Didn't actually mean a literal hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Just one with moderate to high levels of physical activity, with a paleo style protein, fruit, nut diet.
Were hunter gatherers healthier than we are?
- Thread starter Kinitari
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Didn't actually mean a literal hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Just one with moderate to high levels of physical activity, with a paleo style protein, fruit, nut diet.
Wiktor
Member
He is propably working out and muscles can't exactly tell the difference between this and hunting.
I really just wanted as much information as possible, health in any connotation, specifics or general comparison - didn't matter.
I've gotten a lot of information so far, so when I continue to debate with this person, I'll know how to deal with the appeal to HG societies.
Only other thing I'd like to see is any cancer research that talks about increasing rates of cancer and what they are linked too (I saw one a while ago that linked a large portion of the cases to old age and too much estrogen). If there was info on cancer from 10k years ago, all the better.
Wafflecakes
Member
What a ridiculous comparison.
For one thing... people like throwing out buzzwords like "Obese" around for drama's but they don't really mean much. MANY people who are technically "Obese" look fairly average and are completely healthy.
The % of Americans who are severely overweight (including devastating health issues related) is about 6.6% as of 2010.
Not to mention that in all likelihood the % of people back in the day who had severe malnutrition was probably massive. More like 50%+. Not to mention that the amount of physical exertion and exposure required to live that lifestyle would be hugely detrimental to health.
No way in hell can any rational person say gatherers were healthier.
Wafflecakes
Member
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2012/10/01/severely-obese-americans-increasing/1606469/
For the 6.6%.
Watch "Fathead" the documentary for the debunking of "obesity epidemic". The guy in it is technically obese yet is 100% normal, active, and healthy. He also points out that while we ARE getting heavier as a society, most of the "epidemic" is due to the fact that we are an aging populace and older people have higher obesity rates. CANNOT RECOMMEND THIS FILM ENOUGH!
The hunter gatherer stuff was just a guess......but I would be shocked if it was any lower. I do know from many hours of the history channel that infant mortality was massive at the time....and that almost always associated with poor nutrition.
Hunter gatherer diet is in vogue now. I'm personally partial to the Paleo diet but there are many variations. Most people in nutrition now will promote natural whole foods, meaning unprocessed. That alone would suggest to me that our modern diets are inferior. Everything from partially hydrogenated oils to high fructose corn syrup to GMO's, preservatives, hormones and all the rest are worth considering before you eat them.
You can look at Mark Sisson: Primal Blueprint: http://www.marksdailyapple.com/
Here's Robb Wolf talking about the "Cavemen lived short lives" thing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TdggAsj2Xcw
Here's a longer interview with Gary Taubes (Why we get fat author) who talks about his books:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l59YyXpCT1M
All of these people promote a more hunter gatherer diet as opposed to an agricultural one.
You can look at Mark Sisson: Primal Blueprint: http://www.marksdailyapple.com/
Here's Robb Wolf talking about the "Cavemen lived short lives" thing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TdggAsj2Xcw
Here's a longer interview with Gary Taubes (Why we get fat author) who talks about his books:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l59YyXpCT1M
All of these people promote a more hunter gatherer diet as opposed to an agricultural one.
weremichael
Member
Absolutely not. I have excavated archaeological sites throughout the Great Basin, managed a lab that did dietary analysis of shell midden site from the west coast of the United States, worked for the National Park Service in the southwest, and excavated sites in Peru. During the decade that I worked as an archaeologist, I have looked at hundreds of sites in detail and many of them strictly from a dietary perspective. The data indicated that when food was plentiful (this was from data from the west coast of the US), populations could boom, until some events caused the population to bust. These people were not able to withstand the weather/climatic changes in large numbers and their population didn't truly increase dramatically until well into the Holocene (and then only during the last several thousand years). By that time, people were farming, because, I suppose, in part that they wanted to have a stable diet.
I have encountered many people who fall into a romanticized view of what times were like during paleo and archaic times. No archaeologist can tell you what those times were truly like, but what we provide is a narrow snapshot of what their life was like dietarily, physically (in the presence of what type of tools they made/used), and biologically, when we can actually study the human remains (thanks to NAGPRA that isn't very often). In the evidence that I have seen, people didn't live as long and died of things that are easily preventable now. One of those things is malnutrition.
