The Paleo diet is a more holistic and complete approach to food-related well-being than other trendy diets on the market. Many popular dieting plans are designed specifically for weight loss and center around the idea that the carbohydrate intake of the average modern person is far too high, causing weight gain when the body’s natural processes store excess carbohydrates as fat. The starchy grains and refined sugars that contribute so much to a high carb intake are products of agricultural development, and also have a high rate of genetic modification. The Paleo diet removes entirely not only sugar, grains and legumes, but also dairy products, which were not in the ‘stone-age’ humans’ diets.
Pioneered in the 70s by a gastroenterologist named Dr. Walter L. Voegtlin in his book The Stone Age Diet, the Paleo diet is based on extensive scientific research that suggests that our genetics are simply not compatible with the carbs, trans fats and sugars that so many people’s diets are commonly loaded with today. Unlike the omnivorous low-fat model of the typical caveman diet held by many researchers, The Stone Age Diet presents a robust argument for a Paleolithic human ancestor that was almost entirely carnivorous and survived first and foremost on animal fat, with very limited supplement from the vegetable world. The high-protein, meat-eating model held forth in Dr. Voegtlin’s book is heavily supported by a comparison analysis of human anatomy, which has much more in common with the anatomy of carnivorous predators than it does with that of herbivores. Fundamental differences between carnivorous human anatomy and herbivore anatomy, from our teeth to our appendix, make it physically impossible for humans to ever fully adapt to a plant-based diet, and Dr. Voegtlin speculated that it is this inadaptability which causes a wide array of degenerative conditions.
Later approaches to the Paleo diet supported an idea of a caveman who ate lean meats low in natural saturated fats, such as fish and wild game, supplemented with high amounts of plant fiber and moderate amounts of monounsaturated fats that can be found in plant oils like olive and almond. Although there are a few different schools of thought regarding exactly what our evolutionary ancestors ate for lunch, everyone can agree on what they didn’t eat. Whether the Paleo human chowed down on the fattiest parts of meat or had a nice salad instead, or both, Paleo diets had little or no refined sugar or salt in them at all..
The Paleolithic era is one of the largest segments of human history, spanning millions of years. Also called the ‘Stone Age’, the Paleolithic era began with humankind’s earliest use of stone tools, even before the homo sapiens species, and ended with the invention of agriculture about ten thousand years ago. Modern agricultural practices that provide a large majority of our food sources have existed for a relatively short time, and in the context of the long history of human evolution, have hardly existed any time at all. The Paleo diet is founded on the principle that we have a digestion system that is optimized for a pre-agricultural diet, and that the human body is naturally designed to most efficiently process the same foods that our ancestors ate. The development of agriculture not only made available new food sources that our bodies are not naturally designed to process, but also paved the way for centuries of genetic modification practices that, while they made food easier to grow, harvest, and distribute, did not make it easier to digest or make the nutrients more available for our bodies to use.
The principle is simple enough: don’t eat anything a caveman wouldn’t eat; but the effects can be profound and long-lasting. Historical and scientific evidence suggests that digesting and processing agriculturally produced foods puts more wear and tear on the body’s entire system than consuming the foods we were naturally evolved to eat. The unnecessary strain that modern foods cause has been linked to weight gain, diabetes, and even other serious degenerative conditions like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. Though many people who are mindful of their diets have the common sense to select non-GMO fruits and vegetables, many modern food sources, especially grains, have been genetically modified by plant husbandry to exist in forms that would never be encountered in the natural world. We have limited hard evidence today of how cavemen lived and what they ate, but thousand-year old tools and artifacts paint a picture of humans who mainly lived by hunting, and ate what plant life they could gather from their surroundings. While there is some evidence that the Paleo human did eat seeds, nuts, and other plant life, thousands of years of agricultural development have changed that food source into something the human body, barely changed at all, has not adapted to handle efficiently.
The Paleo diet is different from other popular modern diets in that it is not specifically designed to help you with losing weight, but rather to give your body the best and most usable nutrients without causing it any undue stress by eating things it is not adapted to process. The main goal of the Paleo diet is to optimize your body for long-lasting better hearlth, but this far-reaching benefit does help many people with obesity, cholesterol problems, heart disease, and other weight-related issues. While other modern diet fads usually treat only a symptom, like weight gain, often while putting other areas of your wellbeing at risk, the Paleo diet is based in your body’s own common sense and promotes overall better hearlth. Many diet plans involve denying your body essential nutrients, and are so unpleasant and extreme that they can only be used periodically; this cycle of going from one extreme to the other can be ultimately dangerous, as neither extreme is good for you and it can affect your metabolism and energy levels, making achieving your optimum weight even harder.
