The Paleo Diet - So Easy Even a Caveman Can Do It

So what is the Paleo diet? Basically, it's the diet our ancestors thrived on for over 99% of our evolutionary history. These are the foods that were available in the environment humans occupied in paleolithic times, and over millions of years evolution honed our bodies and genetics to function optimally while consuming them. In a nutshell, it's the diet we are built to eat.

The paleo diet is also sometimes called the Hunter-Gatherer diet. Our foraging ancestors ate this diet, and hunter-gatherer societies today thrive on it. It consists of pre-agricultural foods, because those foods were introduced very recently in our evolutionary timeline. The processes of evolutionary adaptation can move slowly, and humans have not fully adapted to the consumption of neolithic foodstuffs that only appeared on our plates with the advent of agriculture. Yes, agriculture has been with us for around 10,000 years - and this sounds like a long time. But compared to the entire span of human evolution, it's a drop in the bucket.

This chart, from Dr. Loren Cordain's excellent Paleo Diet site, shows the relative time scales of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle v. the agricultural lifestyle.

As you can see, the 10,000 year history of agriculture is a tiny blip when compared to the 2 million years humans have subsisted on a hunting and gathering lifestyle. What this means to us is that our bodies and genetics have been fine-tuned over a very long time to functionally optimally on a paleolithic diet, and only recently have we made the shift to an agricultural eating pattern. Not coincidentally, this shift in eating patterns was accompanied by decrease in overall health and the introduction of new diseases. There is a growing mountain of research now telling us that many of the so-called "diseases of civilization" - obesity, diabetes, heart disease, various cancers - are part of the price we are paying for the dietary shift to agricultural foods. I will provide links to some of this research for those of you who like that sort of thing.

He Blinded Me With SCIENCE!

At this point I could completely geek-out Thomas Dolby style and bombard you with the science behind all this - and trust me, sooner or later it's going to happen. But for now I'm just going to tell you what following a paleo diet is like, and why you might want to do it.

Why go Paleo?

You mean other than the whole "avoiding disease" reason? Well, for one thing you will become leaner - and who doesn't want that? Following a paleo diet will change your body composition, increasing or maintaining your lean body mass while reducing body fat. Even in the absence of an exercise program, eating paleo will make you leaner. I can attest to this from personal experience - I switched to paleo eating without changing my exercise routine, and I lost fat while at the same time improving my workout performance. And it happened pretty quickly.
The amount of fat you lose and how quickly you lose it is in part dependent upon what your diet was like before you went paleo. If you're a donut, soda and pizza kind of person, switching to paleo will produce relatively rapid changes in the way you look, feel and perform. If you already eat a clean and lean diet, you will see results more slowly.

In addition to looking and performing better, you will likely FEEL better on a paleo program. I know I do. The thing about agricultural foods is that we have not fully adapted to them, so we tend to get a lot of sub-critical inflammation and other disorders from eating them. By sub-critical, I mean it's not going to kill you (right away) but you sure won't be firing on all cylinders on such a diet. Allergies, joint aches, intestinal issues, and a host of other annoying ailments have been linked to non-paleo foods. Oh yeah, and the big ones too - heart disease, diabetes, widespread obesity...the big killers in our society.

But more importantly you'll look good naked.

How Do I Do It?

So now you've seen some of the reasons why you might want to go paleo - now how do you do it? Well, it's not that hard - as the title of this blog entry states, even a caveman could do it. Actually, our ancestors did it because they had little choice in the matter - but those who thrived best on paleo foods left more offspring and gave us the genetic inheritance that will make us thrive on such a diet as well. But the plan is pretty simple.

What to eat:

Meat - beef, chicken, fish, pork. Grass-fed meat or wild game is best, but you can get by with the stuff you find in your neighborhood grocery store. Eggs count as meat.

Vegetables - lots and lots of veggies, of many varieties. Green and leafy is great, and root vegetables like carrots and turnips are good too.

Fruit - apples, oranges, bananas, and so on.

Nuts and berries - walnuts, almonds, pecans, and other tree nuts. Not peanuts, which are a legume rather than a true nut. All sorts of berries are good.

That's it. Meat, veggies, fruit, nuts, and berries - paleo in a nutshell. There's plenty of variety and nutrition available in those few categories, all you really need. The categories above are in order of how much they should contribute to your daily calorie intake, more or less. You should have a huge mound of veggies on your plate, but the calorie content of even a massive pile of veggies will typically be lower than that of a normal portion of meat.

What NOT to eat:

Grains - these are neolithic foods introduced with the advent of agriculture, and as such are not among the foods the human species is well-adapted to consume. They are nutritionally weak and are poor substitutes for meat and veggies. They are also associated with various diseases of civilization. More on this later.

Sugar - refined sugars and especially new frankenfoods like high fructose corn syrup. Our ancestors never ate that stuff, and now it's in the majority of packaged foods. Steer clear of packaged foods.

Dairy - milk, cheese and the various products made from them. Neolithic foods again, and ones which many people can't even digest properly. They can also be pretty potent allergens.

Legumes - beans, peas and peanuts. These neolithic foods are typically not even digestible, and occasionally toxic, unless processed in some way. Avoid them as much as possible.

Excess salt - yeah, it's bad for you. Surprise.


Now this is a radical departure from the Standard American Diet (SAD), but that's a GOOD thing. In reality, no one should be eating the SAD - it's no coincidence that obesity and diabetes have skyrocketed over the last few decades. The paleo diet is also pretty intuitive and flexible. I will post my meals in subsequent entries to give an idea of how it can be done. There are also a lot of great websites out there - just do a Google search for paleo recipes.

That's enough for now on the dietary aspects of the paleo plan. Good luck and happy foraging!