How To Eat Like Your Ancestors

Whether you’re a Paleo fan or not, there’s certainly common ground between those who follow the
diet and everyone else. Obviously, our ancestors were doing something right when it came to eating
and exercise. Food wasn’t simply grabbed off a shelf, tossed into a cart and driven to your home. It
was hunted, killed, prepared and cooked. Nowadays, disease abounds and even with advances in
technology, our lifespans are shortening as lifestyle choices create epidemics far out of our collective
control. Little kids are obese and twenty-some-year-olds are suffering from heart attacks. So where exactly did we go wrong, and is there a way to fix it?

If you take a look at countries who still practice subsistence farming and must grow and hunt the
food they consume, some things haven't changed with time. The disease presence in these countries
falls more along the lines of undernutrition than the issues we have elsewhere that are a result of
over‐consumption. But there is clearly an issue in industrialized countries where while we grow food
to live off of, we also mass‐produce and process a much larger amount.
It wasn't until 10,000 years ago when our diets shifted from only those things we could hunt, fish, and gather towards the state we're in today. Because the number of hunter‐gathers left in the world
are so slim, researchers are trying to learn about their way of life before it's too late. While the
development of agriculture seemed to be a step in the right direction, it's up for debate when we
assess the current health state of the majority of the world's population.
In an article in National Geographic, titled "The Evolution of Diet," studies were done on the Mayan
population that may be indicative of what exactly happened to our health as a result of a shift in the
foods we consumed and the methods in which food was obtained. Until the 1950s, diabetes was
unheard of amongst the Maya. However, when they shifted their diets towards a more Western
(read: sugar‐heavy) diet, diabetes occurrences were through the roof.
There may be some tie, too, between the way we prepare food nowadays compared to how we
used to. With advanced cooking methods, we serve and consume meat in a very digestible form,
whereas our ancestors were eating raw or minimally cooked meats in particular. The energy
required by our bodies to break down the meats we consume is pale in comparison to the amount of
work our bodies used to have to do.
Whatever way you look at it, it's quite obvious that whatever happened between then and now isn't
a shift in the right direction. Instead of dying from sicknesses that went untreated due to lack of
medical care and resources, we're dying off from lifestyle diseases we've brought onto ourselves
amidst the most impeccable medical technology. Perhaps the best we can do is to ensure that we
are doing our part to eat and stay healthy in a fashion that is as close to our ancestors as possible this
wouldn't be a bad case of history repeating itself.