Paleo Diet and Paleolithic Diet Questions & Answers

Question

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How do we explain the concept of RDA with respect to the Paleolithic?

It is quite likely that various groups ate very similar foods for days on end. A relatively large hunted animal would feed a group for days and they might eat a portion from it every time they have a meal - and then there would be relatively long periods when they would just forage and live on sub optimal food.

If RDA was so important, these groups would not be able to have healthy off-springs, and over a long period - poor nutrition coupled with probable in breeding would result in their extinction.

How did we get past this to be where we are today?

flag	asked Nov 30 2011 at 10:11 Resurgent 3,883●1●4●22

Why do you think that their diets would not have met the RDAs? – Matt Nov 30 2011 at 10:28

An example: Animal foods are low in manganese. They would rarely have met the RDA of manganese unless they carried nuts at all times or eaten copious amounts of vegetables daily, both of which seems doubtful. – Dean Nov 30 2011 at 10:40

Do you know what are high in manganese? Tubers! Wait, wait. I hear ''there's no essential carbohydrate being screamed'' as the myth on humans being 100% carnivorous falls to pieces. – JRAC Nov 30 2011 at 11:22

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If only it were that simple, right? Alas, there are several problems with such cause and effect logic. I look at the rates at which manganese is excreted, at magnesium fulfilling some it's functions, at higher manganese content in drinking water correlating with lowered intelligence, at it's toxicity, at the fact that tubers need to be cooked and there not being any single plant food group that we would have evolved to require. Maybe the RDA is off? Wait, did I say drinking water? Yeah, maybe that was the source of such TRACE minerals. – Dean Nov 30 2011 at 11:44

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It is problematic to guess nutrient intakes from wild prehistoric foods based on modern agricultural foods. – Matt Nov 30 2011 at 13:27

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gydle · Answer 1 · 2011-11-30 10:28:48Z UTC

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RDA is an institutional construct and IMHO has little to do with reality. Grok and Grokkina probably got a balanced ratio of nutrients over a longer time period - probably weekly or monthly, perhaps, as in vitamin D, even seasonally. For some reason, contemporary medicine has shrunk the period for obtaining nutrient balance down to t=24hours. It would be interesting to delve, Taubes-like, into the reasons why. Methinks money might be involved.

answered Nov 30 2011 at 10:28

gydle
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RDAs are daily averages over a period of time. There is no requirement to eat a certain amount everyday. They are often calculated as the daily average from a week or months worth of food intake for convenience. – Matt Nov 30 2011 at 11:34

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Grok: ''I'm only at 95% of my calcium requirement for the day, bugger! Better run down to the supplement tree before 23:59'' :-) – JRAC Nov 30 2011 at 11:40

@Matthew maybe so, but people interpret them as daily needs and take supplements accordingly. – gydle Nov 30 2011 at 12:25

People misinterpret everything. – Matt Nov 30 2011 at 13:05

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Gydle, I am not sure if people misinterpret so much as it's a lot easier to track one's daily consumption of a nutrient than monthly. If someone told you that you needed an X amount of a vitamin per month, wouldn't your first thought be to divide it by 30 to figure out how much you needed per day? – Renee Nov 30 2011 at 13:32

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cliff · Answer 2 · 2011-11-30 12:47:33Z UTC

Wild foods in general are much more nutritious and HG's eat very varied diets. Many tribes probably did suffer from certain deficiencies as well(and had health problems), its a logical fallacy to assume they all got perfect nutrition and had good health.

Nance · Answer 3 · 2011-12-01 01:12:17Z UTC

Grok managed his RDA the old-fashioned way; he either survived/thrived on the available foods or died. Those who lived to raise offspring at least to adolescence were those who did the best on whatever could be scrounged/hunted/foraged.

Over time, the RDA became those foods that were available in the natural environment. With the ebb and flow of glaciers up north and forests/savannahs down south, he was even more challenged and again either found a way to survive or died out--and fossils show that many did the latter.

And here we are today! (Unfortunately trying to live on cereal and manufactured food-like products.)

JRAC · Answer 4 · 2011-11-30 10:50:18Z UTC

We're also told to eat wholegrains...

RDA is a starting point but it's hardly a basis for health. I could meet the minimum requirement for vitamin C and end up with scurvy if I had a condition that depleted vitamin C rapidly and was not raising insulin enough (to recycle it). Equally you could think you'd be getting enough vitamin A from the RDA and actually getting no usable amount for a number of reasons (inability to convert carotene to vitamin A, lack of fat etc).

Eating nutrient dense low toxicity foods is the best route to health. If I were eating lean meats and vegetables I'd be worried too. :-)

Also, who ever said Grok was never lacking in some nutrients?

