Ancestral Health Symposium 2018

[Indy51]

For people interested in Paleo, Primal, real/whole food, keto etc. ways of eating, the Ancestry Foundation have posted video presentations from their recent 7th annual conference, July 2018 in Bozeman, Montana.

This is the link to the 2017 Playlist:

This is the link to the Ancestry Foundation Youtube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/user/AncestryFoundation/playlists

Many interesting health topics covered.

 

[Indy51]

If you're going to watch even one of these presentations, my vote is for this talk by Michael Rose on Evolutionary Biology of Diet, Aging, and Mismatch.

He and his lab have done years of study on aging using fruit fly models and he has some interesting theories on ancestral diets and evolutionary biology. He's also done a great interview on Robb Wolf's Paleo Solution podcast. His PhD student Grant Rutledge also presented on the data a couple of years earlier.

https://robbwolf.com/2018/11/13/episode-416-dr-michael-rose-aging-adaptation-and-diet/

Rough outline of the theory is this: until age of first reproduction, we can get by eating what he refers to as the "organic agricultural diet" (ie diet eaten by our ancestors up till around 1850) or even the "novel diet" (ie ultra industrially processed food), but once we reach a post-reproductive age, we will age better by eating the ancestral, pre-agricultural diet. He specifically says that Australian Aboriginals should not be eating anything but their ancestral diet as they have had no period of adaptation to any agricultural diet - and how long you can defer the switch to your ancestral diet will also be affected by the length of your ancestral adaptation to agriculture. So for most northern Europeans, especially the British Isles (estimated 2,000-5,000BC), this is shorter than the time for Eurasia and Middle East (c. 10,000BC or perhaps longer).

He refers to modern "Paleo" diets as a "half-assed" version since we don't eat anything near as varied a diet as our Paleolithic ancestors, but even this "half-assed" version is proven by their experiments to improve aging.

The fruit fly versions of these diets were:

Half-assed ancestral diet = a mix of apple sauce and yeast (the founding population of fruit flies had been eating rotting apples as their diet since at least 1600AD).
Organic agricultural diet = bananas and yeast (the fruit flies transitioned in the 1980s, forget the number of generations involved)
Novel modern diet = oranges and yeast.

He swapped to the half-assed Paleo diet himself about 10 years ago - is now in his 60s but man, sure proves a great advertisement for the diet