Reddit reviews Paleofantasy: What Evolution Really Tells Us about Sex, Diet, and How We Live

>It's important to remember that all this is based on, at worst, million year old bone fragments, and at best, sixty year old accounts by explorers observing cultures of people they viewed as primitive savages. For a field like nutrition, where everyone is quick to completely disregard an epidemiological study because it used food frequency questionnaires, relying on this level of evidence and theorizing to actually decide what's healthy or not is ridiculous.

That's one of my primary issues with the so-called 'paleo' diet. There wasn't anything resembling a single diet across all peoples and all time periods. And even if there was an overall food pattern, the foods that those humans ate are quite distinct from the foods that we have available today in the supermarket.

Here is a referenced article from Kevin Bass (BS in bio and BA in anthro) that discounts some of the claims in Phinney and Volek's recent low-carb paleo book.

Christina Warinner (PhD in anthro) gave a TedX talk debunking common paleo talking-points.

Marlene Zuk (PhD in evolutionary bio) wrote a book called Paleofantasy which has a good section on the quite varied food and macro intakes of traditional peoples.

Stephan Guyenet (BS in biochem, PhD in neurosci) has a page with links to papers about the healthy high-carb tribes of the Hadza, Mbuti, Kuna, and Kitavans. The relevant sections are 21-23.

Here is a 2015 paper in the Quarterly Review of Biology with a position that high-starch foods were essential for the evolution of the human phenotype.

SciShow also did a recent video showing long-term consumption of plant foods (sources linked in video description).