Human beings have been in existence for roughly 900,000 years. For the first 890,000 years of mans existence humans everywhere ate the same thing: wild game, fish and shellfish, insects, fowl and bird eggs, wild fruit and vegetables. This narrow and limited menu of food types represented the sum total of mans available food sources.
Mankind ceased physical evolution approximately 100,000 years ago and from our inception as a species until the end of our evolutionary glide-path, everyone everywhere ate variations on the same nutritional themes: we hunted and fished, we gathered and we ate whatever seasonally appropriate fruits and vegetables were available.
Nothing was cultivated and domesticated livestock was unheard of. Regardless if primal man lived on the African Savanna, the Russian Steppes, the North American Plains, the South American jungle or the Australian Outback, wild animals, fish, shellfish, insects, fowl, eggs and wild fruits and vegetables constituted the sum total of mans available food sources. This was the prototypical organic diet and from a health and fitness standpoint, the ancients thrived on this extremely limited diet assuming they could find enough of it to survive.
Science indicates the ancients were completely devoid of modern maladies: the combination of intense physical activity and organic eating created lean, muscular humans that physically would be the envy of modern man.
Humans existed on a completely organic diet for hundreds of thousands of years. These foods nurtured man through his evolution and became the optimal food/fuel for the human body. Carnivorous, we developed incisors and powerful jaws for eating and chewing tough substances; our brains enlarged and our digestive tract shortened – adaptations that discount vegetarianism as part of our genetic heritage. Our primordial ancestors supplemented available proteins by gathering and consuming whatever wild fruits and vegetables they could forage.
Humans created tribes that followed the migratory patterns of animal herds and ate everything they killed: the flesh, fat, blood, organs, skin and even the marrow within the bones. This was nutrient-dense food derived from plant-fed omnivores or flesh-eating carnivores. The sameness of the human dietary pattern went on for hundreds of thousands of years. Once human evolution ceased, we were locked in nutritionally: as a fully evolved species it became a physiological impossibility to adapt to new foods.
Everything changed with the invention of agriculture, which likely occurred in the Euphrates Valley around 8,000 BC. In about that same time men domesticated animals to produce both milk and meat. Humans began consuming food/fuel that the body was not designed to run on. Grain production became widespread and for the first time we began eating high glycemic food. This nutritional wrinkle wreaked havoc with insulin and blood sugar levels. In Primordial times hunter/gatherers might occasionally stumble onto wild honey or come across fructose-infused fruit, but other than on those rare occasions, ancient man never ate food that caused pancreatic insulin secretions. With the advent of agriculture and the widespread introduction of grains and grain products into the human diet, a new malady made its first appearance: obesity. The human machinery was fully adapted to run on rarified organic nutrients and in this regard we were akin to sophisticated racecars that use nitro-methane as fuel suddenly low-grade, impure food/fuel appeared: agriculture bought us insulin-spiking baked goods and alcoholic beverages; domesticated animals began being fed grain and for the first time in human history food-related physical maladies appeared read more at: Marty’s Strength Column
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