Brief history of human diet

Previously in series: The myth of 5 a day - people never ate that much fruit and veg, Dietary consequences.

I've been listening to an audiobook about history of potato cultivation, which I purchased legitimately, and then proceeded to strip DRM of it in spite of Audible insisting in its FAQ that it's impossible. Are you getting WTF overload already?

Anyway... for people who are puzzled by the recent obesity/diabetes/metabolic syndrome clusterfuck, here's a quick reminder of history of human diet:

• Humans did a lot of hunting and gathering with diet composition being highly varied depending on local circumstances. Normally hunting would bring most high quality protein, while gathering would bring most calories, and diversity of food sources would ensure good dietary balance and protect against bad seasons.
• Then humans switched to agriculture. This happened at least 7 times, independently, almost at once, after millions of years during which it could have happened and didn't. Amount of evidence we have is just ridiculously high compared to all other human evolutionary transitions (like language, behavioral modernity, industrial revolution, and scientific revolution - all happening just once) that it's a shame that we don't have any convincing theories explaining why it happened when and where it happened.
• Invariably, this switch resulted in severe health problems. Calories were more plentiful, but reliance on a small number of food sources virtually ensured micronutrient deficiencies, and regular famines due to bad weather. Farmers were shorter, died earlier, and generally suffered. This is well documented everywhere transition to agriculture happened.
• Gradually, people figured out how to diversify their food sources, and in time farmers got as healthy as hunter-gatherers before them. There were more kinds of food, better agricultural practices, better preservation methods, better cooking methods, varieties of food grown got changed, and to a small extent even human biochemistry changed to adapt to agriculture.
• There was still one huge problem - people were spending insane amount of time on food preparation. According to some statistics, even as recently as a century ago, average wife spent 45 hours a week on activities related to food preparation. Stay-at-home mums were not a cultural quirk - they were a necessity (unless you could afford servants).
• A new revolution in food production happened in the last century. There was quantitative increase in productivity, but most interesting part of it was switch from highly home-labour-intensive food which required rigid gender role separation to semi-prepared food which freed women into general labour force.

Yes, it was not feminist nonsense which brought equality, or birth control, or anything like that - it was primarily food processing industry. You might protest that you don't eat that much processed food - but you're fooling yourself. How many of you have milked your own cows, churned your own butter, baked your own bread (milling flour has been industrialized ages ago - but at first it was also done at home), made your own pasta etc.? We have gone so far up the food processing ladder than we forgot how much processing goes into all those seemingly simple foods that form bulk of our diets. Actually, I do bake my own bread sometimes, but with a bread machine, so it hardly counts, and mostly because British bread is atrocious spongy shit.


Unfortunately food is a complex matter, and this transition went not without causing some serious problems, just like the original switch to agriculture. If you think about it - these problems aren't terribly severe. Yes - untreated obesity is live-threatening, and we haven't found good cure for it, but we have been really good at treating the symptoms. There are drugs for diabetes and hypertension, cars have replaced the need to even as much as walk longer distances, and loss of physical attractiveness can be largely covered by learning the art of myspace shots. People still live longer each year, and don't seem that terribly distressed.


Moreover, it seems that obesity rates have plateaued in States in the last decade - at a ridiculously high rate, but it's not unlikely that the worse is already over, and they'll only go down from there.

If the rates start indeed falling, then perhaps the transition to the new kind of food will have went surprisingly smoothly, compared to all such past transitions.

Case study - USA

Let's take a look at how eating patterns changed in one of the worst affected countries - USA. It is so commonly repeated that people eat more sugar, fat and animal products that it gets on my nerves. Here's the definite table of all major food groups (at least 1% share at either date), based on FAO data, as percentage of caloric intake, ordered by relative change. I'd love to have data for 1900, as 1961 was midway the shift from unprocessed to processed food, but we have to do with the data we have, instead of despairing for the data we wished to have.

Product	1961	2005
Rice	0.93%	2.46%
Poultry Meat	2.23%	5.48%
Cheese	1.67%	3.94%
Vegetable Oils	9.58%	18.58%
Groundnuts	1.1%	1.55%
Maize	2.05%	2.52%
Vegetal Products	64.93%	72.77%
Fruits - Excluding Wine	2.77%	3.03%
Beer	2.36%	2.57%
Meat	11.63%	12.0%
Alcoholic Beverages	3.77%	3.84%
Cereals - Excluding Beer	21.76%	21.44%
Sugar & Sweeteners	17.89%	16.92%
Pulses	1.25%	1.14%
Potatoes	2.69%	2.43%
Wheat	17.5%	15.5%
Vegetables	2.22%	1.93%
Starchy Roots	3.14%	2.57%
Animal Products	35.07%	27.23%
Other Alcoholic Beverages	1.19%	0.92%
Pigmeat	4.41%	3.36%
Milk - Excluding Butter	13.29%	9.9%
Beans	1.13%	0.79%
Bovine Meat	4.36%	3.02%
Eggs	2.33%	1.45%
Butter, Ghee	2.26%	1.05%
Animal Fats	6.92%	2.91%

That is:

• Americans eat more vegetal, and less animal products - and within this category there's shift towards leaner meats
• Americans eat about as much sugar & HFCS
• Americans eat absolutely insane amounts of vegetable oil

And these are the biggest losers. I will slap around with a large healthy trout everyone who dares to suggest that HFCS is responsible for obesity. HFCS is damn sugar - statistics say it's vegetable oil you eat too much of.

