Re: Guidance for minimising amines in foods

[Guest guest]

> This is some extremely STRICT guidance on handling meats to minimise

> amines, including glutamates and histamine:

>http://www.eklhad.net/manage-amines.html#intro

Ow, I know I shouldn't get in on this thread so late a date with

minimal investigation. However, I just have a hard time with the

strict recommendations jibing with anything that resembles a native

diet. No ferments, white skinless meat is best. Ayeyiyi. I guess

the real question is: can one get optimal nutrition on such a plan?

It also makes me wonder about life in general. I mean, sure it's

great we can categorize and perhaps pinpoint issues. But to what end?

We die or we pass on genes. Or both. I guess if a modern diet of

this and that really works to end suffering, then great. But there is

surely more to life than diet. Like exercise for instance. I

certainly mean no offense to anyone, but the problems we face in the

world are more than the foods we eat, or not. They also concern how

we conduct our lives, or not.

Deanna

[Guest guest]

Deanna,

> Ow, I know I shouldn't get in on this thread so late a date with

> minimal investigation. However, I just have a hard time with the

> strict recommendations jibing with anything that resembles a native

> diet. No ferments, white skinless meat is best. Ayeyiyi. I guess

> the real question is: can one get optimal nutrition on such a plan?

I doubt one can get optimal nutrition on it, but for someone who has

an amine intolerance, then eating nutritious foods that are depleting

your body of nutrients isn't very helpful. If the nutritious foods

are a net loss of nutrition, your nutrition would still be better, if

not optimal, without the offending amines.

Clearly, however, the best thing to do is to cultivate a reasonable

tolerance to amines and other chemicals so that one can eat some of

the most important nutritious foods, but one is likely to best achieve

that by first getting rid of them, then working on health, and adding

some back in slowly over time, I suspect.

> It also makes me wonder about life in general. I mean, sure it's

> great we can categorize and perhaps pinpoint issues. But to what end?

> We die or we pass on genes. Or both.

Well, we certainly don't pass on genes without dying. ;-)

> I guess if a modern diet of

> this and that really works to end suffering, then great. But there is

> surely more to life than diet. Like exercise for instance. I

> certainly mean no offense to anyone, but the problems we face in the

> world are more than the foods we eat, or not. They also concern how

> we conduct our lives, or not.

Do you have any information on how exercise can treat an amine intolerance?

Chris

--

The Truth About Cholesterol

Find Out What Your Doctor Isn't Telling You:

http://www.cholesterol-and-health.com

[Guest guest]

Gluten is simply a

>neolithic food, just like fermented products are.

Emma,

I don't think that's a correct characterization of fermented foods *per se*.

The Eskimo that Price and Stefansson studied were by their accounts living

much as stone age man. And they fermented and dried a lot of their food.

They buried walrus flippers in the ground and left it there for many months

before digging it up and eating it. They also dried most of their salmon, I

think. IIRC, similar practices were done by other hunter-gatherer groups,

presumably since pre-neolithic times. Several of these ancient ferments are

discussed in " Ferment and Human Nutrition " by Bill Mollison.

Suze

[Guest guest]

> The guy who wrote that article is a layperson and comes with his own

> prejudices. Chickens that have gone through factory processing do have

> amines in their skins, which is why he advises skinless. The only

> reason white (chicken not fish) meat is " better " i.e. safer is because

> it is not hung for an unknown period before it is sold - red meat can

> be an unknown quantity until you get to know your supplier. There is

> no reason why safe red meat can't be eaten. I eat safe red meat, I

> rarely eat chicken or fish.

Emma,

Does that mean one can eat pastured, freshly-killed chicken with the

skin--or no?

Seriously, I want to try this diet, the whole thing sort of fascinates

me, and I want to see what happens after two weeks of low-chemical foods.

But I need to know more precise descriptions of what is okay and not

okay than the list at the allergy dietician so I don't and lack

certainty about the foods I can eat.

So, you eat sourdough bread, right? What sort of sourdough is okay

for the test diet, if at all? Whole grain or flour?

How do you find red meat which hasn't been aged at all? Is that what

I'm looking for?

Oats can't be pre-soaked--even in water?

FWIW I had marginal IGA numbers on the Enterolab tests for gluten and

casein.

B.

[Guest guest]

WAPFers come with a lot

of baggage about what is and is not a native/nutritious diet, which is

probably why it's taken me so long to get this dialogue going.

**and yet for people like me this addition of more *rules* makes eating that

much more stressful! As if trying to incorporate NT principles into my life

wasn't difficult enough! I really find that the more people talk about what

we *should* or *should not* be eating the more I worry and the more I fall

into a sort of eating disorder where my brain just cannot think anymore

about what to eat, and then I don't eat enough to keep me functioning!

I've also found that WAPFers tend to assume that all human health

problems can be solved with the right combination of vitamins.

**OR the right combination of REAL food with the help of a few vitamins that

we may be deficient in because of our previous SAD ways of eating and the

fact that most food in this country is devoid of most of it's minerals and

vitamins.

**then what do you propose we eat? Does everyone in the whole world have

problems with natural poisons? I don't know if I have issues with

salicylates or amines. It has been suggested that I might from some of my

previous posts, but quite frankly I don't know how to be sure. I will say

that I have never felt better in my life since I started eating NT and I

cannot imagine doing anything else.

All the fruit and vegetables we

eat today are neolithic distortions of the ones we used to eat. I think part

of the problem is that people are unable to make

those same connections today because the wisdom has been lost.

**either that, or the fact that we have been brainwashed into believing that

the food on the store shelves these days and the food that comes from

factory farms is just as good as ever and that we should be thankful for the

invention of the *convenience* foods so that we can have that much more time

for all the other junk we put in our lives.

Honestly, I feel better nourished on failsafe than I did before, and

my NT nutritional principles haven't changed. NT is about a lot more

than just fermented food.

