Eating like your oldest ancestors

In 1985 two scholars at Emory, a physician named Boyd Eaton and an anthropologist named Melvin Konner, published a paper in a major medical journal with a provocative idea: the human body was shaped by two million years of hunting and gathering, agriculture is only ten thousand years old, and many of our modern diseases come from eating foods our genes never met. They called it Paleolithic nutrition, and the paleo diet grew from it.

The pattern: meat, fish, eggs, vegetables, fruit, nuts and seeds. No grains, no dairy, no legumes, no refined sugar or oils, because those arrived with farming. The logic is evolutionary: eat what your ancestors ate, and the mismatch goes away.

The idea has been tested and argued over for forty years. The strongest finding is that people on a paleo pattern tend to eat more vegetables and protein and far less processed food than before, and they do well, with improvements in weight, blood pressure and blood sugar in short trials. The weakest part is the history: there was no single Paleolithic diet, ancestral humans ate wildly differently depending on where they lived, and the foods we have now, even the meat and vegetables, are nothing like what they ate. Grains and legumes, excluded by the rule, are in nearly every long-lived population on earth.

So Vault Human keeps the direction and drops the dogma. The direction is excellent: real food, lots of plants, quality protein, nothing from a factory. That's what every sensible key on this shelf says, and paleo says it with a story that helps some people stick to it.

For the Meaning chamber: Eaton and Konner's deeper point was about mismatch, and it applies beyond food. We have bodies built for one world living in another. Noticing the mismatch, in food, in movement, in sleep, in light, is most of what this year has been.