ANCESTRAL EATING: Seafood, pt.1

Consumption of seafood is one powerful way to reach optimal health, according to Weston Price

Welcome back to Ancestral Eating. In this instalment, I’m going to begin talking about the value of seafood consumption in achieving what Weston Price called “perfect health”. A number of the traditional groups he studied for the book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration consumed copious amounts of the stuff. In following instalments I’ll provide recipes and also consider some of the main issues associated with consumption of seafood today, including radioactivity from Fukushima and the accumulation of nasty toxins and substances in particular kinds of seafood.

Note that I’ll be considering freshwater and saltwater varieties under the rubric of seafood: “seafood” is just a convenient label.

Once again, I’m not saying you HAVE to eat seafood to be in optimal health. A number of groups Price encountered did not, or certainly not in any great quantity. The Alpine Swiss are a good example: they lived entirely on milk products, rye bread and a little bit of meat, which might include the odd stream trout every now and then. What’s important, fundamentally, is to place your reliance on nutrient-dense animal foods. If you don’t like seafood or find it too expensive where you live, eat something else instead. You’ve got plenty of options to choose from.

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Our ancestors have been eating seafood for hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years.

About two million years ago, hominins in Kenya deboned a catfish (and presumably ate it), and then 800,000 years ago another group grilled a massive carp in what is now Israel.

There’s ample evidence of shellfish consumption by our ancestors, in particular, since shells are durable and show up readily in the archaeological record.

According to a study released a few years ago, Neanderthals living in Italy are likely to have dived for clams. An assortment of clamshells and pumice stones were found in a cave near Naples in 1949 and dated to well before the arrival of Homo sapiens in Italy. The shells had been worked into tools, probably because of an absence of suitable stone in the area.

For some reason, nothing more was made of this find until 2020, when a team from the University of Colorado reexamined it and realised the Neanderthals hadn’t just gathered the clams: they must have dived for them. The particular clam species the shells belonged to is only found underwater, although not at a great depth.

“If you’re a Neanderthal in Italy, I can tell you there’s lots of beaches, and lots of caves near the sea,” says Paola Villa, an archaeologist at the University of Colorado and lead author of the paper. “They probably collected [the clams] by just holding their breath underwater and scooping them off of the seafloor.” (Atlas Obscura)

The site of the clamshell finds near Naples

The Neanderthals who inhabited the site probably did so seasonally. Other research on shell fishing during the Upper Paleolithic suggests it took place during the winters.

Neanderthals have also been shown to have suffered from swimmer’s ear, a common ailment of the outer ear caused when water gets trapped, providing perfect conditions for bacterial growth and infection. It’s entirely possible Neanderthals developed this condition from diving for food.

It’s only natural, then, that in the globe-trotting adventure that formed the basis of Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, Weston Price encountered a number of groups who achieved perfect health with either the addition of seafood to their diet or an especial reliance on it.

Seafood is a nutrient-dense animal food, containing not just the protein and fat that humans need but also the wide variety of vitamins, minerals, cofactors and “fat soluble activators” that are necessary for the body’s processes of growth, repair and defence to take place fully.