How Did Hunter-gatherers Get Their Calcium?

RMJ

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Ever since? Animals are attracted to what tastes good because they need it.
That's how the sense of taste evolved. It's also the reason why we can discard the latest trend of demonizing sugar per se without even knowing of Peat, because we have such a delicate taste for sugars.

I just find it odd to think of humans eating eggshells because it's such an unpleasant experience.
Maybe they taste good if you are really calcium deficient, who knows...

its more like stuff tastes good when we need it

force urself to drink 5l of water a day ... it will taste like crap

dont drink water for 2 days and then drink it again ... it will taste like heaven on earth


Edit: I just realized thats exactly what u wrote xD
 

x-ray peat

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Yes, and such an abundance could only be unlocked after transitioning to agriculture. The transition in the first place would be preceded by declining game/fish resources, and increased human competition for them.
That's true too. I would just add that Native American's in both North and South America as well as Africans also developed agriculture. The reason their civilizations didn't develop as far as those in Eurasia was due to their limited productivity as compared to that of Eurasia. The book I mentioned makes a good case that this was mainly due to two reasons; the lack of draft animals in the Americas and Africa, and the North South vs East West geographical layout of each region. The east west layout of Eurasia allowed for the the spread of agricultural crops that were selected for similar latitudes. The North South layout of Africa and the Americas didnt allow for this, and new crops were required at each latitude.
 
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lvysaur

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I would just add that Native American's in both North and South America as well as Africans also developed agriculture

Well, the native North Americans had very limited agriculture. Their population densities were nowhere near those of Eurasians.
 

ernobe

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How did hunter-gatherers get their calcium? How much calcium did they consume in a day or in a week, does anyone know?

They may have noticed that their health improves when drinking "hard water". From Hard water - Wikipedia : "Hard water is formed when water percolates through deposits of limestone and chalk which are largely made up of calcium and magnesium carbonates."
 

TeaRex14

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Probably from bones mostly. Sally Fallon wrote a piece discussing how primitive tribes would soften the bones by cooking them and then grinding them into a powdered like substance and putting it on their meats. Also small slender bones in things like sardines can be eaten straight. So my money is on bones. My biggest question is where did they get their sodium from? Because I really don't buy Loren Cordain's theory about very low sodium intake, that's really dangerous. But obviously salt wasn't available, so they had to get it elsewhere. I've heard a few people claim animal blood is high in sodium, I've never seen any nutrient facts for blood so that's just all hearsay in my opinion. Coastal tribes could've possibly survived on sea water and seafood for adequate sodium.
 
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Bone broth. Most African tribes go like this

Honey: GOLD, universal gold.-Though eaten with larve/comb/pollen for more nutrients/ammino balance.
Small-medium game eaten entirely : Organs/collagen/skin/boiled bones. Bones and lean meat were given to the dogs.
Roots/Tubers dug up

Peats, essentially spot on completely. Now fresh fruit/milk may be superior diet choices, but not practical for most hunter gathers. Masai excluded.

So avoiding agriculture crops such as grains/beans. As well as famine food "greens". And any concentrated PUFA Oils

And instead sticking to fruit, honey, tubers, milk, whole animals(shank/liver/oaxtail) is about as optimal as you can get. Through in some seafood.

So yeah peats pretty much correct

Whole Baboon+honey
 
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Runenight201

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I can’t undersgand the appeal of eating skin/collagen/tendons etc... to be honest it doesn’t really have an appealing texture or taste like meat does.

Maybe they just knew it was good for them and ate it anyways.

Hard water is an interesting concept. Perhaps that justified calcium supplementation when one doesn’t consume a lot of milk.

Also I don’t agree with greens being famine food. Herbs actually make dishes taste better, and I will crave and enjoy boiled spinach and notice increased sense of well-being from consuming it.
 

tara

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Also I don’t agree with greens being famine food. Herbs actually make dishes taste better, and I will crave and enjoy boiled spinach and notice increased sense of well-being from consuming it.
If they are the flavouring or side dish to the main foods, then they are not being used as famine foods.
 

schultz

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Interesting topic!