But those who believe that having to eat vegetation that has little to no nutritional value during leans times and not being exposed to the wide variety of essential minerals that a modern varied diet provides, can continue to believe what they want. I am going to continue to enjoy a varied diet, which today includes: homemade bread, homemade duck confit, roasted potatoes, and a salad with vegetable/fruit that are not in season here in Wyoming.
Oh man, I'd really appreciate more of your input - this is really good stuff. She seems to be doubling down on this HG nutrition/eating habits thing (our debate didn't even originate on that, but I guess my obvious lack of information in the subject has given her something stable to hold on to
).She just sent me these links:
http://escholarship.org/uc/item/4wc9g8g4
http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/81/2/341.full
And honestly, I'm not really 100% sure what the point she is trying to make is. I'm thinking it's something about how people aren't eating healthy. Which, I don't even necessarily disagree with.
You Are Viewtiful
Member
Uhhh... HGS don't eat only meat. In fact they meat a lot less than we do. The gatherer part of hunter-gatherer is more important than the hunter part.
This image was posted in a similar thread about this topic a while back. It outlines the average life expectancy, and health challenges people faced throughout the ages:
(quoted due to size)
weremichael
Member
Oh man, I'd really appreciate more of your input - this is really good stuff. She seems to be doubling down on this HG nutrition/eating habits thing (our debate didn't even originate on that, but I guess my obvious lack of information in the subject has given her something stable to hold on to
She just sent me these links:
http://escholarship.org/uc/item/4wc9g8g4
http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/81/2/341.full
And honestly, I'm not really 100% sure what the point she is trying to make is. I'm thinking it's something about how people aren't eating healthy. Which, I don't even necessarily disagree with.
The Kious (2002) just says the following: Hunter gatherers ate a lot more fruit, ate less salts, consumed more calories, and expended more calories than modern man. Big shock. It doesn't address that each area of the world will seasonally go through dramatic periods of a dearth of adequate food and the people will have to travel to the food. Sometimes that could lead to starvation. That type of lifestyle only can sustain such a limited population.
If your friend is really into the nutritional debate, I think the part of the Kious (2002) article concerning eating wild game should be a focus for her. I know that my body feels a lot better after eating some elk, pronghorn, or deer than it does if I ate the same amount of beef. Also, when wild huckleberries, wild strawberries, and wild raspberries are in season, my wife and I go out and gorge while backpacking. I don't know about their nutritional value compared to farmed varieties, but they taste AMAZING.
Rentahamster
Rodent Whores
If Kinitari wants an avid proponent of the HG lifestyle, then he should probably talk to magicstop. He and I had a fairly detailed conversation about Pinker in this thread:
http://neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=466301
I would have liked to discuss it more, but the conversation kinda petered out.
A lot of us don't get enough exercise. So what? We don't have to to survive. A person in a modern society can be a lazy-ass sloth (physically) and still outlive the average hunter gatherer twice over. That we're not constantly worrying about staying alive should show the obvious superiority of modern society.
And since it's a rare circumstance, someone like Hawking is MUCH more likely to survive in a modern society and contribute to civilization. Physically disabled geniuses have no chance in hell out in the wild.
We are not diluting the species' biological strength. That is a ridiculous eugenics argument. We still have aggressive sex selection and genetic diversity. Even if we were "diluting the species" and making ourselves biologically weak? Who cares? We still seem to be smashing athletic records all the time. We've been "making ourselves weak" for the past 10,000 years and we just keep living longer and longer.
Even if we were becoming "biologically weaker" because of weaklings like Hawking, their contributions to science enables us to strengthen ourselves biologically with technology anyway.
Trojita
Rapid Response Threadmaker
Using Neanderthals as a basis for early humans is derpy as fuck, especially for something trying to be scientific. All people that have early ancestors that left Africa usually have around 4% Neanderthal DNA.
I know that diets patterned off of what hunter-gather societies might have eaten are currently in vogue, but the reality of the situation is, if humans returned to a hunter-gatherer mode of life, the carrying capacity of the earth would be around 100 million people. The extra 6.9 billion of us owe our existence to agriculture and the various technologies it allowed us to develop. Some of us have the freedom to try an pursue natural diets, but if we all did that, we would be screwed in short order.
