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Show If by David Lampe you eat like a prehistoric American cave dweller, you will be healthier. You will shed unwanted pounds. And you will feel and look And to bulk out and vary his diet he created different leafy salads with younger. Cactus pads and hackberry seeds don't appeal to you as food? Grasshoppers, lizards, mice and snakes sound unpalatable? No matter. Although cave people 10,000 years ago thrived on all these cavethings, your own man diet can consist entirely of normal, wholesome foods from the supermarket. The man who demonstrated this is 20th-centu- ry Vaughn M. Bryant )r Associate Professor in the Anthropology Department at Texas A & M University. Convinced that cavemen's eating habits were better than ours are today, he put himself on a caveman's diet to prove it. Result? At 39, he has cut his weight to what it was when he entered college, has the physique of a and feels as good as he looks. Dr. Bryant knows what cavemen ate because he is the world's foremost authority on their dung known in scientific circles as "coprolites." For the last 10 years he has been screening thousands of specimens from caves in cliffsides in the Pecos River valley of southwest Texas. Through chemical treatment, these coprolites reveal not only what the caveman ate but in what proportions and even how they prepared their food. For thousands of years, Bryant says, American cave people lived healthily on carbohydrates more than proteins. "Their staple food' he explains, "was cactus. They roasted the pads simply by throwing them into fires, making them more palatable." Few calories the vegetables the cave peocacti were heavy in fiber the ple ate, and low in calories, Bryant found. Thus, the cavemen felt full but didn't over-futheir bodies. They also ate Like all el cactus flowers and fruit, and in winter they ground cactus seeds into a paste which was baked into tortilla-lik- e bread or thinned into a gruel. They consumed lots of walnuts and whole hackberries, which have fleshy exteriors and hard pits rich in calcium. They also ate wild onions, cattail roots, and occasionally roots and bark from trees fibrous but possibly a filler in hard times. None of these foods contained much fat. Nor did the snakes, pack rats, rabbits and other small rodents the cavemen trapped. "They some Anthropologist Vaughn Bryant, who studies what cavemen ate thousands of years ago, felt pudgy in 1974 (I). He tried the caveman's diet himself, lost unwanted pounds. Today, at 39, he looks and feels much younger (r). times ate mice whole," Bryant says. "In one coprolite we found a complete skeleton skull and all." The scant amount of sugar in their diet was mainly fructose from fruit. Living entirely on a caveman diet occurred to Bryant four years ago. "My metabolism was changing. Despite regular heavy exercise, I was almost 30 pounds heavier than when I'd entered college. I was pudgy, my clothes seemed to be shrinking. I was beginning to go to pot." A liquid-protei- n diet had helped him lose pounds, but when he gave it up his weight had risen alarmingly. The popular diet hadn't worked either. Neither had several others. So he decided to eat like a caveman. high-protei- n, No mice "I wasn't about to go the mouse route," he recalls, "or eat snakes and grubs and grasshoppers. But I was sure could replicate the caveman regimen with wholesome foods, matching vitamin for vitamin, protein for protein, carbohydrate for carbohydrate." Physicians and nutritionists assured him he would come to no harm. "Basically I was looking for foods natural, low- I higli-fibe- low-calor- r, fat items. You do need some fats to survive, but you can get them from walnuts as our cavemen most often did or some other plant foods." Bryant ate lots of fruits, especially cantaloupes and grapefruit. Instead of cattail root he ate jicama, an almost tasteless northern Mexican root, very filling and high in water and fiber. He also ate raw turnips, cucumbers and dried beans that he cooked himself d because the ones are canned with sugar. In fact, he cut out all simple sugars, a big problem as most grocery store foods contain it. "To satisfy my craving for sweets I switched to saccharin," he admits. "I may die of cancer of the bladder, but not of overweight!" He cut out eggs which cavemen seldom ate and hamburger and other fatty meat. The cavemen did eat fish, so Bryant worked into his diet flounder, snapper, cod and other nonfatty ready-cooke- fish. He couldn't find rabbit in local stores, so he substituted lean steak, shrimp and other shellfish low in fat. Instead of white bread he ate Meditewholewheat pita bread rranean-style nutritionally much like the caveman e bread, he says. He marinated carrots in lemon or lime juice and a touch of saccharin. cactus-seed-past- dressings of vinegar, spices, lime or lemon juice and a drop of saccharin. "In other words, a big chef's salad minus the cheese, the meat and the heavy, mayonnaise-typ- e dressing. And no potato chips or things like that." During the first three months on his diet Bryant ate for breakfast a few handfuls of carrots, some jicama and fresh fruit. "I took some of this garbage to school for lunch and snacking," he says, and sometimes he had a breast of chicken, but without the fatty skin. "For dinner sometimes fish, sometimes just high-bul- k vegetables." At first he lost three or four pounds a week, then, some weeks, just a pound or two. In four months he had shed over 20 pounds. "It may not sound like a lot, but it was painless. I never played the calorie-countin- g game. I simply ate when hungry." Not everybody, Vaughn Bryant admits, would like his caveman diet. His wife, for example, finds it bland. But now he follows it by choice. He avoids most fats and all simple sugars. "Polyunsaturated or saturated, fats are bad for your system. And the body absorbs simple sugars too quickly, so they flood your system and all too soon you're hungry again. "The secondary carbohydrates all the carbohydrates except sugar put on much less weight," he emphasizes. "Many reducing diets don't include potatoes, but I've found that can eat baked ones, with a minimum of butter, and not put on unwanted pounds. also eat a lot of rice brown and I I white." Little salt, less alcohol Lte rarely salts anything. Too much salt, he says, makes you retain body fluids, raising your blood pressure. He cut out beer and the stronger alcohols the cavemen didn't have them and he feels much better without them. Mostly he drinks diet sodas by the "The important thing is that feel better," Bryant says. "Partly, this is psychological. I can get into those 'shrunken' clothes again. I've lost my pot and I feel trimmer. Brisk exercise is easier, more fun. "Im sure that my caveman menus have helped my body. Remember, the people got them from didn't have access to simple sugars, fats, salt, unlimited meat supplies, as far as we know. And yet they and their ancestors thrived on variations of this diet for 5 million years." JjS I I 18 I'AKADI M Ill Mill R in, rn |