**I thought NT was more about eating REAL food. Food without added anything,

food that came from preferably a local garden/farm where there were no

pesticides or herbicides used. Fresh meat from animals given green,

pesticide free grass on which to graze and not fed GMO or otherwise grains

esp. ones containing soy. Making everything from scratch so we know exactly

what goes into a given dish etc etc etc. Oh, and good real fats, not some

concoction that came from a factory or a test tube. I don't think that much

about fermenting. I used to make kefir and I tried so hard to get into a

rhythm so I could have some fresh everyday because I thought that was what I

was supposed to think. But I couldn't stomach it. I gave up because it

wasn't worth the stress and whether or not my body was actually saying NO

don't eat it, or not I don't really care. We eat pickles and occasionally

sauerkraut when we feel like it, but yogurt is about the only fermented

staple in our house.

amanda

[Guest guest]

On 9/20/06, Emma Davies <emma@...> wrote:

> I don't always understand this perspective. I don't think failsafe

> jars with a native diet at all. The ish Hebredians ate virtually

> nothing but fresh seafood and oats.

Fresh? You mean leaving the oatcakes sitting in their drawers

perpetually yielded " fresh " oats?

> All the fruit and vegetables we

> eat today are neolithic distortions of the ones we used to eat.

Very true.

>In

> paleolithic times we surely did not hang meat for six weeks before we

> ate it (drying as opposed to hanging actually slows down amine

> formation, and dried meat was not a staple but a standby store).

How do you figure? I have no idea how anyone can have any idea how

paleolithic man processed his meat, but all traditional cultures that

have been studied to my knowledge have aged their meat in some way,

including ones studied and revealed to be *healthy.* And that direct

observation trumps any speculation or unreliable inference about what

paleolithic man was doing.

> Amines act like recreational drugs on the brain, they're

> neurotransmitters. Even pets can suffer histamine reactions to

> old/canned meat. Native groups have never avoided hallucinogenic

> plants, alcohol, etc., who is to say that they did not recognise the

> pharmacological impact of fermented foods? But perhaps they knew when

> to stop.

Possibly, or maybe they didn't have the defects in enzyme functioning

that are probably largely attributed to poor nutrition.

> I think part of the problem is that people are unable to make

> those same connections today because the wisdom has been lost.

Or, alternatively, modern people have a higher rate of defective metabolisms.

> While

> someone in the Swiss alps might have known too much sauerkraut gives

> one a headrush and makes one irritable, I think sometimes WAPFers

> think " there must be something wrong with me, because I can't eat much

> sauerkraut " . WAPF spends a lot of time warning people about MSG. Well,

> fermented foods contain MSG too.

Since basiclly EVERYTHING that the Swiss ate was fermented and aged,

what exactly would be the value of knowing when too much sauerkraut

was too much? What are they going to replace it with? Cheese?

3-week-aged fermented bread?

> Honestly, I feel better nourished on failsafe than I did before, and

> my NT nutritional principles haven't changed. NT is about a lot more

> than just fermented food. I feel better nourished now because I'm not

> being poisoned all the time. The body has an amazing ability to bounce

> back without the aide of high doses of vitamins, as long as there is

> nothing actively keeping it sick.

Agreed, but your problems metabolising certain food chemicals are not

universal, so there's no reason to identify the diet that works best

for you at this time in your life as the ideal human diet. It is very

possible that the diet that best sustains good health is not the same

diet as that which best helps someone with poor health recover.

> But it isn't a modern diet. We don't know what paleolithic people ate,

> but we can logically infer that they did not eat additives, and also

> did not eat sauerkraut, kefir, kvass, spinach, rhubarb, broccoli, and

> three week hung beef all on the same day, if at all.

How do you logically infer this? They didn't have anything to hang it on?

Chris

--

The Truth About Cholesterol

Find Out What Your Doctor Isn't Telling You:

http://www.cholesterol-and-health.com

[Guest guest]

I agree with Suze here. All we had to do to " discover " fermented

foods was to have left some greens or other foods out in the right

kind of containers under the right conditions, coincidentally, for

too long. They would have fermented; we would have tried them, and

some would have liked them. Hunter-gatherers probably stored food to

one degree or another from early times. Even dried meat may have

been discovered this way. I don't think hung or dried meat, or

fermented foods are at all products of the Neolithic. Domesticated

plant foods, though, are mostly from the Neolithic. I believe,

however, that horticulture (gardening) would have preceded

agriculture and would have been a part of some pre-Neolithic people's

lives, though this probably yielded little changes in the plants they

were tending.

Tim Reeves

Berkeley, Calif.

>

> Gluten is simply a

> >neolithic food, just like fermented products are.

>

> Emma,

>

> I don't think that's a correct characterization of fermented foods

*per se*.

> The Eskimo that Price and Stefansson studied were by their accounts

living

> much as stone age man. And they fermented and dried a lot of their

food.

> They buried walrus flippers in the ground and left it there for

many months

> before digging it up and eating it. They also dried most of their

salmon, I

> think. IIRC, similar practices were done by other hunter-gatherer

groups,

> presumably since pre-neolithic times. Several of these ancient

ferments are

> discussed in " Ferment and Human Nutrition " by Bill Mollison.

>

> Suze

>

[Guest guest]

> **and yet for people like me this addition of more

> *rules* makes eating that

> much more stressful! As if trying to incorporate

> NT principles into my life

> wasn't difficult enough! I really find that the

> more people talk about what

> we *should* or *should not* be eating the more I

> worry and the more I fall

> into a sort of eating disorder where my brain just

> cannot think anymore

> about what to eat, and then I don't eat enough to

> keep me functioning!

I agree! I am maybe 1/3 or so of the way towards eating NT most or

all of the time -- I have adopted it as a basic master principal.

EXCEPT I have one rule that comes before it: eat what I feel like

eating. Sometimes that will lead to bad reactions, compulsion to eat

more of it, etc., but that's just something I let play out. I can

have a theory about what to eat and let that theory help guide me,

but ultimately, if I want a donut badly enough, I'm gonna eat it!

(And I am gluten intolerant). Otherwise, that desire's just going to

exhibit itself in some other way.

Tim Reeves

Berkeley, CA

[Guest guest]

> I have found that WAPFers are generally much more resistant to this

> diet than others I have talked this over with. WAPFers come with a lot

> of baggage about what is and is not a native/nutritious diet, which is

> probably why it's taken me so long to get this dialogue going.

Emma, I assure you that I am not resistant to the idea, I am just

wondering how healthy the recommendations from that list you linked to

really are long term. And I am relatively healthy individual, so I

haven't the knowledge or experience to make any judgments about these

sensitivities one way or the other. I simply asked the questions and

made some general commentary. I am just wondering how nutritious such a

diet can be. Lastly, fyi I am a WAPF chapter leader presently, but it

is my opinion that the foundation emphasizes grains and dairy to a far

greater degree than Dr. Price's work would indicate they should be (what

I mean is only one group ate bread and only two ate dairy, whilst all

obtained sea foods to some degree or another).

