The internet is full of fad diets, and quick tips that are meant to help you lose weight, gain muscle, and get fit with the least amount of effort and complication possible. These one-size-fits-all approaches promise to make it easy for you, without any need to tailor them to your own needs. Unfortunately, most of these tips are rubbish, and the diets don’t work. The truth behind most of these myths is that you need to find a balanced approach that works for you instead of following fads. 

10. Myth: Non-Celiac Gluten Sensitivity

Non-celiac gluten sensitivity is a controversial issue among both doctors and the public. Some doctors are now diagnosing people with it in certain situations, but many medical researchers are still openly skeptical and think that we are going in the wrong direction. Now, this doesn’t mean that there isn’t anything going on, but medical researchers have long felt that the gluten itself being the cause may be nothing more than a gigantic red herring. 

See, in the medical world, doctors are told that when you hear hooves, you should think of horses, not zebras. This means you go for the most obvious answer first, instead of the more arcane one. There’s no biological reason to think that non-celiac gluten sensitivity would exist, so the likely answer is that it’s some additive in gluten products causing the problem. Researchers have studied something called FODMAPS, a group of four fermentable sugars often found in gluten products, and only 8% of people who kept using gluten but stopped using FODMAPs still had a problem. As for the other 8%? Many gluten products contain something called Amalyse Tripsin Inhibitors, which are also known to cause gut and bowel issues for some people. 

9. Myth: Carbohydrates And Fats Are Bad For You, But Protein Is Good 

We’ve all heard the claims many times: You should avoid carbohydrates as much as possible because they make you fat. Fat makes you fat, and protein is good because it makes you strong and gives you energy. Many of these beliefs are so widespread that people base entire fad diets around them, and millions then follow those diets. These diets have become so extreme that they often restrict or almost entirely remove one or more of these categories, which is not advisable. 

The truth is that all three are essential macronutrients, and all are an important part of a well-balanced diet. While it’s true some processed carbs aren’t very good for you, that doesn’t mean they are all bad or that you should toss out a macronutrient. As for fat, there is no proven link between the consumption of fat in and of itself and more health problems. Fat is also an essential macronutrient, you should just focus on eating healthy fats such as fish, natural peanut butter, coconut oil, and so on. And finally, there’s protein, which almost every diet will tell you is fine to just go to town on every day. The truth is protein’s main purpose is for muscle growth and repair, so if you aren’t being particularly active, you probably don’t need as much. Too much protein can cause kidney damage, and it should be treated with respect. 

8. Myth: People Who Are Extremely Overweight Can Lose Weight As Easily As The Next Guy 

It is quite common for people to look at those who are extremely overweight, and wonder why they don’t just lose some weight. Some people think that they don’t really try to lose weight at all, or only half-heartedly try on rare occasions. However, the truth is that many obese people are struggling hard to lose weight and have it harder than normal-sized people. Once you start to reach a certain level of overweight, hormonal changes can take place in your body which make it hard to get the weight back off. 

First, those who are extremely overweight can develop a resistance to an important hormone called Leptin. This hormone is very important for regulating how much fat your body creates and stores. When this hormone is not working properly your body will resist shedding fat, even when you are taking the right steps to lose weight. Secondly, the more weight you gain, the more likely you are to gain insulin resistance, making it harder to convince your body that it is okay to shed that extra fat. This doesn’t mean someone who has a lot of extra weight can’t achieve their goals, but it may be harder for them. 

7. Myth: Sodas With Sugar Substitutes Will Help You Lose Weight 

Sugar-free sodas are insanely popular and have become such a diet trend over the years that the versions of sodas like Coca-Cola that don’t have sugar have become more popular than their regular versions. People think of them as a great way to control their sugar cravings and lose weight, keeping that sweet tooth in check with none of the guilt. For a lot of people, it is an easy step and the first transition they take when trying to be a little bit healthier. 

