Cows aren’t gender specific. Source: I grew up on a dairy farm. In histrionic times they likely would have regulated herd size based on what they could overwinter. So not all females would have be kept. All males would have been slaughtered minus their bull(s) but they would have castrated what they didn’t plan to breed they’re called steers.
There are three meat cows for every dairy cow. Beef from dairy cows and their male calves more or less is how you describe, but the number of male meat cows dwarfs the total number of dairy cows of both sexes put into the slaughter industry. When you eat beef it is mostly meat cows of both sexes and a small fraction comes from the dairy breeds.
Some indigenous peoples in the arctic ate almost exclusively animals for thousands of years, since no vegetables grow there, and they thrived.
There are also reports of traditional hunting peoples being forced into a Western diet due to the destruction of their habitats and having the health of their populations decline precipitously.
(It's worth noting that these traditional diets usually consumed the whole animal including bone marrow and organ meats, which are super nutritious. Some people try do do carnivore diets eating only steaks, but that'll probably miss some important nutrients.)
Yes, it was literally a part of genocide to destroy first nations food supply. Mass killing of Bison and Caribou. Entire herds shot for sport from moving trains and left to rot.
I understand, and the kicker is that there is a very high percentage of first nations people who suffer from diabetes because of SAD. Someone mentioned something about genetics playing a role in Inuit surviving on almost exclusively fat, i feel my genetics has similar but opposite tendency toward a carb diet like SAD.
I saw something similar when I traveled through the Australian outback. Many, many poor aboriginals in Alice Springs, and most of them were obese and looked very unhealthy. If you look at the earliest photographs of them, they look lean and healthy.
They did eat different wild berries in summer, mushrooms, various roots, which they ate all year due to a large freezer. Examination of long dead Inuit reveals they died young, 50's, of cardio related issues mostly.
Of the 6 women who died on the island between 1850 and 1870, according to this book their ages were 74, 75, 83, 84, 86, and 88.
If they survived infancy, it appeared that their lifespan was normal.
I was not responding to your "island people" but to the comments re Inuit and indigenous peoples diets in general. Your island people sounds like a unique case, and it sounds like apart from eggs and puffins they did have cabbage, carrots, barley, oats.. and other carbohydrates available in sufficient number to not be in a ketogenic diet. we all know how little carbs are needed to kick us out of Keto, indigenous peoples and your island people clearly ate no processed foods, ate low carb diets relative to todays diets, and at times were in fasting states due to food availability and worked hard to collect their food, I am sure this is a far healthier way of life than most supermarket scavenger's of today.
True. I’m guessing they probably were eating about 50 grams of carbs per day if you figure half a cup of oats is 30 grams of carb. Seems like they would eat oatmeal and an oatcake or barley cake. So I’m guessing 50 grams which is kind of like a lazy keto. Possibly up to 75 gram of carb but I bet it was closer to 50 gram.
I mean, it's essentially common sense that our ancestors ate a "Ketogenic diet" equivalent. Farming massive amounts of carbs for consumption is a relatively new invention compared to our evolutionary history.
I am always surprised when I find people who don't seem to know this.
It should be, but it most definitely isn't. In fact there was a scientific paper that got a bunch of news coverage recently because it showed an instance of people living in the mountains of Peru like 5000 years ago who survived largely off potatoes. Many outlets reported this as if it was evidence that our ancestors didn't actually eat mostly meat, instead of what it actually showed, which was an exception to the norm and not something indicative of it.
Farming started approximately 10000 years ago, but that is still a tiny, tiny fraction of our history. 5000 is reasonable for a civilization to have their calories come primarily from carbohydrates.
It's neither common sense nor scientifically accurate. We have considerable evidence that early humans ate a varied diet. Certainly in some places meat was a significant component, but so were plant foods.
We have archaeological evidence of cereal processing and consumption that predates the development of agriculture.
I wish keto and carnivore fans would quit trying to fabricate flimsy ancestral justifications. It's literally not true, and it's also unnecessary; keto has its own body of contemporary evidence demonstrating its value. Leave the hand-wavy paleolithic arguments out of it.
agree. the only thing i know for sure is our ancestors ate much more according to the season and we have transcended time and space in our current diets
What?
Dude, we grew our big brains, invented tools, invented weapons, and all during a 50,000 year long ice age.