> I don't always understand this perspective. I don't think failsafe

> jars with a native diet at all.

Not unless failsafe ends up close to breathanarianism (sp?) whereby

nutrients needed are not obtained and deficiencies result. In the

context of primitive diets, that may be the case seasonally.

> The ish Hebredians ate virtually

> nothing but fresh seafood and oats.

You know, I have often mused over the black houses these folks lived in,

with constant smoke bellowing and little by way of windows. The reason

was for better soil amendments, but is not such an environment full of

chemicals that the occupants must inhale regularly?

> All the fruit and vegetables we

> eat today are neolithic distortions of the ones we used to eat.

Absolutely. Fruit is particularly distorted. But not only that, these

foods are all seasonal. They cannot be obtained fresh year round save

in a few remote regions of the tropics.

> In

> paleolithic times we surely did not hang meat for six weeks before we

> ate it (drying as opposed to hanging actually slows down amine

> formation, and dried meat was not a staple but a standby store).

I disagree with this remark. Again, even meat acquisition and the

running of the fish are seasonal events. People cannot hunt year round

without driving down the populations of the wild stock they enjoy. It

is part of the ancient wisdom. In fact, just today my sons and I

journeyed by atlas and NAPD to the Inuit villages Dr. Price visited in

1933 (as I was a bit put off by Sally Fallon's suggestion in NT that the

best source of all the B complex vitamins is whole grains, even though

the 1980s published anatomy book declared animal foods mostly, including

liver again and again). Price states continually that the natives in

all villages who were practicing primitive nutrition would catch the

salmon in huge quantities in season, dry and smoke them for consumption

all winter. Salmon roe was only dried. Thus, dried and smoked fish was

indeed staple food for at least the long Arctic winter. Without the

modern convenience of petroleum-based transported foods found in climate

controlled grocery stores, just what could Paleolithic peoples eat in

the off season? It seems to me that ferments are another storage food

for sparse or nonexistent fresh foods of the off season.

You'll please forgive my general ignorance of the specialized diet, but

I am very fascinated by the native concepts in general and do myself eat

the generally described Paleolithic diet with some SCD foods. I do

appreciate the knowledge you have shared that I am sure will be of great

assistance to many peoples. Obviously you have been helped by this

particular adherence. It is good for you to have gained the energy to

expend in exercise - well done.

> Do you have an alternative? Are you recommending people who have

> problems with amines and salicylates to continue to eat amines and

> salicylates and solve their problems with... what? Should people who

> have problems with gluten continue to eat gluten and solve their

> problems with... what? The fatal and flawed assumption is to assume

> that people who are gluten intolerant don't have to eat gluten because

> gluten isn't a " natural " part of our diet. Gluten is simply a

> neolithic food, just like fermented products are. But where is the

> evidence that heavily cultivated high-salicylate fruit and vegetables

> and hung meat are truly a " natural " part of our diet? They too are

> neolithic/modern dietary distortions.

No no, I think my general rambling was mistaken for a " let them eat

cake " sort of remark, which was not my intent. We are complex

organisms, and problems may not always be as simple as dietary

modification, as you mentioned that you find in WAPfers. I do react to

gluten, so I do avoid it. But stored foods must have been a large part

of the natural diets of folks living without modern conveniences in

winter months. Price found this in his studies. Sure, catch a fresh

fish and eat it. Raw animal foods are important. But when winter set

in for months in the higher latitudes, when the fresh catches are in

hiding, what would natural wo/man eat?

Deanna

[Guest guest]

Emma,

> This is some extremely STRICT guidance on handling meats to minimise

> amines, including glutamates and histamine:

>

> http://www.eklhad.net/manage-amines.html

Please educate me, but aren't all amino acids amines! Thus to

minimize amines you would need to minimize all amino acids.

<scratches head>

Also in the article you reference above, the author states:

" We administer Benadryl liquid, dyphenhydramine hydrochloride, when

our kids are showing allergy symptoms. " But *dyphenhydramine* is an

amine, right? <very puzzled look>

On reading the reference you provided in an earlier post:

http://www.fedupwithfoodadditives.info/factsheets/Factamines.htm

I get the impression that you are talking only about particular amines

and not all amines. Wouldn't it be better to say " certain amines "

instead of just " amines " ? I'm no expert but I would guess that

there are plenty of amines that are required by the body and are good

for most of us and only " certain amines " cause problems in " certain

situations " (perhaps lack of proper enzymes in some cases, as

suggested in this fact sheet).

Thanks for your enlightenment,

<I do believe in evolution>

[Guest guest]

>

> I didn't say dried/hung meat was a product of the neolithic. I said

> paleo people probably didn't eat fermented foods, several different

> green vegetables (which require cooking in pottery vessels) and well

> hung meat every day.

There is no requirement for pottery to either cook or ferment foods.

Cooking dates way back at least 150,000 ya. The evidence is fire

remnants, not pottery.

> Meat is usually dried by cutting it into thin strips and smoking it

> over a fire. Dried meat is rather different to hung meat, which is

> produced in a cold environment. You are forgetting that amines form

> when meat is rotted by bacteria. Meat preservation techniques like

> salting and drying are designed to *slow down* rotting, this is the

> whole point. Paleolithic people lived on the savannah, where wet meat

> rots quickly in the sun and attracts predators and carrion-feeders

> like vultures and wild dogs, with whom they would have to contend.

> Kills are usually gone within hours of being made.

You are forgetting some things here:

1. Paleolithic man lived all over the globe.

2. This period is marked by vast climatic fluctuations of glacial and

interglacial periods

2. The earliest hominids were in fact scavengers and eaters of rotting

flesh along with the hyenas. We evolved out of that paradigm.

It is pure fantasy to imagine that Paleolithic peoples could go out

and hunt a nice sized chicken every day in a perfect sunny climate in

Africa so that they could have fresh meat every time they got hungry

(or even most times in some ages). It's about as realistic as the raw

vegan arguments that we evolved on fruit in Eden. This period is

marked by huge mammals that were hunted and eaten both fresh and

preserved. Furthermore, the ice ages were longer than the

interglacial ages, and food is just plain scarce in such conditions

for long periods of time. You can visit what's left of the Arctic

today to find out what is realistic in primitive survival.

