grains

Is rice paleo?
08/20/2011 - 19:56

 Grains are evil. The people in the paleolithic didn't eat them. Amirite? Unfortunately, that hypothesis is contradicted by archeological evidence, but now there is genetic evidence that rice may have been domesticated earlier than thought. 

Asian rice, Oryza sativa, is one of world's oldest and most important crop species. Rice is believed to have been domesticated ∼9,000 y ago, although debate on its origin remains contentious. A single-origin model suggests that two main subspecies of Asian rice, indica and japonica, were domesticated from the wild rice O. rufipogon. In contrast, the multiple independent domestication model proposes that these two major rice types were domesticated separately and in different parts of the species range of wild rice. This latter view has gained much support from the observation of strong genetic differentiation between indica and japonica as well as several phylogenetic studies of rice domestication. We reexamine the evolutionary history of domesticated rice by resequencing 630 gene fragments on chromosomes 8, 10, and 12 from a diverse set of wild and domesticated rice accessions. Using patterns of SNPs, we identify 20 putative selective sweeps on these chromosomes in cultivated rice. Demographic modeling based on these SNP data and a diffusion-based approach provide the strongest support for a single domestication origin of rice. Bayesian phylogenetic analyses implementing the multispecies coalescent and using previously published phylogenetic sequence datasets also point to a single origin of Asian domesticated rice. Finally, we date the origin of domestication at ∼8,200–13,500 y ago, depending on the molecular clock estimate that is used, which is consistent with known archaeological data that suggests rice was first cultivated at around this time in the Yangtze Valley of China.
 

13,500 is older than what many people consider to be the end of the paleolithic, though many consider the paleolithic era to be relative to the region and would characterize a culture eating rice 13,500 years ago to be mesolithic. 

The molecular clock also has its share of controversy, as it is based on statistical modeling, but no more than other evidence we have used to build the concept of the paleolithic diet. 

I have written about my success with rice and hope to write more about it soon. Maybe I should just start calling my diet the mesolithic diet...

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Fun with headlines: Did paleolithic people eat grains?
10/18/2010 - 18:57

Great, a new pop-sci treatment of an anthropology paper that your Aunt Maude will forward to you with the implication that you should eat her whole wheat pancakes next time you visit. The article portrays this as some kind of ground-breaking research that totally changes our view of the paleolithic.

So what's the deal with this study? Now that I'm wormed my way into academia again somehow, I read the paper. They found something that looks like a mortar and pestle with some evidence of starch residues.

The title says flour, but that's not the good old white flour your Aunt Maude is thinking of. Of the nine species mentioned, one is a seed, the rest are roots and rhizomes. That ground starch has been used by humans since the upper paleolithic is not really news. Famous anthropologist Richard Wrangham who wrote Catching Fire has been writing about the role of cooked starch in the Upper Paleolithic for quite some time. In the Upper Paleolithic it might have spurred population increases that eventually led to early settlements like Gobekli Tepe. There has been selection for genes like AMY1 which allow for better starch digestion.

 I think isotope studies are a little more accurate than a few as the paper admits "poor preserved" plant remains. And the evidence is that the protein in the paleolithic diet was mostly animal protein.


Find the whole wheat...

I've had cattail and it's not bad, though a pain in the ass to gather and process. If you want something similar chestnuts are another starchy paleo-ish food, which by coincidence I ate today. So if it makes you feel more accurate have some yams or chestnuts alongside of your steak. But steak is king.

Comment?: 13
Traditional Grains
08/22/2010 - 14:11

A reader left an interesting comment:

I'm a Polyface intern and CrossFit enthusiast. Polyface has a pretty amicable relationship with the Weston A. Price Foundation, which has a lot in common with Paleo. The difference, however, is that WAPF espouses traditional diets that often include grains. The crisis in nutrition didn't start with the introduction of grains 10,000 years ago, right? It started with the maturation and confluence of the food and marketing industries and the flight from agrarian areas to cities. This was mere decades ago. Traditional diets are the answer.