"HFCS causes obesity" is the new "vaccines cause autism"

Case study - Germany

For a second case study, I took a less drastically affected country - Germany. Germany is taking the transition somewhat better than States, and your guess is as good as mine if this is a genuine success, or the worst is simply still ahead of them.

I wished to simply have EU15 average or something like that, but FAO lacks good aggregate data, so here's the next best thing.

Product	1961	2005
Maize	0.4%	2.44%
Rice	0.53%	1.34%
Poultry Meat	0.66%	1.53%
Wine	0.61%	1.32%
Nuts	0.55%	1.1%
Cheese	1.93%	3.76%
Other Alcoholic Beverages	0.81%	1.39%
Vegetables	1.08%	1.8%
Fish, Seafood	0.77%	1.17%
Vegetable Oils	8.81%	11.4%
Wheat	14.5%	18.41%
Sugar & Sweeteners	11.71%	14.22%
Alcoholic Beverages	5.71%	6.63%
Pigmeat	6.25%	6.96%
Milk - Excluding Butter	8.09%	8.89%
Meat	9.15%	9.79%
Vegetal Products	67.45%	69.96%
Cereals - Excluding Beer	24.94%	25.47%
Animal Products	32.55%	30.04%
Beer	4.3%	3.91%
Fruits - Excluding Wine	3.75%	3.28%
Stimulants	1.07%	0.91%
Eggs	1.7%	1.31%
Animal Fats	12.43%	8.76%
Butter, Ghee	6.56%	3.6%
Bovine Meat	1.99%	1.02%
Potatoes	8.81%	4.06%
Rye	8.2%	2.39%

Interesting points:

• Changes are much less drastic than in States.
• There's big shift away from local rye and potatoes to more international wheat, maize, and rice.
• Just like in States, there's shift from butter to vegetable oil, and from fatter to leaner meat - but it's less significant.
• Other than that, German food preferences are remarkably stable over such a long period of time, and such drastic changes in actual agricultural practice.

Case study - Japan

And finally the country which takes transition remarkably well - they are essentially free of Western metabolic syndrome troubles. You'd think they sticked to their traditional food? No such luck.

Product	1961	2005
Maize	0.16%	2.74%
Poultry Meat	0.18%	2.03%
Pigmeat	0.36%	3.37%
Meat	1.07%	6.38%
Vegetable Oils	3.26%	12.21%
Milk - Excluding Butter	1.42%	3.78%
Animal Products	9.64%	20.58%
Eggs	1.45%	2.75%
Beer	0.74%	1.3%
Other Alcoholic Beverages	1.51%	2.54%
Demersal Fish	1.19%	1.83%
Fruits - Excluding Wine	1.36%	2.0%
Sugar & Sweeteners	7.01%	10.01%
Wheat	9.73%	13.32%
Animal Fats	1.05%	1.38%
Fish, Seafood	4.52%	5.93%
Alcoholic Beverages	3.56%	4.65%
Vegetables	2.4%	2.82%
Pelagic Fish	2.5%	2.21%
Vegetal Products	90.36%	79.42%
Soyabeans	4.29%	3.52%
Potatoes	2.09%	1.5%
Cereals - Excluding Beer	60.34%	38.68%
Fermented Beverages	1.3%	0.68%
Rice	46.6%	22.09%
Beans	1.24%	0.54%
Starchy Roots	5.87%	2.45%
Pulses	1.44%	0.6%
Sweet Potatoes	3.31%	0.64%
Barley	3.6%	0.17%

Or:

• Changes are even more drastic than in other case studies.
• There has been huge reduction in consumption of rice, barley, sweet potatoes.
• There has been huge increase in consumption of animal products, and vegetable oil, and big increase in consumption of sugar.
• Japanese drink far more milk than they used to - and fuck lactose intolerance.

So to sum it up... I makes little sense. There's no going back. Stay-at-home mums are as much a thing of the past as bands of hunters chasing mammoths across tundra. You have to switch. The question remains - what to switch to.


The optimistic answer to this is simply follow the crowd, and hope they'll eventually figure out what works. Even if it ends up as badly as the idea of replacing animal fats with partially hydrogenated vegetable oils and simple sugars (yes, these were the original "healthy foods") - someone will come with a pretty good drugs for diabetes by the time you need them. Maybe we'll even stem-cell diabetes away entirely?

The pessimistic answer is to just copy the Japanese.

Enjoy your whale sushi.