Back to Basics with Paleo Diet

One of the modern dietary regimens is the Paleo diet or the Paleolithic diet and also comes in other names like caveman diet, actual ancestral human diet, Stone Age diet or hunter-gather diet. This diet employs the supposed diet of our ancestors during the Paleolithic era with wild plants and animals. The Paleolithic era is associated with the dawn of agriculture around ten thousand years ago.

The Paleo diet often includes fish, vegetables, fruit, roots, nut and grass-fed pasture raised meats. Grains, dairy products, salt, legumes, refined sugar and processes oils are excluded in this diet. This dietary regimen has actually started in the mid-1970s. Gastroenterologist Walter L. Voegtlin is responsible in honing this nutritional concept.

The premise that serves as the basis of this diet is that “modern humans are genetically adapted to the diet of their Paleolithic ancestors.” It also claims that there are no major changes in the human genetics since the start of agriculture. Thus, this diet assumes that an ideal diet for the current time is that which has a similarity to the diet used by Paleolithic men.

Those who believe in this kind of diet state that engaging in the traditional diet resembling that of Paleolithic hunters and gatherers reduce the possibilities of being affected by different kinds of diseases springing nowadays. There are also studies that show that Paelolithic diet has advantages to the health of people who are into this diet and that it has some potentially therapeutic nutritional characteriscs.

However, critics of this diet argue that immunity of hunter-gatherer societies to the “diseases of modern civilization” is only due to the lack of calories in their diet or brought about by other factors. Critics do not see that their diet has a special composition that can be applicable nowadays and will make us immune from different diseases.