However, the unfortunate reality is that the evidence doesn’t bear out that sugar-free sodas with sugar substitutes have any benefit when it comes to weight loss or controlling our sugar cravings. Now, this doesn’t mean that diabetics should go drinking sugared sodas, as they have a very good medical reason for using sugar substitutes. For everyone else, a review of 283 studies found no evidence at all that sugar-free sodas help with weight loss. You might think that getting rid of sugared sodas would help, but the problem is that the substitutes do not satisfy our cravings, and we just end up getting as much or more sugar from somewhere else. 

6. Myth: It’s Okay To Burn Lots Of Fat In A Short Time 

Crash diets will offer you a chance to lose all that extra weight that you’ve been wanting to get rid of in just a few months, or even weeks. What they claim seems like magic, and burns all that fat right off. Now, while the efficacy of these diets is also in question, the bigger problem is that even if the diets did work, they wouldn’t be safe for you to do. It is simply not medically advisable to lose lots of weight in a short amount of time. 

According to experts, you should not be losing more than one to two pounds of weight per week. This is a normal and healthy amount of weight loss if you have a good fitness plan. If you try to go faster than this, you can put yourself at risk of health complications. The issue is that to lose more than a couple of pounds a week, you are going to have to go extremely hard on the calorie deficit. This can lead to various problems including gallstones, a slowed metabolic rate, malnutrition, fatigue, and more. 

5. Myth: Preworkout Powder Is Important For Getting Massive Gains 

Pre-workout powder has been a big thing in the world of bodybuilding for a while, and top bodybuilders are often sponsored by particular brands. It’s become a heavily promoted product, and many now cannot imagine going without it. These powders are a mix of various things that vary from brand to brand including amino acids, vitamins, and the random stimulants you find in energy drinks. However, the one thing that they all contain in very large amounts, which is the most important part of all formulations, is caffeine. 

These powdered workout blends have so much caffeine that they have more than the average cup of coffee. And to make matters worse, like everything in the supplement category, there is no standardization and you do not know what you are getting when it comes to the rest of the blend from brand to brand. This doesn’t mean that pre-workout powder is not safe if you use it according to package instructions, and don’t mix it with too many other stimulant products, but it is not necessary and is not a replacement for a balanced diet. 

4. Myth: Need Potassium? Reach For A Banana 

Now, we want to be clear that we aren’t saying that bananas are low in potassium. They have a pretty large amount. However, most people think of bananas as the thing to reach for if you need a potassium boost but would be hard-pressed to tell you about other items that contain this essential electrolyte. This myth is so pervasive it has appeared in movies like Honey We Shrunk Ourselves, where a kid with a potassium problem who couldn’t find his medication saves his life with a banana. 

It is true that if you cannot find anything else with potassium on hand and you really need some a banana will help, but there are tons of options with higher amounts of it. Legumes, especially white beans, leafy greens, yams, many melons, and a plethora of other fruits and vegetables have significantly more potassium than a banana. While you may not have a lot of these on hand or know how to cook with them if you are not a big vegetable lover, you probably like at least a food item or two that is heavily tomato-based, These are another produce item with significantly more potassium than a banana and less sugar. 

3. Myth: Brown Rice Is Better For You Than White Rice 

Many people prefer white rice but wish they could tolerate brown rice more, as they know it is better for them. It has more vitamins, without the need to be enriched, and it has more fiber as well. On top of this, it is lower on the glycemic index. This makes it sound, on paper, like the far healthier option to consume regularly. However, there are some issues with brown rice that make it far more than a cut-and-dried decision. 

Now, since white rice is still a processed, enriched grain, it is not necessarily a good idea to eat it as your only or main source of carbohydrates, but brown rice may not necessarily be a great replacement either. Because it is processed less, brown rice has 80% more inorganic arsenic than white rice, which has caused concern among some public health experts. Even if we could get a handle on the arsenic problem, brown rice contains phytic acid, which many people have trouble digesting, and can stop your body from properly absorbing iron and zinc. 

2. Myth: Fad Dieting Will Help You Achieve Your Long-Term Weight Loss Goals 

This might sound like common sense, but statistics show that at any given time one in five Americans report being on some fad diet. These diets often involve severe caloric restriction, severe restrictions of various food groups, and other one-size-fits-all features that promise to make you shed those extra pounds and have the body you always dreamed of. Unfortunately, while one in five Americans are regularly on a diet of some type, these diets have been proven by scientific studies not to be effective for long-term weight loss — in fact, many people gain back more than they lose. 

