Let’s get straight to the point using science, facts and data.
Yes! you are probably doing your Paleo diet wrong if you are going hard on the meat end of things, new groundbreaking research by the archeologists at the university of Wyoming shows that the early hunter-gatherer diet consisted more plant based diet and less meat based. Scientist goes to the extent of claiming that it’s more of an 80–20, where the 80 percent of the diet consisted of tubers(plants that grow undergroud such as potatoes) while the 20 percent was meat based diet. This research was done on the remains of 24 individuals from the Wilmaya Patjxa and Soro Mik’aya Patjxa burial sites in Peru.
The peer reviewed paper further suggests that fish, birds and small mammals played negligible role in these early subsistence economies.
This study could prove as a surprising twist in our understanding of modern day health and diet culture and could potentially strike a blow on the “all carnivore diet” trend which has been popularised by many celebrities and YouTubers, if you are a lifestyle and fitness junkie and you open your Youtube feed you are most probably going to find a video with this title “I tried 100% carnivore diet for 30 days and this happened…” or “How 100% carnivore diet changed my life” well maybe our understanding of how the people from past lived has become more conventional and we need science and data to break this conventional thought for us.
Assistant professor Randy Hass of the Wyoming University says,
Conventional wisdom holds that early human economies focused on hunting — an idea that has led to a number of high-protein dietary fads such as the Paleodiet,
They found the proof for this counterintuitive idea through the study of burnt plant remains from the sites and distinct dental-wear patterns on the individuals’ upper incisors indicate that tubers — or plants that grow underground, such as potatoes — likely were the most prominent subsistence resource.
We can turn around the “hunter-gatherer” narrative into more of “gatherer-hunter” because now we know that hunting was secondary, just imagine how this study can turn around the story of early humans which we consider to be primal and wild and instead expose us to a more neutral and soft side of our ancestors instead of the narrative in which they are screaming and hunting and making bows and arrows all the time. Hass also suggests that how scientist in other parts of the world can carry out researches in their areas and break their biases which they themselves can become a victim of. Where the “all carnivore diet” has become a staple narrative of more masculinity and more “primal!”(liver king reference) lifestyle the data suggests something else. It’s high time that we challenge these conventional ideas and change how we look at lifestyle, diet and health.
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Image credit: Pintrest
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