Cavemen Did Not Get Prostate Cancer

[gusgold]

They also ate a meat based diet but the average lifespan was 35, so were they to young for PCa. Who knows, but just to be safe I am marinating my grass fed beef in Gator Blood.

Gus

cavemandoctor.com/2012/01/2...

[Hidden]

As recent as 100 years ago, people on average didn't live long enough to get cancer. Someone commented in a post that they thought the reason why people didn't get lung cancer in the early 1900s was because the tobacco had less additives. Turns out they just didn't live long enough. Today, only 10% of lung cancer is diagnosed before 50 which was the average life expectancy back then.

I love beef too much to give it up, but I do try to find organic beef instead of the hormone-fed variety.

[pjoshea13 in reply to Hidden]

Gregg,

With high infant mortality, etc, the probability of getting to 75 wasn't that good over 150 years ago, compared to today, but there were enough old guys around that PCa would have been noted. The urology textbooks published in the 1800s have a lot to say about BPH (a documented age-related problem for over a thousand years), but almost nothing to say about PCa until the late 1890's. A few cases are mentioned anecdotally, if at all.

In 1901, beginning with 100,00 male births, it was expected that 21,076 would get to 75, 12,084 to age 80 & 5,179 to age 85. [1]

By 1901, life expectancy for a male birth was 75.67 years.

The human life cycle hasn't changed - by 115 years pretty much an entire birth cohort will have gone - only the mortality distribution has changed. But if a male made it to 25, he stood a pretty good chance of reaching old age.

Age at death of first 10 presidents, by death year:

Washington (1) 67 -1799

Jefferson (3) 83 -1826

Adams (2) 90 -1826

Monroe (5) 73 -1831

Madison (4) 85 -1836

Harrison (9) 68 -1841

Jackson (7) 78 -1845

Adams, JQ (6) 80 -1848

Tyler (10) 71 -1862

Van Buren (8) 79 -1862

... average: 77.4 years!

-Patrick

[1] cdc.gov/nchs/data/lifetable...

[2] aldoi.gov/PDF/Consumers/Mor...

[Hidden in reply to pjoshea13]

I wonder how long I would have lasted with BPH, untreated. Probably not past age 60.

[13thwarrior in reply to Hidden]

WSOPeddie, You might consider a subscription to the Institute for Natural Healing. This week, they published an excellent big-picture view of Prostate Cancer treatments and non, entitled, Prostate Cancer is Normal. Dying from it is Not.

[Hidden in reply to Hidden]

You know Ed, I got this without any symptoms, and I frequently thought the same thing. It was St. 4 when found 8 years ago. But, I must have had it well before then. But, I'm about sick and tired of the bs I've been through. I'm at the point where I don't give a crap about the cancer, just gimme some T.

Joe

[Hidden]

If, and this is a big if, you can get grass fed beef here in the states, try it. I dare you. It tastes exactly like a grass fed cow would taste like, grass. Marinate away, it'll still taste like dirt.

[Hidden in reply to Hidden]

For what it's worth, Costco has much better steak than the grocery chains, IMHO.

[Kuanyin]

Will The Real Hunters and Gatherers Please Stand Up!

The following selection somewhat long, but readable. summarizes relevant findings from anthropological literature which incorporate "facts on the ground" gathered from the examinations of the remains of our early hunter and gatherer ancestors and compares them with the few remaining societies in the world where hunting and gathering is still practiced. Please be patient and read to the end of the selection which was taken from “The Evolution of Diet” (National Geographic Magazine, nationalgeographic.com/food...

The latest clue as to why our modern diet may be making us sick comes from Harvard primatologist Richard Wrangham, who argues that the biggest revolution in the human diet came not when we started to eat meat but when we learned to cook. Our human ancestors who began cooking sometime between 1.8 million and 400,000 years ago probably had more children who thrived, Wrangham says. Pounding and heating food “predigests” it, so our guts spend less energy breaking it down, absorb more than if the food were raw, and thus extract more fuel for our brains. “Cooking produces soft, energy-rich foods,” says Wrangham. Today we can’t survive on raw, unprocessed food alone, he says. We have evolved to depend upon cooked food.

