Diet

Watched Nanook of the North yesterday, now that's a diet up there for the Northerners! 

Everything from raw Walrus meat, raw Seal...salmon in the summer time I think if you are lucky (during spawning season), and the kids consider raw cod liver oil (castor oil?!) a real treat. 

But actually, probably right, genetic/epigenetic dietary adaptations to this...hmm...
have to admit, having a fondness for salty ridden snacks, and too much sugar, although don't mind eating healthier at times...makes me wonder if this condition were owing to at times to nutritionally poor diets... during Roman times, the lower classes there might have been lucky really to have any meat cutlet in weeks, months, or years in populated centers, ironic because you might think that better trade access would afford better diet to most citizens in populated civilised centres...most likely these classes ate something like a grain mush porridge, with milling stone fragments mixed in?!  Hmm...anyways, not sure where cheese ranks in ancient dietary possibilities, outside pastoral communities that might have afforded possibly easier access...yoghurt might have existed, along with kefir, and something else...ah King Midas's last meal consisted of something like barley, honey, and mutton or lamb, read this somewhere supposedly, but the lamb/muttton, but no cheese, or dairy from what could be determined based upon modern day forensic analysis of his stomach.  Cheese could have been around as long as pastoralist were taking advantage of raising domesticated livestock, and something like intestinal membranes of animal guts (usually sheep/goat/cow) would naturally have coagulating enzymes that would cause curdling of milk here...alongside any bacterium which could sufficiently produce enough acidification in the milk to likewise aid curdling.  The effect of this were also probably naturally giving a longer shelf life to then dairy, since at least potentially a benign bacterial population could by chance squeeze out the chance of other undesirables for a time in such niche.  In any event, hard to say, how potentially something like milk allergies or lactose intolerance would fare in so far as those typically raised generation after generation to these products.  Really it seems to me consistent access to meat is relatively modern with respect to most diets, excepting perhaps indigenous subsistence based diets, and local diets were meat could be managed to be placed on the dinner table on a more daily basis, but even in the Americas as possibly elsewhere in the world, there seems to have been evidence that bounty weren't always consistently coming.  Hence if dietary nutrition mattered in so far as physiological size, people were generally up until this past century, smaller in size overall relative to the size of peoples today, especially in developed first world nations.
   In a way I kind of understand his attraction to what could be considered less nutritional here...while refined grains and sugars weren't generally found, on the other hand, nutritionally poorer foods in some locales may been far more commonly consumed throughout the better part of the year?!

As to Nanook, despite the possibility of having access to the nutrient rich aspects of sea life in his part of the world, he succumbed to starvation, apparently attempting to hunt for deer inside the Hudson interior, not sure if this pattern of hunting were so common?!  I would offer generally speaking, we likely have some adaptation to not only poor diets, but being able to starve, more commonly though where humans are not as well adapted perhaps is in the context of consistent high caloric access.  Supposedly some epigenetic studies have linked diabetes possibly to feast/famine cycles in successive generations, possibly  a genetic trigger in early adolescent males may control the likelihood of successive generations being more prone in the aging context to is commonly referred as Adult onset.  Read of examples, perhaps anecdotal here, where generally speaking diabetes tended to be more rare, up until a modern context when general improvement in dietary access not increased lifespans, but also seemed to bring about the increased likelihood of adult onset diabetes prone populations.  Perhaps controlled fasting may be of some aid, here, but then I wouldn't recommend it absolutely without advice from a doctor on this one.