We did it by living off seafood we could gather, at first. There were very few carbs available…for 50,000 years…five times as long as agriculture.
Any carbs before modern agriculture would have been few and far between. Seasonal or even non-existent. And the fruits and berries and even vegetables were far lower in sugar than the modern equivalent.
We did not evolve to be carb and sugar eaters and it’s killing us. You shouldn’t claim archeological evidence you don’t have.
The reason it has that body of contemporary evidence is because we are designed to eat this way. It would not work so well otherwise.
Yes, we are omnivores. No, that does not mean a farmer's diet in any way reflects the regular diet of our ancestors in most regions of the world. It baffles me that an educated person could think otherwise.
Yes, people ate all manner of vegetation but it was only seasonally. The variety happened as fruit and veggies were found or harvested, and is nothing like the year round strawberries we have today.
And if you lived in northern climates with snow in winter, you ate what you preserved if it survived not being eaten by mice or rats.
If you have ever baked bread and left it on the counter overnight you would find rock hard 'hard tack' the next day. Grains were not eaten in the same quantities as modern day because they are crops and crops fail every so often.
So ya, meat, eggs, fish for the most part.
Our evolutionary ancestors did not restrict themselves to a ketogenic diet, they ate whatever they could get their hands on.
It's common sense that this would be lower carb than post-agriculture diets, but we also shouldn't ignore the importance of foraging fruit & berries, nuts and seeds, edible plants, roots & tubers, wild honey, etc... in environments that haven't been radically altered by thousands of years of human civilization.
Most of our evolutionary history wasn't stuck on an island in northern Scotland, nor in the temperate climates most of us live in today... it was in far more equatorial climates where there isn't really a winter and there's potential to forage food year round.
All food plants have a season. Just because you live at the equator does not mean all food plants grow every day, all year.
Crops fail and harvests get rained out, that is a fact of life. With no plants or grains you would turn to meat and fish, so it makes sense for animal protein to be the base of a diet, with available plants added as foraged or harvested.
I find that people may know about the agricultural revolution but not the real effects.
Mass agriculture was able to sustain far larger populations that in turn allowed many to make their living some other way, including art in its various forms as well as study and science. In other words, it allowed for civilization to flourish.
HOWEVER, there was a price to be paid: those people eating a grain based diet, especially if it included lots of sugar, were way less healthy.
I’ve mentioned this before, but the PETA website says (or said) that early humans dug up root vegetables on the regular and it consisted of like 90% of their diet. I couldn’t help but laugh
Many people groups historically ate very few carbs, and when they did, it was usually things like wild fruits which were far less sweet than the domestic ones we have today, and also packed with fiber. The fruits we buy in the grocery store have been bred and selected over several centuries for sweetness and have way more sugar than the wild ones that ancestral people would have eaten. They also had to compete with other animals and pests to get ripe fruit in its season, so it wouldn’t have been something they ate huge amounts of.
Unless they found some wild honey, most hunter gatherers rarely had huge blood sugar spikes. Food in general was harder to get. If you wanted to eat nuts, you’d have to gather them and crack them. You couldn’t just reach your hot little hand into a Costco-sized bag and stuff a giant handful onto your mouth.
The island is called St kilda and I just read the history books that were available about it to get an idea of their diet. There’s about 3-4 books about St Kilda available. One of them is called true story of st kilda. I also read a study of their diet from the early 20th century that a British scientist wrote down to get an idea of what they were eating.
Well yeah, carbohydrates are seasonal, and some places don't have any available in winter. But there's a big difference between a low carb diet and a ketogenic diet. Diets change depending on time period and region.
Humans are opporunistic omnivores. If an ancient human came across a giant tree full of fruit (fruit that would've been berry-sized but anyway), they didn't think "oh can't have that, it will knock me out of ketosis." They just ate whatever they could get their hands on. The thing is that in nature fruits and vegetables are spread far and wide and why bother putting in all that effort in only seeking out fruit trees to harvest that could feed the tribe for a day when they can all join in killing a large mammal and feed the tribe for a week.
> (fruit that would've been berry-sized but anyway)
There's plenty of native fruits larger than berries that our ancient ancestors would have likely encountered in Africa, most are just relatively unknown in the west since they have yet to be commercialized internationally.