To test his ideas, Wrangham and his students fed raw and cooked food to rats and mice. When I visited Wrangham’s lab at Harvard, his then graduate student, Rachel Carmody, opened the door of a small refrigerator to show me plastic bags filled with meat and sweet potatoes, some raw and some cooked. Mice raised on cooked foods gained 15 to 40 percent more weight than mice raised only on raw food.

If Wrangham is right, cooking not only gave early humans the energy they needed to build bigger brains but also helped them get more calories from food so that they could gain weight. In the modern context the flip side of his hypothesis is that we may be victims of our own success. We have gotten so good at processing foods that for the first time in human evolution, many humans are getting more calories than they burn in a day. “Rough breads have given way to Twinkies, apples to apple juice,” he writes. “We need to become more aware of the calorie-raising consequences of a highly processed diet.”

The real Paleolithic diet, though, wasn’t all meat and marrow. It’s true that hunter-gatherers around the world crave meat more than any other food and usually get around 30 percent of their annual calories from animals. But most also endure lean times when they eat less than a handful of meat each week. New studies suggest that more than a reliance on meat in ancient human diets fueled the brain’s expansion.

Year-round observations confirm that hunter-gatherers often have dismal success as hunters. The Hadza and Kung bushmen of Africa, for example, fail to get meat more than half the time when they venture forth with bows and arrows. This suggests it was even harder for our ancestors who didn’t have these weapons. “Everybody thinks you wander out into the savanna and there are antelopes everywhere, just waiting for you to bonk them on the head,” says paleoanthropologist Alison Brooks of George Washington University, an expert on the Dobe Kung of Botswana. No one eats meat all that often, except in the Arctic, where Inuit and other groups traditionally got as much as 99 percent of their calories from seals, narwhals, and fish.

So how do hunter-gatherers get energy when there’s no meat? It turns out that “man the hunter” is backed up by “woman the forager,” who, with some help from children, provides more calories during difficult times. When meat, fruit, or honey is scarce, foragers depend on “fallback foods,” says Brooks. The Hadza get almost 70 percent of their calories from plants. The Kung traditionally rely on tubers and mongongo nuts, the Aka and Baka Pygmies of the Congo River Basin on yams, the Tsimane and Yanomami Indians of the Amazon on plantains and manioc, the Australian Aboriginals on nut grass and water chestnuts.

“There’s been a consistent story about hunting defining us and that meat made us human,” says Amanda Henry, a paleobiologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. “Frankly, I think that misses half of the story. They want meat, sure. But what they actually live on is plant foods.” What’s more, she found starch granules from plants on fossil teeth and stone tools, which suggests humans may have been eating grains, as well as tubers, for at least 100,000 years—long enough to have evolved the ability to tolerate them.

The notion that we stopped evolving in the Paleolithic period simply isn’t true. Our teeth, jaws, and faces have gotten smaller, and our DNA has changed since the invention of agriculture. “Are humans still evolving? Yes!” says geneticist Sarah Tishkoff of the University of Pennsylvania.

One striking piece of evidence is lactose tolerance. All humans digest mother’s milk as infants, but until cattle began being domesticated 10,000 years ago, weaned children no longer needed to digest milk. As a result, they stopped making the enzyme lactase, which breaks down the lactose into simple sugars. After humans began herding cattle, it became tremendously advantageous to digest milk, and lactose tolerance evolved independently among cattle herders in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Groups not dependent on cattle, such as the Chinese and Thai, the Pima Indians of the American Southwest, and the Bantu of West Africa, remain lactose intolerant.

Humans also vary in their ability to extract sugars from starchy foods as they chew them, depending on how many copies of a certain gene they inherit. Populations that traditionally ate more starchy foods, such as the Hadza, have more copies of the gene than the Yakut meat-eaters of Siberia, and their saliva helps break down starches before the food reaches their stomachs.

