Real cavemen eat bone broth

[rachelmanija]

For reasons that really don't bear rehashing, I spent the last two years getting told to go on diets. Every kind of diet. No "nightshades." No acid. No gluten. No dairy. Low-FODMAP (bans dairy, gluten, soy, legumes, and half of all fruits and vegetables.) Low-fat. "Eat nothing but bone broth that you made yourself, and if you don't simmer it for six hours, it's no good." "Microwaving food destroys its nutrients." At one point I had successive doctors tell me to go on a low-fiber diet and a high-fiber diet.

Every single diet-pusher, whether doctor or rando, said or implied (usually explicitly said), "If you don't do this, you'll never get better. Don't you want to get better?"

This was especially infuriating given that I was so underweight that I had symptoms of malnutrition. And also that in two years of dieting, there had never once been any indication whatsoever that my illness was caused by diet or that changing my diet was helpful. I eventually came to the conclusion that Americans are fucking insane about food and that a primary manifestation of sexism is controlling women by controlling what they eat.

Anyway, I am not dieting now. But now that I am slightly less likely to hit NEON RAGE APOCALYPSE at the word "diet," I clicked on a link and fell into an internet rabbit hole of diet advice. Like the evolved forager that I am, I bring you my findings for amusement, analysis, and mockery:

- A comparison of wild fruits and vegetables with cultivated ones, concluding that eating fruits and vegetables is unhealthy because they are unnatural and not what the cavemen ate.

By that reasoning there is literally nothing we can eat unless we get air-dropped into some untouched stretch of rainforest to forage for wild bananas.

- Eating fruit makes you fat.

- Humans did not evolve to eat fruit.

We're PRIMATES. Monkeys love bananas.

- Corn causes Oppositional Defiant Disorder.

- Corn causes ADHD.

- Corn causes autism.

- Corn causes cancer.

- Broccoli causes cancer.

- Hot water causes cancer.

The last one, from a study saying that drinking hot beverages can cause cancer, had the best response: David Spiegelhalter, a professor of the Public Understanding of Risk at Britain's University of Cambridge, said: "In the case of very hot drinks, the IARC concludes they are probably hazardous, but can't say how big the risk might be," according to the Australian Financial Review. "This may be interesting science, but makes it difficult to construct a sensible response."

- A Breatharian – as defined in the book A Year Without Food – is a person who chooses to live mostly, or completely, from Pranic nourishment. Israeli author Ray Maor claims that once Breatharians have trained their body to absorb this energy from the air and sunlight, they are no longer dependent on food. Many of them continue to taste food for enjoyment, but do not need it for survival, he says.

Umm.

- Brian J. Ford has suggested that ketosis, possibly caused by alcoholism or low-carb dieting, produces acetone, which is highly flammable and could therefore lead to apparently spontaneous combustion.

The Atkins diet will make you burst into flame!

- Our ancestors NEVER ate a carb. They ate meat and fat and that was it. On that diet, they grew, improved their lot, invented the wheel, survived in caves and hinted in groups.

Bad history aside (even in the Arctic, people ate seaweed and lichen), anyone who's ever lived in a small town or attended school knows that a major human activity is indeed hinting in groups.

Comments

[monanotlisa]

"I eventually came to the conclusion that Americans are fucking insane about food and that a primary manifestation of sexism is controlling women by controlling what they eat."

Hah! Yes, this.

Every nation has its own neuroses, of course; the Germans are no less neurotic than US-Americans. But...not quite that food-related, thankfully (I'm a lot more US-American than my countryfolks in that regard, though I try to relax).

Speaking not of women but of controlling other people's bodies, one of the things that drove me batty as a teen was folks telling me about my acne, "Just cut out chocolate, sugar, and fats!" And I did manage to not speak my mind and say, "FUCK YOU THERE IS NO SCIENCE SUPPORTING ANY OF THIS CONTROLLING BULLSHIT." But it was a close call.

[rachelmanija]

I would like ANY national neurosis more. This has turned into my all-time biggest berserk button.

I got told that too when I was a teenager! And I sometimes tried telling people that there's no evidence for that. They never, ever believed me.