That’s because most of these diets are either crash diets or too restrictive for the average person to stick with them long-term. They lose some weight temporarily, but rebound once they quit the diet, which they barely manage to keep up. These diets are designed in a way that, scientifically, they are very hard to sustain. The answer to long-term weight loss is finding a balanced, nutritious diet that works for your body, and also has tastes and textures that you can look forward to and not feel restricted by. 

1. Myth: Trying To Lose Weight Or Gain Muscle? Keep Your Eyes On The Scale 

When you’re trying to either lose weight, gain muscle, or both, it can be easy to slip into the (pretty unhealthy) habit of obsessing over what your scale says. Understandably, people want to see benchmarks of their success to keep them motivated, and the scale seems like an easy way to do so. Reality shows like The Biggest Loser have made losing just a handful of pounds a really big deal and left contestants feeling bad when they didn’t reach the artificial goal. 

However, the problem is that going by scale alone, especially looking at it regularly, can make things more frustrating than motivating. The issue is that your weight can vary from five to eight pounds every week, and sometimes every day based on a host of factors. This weight is mainly due to how much food and water is in your body (and yes, that includes your pee and poop). This weight can also be higher at certain times of the week. Studies have shown that Sunday is our highest weight point and that it goes down from there throughout the week, slowly creeping its way back up again nearer to Sunday.

[COMPETITION: This list features a competition. See the bonus item at the end of the list for details.] I’m as guilty as the next man when it comes to canonizing our ancestors—in fact, probably more guilty than most if this list, this list, and this list are any indication. And perhaps it is no small wonder when it comes to diet, that so many of us look to the past to find answers: after all, our own governments failed us when they began promoting the modern diet (you know . . . the one that made us all fat!)^[1]

See Also: Top 10 Craziest Diets Ever

But as tempting as it is to find these answers in the past, we are not living in the past. Just as we don’t seek to find the best way to build our houses from the ancient homes of the Greeks, we shouldn’t be looking at cavemen to find the perfect diet. In fact, I would posit that the perfect diet is not even a diet at all!

10 Ditch The Diets

This is probably the single most important item on this list. From this moment, delete all diets from your life. No more keto, no more paleo, no more veganism, no more vegetarianism, no more weight watchers, no more Jenny Craig, and on and on and on. Every time you go on a diet, you statistically gain 11 pounds for the effort (after the diet fails: and it always does.)^[2]

Why does this happen? The physiologically reason is that diets tend to restrict nutrients you need (weight watchers: no fat; keto: no carbs), and your body does a nutrient catch up when your diet fails (though new research now indicates that stomach bacteria may have a big part to play in this). And psychologically we fail because the diet is ordering you not to have something you really want. When the diet ends, your entire mind and body begin to work against you. This can cause a snowball effect of bad habits which makes things even worse. This, obviously, is the binge / purge form of modern dieting.^[3]

9 Ditch The Exercise

Don’t have a melt-down! I don’t meant to ditch all exercise. But intense and prolonged exercise? Dump it. At least for now. Remember that old phrase “work up an appetite”? In other words: exercise to get hungry. This is the natural consequence of intensely working out and it is also the reason that when we join the gym to lose weight, we are recommended diets involving 6 or even more meals per day to compensate: but those are usually meals comprised of meagre nutrients and lots of fillers (vegetables mainly).^[4]

So why go through the pain? Don’t. Ditch the gym and bring exercise into your daily life as a part of living: walk to the store for milk, park further away from the office door, dance around your kitchen when no one is looking. As you get older, being more nimble and flexible is really important. Focus there, not on sweat pouring down your brow before you chow down on a salad that does nothing for your hunger at all. If you look at it objectively, this “gym->salad” cycle is a form of voluntary torture.^[5]