> Why would paleo people save meat for long periods of time instead of

> eating it and risk it being lost to predators unless it was in excess

> of requirement, i.e. they had already eaten their fill of fresh meat?

> I've heard of big cats making kills and pulling them up into trees for

> a day or two when they are not hungry, but they often lose them to

> carrion feeders.

Well, when you've risked life and limb to down a big animal in a

glacial period, you are going to have to make it last for quite awhile

if you want to survive. That's why these animals were stored where

they would indeed ferment, dry, or be frozen solid and be eaten over

time. Native Americans have been doing this for ages with both land

animals and marine life, and it is written about extensively in

outdoor survival and primitive technology guides today. That is how

you keep the predators away from your food cache. Paleolithic man

could not afford to just waste big game animals when he was full of

the fresh kill, leaving it out for the birds to eat. They used all of

the game animal, and they used it for more than just food. That's

what makes us homonids different than felines - we make and use tools.

Deanna

[Guest guest]

> Again, this is a presumption because the groups were neolithic.

No, the hunter gatherers that happened to survive to modern times

cannot be lumped in with agricultural peoples. In fact, these groups

give us a pretty good indication of how preagricultural people lived,

especially since 1) farming and other aspects of civilization were

never a part of their history, and 2) farming and animal husbandry are

pretty darn recent inventions themselves. Thus, this issue of epoch

is, for all practical purposes, a red herring.

Deanna

[Guest guest]

> > I have one rule that comes before it: eat what I feel like

> > eating. Sometimes that will lead to bad reactions, compulsion to

> > eat

> > more of it, etc., but that's just something I let play out.

>

> I don't know how bad your reactions are Tim, but I don't think you'd

> be offering that sort of advice if you knew that eating the wrong

> foods would leave you bedridden.

Well, I said what my rule is. I didn't offer it as advice. This

kind of thing I ~might~ phrase as advice to someone I knew, or

someone in person, but not here. However, this works for me.

If I knew that eating the wrong foods would leave me bedridden, then

I probably wouldn't do it. Probably. I'm not moralistic about diet,

so if, in taking into account all the pros and cons about eating

something I'm sensitive to, I decide to accept the consequences /

penalties, I may do it anyway, no matter what other people may think

about it! I find bread products to be tasty and I associate them

with coziness and comfort. This doesn't always jibe with how my body

reacts later, but it's up to me to make that decision.

And it's up to you and others, if you don't like the idea of " just

eating what one feels like " , to not do it. It's not as if I put

myself forward as a doctor in saying this.

Tim.

[Guest guest]

On 9/21/06, yoginidd <WAPFbaby@...> wrote:

> > I didn't say dried/hung meat was a product of the neolithic. I said

> > paleo people probably didn't eat fermented foods, several different

> > green vegetables (which require cooking in pottery vessels) and well

> > hung meat every day.

>

> There is no requirement for pottery to either cook or ferment foods.

> Cooking dates way back at least 150,000 ya. The evidence is fire

> remnants, not pottery.

Thinking here of pig cookery done by a tribe in New Guinea that I

watched once (well, on the tee vee)-- they buried various wild greens

along with the pig in a pit with heated rocks and slow-roasted the

whole lot. (Aside: , are you writing this down? We want pig in

November.)

There'd be no evidence of stuff like that (except maybe carbony

rocks?) other than that of the fire pits. But what were those wild

greens and how do they compare to, say, spinach or today's wild rocket

or etc? I'll leave that to people who know more.

> 1. Paleolithic man lived all over the globe.

....

> This period is

> marked by huge mammals that were hunted and eaten both fresh and

> preserved. Furthermore, the ice ages were longer than the

> interglacial ages, and food is just plain scarce in such conditions

> for long periods of time. You can visit what's left of the Arctic

> today to find out what is realistic in primitive survival.

Ice age periods didn't mean the whole globe was colder, or even that

it was that much colder in northern latitudes. The formation of an

ice sheet just needs accumulation in excess of melting; that could

just as easily come from a wetter period. You also can't infer that

lower latitudes were colder-- some were warmer, some were wetter, some

drier. It got warmer in places, and either wetter or drier depending

on where you were. They weren't all hunting big game and they weren't

all freezing cold.

The most important point I just noticed from the book in front of me

is that it's thought that equatorial regions were least affected by

the glaciation cycles. (*)

So:

I find the idea that people evolved (yeah, yeah) strictly in northern

latitudes or savanna hunting big game not all that convincing. Some

of our ancestors surely did, but they also needed significant cultural

development in order to reach that point. People that I've read (like

Carl Sauer) argue that our species grew up instead along equatorial

sea coasts, filling the formerly emptyish niche available to an animal

who could eat a wide variety of foods that needed good tactile and

ambulatory skills to gather (and not necessarily well-developed

toolsets... you can't have the chicken before the egg. Or...can

you?). And we're damn good swimmers for monkey men, what with the

lack of fur etc.

And the fact that the equatorial regions changed the least would

support that, since it'd provide a nice steady set of foods and

environments suited to just the right monkey man should he come along.

> 2. The earliest hominids were in fact scavengers and eaters of rotting

> flesh along with the hyenas. We evolved out of that paradigm.

What's the evidence for that?

> ...

> Deanna

(*) " Concerning Primeval Habitat and Habit " by Carl Sauer from 1964.

I'd love to hear more recent evidence for or against all this... I've

stuck mostly to Sauer because his prose is so damned good and his mind

so clear and intelligent it's hard to go anywhere else. And there's

just so much written that it's hard to know who are this generation's

really worthy sources.

[Guest guest]

First, you don't have to do too much pounding or chopping in order to

ferment something. Second, it doesnt' have to be ~in~ the vessel it

ferments in. Third, I'll bet some form of basketry was used in paleo

times, at least by some, and that would be another possible vessel. I

can't offer evidence but rather appeal to intuition here. I have no

doubt that it wasn't uncommon to discover food set aside to have

fermented -- and on occasion, in a pleasant manner. Eventually,

people would have tried to replicate this, especially if, in addition

to tasting good, it was rejuvenating. I'm not saying it was

consistent and routine among all paleolithics at all times and

places. But evidence can be hard to find when it's grass or straw or

fibers -- these decay quickly. My understanding is the oldest

baskets we know about are ~impressions~ of basketry in clay that was

fired (ie as a mold, in essence, for the earliest pottery).

