When It Came to Eating Right, Did Hunter Gatherers Have the Right Stuff?
Yes, they lacked indoor plumbing, permanent settlements and elevated manners when it came to eating, but our hunter-gatherer ancestors may have eaten a diet that can help modern people combat metabolic syndrome and even type 2 diabetes. That’s the hypothesis of Dr. Umesh Masharani, an endocrinologist at the University of California at San Francisco. He and his colleagues are looking into the benefits of the diet our ancestors ate during the Paleolithic Era more than 10,000 years ago, before the invention of agriculture. Until then, our distant kin ate what they could hunt or gather. The result was a diet high in wild plants, with variable amounts of meat thrown in. It was, overall, a reasonably low-fat diet that required human digestive systems to work hard to extract nutrients. The pancreas and the body’s insulin-producing capabilities were never overwhelmed by a sudden sugar onslaught. But that changed when humans domesticated animals, grains and other plants, and settled down in vil
