Friday, October 14, 2016

Paleo diet

It turns out that 400,000 year old skulls had tartar. Tartar is porous, and stuff can get entrapped. Researchers found "charcoal from indoor fires; evidence for the ingestion of essential plant-based dietary components; and fibers that might have been used to clean teeth or were remnants of raw materials." "Within the calculus, the researchers also discovered small plant fibers, which they suspect may have been used to clean teeth—prehistoric tooth picks."

There are also traces of fatty acids and bits of starch, presumably from nuts and other plants.

The real paleo diet didn't prevent tartar buildup. I wonder what else it didn't prevent. Attacks by cave bears, ...

2 comments:

  1. I can easily believe that our bodies haven't had time to evolve completely to tolerate the Neolithic diet, and that our Neolithic forebears had to strike a hard bargain to eat foods they didn't tolerate all that well in order to avoid outright starvation. But heavens, the nonsense that gets talked about the universally curative effects of whatever people imagine a Paleolithic diet to have been! If people want a genuine paleo diet, they probably should restrict their calories by about half and spend a good part of the day working like dogs.

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  2. Acai berries have been shown to reduce attacks by cave bears.

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