The Very Fiber of Our Being – What’s lacking in the modern human diet 05 have our species at a crossroads – Sobolik
University of Maine anthropologist Kristin Sobolik argues that you are what you eat — and what your ancestors ate, and what their ancestors ate, and so on, for millennia. For that reason, today’s human diet is in a sad state of affairs and, quite frankly, our bodies weren’t designed for this.
Problem is, it could be too late — and too complicated — to do anything about it, she says.
Our long-ago ancestors hunted, foraged and gathered whatever sustenance they could find. Today, despite the relative abundance at the grocery store — and despite the global food system that attempts to feed a mass population efficiently and inexpensively — humans aren’t getting the same variety of flora and fauna in their diets as they used to.
In a recent article in the British Journal of Nutrition, Sobolik and Jeff Leach of the New Orleans-based Paleobiotics Laboratory note that our forebears had a much higher concentration of fiber — particularly undigested fiber — in their diets than we do today. Humans evolved in synchrony with their intestinal anaerobes, and undigested fiber promotes the growth of positive microbiota, which helps process food efficiently.