What is the Paleolithic Diet?
The paleolithic diet is also called the paleo diet, Stone Age diet and caveman diet. The basic premise is that modern methods of eating aren’t what our bodies are evolved to process, and that we should eat a diet that’s similar to what our most ancient ancestors consume. Of course, no one knows exactly what humans ate during the Paleolithic periods, so this diet is based on our estimations. It also tends to focus on modernly available versions of these foods. The major components of the Paleolithic diet are meat and fish, roots, nuts, vegetables and fruits. Most people on this diet avoid processed oils, refined sugars, salt, dairy products, grains and legumes.
Who Developed The Paleolithic Diet?
This diet was first developed in the mid 1970s by a doctor named Walter L. Voegtlin. However, many other people have also promoted this diet and created their own versions of it. Reportedly, modern humans who eat traditional diets that look a lot like what our ancestors ate don’t suffer from most of our “diseases of affluence” – diabetes, obesity, heart disease and other problems that come about when we eat badly. Plus, two small studies on this diet have shown some real health benefits.
What Stone Age People Ate
Voegtlin based his 1975 book on the theory that most Paleolithic people ate meat and proteins, with little grain or other carbohydrates. Later authors have modified his premise that we shouldn’t eat anything that wasn’t available to our Stone Age ancestors to include foods that weren’t available, but provide the same theoretical nutrient balance. After all, most of us can’t live our lives as hunter-gatherers. Some people using this diet also believe that cooking wouldn’t have been a big part of our ancestors’ foods, and stick to eating most of their food raw.
Opponents of this diet note that it’s been over ten thousand years since the introduction of agriculture, and believe that this is enough time for our bodies to have adapted to these “new” foods. They also note that hunter gatherers often get a lot of carbohydrates in the form of starchy tubers like yams, and point out that we don’t actually have a lot of data to tell us what ratios of plant and animal foods our ancestors consumed.
About half to two thirds of the energy in this diet should come from animal foods, with protein making up twenty to thirty-five percent of the energy provided. The remaining thirty-five to forty-five percent is from plant foods, with farmed foods mostly avoided. That’s a big difference from the food intake of most US citizens, who get about seventy percent of their energy from carbohydrates and dairy.
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