On the "Hunter-Gatherer" Diet and "Food Sequencing"

Once, I read a book (unfortunately, I can’t remember its title) about how our digestive tracts have evolved to be much more suited to hunter-gatherer lifestyles than our modern post-agricultural lifestyle; i.e., not enough time has passed for our guts to evolve to adapt to agriculture, which has only been around since 9,000 BC or so.

Lean meats and fish, caught in the wild, and nuts, seeds, complex carbohydrates: these are what we're suited for. Because our guts are so adapted to breaking down harder to digest and more fibrous foods, processed white flour and sugar make glucose too instantly available to the bloodstream, and spikes in blood sugar cause all kinds of problems, including inflammation and, ultimately, diabetes.

John Rush, the author of “Gut Morphology, Cultural Eating Habits, Digestive Failure, and Ill Health,” is a big fan of food sequencing, and thinks the culprits in modern day malnutrition are:
1) the “balanced meals” we’ve been instructed to eat (consuming proteins, carbohydrates, and fats at the same meal) and
2) what he calls the “fractionating” of whole foods (what I call “stripping”).

John Rush points out that our teeth, which have basically stayed the same over a few million years, are a good clue that we are adapted to an omnivorous but mostly plant foods diet. He cites an analysis of fossilized fecal droppings showing that hunter-gatherer meals were each dominated by one food type, mostly vegetable, and when meat was consumed, it was not consumed with other types of food. (I imagine everyone gathering for a mostly- or all-meat meal after a rare big kill.) He then explains that different digestive processes are required to digest plants versus proteins, so consuming them together might be counterproductive in terms of gut functioning.

Rush is a big fan of eating animal protein less frequently and isolating it to one meal, i.e., not combining it with vegetables and starches.

Your gastrointestinal tract definitely can handle a variety of food groups at the same time. And nuts, seeds, and legumes, all of which are important parts of a healthy diet, are made up of protein and carbohydrates.

But if anyone follows that “food sequencing” diet for more than two or three months, I’d love to hear how it worked for you.