The Paleo diet contains all the nutrients your body needs and promotes balance for a more sustainable and energetic lifestyle that is long-lasting and ultimately more effective.
Though the Paleo diet may seem restrictive, ruling out cereal grains and dairy entirely, it's easy to have a delicious and diverse diet with emphasis on fresh meats, seafood, fruits and veggies. Just like any diet, it takes careful planning and adjustment, but your body will thank you for the valuable long-term effects. Unlike other diets that can deny your body nutrients that it needs in the name of fleeting weight loss, the Paleo diet allows you to eat all the foods you need, while providing the nutrients that stave off hunger and give your body lasting energy. Though dairy consumption should be limited, all other animal proteins, including red meat and eggs, contain nutrients that our Paleo ancestors needed to survive. Carb-laden veggies and grains like potatoes and wheat should be avoided, but a rainbow of root vegetables, leafy greens, and fresh veggies make Paleo salads a colorful delight.
Advocates of the Paleo diet recognize that fat is not the enemy, but that the healthiest fats come in unsaturated natural form. Delicious and unrefined oils from nuts and fruits like olives, walnuts, almonds, coconuts, and many others, can be eaten raw as a delicious dressing for salads, or cooked as a substitute to nutritionally devoid refined vegetable oils in your favorite hot dishes.
With the increasing popularity of the Paleo diet, there are several recipe books and meal plans available to give you creative ideas for how to make delicious meals from tasty Paleo foods. There are so many nutritious food sources in the Paleo plan that it is easy to tailor your eating habits to achieve your specific dieting goals, while still maintaining the Stone Age diet. If you are trying to lose weight, you can reduce the calorie intake in your daily meal plan, or if you are an athlete, the Paleo diet allows for a high-fat, animal-protien rich diet for lasting energy and faster recovery time.
The Paleo diet allows you to tailor your eating habits for more specific results and ultimate optimization, but a simple menu plan for daily living is an easy way to start building good habits, no matter what your lifestyle is. A good menu plan should still follow the recommended eating pattern of small meals with several light snacks during the day to promote faster metabolism. The following example is similar to the menu plans found in the bestselling cookbooks by Dr. Loren Cordain, today’s leading expert on the Paleo diet.
Breakfast:
Mixed veggie omelet cooked in olive oil with a grapefruit and herbal tea. Add chicken or turkey to your omelet for an extra protein boost.
Lunch:
Mixed green salad with dried fruit, walnuts and avocado oil, lemon juice, olive oil or other favorite dairy-free dressing.
Dinner:
Spaghetti squash with pesto, garlic, and beef meatballs, with berries and honey for dessert.
Snacks:
Pre-cut veggies like carrot sticks and broccoli florets, prepared fresh fruit like apple slices, nut mixes, or slices of cooked meat all make great snacks that are easy to carry around and munch during the day, making it easier to stay committed to your diet. Convenient pre-packaged options like dehydrated fruit and veggie mixes or single-serving packets of almond butter are also available to make Paleo on the go even easier.
Because the Paleolithic era ended around 10,000 years ago, hard evidence of the average caveman diet is scarce. Though we don’t have access to the history of millenniums ago, even recent history bears evidence of people thriving naturally on a hunter gatherer diet. A lot of information can be gleaned from looking at recovered stone tools used by ancient cavemen, and also from the historical lifestyles of peoples, such as Native Americans and Australian aboriginals, who continued to live without agricultural techniques well into the era of civilization. Before European influence, the vast majority of Native Americans belonged to nomadic tribes who never stayed in one place for long and relied heavily on the dense fat and protein of bison, venison, and seafood, with no access to farmed goods or salt and sugars. The image of the natural pre-European American is a robust individual with the energy and strength for a rigorous and challenging life. Very shortly after the establishment of European civilization and culture, native tribes faced obesity and other medical problems that illustrate a direct link to the sudden introduction of refined sugars, cereal grains, dairy and salt not consumed by humans in the natural world. This recent and rapid transformation is a case study of just how influential the correct diet choice can be on the well-being of not just individuals, but generations.