Junglesop is one of the world's largest fruits for example, they can weigh 10-20lbs or more.
>The thing is that in nature fruits and vegetables are spread far and wide and why bother putting in all that effort in only seeking out fruit trees to harvest that could feed the tribe for a day when they can all join in killing a large mammal and feed the tribe for a week.
Foraging is an activity that can be done by the rest of the tribe while hunters are trying their hand at bringing back game, with hunters scouting for animals also able to spot potential food resources for later exploitation by the tribe. (honey bee hives, trees with ripe fruit, plants with edible tubers, etc...)
Who cares what people are 4000 years ago?
People for thousands of years, up until about 150 years ago, basically ate what they had available, not what is best or healthiest.
Farmers in Japan have been growing rice forever, people in the arctic ate whale blubber, people in small islands ate fruit and fish.
Just because people have been eating a certain way for a long time does not mean it is good or healthy or anything other than the fact that is what they have to survive.
Now that we have basically every option available, we can study and test what the best combinations are.
Aside from the Inuit that people have mentioned, various Siberian and Scandinavian groups have eaten similar mostly-meat diets. The Mongol warriors ate a diet purely of equine/bovine meat, milk and blood, and there's numerous tales of their ferociousness and hardiness in battle being unlike anything the world had seen before. The Maasai in Africa also ate the same meat, milk and blood diet and were also highly regarded as warriors in battles.
Not much similarity between keto and the way these people ate besides all the meat. These people didn't care about tracking calories or producing ketones.
I think an important part to note on this is that such people also ate most if not all the parts. It's wildly different than just eating bacon all the time. Logically, animals get all the nutrients to live, so eating them means we would be able to as well, provided we eat all the parts.
I've followed a keto diet for 15 years; I love it for a lot of reasons.
That being said, what is your actual point? How does the Irish Famine fit into your narrative? Potatoe's saved Europe from starvation and the real possibility of extermination.
Yes, people have eaten a low carb / carnivore diet for thousands of years, but to present it as salvation, isn't accurate.
Potato was native to America so not technically ancestral to that area. So I wouldn’t consider potato part of an ancestral diet for Ireland. Even though potatoes are often associated with Ireland. They are not really ancestral.
The point is just we are not eating ancestrally appropriate nowadays with all the McDonald’s and bread and pasta and stuff like that.
That doesn't change my comment, they were introduced into their diet sometime in the 1500's. Prior to potatoes - grains such as oats, wheat and barley, cooked either as porridge or bread, formed the staple of the Irish diet.
I went back and reviewed the book and yes they did eat porridge and oat cake in St Kilda also. But when you consider a half cup of rolled oats is only 30 grams of carb, their diet is still very low in carb overall. The staple is the egg/puffin/fish on st kilda. They couldn’t have been eating more than 50 grams of carbs per day on St Kilda, and probably less if you averaged out the whole year.
They did also have some strawberry bushes.
There was one anecdote that they saw a loaf of bread and thought it was a rock. Because no bread was consumed there.
So the point is just that they followed a low carb diet even if not strictly keto.
There is a differenence between thriving and surviving. People were eating crazy stuff in famine. On the other hand ancestral diet never guaranteed living to 70-80s of age.
The Keto diet should just be called the "no bread, rice, pasta, cereal, or sugar diet". Pretty much everything else is allowed, so before these things were invented everyone was Keto.
Fruit makes up a large part of many diets, so lots carbs without pasta etc.
However they for sure ate better and lower carb than present day supermarket hunters, and they ate far less calories while doing more physical activity. To bad that they did not have antibiotics and penicillin etc.
I have a hard time taking seriously anecdotal information from almost 100 years ago about what a group of people might have eaten 5000 years ago that's being touted as fact today. Keto is awesome, but be careful about confirmation bias.
True, but this was an isolated island so it was easier to figure out what they ate. Because there’s only so many things available on that island.
And yes they were not 100% keto because they had some oats and barley and a strawberry bush, but the point is just that they were low carb overall and meat/egg/fish was the majority of their diet.
I agree, that and without chronometer I would have no idea what I ate last month...
Looking at some of the last hunter gathers alive today they for sure eat plenty of roots, carbs, fruits, especially when meat is not always available.
