Note that some of the information in this piece is taken from Dr. Herman Pontzer’s brilliant book Burn: The Misunderstood Science of Metabolism (India, USA). Dr. Herman Pontzer has been living with hunter gatherers and studying their lifestyle and diet for a long time. If you like this series, I highly recommend picking up a copy of his book.
In the last part of this series, I talked about what humans evolved to eat over millions of years of evolution. In this part, I want to talk about what the hunter gatherers that are still around eat.
Why Talk About Hunter Gatherers
Hunter gatherer populations have very little of the health problems plaguing the industrialized world like obesity, diabetes, heart attacks, hypertension, etc. so their diet and lifestyle are worth studying.
To give you an example, the Tsimane (a hunter gatherer population from South America) have negligible coronary artery calcium (CAC) which is a key metric of heart attack risk.
Between July 2, 2014, and Sept 10, 2015, 705 individuals, who had data available for analysis, were included in this study. 596 (85%) of 705 Tsimane had no CAC, 89 (13%) had CAC scores of 1–100, and 20 (3%) had CAC scores higher than 100. For individuals older than age 75 years, 31 (65%) Tsimane presented with a CAC score of 0, and only four (8%) had CAC scores of 100 or more, a five-fold lower prevalence than industrialised populations
Isn’t that remarkable? 85% of them have no CAC. Even the majority of guys above 75 had a CAC score of ZERO.
Here in India, living beyond 70 is considered a blessing (average life expectancy at birth is about 71 according to 2023 World Bank and WHO data).
People in more developed countries live longer (~78 years in the USA) but very few of them are healthy by that age (most rely on pharmacology or the medical system to keep them alive in some way or the other, e.g. blood thinners, stents, blood pressure medicine, etc.).
We’ve solved the problems that kill these hunter gatherers (infections, disease, etc.) with tools like antibiotics and vaccines, but we’re dying of different causes created by our diet and lifestyle. (According to the CDC, 93.0% of U.S. adults ≥65 reported ≥1 chronic condition, and 78.8% reported multiple chronic conditions)
In many ways, the hunter gatherer life is the opposite of ours. They hunt and gather their food, we get it from a supermarket (nowadays the supermarket delivers it to our door in 10 minutes or less).
They die of infectious disease, and we almost never do. We die of heart attacks, and they rarely get any.
What useful things can we absorb from the diet and lifestyle of hunter gatherers and what useless things can we discard from our own lives?
For that we must leave our pride and ego aside and study them.
The mindset that “there is nothing I can learn from these primitive savages” is basically the equivalent of you saying “there is nothing I can learn from my past” because less than a few hundred to a few thousand years ago (less than a blink of an eye in the evolutionary timeline), your ancestors were living a lot like them.
What Are These People Eating?
The one line answer is that they eat what is around them.
There isn’t a lot of pickiness simply because they lack the luxury of getting to choose what they want to eat from 1000 different options at a supermarket.
They eat whatever plant foods (nuts, tubers, fruits, wild grains, etc.) that grow around them.
They eat whatever animals they can catch that dwell around them.
They eat what they have access to.
For groups like the Hadza (well studied with lots of high quality data), they get 65% of their calories a day from carbohydrates.
About 15-20% of their daily calories come from honey. The rest of their carbs come from starchy plants like wild tubers.
Honey is not that different from refined sugar or the much hated high fructose corn syrup.
The saccharides in honey are mostly fructose and glucose. The saccharide in white cane sugar is sucrose which breaks down into fructose and glucose. The difference is fairly minimal from a metabolism perspective.
They are eating pure sugar all the time and spiking their blood sugar hard repeatedly… they should all be diabetic, right?
And if sugar causes heart disease, they should have clogged arteries, correct?
Likewise, they also eat wild game they catch. Red meat (gasp). They should be dropping dead from heart attacks, correct?
In reality, there is virtually no heart disease, high blood pressure, and diabetes among the Hadza.
The same is true of other studied hunter gatherer groups. They eat whatever is available locally and don’t seem to have any modern diseases.
They break every rule – there are groups that eat lots of sugars, groups that eat lots of meats, and none of them are getting heart attacks like us.
What are we doing wrong that they’re doing right?
There is no “one true diet”. The variation in human diets is MASSIVE.
When studied groups are plotted by how close they are to the equator, this becomes even clearer.
