Ok, little bit of history, til the mid 50’s, nutritionists used to recommend that people ate whole foods, cook in butter and lard and ate saturated fat!Then big food lobbies like GE corn, soy and sugar got involved with govt and nutritional advice funding and as they didn’t want to be blamed for the health issues they knew that their industries were causing, at the first chance that presented itself, which was in 1955 when President Eisenhower had his dramatically timed heart attacks start, they colluded and via marketing and carefully selected donations to nutritional institutions and govt advisors, made fat the scapegoat for heart attacks, heart disease, obesity, diabetes and many other health issues which had started affecting the general American public since they had expanded, this strategy allowed them to grow their industries monopolies still more in the name of health…
From then on, by marketing their industry waste products such as lecithin and the GE presticide mop-crop soy (planted specifically to take soils that had been poisoned by the pesticides to the point where nothing would else grow there anymore, back to being arable,) they then marketed lecithin, margarine (also a waste product that they bleached and then coloured to be the same colour as the butter everyone was used to eating) and even soy, as health foods, they were then able to expand their markets and maximise their profits… They were able to fund studies seeking certain outcomes and weed out results that were unwanted, all in support of their marketing view, which is now a common practice in various industry funded ‘scientific studies’… Damn the ethics huh.
In short, they used all their financial clout to create their own markets… As is said, it’s All about the money, honey.
I’d probably look less into “hunter gathering” and more just to the 1600-1700s and further back. Diet at that point is still old and more “natural” to our diets… basically nobody was selling you plant based “meat” and vegetable oil.
Also look at YOUR ancestors. Not generic history.
However, “evidence for saturated fat” being in our diet? Well we’ve always consumed animal foods and plenty of butter, olives, coconuts, and other saturated fats.
Like I always say, the issue is fake fats, highly processed fats and oxidised fats. Things our ancestors almost never had to deal with.
I extremely disagree that our evolutionary diets were ever bad for us. Otherwise we’d be like panadas, useless dying and slow.
I’d also not be in this group of mind that thinks our ancestors were morons who didn’t know much about the body. Chemically, not really, vut physiology and health wasn’t that unknown as claimed back then.
Even the Mediterraneans and still do eat plenty of meat with saturated fat, butter, plant sat fats, etc. Despite the bullshit claims that they don’t.
So people did find 500 year old mummies in Greenland, and when they looked at their arteries with xray imaging, most of them had heart disease. This was a pretty impressive feat, given they ranged in age from late teens to 30.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2757994
In other areas, it is not even clear to me that people ate a lot of saturated fat. The skeletal muscle of wild animals is very lean. Insects, various plant foods, and fish also seem pretty heart healthy.
Some cardiologists like to point out that newborn babies and other animals have serum LDL-C around 40mg/dl, and they argue that is what should be considered a natural amount. This would require a low saturated fat diet and some good genetics or pharmaceutical agents/bariatric surgery to achieve.
Not gonna lie, no idea what you mean by “evolutionarily consistent” but regardless our ancestors had no idea what a good diet was. They just ate things to survive. Thousands of years ago no one had the science to know the right amount of micros to intake, no one knew wtf cholesterol was.
We didn’t evolve to live until 80. We evolved to live, reproduce, raise the kids, and die.
Wild meat might not have that much fat.
People eat meat at different rates in different environments and evolved accordingly.
Hunter gatherers and farmers get tons of physical activity. That compensated for a lot.
Our evolutionary diet gives Zero shits about your health once the kids are grown. Natural selection really only works on preparing the next generation. After the reproductive years, from a genetic standpoint, the rest doesn’t matter. Our evolutionary diet was never concerned with how we age. You would have probably died of a dental infection well before your arteries ever clogged.
The average primal human would eat just about anything, therefore their diet varied wildly across regions. Also they would die young(you only need to live about 14 years to successfully reproduce and continue the species).
I think you might be overestimating the role of evolution here.
I do think our ancestors probably had diets high in saturated fats. But evolution doesn’t factor in if that diet is good or bad for us.
Remember, the whole point of evolution is reproduction. After that, evolutionary pressure is weak. That’s why diseases like atherosclerosis, strokes, dementia, blood clots, heart attacks, etc are all so common. Because by the time you get those diseases, you already reproduced and passed on those genes and raised your kids a bit.
So you can’t really look at evolution and determine what diet is good for us or not. All you can determine is that the diet is good enough until they can reproduce….. which isn’t that helpful.
To continue our species, early humans only had to reach an age of being able to procreate and then raise their children. That’s…a lot younger than 70…80…90…100. This tells us nothing about what we should eat today with our modern means and modern information about health. Cardiovascular disease takes a long time to develop. That buildup of plaque in your artery walls doesn’t happen the instant you eat a meal high in saturated fat and sugar. It takes decades. I could post a lot about saturated fat and cardiovascular disease, but I’d rather save some time and just say that your question is probably the wrong place to start with.
Look at health outcome data, not naturalistic fallacies. For what it’s worth, I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad question to ask, but I would be highly skeptical of any idea that because a food or dietary pattern is what a certain portion of our ancestors (the ones with a high intake of saturated fat, many or even the majority would probably have had a relatively low intake of saturated fat) ate at a certain time in history, that it is the right or best thing to eat today. Back then, you ate what you had access to. Who would care if it had saturated fat? It had calories. In the absence of all other food, I’d eat pure lard.
Hi so I am absolutely not knowledgable enough to speak on this in detail but I think if you are focused on human evolution and diet you should be looking into the Life History theory of evolutionary anthropology.
Some good sources off the top of my head are
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228866917_The_Western_diet_and_lifestyle_and_diseases_of_civilization
Cheetham, N. (2010). Introducing Biological Energetics: How Energy and information control the living world. Oxford University Press.
Snodgrass, J. J. (2012). Human Energetics. In Human Biology: An Evolutionary and Biocultural Perspective. Wiley-Blackwell.
The latter two are book chapters. If you can’t find them on the internet, you can dm me and I can give you the pdfs.
Ive listened this recently, it should answer your question : https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9jYXJuaXZvcmVjYXN0LmxpYnN5bi5jb20vcnNz/episode/NTcxZWZhNjktNjhjZi00MzJhLWJjZDYtNTc3MWViMDQ1NWVl?ep=14
Sugar and carbs trump and protein every day of the week. Our bodies know they are hard to come by in nature and while they are available store any fat on our bodies while we have the chance! Problem is in modern times sugar and carbs are readily available on the regular. So fat just gets added to our bodies and is kept for sugar and carbs free times…that never happen!
Various Ancestral diets have 7-17% of calories from saturated fat. (1) Table 4. Grains, roots, tubers, and honey have traditionally been dominant sources of calories. (2) 60% of ancient Inuit mummies, who ate primarily animals, show significant evidence of cardiovascular disease. (3)