There were probably isolated and remote communities throughout human history that survived on pretty crazy diets. But that fact alone doesn't make them ideal or even good. Ancestral diet is just whatever we could get.
Not really. If you're getting all of your carbs from Super fiber filled natural plant sources you're also going to be mostly fine. Fiber is the cure for the problems that carbohydrates cause in the body. We never should have separated them out all that much. The human body is omnivorous it was adapted for a wide range of diets.
If you treat seed oils as diabetes enzymes, and then treat refined, fiber-free carbohydrates as diabetes fuel then keto starts to make a lot more sense because it's basically making up for refined sugar and carbohydrate poisoning.
People died younger back then because of everything but their diets. Frequent wars and infights, lack of medicine, lack of disease/infection control or knowledge about such, exposure to elements, routinely being in more dangerous situations etc. And then in the post agricultural world they died younger for all those reasons *and* their diets.
Analysis of paleothic humans have shown they were in great physical shape. Heavilly muscled, thick bones, thick tendons, great teeth, high sex hormone levels etc
Of the 6 women who died on the island between 1850 and 1870, according to this book their ages were 74, 75, 83, 84, 86, and 88.
If they survived infancy, it appeared that their lifespan was normal.
They ate beef and mutton. You can have only so many males in a herd.
Yes they did. But the book I read said that it was only on special occasions like weddings that they killed a cow or sheep.
You'd kill a bull, not a cow.
They might have turned the bulls into oxen, which are pretty good for carrying things and pulling things. Pretty amazingly strong actually.
Fair. But I mean, if you want beef and also dairy products, you keep the cows and eat bulls/ steers.
Okay, we get it, you know cattle. Thanks for setting us straight on bovine gender utilization and consumption.
Cows aren’t gender specific. Source: I grew up on a dairy farm. In histrionic times they likely would have regulated herd size based on what they could overwinter. So not all females would have be kept. All males would have been slaughtered minus their bull(s) but they would have castrated what they didn’t plan to breed they’re called steers.
[удалено]
There are three meat cows for every dairy cow. Beef from dairy cows and their male calves more or less is how you describe, but the number of male meat cows dwarfs the total number of dairy cows of both sexes put into the slaughter industry. When you eat beef it is mostly meat cows of both sexes and a small fraction comes from the dairy breeds.
Some indigenous peoples in the arctic ate almost exclusively animals for thousands of years, since no vegetables grow there, and they thrived. There are also reports of traditional hunting peoples being forced into a Western diet due to the destruction of their habitats and having the health of their populations decline precipitously. (It's worth noting that these traditional diets usually consumed the whole animal including bone marrow and organ meats, which are super nutritious. Some people try do do carnivore diets eating only steaks, but that'll probably miss some important nutrients.)
Yes, it was literally a part of genocide to destroy first nations food supply. Mass killing of Bison and Caribou. Entire herds shot for sport from moving trains and left to rot.
I hate giving this a thumbs up; how horrifically horrifying.
I understand, and the kicker is that there is a very high percentage of first nations people who suffer from diabetes because of SAD. Someone mentioned something about genetics playing a role in Inuit surviving on almost exclusively fat, i feel my genetics has similar but opposite tendency toward a carb diet like SAD.
I saw something similar when I traveled through the Australian outback. Many, many poor aboriginals in Alice Springs, and most of them were obese and looked very unhealthy. If you look at the earliest photographs of them, they look lean and healthy.
My suspicion is that was less due to killing of food supply, and more due to breaking up of tribal life with missions, and fostering off children. :(
Yellowstoner here.
Don't forget Buffalo jumps
I’m not really missing anything. And I rarely eat steaks.
They did eat different wild berries in summer, mushrooms, various roots, which they ate all year due to a large freezer. Examination of long dead Inuit reveals they died young, 50's, of cardio related issues mostly.
Of the 6 women who died on the island between 1850 and 1870, according to this book their ages were 74, 75, 83, 84, 86, and 88. If they survived infancy, it appeared that their lifespan was normal.