Populations that live closer to the equator have more access to plants and get much of their calories from carbohydrates because they are easily available (more trees and vegetation = more wild tubers, more honey, more fruits, etc.).
This is not to say they “avoid meat”. They actively hunt animals to secure meat. It’s just that plant foods are easier and in plenty.
Populations that live away from the equator (closer to the poles) have less access to plant foods and thus get more of their calories from animal foods.
This is not to say they “consider plants inferior”. They try very hard to secure plant foods as well (to the point of digging up rodent holes to steal their stores). Animals are just more abundant than plants for them.
But but but what about the Paleolithic diet?
The vast majority of humans never ate “paleo”.
Contrary to popular belief, almost no hunter gatherer group ate the “paleo diet” except if they lived in a region where they were forced into it. And humans living close to the poles were the exceptions to the norm.
The story behind the Paleo diet is that there’s an old book called the Ethnographic Atlas by George Murdock. It’s a database that catalogues data from lots of pre-industrial societies (many of which no longer exist).
Murdock assigned a dietary score from 0 to 9 as a rough estimate of the dependence on various subsistence activities (hunting, gathering, fishing, etc.) of various hunter gatherer populations.
The quality of the data isn’t great because there are no mentions of how he came up with these numbers. It could just be his hunch based on the groups he talked to.
Given that hunting is usually done by the men and that gathering is done by women, it’s likely that he missed a lot of the carbohydrate parts of their diet because he probably talked to more men than the women (for various reasons, first being that he was from a time where women and their contributions were not taken that seriously, and secondly I presume that many hunter gatherers are more cagey about letting outsiders interact with their women).
We also know that Murdock ignored things like honey, which is a big source of calories for hunter gatherers.
Some researchers then took these numbers extremely seriously and tried their best to come up with the “average” hunter gatherer diet. They tried their best to translate Murdock’s numbers into precise percentages of fats, carbs, and protein and concluded that about 55% of the calories come from animal foods.
This is the basis behind the book The Paleo Diet which launched it all.
These types of analyses also lead to the publishing of many peer reviewed papers that claim that hunter gatherers ate mostly animal foods. An example is below:
Studies like this are often pushed by influencers because they’ve only read the abstract and often don’t even have access to the full study. When you look at the actual study, it’s always Murdock’s Atlas.
This is from the full version of the study pictured above:
Also, the most extreme versions of the paleo diet that say things like 95% of hunter gatherer calories came from animals… are entirely made up (surprise!). Yeah, many book authors make up stuff. Just because it’s in a book does not make it true.
Local Adaptations
Even though evolution takes millions of years, lots of changes do happen over thousands of years as well.
Populations adapt to the food they have available around them. This is simply because if you can get more nutrients out of the food available to you, you are more likely to survive and pass your genes on.
There are various examples of this:
1) Lactose tolerance: Populations that had access to lot of milk (e.g. pastoralists) are far more likely to retain their ability to digest lactose into adulthood. They do not stop producing lactase enzyme as they grow older.
This gives them a massive advantage because they can get tons of nutrients and energy from animal milk while those without the adaptation need to secure them from more difficult sources.
Fun read: How I Fixed My Lactose Intolerance (To a Large Extent)
2) Salivary amylase: This is an enzyme in your saliva that digests starch. Given our evolutionary history, all humans have the gene that makes salivary amylase. But populations that rely on more carbohydrates have extra copies to help them get even more nutrition out of starches.
3) Anti-keto adaptations: I talked about this earlier as well. The Inuit (a population that lives around the arctic with little vegetation) have a CPT1A gene variant that alters how they use fats. Their production of ketones is heavily dampened i.e. in practical terms, they cannot “do keto” even if they wanted to.
The babies that didn’t have this genetic variation were more likely to die. Over time, they all have the genetic variant.
There are tons of examples like this. There are even populations in the Atacama Desert that adapted to naturally high levels of arsenic in their groundwater… they’ve got a gene that speeds up the clearance of arsenic from their body.
The reason I’m telling you this is because I want to show you how much variation there is to humanity. There is no one true diet (Paleo or high carb or keto or carnivore or vegan or whatever).
Anyone who says there is one diet for everyone and everything else is wrong or unhealthy is either ill informed, or has an agenda, or trying to sell you something.
