 Our ancestors consumed an incredible variety of both animal and plant foods. As you can imagine, certain animals are specific to certain parts of the world, just as plant foods are specific to certain regions of the world as well as the time of year. This brings up the question, is our understanding of what the Paleo diet should be correct? Unfortunately, the Paleo diet focuses more on what foods we should eliminate as opposed to nutrient density and the quality of the food in the diet. Upon further observation of this variance in plant and animal foods, it becomes clear that the one consistent in these indigenous, native, hunter-gatherer diets, whatever you may call it, is the presence of high quality animal foods. If there is such a clear difference in the types of plant foods and the variety of plant foods and when we look at these plant foods we see they don't exactly have a complete nutritional profile, it definitely questions our current conventional what we've been told our whole lives, beliefs about nutrition. Our analysis showed that whenever and wherever it was ecologically possible, hunter-gatherers consumed high amounts, 45-65% of energy from animal food. 73% of the worldwide hunter-gatherer societies derived greater than 50% of their subsistence from animal foods, whereas only 14% of these societies derived greater than 50% of their subsistence from gathered plant foods. This high reliance on animal-based foods coupled with the relatively low carbohydrate content of wild plant foods produces universally characteristic macronutrient composition ratios in which protein is elevated from 20% to 35% of energy at the expense of carbohydrates, 22% to 40% of energy. And some people are inclined to say that these people didn't live past 30 or 35, but field studies of 20th century hunter-gatherers showed them to be generally free of the signs and symptoms of cardiovascular disease. And we can safely say that their main food source was meat. The quality of the food these people were consuming is the main thing we need to understand here. When you raise an animal properly, it increases the nutrient content of everything. The fat soluble vitamins A, D, E, K2, water soluble vitamins B and C, omega-3 fatty acids, all the minerals, all the elements are substantially increased in wild animal foods. Not only that, the wild plant foods were much less inflammatory and much higher in various minerals and elements than the foods were consuming now. These plant foods might not have been a great source of vitamins or calories, but they were certainly better than what we're currently consuming. To get a better understanding of what animal foods these people consumed, we're going to take a look at the first nation people that settled in the Arctic regions. There are 23 recorded genus of fish that they consumed, from salmon to cod, trout, flatfish, rockfish, sculpins, and for each of these 23 genus, you have a variety of species over 10 types of cod, 7 types of trout, 7 types of salmon, 10 types of flatfish, 5 types of herring, 8 types of rockfish, 6 types of sculpins, and that isn't touching even half of it. These people likely consumed anywhere from 150 to 200 different types of fish, let alone other animal foods in the diet. When they go out to that river and go fishing, they're not just catching salmon, they're catching 5, 6, 7 different types of salmon, in addition to all those other fish. This incredible variety applies to all of the food groups, birds, fish, insects, mammals, marine invertebrates, mainly shellfish. It might sound crazy that these native peoples consumed over 1000 different types of animal foods in the case of us right now, we only really eat beef, pork, and chicken in America. But these were first nation people specific to an Arctic climate. Imagine a warmer climate like a jungle where there's a much higher level of species diversity. Not only was there this incredible variance in the animal foods they consumed because of this, but the preparation methods vary greatly depending on the animal as well as the tribe. One group of enuits would eat the fat between the intestines of a female bear, feeding the rest to the dogs. Another group would dry all the meat on a rack. Most groups would roast, boil, or stew bear meat and render the fat. So just in a food like bear or bear meat, something that we don't even consume now, we could likely see dozens of different preparations and preferences for certain parts of the animal in these tribes. This was based on a couple of different things, from the nutrient content to the preservation of the food, to how practical it was to carry the food back to their camp. In some cases, if the animal was large, like caribou, the hunter would eat some on the spot and bring back the prized parts, maybe sending tribe members back to gather it. Some groups considered the head, the fermented contents of the stomach, and the droppings made into a soup, delicacies, eating it with blubber. Roasted ribs were favored, boiled kidneys. They would even ferment the liver in the stomach under the hot sun for several days. They ate the ends of the bones. Other groups may have dried out stomach strips and used it to flavor boiled meat. Some preserved marrow and tallow by skewering the fat on sticks and drying it out. You could probably write lectures just based on the preparation that all of these indigenous groups had for one animal, whether it's a bear or a caribou. Let alone all of the other hundreds of animals they consumed. It's safe to say that each tribe had at least thousands of food preparations that they were used to doing depending on the animal. This is what humans are meant to do. This is our job essentially. Our job in nature was to survive and having this knowledge of all of these animal products, all of these preparation methods is something that we've essentially lost in our culture. Whether it was raw, sun dried, boiled, mashed with grease, baked, frozen, rotten, smoked, roasted over a fire, mixed with the stomach contents, it seems like there was no