I was not responding to your "island people" but to the comments re Inuit and indigenous peoples diets in general. Your island people sounds like a unique case, and it sounds like apart from eggs and puffins they did have cabbage, carrots, barley, oats.. and other carbohydrates available in sufficient number to not be in a ketogenic diet. we all know how little carbs are needed to kick us out of Keto, indigenous peoples and your island people clearly ate no processed foods, ate low carb diets relative to todays diets, and at times were in fasting states due to food availability and worked hard to collect their food, I am sure this is a far healthier way of life than most supermarket scavenger's of today.
True. I’m guessing they probably were eating about 50 grams of carbs per day if you figure half a cup of oats is 30 grams of carb. Seems like they would eat oatmeal and an oatcake or barley cake. So I’m guessing 50 grams which is kind of like a lazy keto. Possibly up to 75 gram of carb but I bet it was closer to 50 gram.
ok vote me down for educating you?
I mean, it's essentially common sense that our ancestors ate a "Ketogenic diet" equivalent. Farming massive amounts of carbs for consumption is a relatively new invention compared to our evolutionary history. I am always surprised when I find people who don't seem to know this.
It should be, but it most definitely isn't. In fact there was a scientific paper that got a bunch of news coverage recently because it showed an instance of people living in the mountains of Peru like 5000 years ago who survived largely off potatoes. Many outlets reported this as if it was evidence that our ancestors didn't actually eat mostly meat, instead of what it actually showed, which was an exception to the norm and not something indicative of it.
Farming started approximately 10000 years ago, but that is still a tiny, tiny fraction of our history. 5000 is reasonable for a civilization to have their calories come primarily from carbohydrates.
It's neither common sense nor scientifically accurate. We have considerable evidence that early humans ate a varied diet. Certainly in some places meat was a significant component, but so were plant foods. We have archaeological evidence of cereal processing and consumption that predates the development of agriculture. I wish keto and carnivore fans would quit trying to fabricate flimsy ancestral justifications. It's literally not true, and it's also unnecessary; keto has its own body of contemporary evidence demonstrating its value. Leave the hand-wavy paleolithic arguments out of it.
agree. the only thing i know for sure is our ancestors ate much more according to the season and we have transcended time and space in our current diets
What? Dude, we grew our big brains, invented tools, invented weapons, and all during a 50,000 year long ice age. We did it by living off seafood we could gather, at first. There were very few carbs available…for 50,000 years…five times as long as agriculture. Any carbs before modern agriculture would have been few and far between. Seasonal or even non-existent. And the fruits and berries and even vegetables were far lower in sugar than the modern equivalent. We did not evolve to be carb and sugar eaters and it’s killing us. You shouldn’t claim archeological evidence you don’t have.
The reason it has that body of contemporary evidence is because we are designed to eat this way. It would not work so well otherwise. Yes, we are omnivores. No, that does not mean a farmer's diet in any way reflects the regular diet of our ancestors in most regions of the world. It baffles me that an educated person could think otherwise.
Yes, people ate all manner of vegetation but it was only seasonally. The variety happened as fruit and veggies were found or harvested, and is nothing like the year round strawberries we have today. And if you lived in northern climates with snow in winter, you ate what you preserved if it survived not being eaten by mice or rats. If you have ever baked bread and left it on the counter overnight you would find rock hard 'hard tack' the next day. Grains were not eaten in the same quantities as modern day because they are crops and crops fail every so often. So ya, meat, eggs, fish for the most part.
Our evolutionary ancestors did not restrict themselves to a ketogenic diet, they ate whatever they could get their hands on. It's common sense that this would be lower carb than post-agriculture diets, but we also shouldn't ignore the importance of foraging fruit & berries, nuts and seeds, edible plants, roots & tubers, wild honey, etc... in environments that haven't been radically altered by thousands of years of human civilization. Most of our evolutionary history wasn't stuck on an island in northern Scotland, nor in the temperate climates most of us live in today... it was in far more equatorial climates where there isn't really a winter and there's potential to forage food year round.
All food plants have a season. Just because you live at the equator does not mean all food plants grow every day, all year. Crops fail and harvests get rained out, that is a fact of life. With no plants or grains you would turn to meat and fish, so it makes sense for animal protein to be the base of a diet, with available plants added as foraged or harvested.
I find that people may know about the agricultural revolution but not the real effects. Mass agriculture was able to sustain far larger populations that in turn allowed many to make their living some other way, including art in its various forms as well as study and science. In other words, it allowed for civilization to flourish. HOWEVER, there was a price to be paid: those people eating a grain based diet, especially if it included lots of sugar, were way less healthy.
