 The idea that cavemen, hunter-gatherers, various indigenous groups, as well as our ancestors, died when they were young, is something commonly used to argue against the Paleo diet, any sort of appeal to nature, and more recently, the Carnivore diet. This is something that's parroted over and over again and repeated as if it was a fact. It is so ingrained in our culture, in our conventional wisdom, as it's something we've been told since we were kids. There are several considerations here. The main one is that these people were free from degenerative disease, heart disease, cancer, diabetes, didn't exist. These people didn't have a word for insomnia in their language. Another is that life expectancy in the past few hundred to thousand years isn't exactly good. We know people in the Middle Ages died just as young as these people, and one example is in the 17th century, in the colony of Virginia, about 40% of people died before reaching adulthood. Also, you would last a week in that environment, and that might be a generous assumption. The main consideration here is the incredibly high rate of infant mortality as well as early childhood mortality. The reason for this is twofold. One, the nutrition required during these developmental stages of life is substantially higher when they are younger. A fully grown man can go weeks to months in a wild environment without calories. A baby or a child, not so much. The second thing is that these young people are not as developed as an adult, there might have been some sort of physical altercation or issue that they would not have fared as well in. We have to understand that these people were trying to survive. If the crops didn't grow well, if they weren't hunting properly, if there was a drought or famine, people would die, and unfortunately the babies and the children were far more vulnerable than the adults. We see many civilizations where if they were able to get past a certain age, they had a pretty good shot of seeing their grandchildren, essentially. One study done by Gerven and Kaplan found that the most common age of death for hunter-gatherers who survived past 15 was actually 72. Another thing that people like to bring up is that these cavemen were dropping dead of heart attacks when they were 25 years old, as if they were there. It's crazy that these people assume these things. When we look at two groups of people, the Masai and the Inuit, who subsisted largely off of animal foods, they were free of these ailments. A field survey of 400 Masai men and women and children in Tanganyika indicates little or no clinical or chemical evidence for atherosclerosis. Despite a long-continued diet of exclusively meat and milk, the men have low levels of serum cholesterol and no evidence for arterial sclerotic heart disease. The reasons for this disagreement with the popular hypothesis relating animal fat intake to coronary heart disease are examined. The authors can see that some overriding protective mechanisms such as freedom from emotional stress or abundance of physical exercise may be present. They favor the conclusion that dietary fat is not responsible for coronary disease. How hard is that to believe, huh? Not so much considering what you've been told your whole life and that fat and cholesterol are going to clog your arteries. What if we take a look at their actual cholesterol levels? They are remarkably low. Their total serum cholesterol is about half the average Americans. In addition to having incredibly low cholesterol, their blood pressure is also low, hypertension is rare, and being overweight is practically non-existent. Their electrocardiogram readings show no signs of heart disease and they have exceptionally good endurance, the way they examine these people were through autopsies in male Masai. If we take a look at another group of people commonly referred to in this context, the Inuits or the Eskimos more properly referred to as the first nation Native Americans indigenous to these colder climates, we see that the reason that they're suffering from degenerative disease is because they started incorporating modern processed foods into their diet. Weston Price, who was a dentist in the early 1900s who explored these groups of people, referred to these foods as the foods of commerce, refined flour, sugar, canned foods. And interestingly enough, some people might say that the heavy tobacco use of these people might have contributed to that, but when they were on their indigenous diet, smoking the tobacco in a natural way didn't seem to have too much of a negative impact on their life expectancy. So it's safe to say the intake of refined carbohydrate and sugar parallel to the rise in atherosclerotic disease in Greenland Eskimos. While the total carbohydrate intake of the Greenland Eskimos was just 2-8% of total calories in 1855, this increased to around 40% of calories by 1955. The Greenland Eskimos studied by these two people in the 1970s no longer consumed a traditionally healthy Eskimo diet. So overall there are several things that contribute to the low life expectancy, from high rates of infant mortality to possible survival situations where these people would have died at a very young age due to stress of procuring calories in nature, lack of those calories, possibly even battling between other tribes. Then we have instances where the data collected from these people was actually when they weren't following their indigenous diet. Essentially the difference between our modern life expectancy and the life expectancy of these indigenous people is if they didn't suffer from those ailments. So hypothetically in more civilized groups of people that weren't hunter-gatherers, maybe they were settled in groups of people and they had possibly even some agriculture going on, such as the Swiss that we looked at in Weston Price's book. They lived in the Little Chantel Valley, they harvested rye, they had rye bread and dairy and all of these products. They lived in a fairly safe place. So what happens if you live in a safe place and you have access to these calories in the context of an indigenous diet? Your quality of life is essentially much higher than what it is now. Not to say that these people weren't immune to things like smallpox and various modern diseases, but their quality of life was substantially higher. Now I think it's safe to say if we have babies dying in the hospital of cancer, if we have miscarriage rates going up, if autism rates are skyrocketing, all these modern problems, everyone being on medication, even supposedly young, healthy people like me suffering from insomnia due to modern ailments, whether it's that I'm working my bartending job, three days straight, and then staring at lights, filming videos, there's so many unfortunate things in the modern context that we're trying to alleviate and part of it is going back to those indigenous diets or indigenous roots. So if anyone's going to try to make an argument that cape and drop dead at 30, I hope you guys give them a mouthful. So thank you guys for watching. If you guys would like to support the channel, please subscribe, like, and share the video. If you guys do want to check out my Patreon, I got some exclusive videos on there. My Amazon shop does have some nutrient-dense foods that our ancestors might have consumed. If you do want to take a look at my website, frank-tofano.com, I am offering products that I'm wearing right now. I have my lip balm right here on my desk. I have my pomade in my hair. I just brushed my teeth with my tooth powder and I'm wearing my deodorant. So if you guys do want hygiene products that are free from any sort of modern chemicals, definitely check out my website. If you guys would like to reach out to me for one-on-one consultations, whether you want to understand this further or understand how to apply this to your current lifestyle and be healthy, feel free to reach out to me via email. All of that stuff can be found in the comments down below. So again, thank you guys so much for watching this video. If you guys would like to see any videos in the future or have any questions or would like to clarify something, I have provided the sources below, but feel free to ask any questions.