# Food Combining



## MoonRiver (Sep 2, 2007)

I've never really paid attention to food combining, but recently had this thought. How long has "man" collected food and ate meals? I would think for the most part, man ate whatever he could find and ate it until full. 

Civilization occurred between 22,000 and 40,000 years ago, but man has been around about 6 million years by some estimates. So I would think that the concept of meals is a relatively new occurrence in the total existence of man.

So maybe our genes are tuned for eating one type of food at a time. Maybe there is something to food combining. Maybe the idea of eating a balanced meal is actually a bad idea. Maybe balanced over time is important, but not on a meal or even a daily or weekly basis. 

If man ate only what he could find, his diet varied greatly in vitamins, minerals, carbs, protein, and fat over the seasons. Yet he survived and kept the species going. Man didn't plan his diet, he simply are whatever he was lucky enough to find. I imagine he had cravings that caused him to search out certain foods that contained nutrients he needed, but this was likely instinctual at first and then later learned behavior.

Thoughts?


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## Skamp (Apr 26, 2014)

Carbs are the most readily available, and typically the most micro varied. Dandelion, Burdock, Nettle, Greenbrier, wild Rice, etc browse until the protein falls. 

Spend a few days afield. It’ll become obviously apparent.


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## Skamp (Apr 26, 2014)

And, man was not lucky.


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## Alice In TX/MO (May 10, 2002)

Google seasonal local food.


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## Skamp (Apr 26, 2014)

Google, First and foremost?


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## barnbilder (Jul 1, 2005)

Early man would have wandered looking for nutritionally dense food. Meat fits the bill nicely. As he wandered, he would have stripped seeds from grasses to munch along the way. This instinct is still present in most humans. He would have stopped for a nut or berry. Dug out a root here and there. But mainly to tide him over for the next animal harvesting opportunity. The overlooked thing by most folks today is the amount of miles he covered and the junk he carried around, (clubs, rocks, animal haunches). He got a lot of exercise to burn off all of those fat calories that he picked up to get his protein requirements in. And he probably went a longer time between heavy meals. Camping under a fruit tree and eating fruit while waiting on the animals to come get fruit makes more sense than wandering around looking for them. 

Early man didn't mind putting on a few pounds, he would burn it off the next time he had to fast waiting out a storm or when he searched a long time without finding food. The problem with us is that we eat like it is late summer or early fall, and we exercise like we are hunkered down waiting out winter.


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## MoonRiver (Sep 2, 2007)

barnbilder said:


> Early man would have wandered looking for nutritionally dense food. Meat fits the bill nicely. As he wandered, he would have stripped seeds from grasses to munch along the way. This instinct is still present in most humans. He would have stopped for a nut or berry. Dug out a root here and there. But mainly to tide him over for the next animal harvesting opportunity. The overlooked thing by most folks today is the amount of miles he covered and the junk he carried around, (clubs, rocks, animal haunches). He got a lot of exercise to burn off all of those fat calories that he picked up to get his protein requirements in. And he probably went a longer time between heavy meals. Camping under a fruit tree and eating fruit while waiting on the animals to come get fruit makes more sense than wandering around looking for them.
> 
> Early man didn't mind putting on a few pounds, he would burn it off the next time he had to fast waiting out a storm or when he searched a long time without finding food. The problem with us is that we eat like it is late summer or early fall, and we exercise like we are hunkered down waiting out winter.


Sounds good, but I doubt if that is how it happened. Hunting is an inefficient way to exchange energy for food. More likely early man ate worms, grubs, insects, and easily accessible seafood like mollusks and barnacles, with most calories coming from roots and greens.

Early man also likely didn't cover miles every day. Burned to many calories. He foraged for food where he was. Man has been around for about 6 million years and weapons only about 1/2 million years, so hunting game was not likely something happened until fairly recently in man's development.


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## barnbilder (Jul 1, 2005)

Possums eat plenty of meat and they are dumb as they come. Meat is not a problem in a world with large herbivores being hunted by large predators. Walk with eyes to the sky and nose in the wind and you will find your next meal, once you venture out of the fruit laden equatorial rainforests. Savanna living means grains and meat. Further north it means more meat. Hunting is poor use of energy. That is why we have opposable thumbs and enough cognitive capacity to set traps. The best and easiest trap man ever set was the good old "set a fire while the herd is at the edge of a cliff and downwind" trap. An easy explanation for the reason megafauna disappears at the same time man appears in the fossil record, worldwide and throughout history. Also an explanation for our need to roast meat when it is perfectly fine raw.


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## barnbilder (Jul 1, 2005)

If you want clues to early man, and what early man was capable of, look no further than the osage orange. Here we have a fruit that needs something to eat it in order to disperse it's seeds. Nothing eats it. Too big to swallow and too sticky to chew. Once found continent wide, it had shrunken it's range to a small area, guarded and traded for it's wood (superior for bow making). That relatively small geographic area was inhabited by the Osage tribe.

But according to the fossil record, this tree grew on a much larger range. Until the animal that liked it, and was equipped to eat it went extinct and stopped dispersing seeds. At the same time, some cataclysmic event happened that must have killed most of the remaining trees. It's almost like the entire continent burned in the quest for fried giant ground sloth. 

Easy pickings. Big payload of meat. See 'em a long way, hear them breaking osage branches even. Catch the wind right, a couple flicks of the wrist with the flint and your whole family has fried ground sloth. You didn't think early man was dumb enough to hunt down megafauna until it was extinct with spears did you? If we were that dumb we wouldn't be here, but maybe the ground sloths would be here.


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## MoonRiver (Sep 2, 2007)

barnbilder said:


> Possums eat plenty of meat and they are dumb as they come. Meat is not a problem in a world with large herbivores being hunted by large predators. Walk with eyes to the sky and nose in the wind and you will find your next meal, once you venture out of the fruit laden equatorial rainforests. Savanna living means grains and meat. Further north it means more meat. Hunting is poor use of energy. That is why we have opposable thumbs and enough cognitive capacity to set traps. The best and easiest trap man ever set was the good old "set a fire while the herd is at the edge of a cliff and downwind" trap. An easy explanation for the reason megafauna disappears at the same time man appears in the fossil record, worldwide and throughout history. Also an explanation for our need to roast meat when it is perfectly fine raw.


I'm talking about early man and you about modern humans. Using traps and any type of tool is less than 500,000 years old.


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