[recessional]

HINTING IN GROUPS AHAHAHAHA.

I also want to point out to that last one that the computer they are using to spin this bullshit is something that would not have happened without major cultivated carbohydrates (these being the major basis of every VAST civilization ever, and vast civilizations being the basis of the surplus population that allows for mass-scale technological innovation . . . etc). But it's not worth it.

[rachelmanija]

I also like that apparently cavemen had wheels.

[luzula]

Israeli author Ray Maor claims that once Breatharians have trained their body to absorb this energy from the air and sunlight, they are no longer dependent on food. Many of them continue to taste food for enjoyment, but do not need it for survival, he says.

Ahaha, thank you for this post. It is hilarious.

Also with the "microwaving destroys nutrients", yes it does (to an extent)! So does any other kind of heating.

[rachelmanija]

What are you talking about. Cooking on a stovetop or oven is good. Microwaving is bad.

Cavemen had stoves but not microwaves.

[taelle]

Oh good, so the reason I never mastered hinting in groups is obviously that I am not an ancestor but a more evolved version... (and not because I never got the memo everyone else got, as I previously supposed)

[twistedchick]

The only time that I'm aware of when hot drinks are bad is when they're so close to boiling that they scorch and scar the esophagus, which can make it over-sensitive (and it's painful, too.) But that's all.

[rydra_wong]

Yes, I have a vague recollection that the documented association is specifically between scalding drinks and esophageal cancer.

[the_rck]

Thank you. I needed a good laugh today.

[isis]

Is hinting in groups like fainting in coils?

As a runner (and as a woman) I am also pummeled with diet advice, but I appreciate Matt Fitzgerald (a running coach whose books include Diet Cults, which you might enjoy if stuff like the above entertains you) who advocates what he calls "agnostic healthy eating", which doesn't exclude or demonize any type of food, but which emphasizes foods of higher nutritional quality.

[cofax7]

The Atkins diet will make you burst into flame!

HAH.

[sholio]

I had a breatharian roommate once! Well, that's not precisely accurate, but I spent a year in a group living situation in which one of the members of the group was a guy who checked off most of the items you can imagine for "weirdo hippie roommate". In addition to having a bunch of books on breatharianism (they talked a lot about how you can get different nutrients from exposing your body to different colored light), he would also lecture us on the evils of eating cooked food, walked around half naked most of the time (to absorb sunlight?), and claimed to be half Native American despite being blond and green-eyed. (I guess I can't categorically say that the last one was bullshit, but given everything else about the guy ...) He also somehow managed to sleep with my sister during the couple of days she stayed with us.

So any mention of breatharians automatically makes me think of that guy. He was actually a nice guy in spite of all the weirdness, but wow.

[davidgillon]

I quite liked the advice I got after the acute pancreatitis episode, while being told what to do to avoid further attacks until they could whip my gall-bladder out: "Try and limit fat intake, fruit's good. But we've had people go onto a completely fructivorous diet and still have attacks".

A little realism never hurt anyone.

[callmeishmael]

One of my anthropology professors said "modern dieting is secular food taboos" and things made a hell of a lot more sense once I looked at it that way. (Though I still get angry at all the "paleo" diet bad science bullshit.)

[ironed_orchid]

That's a good way of approaching it. You identify your people by what they eat.

[mrissa]

It's a lot like track and field, right? Most people who run relays also run solo. Most people who hint in groups practice on their own as well. Just to keep their game up.

[thistleingrey]

"Hinting in groups" is the best.

[nenya_kanadka]

I know, right? It needs to become a meme. :D

[lilacsigil]

Australia is exactly the same. It's fucking depressing. It wasn't much fun being a fat kid in the 80s and early 90s but I bet it's a lot worse now.

[shati]

I eventually came to the conclusion that Americans are fucking insane about food and that a primary manifestation of sexism is controlling women by controlling what they eat.

The only good food theory!

Youtube recommends me raw vegan videos constantly (um, because I keep clicking on the recs). The Raw Till 4 diet where you don't eat cooked food, just raw fruit, until after 4 pm is my favorite (why?? why 4 pm??) but the concept of monomeals, "cooked food addiction," and the potato cleanse are fascinating at 2 am. I think they are at least cooked potatoes.

