Plague of Strength

According to a study published in the journal Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology in 2003, skeletal remains show that paleolithic humans developed muscularity similar to today’s superior athletes. (1) That’s pretty awesome on the one hand, because everyone back in the day was fucking jacked, but on the other hand, it sucks that humanity has devolved to the point where your average American looks like a shaved walrus and is weak as a newborn kitten. Unless you’re me, of course, in which case it rules because I’m a god among men. Or a man amongst pussies. Whichever one you like.

Well, my fuckers, I’m getting at Paleolithic Nutrition. Back in the turn of the century, a rough-and-tumble professor who apparently grew bored enough with the ease of daily life decided to roll up to snowy Eskimoland with no gear and live amongst the Eskimos while studying their culture. Whilst he lived amongst those silly, snow-blasted freak, Vilhjalmar Stefansson ate nothing but meat, and found himself to be healthy as shit thereafter. He rolled back into NYC with tales of his diet, which everyone called insane, and then decided to be studied for a year to see if it would ruin his health. It didn’t. In 1929, doctors concluded that his all meat, high-fat diet was the shit, and so was Stefansson. R. Buckminster Fuller picked up on this deal (he’s the guy who invented the geodesic dome), and expanded it to include some fruits and veggies, but little else.(3) Later, a dentist from Ohio named Weston Price noticed that his patients’ teeth were becoming an ever-worsening shitstorm of cavities and dental caries. He started traveling all over the world and studying the teeth and diets of indigenous cultures, discovering that none of the problems he was seeing in Ohio were extant in cultures that ate no refined grains or otherwise processed foods. Surprise! He wrote a book entitled “Nutrition and Physical Degeneration” detailing his finds, though his ideas and the foundation that promotes them is essentially considered a pack of quacks by the ADA, as his dietary recommendations would all but put the ADA out of business. About as useful as a pack of syphilitic whores, the ADA. In any event, the diet then sat dormant for years, until mainstream medical journals picked it up in the 1980s and ran articles about “ancestral diets”, which then spurred the development of “evolutionary medicine.”

So, in a nutshell, proponents of evolutionary medicine contend that mankind developed primary adaptations to their meat-filled diets during the paleolithic period, as hunter-gatherers who ran around in loinskins, killing shit and eating it. Secondary adaptations occurred later, and were localized based on the available foodstuffs. Since the Neolithic Revolution, people in the Subarctic and Central Asia evolved to eat very high fat and protein diets, containing little or no vegetable matter. Others, like the Indians of Central America and various peoples in Central Asia, adapted to higher carbohydrate, lower protein and fat diets. Outside of those groups, wide variations in adaptations exist, but they even exist within ethnicities (the ancestral Russian diet versus that of the Mediterannean).(2, pg. 281) Irrespective of where they were, paleolithic people ate, on average, half the fat we currently eat, but 3x the protein. The fats they did eat were by and large polyunsaturated, but their cholesterol was much higher than ours (which lent itself to higher test levels, I’m sure). Additionally, they ate very little in the way of refined carbs, a quarter of the sodium in the modern diet (and much more potassium), two times as much calcium, tons of micronutrients, and 130-150 g of fiber a day. That’s a fuckload of fiber, in case you’re wondering. (4, pp. 82, 86) As a result, cases of metabolic disease amongst Paleolithic people were rare, and findings of them are often steeped in controversy. (1, p. 6)

What was their diet? Meat and veggies, mostly. Their macronutrient profile essentially breaks down to 42% protein, 26% fat, and 32% carbs, eating roughly 3000kcals a day. (4, p. 79) Modern hunter-gatherers have varied diets due to geographic limitations and the general availability of various types of food, but it generally comes down to 30-40% protein no matter where they live, save for a couple of vegan tribes in Africa, who manage to eke out an existance in a place that barely even has dirt, much less any food worth cramming down your suckhole. (1, p.373) The result, however, is that they’re strong little fuckers, are ripped to pieces, and can outperform Western athletes in their indigenous athletic events.

Let’s Break This Motherfucker Down!

Ten Commandments of Paleo Dieting, as described by Ray Audette:

Do Eat

• meats and fish
• fruits
• veggies
• nuts and seeds
• berries

Don’t Eat

• grains
• beans
• potatoes
• dairy
• sugar

Farly simple, and I can tell you from experience that the shit works. I’ve combined that with metabolic typing and carb cycling to spur greater gains in the gym, but the basis of my diet will always remain Paleolithic. Now, there are a couple of caveats. One, this diet is a pain in the ass, as you can’t eat sandwiches. I find myself eating a shitload of italian chicken and turkey sausage, sliced relatively thin, and just carried around in tupperware. It transports easily and tastes good, but it gets old after awhile, just as turkey meatballs lose their luster after a month of eating nothing but. Audette also cautions against cheating, as he states that certain foods have a “druglike effect” that may cause withdrawal symptoms. I personally think this is horseshit, and I love me my 3 hour cheat windows on Tuesday and Friday nights. Lastly, both Audette and Cordain counsel against eating tubers, which is odd, as Cordain stated in the Evolution of the Human Diet that cooking arose at the same time that tubers came to prominance in the human diet. HG’s eat a shitload of them, as did our ancestors. near as I can tell, the tubers of yore were much more fibrous than those of today, so they’re pretty much apples and oranges, but I see nothing wrong with a post-workout yam, or one in the morning on a high-carb day.

There’s a shitload more to this deal, so this will be merely the first installment of me schooling you fuckers on PDing, but I’m tired and this fucking thing is already too long. Thus, I bid you goodnight, my fuckers.

If you can’t beat em, eat em.

—————-
Now playing: Carnifex – The Diseased And The Poisoned
via FoxyTunes

1. Eaton, SB and Eaton SB III 2003. An Evolutionary Perspective on Human Physical Activity: Implications for Health. Comp Biochem Physiol A 136, 153-159.
2. Wharton, CH. Ten Thousand Years From Eden: Metabolic Man. Orlando: Winmark Publishing, 2001.
3. Audett, Ray. Neanderthin. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999.
4. Eaton, S. Boyd, Shostak, Marjorie, and Melvin Konner. The Paleolithic Prescription: A Program of Diet and Exercise and a Design for Living. New York: Harper and Row, 1988.
5. Ungar, Peter S. Evolution of the Human Diet. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
6. Cordain, Loren. Paleo Diet. Hoboken: John Wiley and Sons, 2002.

Liked it? Take a second to support Jamie Chaos on Patreon!