In nutrition, biology, and chemistry, fat usually means any ester of fatty acids, or a mixture of such compounds, most commonly those that occur in living beings or in food.
The Paleolithic or Palaeolithic, also called the Old Stone Age, is a period in human prehistory that is distinguished by the original development of stone tools, and which represents almost the entire period of human prehistoric technology. It extends from the earliest known use of stone tools by hominins, c. 3.3 million years ago, to the end of the Pleistocene, c. 11,650 cal BP.
Biological anthropology, also known as physical anthropology, is a scientific discipline concerned with the biological and behavioral aspects of human beings, their extinct hominin ancestors, and related non-human primates, particularly from an evolutionary perspective. This subfield of anthropology systematically studies human beings from a biological perspective.
The Paleolithic diet, Paleo diet, caveman diet, or stone-age diet is a modern fad diet consisting of foods thought by its proponents to mirror those eaten by humans during the Paleolithic era.
The Mediterranean diet is a diet inspired by the eating habits of people who live near the Mediterranean Sea. When initially formulated in the 1960s, it drew on the cuisines of Greece, Italy, France, Spain and the Ottoman Empire. In decades since, it has also incorporated other Mediterranean cuisines, such as those in Turkey, the Balkans, Lebanon, Syria, North Africa and Portugal.
The glycemic load (GL) of food is a number that estimates how much the food will raise a person's blood glucose level after eating it. One unit of glycemic load approximates the effect of eating one gram of glucose. Glycemic load accounts for how much carbohydrate is in the food and how much each gram of carbohydrate in the food raises blood glucose levels. Glycemic load is based on the glycemic index (GI), and is calculated by multiplying the grams of available carbohydrate in the food by the food's glycemic index, and then dividing by 100.
Evolutionary medicine or Darwinian medicine is the application of modern evolutionary theory to understanding health and disease. Modern biomedical research and practice have focused on the molecular and physiological mechanisms underlying health and disease, while evolutionary medicine focuses on the question of why evolution has shaped these mechanisms in ways that may leave us susceptible to disease. The evolutionary approach has driven important advances in the understanding of cancer, autoimmune disease, and anatomy. Medical schools have been slower to integrate evolutionary approaches because of limitations on what can be added to existing medical curricula. The International Society for Evolution, Medicine and Public Health coordinates efforts to develop the field. It owns the Oxford University Press journal Evolution, Medicine and Public Health and The Evolution and Medicine Review.
The relationship between alcohol and weight is the subject of inconclusive studies. Findings of these studies range from increase in body weight to a small decrease among women who begin consuming alcohol. Some of these studies are conducted with numerous subjects; one involved nearly 80,000 and another 140,000 subjects.
Protein poisoning is an acute form of malnutrition caused by a diet deficient in fat and carbohydrates, where almost all calories consumed come from the protein in lean meat. The concept is discussed in the context of paleoanthropological investigations into the diet of ancient humans, especially during the last glacial maximum and at high latitudes.
Marjorie Shostak was an American anthropologist. Though she never received a formal degree in anthropology, she conducted extensive fieldwork among the !Kung San people of the Kalahari desert in south-western Africa and was widely known for her descriptions of the lives of women in this hunter-gatherer society.
Nutrient density identifies the amount of beneficial nutrients in a food product in proportion to e.g. energy content, weight or amount of perceived detrimental nutrients. Terms such as nutrient rich and micronutrient dense refer to similar properties. Several different national and international standards have been developed and are in use.
The Western pattern diet is a modern dietary pattern that is generally characterized by high intakes of pre-packaged foods, refined grains, red meat, processed meat, high-sugar drinks, candy and sweets, fried foods, conventionally-raised animal products, butter and other high-fat dairy products, eggs, potatoes, corn, and low intakes of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, pasture-raised animal products, fish, nuts, and seeds.
T. Alp Ikizler is a nephrologist, currently holding the Catherine McLaughlin Hakim chair in Medicine at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, where he does clinical work and heads a research lab. Born in Istanbul, Turkey, he received his M.D. from the Istanbul University Faculty of Medicine.
Dietary Reference Values (DRV) is the name of the nutritional requirements systems used by the United Kingdom Department of Health and the European Union's European Food Safety Authority.
Staffan Lindeberg (1950–2016) was an associate professor of family medicine at the Department of Medicine, University of Lund, Sweden. He was a practicing GP at St Lars Primary Health Care Center, Lund, Sweden. Lindeberg researched the paleolithic diet.
Loren Cordain is an American scientist who specializes in the fields of nutrition and exercise physiology. He is notable as an advocate of the Paleolithic diet.
George J. Armelagos was an American anthropologist, and Goodrich C. White Professor of Anthropology at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Armelagos significantly impacted the field of physical anthropology in the disciplines of paleopathology and bioarchaeology. His work has provided invaluable contributions to the theoretical and methodological understanding human disease, diet and human variation within an evolutionary context. Relevant topics include epidemiology, paleopathology, paleodemography, bioarchaeology, evolutionary medicine, and the social interpretations of race, among others.
S. Boyd Eaton is a radiologist and one of the originators of the concept of Paleolithic nutrition. In 1985, he and Melvin Konner published a paper, Paleolithic Nutrition, in The New England Journal of Medicine which attracted some attention from other researchers.
The diet of known human ancestors varies dramatically over time. Strictly speaking, according to evolutionary anthropologists and archaeologists, there is not a single hominin Paleolithic diet. The Paleolithic covers roughly 2.8 million years, concurrent with the Pleistocene, and includes multiple human ancestors with their own evolutionary and technological adaptations living in a wide variety of environments. This fact with the difficulty of finding conclusive of evidence often makes broad generalizations of the earlier human diets very difficult. Our pre-hominin primate ancestors were broadly herbivorous, relying on either foliage or fruits and nuts and the shift in dietary breadth during the Paleolithic is often considered a critical point in hominin evolution. A generalization between Paleolithic diets of the various human ancestors that many anthropologists do make is that they are all to one degree or another omnivorous and are inextricably linked with tool use and new technologies.
Catherine Alison Geissler, Lady Auld is a prominent British nutritionist and author and co-author of widely recognised reference textbooks on human nutrition.