Weston A Price* noted that all the "primitive" tribes he studied had at least 4x the RDA of calcium. I think the RDA for calcium at the time was 600mg, so that would be at least 2400mg they were getting. Not all tribes were the same, but calcium came from things like dairy, oats, greens, bones, shells (eggs and shellfish), insects, etc.

* I know that name will trigger some people on this forum.

I don't think his name will trigger people here. I enjoyed his book immensely when I read it, which was 6 years ago now.

People consumed things that we would not think to consume. We are looking at it from a modern perspective and we just don't realize the sort of stuff primitive peoples did, or the stuff they ate.

In the Weston Price book, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, I remember him talking about people burning plants and using the ashes as a mineral supplement (since the minerals would be left in the ash of course). He also mentions that a lot of native people from different areas of the world would carry clay around in their packs which they would dissolve in water. It is possible this contained a bit of calcium I suppose (though I think it was mainly Kaolin clay... maybe it contained some other minerals?) I looked into this behaviour, and it is called geophagy. It is still common today, though I am not sure I would consider ingesting large amount of soil to be healthy, it may provide some minerals for people. Pregnant women will participate in this practice (on the wikipedia page for geophagy there is a picture of a market in Zambia and they are selling balls of clay for consumption...) Apparently the soil around termite nests is high in calcium (source).

Price lists what each group of peoples that he studied got in terms of calcium and other nutrients, and he says that some of them were getting 5 or 6 times more calcium than the average white person (to be clear on whom he is comparing to, which I assume is the American average, I would have to go back and read it carefully). He also says that some of these groups, like the New Zealand Maori and the Melanesians, were getting over 23 times more magnesium and 10 times more fat soluble vitamins, as well as 5 times the amount of calcium. Things like lobster have a decent amount of calcium. He talks about Maori kids who attended a native school, who brought no lunch with them, but who would jump into the ocean at lunch time and find lobster to eat.

The documentary series "Human Planet" features some interesting cultures eating odd things. These kids in South America, since they don't get enough food in their little village, go out into the rainforest and find tarantulas and then roast them on the fire and eat them whole. I don't know how much calcium that would provide, but it is an interesting thing to eat, and something I wouldn't think of, which is sort of my point, that peoples eat things we wouldn't think of because we have a modern 1st world perspective and only think of things that we see in the grocery store.

Someone mentioned figs already. These are an important source of calcium for many animals. When animals that normally eat a lot of fruit don't have access to it they will eat things like bark, pith, leaves and even consume urine and soil (interestingly, when fruit is very abundant, orangutans will eat 100% of their diet as fruit). This study discusses some of these things and explains that howler monkeys will consume leaves but that the calcium from leaves is not assimilated as well as the calcium from fruit. Things that affect calcium absorption from plants include fiber, phytates, oxalates, tannins. Obviously cooking leaves would make them much more useful. Fire no doubt gave humans an advantage.

Below are some quotes

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"In Africa I found many tribes gathering certain plants from swamps and marshes and streams, particularly the water hyacinth. These plants were dried and burned for their ashes which were put into the foods of mothers and growing children. A species of water hyacinth is shown in Fig. 130. The woman shown in Fig. 130, with an enormous goiter, had come down from a nine thousand-foot level in the mountains above Lake Edward. Here all the drinking water was snow water which did not carry iodine. She had come down from the high area to the six-thousand-foot level to gather the water hyacinth and other plants to obtain the ashes from these and other iodine carrying plants to carry back to her children to prevent, as she explained, the formation of "big neck," such as she had. The people living at the six-thousand-foot level also use the ashes of these plants."

"It is also of interest that among this group in the Andes, among those in central Africa, and among the Aborigines of Australia, each knapsack contained a ball of clay, a little of which was dissolved in water. Into this they dipped their morsels of food while eating. Their explanation was to prevent "sick stomach." This is the medicine that is used by the native in these countries for combating dysentery and food infections."

"The earliest recorded successful treatment of scurvy occurred in Canada in 1535 when Jacques Cartier, on the advice of a friendly Indian, gave his scurvyprostrated men a decoction of young green succulent 'shoots' from the spruce trees with successful results. These happy effects apparently were not appreciated in Europe, for scurvy continued to be endemic."

