RIP PALEO

Here lies Grok the Caveman. Don't worry, he was made up.

grok the caveman dead, with a big gravestone

I did Paleo for several years before magically fixing my Non-24 with keto. I’ve mostly maintained a paleo-ish outlook on nutrition. That recently changed.

Paleo was never true

Paleo doesn't make sense in light of how evolution really works. It's an effective intuition pump, but it's wrong.

Which is why it mostly doesn’t work for most people, which is why almost nobody still does it or advocates it.

I never lost a pound doing paleo, even when I was doing CrossFit 5x a week along with it. It did help with acid reflux, so I guess I had that going for me.

After listening to an interview on the Mind and Matter podcast with an evolutionary geneticist recently, I realized that even the last remnants of my belief in Paleo as a useful heuristic are gone.

Paleo as a backstop-heuristic

Obviously it never helped me lose weight, and it didn't in any of my friends who tried it. But I always thought that, while not sufficient, Paleo was a good "conservative baseline" of what to eat. I don't believe that any more.

Paleo implicitly rests on 2 assumptions:

1. We haven't evolved since the paleolithic ended (~10k BC)

2. We can't lose adaptations to food

Turns out these are both wrong.

Strong evolutionary pressure can produce very impressive genetic adaptations in 1,000 years or less. And we can absolutely lose the ability to process certain foods.

That means what Grok the Caveman ate isn't necessarily optimal for us, or even doable. Sure, it might work for some people - those whose food adaptation hasn't changed much since the paleolithic. But I now believe Paleo only works by accident, like a broken clock if you happen to be one of those with mostly hunter gatherer ancestry. Although, to be fair, if it works 1/3 of the time that’s better than a broken clock.

Many of us adapted well to starches, others to dairy. I see too many people thriving, reversing obesity, and fixing their diabetes on high-starch & high-dairy diets to dismiss it. This is often in people coming from Paleo or Paleo-ish diets.

My personal experience shows that I cannot thrive without dairy, apparently - never even found a dairy-free diet sustainable, let alone effective. So, farewell to Paleo. It was a nice idea, but it was wrong.

Meet the Yamnaya

Who are the Yamnaya?

I’d never heard of them either. Eske Willerslev, professor of evolutionary biology in Copenhagen and Cambridge, describes them in the podcast as tall, blond, fair-skinned people subsisting on the dairy products from the animals they learned to domesticate.

They’re one of 3 clusters of genetic types making up the European-sourced stock of humanity:

1. Hunter gatherers (Grok types)

2. Agriculturalists (mostly in Southern Europe)

3. Yamnaya-style pastoralists well-adapted to dairy (mostly in Northern Europe

Want to have a guess where my genetics hail from? Pro tip: People got really mad when we conquered their towns w/ shitty little boats and pillaged and stole their women and all that. Crybabies.

Oh, and we did all that eating lots of dairy.

That’s right, Vikings.

In fact, the Yamnaya CONQUERED Scandinavia. Whoever lived there before got wrecked. Willerslev describes it as “probably a genocide.”

Nice fellas, the Yamnaya. But if they migrated to Scandinavia, where did they come from?

The area dominated by the Yamnaya at the time was pretty huge, especially for the time: much of what we’d now call Ukraine, Russia, some parts of Central Asia, and some parts of Eastern Europe.

This was during the Copper Age (did you know there was a Copper Age?) and Bronze Age, around 3,300-2,600 B.C. Not a crazy amount of time back. Certainly after the paleolithic had ended.

Interestingly, the ability to digest dairy, according to Willerslev, only developed less than 5,000 years ago. And it took a significant amount of time to spread: most people didn’t have it for thousands of years after it developed, and then it exploded.

It’s apparently not clear in the field of evolutionary biology what hastened its spread. Willerslev assumes there was some sort of famine or similar disaster, which would’ve provided a significant advantage to those able to digest dairy. Maybe a sort of pre-historic potato famine?

This completely blows Paleo out of the water for me. What do I care what Grok ate in 300,000 B.C. when my much more recent ancestors had developed the ability do digest delicious, nutrient-rich, fatty, and all-around-good-guy dairy as recently as 2,600 B.C.?

In addition, this shows us that it’s not even necessarily about the age of an adaptation. Dairy tolerance was developed maybe 5,000 years ago, but if it spread another 2,000 after that, it doesn’t matter that people in “my area” only got it somewhat recently. It was just brought there later, fully developed. People traveled a lot even in those days.

What were the Yamnaya like?

The Yamnaya culture was nomadic or semi-nomadic, with some agriculture practiced near rivers, and a few fortified sites [..]