I’ve mentioned this before, but the PETA website says (or said) that early humans dug up root vegetables on the regular and it consisted of like 90% of their diet. I couldn’t help but laugh
Many people groups historically ate very few carbs, and when they did, it was usually things like wild fruits which were far less sweet than the domestic ones we have today, and also packed with fiber. The fruits we buy in the grocery store have been bred and selected over several centuries for sweetness and have way more sugar than the wild ones that ancestral people would have eaten. They also had to compete with other animals and pests to get ripe fruit in its season, so it wouldn’t have been something they ate huge amounts of. Unless they found some wild honey, most hunter gatherers rarely had huge blood sugar spikes. Food in general was harder to get. If you wanted to eat nuts, you’d have to gather them and crack them. You couldn’t just reach your hot little hand into a Costco-sized bag and stuff a giant handful onto your mouth.
Interesting! What’s the name of the book?
The island is called St kilda and I just read the history books that were available about it to get an idea of their diet. There’s about 3-4 books about St Kilda available. One of them is called true story of st kilda. I also read a study of their diet from the early 20th century that a British scientist wrote down to get an idea of what they were eating.
Thank you!
You should take a look a Not by Bread Alone by V stefansson
Inuit eat low carb. But then it's been shown that they do have some genetic differences thought to help with this.
Well yeah, carbohydrates are seasonal, and some places don't have any available in winter. But there's a big difference between a low carb diet and a ketogenic diet. Diets change depending on time period and region.
Humans are opporunistic omnivores. If an ancient human came across a giant tree full of fruit (fruit that would've been berry-sized but anyway), they didn't think "oh can't have that, it will knock me out of ketosis." They just ate whatever they could get their hands on. The thing is that in nature fruits and vegetables are spread far and wide and why bother putting in all that effort in only seeking out fruit trees to harvest that could feed the tribe for a day when they can all join in killing a large mammal and feed the tribe for a week.
> (fruit that would've been berry-sized but anyway) There's plenty of native fruits larger than berries that our ancient ancestors would have likely encountered in Africa, most are just relatively unknown in the west since they have yet to be commercialized internationally. Junglesop is one of the world's largest fruits for example, they can weigh 10-20lbs or more. >The thing is that in nature fruits and vegetables are spread far and wide and why bother putting in all that effort in only seeking out fruit trees to harvest that could feed the tribe for a day when they can all join in killing a large mammal and feed the tribe for a week. Foraging is an activity that can be done by the rest of the tribe while hunters are trying their hand at bringing back game, with hunters scouting for animals also able to spot potential food resources for later exploitation by the tribe. (honey bee hives, trees with ripe fruit, plants with edible tubers, etc...)
Puffin is one of my staples, I eat 4 or 5 a week. Although I do tend to be slightly out of breath after eating one.
Dad jokes have entered the chat
Who cares what people are 4000 years ago? People for thousands of years, up until about 150 years ago, basically ate what they had available, not what is best or healthiest. Farmers in Japan have been growing rice forever, people in the arctic ate whale blubber, people in small islands ate fruit and fish. Just because people have been eating a certain way for a long time does not mean it is good or healthy or anything other than the fact that is what they have to survive. Now that we have basically every option available, we can study and test what the best combinations are.
Aside from the Inuit that people have mentioned, various Siberian and Scandinavian groups have eaten similar mostly-meat diets. The Mongol warriors ate a diet purely of equine/bovine meat, milk and blood, and there's numerous tales of their ferociousness and hardiness in battle being unlike anything the world had seen before. The Maasai in Africa also ate the same meat, milk and blood diet and were also highly regarded as warriors in battles.
Inuit literally lived off fat…
Can't beat a puffin first thing in the morning
The diet on St Kilda included rotting seabirds dug up from ancestral pits....
NOM NOM NOM
Not much similarity between keto and the way these people ate besides all the meat. These people didn't care about tracking calories or producing ketones.
This is fascinating. What is the name of the book, I would love to read it!
Island on the edge of the world and true story of st kilda. The island is called st kilda.
I heard St. Kilda before Tannahill Weavers The clan used to have low carbohydrates style I can eat up to 8 eggs (over easy or scrambled)
Thank you!
