More facts disrupting the Fantasy that is the "Paleo Diet"

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More facts disrupting the Fantasy that is the "Paleo Diet"

Postby Ltldogg » Mon Jul 16, 2018 1:38 pm

https://gizmodo.com/discovery-of-14-000 ... 1827631358

Some highlights of the article:

Archaeologists have uncovered the earliest evidence of bread-making at a site in northeastern Jordan. Dating back some 14,400 years, the discovery shows that ancient hunter-gatherers were making and eating bread 4,000 years before the Neolithic era and the introduction of agriculture. So much for the “Paleo Diet” actually being a thing.


“First, that bread predates the advent of agriculture and farming—it was always thought that it was the other way round,” Richter told Gizmodo. “Second, that the bread was of high quality, since it was made using quite fine flour. We didn’t expect to find such high-quality flour this early on in human history. Third, the hunter-gatherer bread we have does not only contain flour from wild barley, wheat and oats, but also from tubers, namely tubers from water plants (sedges). The bread was therefore more of a multi-grain-tuber bread, rather than a white loaf.”


“I think it’s quite important to recognize that bread is such a hugely important staple in the world today,” said Richter. “That it can now be shown to have started a lot earlier than previously thought is quite intriguing, I think, and may help to explain the huge variety of different types of breads that have evolved in different cultures around the world over the millennia.


“If we listen to many of the familiar narratives about how humans ate before the advent of agriculture, we hear a great deal about animals, and a bit about seafood,” Jones told Gizmodo. “We have got nowhere near as far with understanding how they worked with plants, and it is beginning to come clear that plant-based cuisine is very old indeed, and very significant.”


As a final note, this study reminds us, yet again, that the so-called Paleo Diet isn’t an actual thing, or at the very least, not a coherent, unified diet that existed across multiple populations of paleolithic peoples. What’s more, this study doesn’t tell us which particular ancestral diet was the “healthiest,” and it’s doubtful that archaeology can tells us anything meaningful in this regard. When it comes to a balanced, healthy diet, you should listen to the experts: Eat lots of vegetables and fruit, choose whole grains, get your protein, and avoid highly processed foods, especially those with added sugar.


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