And then I realize I'm watching a lot of adults tell an audience that appears to be almost all teenage girls/young women to eat nothing but raw fruit so they can be "healthy" (measured by thinness) and then it's gross. The really pervasive sense of "You're not eating how I think you should, so you caused every health problem you have by consuming [in these cases, animal products]" is even worse -- I've seen more than one video telling a Youtuber that his cancer was his fault.

And at this point in my life I've seen explanations for why I shouldn't eat literally every food. Including, like, spinach and broccoli (cancer is new, though, I think what I saw was thyroid problems).

[rachelmanija]

The blame aspect especially gets to me. It's basically a horrific marriage of junk science, just world theory, sexism, and outright cruelty which enables people to always blame anyone who's sick. Especially if they're female.

I looked up monomeals (what us ancients used to call "snacks") and found SO MUCH stupidity:

Eating a Monomeal is Refusing to Alimentarily Multitask. We know that multitasking overtaxes the brain and sets us up for mistakes. [...] If we eat a cheese & veggie omelet , bacon, toast with jelly and butter with a side of cut mixed fruit and also juice and coffee…wow, what a multi-enzymatic task cut out for our bodies!

Wow, indeed.

Think About How Our Primitive Ancestors Ate

Living in the wild, foraging for food, when a tree of ripe fruit was discovered, primitive humans ate the ripe fruit until they were satiated. They didn’t look to combine the fruit with another food for a more interesting presentation.

How do you know? Were you there?

Primitive man, in his pristine life in the forest, probably ate one food at a time, depending upon the availability of the food.

1. Since when are all natural food sources completely isolated from each other, so it's impossible to eat berries and also some insects and maybe fallen nuts and mushrooms?

2. So, we're talking so early in the timeline that there was no such thing as foraging for food which was then brought somewhere else. That is so early that you might as well say, "We must all eat like our cousins, the gorillas."

3. Why no advocacy of eating bugs? I will go out on a limb and say that before we had containers, we definitely ate some bugs.

Starchy foods require an alkaline digestive medium. Protein-rich foods require an acid medium. When acids and bases (alkalines) meet in any situation, they neutralize each other. This also happens in the stomach. With no acids breaking down our food, they quickly start to ferment and rot in the humid, dark interiors of our bodies.

...no. No, that is not how it works.

Humans are the only creatures on the earth that mix hard-to-digest conglomerations of unhealthy food into meals containing dozens of ingredients, and even our species has only been at this peculiar habit for a few thousand years.

1. CITE PLEASE.

2. You've never actually watched wild omnivores, have you?

3. Or read a history book.

4. Our species has only been at these peculiar habits of reading, writing, living indoors, and wearing clothing for a few thousand years. We must cease this abnormal behavior!

Your options for raw food combining fall into 11 categories based not on culinary classifications, but on the actual composition of the food. If you're eating well, though, there are only really eight categories you'll be eating from with any regularity.

It might seem complex, but once you get the hang of it you won't even need to think about it anymore. For me, it's pretty much instinct.

[Completely batshit food table explaining that you can eat bananas at the same meal as blueberries but not with apples follows.]

...this is actually the five-year-old who won't eat blue foods with red foods because he doesn't like the color purple all grown up, right?

[ekaterinn]

It's crazy here. A friend of mine's 11-year-old son has high blood pressure. He's also overweight. So far the doctors have just told her to put him on a diet. He's ELEVEN.

And my best friend's six-year-old daughter is also overweight for her size and already has body image issues. :( Thankfully, all my friend is doing about that is encouraging her to participate in exercise with the rest of the family (she's not as fast as her siblings but she has hella stamina) and complimenting her on her body and clothes.

[telly]

Hot water causes cancer.

But ice water is ALSO bad, it solidifies the fats in your stomach (and probably also gives you cancer)! Or so I was told by several coworkers who are into "alternative medicine."

[rachelmanija]

My mother always said not to eat cucumbers and then drink water. When pressed, she didn't know the justification, she just knew it was bad.

