Abstract
Forget the Paleo Diet. Noshing on meats and vegetables once eaten by the humble caveman is so last year. The ancient nutritional fad that’s trending now is the Gladiator Diet. A team of forensic scientists reported last month in PLOS One that Roman gladiators—the athletic superstars of their day—likely kept in shape by chugging a drink made of plant ash (DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0110489). What’s left behind after burning trees or plants is a high-mineral-content ash, explains Fabian Kanz, one of the team’s leaders and a forensic anthropologist at the Medical University of Vienna, in Austria. So the finding isn’t all that strange: Gladiators imbibing charred greenery, he says, are like people today taking drugstore calcium or magnesium supplements. Kanz and coworkers arrived at the idea that these gladiators had their own sports drink after analyzing skeletons excavated from a cemetery in what was once the Roman city of Ephesus. The burial ...
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