I agree with your feelings about paleo people not preserving meats on

the savannah. Also, Paleo people in tropical areas may not have

wanted to preserve meat, but paleo people in cooler areas probably

did.

I in no way mean to dispute some limit on amines. I don't know

enough about it, really, to have an opinion. And I am curious about

it. But I also know that eating fermented foods has revolutionized

how well I feel, in various systems of my body. And it's not just an

intoxication -- I know what that feels like.

And yes, it is my belief that rudimentary gardening preceeded

agriculture. Certain modern hunter-gatherers engage in it on

occasion: replanting and fostering new growth in wild plants that are

favored. And it is common practice, at least in the traditional

classification of human organization, for tribal people to do it. I

know this doesn't mean the ancients did it, but when something is

very basic (we really like this root! let's water it so its season is

longer and we can eat more of it) then I usually give the benefit of

the doubt to H. sapiens sapiens. And there wouldn't be much evidence

for this surviving. This is my intuitively-reached opinion.

I do agree with you about about being able to recover from difficult-

to-digest or toxic components of food by putting more time in between

meals.

Tim.

--- In , " Emma Davies " <emma@...>

wrote:

>

> --- In , " Tim " <friarslantern@>

wrote:

> >

> > I agree with Suze here. All we had to do to " discover " fermented

> > foods was to have left some greens or other foods out in the

right

> > kind of containers under the right conditions, coincidentally,

for

> > too long. They would have fermented; we would have tried them,

and

> > some would have liked them. Hunter-gatherers probably stored

food to

> > one degree or another from early times.

>

> But where is the evidence for it?

>

> Since pottery is neolithic, this limits possible paleo fermenting

> vessels to gourds or animal stomachs. It's fairly hard to pound and

> chop things in objects that themselves get shredded by pounding and

> grinding, so this limits fermenting to soft objects like fruits,

which

> are limited, seasonal foods, and normally fermented to produce an

> alcoholic concoction.

>

> The actual hard evidence for fermenting is on the food timeline.

> Evidence for wine appeared around 6000 BC, yoghurt around 5000 BC,

and

> pickles around 1000 BC. http://www.foodtimeline.org/

>

>

> Even dried meat may have

> > been discovered this way. I don't think hung or dried meat, or

> > fermented foods are at all products of the Neolithic.

>

> I didn't say dried/hung meat was a product of the neolithic. I said

> paleo people probably didn't eat fermented foods, several different

> green vegetables (which require cooking in pottery vessels) and well

> hung meat every day.

>

> Meat is usually dried by cutting it into thin strips and smoking it

> over a fire. Dried meat is rather different to hung meat, which is

> produced in a cold environment. You are forgetting that amines form

> when meat is rotted by bacteria. Meat preservation techniques like

> salting and drying are designed to *slow down* rotting, this is the

> whole point. Paleolithic people lived on the savannah, where wet

meat

> rots quickly in the sun and attracts predators and carrion-feeders

> like vultures and wild dogs, with whom they would have to contend.

> Kills are usually gone within hours of being made.

>

> Why would paleo people save meat for long periods of time instead of

> eating it and risk it being lost to predators unless it was in

excess

> of requirement, i.e. they had already eaten their fill of fresh

meat?

> I've heard of big cats making kills and pulling them up into trees

for

> a day or two when they are not hungry, but they often lose them to

> carrion feeders.

>

> Different animals are built to handle different things. Some are

> designed to eat carrion, some are designed to handle eating toxic

> plants. How do you know how much of those things we have evolved to

> eat? It seems to me that if levels of histamines over 50 mg are

> regarded as " toxic levels " by scientists studying scromboid

poisoning,

> and levels of only 5 mg are regarded as being fully safe, then we

are

> not as a species evolved to silently handle very much histamine.

>

> Another aspect of the paleolithic that we have to consider is that

> paleo man/woman probably didn't eat three meals a day every day.

> Instead feeding would have been sporadic, with periods of fasting in

> between like lions. The body works quite differently when it is

> allowed to fast, it also handles food chemicals much better when it

is

> allowed to recuperate between exposures.

>

>

>

> Domesticated

> > plant foods, though, are mostly from the Neolithic. I believe,

> > however, that horticulture (gardening) would have preceded

> > agriculture and would have been a part of some pre-Neolithic

people's

> > lives, though this probably yielded little changes in the plants

they

> > were tending.

>

> Are you suggesting that the gardening of vegtables came before the

> neolithic revolution? Do you have evidence for this? The pottery

> evidence says grains, which are high calorie compared to vegetables.

>

[Guest guest]

On 9/21/06, Tim <friarslantern@...> wrote:

....

> And yes, it is my belief that rudimentary gardening preceeded

> agriculture. Certain modern hunter-gatherers engage in it on

> occasion: replanting and fostering new growth in wild plants that are

> favored. And it is common practice, at least in the traditional

> classification of human organization, for tribal people to do it. I

> know this doesn't mean the ancients did it, but when something is

> very basic (we really like this root! let's water it so its season is

> longer and we can eat more of it) then I usually give the benefit of

> the doubt to H. sapiens sapiens. And there wouldn't be much evidence

> for this surviving. This is my intuitively-reached opinion.

....

That seems pretty reasonable to me too. Where I'm from in Texas there

was clear evidence of tendence of stuff like pecans and grapes by the

natives... it was less active than today's agriculture but it's

definitely on the way in that direction. Lots of tubers from

different places in the world are multiplied by breaking and

disturbance of the earth around them, and would have been taken

advantage of by opportunistic gatherers. I can't imagine tendence

wasn't happening with lots of other stuff like mushrooms or herbs etc,

even if it was just minimizing disturbance.

The point being just that it wouldn't take eons of cultural

development to realize that stuff... it wouldn't have to be a

neolithic revelation. At any rate I think it's more dangerous to

conflate lack of archaeological evidence with nonexistence than it is

to follow the intuition that humans would have taken obvious

opportunities... the picture drawn from direct evidence is bound to be

skewed due to the fact that only a tiny bit of the leavings were

nondegradable enough to survive. We see lots of tribes today that use

only tools that would degrade in less than a generation or so.

[Guest guest]

> > 2. The earliest hominids were in fact scavengers and eaters of rotting

> > flesh along with the hyenas. We evolved out of that paradigm.

>

> What's the evidence for that?

