The SCD™ Knowledge Base

Grain and Our Evolutionary Heritage

Karen writes:
We are all different in certain ways, but genetically we are basically the
same as humans were 100,000 years ago. Those hunter-gatherer diets
differed according to climate and availability of foods in the particular
area, but there's a common demoninator-- we're all omnivores, and do best
on a diet that includes animal foods and vegetables. Agricultural foods
like grains were only introduced in the last 10,000 years, and genetically
we have not had time to adapt to them, much less to the modern "fake"
foods that haven't existed before the last 50 or 100 years.
So although biblical times seem ancient to us, it's still within the same
agricultural period in which people have been eating grains and having
diseases that native hunter-gatherers didn't have.
Some good reading on this subject would be Loren Cordain's book _The Paleo
Diet_, and his articles on http://www.beyondveg.com. Also, there's a great
article by Dr. Stephen Byrnes called The Myths of Vegetarianism which he
has just revised with more references; the new version is at his web site
http://www.powerhealth.net. This is a good article to explain why we're
suited for meat eating.