of potential baddies to experiment with. Lactose intolerance is the most famous type and all the other types are similar in that they can be dose-dependent. That's why I was so confused at first. Sometimes I'd eat potentially bad food X and feel fine and other times I'd feel terrible. Amount effects it, but that's the tip of the iceberg, because the context can affect it too. For example, with fructose, the amount of glucose ingested at the same time can affect tolerance. 

So far you can see where my experiments have left me vs. the typical paleo diet:

It seems I have some fructose intolerance, but my tolerance is comparatively high. I can eat an apple, but if I start eating a bunch of dried apples (more concentrated fructose), then I start getting into problems. 

Then there are foods that I can tolerate almost none of, such as brassica vegetables like cauliflower. Many "paleo" recipes use cauliflower in place of rice. I am much worse off if I eat that compared to real rice and in fact I've found that rice soothes my stomach quite nicely when it's upset, particularly when cooked in broth as a congee. 

I'm still torn about wheat. I think I've tried every possible type of wheat at this point, including wheat that was fermented to remove gluten and a variety of "heritage" wheats. I still didn't tolerate it, which makes me think that it was never about gluten for me, but about fiber. 

It's also pretty important to self-experiment and not just write entire foods off because they contain something that might be the culprit in causing you problems with another food. Onions are a major issue for me, but I've found I can tolerate them pretty well if they are cooked into oblivion (for example, in a sauce), which frees me to enjoy certain delicious Indian dishes. Tomatoes are only an issue for me raw.

I think this jives very well with the evolutionary idea that cooking was important in human evolution because it transferred digestion to the small intestine rather than the large. That seems to be exactly what is happening here. The large intestine is where fermentation takes place, so if fermentable carbohydrates are the issue, then cooking them to make them more available to the small intestine could help. Of course there is all kinds of fancy cooking science here I'm not getting into, which I need to research further. There is also the issue of tolerance improving if you manage to heal the gut lining and balance the gut bacteria somehow. I think that overall my tolerance has improved as I've eaten healthier. I used to not tolerate spicy food at all, which was practically a tragedy for me since I love it, but now I eat it quite often without an issue. 

But people are always asking me to do an IBS post or series. And I kind of can't because it's been just all one weird experiment of me trying to figure out what I can tolerate and at what level. That's why I'm such a huge proponent of self-experimentation and not such a huge fan of dietary dogma. 

 Hands down the best health book I read this year was The Definitive H.P. Lovecraft: 67 Tales of Horror in One Volume. Despite being about fictional creatures of terror from unholy abysses, I learned quite a bit from Lovecraft's depiction of the universe. The humans in Lovecraft's stories are baptized into the knowledge that the universe is older and more incomprehensible than they could have ever imagined. While the monstrosities and sublime ancient temples are quite terrifying, what is even more terrifying to the humans in the stories is their realization of how little they can ever really know. Those that get a taste of the mysteries often only do so at a very high price. 

They called up some image from deep cells and tissues whose retentive functions are wholly primal and awesomely ancestral

I'm not sure I have any sort of particular cause in terms of diet anymore. It's gotten to the point where I'm just interested in the Paleolithic and not really very concerned with arguing about whether or not a potato is safe to eat or not. 

Wouldn't it be nice if our nice little narratives worked out? The ones in which Homo sapiens sapiens is the protagonist and you can trace his illustrious evolution neatly through the ages. And he fits rather nicely in your romantic stories about hunters and mammoths so you can tell people that this is their heritage. 

But in reality you don't get your nice story. Instead, you get ages and ages of dust and bones, in which every little shred of a skeleton is a prized, but dim, glimpse into ages long past. 

In my anthropology class last year, one of the skull casts that caught my attention was the Kabwe skull, which is estimated to be between 125,000 and 300,000 years old. Not quite Homo Sapiens, the skull has some features of modern humans and some of Neanderthals. Homo rhodesiensis? Homo heidelbergensis? Homo sapiens rhodesiensis? Anthropologists could argue about it all day. Either way, this person died a miserable death. The first known incidence of dental infection in a hominid as far as I know, and the infection was bad enough to put some ugly holes in the bone and eventually kill the individual. 

