The Gay Caveman Diet: Part I

Many Americans—and now, people all over the world—are literally eating themselves to disease and early death. Think for a moment about the people you know who lived or who are now living into their 80s or 90s: was—or is—there a fat one in the group? Probably not, and there’s a good reason for this: the overweight and obese do not usually live that long. You can go here and read an article in the New England Journal of Medicine that lays out the data that show the clear association between excess weight and higher death rates.

Obesity has now overtaken hunger as the number one nutritional problem worldwide. The December 11, 2003 issue of The Economist put it best:

”When the world was a simpler place, the rich were fat, the poor were thin, and right-thinking people worried about how to feed the hungry. Now, in much of the world, the rich are thin, the poor are fat, and right-thinking people are worrying about obesity.”

Why is there now an epidemic of obesity? Simply put (and I know you’ve heard this before) too much energy in (that is, we eat too much) and too little energy out (that is, we do not get enough activity). True enough, but it’s not quite the whole story. While calories in and out are certainly key issues, the types of foods (that is, the ultimate mixture of carbohydrates, proteins and fats, the macronutrients) we eat also play a significant role in setting various switches in our bodies, switches that control rates of metabolism, whether we burn carbs or fats for energy and importantly, our hunger level. So, how do we figure out what the right proportion of macronutrients should be in our diet? What should we eat?

A good place to start would be to consider what our species was built for, or put another way, what were our factory settings?

To answer this question, we turn to the late Ukrainian-American biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky who famously said:

Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.

Therefore, if we’re trying to figure out what is natural for our species to eat, we need to look at the environment that we evolved into, the one that shaped us as a species and that we’ve lived in for the greatest time as a species.

Figuring out the proper diet for capuchin monkeys or polar bears or bullfrogs, we need only look at what they eat in their natural environments, be they rainforests, glaciers or Alabama lakes, and extract their wild diet from information gained by observation. However, for our species, Homo sapiens, things aren’t quite so easy. Because of our intelligence, we were able to evolve culturally and move away from the environment and behavior that evolutionary forces set for our genetic and biochemical machinery. The period of our species’ life that occupied more than 99% of our time on Earth was spent as hunter-gatherers, and not as moderns who do their hunting and gathering in supermarkets. Further, it was not even spent as agriculturalists, raising corn, rice or wheat; agriculture is only about 15,000 years old for us, a drop in the bucket compared to the 2.5 million years we spent as hunter-gatherers.

We cannot, however, teleport ourselves back, say, 300,000 or one million years and see what our forbears were eating, so we need to do the next best thing and catalog what modern hunter-gatherers eat and infer our natural diet from those data. Luckily, this has already been done. (Clicking on the link will take you to a site where the original article will automatically download). What these investigators found when they examined the diets of 229 hunter-gatherer tribal societies was a menu vastly different from what organizations such as the US Department of Agriculture, the American Diabetes Association and the American Heart Association recommend. Hunter-gatherers get about 25% of their calories from carbohydrates and about 30% from protein (although variation exists among different tribal societies depending on where they live).

For example, the American Heart Association recommends 15% of energy from protein, 55% from carbohydrates and 30% from fat. It would have been impossible for a hunter-gatherer to achieve this mixture of macronutrients because there is no way in the wild to get concentrated forms of carbohydrate. That ability only came recently, with the advent of agriculture, where we could grow wheat or corn, grind it up, and make tortillas or bread and get a big dose of carbs.

Not only are processed carbs unnatural (defined as coming from anything other than unprocessed fruits, vegetables, grains, nuts or legumes), but so are all dairy products! Cavemen and women did not drink milk, churn butter or produce cheese.

Okay, you may say, I see where you’re going with the caveman bit, but what does gay have to do with anything? For that and whether Dr. Atkins was right or wrong, and how the nutrition establishment reacts to all of this you will have to come back here next week.

Acknowledgement to Bob Hodgen for calling our natural state “factory settings” which I used above

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