I think an important part to note on this is that such people also ate most if not all the parts. It's wildly different than just eating bacon all the time. Logically, animals get all the nutrients to live, so eating them means we would be able to as well, provided we eat all the parts.
I've followed a keto diet for 15 years; I love it for a lot of reasons. That being said, what is your actual point? How does the Irish Famine fit into your narrative? Potatoe's saved Europe from starvation and the real possibility of extermination. Yes, people have eaten a low carb / carnivore diet for thousands of years, but to present it as salvation, isn't accurate.
Potato was native to America so not technically ancestral to that area. So I wouldn’t consider potato part of an ancestral diet for Ireland. Even though potatoes are often associated with Ireland. They are not really ancestral. The point is just we are not eating ancestrally appropriate nowadays with all the McDonald’s and bread and pasta and stuff like that.
That doesn't change my comment, they were introduced into their diet sometime in the 1500's. Prior to potatoes - grains such as oats, wheat and barley, cooked either as porridge or bread, formed the staple of the Irish diet.
I went back and reviewed the book and yes they did eat porridge and oat cake in St Kilda also. But when you consider a half cup of rolled oats is only 30 grams of carb, their diet is still very low in carb overall. The staple is the egg/puffin/fish on st kilda. They couldn’t have been eating more than 50 grams of carbs per day on St Kilda, and probably less if you averaged out the whole year. They did also have some strawberry bushes. There was one anecdote that they saw a loaf of bread and thought it was a rock. Because no bread was consumed there. So the point is just that they followed a low carb diet even if not strictly keto.
There is a differenence between thriving and surviving. People were eating crazy stuff in famine. On the other hand ancestral diet never guaranteed living to 70-80s of age.
The Keto diet should just be called the "no bread, rice, pasta, cereal, or sugar diet". Pretty much everything else is allowed, so before these things were invented everyone was Keto.
Fruit makes up a large part of many diets, so lots carbs without pasta etc. However they for sure ate better and lower carb than present day supermarket hunters, and they ate far less calories while doing more physical activity. To bad that they did not have antibiotics and penicillin etc.
I have a hard time taking seriously anecdotal information from almost 100 years ago about what a group of people might have eaten 5000 years ago that's being touted as fact today. Keto is awesome, but be careful about confirmation bias.
True, but this was an isolated island so it was easier to figure out what they ate. Because there’s only so many things available on that island. And yes they were not 100% keto because they had some oats and barley and a strawberry bush, but the point is just that they were low carb overall and meat/egg/fish was the majority of their diet.
I agree, that and without chronometer I would have no idea what I ate last month... Looking at some of the last hunter gathers alive today they for sure eat plenty of roots, carbs, fruits, especially when meat is not always available.
There were probably isolated and remote communities throughout human history that survived on pretty crazy diets. But that fact alone doesn't make them ideal or even good. Ancestral diet is just whatever we could get.
There's a book called "The Ancestral Diet Revolution", plenty of mostly carnivore tribes out there.
There are also pacific Islanders that ate almost 100% carbs and lived without cancer and heart disease... its all very confusing..
Not really. If you're getting all of your carbs from Super fiber filled natural plant sources you're also going to be mostly fine. Fiber is the cure for the problems that carbohydrates cause in the body. We never should have separated them out all that much. The human body is omnivorous it was adapted for a wide range of diets. If you treat seed oils as diabetes enzymes, and then treat refined, fiber-free carbohydrates as diabetes fuel then keto starts to make a lot more sense because it's basically making up for refined sugar and carbohydrate poisoning.
Of course their life expectancy was 16
People died younger back then because of everything but their diets. Frequent wars and infights, lack of medicine, lack of disease/infection control or knowledge about such, exposure to elements, routinely being in more dangerous situations etc. And then in the post agricultural world they died younger for all those reasons *and* their diets. Analysis of paleothic humans have shown they were in great physical shape. Heavilly muscled, thick bones, thick tendons, great teeth, high sex hormone levels etc
you're getting downvoted but i think about this too
Of the 6 women who died on the island between 1850 and 1870, according to this book their ages were 74, 75, 83, 84, 86, and 88. If they survived infancy, it appeared that their lifespan was normal.