What is the Paleo Diet?

The Paleo diet is certainly not a new idea. Coming to popular attention with the publication of a book on the subject by Walter Voegtlin in 1975, its central concept is to mimic the diet of humans that lived 25 to 50 thousand years ago, during the Paleolithic Age. Voegtlin claimed distinct benefits are associated with what he claims was the high protein and low carbohydrate diet of the ancients. His plan is occasionally called the caveman diet, the Stone Age diet and the hunter-gatherer diet. Proponents of the Paleo diet continue to practice it, and it has been somewhat validated by the emergence of other similar low-carb diets.

Features

The Paleo diet attempts to mimic the food intake of our distant ancestors by excluding foods that entered the human diet during the Neolithic Age, mostly grains, legumes, and other products of agriculture. These foods are not edible in their natural state, but they must be cooked to convert toxins into safe substances and to become digestible. Instead, the Paleo diet focuses on foods that are edible in their natural state and would have been available to low-technology hunter/gatherers.

Function

The claim of Paleo diet proponents is that the human body evolved for millennia with the fairly consistent food sources available to hunter/gatherers. Over time, it adapted to these foods and reacted to them optimally. They claim that grains and other agricultural products were introduced relatively recently in human history, and that they not only are not well handled by the body, which suffers as a result, but they are not as nutritionally beneficial as the traditional foods of the Paleolithic era.

Types

The kinds of foods the Paleo diet allow are meats (especially seafood, lean meats and organ meats like liver and kidneys), raw vegetables (especially roots vegetables like carrots, but not potatoes), nuts (especially walnuts, Brazil nuts, macadamia, and almonds, but not peanuts or cashews) and fruits (especially berries).

Effects

The Paleo diet is not intended to be a faddish or temporary tool for producing immediate weight loss but rather a lasting lifestyle change. Proponents of the diet claim that not only will it prevent the onset of cardiovascular disease, diabetes and other "diseases of affluence," but it also leads to a gradual realization of an individual's ideal body weight, maximum health and top athletic performance.

Considerations

The Paleo diet is a low-carb diet, not unlike the Atkins or South Beach diets. Unlike those diets, however, the Paleo diet does not advocate counting carbs or calories. Instead, it maintains that a simple focus on the right kinds of foods will naturally increase overall percentage of energy coming from protein, reduce the intake of carbohydrates and lead to improved health and longevity. These claims are not uncontested, however, and several studies link vegetarian, Mediterranean and Asian diets with health and longevity. Scientists agree there is insufficient evidence as to the relative proportion of plant and animal foods that constituted the diet of Paleolithic humans.