The paleo diet is a diet based on foods similar to those eaten in the Palaeolithic between 2.5 million and 10,000 years ago. It is a fad that claims the human body is designed to eat a pre-agricultural mix of meat, roots, fruits, vegetables and nuts. This is true from the point of view of human nutrition, but paleoecology calls it a myth, because people debate the natural human diet for thousands of years and often raise the question of morality about the consumption of other animals. [Sources: 1, 4, 7]
The Paleo diet, also known as the hunter-gatherer diet or the Stone Age diet recommends eating lean meats, fish, fruits, vegetables, nuts and foods that had become available to our paleolithic ancestors for optimal health in modern times. It excludes cereals and dairy products, although some paleo-enthusiasts believe that these foods entered the human diet less than 12,000 years before the advent of agriculture. [Sources: 9]
The declared reason for the Palaeolithic diet is that the human genes in modern times are largely unchanged compared to 10,000 years ago, and therefore the diet of modern times is well suited for today's humans. Understanding the ancestral diet and its relationship to health of the hunter-gatherer populations would be a good starting point in itself, but it is not proven that such a diet is the best option for modern humans. The introduction of the paleo diet assumes that modern humans can reproduce with a hunter-gatherer diet. [Sources: 10, 12]
There are also various dietary approaches such as the Atkins diet, Keto diet, Paleo diet, raw food diet, blood group diet, vegan diet and much more, all of which have been discussed in previous blogs. There is no optimal human diet, only the foods that humans are supposed to eat. We need to know which nutrients are essential for human health, which nutrients are contained in food, which various components of the diet are present and which compounds in food influence our physiology. [Sources: 3, 10]
One of the reasons why we do not have new rules on food consumption is that once the real human diet is developed to work out what we can and cannot consume, it becomes a hidden blur. [Sources: 3]
The popularity of the Palaeolithic diet is based on the idea that modern humans lived as hunters and gatherers in the Palaeolithic Age (2.6 million years ago) before the agrarian revolution and that our genes did not have enough time to adapt to agricultural food. The author of The Power of Your Plate, Dr. Neal Barnard, talks about early human nutrition and explains that human nutrition should be a largely plant-based diet that was eaten before eating, eating and consuming the leftovers that carnivores left behind. The arguments are also based on anatomical features of humans and the diet of their caveman ancestors. [Sources: 0, 3, 8]
Agriculture changed what people ate, and established dairy products, cereals, and legumes as additional staple foods in the human diet. In this sense, people in rural China and Africa are still eating the kind of food that we have consumed 90% of over the last 20 million years, mainly plant-based foods. [Sources: 1, 2]
The natural diet of humans has been a topic of discussion for thousands of years. Today's human diet varies from population to population around the world. In his 1975 book The Stone Age Diet, the evolutionary biologist Charles Darwin advocated a meat-based diet with a low proportion of vegetables and starchy foods based on his claim that humans have eaten meat for at least 10,000 years. [Sources: 3, 12]
Simply put, a diet that revolves around meat and dairy products is a diet that is on the rise in developing countries and taking a greater toll on the planet's resources than one that revolves around non-refined grains, nuts, fruits and vegetables. If most of the world would eat local fruits and vegetables without meat, fish or whole grains like the much-lauded Mediterranean diet and exercise for hours a day, then this would be good news for our health and the world. [Sources: 8]
In the meantime, the human body's H. erectus relies on a diet of high-energy foods, especially meat. Most researchers believe that eating meat and fish leads to larger brains and smaller intestines compared to other primates and animals, because these foods are more energy-rich and easier to digest than plant-based foods. The longer intestine gives the body more time to break down fibre and absorb nutrients from plant foods, but also makes it more dangerous for humans to eat meat. [Sources: 0, 8, 10]
The Nordic Nutrition Recommendation (NNR) is a common dietary recommendation for northern European countries that contains less protein, fat and more carbohydrates than the paleo diet, but includes lean meat, fish, eggs, vegetables, fruit, berries and nuts. The diet is 65% plant-based and is not typical of the more widespread paleo diet, but Loren Cordains is popular for emphasizing animal products and avoiding processed foods. [Sources: 5, 12]
Archaeologists tend to emphasize the role of meat in the ancient human diet, as slaughtered bones of wild animals are more likely to be preserved at excavation sites. A number of randomized clinical trials suggest that the paleo diet offers no benefit compared to a diet of fruits and vegetables, lean meat, whole grains, legumes, and low-fat dairy products. An influential article, a headlined in my video The Problems with the Paleo Diet, is an argument in favour of a return to a hunter-gatherer diet of lean meat, fruit, vegetables and nuts. [Sources: 1, 2, 13]