I saw it on TV <g>. There is evidence from Olduvai bones assemblages of

a carnivore-hominid-carnivore pattern of activity through the marking

overlays and fragmentation. Here is some work that has been done on

that front:

http://www.modernhumanorigins.net/anth650.html

Deanna

[Guest guest]

<<The formation of anbice sheet just needs accumulation in excess of

melting; that could just as easily come from a wetter period. You

also can't infer thatlower latitudes were colder-- some were warmer,

some were wetter, some drier. It got warmer in places, and either

wetter or drier dependingon where you were. They weren't all hunting

big game and they weren't all freezing cold.>>

Freezing cold, I don't know. But colder than the tropics, I am sure

they were! And that's all that's required here. In cooler climates

you won't have such an abundance of food everywhere, and you also

won't have such rapid putrefaction. The availability of ice in

places too would have facilitated freezing or cold-hanging. However

colder the northern lattitudes were or not, the ice there was still

under 32 degrees Farenheit.

<<I find the idea that people evolved (yeah, yeah) strictly in

northern latitudes or savanna hunting big game not all that

convincing. Some of our ancestors surely did, but they also needed

significant cultural development in order to reach that point. People

that I've read (like Carl Sauer) argue that our species grew up

instead along equatorial sea coasts, filling the formerly emptyish

niche available to an animalwho could eat a wide variety of foods

that needed good tactile and

ambulatory skills to gather (and not necessarily well-developed

toolsets... you can't have the chicken before the egg. Or...can

you?). And we're damn good swimmers for monkey men, what with the

lack of fur etc.>>

I agree. But I don't feel this means we wouldn't have gone in for

fermented foods. Fermented foods make me feel great; because of

them, principally, I have lost weight, gained energy, and recovered

from a lot of different maladies. I know this doesn't mean they are

appropriate for someone who is " healthy " -- this I want to believe,

but I don't know. But they work in a lot of people to -heal-. I

feel that would have included paleolithic people.

<<And the fact that the equatorial regions changed the least would

support that, since it'd provide a nice steady set of foods and

environments suited to just the right monkey man should he come

along.>>

I'm going on the assumption that a lot of change happened in the last

portion of our development -- the part where many of us would have

experimented with aged foods. You may feel that's not enough time

for evolution to happen -- I don't. I feel there probably were

changes that occurred in the last 500,000 years of our development,

which would include periods where we clearly lived in many many

different environments with different kinds of foods available, and

where the food had differing dependability.

>> 2. The earliest hominids were in fact scavengers and eaters of

>> rotting

>> flesh along with the hyenas. We evolved out of that paradigm.

>What's the evidence for that?

I don't think there's wide spread evidence. There is evidence

though. Human cutting tool marks on animal bones that are imposed

over predator tooth marks, for example. But why wait around for

evidence? I say argue the logic behind it. We were once probably

omnivore apes adapted to tree life, then we were probably forced to

start living in the spaces between the trees. We would have been ill

adapted at first for running, hunting larger animals, etc. So I'd be

willing to bet that scavenged animals would have been a treat. They

wouldn't be so old as to have started rotting -- they only need to

have been left behind by the lion just moments earlier! So this

shouldn't affect the argument about whether chemicals had formed

typical of aged meats.

Tim.

> > > I didn't say dried/hung meat was a product of the neolithic. I

said

> > > paleo people probably didn't eat fermented foods, several

different

> > > green vegetables (which require cooking in pottery vessels) and

well

> > > hung meat every day.

> >

> > There is no requirement for pottery to either cook or ferment

foods.

> > Cooking dates way back at least 150,000 ya. The evidence is fire

> > remnants, not pottery.

>

> Thinking here of pig cookery done by a tribe in New Guinea that I

> watched once (well, on the tee vee)-- they buried various wild

greens

> along with the pig in a pit with heated rocks and slow-roasted the

> whole lot. (Aside: , are you writing this down? We want pig

in

> November.)

>

> There'd be no evidence of stuff like that (except maybe carbony

> rocks?) other than that of the fire pits. But what were those wild

> greens and how do they compare to, say, spinach or today's wild

rocket

> or etc? I'll leave that to people who know more.

>

> > 1. Paleolithic man lived all over the globe.

> ...

> > This period is

> > marked by huge mammals that were hunted and eaten both fresh and

> > preserved. Furthermore, the ice ages were longer than the

> > interglacial ages, and food is just plain scarce in such

conditions

> > for long periods of time. You can visit what's left of the Arctic

> > today to find out what is realistic in primitive survival.

>

> Ice age periods didn't mean the whole globe was colder, or even that

> it was that much colder in northern latitudes. The formation of an

> ice sheet just needs accumulation in excess of melting; that could

> just as easily come from a wetter period. You also can't infer that

> lower latitudes were colder-- some were warmer, some were wetter,

some

> drier. It got warmer in places, and either wetter or drier

depending

> on where you were. They weren't all hunting big game and they

weren't

> all freezing cold.

>

> The most important point I just noticed from the book in front of me

> is that it's thought that equatorial regions were least affected by

> the glaciation cycles. (*)

>

> So:

>

> I find the idea that people evolved (yeah, yeah) strictly in

northern

> latitudes or savanna hunting big game not all that convincing. Some

> of our ancestors surely did, but they also needed significant

cultural

> development in order to reach that point. People that I've read

(like

> Carl Sauer) argue that our species grew up instead along equatorial

> sea coasts, filling the formerly emptyish niche available to an

animal

> who could eat a wide variety of foods that needed good tactile and

> ambulatory skills to gather (and not necessarily well-developed

> toolsets... you can't have the chicken before the egg. Or...can

> you?). And we're damn good swimmers for monkey men, what with the

> lack of fur etc.

>

> And the fact that the equatorial regions changed the least would

> support that, since it'd provide a nice steady set of foods and

> environments suited to just the right monkey man should he come

along.

>

> > 2. The earliest hominids were in fact scavengers and eaters of

rotting

> > flesh along with the hyenas. We evolved out of that paradigm.

>

> What's the evidence for that?

>

> > ...

> > Deanna

>

>

>

> (*) " Concerning Primeval Habitat and Habit " by Carl Sauer from 1964.

> I'd love to hear more recent evidence for or against all this...

I've

> stuck mostly to Sauer because his prose is so damned good and his

mind

> so clear and intelligent it's hard to go anywhere else. And there's

> just so much written that it's hard to know who are this

generation's

> really worthy sources.

