What is the Paleolithic diet?
For most of the million or so years our species has existed on Earth, we have been hunter-gatherers. Our ancestors hunted game and ate lots of meat. They also gathered whatever fruits, vegetables, nuts, and berries were in season. Being nomadic, they followed the sources of food and did not grow crops. Over many hundreds of thousands of years our ancestors became superbly adapted to this diet and lifestyle. Studies of 19th and 20th century hunter-gatherers show that they ate a lot of meat. On average, two thirds of their calories came from animal sources. Our early ancestors probably ate at least as much meat. They produced many cave paintings and pictographs of the animals they hunted and carved animal figures or totems. I can’t remember seeing any cave paintings of fruit, grains, or vegetables. Among the oldest man made objects are stone spear points knives and axes. The evidence shows that they followed the herds and their lives revolved around hunting. The agricultural lifestyle ca
If you hadn’t noticed, in the last few years there has been a steadily increasing interest in all things natural, all things “green”, all things organic – a veritable fever pitch. Why, then, are Americans fatter and more diseased than ever? Why are countries like Japan, China and France, previously beacons of health and vitality, suddenly experiencing a sharp increase in instances of diabetes, heart disease and obesity? The problem might lie in our slow recession from consuming the foods we as human beings are biologically designed to eat, and the spread of a Western and increasingly Americanized diet overseas. So here I present to you the basics of, well, getting back to basics. Let’s first take a look at our history as a hunter-gatherer species. Our predecessors based their diets on raw vegetation, leaves, berries, and fruits where available. Meat and eggs where consumed in large quantities when the hunt was good. Anything that could be safely eaten raw with no adverse side effects w
By Bob Hodgen For most of the million or so years our species has existed on Earth, we have been hunter-gatherers. Our ancestors hunted game and ate lots of meat. They also gathered whatever fruits, vegetables, nuts, and berries were in season. Being nomadic, they followed the sources of food and did not grow crops. Over many hundreds of thousands of years our ancestors became superbly adapted to this diet and lifestyle. Studies of 19th and 20th century hunter-gatherers show that they ate a lot of meat. On average, two thirds of their calories came from animal sources. Our early ancestors probably ate at least as much meat. They produced many cave paintings and pictographs of the animals they hunted and carved animal figures or totems. I can’t remember seeing any cave paintings of fruit, grains, or vegetables. Among the oldest man made objects are stone spear points knives and axes. The evidence shows that they followed the herds and their lives revolved around hunting. The agricultura
The Paleolithic Diet is sometimes called “the ancestral human diet” because it contains the types of foods that would have been eaten by the Stone Age hunter-gatherer ancestors of modern day humans.The Paleolithic Era in geological time was when the first humans evolved who were genetically identical with modern humans (Homo sapiens) of today. Our biology, including our genes, has not changed much in the two-and-a-half million years since the first humans walked the earth. For much of that time period, humans ate the whole foods they found in nature, with little processing besides cooking. But in the last 10 thousand years, our diet has changed dramatically with the advent of agriculture and increased consumption of refined grains. More recently, refined sugars and synthetic and processed foods have become much more common in the modern human diet. Because our diet has changed so rapidly, our biology has not had time to fully adapt to the new foods. Researchers who study the Paleolithi
The Paleolithic diet, also known as the Paleo diet, caveman diet and Stone Age diet, is an eating plan that is based on the diet of humans in the Paleolithic era, about 2.5 millions years ago, before the Neolithic era, when agriculture became dominant. This eating plan is based on the concept of hunting and gathering and focuses on lean meats and fish, vegetables, fruits, nuts, roots, and legumes and omits processed grains, oils, sugars and salts. The Paleo diet was first introduced in the mid-1970s by a gastroenterologist named Walter L. Voegtlin, who based his beliefs on evolutionary medicine that humans are genetically adapted to a pre-agricultural way of eating. His dietary treatments were based on the principles of the Paleo diet and he used the diet to treat various digestive disorders, including colitis, Crohns disease, irritable bowel syndrome and indigestion. The Paleo diet was further extolled in the mid to late-1980s in an article written by two health care professors, whose
