This Pre-Historic Diet Will Save Your Life: Why You Should Start Eating Like Your Ancestors

If you are above the age of 30 then you most likely remember The Food Pyramid, the USDA’s official guidance on the foods that we all should eat for an “optimal” diet. Among other things, this guidance included recommendations like eating 6-11 servings of bread and grains every day while sparingly eating fats.

This is terrible advice.

To make things worse, when I think about health and fitness one of the most frustrating things is the over emphasis on calories. Everywhere you go, in all of the marketing, everyone is worried about calories as if the body isn’t a complex system that requires a more nuanced approach to losing weight.

Recently we’ve seen a wave of diet trends ranging from carnivore to veganism, all of which are promoted respectively as the optimal diet for human health.

Despite things like The Food Pyramid, the fitness industry’s emphasis on calories, and the various diet trends that are out there, one thing is certain, weight gain and chronic diseases remain endemic in modern times.

In my opinion, however, diet should not be about extremes. It’s not about completely cutting out meat, or dairy, or fruit. Rather, it comes down to a very simple, yet foreign concept – eat real and whole foods that are of the earth, and do not eat man-made things that are made in laboratories.

This is effectively known as the ancestral diet, and it is the diet that our prehistoric ancestors ate for millennia before modern food processing fundamentally altered our foods and the course of human health.

Weight Gain and Chronic Disease

Today the most pervasive illnesses that we suffer from are known as the “diseases of civilization.” These include the usual: heart disease, cancer, obesity, diabetes, and dementia, to name a few.

What’s interesting about these diseases is that they are unique to wealthier, industrialized societies which implies that these diseases are not simply a fact of life, but rather are the result of certain lifestyle and cultural norms that are prevalent in western society.

There are many factors at play here, but one of the most influential is the standard western diet, which consists almost entirely of heavily processed foods mass-manufactured at an industrial scale and treated with a litany of pesticides, chemicals, and who knows what else.

When we go to the grocery store, we see thousands of packaged food products which were modified and altered to sit on shelves, taste amazing, and squeeze out maximum profit margins for food companies. The problem is that a good 90-95% of these foods are not food at all. They are synthetic substances that have been passed off as “food” and our bodies respond accordingly.

To put it bluntly, the perversion of our food supply is a major contributor to the prevalence of “diseases of civilization.”

The Metabolism

While the brain may be where our conscious resides, our metabolism is effectively the body’s powerplant. Food is just energy that is packaged in a bunch of different ways, and that packaging plays a huge role in how your body unpacks that energy and uses it. The metabolism is the body’s energy clearing house which unpackages the food that we eat and distributes as energy throughout the body to our muscles, organs, and other cells.

Because the metabolism is key to the health of every single one of the 30 trillion cells in your body, it is extraordinarily influential in virtually every aspect of your existence. It is the underlying mechanism at play behind the growth of tissue including muscle and body fat, it influences your hormones, and plays a major role in regulating your overall health.

The foods that we consume dictate how our metabolisms will function. Eat poor quality food, and the metabolism responds poorly. Eat high quality food, and the metabolism will reward you greatly.

Unfortunately, “advancements” in civilization have put humans on a trajectory of diet habits that have become increasingly damaging to the metabolism, and the ramifications are being felt today.

History of Human Diet

The metabolism of the modern human is a direct reflection of the past foods that we ate. Our metabolisms have evolved specifically to function optimally when consuming a diet that is in line with what humans and our evolutionary pre-cursors have eaten for over 2 million years.

For the majority of human history, we adapted to persist on a hunting and gathering diet. Through the division of labor we found a way to survive in environments of unforgiving weather, competition with other animals, and general food scarcity. Men typically worked together to either hunt or scavenge for nutrient dense meat, while women typically did the gathering by foraging for fruits, tubers, nuts, and other foods.

A very important thing to note about the hunter-gatherer diet is that it is believed to have consisted of a roughly 1:1 balanced ratio of omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids (more on this later).

With advancements in technology and cultural evolution, humans began the early stages of modern civilization by permanently settling on land and growing food through agriculture. With agriculture, food became more predictable, as we now had some degree of control over what, when, where, and how foods would be grown. While this may seem all good, in exchange for food security we lost the diversity of foods that the hunter-gatherer diet afforded us. We became highly dependent on single types of crops such as grains (rice, wheat, barley, corn, etc.)

While wild grains are generally good for human consumption, our evolutionary past did not prepare us to consume grains as a dietary staple. This is where the problems began to arise.

Throughout the past 10,000 years or so, agriculture has become ever more sophisticated. We have altered and modified crops, we now grow crops through unnatural non-regenerative farming, and we transport perishable foods across the world for consumption.

In most recent years we have added chemicals, pesticides, and industrial-scale food manufacturing into the mix to create the endless varieties of highly palatable and shelf-stable foods, condiments, and ingredients that we are familiar with today. These foods are now ubiquitous, and represent the rule rather than the exception.