wrong way to consume high quality animal foods. Something like duck was even eaten raw when cooking was not possible. It was boiled, roasted, dried just like the other meats. Whatever you can think of, someone ate it that way. Eggs were interestingly gathered discreetly. They didn't want the animals to become suspicious so they weren't really consumed in incredibly large amounts. Fish of course are included in this unimaginable amount of food preparations. But this was more specific to the part of the fish, the organ as opposed to the animal in general. Fish eggs were a prized food in every single indigenous group. But the preparation was pretty different. Sometimes they were dried, sometimes they were boiled, sometimes they were eaten with the fat made into a stew. One common theme among prized foods in native groups, the foods that they liked eating first and in certain ways is that they were very high in certain nutrients. Of course when you're consuming high quality animal foods pretty much every part of the animal is nutritious but the eggs of the fish are much higher in nutrients than the flesh of the fish. One example of this food preference on nutrient density is bogong moths. Bogong moths were historically used as a food source by aboriginal tribes, the natives to Australia located in the southeastern part of the continent. Tribes would travel to the Australian capital territories towards the summits of mountains to harvest moths where they would also meet other aboriginal tribes, fostering intertribal relations as people gathered and feasted during these harvests. People would travel into the caves and scrape ace-devating moths off the wall into nets and dishes using sticks. That pretty much means that the moths were in a hybrid native state and couldn't really fly away. Once gathered the moths would be roasted to remove the scales and wings and then either eaten immediately or ground into a paste and made into moth meat cakes that would last and could be taken home. The moth was said to have a nice nutty flavor that was most similar to walnuts or almonds. The bogong moth is an icon of Australian wildlife due to the historical role as an important food source and as an intertribal gathering point for aboriginal tribes in southeastern Australia. This is an example of a food that they would have eaten for fertility. So at this point in time when they were gathering these moths would likely have been the time where they would have conceived children. When there's nutrients present in the diet in the form of animal foods, fertility is greatly enhanced. That's why we see the opposite in vegans. They are lacking fertility from animal foods. Now are we answering the question of what cavemen ate or are we answering the question of what more civilized tribes of hunter-gatherers ate? Either way I think these people would have eaten whatever animal or plant foods they could have gotten their hands on. If we take a step in the more modern direction towards the Swiss in the Low Shental Valley in Weston Price's book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, Weston Price was a dentist who went around in the early 1900s exploring indigenous groups because of his curiosity of why they did not suffer from cavities. In this specific group of people their diet consisted largely of a slice of whole rye bread and a piece of raw summer made cheese from grass-fed cattle which was eaten fresh with the milk of goat or cow. Meat was eaten about once a week. With our modern access to nutrient databases when we actually look at the nutrient profile of this raw cow cheese, this whole dark grain rye bread, the raw milk, these animal foods in their highest quality contain all the body building vitamins, minerals and elements that you need. It sounds crazy that these native peoples were consuming a thousand different animal foods but you can be healthy only eating cheese and rye bread. This is a testament to the nutrient density of these animal foods. It's safe to say that animal foods were the base nutrient content of our diet and we consumed so many different types of them. But this brings up the question of plant foods and in those indigenous Aborigines groups of Australia the plant food variety was even higher than the animal food variety. So imagine these tribes having this cultural wisdom of thousands of different plant foods ingrained in them. They can literally walk into a forest and see and smell so much more than we can now. They know what plants are safe to eat, what plants are for medicinal purposes, what plants are for hydration, enjoyment. Just this knowledge is something that was inherent to human beings. Same with hunting animals. It's really unfortunate to think that we're so far from our indigenous roots and it's only several hundred years away in some cases. What role did the plant foods actually place though in these diets? It's pretty safe to say that it could only have been from a survival perspective or a medicinal perspective as well as enjoyment. If you're not consuming plant foods for energy, enjoyment or medicinal uses, you shouldn't really be consuming them. The interesting thing about grains and the Neolithic Revolution is that grains essentially replaced plant food consumption as you can imagine plant foods aren't available in all climates and regions especially at certain times of the year. Evident in those Arctic climates we spoke about earlier, there wasn't really mention of too many different types of plant foods. So if we can deduce that grains replaced fruit and vegetable consumption in the Neolithic Revolution and these people were still in excellent health, granted they had quality animal foods present in their diet, this is another logical and anthropological argument against the necessity of consuming plant foods in the diet that we've been led to believe. So thank you guys for watching. If you guys would like to support the channel, please like, subscribe and share the video down below in the comments guys. 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