A Paleo diet seems to me to be ultimately fundamentalist and impossible to follow. There is no way we can know what hunter/gatherers 10,000 years ago actually consumed. It makes much more sense to follow human culture and eat traditional diets like we have been for millennia, including sprouted grains!

http://www.westonaprice.org/faq/785-faq-grains-seeds-nuts-beans.html

I tend to be very sympathetic with the idea that agrarian diets are good. But there is simply no escaping the fact that

1. Grains are not necessary to be healthy

2. Despite that fact that many agrarian populations are health compared to us, archaeological evidence shows that they are shorter, have smaller crania, and sometimes have worse teeth. Of course agrarian populations vary quite a lot. I find it quite odd to see people like Matt Stone and other starch-pushers extol traditional potato-based diets. Yes, those people were not obese, but they were very short and when immigrants from these populations move to the US the height gains in their children are quite dramatic. Traditional grains and starches might not be "bad," but are they the best foods to pick when you have access to plenty of easily-digested nutritious meat and fish?

As for the Paleo diet being fundamentalist and impossible to follow, I actually don't think it is. I eat at normal restaurants and shop at normal stores. I am a fan of the WAPF and eat some agrarian foods. Ironically it's THOSE foods that require me to engage in illegal activity, order stuff online, spend hours grinding grains, planning ahead to ferment them. I LOVE idlis and buckwheat pancakes, but I almost never make them because they are too much of a pain. I run my own consulting business and it's much easier for me to just throw a bunch of meat and vegetables into a pan and eat it. I think WAPF is a good diet, but I'm not sure it's the best diet and I'm positive it's not the easiest.

You are right, I don't know exactly what hunter-gatherers 10,000 years ago ate. They didn't leave any recipe books. But paleo isn't reenactment, it's about nutritional principles: fat is good, animals are the perfect food, and grains should be limited are the main principles I live by.

 

* as for shortness being a bad thing, it's only an indicator of a less than optimal diet if people aren't acheiving the max height possible for their genes. There is plenty of evidence from immigration that a lot of people in agrarian cultures don't reach that max height. Caries in agrarian populations are well documented, with some having very high rates (mostly corn based) and others low (milk and rice based).

Comment?: 10
The Effect of Culture: Estrogenic foods
05/11/2010 - 19:33

What is the most common non-paleo indulgence? In my experience, it seems beer is the vice of choice. Don't get me wrong- I love beer and it was one of the hardest things to give up, especially since craft beer was one of my big hobbies in college. But in the end, I did notice that the effects of it on my digestive health were very negative. But there is something else about beer.

It's funny because no paleo dude would be caught dead with a carton of soy milk or a tofutti cutie, partially out of fear of soy phytoestrogen.

Mmmm would you like some omega-6 and a bucket of sugar with your estrogen?

But did you know that hops have even more phytoestrogen? "We have identified a potent phytoestrogen in hops, 8-prenylnaringenin, which has an activity greater than other established plant estrogens." Ouch... so much for some foods being intrensically manly. Conspiracy theorists blame the church and say that the Reinheitsgebot beer laws that mandated hops in 1516 (and similar laws in other countries) were to suppress the sexuality of men. It's true that in the past it was common to use other bittering agents. But the truth is that beer made with hops simply keeps better.

BUT this does highlight the fact that it is possible to make beer without hops. If gluten doesn't bother you, they might be worth checking out. Dogfish Head has been making some ancient beers recipes lately, one of which I tried before giving up gluten. Midas Touch is a recipe recovered from analysis of residues of clay vessels from the 8th century BC and is unusual, but richly flavored. I've also heard good things abou the Finnish Sahti made with Juniper berries.

Another set of beers I've tried are these Scottish historic ales made by Williams Brothers. The hop-less options are Fraoch made with heather and Alba made with Scots Pine (my favorite). Both are dark flavorful malty beers that anyone who enjoys craft beer will appreciate.