Also, when we think of hunter-gatherer diets now, we are thinking of an artificial version of it that would have a ten-fold increase in food variety and availability. We have access to an abundance of raw foods from every part of the world. Hunter Gatherers would have had to make due with whatever grew within a few hundred square kilometers of land. We no longer worry about protein, vitamin, or sodium deficiencies. If you are not getting enough iron or vitamin E in your diet, you just take a pill or two. If you are not getting enough protein, make a protein shake. Historically that was not the case, and starvation in lean years of drought or frost would have been pretty common place.
You also weren't free to just travel wherever you chose if conditions were unfavorable, since hunter-gatherer tribes would still have territories and home ranges (like other animal species) and strangers would likely kill you on sight.
The upper range of human lifespans probably hasn't increased all that much in the past 15 000 years. There would have been some cases of people living to 90+ in hunter-gather societies. However the percentage of people living past the age of 60 today is higher than it has ever been in the past. Today, even people with serious congenital health problems are not only routinely surviving childhood, but often living into middle age or beyond. Every one of these individuals would have been dead within a couple of years of birth in a hunter-gatherer society.
Also, when we think of hunter-gatherer diets now, we are thinking of an artificial version of it that would have a ten-fold increase in food variety and availability. We have access to an abundance of raw foods from every part of the world. Hunter Gatherers would have had to make due with whatever grew within a few hundred square kilometers of land. We no longer worry about protein, vitamin, or sodium deficiencies. If you are not getting enough iron or vitamin E in your diet, you just take a pill or two. If you are not getting enough protein, make a protein shake. Historically that was not the case, and starvation in lean years of drought or frost would have been pretty common place.
You also weren't free to just travel wherever you chose if conditions were unfavorable, since hunter-gatherer tribes would still have territories and home ranges (like other animal species) and strangers would likely kill you on sight.
The upper range of human lifespans probably hasn't increased all that much in the past 15 000 years. There would have been some cases of people living to 90+ in hunter-gather societies. However the percentage of people living past the age of 60 today is higher than it has ever been in the past. Today, even people with serious congenital health problems are not only routinely surviving childhood, but often living into middle age or beyond. Every one of these individuals would have been dead within a couple of years of birth in a hunter-gatherer society.
entremet
Member
They ate animals who got plenty of vitamin C.
While you can get your required vitamin C from animal sources, it's not in the way that a modern person on a paleo diet would get it. Muscle tissues don't contain a lot of vitamin-C, and cooking meat destroys some of the nutritional content. Hunter-gatherers got their vitamins from the mostly raw organs (especially liver), skin, and stomach contents of the animals they killed (in addition to fruits, and berries if they lived in areas rich in plant life).
IIRC animals like wolves get their vitamin C by eating the contents of their prey's stomachs.
Ya, Inuit people (who traditionally have almost exclusively meat based diets with only 2-3% plant matter by weight) used to do the same. Some probably still do.
Pfft. They were lucky to survive into adulthood and very few reached 40 years.
They were significantly shorter than modern humans, probably suffered from chronic tooth problems, had subpar vision with no way to correct it etc. Sure not many of them were fat but to say they were healthier than modern humans is ridiculous.
They were significantly shorter than modern humans, probably suffered from chronic tooth problems, had subpar vision with no way to correct it etc. Sure not many of them were fat but to say they were healthier than modern humans is ridiculous.
I think historically humans had far fewer dental issues in terms of cavities and other oral diseases caused by an abundance of sugar and acid in your diet, but tooth loss due to accidents or general wear in old age would have been a much more severe concern.
Weren't the Cro Magnon taller than modern humans?
Patrick Bateman
Member
When you look at all those people today (old people with dementia, people with sever psychic and physical disabilities) who are able to survive thanks to modern medicine:
No.
No.
Taller than modern humans in developed countries? No.
They were taller on average than people living in agricultural societies before the last 100 or so years though. Depending on what you read, males would have averaged 5'6"-5'10".
Patrick Bateman
Member
Pine needles are a good source of Vitamin C. There's probably a lot of other plants that gatherers chew on that also supply it.