These examples suggest a twist on “You are what you eat.” More accurately, you are what your ancestors ate. There is tremendous variation in what foods humans can thrive on, depending on genetic inheritance. Traditional diets today include the vegetarian regimen of India’s Jains, the meat-intensive fare of Inuit, and the fish-heavy diet of Malaysia’s Bajau people. The Nochmani of the Nicobar Islands off the coast of India get by on protein from insects. “What makes us human is our ability to find a meal in virtually any environment,” says the Tsimane study co-leader Leonard.

Studies suggest that indigenous groups get into trouble when they abandon their traditional diets and active lifestyles for Western living. Diabetes was virtually unknown, for instance, among the Maya of Central America until the 1950s. As they’ve switched to a Western diet high in sugars, the rate of diabetes has skyrocketed. Siberian nomads such as the Evenk reindeer herders and the Yakut ate diets heavy in meat, yet they had almost no heart disease until after the fall of the Soviet Union, when many settled in towns and began eating market foods. Today about half the Yakut living in villages are overweight, and almost a third have hypertension, says Leonard. And Tsimane people who eat market foods are more prone to diabetes than those who still rely on hunting and gathering.

For those of us whose ancestors were adapted to plant-based diets—and who have desk jobs—it might be best not to eat as much meat as the Yakut. Recent studies confirm older findings that although humans have eaten red meat for two million years, heavy consumption increases atherosclerosis and cancer in most populations—and the culprit isn’t just saturated fat or cholesterol. Our gut bacteria digest a nutrient in meat called L-carnitine. In one mouse study, digestion of L-carnitine boosted artery-clogging plaque. Research also has shown that the human immune system attacks a sugar in red meat that’s called Neu5Gc, causing inflammation that’s low level in the young but that eventually could cause cancer. “Red meat is great, if you want to live to 45,” says Ajit Varki of the University of California, San Diego, lead author of the Neu5Gc study.

Many paleoanthropologists say that although advocates of the modern Paleolithic diet urge us to stay away from unhealthy processed foods, the diet’s heavy focus on meat doesn’t replicate the diversity of foods that our ancestors ate—or take into account the active lifestyles that protected them from heart disease and diabetes. “What bothers a lot of paleoanthropologists is that we actually didn’t have just one caveman diet,” says Leslie Aiello, president of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research in New York City. “The human diet goes back at least two million years. We had a lot of cavemen out there.”

In other words, there is no one ideal human diet. Aiello and Leonard say the real hallmark of being human isn’t our taste for meat but our ability to adapt to many habitats—and to be able to combine many different foods to create many healthy diets. Unfortunately the modern Western diet does not appear to be one of them.

It’s this shift to processed foods, taking place all over the world, that’s contributing to a rising epidemic of obesity and related diseases.

If most of the world ate more local fruits and vegetables, a little meat, fish, and some whole grains (as in the highly touted Mediterranean diet), and exercised an hour a day, that would be good news for our health—and for the planet.

The takeaways:

--The diet of early humans may have consisted 70% of non-meat foods for long periods of time

--The Mediterranean diet which includes very little meat may be the healthiest regimen to follow. I might add a comment of my own here. It is interesting that when Mediterraneans ( if we can use that phrase) do eat meat, it is generally NOT beef, but goat, lamb and fowl. Mediterraneans do eat and drink the milk and milk products from these animals. I was looking for Feta cheese the other day. It seems that almost all of this cheese that comes from that part of the world is made from the milk of goat and sheep. Something to think about.

--Processed food is our downfall: doesn't make any difference whether meat or vegetable: all bad.

--The "hallmark of being human" is our ability to adapt to our environment.

--We don't exercise enough and, of course, the crowning jewel,

Our gut bacteria digest a nutrient in meat called L-carnitine. In one mouse study, digestion of L-carnitine boosted artery-clogging plaque. Research also has shown that the human immune system attacks a sugar in red meat that’s called Neu5Gc, causing inflammation that’s low level in the young but that eventually could cause cancer. “Red meat is great, if you want to live to 45,”