So the vegan people lied to me?
This is just my opinion but from what I can tell, vegans are almost a religious group that views their diet to be “purer” or “more moral” than eating animals or animal produced foods.
They believe eating animals is immoral and just like how you can’t talk a man out of his religion, there is no evidence you can show a vegan that will get him to change his mind.
To them getting you to also be vegan is a religious pursuit and they will spew whatever they need to make it happen.
They don’t care about truth or history or facts. They just repeat the same talking points over and over again even if you show them that what they’re saying is false.
Again, these people view their diet as a religious and moral responsibility. Logic and facts have no place here. To a large extent, the same is true for vegetarians.
This is not to say that you can’t live a long and healthy life on a vegetarian or vegan diet with the help of modern technology like protein powders and vitamin and mineral supplements (for example, there is no plant based foods that are rich in vitamin B12 so a vegan must either supplement it or suffer from a deficiency).
But the question is… why?
Animal foods are excellent sources high quality protein and many micro-nutrients so why would you not eat them in your diet if you can afford them. The choice to be vegan or vegetarian is pure emotion and religion/ideology and has nothing to do with physiology.
I will say that as far as hypertrophy is concerned, it is quite difficult to get enough protein while keeping calories reasonable on these diets.
If you want maximum results in the gym, the vegetarian diet is suboptimal and the vegan diet is extremely suboptimal. (The only way to make the vegan diet work well for hypertrophy is to rely extensively on supplements like protein powders, vitamin B12, etc.)
There are no hunter gatherer groups that were vegan. You can only be a vegan in a modern industrialized society that has lots of cheap plant foods and supplements.
So the carnivore and keto people lied to me?
Again, it’s just my opinion, but from what I can tell, the carnivore/keto people are guys who had a lot of health problems (diabetes, obesity, hypertension, etc.) and their carnivore/keto diet helped them manage their health issues and/or shed lots of fat.
For the first time in their life, they find themselves losing fat without a lot of effort and see their health improve… of course they love this diet.
But that’s all they’ve done. They’ve lost weight. It does not make them diet experts or make their diet the “one true diet” for all.
The actual reason why the carnivore/keto diet works well for many people is that it does two things:
- It makes people cut out all the highly palatable junk food they are eating (no pizza, ice cream, soda, etc.)
- It gets them to consume more highly satiating foods like meat and eggs so they feel full for longer
Basically, it helps many people build a sustainable caloric deficit without feeling like they are starving all the time. They lose weight and they love it.
Of course most carnivore/keto influencers are exactly as ideological and aggressive rabid and foaming at the mouth like vegan influencers. It just seems to come with the territory of being a “one true diet” influencer.
As with before, you can live a long and healthy life on keto/carnivore but why would you? You are missing out on plant based foods which are excellent sources of various nutrients.
As far as hypertrophy is concerned, a carnivore/keto/low carb diet is suboptimal because the lack of glucose blunts your ability to do high intensity work. This is not to say that you can’t make it work, it’s that you would perform better if you had glucose in your system.
This has been covered earlier but bears repeating: High intensity work requires fast ATP and glucose is unmatched (there is a reason why very few athletes are on keto). Almost everyone underperforms on true high intensity work if they don’t have enough glucose in their system.
This is why almost every athlete eats a high carb meal before training and why all the coaches recommend it. You can test it for yourself.
Train a day with a high carb pre-workout meal (e.g. 4 bananas before a leg day) and train a day with a zero carb pre-workout meal (e.g. 4 eggs before a leg day). All other things equal, you will perform much better on the day you ate carbs as your pre-workout.
There are no hunter gatherer groups that were exclusively carnivore. You can only be a carnivore in a modern industrialized society that farms animals at large scales.
So why are we becoming fat and diabetic?
Thus far I’ve shown you that hunter gatherers are eating plants, sugars, milk, meat including red meat, etc. and they have virtually no diseases of modern society like diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, etc.
You’re likely asking yourself one question:
If it’s not carbs, not sugar, not fats, not red meat, not plants, not animals, why are we dying from diabetes, hypertension, and heart attacks and they aren’t? What are we doing wrong?
I will answer this question in detail in the next few pieces in this series.
Hint: The answer is not in what these hunter gatherers are eating, but in what these guys are NOT eating.
See you in the next piece.
Your man,
Harsh Strongman
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