8 Eat Three Meals

This is conventional wisdom and follows logically from rejecting the 6+ meals a day thing. Eat three meals a day. I know cavemen only ate when they could (which was not daily) and that breakfast is a modern invention, but that doesn’t mean three square meals should be anathema. In addition to this weird idea that you need to basically graze throughout the day like a cow, there is even a bizarre myth floating around that eating so many hours before bed will make you fat. How ridiculous! Calories don’t change because of the position of the hands on the clock. Eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and eat well at each meal.^[6]

Basically common sense says to have one hearty meal and two smaller meals a day. For most of us that looks like a small breakfast, a moderate lunch, and a big dinner. Some European countries (though they are becoming fewer in number) have their main meal at lunch time. Oh, and if you are a Catholic in most of the world (except America), don’t forget: no meat on Fridays!^[7]

7 Don’t Snack

This is pretty obvious right? And much of this list is, but that goes to show how bad things have become that we need to even write a list that tells you not to eat more food than you need. Snacking is, in almost all cases, about passing the time or alleviating boredom. A busy person doesn’t eat snacks unless he is trying to adhere to a gym routine that demands six meals a day or is obeying the government’s advice on eating up to 10 pieces of fruit and vegetables a day.^[8]

What bizarre advice: with no caveats whatsoever, a government committee decreed that we should eat 10 fruits or vegetables a day. Ludicrous. Have some vegetables with your meal and a bit of fruit in your dessert and that’s it. Until refrigeration was invented for mass transportation of food around the world, there were entire nations who had no notion of most of the fruit and vegetables we have today. Children in England had their minds blown when they saw bananas for the first time after wartime rationing.^[9]

6 Keep It Real

Try to keep the food natural. Here’s a good way to put it: if God made it, it’s good to go. Food from nature is your best choice. One gimmicky way to look at this (which is surprisingly accurate actually) is to outlaw anything in the center aisles of the supermarket. On the outskirts you usually have the fresh food, and in the middle are the shelves of chips, cookies, cakes, and other delectable poisons. Supermarkets are actually designed that way on purpose to give the illusion when you enter that they are selling fresh, healthy goods. The real coup of the supermarket villains was combining the farmers market with the dry goods store.^[10]

I dare you to do an experiment and see if you can go an entire week without venturing into the dark recesses of the middle aisles. Eat entirely from the edges. And here’s food for thought: if we all did this (hint: before the 1930s we did,) how much plastic waste would there be in our homes? Governments are busy banning straws and plastic shopping bags when it is the entire supermarket concept they should be banning! I guess supermarket chains have too much money to offer governments for them to do the genuinely right thing rather than the “visibly right” thing. Ah . . . government virtuousness.^[11]

5 Cook At Home

Try to be part of the cooking process. If you contribute to the process of preparing your meals, you are (provably) less hungry, and more likely to eat better. And it goes without saying, you will find the whole “keep it real” rule far easier to follow. If you cook the food you know what’s in the food.^[12]

Additionally, you will obviously need to eat out from time to time. No problem: just choose meals that match the advice here as closely as possible and you will be fine. You can even have dessert if you feel like it; but if you are not home cooking, I’d suggest you keep the non-nutritive foods to every other meal out.^[13]

4 Fats And Oils

Fat was the biggest victim of the new governmental dietary plans of the 1960s and 1970s. Because of bad studies, it was determined that animal fat in particular was absolutely terrible. So much so that even synthetic fats were recommended over natural fats and companies like McDonalds switched from cooking their fries in beef tallow to cooking in trans-fats! We now know, of course, that they couldn’t have done a worse thing!^[14]

Even though we now understand how wrong this advice was, animal fats are still off the menu (probably due to vegan or vegetarian lobbying and the mainstream media promoting anything that is abnormal for clicks). But if you can, buy meat cuts that are high in their natural fats, and favor fish like salmon with naturally high fish oil. It is not only better for your brain (particularly if you are a child) but it is more delicious and more satiating; and that, in turn, keeps you full for longer. The anti-animal-fat crusade has led to what could well be the single worst piece of dietary advice ever inflicted upon man.^[15]

