Is the Paleo Diet Eurocentric?

A random thought for the day, if someone were to play me in a movie, I would vote for Michael Cera. Now, my post.

So, as some you may know I went to Wellesley College. And, I LOVED Wellesley College. It was an intellectual boot camp. Now, I may not be the poster girl for Wellesley given that I am an overweight blogger who is on unemployment, but I am blessed to keep in regular touch with wicked smart, accomplished women.

My friend Adrienne (who was a French major and I forgive her for that) who is a professor down south and very much a self identified Black woman (capital B), has taken to reading my nonsense regularly. Imagine my surprise when this intellectual, stable, professional woman actually takes me seriously and writes to me about doing CrossFit and that my posts are helpful…

Anyway, I want to share a note I received from Adrienne after a phone call we had this week. While both of us of not anthropologists, we got to talking about the Paleo diet. And, well this is what happens after two Wellesley girls start talking diets, we get all intellectual and shit. Adrienne writes:

Before I go to bed, I want to say thank you for introducing me to CrossFit. I’m going to to give it a try, but more importantly just hearing your enthusiasm gives me hope.

I wanted to say something more about the Paleo Diet and how I feel about evolution and migration. The paleolithic period is prehistoric and as much as anthropology has told, there is still so much we don’t know. What we do know is that this is the period of time when Hominids (I think we were called that by then) started moving around the world.

Many tens of thousands of years have passed since then. And if our ancestors adapted so differently, in ways that are visible to us now, it only makes sense that we may have adapted in ways that are invisible to us.

For instance, Asians, Native Americans, and blacks are lactose intolerant, and blacks (the group I know best) tend to grow strong bones without consuming a lot of calcium through milk. White women are prone to osteoporosis and tend not to be lactose intolerant. Also, Sickle Cell is an adaptation that protects blacks from malaria, but can still kill us. Whites don’t have Sickle Cell. In our attempt to become colorblind (which I think is completely ridiculous), we forget that there are real differences that need to be acknowledged and respected.

In all of these years struggling with my weight , I have come to the conclusion that any diet promoted widely in the U.S. is missing something for me. I can’t put my finger on it.

I’ve been doing my own bit of research into where I came from prior to the most recent “migration”. I think there may be some answers there for me. In the meantime, I have had to acknowledge that my people–in the most immediate past–were incredibly active people who worked very hard with their bodies on very few calories. I have to find something that makes me work hard because the basic calories in/calories out equation isn’t going to work for me; nor, to put a fine point on it, is a diet based on only part of our evolutionary past that ignores the migration and the variation in our evolutionary pathways sufficient information that informs a wide based dietary program.

I don’t mean to get preachy, but the minute I read about the Paleo Diet much of this occurred to me. Anthropology is complex, and I’m sure I’ve missed something crucial, but I think there is support for my perspective.

Thoughts?

7 Comments For This Post

Caroline Kong Says:
January 10th, 2010 at 3:13 pm

What is/was the basic components of the African diet(s)? A huge field of research there! Such a vast continent and so many tribes (not unlike Native Americans), some migratory and some agricultural, etc. I believe at least one drinks the blood of their herding animals as well as the milk? Very interesting point your friend introduces to the forum. Best of luck to her in her CrossFit journey also!

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americapeals Reply:
January 10th, 2010 at 3:19 pm

Caroline
Thank you for your insight. Yes, I think Adrienne raised a gaping chasm that had never crossed my mind. In talking, Adrienne related that tracing her ancestry, her people would much more calorie restricted and eating fruits and plants. I think further research on this would be a phenom project.

And, I would love to talk to you when time is available.

best
Amanda

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Kevin Daigle Says:
January 11th, 2010 at 10:39 am

It all comes back to the same issues…wherever you migrated to at that point in time, there was no animal husbandry or dairy farming. Dairy is out. Grains were also not cultivated or processed, so those are out. What are you left with? Lean meats, fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds. Thats why the Paleo diet is so deceptively simple….because there really isn’t much that COULD be eaten. All of those items in their various iterations were available in some form everyplace humans settled, and is arguably the reason they settled there. Obviously your friends ancestors living on the African Savanna, are not going to be eating the same fruits, nuts, seeds, meats etc as my ancestors living in the Mediterranean….but the macro-nutrient makeup was definitely similar.

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Lisa N. Says:
January 11th, 2010 at 5:27 pm

This is something that I find very interesting. There are two easy ways to get calcium and vitamin D. Native Africans are lactose intolerant because their bodies absorbed calcium and vitamin D from the sun. When people started migrating away from Africa and towards Europe (where the sun is less of a factor), people who couldn’t digest milk developed rickets and died. So, I guess in theory, the avoidance of dairy in the Paleo diet would be the opposite of Eurocentric. Afrocentric, maybe?

The way that I understand Paelo, however, is that it is the diet that we ate before the continents started dividing and people started migrating. If you think about the history of humanity as if it were a calendar year, humans have been eating processed foods and dairy for probably the last minute. So, at least avoiding the processed stuff and dairy, is a great place to start.

On another anthropological note, humans started getting into trouble when our big brains started evolving. Our brains needed sugar and fat to grow. Our bodies were programmed to crave these substances because there were so hard to find. But then one day humans harnessed the power of fire, and all of a sudden our ancestors were able to access large quantities of fat and sugar by cooking down things like grains and potatoes. So our brains grew and grew, and we got smarter and smarter. The smarter we got, the easier it became to have the things that we craved (fat and sugar) on hand. Now we have MORE than enough fat and sugar available to us, but our bodies haven’t evolved past the point of craving. This is tricky, and I am not sure there is an answer.

What I think that the paleo diet does is that it asks humans to eat like they ate before fire, before vending machines, and before grocery stores. It asks us to eat as though we still had to fight for our fat and sugar. In fighting for it, I think that we get the amount that our bodies are able to process. The paleo diet also assumes that you have an abundance of food at your disposal. It assumes that you can get calcium from Kale and that you don’t need to rely on a product like milk that humans began digesting late in the game. So, in some ways the paelo diet is historical, but in other ways it is very modern.

Thanks for giving an anthro minor a chance to vent! And yes, good luck in your Cross Fit journey. I am just about three month in, and I can honestly say that it is a new way of life for me.

And thanks for blogging. It is interesting!

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Adriane Says:
January 11th, 2010 at 6:04 pm

Does pre-fire mean no meat? That would eliminate the lean meats in the Paleo Diet. Or everyone would have to come to terms with the risks of parasitic and bacterial infections, which likely just killed paleolithic people.

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Lisa N. Says:
January 11th, 2010 at 6:28 pm

Nope. Pre-fire just means that our ancestors ate their meat raw. I for one am a fan of medium well