Whole Foods’ new nutritional ratings system ignores 2.4 million years of human history. Oops.
First off, we love us some Whole Foods (WF). They get it, and in a big way. Plus their stores are really cool and smell nice. But, in case you missed it, WF just launched (or is in process of launching) a new nutrition rating system called ANDI (Aggregate Nutrient Density Index) based on the work of author Joel Fuhrman. So far, so good.
A quick review of the ANDI page reveals a thoughtful effort to help consumers eat better. However, the “Low Fat” portion of ANDI got our attention. According to ANDI, your diet should be low in fat and you should “get your healthy fats from plant sources, such as nuts and avocados.” In other words, your primary source of fatty acids/lipids (aka fat) should be from plants. While we get why WF takes this position, the ANDI system conveniently ignores 2.4 million years of human evolution, hundreds of peer-reviewed articles on fatty acids, and major paradigm shifts under way in the nutrition, medical, and genomic sciences. Again, we love us some WF, but this is a classic example of political vegetarianism vs evolutionary biology. Somewhere betwixt the twain the truth will be found. But first, our perspective.
By analyzing ancient human and animal remains, studying the diets of modern hunter-gatherers, and comparing nutrient compositions of wild and domesticated plant and animal foods, evolutionary biologists have gained insights into ancestral human diets. Although dietary patterns varied by latitude, season, weather, culture, and other variables, all ancestral diets shared key features. Food sources were limited to unprocessed plants foraged, and unprocessed land and marine animals hunted from the proximate environment. Hunted animals consumed only natural foods from local environments. Until recently, human diets consisted of combinations of wild animal carcasses (including brains, bone marrow, and organs), shellfish, fish, fruits, leafy vegetables, mushrooms, insects, larvae, nuts, and seasonal honey and eggs. These diets provided balance in critical metabolic processes, favored health, and allowed our ancestors to thrive, reproduce, and pass their genes to subsequent generations.
It is clear from modern medical research that dietary lipid intake exert important influence upon human health and the expression of chronic disease. Therefore, it is likely that human dietary lipid requirements are genetically determined, and that the evolutionary, nutritional selective pressures that have acted upon the ancestral human lineage over the past 2.4 million years may provide important insight into optimal, present day, lipid intakes. Substantial evidence from archaeological deposits reveal that consumption of animal tissues play a prominent (often dominant) role in diet of our ancestors. Consequently, fats derived from wild game animals almost always represented the primary lipid source in pre-agricultural human diets.
Neither fish nor fowl became common dietary constituents until about 15,000 years ago — limited mainly due to technology — so the main nutritional adaptation over the most of humanities 2.4 million year existence was the tissues of mammals that were either scavenged or hunted. Archaeological and ethnographic data indicate that our ancestors consumed not just muscle tissue, but also certain fatty portions of the carcass including brain, marrow and depot fat. Consequently, the lipid composition of these wild ruminant tissues provide insight into the qualitative range of dietary lipids that ancestral humans typically encountered and may be useful in determination of present day dietary lipid recommendations for the prevention and treatment of chronic disease.
So any new nutrition rating system (e.g., ANDI) that honestly wants to improve human health should develop rating systems that consider the lipid composition of mammal tissues most likely consumed by our ancestors in order to provide some evolutionary glimpse into dietary lipid profiles that modern humans are physiologically adapted to and create rating systems that most likely resembles fats we are genetically selected for.
LIVNAKED friendos. Think before you bite.
I think that the author here is tyring to advance and interesting point, but with a somewhat flawed (or maybe just oversimplified?) understanding of evolutionary theory and genomics. Evolution is a random process, not a response to environmental factors. To use the standby “giraffe” illustration – Giraffes didn’t start being born with long necks because there was more edible material at the tops of trees. Rather, one mutant giraffe was born with a genetic anomaly that gave it a long-ass neck. The long-ass neck gave it a feeding advantage over other giraffes, and so it survived longer, outcompeted its fellows for mates, and consequently its freak genes became dominant in the gene pool and long-necked continued to out-compete short-necked variants over time (speaking of oversimplification). So, it isn’t really legitimate to say that we have evolved to eat meat. We evolved based on what best enabled our ancestors to survive. All of the traditional biological and genetic processes that underlie the last several million years, however, have ceased to be relevant to human evolution in the last 1000+ years, when how much money your father made had equal bearing on your ability to survive as did your basic genetic make-up. All that to say, that while humans have certain basic dietary requirements, quibbling about the sources from which they should optimally be coming is a bit of a non-starter. There are studies that show that consuming lean meat rather than an equivalent amount of vegetable protein will lead to greater muscle density, but I don’t beleive that there is any truly solid rationale pointing to evolution as the reason for this disparity.
Ultimately, anyone who manages to consume a healthy amount of lean protein without a huge amount of saturated fat, sodium or simple carbs is doign okay for themselves. This is absolutely easier to do by consuming a diet free from low-quality “enhanced” factory-farmed meats, but there is no one answer. As others have commented in this thread, there is a huge amount of diversity in metabolic factors across the human population, some will get along perfectly fine with a Vegan diet, while others will not. Some will have much more energy and feel better by cutting meat out of their diets. Others not so much. With so much variation, and so much uncertainty, I feel like we should ALL get off our high horses and let others live in their own particular “sweet spots” where their biology and ideology are aligned. If you want to eat that horse you just got off of, that’s your business.
