ABSTRACT
To better understand the state of our current nutritional requirements, it is important to consider the historical evolution of the human diet since the appearance of the genus Homo during the Paleolithic Age (approximately 2.5 million years ago). A glance at the past allows to clarify the present situation and foresee the future. It is now well acquired that the nutritional characteristics of the modern man result from a long evolutionary process during which the environmental pressure has modeled slowly its genetic inheritance. It should not be forgotten that we are preceded by only 2 or 3 generations that knew a sophisticated diet, increasingly inuenced by food engineering; 10 generations during the industrial era; approximately 500 generations that lived almost exclusively from agriculture; and more than 100,000 generations that only knew gathering plants, shing, hunting, and scavenging wild animals (hunter-gatherers). Given the slowness of the evolutionary processes, natural selection could have had only very few repercussions since the appearance of agriculture, about 10,000 years ago, and still much less since the Industrial Revolution, not more than one century ago. Thus, except for total energy requirements, which depend closely on body weight and physical exercises, everything indicates that the modern man remains very close to his ancestors of the Paleolithic Age in terms of his genetic equipment and thus his metabolic and nutritional capacities.