>

[Guest guest]

:

> The point being just that it wouldn't take eons of cultural

> development to realize that stuff... it wouldn't have to be a

> neolithic revelation. At any rate I think it's more dangerous to

> conflate lack of archaeological evidence with nonexistence than it is

> to follow the intuition that humans would have taken obvious

> opportunities...

Here here.

:-)

Tim

[Guest guest]

On 9/21/06, Tim <friarslantern@...> wrote:

> <<The formation of anbice sheet just needs accumulation in excess of

> melting; that could just as easily come from a wetter period. You

> also can't infer thatlower latitudes were colder-- some were warmer,

> some were wetter, some drier. It got warmer in places, and either

> wetter or drier dependingon where you were. They weren't all hunting

> big game and they weren't all freezing cold.>>

>

> Freezing cold, I don't know. But colder than the tropics, I am sure

> they were! And that's all that's required here. In cooler climates

> you won't have such an abundance of food everywhere, and you also

> won't have such rapid putrefaction. The availability of ice in

> places too would have facilitated freezing or cold-hanging. However

> colder the northern lattitudes were or not, the ice there was still

> under 32 degrees Farenheit.

Of course, I'm not saying it wasn't colder in northern latitudes than

it is now... but that change was due to changes in a complex of

climate patterns that (what I've read says) wouldn't have affected the

whole globe in the same way. The equatorial climate might not have

changed much at all beyond the fluctuation in sea level, change in

rainfall, etc. There aren't any glacial lakes in Equador, are there?

Or in Texas for that matter. Instead, New Mexico and much of the arid

south-western US was covered in lakes due to higher annual rainfall.

Not sure where all that's leading anyway-- just trying to point out

that " ice age " doesn't by any stretch mean the whole earth was frozen.

> <<I find the idea that people evolved (yeah, yeah) strictly in

> northern latitudes or savanna hunting big game not all that

> convincing. Some of our ancestors surely did, but they also needed

> significant cultural development in order to reach that point. People

> that I've read (like Carl Sauer) argue that our species grew up

> instead along equatorial sea coasts, filling the formerly emptyish

> niche available to an animalwho could eat a wide variety of foods

> that needed good tactile and

> ambulatory skills to gather (and not necessarily well-developed

> toolsets... you can't have the chicken before the egg. Or...can

> you?). And we're damn good swimmers for monkey men, what with the

> lack of fur etc.>>

>

> I agree. But I don't feel this means we wouldn't have gone in for

> fermented foods. Fermented foods make me feel great; because of

> them, principally, I have lost weight, gained energy, and recovered

> from a lot of different maladies. I know this doesn't mean they are

> appropriate for someone who is " healthy " -- this I want to believe,

> but I don't know. But they work in a lot of people to -heal-. I

> feel that would have included paleolithic people.

Oh, I didn't mean to argue we didn't go for fermented stuff. Whether

it was primarily for extending the lifetime of food or health or

whatever it's clear people liked it for some reason. But with the

diversity of different media and bugs to eat it I doubt the issue is

black and white. Maybe certain types can be helpful for people from

certain blood lines and others harmful, maybe the type of climate in

which you live could help determine which ferments make sense for you,

or a million other different variations of a million other details.

> <<And the fact that the equatorial regions changed the least would

> support that, since it'd provide a nice steady set of foods and

> environments suited to just the right monkey man should he come

> along.>>

>

> I'm going on the assumption that a lot of change happened in the last

> portion of our development -- the part where many of us would have

> experimented with aged foods. You may feel that's not enough time

> for evolution to happen -- I don't. I feel there probably were

> changes that occurred in the last 500,000 years of our development,

> which would include periods where we clearly lived in many many

> different environments with different kinds of foods available, and

> where the food had differing dependability.

Absolutely. How else do we account for skin color, stature,

(in)susceptibility to various diseases, etc? I'm not trying to say

even that neolithic developments couldn't have changed people in

important ways. But individual changes, as you've just said, were

isolated to those groups whose environments mandated them. So to say

that " fermentation is good " or " fermentation is bad " ignores a lot of

subtlety and complexity.

> >> 2. The earliest hominids were in fact scavengers and eaters of

> >> rotting

> >> flesh along with the hyenas. We evolved out of that paradigm.

>

> >What's the evidence for that?

>

> I don't think there's wide spread evidence. There is evidence

> though. Human cutting tool marks on animal bones that are imposed

> over predator tooth marks, for example. But why wait around for

> evidence? I say argue the logic behind it. We were once probably

> omnivore apes adapted to tree life, then we were probably forced to

> start living in the spaces between the trees. We would have been ill

> adapted at first for running, hunting larger animals, etc. So I'd be

> willing to bet that scavenged animals would have been a treat. They

> wouldn't be so old as to have started rotting -- they only need to

> have been left behind by the lion just moments earlier! So this

> shouldn't affect the argument about whether chemicals had formed

> typical of aged meats.

I don't follow. How often do lions " leave " a carcass, much less one

with enough junk on it to warrant butchery? I'd say that's more

likely evidence that a bunch of cave men figured out that if they all

got together and chucked heavy or sharp things at a single lion who

made a kill they'd get the whole (fresh) carcass to themselves.

Humans, being smart and social and opportunistic and posessed of

various weapons, wouldn't take long to figure that out.

Is there any evidence from study of modern " primitives " of eating

scavenged or otherwise non-deliberately fermented meat? I'm asking

because I don't know, not being a wise-ass.

ps, sorry, by " what's the evidence " I meant something more like " what

makes you think that. " Like what's your source, what's the argument.

I'd rather hear a dreamed up story any day than the boring old

" truth. " Does that hurt my credibility? Hopefully.

[Guest guest]

On 9/21/06, Deanna <WAPFbaby@...> wrote:

> > > 2. The earliest hominids were in fact scavengers and eaters of rotting

> > > flesh along with the hyenas. We evolved out of that paradigm.

> >

> > What's the evidence for that?

>

> I saw it on TV <g>. There is evidence from Olduvai bones assemblages of

> a carnivore-hominid-carnivore pattern of activity through the marking

> overlays and fragmentation. Here is some work that has been done on

> that front:

>

> http://www.modernhumanorigins.net/anth650.html

From that page:

" One can accept the argument made by Binford (1988) and Binford et al.

