Paleo Diet

The paleo diet or Paleolithic diet, also commonly known as the Stone Age diet, caveman diet and hunter-gatherer diet, is as the name suggests a dietary regimen intended to replicate the diet of humans during the Paleolithic era. Humans living during the Paleolithic era that lasted from around 2.5 million years ago to around ten thousand years ago thrived on a diet of wild plants and animals. This era ended with the development of agriculture just ten thousand years ago. Following a paleo diet offers the obvious health benefit of being consistent with human evolution. New research from many experts hints that a diet consisting of lean meats, seafood, fresh vegetables, and fresh fruits can facilitate the development of optimum health, ideal body weight, and peak athletic performance.

The Agricultural Revolution marked a huge shift in the human diet, with our seventy percent of our caloric intake today coming from foods that were rarely or never eaten before. The result as we can see has been an epidemic rise of cardiovascular disease, cancer, osteoporosis, arthritis, gastrointestinal disease, diabetes, acne, and more.

Although there is no way to accurately replicate the diet of the Paleolithic era, the paleo diet attempts to be as close as possible with substitutions made in some cases. The most important aspects of the diet would be meats, including seafood, and eggs. Ideally the source of these meats and eggs would be nature or rather from animals raised on a natural organic diet. It is important that meats should not be the product of breeding of any kind as is the case today.

Vegetables are also encouraged, but by and large anything that can not be eaten raw is excluded, including legumes like green beans and peas. Fruits are generally an accepted part of the diet, juices however being restricted to limited quantities. Nuts and seeds are also generally accepted as part of the diet, but cashews are excluded by some as they can’t be eaten raw. Coconut milk and unsweetened almond milk are often used to substitute dairy products. When it comes to oils, those extracted from plants or vegetables that can be eaten on the diet are fine, with olive oil, flax seed oil, and nut oils being the preferred choice. Fish oil supplements are also encouraged. When it comes to beverages, anything other than water should be consumed in moderation and some even prefer to exclude any coffee and alcohol completely from the paleo diet.

Submitted on January 16, 2014