Korion · Answer 5 · 2011-11-30 10:51:30Z UTC

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Don't forget about this : ZC experiment. Besides, if I stopped eating coconut oil and ate only meat and veggies instead, I'd hit the RDA for everything with no effort.

answered Nov 30 2011 at 10:51

Korion
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The problem with RDAs is different diets have different nutritional requirements. I don't think muscle meat + vegetables is a great diet (although will still be miles better than what Joe Bloggs gets). – JRAC Nov 30 2011 at 11:13

Don't forget that the people in that experiment experienced health problems "The men lost large amounts of calcium – about 400 mg per day. Meat contains little calcium, but the calcium metabolism cycle continued in the men’s bodies. [J. Biol. Chem. 1930 87: 669-680.] Even more serious is what happened to Karsten Anderson after a year on the meat diet. In the spring of 1929 the polar explorer developed "pain in the right chest, a severe chill, and rapidly rising temperature. The next day the sputum was rusty in color, the temperature was 40 degrees", the researchers wrote. [J. Biol. Chem. 1930 – cliff Nov 30 2011 at 12:43

"Sounds like a heart attack. Not that strange when you consider that the subjects’ cholesterol level rose to 800. [Cardiologists consider a total cholesterol count of 240 to be the level at which you need to intervene because of the danger of a heart attack, Ed.] " – cliff Nov 30 2011 at 12:43

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WOW cliff, you should really check your sources instead of quoting such BS! This is a more complete quote: "On the morning of February 15, he took 100 gm. of glucose for a glucose tolerance test. That evening he had pain in the right chest, a severe chill, and rapidly rising temperature. The next day the sputum was rusty in color, the temperature was 40.0’ (104’F.), and signs of consolidation were present over the rigbt lower lobe. A diagnosis of lobar pneumonia was made. The infecting organism was the pneumococcus, Type II." jbc.org/content/87/3/651.full.pdf+html – Dean Dec 1 2011 at 1:05

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From the same paper: "the clinical observations and laboratory studies gave no evidence that any ill effects had occurred from the prolonged use of the exclusive meat diet." You should really know better cliff, this study is famous for that last quote. – Dean Dec 1 2011 at 1:07

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Alexandra · Answer 6 · 2011-11-30 21:39:56Z UTC

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@ Cliff: The link below has the full text of the journal article you quoted from. The part you quote about Anderson is on bottom of page 654 and continued on top of page 655 and refers to what happened after the all meat/fat diet. It specifically speaks of Anderson having completed the 367 days on the all meat/fat diet (January 24, 1929) and then being tested for 3 additional subsequent weeks on a "variety" of diets "all high fat" but not all meat/fat. He became ill during this additional 3 week period of variety diets and mid-February got the attack. Most importantly, on the morning of the attack, he was subjected to 100 grams of glucose for a glucose tolerance test. Full text is in the link above. The devil is in the details.

http://www.jbc.org/content/87/3/651.full.pdf+html

answered Nov 30 2011 at 21:39

Alexandra
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He didn't even have a heart attack. He had pneumonia. Sugar is known to suppress the immune system and it was probably an especially big shock to his system after not being exposed to it for a while. – Dean Dec 1 2011 at 2:59

so one dose of 100g of glucose caused the not his year long diet of nothing but meat? – cliff Dec 1 2011 at 12:05

what does that say for the all meat diet? If you all of sudden have to eat carbs in an emergency situation you might suffer some sort of attack? – cliff Dec 1 2011 at 12:07

That's about a candy bar's worth of glucose. If an all-meat/fat diet induces a negative health reaction of that magnitude to such a small dose of sugar, you'd best stay on a mixed diet. Many LC hackers here report nasty health effects from carb reintroduction, though I haven't seen any this severe. – thhq Dec 1 2011 at 13:05

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I'm sorry, you're still doing it wrong. It's cliff and you who made that generalized assumption, I merely remarked about a fact that may have played a role in this case. I posted to correct the attribution of a carnivorous diet to a heart attack. I didn't call glucose a poison, I called it a stressor, and that it is, especially when one has been VLC. – Dean Dec 1 2011 at 17:41

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Chris Antenucci · Answer 7 · 2011-12-01 04:10:06Z UTC

Great question. Eating the organs of animals will provide a lot of the nutrients our ancestors needed, but they weren't available to them all the time like they are to us. This is where evolution comes in, because they survived when certain nutrients were low or nonexistent in their food supply for various amounts of time. We have the needs we recognize today because of the foods that were/weren't in our ancestors diet that changed their needs for each nutrient. They evolved to produce the molecules that filled the most important functions of our body, and if they didn't evolve to make certain molecules or lost the ability to do so (like vitamin C) it was because there was evolutionary pressure against producing that molecule because it could be found in the food supply. Keep in mind they ate many things from the soil and the soil back then was nutrient rich so they got a lot more minerals that way. Also, they could afford to be low in certain nutrients at various times because they ate the best foods for their bodies so they weren't putting the stress on their bodies many people in modern times do from a bad diet and poor lifestyle choices which depletes various nutrients in the body.

thhq · Answer 8 · 2011-11-30 13:10:58Z UTC

Food availability determined where paleos could survive at all. Traveling distances greater than 5 miles was difficult and uncertain. Our ability to eat food in quantities far in excess of modern RDA, and to digest a wide range of nutrients, is a result of successful adaptation to survive in a small locality.

How did Grok manage his RDA

8 Answers