For the OP:
Here is an informative meta study on longevity that looks at several data sets gathered from traditional (pre-contact) hunter-gatherer tribes, as well as accultured hunter-gatherers and forager-horticulturalist tribes.
http://www.anth.ucsb.edu/faculty/gurven/papers/GurvenKaplan2007pdr.pdf
A few interesting points:
- In traditional Hunter-gatherer tribes, an average of 57% of the children born make it to Age 15 (which this study considers adulthood). Of those, 64% make it to Age 45 (the age of senescence/menopause for females). Hunter Gatherers who make it to 45 tend to live another 20 years or so, and the modal (most frequent) age of death for adults averaged 72 years of age across tribes (modal age of death in the US is 87).
- Of all the deaths recorded, illnesses accounted for 70%, violence and accidents for 20%, and degenerative diseases around 10% (but this might be underestimated because people suffering from degenerative diseases are more prone to illness). Less than half the illness-related disease were illnesses spread by human contact. The majority were from infections (especially respiratory infections) and gastro-intestinal diseases. Heart attacks and strokes were rare. Deaths due to degenerative diseases were largely confined to infants and older adults. I didn't see anything specifically on cancer though.
- Infant mortality rates in hunter-gatherer tribes are 30x higher than infant mortality in the United States currently.
- Early childhood mortality rates are 100x higher in hunter gatherer tribes compared to that of the US
- Late childhood mortality rates are 80x higher in hunter gatherer tribes compared to that of the US
- Late teen mortality are 10x higher in hunter gatherer tribes compared to that of the US
- After that the relationship flattens out, with 5x the mortality rate at 50 years old, and 3 times the mortality rate at 70 years old compared to the US.
Here is an informative meta study on longevity that looks at several data sets gathered from traditional (pre-contact) hunter-gatherer tribes, as well as accultured hunter-gatherers and forager-horticulturalist tribes.
http://www.anth.ucsb.edu/faculty/gurven/papers/GurvenKaplan2007pdr.pdf
A few interesting points:
- In traditional Hunter-gatherer tribes, an average of 57% of the children born make it to Age 15 (which this study considers adulthood). Of those, 64% make it to Age 45 (the age of senescence/menopause for females). Hunter Gatherers who make it to 45 tend to live another 20 years or so, and the modal (most frequent) age of death for adults averaged 72 years of age across tribes (modal age of death in the US is 87).
- Of all the deaths recorded, illnesses accounted for 70%, violence and accidents for 20%, and degenerative diseases around 10% (but this might be underestimated because people suffering from degenerative diseases are more prone to illness). Less than half the illness-related disease were illnesses spread by human contact. The majority were from infections (especially respiratory infections) and gastro-intestinal diseases. Heart attacks and strokes were rare. Deaths due to degenerative diseases were largely confined to infants and older adults. I didn't see anything specifically on cancer though.
- Infant mortality rates in hunter-gatherer tribes are 30x higher than infant mortality in the United States currently.
- Early childhood mortality rates are 100x higher in hunter gatherer tribes compared to that of the US
- Late childhood mortality rates are 80x higher in hunter gatherer tribes compared to that of the US
- Late teen mortality are 10x higher in hunter gatherer tribes compared to that of the US
- After that the relationship flattens out, with 5x the mortality rate at 50 years old, and 3 times the mortality rate at 70 years old compared to the US.
scar tissue
Banned
They sure as hell didn't live longer (thanks, modern medicine
They probably had a lot less problems with stuff that comes from eating wrong and not moving your fat ass enough, though.
They probably had a lot less problems with stuff that comes from eating wrong and not moving your fat ass enough, though.
Admittedly, no I didnt factor that in. Brain fart moment.
And this would seem to then explain those numbers above.
Ya, life expectancy looks at the breakdown of deaths by age in a population and then forecasts the average age that a newborn baby will live to, assuming it has X% chance of dying at each age category. If life expectancy for a population is 30-35 years old, it doesn't mean most people die at that age, it just means that if you averaged together the ages of all the deaths in a population, you would get 30-35. At least for hunter-gatherer societies. I don't know if modern life expectancy figures try to account for trending improvements in healthcare.
About 35-40% of the babies born in these hunter gatherer tribes made it to 45 years old in the populations studied, but those adults who do make it to 45 tend to live 15-20 more years on average.
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