3 Proteins and Carbohydrates

Humans are meat-eating creatures. Our stomachs match those of the other meat eaters, and our brains allowed us to develop the requisite tools for the important task of chopping up animals for yums. However, some people prefer a non-meat diet due to religious or philosophical reasons. Regardless of whether you eat the normal human diet or a vegetable-based diet, protein is essential and should comprise a significant portion of your calories. And, as mentioned above, even better if the protein is laced in fat.^[16]

Your main meal of the day should typically comprise a large cut of meat or fish (or a protein substitute) with a generous amount of vegetables and accompaniments to enhance the taste and pleasure of the meal. Forget measuring or weighing food, forget counts of 6 or 8 or 10 portions a day. If you love lettuce, fill the plate with lettuce. If you love carrots: ditto.^[17]

And this is also true of potatoes and starches though some caution is needed while you transition back to real eating. Starches, like these, should preferably not dominate the meal—though on occasion they will such as with pasta. But generally, if you are eating whole food, you don’t need to worry yourself about carbohydrate vs protein ratios or weights, and as a rough guide, one small potato is the correct quantity for one person.^[18]

2 Portions

A correct portion size doesn’t need measuring. Just take a standard dinner plate and leave a good inch around the rim and don’t fill the plate like a mountain. If you do that, and if you don’t go back for seconds, you will maintain a healthy weight for your body. If you are overweight, this advice will allow your body to slowly restore itself to normal but it is important not to fret through the process. Natural weight loss is slow weight loss. Just focus on enjoying the food you are eating.^[19]

This is probably also a good time to point out that you should portion such things as sugar in the same way you would portion alcohol. Consider it to be an addictive substance that needs moderation (or total abstinence if you are unable to moderate). So while all the advice here is generally unrestrictive, sugar should be counted not as food but as a stimulant. It is no less addictive than alcohol and should be treated with the same caution.^[20]

1 Cheat

If you really want to: cheat. It’s not really cheating if you’re not in a competition. When you lie on your deathbed, no one is going to tally up the times you ate a chocolate bar and condemn you to the fiery pits of hell for it. Truthfully, a large part of the reason we fail on diets is because we can’t stand the severity of dietary restriction. It is certainly better to buy one candy bar and eat it today, than starve yourself of candy, spend every waking moment thinking about it, and then gorge yourself on five of them in one go. What is the point of a healthy diet if you can never enjoy the benefits that come from good health due to a constant gnawing sense of desire for that which is forbidden.^[21]

My aim in writing this list is to help you take the guilt out of the food you eat, and to get you on the path to enjoying one of the great pleasures that life has to give us. So, to that end, I’ll leave you with this Biblical exhortation: “Eat, and drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we shall die.”^[22]

+ Competition

Because this list is all about food it makes sense to give away my favorite cook book: Gordon Ramsay’s Home Cooking. It is a cook book I go back to time and again for various staple recipes. Everyone needs Gordon Ramsay in their kitchen! The commenter, by the end of the day, with the highest upvotes for their witty and relevant comment, will have a free copy sent to them. All commenters are included, regardless of where they live.

Prehistoric people had to scrape and scrounge for every measly calorie. They often risked their lives to bring home dinner. Given the scarcity of ancient food sources and the dangers in trying to procure them, it’s not surprising that so many people are on the chubby side nowadays.

The “Paleo diet” is a solution prescribed by the trendy. But actual ancient diets were much weirder than anyone thinks.

10 Of The Most Interesting Ancient Foods

10 Dog Stew

Coprolites are fossilized turds that reveal a lot about our ancestors’ diets. An ancient poo from Hinds Cave in Texas holds a surprising tidbit: a 9,400-year-old fragment from a domesticated dog’s skull.

For thousands of years, dogs have offered us companionship and guardianship. And now it appears they also (involuntarily) offered us a food source. DNA analysis revealed that the skull fragment came from a domesticated dog and not a wild canid like a coyote or a fox.

The dog resembled a short-nosed Native American dog that lived in New Mexico. It probably weighed around 13.6 kilograms (30 lb), which would have been a substantial meal 10,000 years ago.^[1]

But dogs probably weren’t an everyday dish. Based on ethnographic evidence, prehistoric people only dined on dogs during famines or celebratory feasts. The preferred cooking method? A hearty dog stew.

