Top Ten Problems With Applying The Paleolithic Diet Principles: Number 8

Eating quantities of raw nuts

Evolutionary selection favored trees that produced toxic nuts that would discourage predators from consuming the seed offspring of the tree. Although farmers have bred nut trees to reduce the bitterness of nuts, modern nuts still contain these toxins including enzyme inhibitors, bitter poisons, and lectins.

Traditional hunter-gatherers processed nuts by washing, soaking, and/or roasting to reduce or remove these inhibitors. In an essay on aboriginal subsistence in the Australian rain forest found in Food and Evolution (Temple University Press, 1987), David Harris quotes Archibald Meston, who in 1889 reported on the inland Australian Aborigines:

“The koa nut and other large nuts not yet botanically named, are the chief articles of diet. Some of the nuts and roots they eat are poisonous in their raw state, and these are pounded up and placed in dilly bags in running water for a couple of days to have the poisonous principle washed out.”

Harris goes on to quote a 1904 report of Aborigine food habits by Meston:

“They use three kinds of yam, and so far as I could learn they eat about twenty varieties of nuts…A majority of the nuts used are subjected to roasting and purification by running water. Some are merely roasted and eaten, and a few are eaten raw….”

For most hunters, most nuts presented an inefficient food source compared to meat and animal fat, due largely to the large amount of time required to extract nut meats from their wild shells. If you have no experience with wild nuts, take a look at this picture of a wild walnut shell. From this you can easily understand the difficulty involved in eating wild nuts: Thick shells with minimal meat. By breeding, farmers have created nuts with realtively thin shells and bigger meats, and we can purchase these already shelled. The breeding and shelling has made it possible to eat nuts in quantities without taking any steps to detoxify them.

In accord with Optimal Foraging Theory, if large game was available, hunters would pursue that rather than nuts because they could garner more food energy return per unit of energy spent hunting large game than they could gathering nuts.

The toxins and enzyme inhibitors naturally present in raw nuts can cause allergic (including anaphylactic) reactions, digestive distress, and skin disorders. On top of that, nuts have an unfavorable amount of omega-6 and ratio of omega-6 relative to omega-3.

For these reasons, I myself rarely eat raw nuts, with the exception of coconut flakes. To avoid ill effects of toxins in nuts, I recommend that modern foragers minimize or avoid raw nuts and, like the Aborigines, eat roasted nuts instead.