(1988) that the hominids were very marginal scavengers with access to

only marrow and inconsequential amounts of meat scraps, that of

Blumenschine (1995) that the hominids had access to very little

residual meat (i.e., were not removing large amounts of flesh, but

more than indicated in Binford's model), or that hominids had access

to large amounts of flesh, as suggested by Oliver (1994), Cavallo and

Blumenschine 1989, or Capaldo (1997). Regardless, it is highly

unlikely using the experimental assemblages created by Blumenschine,

Selvaggio, and Dominguez-Rodrigo as a baseline, that hominids had

first access to material. Looking at the cut mark frequencies on the

FLK 22 assemblage where there is no associated tooth marks on the

fragments (Table 14 below) one can also see this, as the percentages

are extremely low. When hominids have first access to a carcass,

carnivores do not bother with non-epiphyseal fragments, as they hold

no nutritional value with the meat and marrow removed (Blumenschine

1988: Table 6). Thus, the low frequency of cut marked only midshaft

fragments indicates that hominids rarely, if ever, had first access to

carcasses or extremely early access to carcasses.

....

" Therefore, it seems likely that the FLK 22 archaeofaunal assemblage

was created by hominids scavenging kills after carnivore abandonment -

rather than confrontational scavenging - since confrontational

scavenging would likely lead to earlier access to meaty limbs, and

hence more cut marks with no tooth marks on them. This sequence was

completed with carnivores scavenging the remains, particularly the

epiphyseal fragments for their bone grease. "

Wow, that's neat... so they might not have been chucking rocks. I

guess I'm still not sure this says that we were eating rotten or

fermented meat, but I can see it both ways. This study seems to be

saying that it was a toss-up between carnivore-human and

carnivore-human-carnivore... meaning humans generally got there before

other opportunistic and skilled scavengers. So surely there's a time

limit involved...

Or maybe the humans tossed the muscle meat to the dogs...

[Guest guest]

> but that change was due to changes in a complex of

> climate patterns that (what I've read says) wouldn't have affected

> the whole globe in the same way.

Right, . Earth's precession, the change in the inclination of

Earth's axis and the changing shape of our orbit all come together in

different ways periodically. And throw a major volcanic eruption into

the mix and who knows.

My main argument was that hunter gatherers were not all on the

savannah eating fresh amine free meat all the time. I don't mean to

imply we were all sub Artic - I can only speak for my own ancestors.

And the more I think on this, the more I think about our optimum human

ancestors. Didn't the finest specimens of our species come from the

Upper Paleolithic of recent times (which also happens to be the

coldest period of our existence as a species I do believe - something

like 14 degrees cooler than now worldwide)? We had bigger bones and

bigger brains than now. Isn't it true that human remains are

clasified as Neolithic or not based on skeletal and dental

degeneration? And isn't Dr. Price's work somehow relevant here as it

concerns finding primitives with better teeth and bones than the

moderns? And I really wonder how remains of recent hunter gatherers

like the Inuit stack up against the Upper Paleofolk.

> Is there any evidence from study of modern " primitives " of eating

> scavenged or otherwise non-deliberately fermented meat? I'm asking

> because I don't know, not being a wise-ass.

I don't think scavenging continued on in our history, but I don't

know. Hunting and gathering definitely makes up most of our history,

though - over 99% of the genus. I just don't see things changing too

radically on that front from say, 30,000 ya (a good developmental

stage for us) until now. And I certainly see no reason to discount

the isolated peoples that Price studied from a general discussion of

hunter gatherers of preagricultural times. Yes, there may be some

changes, but the foodstuffs will most certainly be very similar.

Price found fermentation in every group, did he not?

Deanna

[Guest guest]

:

>>Oh, I didn't mean to argue we didn't go for fermented stuff. ....

Maybe certain types can be helpful for people from

certain blood lines and others harmful, maybe the type of climate in

which you live could help determine which ferments make sense for you,

or a million other different variations of a million other

details .... to say that " fermentation is good " or " fermentation is

bad " ignores a lot of subtlety and complexity.<<

OK, I agree.

>> I'd say that's more likely evidence that a bunch of cave men

figured out that if they all got together and chucked heavy or sharp

things at a single lion who made a kill they'd get the whole (fresh)

carcass to themselves. <<<

Yes -- good point.

>>Is there any evidence from study of modern " primitives " of eating

scavenged or otherwise non-deliberately fermented meat? I'm asking

because I don't know, not being a wise-ass.<<

I don't know. I'll bet not. I was thinking of people doing this way

back 2 or 3 million years ago... In more recent times there are

probably taboos against it (?).

>>ps, sorry, by " what's the evidence " I meant something more

like " what makes you think that. " Like what's your source, what's the

argument. I'd rather hear a dreamed up story any day than the boring

old " truth. " Does that hurt my credibility? Hopefully.<<

Yay! I hear you. And I could have read your post a little more

carefully, too.

Tim

[Guest guest]

:

>>Oh, I didn't mean to argue we didn't go for fermented stuff. ....

Maybe certain types can be helpful for people from

certain blood lines and others harmful, maybe the type of climate in

which you live could help determine which ferments make sense for you,

or a million other different variations of a million other

details .... to say that " fermentation is good " or " fermentation is

bad " ignores a lot of subtlety and complexity.<<

OK, I agree.

>> I'd say that's more likely evidence that a bunch of cave men

figured out that if they all got together and chucked heavy or sharp

things at a single lion who made a kill they'd get the whole (fresh)

carcass to themselves. <<<

Yes -- good point.

>>Is there any evidence from study of modern " primitives " of eating

scavenged or otherwise non-deliberately fermented meat? I'm asking

because I don't know, not being a wise-ass.<<

I don't know. I'll bet not. I was thinking of people doing this way

back 2 or 3 million years ago... In more recent times there are

probably taboos against it (?).

>>ps, sorry, by " what's the evidence " I meant something more

like " what makes you think that. " Like what's your source, what's the

argument. I'd rather hear a dreamed up story any day than the boring

old " truth. " Does that hurt my credibility? Hopefully.<<

Yay! I hear you. And I could have read your post a little more

carefully, too.

Tim

[Guest guest]

> Where I'm from in Texas there was clear evidence of tendence of

> stuff like pecans and grapes by the natives...

Nuh uh. I'm in Texas too and I seen em! It's dem rodent farmer

Neolithic squirrels burying seeds all over. Why I get dem pecan

sprouts e'rywhere, dag nab it! If a-they only would plant em in a

good spot, why, I'd be a-selling dem organic peacans in the farm market.

Deanna