There is only so much you can tell from bones, which leaves lots of room for people to make stuff up. Stable isotope analysis seems quite promising, as they can potentially tell you the source of protein in the diet, but they can only tell that and nothing else, and the isotopes are subject to interpretation. For example, Lierre Keith in her error-ridden Vegetarian Myth claims that stable isotope analysis showed Australopithecus africanus ate meat, but in reality the data only said that the protein was from carbon-13 enriched foods, which could include grasses and sedges as well. Later investigations revealed that the carbon-13 probably was more likely from grasses and sedges, but the data is up for interpretation. Before you tear up your lawn to make dinner, it might be worth remembering that Australopithecus africanus is only thought to be a possible human ancestor and was quite a bit different from a modern human. 

That said, stable isotope analysis puts to bed the idea that early Homo sapiens were getting their protein from the Paleolithic equivalent of tofu or the idea that Neanderthals definitely only ate meat (turns out that some ate fish too...maybe). 

"Maybe", "later investigations revealed", "thought to be"- these are things that should give you pause whenever you encounter stable isotopes being used to argue about ancient diets. Have I confused you? Good, now you are less vulnerable to the abuse of bones in the name of various causes one way or another. 

It can be used to estimate the trophic level and origin of the protein, but it cannot tell you whether the person ate a teeny tiny auroch steak and then 17 potatoes or whether they only ate mammoth. It cannot tell you the percentage of protein in the diet. It cannot tell you how much protein in grams. That information was lost when the person died. 

Then there is the use (and mainly misuse) of animal bones and modern data from wild game species to argue various things about ancient diets. I read this latest paper, Man The Fat Hunter, with absolute glee because it uses many of the same questionable methods and comes to an opposite conclusion of many past papers, which overemphasize protein. The questionable method is taking bones of animals possibly consumed by ancient humans and plugging them into an equation with the modern wild game data and then saying this or that about the amount of fat or protein in an ancient diet. In this paper we have elephants featured, which is great, since elephants are very fatty, but unfortunately their presence or absence in bone assemblages is not a food diary. There is no way to know how often elephants were eaten, so there is no way to make an even sort-of accurate conclusion about %elephant and therefore %elephant fat in the diet. Whether or not the hominids in question were able to cook is also a point of contention.

One good thing about the paper is that it does try to address one issue, which is ceilings. In this case, the paper mentions possible ceilings for protein consumption and fiber consumption that could be used to build diet-estimating equations. Unfortunately, there are quite hard to determine, as they are affected by human genetic variation, culture, and environment. For example, there is possible a ceiling on the consumption of raw plant materials based on gut morphology (though if you have only skeletons you can only speculate on this) and toxins, but that ceiling can be raised with access to cooking and processing. To complicate matters further, their food sources may have been things you haven't even thought about eating. You can try to figure it out based on local paleobotany and starch microfossils, which can be hard to read. Once you've established that a microfossil on an ancient tooth is possibly Bromus secalinu, you might be able to figure out a little about how it was processed based on microfossil shape and local conditions and if you have a rich lab you might be able to collect it and do a full nutritional analysis, but you still have no idea how much of the diet it made up. 

And what is the protein ceiling? It depends on the rest of the diet, an individual's health, and possibly genetics. Modern genetics adds some depths to the picture. For example, the fact that genetic adaptations for a starch-based diet seem to be part of fairly recent selective sweeps may give us a clue that Paleolithic human ancestors probably weren't eating mainly starch, but statistical genetics is in its infancy.

But genetic variation can add more confusion if we are talking about what to eat now. Many "paleo" dieters have learned the hard way that they carry alleles for hemochromatosis, which means they can over-accumulate iron, which has some pretty nasty effects. It would be interesting to know where this came from, as it clearly would be a liability if an ancient human ate meat-based diet, but ultimately whether or not Paleolithic hominids carried such alleles in high frequency is irrelevant to the millions of men (and some women) who are at risk. This represents a ceiling for them, though it can be modified through modern medical treatment.

Normal is of limited use if you are on the end of the bell curve- this is where personalized medicine and self-experimentation is important

So while it's not completely true we have no idea what Paleolithic hominids ate. We do have some good clues, but reconstructing the diet is pretty hard. That doesn't stop people from trying, but their results are on some pretty shaky ground. 