9 Fish Fermented In Pine Bark And Boar Skin

Fish bones dissolve into nothingness much quicker than the extra-sturdy bones of land animals. As a result, seafood-eating habits are harder to trace back in time. But a 9,200-year-old Swedish discovery bucks that trend, although you’ll wish it hadn’t because it’s a doozy.

At a site in Blekinge, Sweden, researchers found a stupendous number of fish bones—to the tune of 30,000 bones per square meter (10.8 ft²). It immortalizes a Nordic strategy for taking advantage of a cold environment to achieve arguably the nastiest method of fermentation ever devised.

First, they dug a pit. Next, they filled seal and boar skins with a bunch of fish. Then they slathered the mess in pine bark and seal fat. Finally, they buried the stinking bag of fish rot because people had to get creative in the absence of modern preservatives.^[2]

That’s rough even by Nordic food standards, which feature a notorious amount of fermented, sometimes unidentifiable, sea life. But the discovery of a mass fermentation site reveals an enlightening ancient societal trend: The people of the North began settling down around the same time as the people of the Fertile Crescent.

8 Crocodile And Hippo

We like to think that we evolved our humongous Homo sapien brains by eating flame-seared mammoth steaks. But it’s just as likely that the slimy flesh from turtles, crocodiles, and hippos provided the vital nutrients and calorie-dense fats necessary for massive brain growth.

A Kenyan site that housed our ancestors 1.95 million years ago is so well-preserved that researchers can recreate the ancient environment. The wealth of extinct plant fossils paints a picture of a much wetter, marshier northern Kenya.^[3]

Researchers found more evidence lodged in the teeth of the animals slaughtered two million years ago. Their teeth held traces of microscopic plants, meaning our ancestors enjoyed the finest grass-fed meats.

Meats that they ate raw. But targeting swamp creatures was a strategic move. Swamps were an underappreciated hunting ground, safer than the hostile grasslands and savannas populated by large feline assassins and bitey hyenas.

7 Stomach Contents Of Animals

Our ancestors routinely ate nasty things out of necessity. You can’t be picky when you don’t know when (or if) your next meal is coming. But among the nastiest of the nasties may have been chyme, the partially digested stomach contents from animals.

Some researchers believe this based on microscopic remains found in 50,000-year-old Neanderthal dental plaque. Therein were found bits of yarrow and chamomile, both of which are bitter.

Researchers proposed that these plants found their way into the old hominids’ guts in an undignified way: through the stomach contents of animals.^[4] After all, once you’ve got the kill, why be wasteful and throw away the stomach (or other organs)? It’s a convenient source of extra calories.

Some cultures still partake in a similar culinary tradition. Inuits in Greenland consume reindeer stomachs as an occasional delicacy, while Indigenous Australians occasionally go to town on kangaroo chyme.

6 Flour

Supposedly, flour is a foodstuff invented to feed expanding civilizations in the agricultural age. But it does date back to at least 32,000 years ago.

The grinding of plant stuff is a simple but clever culinary strategy that yields heartier, less perishable foods. In Puglia, Italy, at the Grotta Paglicci cave site, the paleolithic Gravettian people were doing just that, preempting agricultural practices by thousands of years.^[5]

The Gravettian people painted a mean cave wall and developed loads of tools. One of these tools is a combo pestle and grinder, a hand-sized stone with a pointy end and a flat end.

The pointy end bit was used to smash open seeds and the flat end ground them down. When researchers hosed the tool down and scanned the residues, they found starches from wild oats, prehistoric millet, and acorns.

10 Foods We Eat That May Lead To Poisoning Or Death

5 Deep-Sea Fish (Tuna)

When we picture the humans of 50,000 years ago, we see people huddled around meager stick fires in crappy little caves.

But these people were already plying the deep seas. They used their advanced maritime skills to reach Australia and, more importantly, to eat well. And eat well they did, dining on fish that sell for thousands of dollars today.

