I don’t know, I’d expect them to be out during the day hunting or gathering, and then coming back to camp in the evening to share the food with the rest of the tribe (those who were procuring the other sort of food, or those who are too old or young to contribute to either). It’s not like the hunters ate exclusively meat while the gatherers ate exclusively fruit and roots.
Based on things like National Geographic articles and shows 
as well as a somewhat personal experience owning and working on farms earlier in life, the notion that either a hunter or gatherer is snacking throughout the day seems implausible. You work hard for a day, or half a day, and you eat in between when you get hungry. I don’t imagine the hunters or gatherers who kept stopping to eat their spoils were real popular. You went out there to work, not stop and snack 4-6 times a day.
In modern times, “snacking” and drinking are associated with just about every day-to-day activity, from driving to watching TV or live sports to going grocery shopping to…just about everything people do. A local grocery chain has Big-Gulp- sized cup-holders on their carts, for shit’s sake. Like people can’t refrain from stuffing something in their mouths for the 30 minutes or whatever it takes to go grocery shopping.
Neither is the assumption that what any of the wide variety of Paleolithic lifestyles (of which there were many adapted for different places and times) represent the ideal necessarily valid.
But what the body was used to for 100,000 to 6M or more years is probably a good indication of what it was adapted to.
Unless the tribe camped out under the date tree at harvest time, I doubt there was much in the way of big meals at wake-up until food preservation and ways to keep pests away from it were developed. Presumably then (and now) hunger was a motivator to find at least something to eat since you’d been fasting since sundown. Those in big game environments might spend days chasing one big kill, but more likely the lifestyle was hunting a rabbit or two then dealing with it as soon as you got back to camp.
Meh. Most of primate history we ate insects, leaves and fruit. Evolution is dynamic.
And evolution does not per se adapt for long lived elders. Sometimes that increases the genes’ reproductive success, but sometimes not.
More so your guess as to what was “more likely” is pretty inconsistent with everything I’ve ever read about the various lifestyles through Paleolithic times. Food preparation is a big event.
Jared Diamond in The World Until Yesterday mentions that families with grandparents (more specifically, grandmothers) the children developed better and were healthier. Of course, “grandma” in those societies likely means 40 years old.
Every society eats some sort of meat. It’s an integral part of the diet. The theory goes that the early humans would sneak out of the trees to scavenge the carcasses left by big game predators, gradually evolving the tools and techniques to kill their own food. Presumably over that time we evolved from all-day grazing to food prep, as we used fire to simulate the softening of meat that aging brings.
I assume there were techniques before pottery - wrap it in leaves, put it on a flat stone, etc. - but I haven’t seen any discussion of the evolution of food preparation techniques. Presumably too a lot of these techniques were a byproduct of agriculture. We can speculate that someone tired of pre-chewing food for junior maybe decided to grind those grass seeds with a rock and add water, finding a nifty new way to make a mouthful.
Ceremonial meals would be a relatively(?) recent byproduct of social structure. etc.
The “body”? different parts of the body have different pH norms. And unless you have a kidney disease called renal tubular acidosis, the alkalinity of your blood (one body part that is alkaline-- around 7.4) is not an issue. If you do have this disease, you won’t correct it by eating more vegetables. You have to down teaspoonfuls of baking soda every day.
Otherwise, your kidneys do a really good job at maintaining your blood at an ideal pH level, no matter what you eat, as long as you aren’t dehydrated.
md2000, you make a lot of presumptions, and some big leaps. The bit about early humans possibly being primarily scavengers, and that is one big speculation, is a consideration of early hominid behavior, not our species. And most experts tend to think that scavenging was a tool in the kit, not to the exclusion of hunting, probably restricted to brains that the big predators could not get to without tools (the bigger predators eating the rest pretty clean leaving little behind scavenge.) And scavenging was not grazing or snacking. The bigger deal seems however to have been cooking and cooking was clearly NOT a byproduct of agriculture but an integral part of the homo sapiens (and neanderthal and possibly h erectus) nutrition plan. And both it and the sharing of food with the group was a big deal from early man on. I do suggest you do some research on the food preparation techniques and meal habits and rituals of various HG groups. It was/is not just “oh a bit peckish am I, I’ll grab a squirrel or find some leftover carcass and have snack.”
But again, while I personally conclude that for most of paleolithic history h sapiens likely ate one major meal a day, as a big social event, likely before the sun set, I do not accept that such is a convincing argument that doing so represents a nutritional ideal.
Isn’t fasting the lack of calories. Or more specifically, the body recognizing the lack of calories?
“Fasting” is the lack of calories (or even relative lack) for periods of time … how long of time qualifies depends on who is defining. The body can’t help but recognize any lack (or relative lack) for any length of time … it is constantly adjusting to maintain homeostasis.
I fast daily from 11 pm clear until 7 am. I find it cleansing.
The short answer: no.
Longer answer: If your diet sucks, taking vitamins will just spackle over the holes. While you can survive on everything from an all-meat to an all-vegetable diet, both extremes are not generally sustainable for most people.
If you don’t like veggies, you should probably get used to stuff like eating raw organ meats and fermented fish along with plenty of fat to meet micronutrient requirements (see the Vilhjalmur Stefansson field journals and later closed-ward studies for more details). If you can’t stomach brains, eyeballs, liver, kidneys, bone marrow, etc., vitamins might help you avoid vegetables, but given how we’ve learned over and over again that artificial sources might have benefits for reversing some effects of poor diet in the short term, but cause more problems in the long term, you’d probably be better off adopting a more moderate eating strategy.
If you don’t like to eat poor little cute animals and go vegan, without some serious attention to exactly what you’re eating you will almost certainly end up with some deficiency (see point 11 here for a shallow overview). The majority of vegans will have vitamin D deficiencies (resulting in a risk of rickets and greater levels of depression) nearly all of them will have B12 deficiencies (B12, including supplement forms is only available from animal products, and supplements are not as bioavailable as natural forms) and vegan diets are so low in EPA and DHA (again, only realistically available from animal sources) that nursing mothers are strongly encouraged to supplement for B12, EPA, DHA, D, and pay particular attention to calcium and zinc intake.
In my not-so-neutral opinion, any diet that virtually requires supplements to be sustainable is pretty shitty, and demonstrably not “natural”. No matter how militant vegans are about those who disagree with them, increasingly negative findings over the years have made me highly skeptical of any positive claims of vegetarianism. While, to my knowledge, a study has not been done on the growth and mental development of children raised in vegetarian households, I’d be willing to bet that the results would not be good, considering the well-established endemically deficient state of many vegetarians who are not pregnant or nursing in nutrients crucial for neural development and growth.
The standard American diet of fortified grains, sugar, more sugar, trans-fats, “meat” “products” and other so-called “food” is bad for you too, but varied enough that probably you won’t need supplements to actually avoid dietary deficiencies. Probably. Besides, they already add nutrients in to counteract the loss of nutrients caused by processing the bejesus out of everything. Eat some fish and go out in the #^¢*ing sun once in a while, and you’ll probably avoid the D problems all the pasty fat bastards in North America seem to be cropping up with lately.