paelofantasy
Posted: Sat Mar 23, 2013 12:40 am
new book about how wrong-headed paleo is. haven't read it, but saw a review.
Paleofantasy: What Evolution Really Tells Us About Sex, Diet, and How We Live by Marlene Zuk.[The author] argues that the line of thinking that animates much of paleo living begins with some questionable premises. “The notion that humans got to a point in evolutionary history where their bodies were somehow in sync with the environment … reflects a misunderstanding of evolution,” Zuk writes. “What we are able to eat and thrive on depends on our more than 30 million years of history as primates, not on a single, arbitrarily more recent moment in time”—that is, not merely on some hunter-gatherer fantasy.
Attempts to mimic the eating habits of our foraging relatives results from a confused understanding of our history. According to Zuk, humans ate different foods in different places, and “thrived on the variety.”
Perhaps the biggest paleo-fallacy identified by Zuk is the assumption that our biology has somehow stopped changing since the dawn of agriculture. She notes that there’s “a strong body of evidence” that our genome has changed as we spread across the world and discovered farming, “making it difficult at best to point to a single way of eating to which we were, and remain, best suited.”