My own method, which is about as accurate as some of these equations, is to observe the fact that a medallion of relatively lean wild boar goes absolutely perfectly with a seared hazelnut crust and dollop of mashed celeriac or potatoes cooked in broth. Maybe there is a reason that dishes containing a protein on a bed of delicious carbs AND fat (but not overpowered by them) is so appealing to so many? Who knows. 

 When I first moved into the college dorms, one of my favorite meals was Special K (with those freeze-dried "berries") floating in tan-colored soy milk. It was healthy and I thought it tasted pretty good. Looking back I shudder because it was quite clearly the culprit in many of the stomach issues I had, as it was rich in the dreaded Fermentable Oligosaccharides, Disaccharides, Monosaccharides and Polyols (FODMAPS). 

Once I realized that soymilk was one of the major causes of the bloating and other fun stuff I struggled with, I never bought soy milk again. 

But I've never been anti-soy. In fact, I can't imagine life without the culinary treasures of soy sauce and miso. For me, changing my diet was about shifting staples, not clamping down on the margins. I'm only willing to do that if absolutely necessary. I don't think soy is a problem unless you are getting a large percentage of your calories from it. 

And through my explorations of Asian cuisine I've come to appreciate soy for what it, which is a potent substrate for fermentation. That's why soy milk upset my stomach so much. But luckily, long ago someone figured out how to ferment it outside the body, creating rich salty flavors that characterize miso and soy sauce.  

It's by no means a recent food. There is new evidence that humans were using wild soybeans 9000 years ago and that domestication occurred 5,500 years ago.

American vegetarians embraced Asian soy products a long time ago, but it wasn't until I started actually eating authentic Asian food that it struck me on how much they were missing out on. In Asian cuisine, soy is an extender of animal and seafood products, creating potent health and flavor synergies. 

If you think tempeh is just some bland crappy paste-board-like soy concoction, you need to fly to Amsterdam and have homemade tempeh in a rich briny fermented shrimp and black pepper sauce. I've never ever had tempeh like that in America.

And I've found that even unfermented soy doesn't really bother my stomach. Oh, but only when it's served in a Korean restaurant that makes broth from scratch, boiling animal bones for days to achieve a creaminess, then boiling fresh homemade tofu and chunks of ox blood in the broth. It's digestible and much more delicious than it sounds, particularly when you pour some of the homemade kimchee into the broth.

Another unsung hero in Korean cooking is fermented soybean-red pepper paste, Gochujang, which makes sriracha seem bland. It works so well with beef that it's heresy to put it on some vegetarian brown rice gunk. It almost always contains barley though, so stay away from it if you don't eat wheat, though I'd wonder how much of it could be harmful because fermentation can destroy gluten. 

And really, there is nothing like liver or beef belly marinated in soy sauce. I know some folks use coconut aminos because they think they are reacting to soy sauce, but I don't think there is much in most soy sauce to react to, except for amines, which are present in coconut aminos too. 

But Asian food hasn't been immune for the industrialization of soy products, which leads to general mediocrity and upset stomachs all across the globe. The latest issue of my new favorite magazine, Lucky Peach, has an amazing article about miso. There are a great many types of miso, but the miso that most Asian restaurants serve is a powdered, pasteurized, fortified, bleached concoction that barely deserves to be called shinshu miso. But it's bland, ships easily, stores easily, and requires no skill to make into soup. 

The same thing has happened to broth and many other traditional foods. It's hard to find a restaurant that makes its own broths with bones rather than a powder containing MSG and other assorted non-food additives. Many Koreans now make a Gochujang that isn't fermented at all. 

The only good trend is the post-WWII trend of combining butter with miso or soy sauce. You can create some incredibly rich and wonderful sauces this way. I just now enjoyed some scallops with a soy-sauce browned butter glaze. 

For me the fascinating thing about soy sauce and miso is how deep and rich the flavors are, yet they do not compel me to overeat. I think it's a function of their complexity. They are delicious, but have an underlying funkiness. It's important, like fish sauce is to SE Asian cooking, but you definitely don't want to overdo it. 