Everything you ingest will kill you! Possibly via spontaneous human combustion.

[princessofgeeks]

I DON'T EVEN.

Thank you for your sanity. I love reading your journal.

[ironed_orchid]

Not just America!

The what-cavemen-did diets are just annoyingly bad evolution combined with with annoyingly bad history/archaeology and dangerously bad nutrition advice.

Anecdata: For a couple of hundred of years anthropologists etc. thought Indigenous Australians did not grow grains. But it turns out that they did. Despite having a nomadic culture with few permanent settlements. Rethinking Indigenous Australia's agricultural past.

[recessional]

Gosh it's like grains are super-dense in caloric and nutritional content for their size and this is SUPER IMPORTANT or something . . .

[cyphomandra]

Hinting in groups makes me think of primitive charades ("It's mammoth! No? Arrgh. First syllable?")

Some of the diet criticism also shades into that judgmental medical thinking you get when anyone poor is discussing their daily budget, where everyone focuses on details and moral failings ("well, you shouldn't have a pet. And no internet access, we never had it when we were kids") and not at all on any structural societal factors that they might possibly be involved in perpetuating. But yes, lots of misogyny too. I saw a reference recently to raw food enthusiasts claiming that stopping menstruating was a good sign, because your body was no longer having to remove toxins. Horrifying.

[orcofnewyork]

Hinting in groups sounds like an afternoon with my mother's aunts and cousins, oh the passive aggressive hints and jabs!

How sad is it that I've heard almost all of these crackpot diets? Too many crazy diets out there. Breatharian is new to me though, who knew humans could totally photosynthesize!

[brownbetty]

These people romanticising our 'primitive ancestors' have never been even slightly close to nature, I can only conclude.

[graydon]

The whole primitive-condition-of-effortless-health trope makes me want to smack people with the we-can-deduce-diet-by-tooth-damage literature. ("Stone-ground"; this means your food has rocks in it.)

[conuly]

Why do people in caves need wheels? Primitive wheels are only useful if you have beasts of burden. If you have beasts of burden - horses or oxen - then you either are a farmer or a herder. Either way, you don't live in a freaking cave.

Also: We gathered in groups. Hoo-boy, did we ever.

[redbird]

Or if you've invented the wheelbarrow. Which is an agricultural technology, absolutely, but doesn't require domesticated animals.

[swingandswirl]

The only food advice I've ever found sensible is Michael Pollan's: Eat real food, not a lot, mostly plants. Between that and the Ratio guy whose name I'm blanking on (Ruhlman? I think?) I'm doing pretty okay, I think.

/shudders/ I commend your bravery, going into the uncharted wilds of the online diet community. I had enough of the offline version of that bunch when I lived in California. They never did understand why the type 2 diabetic going raw vegan and/or doing a juice cleanse was maaaybe not the best idea...

[kiezh]

No one in the Diet Wars ever seems to consider the psychological and physical cost of making the act of eating into a war zone. (Hey, you know what we DO have scientific evidence is Bad For People? Living under constant stress! Gee, I wonder if making every single interaction with food terribly fraught and dangerous is... really stressful to the bodies involved...) None of them seem to value positive sensory experiences, either.

Speaking as a depressed, chronically ill person with digestion issues: they can all go screw themselves. Food is for a) sustaining the body, which works differently with every body, and b) pleasure and social bonding, when possible. Not for finding yet another way to be miserable and Wrong.

[rachelmanija]

I managed to go FORTY-TWO YEARS without ever succumbing to diet hysteria, obsessing over food, fearing food, fearing the effect of food on my body, or any of the nearly-universal food neuroses that are hammered into women...

...until I got a two-year avalanche of in-person demands to diet and accusations that I was deliberately making myself sick by eating as I pleased and being told that there's no such thing as too thin and guilt-tripped if I said that dieting stressed me out and so forth. It made an already-miserable experience way worse, and I'm sure contributed to me losing so much weight that if the cause had been anorexia, I'd have been hospitalized. It was incredibly fucked-up, unhealthy, and literally life-threatening.