"A splendid illustration of the primitive Maori instinct or wisdom regarding the value of sea foods was shown in an experience we had while making examinations in a native school on the east coast of the North Islands. I was impressed with the fact that the children in the school gave very little evidence of having active dental caries. I asked the teacher what the children brought from their homes to eat at their midday lunch, since most of them had to come too great a distance to return at noon. I was told that they brought no lunch but that when school was dismissed at noon the children rushed for the beach where, while part of the group prepared bonfires, the others stripped and dived into the sea, and brought up a large species of lobster. The lobsters were promptly roasted on the coals and devoured with great relish."

"However, it has been found that wild mantled howler monkeys (A. palliata) assimilate Ca at substantially lower levels than other plant-eating vertebrates [Nagy & Milton, 1979]. Additionally, studies in humans have found that individuals who consume a diet high in cellulose or other plant-based fibers absorb less Ca than those that do not [Ismail-Beigi etal., 1977; Kelsay et al., 1979]. This may also be the case in mantled howler monkeys who had lower Ca assimilation rates when fed a leaf-based compared to a fruit-based diet [Nagy & Milton, 1979]. Considering the highly fibrous nature of the post-hurricane leaf-based diet of A. pigra, it is possible that the actual assimilation of Ca is quite low making it a potentially limiting factor especially during the first 18 months when no fruit was consumed and the diet would have been higher in fiber."

"Wiley and Katz (5) have proposed that eating clay serves different purposes during different periods of pregnancy, soothing stomach upset during morning sickness in the first trimester and supplementing nutrients (especially calcium) during the second and third trimesters, when the fetal skeleton is forming. This type of geophagy occurs most commonly in cultures of sub-Saharan Africa and their descendants (5). The timing of dirt ingestion and amounts consumed vary with tribes and individual persons, but soil comes consistently from certain sites. In some cultures, well-established trade routes and clay traders make rural clays available for geophagy even in urban settings. Clays from termite mounds are especially popular among traded clays, perhaps because they are rich in calcium (5). Whatever the underlying reason, geophagy in Africa does not appear to be a recent cultural development; it may predate Homo sapiens."
 

schultz

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If they are the flavouring or side dish to the main foods, then they are not being used as famine foods.

Exactly. I just posted above a study discussing howler monkeys in a post hurricane area. They had to survive off of a diet high in leaves because a lot of the fruit trees were damaged. In the geophagy article on wikipedia it talks about people eating soil to stave hunger pangs. These are famine type situations, or situations with inadequate food. Sprinkling some dried thyme on your chicken breast is a bit different. Some of these animals will drink their own urine in order to get enough sodium when times are tough. Something to consider is that peoples, and animals in general, don't have an ideal diet 100% of the time and things get pretty tough. While I am interested in the foods people ate when times were tough, I am also interesting in what foods are optimal. Paleo people may not have always been eating optimally, and may have been eating just to survive depending on where they lived. Ray doesn't say that 2 cups of milk and 1 cup of orange juice is optimal, but it is something that is accessible and it is better than most of the things people have access to.

I think research can help us discover what is optimal (eventually). I also think researching primitive diets can help guide the research in ways. At the very least it is interesting.
 

schultz

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Oh I totally forgot to mention another study I was reading... (sorry for the excessive posting). I thought it was interesting so maybe other people will too.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/237960234_Geophagy_in_Pregnancy_A_Test_of_a_Hypothesis

"In the African context geophagy during pregnancy has several potential adaptive consequences for maternal and fetal health. Indeed, clay seems to be an important component of the biocultural management of pregnancy, particularly for women in societies that do not keep dairy animals or utilize dairy products. First, clay consumption may provide an important supplemental source of minerals such as calcium that are essential to fetal skeletal development and may be limited in heavily plant-based diets, particularly those in which fiber, phytates, or oxalates are common or overall nutritional status is marginal. Populations that practice dairying and rely heavily on dairy products have readily available rich sources of calcium to draw on and therefore do not need the mineral supplementation from clay during pregnancy. Additionally, clay consumption during pregnancy may increase the efficiency of calcium absorption in the small intestine by slowing transit time of foods through the gastrointestinal tract and reducing calcium loss."
 

Grischbal

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Didnt the European Hunter-And-Gatherers get wreckt and outbreeded by herderers like the Indo-Europeans with their chariots?
 

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