A shelter in Jerimalai, East Timor, revealed a bounty of 42,000-year-old fish bones. And not just a few bones, but 38,000. Even more surprising, more than half of the bones belonged to pelagic, deepwater-dwelling species like parrotfish and tuna.^[6]

Researchers also found two fishing hooks hewed from shells. The oldest was between 16,000 and 23,000 years old. Considering the previously oldest-discovered fishhook was about 5,500 years old, the discoveries at Jerimalai upset the pescatarian timeline.

As tuna were too agile for spearfishing, our ancestors had to raft into the ocean and trap them using nets or handmade hooks, beefed-up versions of the ones discovered at the shelter.

4 Porridge

Meat was hard to procure. So, what did our 10,000-year-old forefathers do when the supply of carcasses ran low? They used a very un-Paleo approach: They mixed up all the starches they could find and cooked them into a preagricultural porridge.

Porridges and other semiliquid cooked foods were possible thanks to an underappreciated innovation, the heat-resistant cooking pot. Cooking vessels that didn’t explode or shatter were culinary game changers for multiple reasons.

First, prehistoric people could now turn food scraps and other culinary odds and ends into an actual meal. Be it soup, stew, or the aforementioned porridge. Plant wax and oil residues were discovered in prehistoric pottery at the Takarkori and Uan Afuda sites in the Libyan Sahara.^[7]

Second, cooked plants didn’t spoil as quickly and could be saved for later. Third, plants that were too fibrous to be palatable could be softened through cooking. Finally, toxic plants could be made edible after a nice simmer.

3 Loads Of Roasted Sweet Potatoes

Inside Border Cave in the Lebombo Mountains on South Africa’s border with eSwatini, the real Paleo people were stuffing themselves silly with roasted sweet potatoes more than 170,000 years ago.

These are the oldest roasted starches ever discovered. And even though the charred samples (cooked over ashes) are approaching 200,000 years old, researchers armed with a scanning electron microscope could still see their internal structures.^[8]

Like the sweet potatoes of today, this ancient Hypoxis variant could be eaten raw. But cooking made it easier on the teeth and stomach and unleashed more of its calories.

For comparison, the Hypoxis of today, Hypoxis angustifolia, is a very accommodating food. It provides about 120 calories per 100 grams, a bit more than today’s sweet potatoes, and a fair amount more than today’s non-sweet potatoes.

It also grows year-round across Africa, making it a great food to sustain migrations through and from the continent. Hypoxis also grows in clumps, offering great “bang for the buck” for harvesters. Based on the superfluous plant matter in the region, the Paleo diet here featured way more starch than meat.

2 Rabbits

A big game kill like a mammoth could sustain a group of Neanderthals for many days. But relying strictly on trophy kills was a recipe for starvation.

So the Neanderthals learned to build traps to catch small, agile, and plentiful prey like rabbits. Researchers scouring eight Neanderthal hot spots in France, dating to 400,000 years ago, found that the animal remains at many sites were made up of 80 to 90 percent rabbit.^[9]

Some of the long bones were deliberately snapped at the ends, suggesting that someone chewed off the ends and sucked out the precious bone marrow within.

The discovery reveals an unexpected level of cleverness and adaptability for “cavemen.” Unlike killing larger prey like deer and cattle, rabbit hunting required traps or snares. This type of hunting was an innovation credited to modern humans. It necessitated a sharp mind rather than a strong arm and was supposedly one reason that modern humans outlived the Neanderthals.

1 Juniper-Roasted Escargot

Ancient humans savored woolly rhino steaks on occasion. But the safest survival strategy was to focus on food sources that couldn’t gore you. More than 30,000 years ago, Spanish Homo sapiens did just that. They became the first to enjoy a delicacy favored by the snobby: escargot.

Iberus alonensis land snails were common during the transitional period that produced modern humans between the Pleistocene (2.6 million to 12,000 years ago) and the Holocene (12,000 years ago to the present). At the Cova de la Barriada cave site in Spain, scientists found land snail remnants from 30,000 years ago, which is 10,000 years before the previous earliest escargot samples found in the Mediterranean.^[10]

Like a fancy appetizer at a French restaurant, the snails were cooked over juniper tree embers at high heat, about 375 degrees Celsius (707 °F).

10 Weirdest Street Foods In The World