Siberian wrestlers, 1901

A problem with reconstructing diets from the past is that people often forget to fathom the amount of information and cultural diversity that has been lost. Lost to cultural change, to habitat change, or simply to nature's rising oceans or lava flows. 

Often you only have pale glimpses of what was lost in the form of archeological remains or the writings of passing travelers who probably did not realize that they were witnessing things that few can even imagine today. 

When most people today think of the arctic or an ice age, they think of people clad in skins subsisting on wooly mammoth. But the truth is that arctic peoples of the past and of today rely on a huge variety of plants as well. I have written about the excellent book called Plants That We Eat, which describes the amazing and diverse plant foods of the Inuit. Most of their plant foods were leaves and berries, but they also collect tiny roots from the stores of mice, which provide a small amount of starch.

Turns out that further-south Arctic cultures in the past probably exploited starches more extensively. In Siberia they called the starchy bulbs of flower "sarana", but as this interesting paper shows, the word probably applies to several types of flower bulbs, mainly in the Lilly (Liliaceae) family. 

Like John D. Speth's excellent book, the paper relies extensively on sources written in German, many of which have not yet been translated to English. I was already aware of the use of lily bulbs among the Native Americans of North America, but was not aware that Siberians ate them as well. 

Apparently, sarana was eaten by many Siberian tribes:  Shor, Tofalar, Tuva, Altai, Buryat, Selkup, Itelmen, Aleut, Evenki, Ket, and Khanti are mentioned in the paper. Of course, all these different peoples had very different lifestyles. Some like the Buryat and Evenki are nomadic pastoralists and others like the Itelmen and Aleut are closer to hunter-gatherers. Use of sarana varied in different regions. It was a staple in some and more of a treat in others. 

The accounts of travelers in the area mention that sarana was:

• used to make spiced milk puddings
• dried and used to make flour for "bread"
• mixed with animal fat and stuffed into intestines to make a type of sausage for journeys
• dried and stored for the winter
• made into a thick porridge
• boiled and "eaten like rice"
• dried and put into fish and meat stews
• packed into fish flour dough and fried or made into pancakes
• steamed and served with berries
• cooked and served whole with fish or birds
• used as offerings to spirits alongside spruce and labrador tea

It was mainly gathered by women, who made special tools to dig it out. When it was too cold to dig it out, they could also find large high-quality stores in vole (or other rodent) nests, making sure to leave something in return so that the voles would survive the winter and be able to harvest again next year. Georg Wilhelm Steller, who witnessed this in the 1700s, noted that it resembled a form of trade.

Sarana bulbs could also be steamed and served with berries. According to Krasheninnikov this was the best and foremost dish in Kamchatka. In his view, it was “both sweet and sour at the same time” and it filled the stomach well. “It can be consumed every day, which makes one almost forget the lack of bread”,
says Krasheninnikov (1819: II: 314)... The taste of cooked sarana has been compared to sweet or baked chestnut. Adolph Erman found the taste of sarana delicious. He describes sarana bulbs as excellent food (Erman 1848: III: 161). According to Karl von Ditmar, who calls it “pagan food”, the taste is similar to potato… Bread did not belong to the traditional diet of northern Eurasia. Ditmar correctly observed that the local people did not even miss bread. Bread was (and still is) in comparison extremely important in the European diets and was only partly replaced by potatoes in the 19th century. The lack of bread, potatoes and other familiar food seems to have bothered many of the travellers in Siberia. They were not capable of enjoying the local diet except for some dishes. The boiled bulbs of sarana and other plants were seen as more or less exotic, “pagan”, disgusting, strange or, in rare cases, surprisingly tasty. In general the travellers held a distanced attitude towards local food, which made them unable to correctly estimate the significance of sarana for the Kamchatkan diet.

In many areas of Siberia, game is pretty low in fat. If you've ever tried to eat mainly fish and lean game, it's very much understandable why sarana was so worth the trouble. 

It's also understandable why such traditions have died out, as there are many flower bulbs that are quite poisonous and gathering them was probably a skill passed down through the generations.  

Unfortunately, many traditions like these died out before people could really study them, which is a real shame. I've met arctic people who believe that wheat bread is a "traditional" food. But the remnants cast skepticism on the idea that arctic or ice age diets were just a bunch of big game.