The paleolithic diet, also known as the paleo diet or caveman diet, is a diet based on the food humans' ancient ancestors might likely have eaten, such as meat, nuts and berries, and excludes food to which they likely wouldn't have had access, like dairy.
The diet is based on several premises. Proponents of the diet posit that during the Paleolithic era a period lasting around 2.5 million years that ended about 10,000 years ago with the advent of agriculture and domestication of animals humans evolved nutritional needs specific to the foods available at that time, and that the nutritional needs of modern humans remain best adapted to the diet of their Paleolithic ancestors. Proponents claim that human metabolism has been unable to adapt fast enough to handle many of the foods that have become available since the advent of agriculture. Thus, modern humans are said to be maladapted to eating foods such as grain, legumes, and dairy, and in particular the high-calorie processed foods that are a staple of most modern diets. Proponents claim that modern humans' inability to properly metabolize these comparatively new types of food has led to modern-day problems such as obesity, heart disease, and diabetes. They claim that followers of the Paleolithic diet may enjoy a longer, healthier, more active life.
Critics of the Paleolithic diet have raised a number of objections, including that paleolithic humans did eat grains and legumes,[1] that humans are much more nutritionally flexible than Paleolithic advocates claim, that Paleolithic humans were not genetically adapted to specific local diets, that the Paleolithic period was extremely long and saw a variety of forms of human subsistence, or that little is known for certain about what Paleolithic humans ate. At least one study suggests Neanderthal man and early modern humans ate primarily plant food.[2]
The term Paleolithic () describes a cultural period circa 2 million BCE and 10,000 BCE 'characterized by the use of flint, stone, and bone tools, hunting, fishing, and the gathering of plant foods'.[3] The term was coined by archaeologist John Lubbock in 1865.[4] It derives from Greek: , palaios, "old"; and , lithos, "stone", meaning "old age of the stone" or "Old Stone Age."[5][6]
The terms caveman diet and stone-age diet are also used,[7] with paleo diet by 2002.[8][9]Loren Cordain trademarked the term "Paleo Diet".[10]
The roots of the idea of a paleolithic diet can be traced to the work in the 1970s by gastroenterologist Walter Voegtlin.[8] The idea was later developed by Stanley Boyd Eaton and Melvin Konner, and popularized by Loren Cordain in his best-selling 2002 book, The Paleo Diet.[8][9]
In 2012 the paleolithic diet was described as being one of the "latest trends" in diets, based on the popularity of diet books about it;[11] in 2013 the diet was Google's most searched-for weight-loss method.[12] The diet is one of many fad diets that have been promoted in recent times, and draws on an appeal to nature and a narrative of conspiracy theories about how nutritional research, which does not support the paleo diet, is controlled by a malign food industry.[13]
Cordain has said the diet requires:[14]
Food groups that advocates claim were rarely or never consumed by humans before the Neolithic agricultural revolution are excluded from the diet. These include:
The rationale for the Paleolithic diet derives from evolutionary medicine,[19] specifically the evolutionary discordance hypothesis. which states that "many chronic diseases and degenerative conditions evident in modern Western populations have arisen because of a mismatch between Stone Age genes and recently adopted lifestyles."[20] Advocates of the modern Paleolithic diet, including Loren Cordain, take the evolutionary discordance hypothesis for granted, and form their dietary recommendations on its basis. They argue that modern humans should follow a diet that is as nutritionally close to that of their Paleolithic ancestors as possible.
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Paleolithic diet - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
