Ok, tbh I just chose this picture because I thought it represented variety well, with all the different colors of carrots.
The thing is you can find plenty of variety just with wild foods. A wild carrot from one area will not taste or look exactly the same as a carrot from another area. It might not even look the same as the carrot growing right next to it.
some varieties of domestic fruits and vegetables are more nutrient dense than others
Are there really domestic fruits that are more nutrient-dense than their wild kind out there?
Yeah, and this is why I don't think a veggie-heavy diet is good for most people. The taste change comes really fast with most wild veggies. This is not nearly as true with (at least some) wild fruits, meats, and seafoods. I've never tasted a wild veggie that didn't have a really fast taste change.
There's a French writer called Dominique Guyaux who created his own version of the instincto diet called the "reasoned sensory diet" (
Alimentation Sensorielle Raisonnée or ASR). He wrote a thesis on the role of the senses in human's dietary behavior on raw paleolithic foods -basically what the instincto diet is all about, but with additional evidence, and more detailed explanation of the whole mechanism in question.
His thesis is available for free here (Waring: it's all in french)
http://www.guyaux.fr/memoire/index.htmlIn his thesis, he also explains in what kind of environment the first hominids must've evolved in, why our sense of smell is less precise (or narrow) than that of a carnivore, and to what kind of foods and in which amount our dietary senses had adapted to.
Dominique Guyaux hypothesize that our dietary sense might not regulate amounts as accurately for every category of food, for the simple reason that they were not all available to humans in the same quantity, at all times.
Page 69 of his thesis, he represents it on a simple panel where he classes foods in three categories :
-Proximity (almost always available, can be found pretty much anywhere: roots, bulbs...)
-Seasonal (limited yearly availability: fruits)
-Rare/random (carcasses, honey,...)
And represents the consumer's behavior to these products:
-Accessibility (can I get my hands on some every day, all year round?)
-Sensory Curiosity (Is this food appealing to me?)
-Specific sensory satisfaction or satiety (Is the sensory stop clear?)
He explains that Proximity foods have a high level of accessibility, therefor human's Sensory Curiosity is pretty low since it's always around, and our organism's need of specific macro- and micro-nutrients found in these foods is usually always covered. This is why our Sensory Stop is very clear on foods such as carrots, because our body prevents us from over-eating it,
de par it's great availability.
On the opposite, meat was in the early days of humanity a rare commodity, with low Accessibility, and therefor a great Sensory Curiosity for it's rich nutritious profile, and with a much milder Sensory Stop to it's consumption, since early man never really had the opportunity to over-eat on it. Early man never knew when the next steak was available again: in a week, a month...
This explains why it is much easier to eat plenty of meat than it is to eat other foods that were highly available in times when the dietary senses where still put in use.
I'm not saying you can't eat tons of carrots, but the stop will be much clearer than with meat.
