Throughout the course of this blog, I am likely to write a lot about the Paleolithic Diet or Paleo Diet. So for anyone who hasn’t come across the Paleo Diet before, this is an introduction.
This is going to be a blog in two parts: in part one, I will provide a quick overview and let you know where you can find out more. Next week, in part two, we’ll delve into the details of our ancestral heritage and dig a bit deeper into the science and background.
What is the Paleo Diet and why is it controversial?
The Paleo Diet focuses on what we have evolved to eat.
You may think agriculture has been around for a long time, but on the scale of our evolution it’s still in its infancy – a mere 10,000 years old. It’s certainly not been here long enough for us to adapt to it, having first diverged from apes at least 4.4 million years ago and evolving into Homo Sapiens, with our most recent adaptations, over 100,000 years ago.
The principle of the diet is to eliminate those foods that we haven’t evolved to eat, allowing our bodies to function in the way they are designed to do. These foods include typical agricultural produce: wheat, grains, pulses, simple sugars. This is controversial because most people regard the invention of agriculture as one of the mainstays of civilisation.
What are the benefits?
Personally, I’ve seen positive changes to my recovery times, body composition and menstrual cycle since moving to a paleo diet. I’ll write more about these over the coming weeks. Loren Cordain, the recognised world expert on the Paleo Diet, reports a huge range of success stories on his site, including:
- weight loss,
- reduction of acne,
- curing diabetes,
- removing intestinal problems, and
- relieving auto immune diseases.
Where can I learn more?
For an incredibly useful index on all things paleo (diet-wise, not archaeologically), I really recommend the Paleolithic Diet as it’s a great springboard for finding other sites.
Professor Loren Cordain is a leading expert on the Paleo Diet. His site, The Paleo Diet, includes details of the research that he carries out and some nutritional tools, which can be a good starting point.
For a more scientific perspective, I suggest a visit to Staffan Lindeberg’s site – Paleolithic Diet in Medical Nutrition. There’s plenty to read and I’m still ploughing through the scientific research linked from his site, despite having found the site some time ago.
Finally, for a community of primal-living people, I recommend Mark’s Daily Apple. Whilst not definitively “paleo”, I see this site as covering the same principles as the Paleo Diet.
Related posts:
Nice article. I had not come across Staffan Lindeberg’s site before – I’ll definitely check it out. Do you know if the Paleo Diet is popular in Sweden?
To be perfectly honest, I have no idea.
I’ve had a quick search on google trends, which shows how often people are searching for a certain term on Google and also shows where they are searching from. Interestingly, Sweden is currently seventh in the ranking of countries where the term “paleo diet” is being searched ( http://www.google.com/trends?q=paleo+diet ).
Whilst the number of Swedish searches seems to be only about 20% of the number of searches in the US, the population of Sweden is only 3% of that in the US (9m compared to 304m), so either the same people are searching for “paleo diet” an awful lot, or the paleo diet is popular out there.
Of course Staffen Lindeberg’s site may be skewing it slightly – I’m not sure how Google Trends finds out which country you are in when you do a search. Technology isn’t my strong point!
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