Man-boobs not included

The history of beer as a healing herbal elixir is explored in Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers, which you should check out if you want to brew your own.

Comment?: 19
From The Archive: Demeter's Legacy
04/25/2010 - 22:45

Whenever an article about the paleo diet is published in a major newspaper, at least one commenter expresses dismay that paleo dieters don't realize that humans are adapted to grains and milk. That's a misconception on several levels. First of all, plenty of us are educated enough to know that genetic adaptations can occur rapidly. I remember in high school when I first read The Beak of The Finch, which is about the finches in the Galapagos islands and how their populations genetically respond rapidly to changes in the environment. It takes down the myth that evolution is slow and can't be observed. 

In that case, why are we still talking about what our ancestors eat as if it matters? Well, so far the evidence is that some adaptations have occurred in some populations response to neolithic food. Genetic evidence shows that most of the population in modern societies is descended from agriculturalists who had been farming for several thousand years. Clearly, our ancestors were very much able to survive on diets of grains and dairy. 

I was just reading this scientific paper, Demeter's Legacy, which is free online and a fascinating read. Yes, there are two major genetic adaptations in agriculturalist populations. One improves the digestion of starch and the other of dairy. Great, we can eat these foods and reproduce. Yay, but it doesn't mean that we are completely adapted to them. There are plenty of foods that are digestible for everyday needs, but damaging in the long term. It's up to us to do the research and figure out if foods are really worth it. I ate bread for most of my life and felt OK, but life for me is not just about surviving, but about thriving. It's important to remember that even though adaptations have occurred, the vast majority of our genes were forged before agriculture. 

And for people descended from more recent hunter-gatherers, neolithic foods are even more devastating.

I created a list that I am currently still adding foods to which outlines some pros and cons of various foods from the paleo viewpoint. I think foods should be judged on their merits and there is no "one true" paleo diet...there can't be, since last time I checked I couldn't get wild antelope at the grocery store. It's about learning from the wisdom of the past and choosing food based on those principles, not reenactment. 

 

Comment?: 2
A fishy theory of thyroid problems
02/06/2010 - 14:19

 

If you want to see some beautiful photos of traditional fish eating in a Gwich'in camp, look here, though keep in mind that at the time these pictures were taken, this tribe was eating modern foods.

Lately health blogger Matt Stone has been creating a bit of a controversy in paleo circles by blaming thyroid issues on low carbing. There is no question that many long term low carbers and paleo dieters suffer from thyroid issues . Why? Arctic cultures like the Inuit, Koyoukon, Yupik, Sami, and many others have a traditional diet that is very low in carbohydrates. Many people have written about how healthy they are despite following a diet that's not exactly the USDA food pyramid. 

I think it's pretty clear that the problems people are having are not due to a lack of cornbread. What all the healthy arctic people had in common was that they consumed a wealth of marine foods ranging from seal liver to seaweed. Marine foods have nutrients all of us could benefit from. Traditional cultures not only ate fish, they ate whole fish: fish eyes, liver, and bones. This stuff is a hard sell to those of us who grew up eating the typical American diet, but it's definitely worth getting used to eating, as the arctic explorers did. 

Arctic explorer and low carb idol Vilhjalmur Stefansson forced himself to like fish, as he recounts in his interesting book online:

Until I was twenty seven I had the belief about myself that I could not eat fish and felt certain that its taste was obnoxious to me. I thought it an interesting peculiarity and assumed that everyone else would think so and there were few things I told about so often as the fact that I was peculiar in that I could not eat fish. I think I might have lost the notion sooner if it had not formed such an excellent topic of conversation 

 

I've said it many times: if your paleo or low carb diet is a bunch of ground meat and some chicken breasts, you probably need to rethink things. As far as the carb controversy, it's a rather old one. The Weston A. Price Foundation has been criticizing the paleo diet for not including traditional dairy and fermented grain/legume products. In his books food ecologist Gary Nabhan recounts how Native American tribes like the Pima never suffered from obesity on their traditional high carb diet.  Born To Run recounts the impressive athletic fears of the corn-loving Tarahumara tribe. The yam eating Kitavans don't have too many problems either. 

