Everything We Know About Nutrition Is Wrong...?

Hi, thanks for visiting my blog! I'd like to start off with a few facts and ideas to dip our feet into the nutrition world, and will expand from here. Please feel free to share your thoughts and responses in the comment section below.

I recently came across the website of Zoe Harcombe, a British nutritionist and researcher, who points out some nutritional fallacies that have permeated our collective conventional wisdom. Included is the "calorie myth"- the idea that 3,500 = one pound of fat so no matter what foods you are eating you just need to create that deficit to lose weight. As she points out in her myths & facts page, "If the calorie theory were correct, every human would lose 104 lbs every year, with a 1,000 calorie a day deficit (no matter their gender, starting weight etc)".

I really enjoyed the quote below that was found on her website home page, which puts it into perspective why it's so important to eat like our ancestors as opposed to how we have been eating in the last 40ish years.

“If we have been eating food in the form that nature intended for 24 hours, agriculture (large scale access to carbohydrates) developed four minutes ago and sugar consumption has increased twenty fold in the last five seconds. I wonder which food is more likely to be responsible for obesity, diabetes, or indeed any modern disease…”

Robb Wolf makes a similar analogy in his book The Paleo Solution, where he compared human evolution to a 100-yard American football field. If we walked from one end to the other, 99.5 yards of those would represent all of human history except the last 5,000 years or so. The last 1/2 yard represents the transition from hunter/gatherer existence to agriculture, and "the last few inches represent television, the Internet, refined vegetable oils, and most of what we take to be 'normal' modern living."

I think it's pretty unbelievable that we have evolved in that last 1/2 yard to be able to effectively process the high amount of grains and starchy carbohydrates we currently consume, and I find it extremely unbelievable that we have evolved to consume any of the overly-processed Franken-foods that permeate our modern diet.

What do you think? Do these human evolution analogies blow your mind as it did mine? Does these ideas offend, shock or excite you? Please share your thoughts below!