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WASHINGTON — “Paleo” diet trends holding that the healthiest way to eat is to avoid the ground grain products that were unavailable to our pre-modern ancestors have grown enormously in popularity over the past few years. But evolutionary biologist Marlene Zuk says it’s nonsense to think these products haven’t been around long enough for our bodies to evolutionarily adapt to them.
“The most persuasive argument Zuk marshals against such views,” writes Salon’s Laura Miller, “has to do with the potential for relatively rapid evolution, major changes that can appear over a time as short as, or even shorter than, the 10,000 years (Loren) Cordain (founder of the Paleo diet) scoffed at.”
Grinding and cooking grain is a practice that goes back perhaps as far as 30,000 years. By contrast, brussel sprouts appear to be just a few hundred years old and until the 16th century Native American populations were the only people eating tomatoes or hot peppers.