The Yamnaya culture had and used two-wheeled carts and four-wheeled wagons, which are thought to have been oxen-drawn at this time, and there is evidence that they rode horses. [..]

Stable isotope ratios of Yamna individuals from the Dnipro Valley suggest the Yamnaya diet was terrestrial protein based with insignificant contribution from freshwater or aquatic resources. Anthony speculates that the Yamnaya ate meat, milk, yogurt, cheese, and soups made from seeds and wild vegetables, and probably consumed mead.

— Uncle Wikipedia on the Yamnaya

So no oily fish rich in omega-3 fatty acids then, ey? Just checking.

The Yamnaya got Around (and came around)

They seem to have turned into/generically inspired both the Vikings - and the Mongols!

There are various intermediate civilizations. Remember, we’re talking nearly 5,000 years ago. There was plenty of time to be .. ahem.. “getting jiggy with it?” as the kids say. Do they still say that?

There are a whole bunch of other cultures, some of which seem to have mixed with, evolved in parallel with, or derived from the Yamnaya. There’s apparently some disagreement how/when/where exactly people were gettin’ jiggy with it.

There’s a group called “Corded Ware Culture” (imagine they find your remains and call you this lol) that might or might not have derived from the Yamnaya. And they inhabited most of modern Northern Europe except Finland.

Corded Ware territory

These eventually made their way west, including to what’s now England, where they made.. bell beakers. You can tell these people liked their dairy, what with the pottery. That’s why they’re called the Bell Beakers culture.

Bell Beaker gang signs were everywhere

In any case, while the exact history of this migration is uncertain, it seems pretty clear that most modern Northern Europeans, and their recent descendants, can do amazing eating large amounts of dairy. Similar for certain types of Central Asians, many of whom are renowned for their curds, cheeses, and nomadic pastoralist lifestyles. Somebody must’ve forgotten to tell them they are lactose-intolerant.

So while we might not have the exact line to draw between the Yamnaya and modern Northern Europeans, it’s a pretty dope guess.

tl;dr: Some people do great on starch

Since I’m not exactly an expert on starch, I won’t go into as much detail as with my milk-drinking ancestors, the Yamnaya.

In addition, the idea that some people are pretty well adapted to the agricultural revolution isn’t as new as the dairy one.

More curious is that these two seem to have happened in similar time frames, around the last 5,000 years or so. Definitely less than 10,000 in most places.

Paleo/carnivore types often argue with me that peasant remains of the agricultural revolution aren’t as tall, thick-boned, handsome, bigly-jawed, or cool as Paleo man.

And that’s probably true and very cool, and who doesn’t want to be a meat-eating, woolly-mammoth slaying giga-paleochad.

But most people also didn’t have diabetes and heart disease and weren’t obese for 95% of the agricultural revolution. Just like the dairy adaptation of the Yamnaya, these people had thousands of years, more than enough time to adapt to starch.

I say: if we can get 1/3 of the population to unobese, undiabete, and unartheosclerize, yet they’re not all 6’2” Chads with a square jaw, that’s still a huge step in the right direction.

People on r/SaturatedFat are having tons of success eating low-protein, low-fat, high-carb diets. Typically around 80/10/10 macros, mostly based on starch but often with lots of fruit as well, if only for variety. (edit: 80/10/10, not 80/20/20 as I had typo’d previously, lol).

They report rapidly lowering glucose levels (ON A 80% CARB DIET, KETO MIND BLOWN!), effortless fat loss, finally being able to eat to satiety without gaining tons of weight.

For many it’s a massive revelation and relief, the first time in decades that they had a healthy relationship with food.

You know, kinda like yours truly with the cream diet.

So, what do instead?

I think we can still make educated guesses based on evolution. “Paleo” was just a pretty lacking variant of that, somebody’s favorite narrative that just didn’t pan out in actual evolutionary science.

The podcast linked above focuses mostly on Europe, but there’s tons of evolutionary biology about all sorts of peoples out there.

If your ancestors ate dairy for much of the last 2,000-5,000 years, it’s not a crazy assumption that you’re adapted to dairy. Same with agriculture.

Sure, go ahead and try it. If you get acute diarrhea from dairy, you’re probably lactose intolerant. And there are other ways in which you can be intolerant or even just sensitive to dairy.

But don’t feel you have to cut it out just because some marketing guru came up with a cool-sounding intuition pump. You do great on dairy, keep on doing dairy.

And same for agriculture and grains. Not everyone does great on grains. But many people thrive on them.

I obviously don’t know your exact genetic makeup and your genetically optimal diet. But the answer is probably much closer in our genetic history than the paleolithic age.

The virgin hunter-gatherer, getting murdered by the Chad woolly mammoth