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Category Archives for History
Archevore on Grain Avoidance.
There’s a lot of great writing from years ago, before paleo became “trendy.” [I think of it as "trendy" because I'm now kind of aware of it, I wasn't in 2011.]
Your genes do not care if you get coeliac disease, heart disease, diabetes, degenerative arthritis, tooth decay, autoimmune disorders, cancer or alzheimer dementia if by eating grains you were able to avoid famine just long enough to reproduce.
[via
6s and 3s and the logic of grain avoidance]
Definitely read the entire post, because it’s going to make you question really, how affordable non-grass fed beef really is in terms of your health. Remember, you’re not just avoiding grain in your own diet, you’re also avoiding grain in the animal diets that you eat. You are what you eat.
How Bad Science and Big Business Created the Obesity Epidemic (1h3m)
David Diamond, Ph.D., of the University of South Florida College of Arts and Sciences shares his personal story about his battle with obesity. Diamond shows how he lost weight and reduced his triglycerides by eating red meat, eggs and butter.
Heirlooms: Saving Humanity’s 10,000-year Legacy of Food
Amaranth
Now, from the post-neolithic point of view, these foods aren’t the “greatest” because we cultivated them with the advent of agriculture. This project is about documenting the “losers” of pre-industrial agriculture. But if we don’t track the history of what we did (to ourselves), we’ll almost certain repeat the problem again, a thousand or two thousand years later with the re-discovery of “ancient” grains our ancestors once ate, just as we have today done with grains like amaranth, Kamut, and spelt.
The Long Now Foundation is having a seminar to document these foods from our the earlier part of our current long-now:
Agricultural biodiversity is as much in need of defending as the world’s wildlife. Countless varieties of plants and animals were bred by the world’s peoples for talents specific to every soil, climate, and human culture. Most of them have been lost—their hard-won genetic sophistication extinguished. But many have survived, thanks to professional and amateur devotion, and they are wondrous—living embodiments of humanity’s deepest traditions.
Photojournalist Jim Richardson has been covering the agricultural beat for National Geographic since 1984. His spectacular photographs, and the stories he tells with them, are renowned.
Loren Cordain – Origins and Evolution of the Western Diet: Health Implications for the 21st Century. (1h12m)
Also: Read the paper here.
Why we get fat by Gary Taubes
Gary Taubes is on video where he documented tribe after tribe’s diseases before/after they started eating neolithic foods. It was a long watch, but worth it. Now some people do come out and criticize him because these are just “observational studies“, which is true. They’re not scientific experiments and they’re not “recent” studies. Very few people are willing to pay for science in this area because there’s no money in kicking the industrial food industry in the collective balls. Historians may compare this in the future with the lack of science in the history surrounding tobacco and smoking—a big industry with big losses if the “word gets out.” [from reddit discussion]
Why should people interested in Paleo know about the Long Now?
You might have noticed that I set the date-stamps in WordPress to prefix the year with a zero. For example, this year is 02012 and last year was 02011. I was born in 01971. These dates are inspired by the Long Now Foundation. Long Now? Ok, let’s look at what we mean by “long now”:
This period of time covers almost the entirety of the neolithic period—the last 10,000 years. We’re really exploring a lifestyle that was before the “long now” and the concept is designed to encourage us to think forward how we run “our business of life” over many future generations. If we can get rid of the majority of diet-induced disease, more of us will all be able to focus more importantly on climate disturbance, population overshoot and ecological stresses and with this better knowledge of nutrition and biodiversity.
Extreme Terra-Forming (A Ring World)
By solving our impoverished ideas of how to run and operate our own biology we can begin the work of building the infrastructure required to get humanity off the planet and into the universe at large–whether that involves terra-forming broken parts of our local platform (Earth) or new remote platforms (Mars), and beyond. We probably won’t “solve” hunger for people living today (in the sense of the next five decades), agriculture has already painted us into a corner with 7-billion people. We already are seeing the strains of population overshoot in prices and irregular food distribution. When you make more food, you make more people. There isn’t any way around that other than to improve your biosphere or expand your biosphere. I don’t think many of us can imagine what 7-billion people means to us. But I do think we may live through some horrific apocalyptic situations when the industrial food and distribution system dependent on oil fails to maintain equilibrium. It’s going to happen, and there isn’t any way to predict exactly when, and its a problem we’ll have multiple times in the current long now.
A Coffeehouse in 1650 Holland
While everyone else calls the lifestyle “paleo” in my mind I think of it as “post-neolithic.” We’re not paleo-humans stumbling in the dark for the knowledge of medicine and nutrition anymore—we’re neolithic-humans who have forgotten how paleo-humans lived and ate. We’re taking our awareness of the “long then” past and bringing it forward to the end of the current “long now,” the next 10,000 years. The revolution of this lifestyle will be similar to the addition of caffeine+communication between ourselves in the Coffeehouse Revolutions starting around 01650—people will gather together to learn about themselves and each other. You can see it already online with thousands of people reaching out to each other in small or large communities online and in fitness centers offline. But these communities also need to think about the problems of ourselves in the long term because these problems are not going to go away because we refuse to think about them.
Prepare yourself and your future generations in this long now and for the next long now, for We are too many and We are hungry.
