If I eat like my ancestors did
That's probably the healthiest right? I mean this evolution right? I hear this logic every
Single day, I mean, it's everywhere online. It's really really tempting
I mean if my ancestors ate something for millennia then maybe we're adapted to it. Maybe it's
Natural don't get me wrong. There is some truth to it for example ultra-processed foods
things like soda candy refined grains
They're problematic because we weren't built to process that stuff cavemen didn't have junk food
But then people take this logic and they try to extrapolate and they go too far. For example
There's this idea out there that our ancestors didn't eat whole grains things like oatmeal barley rice
So therefore these things must be bad for us. First of all, the facts are just wrong
There's archaeological evidence that we've been eating whole grains for a long time barley for at least
20,000 years oats for 30,000 and sorghum that's another grain for at least a hundred
Thousand years now our species Homo sapiens were about three hundred thousand years old give or take
So we've been eating whole grains for a large chunk of our existence. Maybe even all along
Ok, so our ancestors did eat grains after all, but does that even matter? Not really?
No
The health value of the food is not determined by whether cavemen had it the fact that our ancestors ate something in the Stone Age
Doesn't tell us anything about the long-term health effects of eating this food for 60 70 80 years
cavemen had tiny life expectancies compared to the modern times our main causes of death at least in the Western world are things like
heart disease
cancer
neurodegenerative disease like Alzheimer's
Strokes cavemen didn't even make it to the ages where you got to start worrying about those diseases
so a diet that gets us through our 20s and 30s tells us nothing about our chances of making it to 90 and
Dodging a heart attack, even if we had come up with the whole grains yesterday, it still wouldn't matter. So
Our ancestors didn't eat whole grains hypothetically speaking, right?
So what they also didn't take antibiotics when they had an infection we make decisions based on risk benefit analyses on pros and cons
with the best information that we have not based on a speculation from a hundred thousand years ago whole grains are
consistently linked to lower risks of heart disease cancer diabetes
inflammation and mortality and according to the massive global burden of disease
Study not eating enough whole grains is one of the main causes of disease and death
worldwide so the risk benefit analysis on whole grains is pretty darn clear the best evidence we have
Strongly points to eating them now. We're talking about whole grains here
We're not talking white bread white pasta pizza candy bass trees
We're talking barley and wheat and wild rice and quinoa. What if you're gluten intolerant?
well
Then you want to stay away from wheat barley and rye those three everything else up for grabs another
situation where this cave man, fallacy gets misused is
Cavemen ate a lot of meat so therefore it must be good for us
It's bad logic for all the reasons
We just talked about some cavemen ate a lot of meat some ate very little
It doesn't matter the modern scientific evidence says we don't need meat if we really want to eat it
We can have some it's compatible with health. Ideally go easy on the amounts eat it here and there not as a staple
Not as a pillar of the diet
ideally
We want to try to get most of our calories including protein from whole plants
Regardless of what the flintstones did bottom line decide based on your preference what you like to eat or decide based on evidence?
Whatever floats your boat
But don't let anybody tell you that you have to eat X Y Z because somebody waving a club
Was doing it a hundred thousand years ago. Who cares that's not evolutionary science
It's just speculation
If anything I'm biased in favor of evolutionary explanations
Like any biomedical scientists evolution permeates every aspect of my work?
I've published entire papers discussing it evolution is
crucial
Which is exactly why we don't throw it around when it doesn't make sense at the end of the day
Nutrition science is not that complicated when you eliminate the distractions the noise
I don't make these videos to tell people what they can and cannot eat
I'm not a guru and I never want to be one. There's plenty of advice like that out there
Here's the list of foods you can have and here's the list that's off-limits
That's not me
What I think is really interesting and important is that we learnt a reason for ourselves on this topic
So we don't fall prey to bad advice and bad logic and end up hurting ourselves
you don't need to be a professional scientist to understand the basics and to be able to make reasonable and
healthy decisions for yourself
and for your family
I'll see you on the next one