Though the Paleo diet often helps people with losing weight, and many people feel more energetic, this is just a beneficial side-effect to the true healthful power of Stone Age eating. Unlike some diets that focus obsessively on body weight, sometimes at the expense of other areas of your health, the Paleo diet focuses on using food sources that are optimized for your digestive system to reduce inflammation, degenerative disease, and all kinds of health problems that can arise from the modern style of eating. Research performed by Dr. Walter L. Voegtlin and many other prominent diet experts who built on his work suggests that non-communicable diseases such as diabetes and heart disease are products of civilization that were not suffered by our caveman ancestors. Many advocates of the Paleo diet claim that removing modern ‘unnatural’ foods from your diet can even help with depression, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and other neurological conditions that could be a result of consuming foodstuffs our bodies are not correctly adapted to handle. Many studies show that in addition to helping with these 'diseases of civilization', the Paleo diet provides a medicine-free cure for a variety of chronic digestion problems suffered by many people today. Colitis, Crohn's disease, chronic indigestion and IBS have all been easily and successfully resolved in a multitude of patients with a simple switch to the more natural eating habits that are part of the Paleo lifestyle.
Furthermore, many agricultural developed foods available on the market today are even further processed in ways that remove a lot of their inherent nutritional value. White flours and refined sugars most notably are made from parts of the plant that carry very little in the way of vitamins and nutrients, and your body does not even receive the full nutritional range of these already questionable plants. Milk and other dairy products are homogenized and pasteurized, removing not only harmful bacteria that causes milk to spoil, but also removing helpful bacteria that could help your body better process this modern food source. Even more extreme and advanced processing techniques give us high fructose corn syrup, isolated monosodium glutamate (MSG), artificial chemical sweeteners, and a wide array of other artificial or radically altered consumables that make snacking on a simple box of crackers like eating a science fair project. These nutritionally bankrupt food sources are often among the cheapest and most readily available, lining the shelves of the average supermarket in brightly colored packaging and making losing weight the less convenient option. Due to the ever-increasing availability of these kinds of food, more and more people seem to accept it as a fact of daily life that their diet has more in common with a laboratory experiment that it does with what the human species has evolved to eat. Even if you cut artificial flavorings, colorings, and other such substances from your diet, something that appears as natural as an ear of corn is the product of centuries of selective breeding, and is genetically modified beyond recognition as far as your digestive system is concerned.
Many of the philosophies of the Paleo diet are based on the fact that human anatomy suggests that we are not effectively adapted to survive solely on plant matter, and that animal proteins are a far more efficient food source that was highly prized by our pre-civilization predecessors. Under ideal conditions, human digestion is the one of the most effective digestive systems on the planet, using virtually 100% of the nutrients consumed with very little waste. However, certain plant matter such as cellulose can’t be digested by the human system at all. Animals that evolved to most efficiently survive on plant life developed a very different digestive system with anatomy and function that works on different mechanics entirely.
Dedicated herbivores like sheep and cows are often ruminators with multiple stomachs, requiring multiple chewing sessions and extra time in the digestive juices of the stomach to break plant matter down into its usable components to be shipped to the colon and absorbed into the body. Instead of grinding, chewing, herbivorous teeth, humans share the biting tearing incisors of other carnivorous predators, suggesting a healthy relationship with animal fats and proteins that is hardwired into our genetic code.
Just like a wild lion would be ill-adapted to a diet of bread and cheese, our primitive ancestors never encountered a bowl of cheerios in all their hunting and gathering travels. Although human civilization and society has come a long way since then, the basics of our form and function have not.
Though we do not have a lot of hard evidence of how early humans fed themselves before the invention of agriculture, a logical evolutionary science approach to health and diet promotes using food to assist your body’s natural processes, rather than work against them. Indigenous peoples today who still rely on traditional hunting and gathering for the bulk of their food supply highly prize animal protein and fat in their diets, Inuit tribes famously valuing the blubber, skin, and vitamin-rich organs of arctic and sub-arctic animals. The hardy endurance of Inuits and other tribes in environments that are brutally hostile to plant life and agriculture goes a long way towards validating the claims of experts like Doctor Loren Cordain that state cereal grains, dairy, and other products of agriculture are not only unnecessary, but detrimental to a healthy lifestyle.
Like any diet change, joining the Paleo movement requires planning, commitment, and a little bit of sacrifice. Unlike other diets that are based on incomplete or symptomatic approaches, however, the Paleo diet is grounded in evolutionary science to work with the natural design of your body for the best possible results. More than a trendy weight loss fad, the Paleo diet is crucial to ideal digestion and overall well-being. A positive choice for any lifestyle, and adaptable to a number of fitness goals, the Paleo diet brings out the best in your body.