Your favorite meal likely consists of foods far removed from the hunter-gatherer diet that our prehistoric ancestors persisted on.

Complications of Modern Diets

The widespread ultra-processing of foods in the modern diet has led us head first into endemic levels of diseases that once were virtually non-existent in any appreciable amounts. In fact, the diseases that most of us struggle with today are so foreign to human history that they are ironically known as “diseases of civilization” because they only appeared fairly recently in the human timeline, and they only tend to persist in industrialized societies.

Due to the ubiquity of food processing we have trouble conceptualizing the notion we are no longer actually eating real food, and as a result we attribute diseases like cancer, dementia, diabetes, and heart disease to things like genetics or some other oddity that leaves us looking in the wrong places for cures.

Our bodies simply are not designed to digest the foods that are prevalent in the modern diet. This causes our metabolisms to operate sub-optimally, or even malfunction altogether. The excessive processed carbohydrates, the lack of naturally occurring fats and proteins, the anti-nutrients in vegetables, the pesticides, the ungodly amounts of refined sugars all wreck havoc on our metabolism which translates to hormonal imbalances, and undesired side effects such as weight gain, or worse.

Circling back to the omega-3 to omega-6 balance mentioned earlier, the ultra-processing of foods has resulted in consumption of foods that are ultra-high in omega-6 fatty acids and ultra-low in omega-3 fatty acids. The modern industrialized diet has a fatty acid ratio of roughly 20:1 in favor of omega-6s. I go into more detail about the significance of this ratio in my “Where are the Omega-3s” article. But to put it bluntly, the consequences are lethal.

In my years of learning about optimal nutrition, I have learned that all of the gimmicks promoted by the healthcare, fitness, and food industries alike for losing weight and getting healthier are all BS and miss the forest for the trees. The focus on calories misses the mark. The notion that eating vegetables is healthier than eating meat misses the mark. The concept of exercising to burn calories misses the mark. And the belief that humans can play God, or Zeus, or whoever by medicating our way out of a bad diet misses the mark.

What I have learned is that diet is king above all else, and that the diet that most closely aligns with that of our prehistoric ancestors is the most effective way to pre-emptively circumvent the onset of “civilization diseases.”

What is the ancestral diet?

The ancestral diet is a whole food and minimally processed food diet that humans consumed prior to the rise of western civilization. The ancestral diet does not particularly favor any one food group, but generally represents a balanced diet that mimics hunter-gatherer style eating.

If I had to pinpoint the specific characteristics of the ancestral diet, I would defer to Dr. Weston A Price.

In the 1930s Weston A Price, a dentist who wanted to understand why “uncivilized” populations were spared from rampant tooth decay that was prevalent in industrialized society, traveled around the world to study communities that were still relatively insulated from western diets.

Price noted that these communities not only had much better oral health, but were also resistant to diseases like tuberculosis and possessed physically healthier appearances than their “civilized” counterparts. He also noted that individuals who did leave their communities to join the industrialized world, began to experience deterioration in oral health among other problems.

Price found that the healthiest populations consumed a diet that contained the following:

• No processed foods such as sugar, flour, vegetable oils, pesticides and chemicals, etc.

• Some form of animal food including meat, fish, eggs, milk, insects, etc.

• Much higher quantities of vitamins and minerals than modern diets

• Enzymes and probiotics such as those found in fermented foods and fruits

• Seeds, grains, and nuts that were soaked, sprouted, or fermented to extract anti-nutrients

• High amounts of naturally occurring fats, including saturated fats

• Equal amounts of omega 3 and omega 6 fatty acids

• Some form of unrefined salt

These findings are effectively the core tenants of the ancestral diet, but if I had to sum it up into one concise phrase it would be this:

“The ancestral diet consists of a balanced assortment of foods and ingredients that can be procured directly from the earth or water through hunting, fishing, and foraging, and consumed with very minimal processing such as cooking or fermentation”

I realize that understanding what is healthy and what is not is a hopeless effort. But if you are convinced that the ancestral diet is the way, then you will be good with applying the definition above to foods that you eat.

What’s ironic about the ancestral diet is that we will quickly see that foods like the 6-11 servings of bread as recommended by The Food Pyramid would not be considered fit for humans due to the processed nature of bread which contains flour, and in most cases in the US, also contains sugar and other processed ingredients. On the other hand foods that are deprioritized by the food pyramid, animal meats, butter, saturated fats, etc. fall well within the guidelines for healthy foods because the ancestral diet understands the importance of fatty foods in maintaining stable insulin levels which fights the onset of insulin resistance.

With this diet, metabolism and hormones are the priority rather than calories. When the body consumes food that is good for it, the metabolism fires on all cylinders and everything else works itself out. Body fat comes down, energy goes up, diseases of civilization become less likely, people become healthier, and the medical, pharmaceutical, and food industries all lose money.