Debunking The Paleo Diet by Christina Warinner Transcript

 In this TEDxOU talk, Christina Warinner, an achaeological geneticist, here debunks the Paleo diet fads…below you can find the full transcript of the talk…

 

MP3 Audio:

 

Christina Warinner – TEDx Talk TRANSCRIPT

Thank you, it’s a pleasure to be here. I’m an archaeological scientist and I study the health and dietary histories of ancient peoples using bone biochemistry and ancient DNA.

I’m here because I want to talk to you about the Paleo Diet. It’s one of America’s fastest growing diet fads. The main idea behind it is that the key to longevity and optimal health is to abandon our modern agricultural diets, which make us ill, and move far back in time to our Palaeolithic ancestors, more than 10,000 years ago, and eat like them.

Now, I’m really interested in this idea because it purports to put archaeology in action, to take information we know about the past and use it in the present to help us today.

Now, this idea was really started in the 1970s with this book, “The Stone Age Diet.” It’s diversified since then into several variants, including the Paleo Diet, the Primal Blueprint, the New Evolution Diet, and NeanderThin, and most of the language of these diets makes references to anthropology, nutrition science, and evolutionary medicine.

The diet does seem primarily targeted at men, so if you look at advertisements and descriptions, they have virile, cavemen-like images, things like “live primal,” lots of red meat. And basically, the idea behind it can be broken down into four parts.

One is that our agricultural diets today make us chronically ill, that they are out of sync with our biology.

And two, that we need to abandon these agricultural diets that started during the agricultural period, and move back in time to the Palaeolithic and eat more like our ancestors over 10,000 years ago.

Third, that we know what these diets were like, and what they were like was they had a lot of meat, they were mainly meat based. That was supplemented with vegetables and fruits and some nuts and oils, but it definitely did not contain grains or legumes or dairy.

And fourth, that if we emulate this ancient diet, it will improve our health and make us live longer.

So what I want to talk to you about today is that this version of the Paleo Diet that’s promoted in popular books, on TV, on self-help websites and in the overwhelming majority of press has no basis in archaeological reality. So, thank you!

No, I’m not going to end there; I will explain. So what I want to do as an archaeologist is go through this, do a bit of myth-busting of some of these foundational archaeological concepts upon which it’s based, and then I want to talk to you about what we really do know from the archaeological record and from scientific studies about what Palaeolithic people did eat.

Myth #1: Humans are evolved to eat meat

So, myth one is that humans are evolved to eat meat and that Palaeolithic peoples consumed large quantities of meat. Humans have no known anatomical, physiological, or genetic adaptations to meat consumption. Quite the opposite, we have many adaptations to plant consumption.

Take, for example, vitamin C. Carnivores can make their own vitamin C, because vitamin C is found in plants. If you don’t eat plants, you need to make it yourself. We can’t make it, we have to consume it from plants. We have a longer digestive tract than carnivores. That’s because our food needs to stay in our bodies longer, so we have more time to digest plant matter.