Burn by Herman Pontzer PhD

Author:Herman Pontzer PhD [Pontzer, Herman]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2021-03-02T00:00:00+00:00

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The impressive amount of carbohydrate in the Hadza diet and those of other groups is the mirror image of the 30 percent protein, 20 percent carbs, and 50 percent fat energy mix typically promoted as “Paleo.” And some Keto and Paleo proponents have pushed this supposed ancestral mix even further. David Perlmutter, author of the popular book Grain Brain, argues—without providing any evidence—that the ancestral diet was only 5 percent carbs and 75 percent fat! Why do so many of today’s Paleo diet evangelists insist that the “natural” hunter-gatherer diet is low carb and high fat?

Part of the answer lies with Murdock’s Atlas. The modern Paleo diet movement was founded in the late 1990s by Loren Cordain, a professor at Colorado State University who wanted to know why hunter-gatherers were seemingly immune from heart disease and other common Western problems. Cordain was trained as an exercise physiologist, not an anthropologist, so he didn’t go to the field to observe hunter-gatherer diets firsthand. Instead, he and his collaborators compiled diet summaries for the hunter-gatherers in Murdock’s Atlas, much as I’ve done in Figure 6.2. They went to great lengths to translate Murdock’s diet scores into precise percentages of fats, carbs, and protein in the diet, and concluded that about 55 percent of calories in the average hunter-gatherer diet came from animal foods. These analyses spawned a number of peer-reviewed scientific papers and formed the basis for Cordain’s influential book, The Paleo Diet, which launched the movement.

These studies were well intended, but they fall short in some key ways. Most fundamentally, the data from Murdock is simply not good enough to get a precise read on dietary intake. His cultural summaries don’t say anything about fats, carbs, or protein. Instead, Murdock assigned a dietary score, 0 through 9, to relay a rough estimate of the contribution of different food types to the diet. For the most part, the methods used to determine those scores aren’t described. It’s likely, though, that they missed a lot of carbohydrate-rich foods. As we discussed in Chapter 4, anthropologists in the early and mid-1900s consistently overlooked women’s contributions, which would tend to underestimate the amount of plant foods. And we know that Murdock’s summaries ignored honey, which is a big part of the diet for the Hadza and many other hunter-gatherers.

Another problem with Cordain’s analyses is the focus on the average proportion of animals and plants rather than on the enormous diversity of diets across the globe. Focusing on the average suggests that there’s one “true” natural human diet, and anything else leads to disease. That makes as much sense as arguing there is one “true” human height, and anyone who deviates from it is pathological. For some measures, the average value isn’t very meaningful. All of the populations in Figure 6.2 are equally natural, and as far as we can tell, all of those populations were equally healthy, despite the fact that their diets ran the gamut from mostly plants to mostly meat.

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