A lot of smart comments I agree with here, so my gist of it is: I disagree with you. Meat today is too full of hormones and antibacterials for me to consider it optimal for health.
There’s two things I would like to add to this conversation. First off is that saturated animal fats are REALLY important to good health. It is commercial animal products that mess people up, so avoid them like the plague. Clean animal protein and fats are essential to optimal health…Now the issue of biochemical individuality. There is a system called Metabolic Typing that will place you into one of six different types, based on your ancestry. This gives you the foods and percentages of fats, carbs and proteins that is optimal for YOU. I will argue that we all need good clean animal based foods, it is just how much and of what quality that make the difference. Check it out at http://www.bioletics.com. Also reference-http://www.westonaprice.org/ To your health!
KiKiVeggie misses evolution. Giraffes did not get long necks because one mutant giraffe miraculously took over the gene pool. The longer the neck, the better the survival chance, reaching slightly higher for food than shorter necks. Over long periods of time, this shifted the gene pool toward longer necks, with favorable mutations and variation growing in frequency.
Weston Price conducted major anthropological studies in the 2oth century on primitive cultures. This article confirms much of his findings.
Weston Price folks need to do some actual research. Price’s views were that an indigenous unprocessed diet was healthier, not that eating large amounts of meat is. This is exactly what Whole Foods is saying.
Our factory farms are far from indigenous hunting. Still the research shows that many of the cultures Price studies still have the lowest life expectancy and highest cancer rates.
Read this article for a bit of wake up:
http://www.diseaseproof.com/archives/diet-myths-the-misinformation-of-barry-groves-and-weston-price.html
Here’s a snippet debunking the indigenous myth:
When Barry Groves and the Weston Price Foundation people listed above rest their laurels on the health of high meat eating tribes, we have to counter that with real research, not phony claims. The research on the life expectancy of these people is clear. The Inuit Greenlanders have the worst longevity statistics in North America. A careful literature search reveals multiple studies documenting an earlier death in these people as a result of their low consumption of fresh produce and their high consumption of meat.
Legitimate research on the health of these people at present and in the past, show that they die on the average about 10 years younger and have a higher rate of cancer than the general population of Canada. Again, we don’t want to mimic the population of Canada and certainly not a population with even a shorter life expectancy. But this research can not be ignore: Iburg KM ; Br�nnum-Hansen H ; Bjerregaard P. Health expectancy in Greenland. Scand J Public Health. 2001; 29(1):5-12. Choini�re R. Mortality among the Baffin Inuit in the mid-80s.Arctic Med Res. 1992; 51(2):87-93.
Similar statistics are available about the Maasai in Kenya. The Maasai are best distinguished by their jewelry and ornamentation in their “self-deformation” of the body: elongated or torn ear lobes and stretched out lips. They do eat a diet rich in wild hunted meats and have the worst life expectancy in the modern world today. Maasai women have a life expectancy of 45 years, and men only live 42 years. I know these red-meat loving nuts will claim that those statistics are of the modern Maasai, not those of years gone by, but the data is also damaging even if you bring up statistics from 20 or more years ago, when good data was collected.
Why do so many arguments start off with a horrible, pedantic and probably incorrect synopsis of evolutionary mechanics that has nothing to do with the topic at hand? Has anyone ever heard of potential wells? Why do the American ancestors of former slaves have a tendency towards hypertension? Not because of slow mutations over time. Maybe it’s the same for giraffes. Perhaps something happened all at once, the short necked giraffes got no food and they all died.
Thumbs down for oversimplified, pedantic lectures on evolutionary mechanics, especially when they have nothing to do with the topic. Despite the Kansas State Board of Education, anyone with more than a cursory understanding of evolution has encountered the concept of potential wells and genetic bottleneck. The concept of evolution by slow change is only applicable to a steady state environment and ecology which is seldom the case. The American ancestors of slaves certainly did not develop a tendency towards hypertension gradually over a thousand years, it happened more or less all at once.
I suggest at least reading up on the Toba catastrophe before trying to use a less than rudimentary knowledge of evolution to draw conclusions about the rather complex field of human nutrition. And leave the giraffes out altogether.
Consequently, the lipid composition of these wild ruminant tissues provide insight into the qualitative range of dietary lipids that ancestral humans typically encountered and may be useful in determination of present day dietary lipid recommendations for the prevention and treatment of chronic disease.
Why do the American ancestors of former slaves have a tendency towards hypertension? Not because of slow mutations over time. Maybe it’s the same for giraffes. Perhaps something happened all at once, the short necked giraffes got no food and they all died.
There are lot of vegan/vegetarian people who like the taste of meat, but choose not to eat it for ethical reasons. That is why meat replacements exist. It amazes me how many omnivores don’t understand this. They are dumbfounded when people who don’t eat meat emulate it in different ways. Really? Is that so hard to understand? We have moral issues with it, okay? And yes, I understand that everyone has different morals and that not everyone cares about animal rights. More specifically that very few people care about animal rights. But maybe you meat-eaters could try to be a little more understanding too?
@vitameatavegimin No one. I am the arbiter of what kind of life deserves consideration for myself only.
hi, our post is not about personal choices. it’s about science. we would never for a second suggest any one personal choices about food are anyone’s business but their own. we are simply pointed to what we think is a flaw in thinking around the science – not moral issues.
People should ware statesman vegetables and whole grains, and little superfatted meats, seasoner and sweetening