But the paleo diet is about more than just not being obese. Plenty of people follow it to heal from autoimmune conditions and damage from eating the Standard American Diet. Others follow it to improve athletic performance. The truth is that while traditional agrarian cultures didn't have type II diabetes epidemics, the healthiest bones that anthropologists have found were those of coastal foragers. As Dr. Kurt Harris says "tolerated is not optimal."

Comment?: 14
Cattle to human health lesson
01/22/2010 - 13:32

Cattle to human health logic:

What's also true is that E. coli only showed up so prolifically in the guts of cows since they've been fed corn in the last 50 years or so. A starchy food the grass-eaters didn't evolve to consume, corn produces an acidic mess in their stomachs that E. coli bacteria apparently loves.

I just realized today that you could totally rewrite that sentence and it would still be true.

What's also true is that E. coli only showed up so prolifically in the guts of human since they've been fed so much corn in the last 50 years or so. A starchy food the meat and vegetable eaters didn't evolve to consume, corn produces an acidicmess in their stomachs that E. coli bacteria apparently loves.

It's not just acidic stomachs of cattle that E. Coli love, it's acidic stomachs of humans too. The amount of food poisoning cases attributed to pathogens that aren't big fans of acid, like salmonella, has dropped. Well, except for in the other extreme end up acidity, which is the growing population treated with drugs like Proton Pump Inhibitors that reduce acid too much, thus leaving them susceptible to other nasty types of food poisoning.

All that is clear is that in the US our stomachs are a mess. We should make an effort to get them back to normal by elimating both grains and acid-reducing drugs.

Comment?: 0
The Traditional Nutrition Diet
01/16/2010 - 17:11

While paleo dieters eat diverse diets that can include a wide variety of vegetables, the main dish is usually meat. While I think this diet is an optimal one, good meat is expensive and some people just don't feel comfortable eating lots of meat from an ethical, visceral, or spiritual standpoint. My father is a big proponent of paleo, but my mother has told me she doesn't want to eat so much meat. 

This comment on Whole Health source got me thinking about those people:

To restore health, we move our nutritional approach back through time. First stop, Mesolithic. With the elimination of anti-nutrients (wheat, etc.) and the increased variety of food, nutrition becomes near optimal for most. Fat-soluble vitamins are at sufficient levels, either through the inclusion of specific foods (seafoods, organ meats) or supplementation. 

This move to Mesolithic nutrition would likely resolve the vast majority of nutrition-driven health issues in the world today, essentially returning us to the lifestyle and health observed by Dr. Price in the 30's.

I have the limitation of illness, so my attempt to eat traditionally prepared grains and dairy products was not successful, but many people can thrive on this diet, which is espoused by the Weston A. Price Foundation. 

 

 

For people interested in improving their diet this way, I recommend these books:

Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon is a seminal cookbook and textbook on the value of preparing grains, legumes, and dairy the traditional way, as well as getting an abundance of fat soluble vitamins. To get these you only really need to eat a very small amount of high quality animal fat in the form of organ meats, oily fish, and raw dairy. 

Full Moon Feast by Jessice Prentice is another great cookbook that adds on spiritual, social, and local aspects to eating traditionally.

Real Food by Nina Planck is a book that does a great job of spreading the word that eating traditionally is vital for the health of future children. 

Why Some Like It Hot by Gary Nabhan or anything by Gary really. He is a big proponent of traditional crop varieties and much of his work is about how devastating it has been for native peoples to lose their traditional diets. 

These books provide a wealth of valuable information no matter what traditional diet you follow. I own them and use them often. 

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