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Unilever has unveiled a new research programme that aims to re-create the diet of the caveman and apply modern biological science to it in the hope of unlocking some long-forgotten dietary knowledge that was instinctive to our ancestors.
The idea of eating like a caveman is nothing new. Gastroenterologist Walter Voegtlin first published The Stone Age Diet book in 1975, and other researchers have picked up the trail. US-based independent research group Paleobiotics Lab, has also been flagging up the heavy load of prebiotic fibre inulin in our ancestors’ diets, and the benefits it can bring.
Like many off-beat new trends, it has been a way of life for a handful of health fanatics for decades.
But are we ready for it to enter the mainstream? Your average caveman couldn’t have had a more different diet to the way we eat today. Tonight’s dinner may be a ready meal with an ingredients list as long as your arm – when once it would have been an armful of berries picked from a shrub.
Unilever’s new inspiration is not completely out of left-field.
First, the natural trend has been gathering pace. We have started to snub those complex ingredients list, preferring them to feature foods we actually recognise as foods. How more natural can you get than to eat like your ancestors, who would have had no idea what an E-number is, let alone how to skin it.
Nostalgic eating, too, has been a big hit. Especially in the recession, we have sought simplicity and savings by digging out our grandmothers’ old-fangled recipes. And once we have had our fill of braised offal and apple pie, what about Granny’s Granny’s recipes… and all the Great-Grannies going back 1200 generations?
Unilever is looking at a time when filling your stomach was a full time occupation. If you got the nutritional balance wrong or plumped for the wrong berry, the consequences were – a horrible death.
Instinct, then, was a pretty crucial life skill.
The Palaeolithic era was also the time when the human genome was set. And by gum, evolution just hasn’t been able to keep up with fast moving consumer trends since then. We’re pretty much the same human beings as our ancient ancestor – just with worse spear skills but considerably better at manoeuvring a supermarket trolley.
The ability to eat instinctively for our genes has been largely crowded out by a sensual confusion of branding, tastes and textures. The outcome? Well, heart disease and cancer aren’t pleasant ways to end your days.
What we have instead of instinct is an armoury of technologies that can be turned back to basics. Archaeologists, anthropologists, evolutionary geneticists, food scientists, botanists… that’s the team of intrepid investigators Unilever has put together for its foray into diets past.
We can’t turn back eating habits 12000 years and we probably wouldn’t want to. I would rather my local supermarket ran a special on mammoth chops any day than have to go out and hunt them myself.
But we can certainly use today’s techniques to mine knowledge from the past, and use it to make better food in the future. Working together these scientists might, just might, unearth the long-lost secret of optimal nutritional need.
If it comes with a cute picture of a caveman on the package, I’d buy it.
7 comments (Comments are now closed)
Real food vs High Tech Food & Animals
The Caveman Diet. I believe that eating real food is what the cavemen ate. They didn't eat food, plant or animal, that was re-engineered, pumped full of steroids and antibiotics and/or pesticides and other chemicals that remain in the food that we end up eating. While some speculate that cavemen didn't live long enough to exhibit signs of heart disease, cancer, etc.and therefore we don't know whether or not there diet played a role in their overall health. It is clearly evident that something is causing heart disease, diabetes, obesity, cancer, etc. in ever younger and younger people that consume the highly processed, highly engineered foods of our "Western Diet". So a "High Tech" company is going to use technology to "improve" on real food?
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Posted by Sharonc
01 October 2010 | 21h08
Insightful article
Once again an insightful article by Jess Halliday that makes us sit up and ponder if all this hullabaloo about modern eating has done us more harm than good.
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Posted by Ravi
29 September 2010 | 04h29
Unilever having fun
I think it is just Unilever having fun. A diet of meat, nuts and berries, with only water to drink would in fact be quite good for you, and be a better response to the obesity epidemic than Slim Fast actually. As for wearing those skin costumes well, you need a good figure to get away with those.
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Posted by Vron
24 September 2010 | 15h53
Caveman/woman health
Hmmm, it's unlikely I would live long enough to worry about health issues -- no airconditioning and hot water for showers and clean toilets would do me in = and no sterile hospitals in which to give birth. Oh well.
All the technology in the world and we are poisoning ourselves by plastics and hormones and greed!!!
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Posted by MSFF
22 September 2010 | 13h12
What do we know about cavemens' lifes?
This approach makes only sense if scientists can proof that the diet of cavemen really was as optimal for health as claimed. What do we know about the average life expectancy of cavemen, their discomforts, illnesses and causes of death? Unless we know for certain about how wonderful the life of cavemen was the whole project concept appears to have little foundation.
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Posted by Jens Kristott
20 September 2010 | 17h43
Silly
This is absurd. Cavemen did not live long enough to develop heart disease and the other chronic diseases that mostly appear as people age.
Maybe we should go out in the woods, live in the cold, and allow ourselves to be chased by bears, too.
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Posted by Aggie
20 September 2010 | 17h14
Terrific news.
It is good to see that linking our diet to where we are genetically will maybe hit the mainstream one day soon. Well done Unilever for grasping the possible significance of this.
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Posted by David Elliott
20 September 2010 | 15h07
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