2.5 Million Years of Low Carb Diets

The conventional wisdom is that low carbohydrate diets are a "fad", an extreme deviation from a normal, healthy, human diet.  One of the points that Gary Taubes makes in his book, "Why we Get Fat and What to Do About It", is that humans have eaten low carb diets for almost all of their 2.5 million years of existence.

For 99.6% of that 2.5 million years, humans were hunter-gatherers.  In 2000, Loren Cordain and others published their analysis of the diets of hunter-gatherers in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.  Here is a hyperlink to the original article: Plant-animal subsistance ratios . . . in Hunter-Gatherer Diets.  The authors compared the diets of 229 hunter-gather populations that survived long enough past 1900 to have their diets documented by anthropologists.  They undertook this study to estimate the likely, typical nutritional content of human hunter-gather diets for the last 2.5 million years.

From the documentation, they estimated the level of carbohydrates, protein, and fat in the diet of these hunter-gathering societies all over the world.  They concluded that most of these populations ate high protein and fat and relatively low carbs.  Thus the diet that many assume to be a fad is actually the way people have eaten for most of human history.