Palaeolithic Diet - Any Thoughts?

Supercell

I was reading Why I eat like a caveman on independent.ie the other day and it peaked my curiosity.

I have read people here posting before recommending eating quite like this diet, not sure if it was deliberate or not..i.e. avoid processed food, bread, pasta etc

I researched further on the web and came across some interesting stuff about this diet ..such as on http://www.nerdheaven.dk/~jevk/paleo_intro.php :-

The Palaeolithic Diet a.k.a. Neanderthin is the diet that we humans are genetically adapted to eat. The paleolithic age is the same as the Stone Age - so this is a stone age diet or life style. This has been humanity's preferred diet for something like 2.5 million years, and humans have only genetically changed 0.005% since the introduction of agriculture (the Neolithic). As a rule, agricultural (and technological) products are not healthy to eat, and we should predominantly try to eat only those whole foods that are healthy in their raw state (though almost all humans, including hunter-gatherers cook their food). (Check out the Palaeolithic links)

This is not a quick-fix diet but a way of life. You're not supposed to starve when you eat only paleo foods. Eat when you're hungry!

I also found this site - http://www.paleofood.com/ which has various recipes which t be honest don't seem to bad or exclusive or unhealthy to me, the menus link was particularly interesting imho..

I know a lot of people here have strong food views and excellent nutritional knowledge, would love to hear your thoughts on this stuff.

Wibbs

It's an interesting theory. Early homo sapiens types, before agriculture were generally taller and more robust. Bone densities higher than moderns. Very very little dental caries and well muscled too(judging by bone attachments). Neandertals although a different species, would make your average powerlifter of today look like a wimp. Huge chests with massive muscle attachments.

There's a few issues though. For a start your actual "caveman" would be only eating eggs in season, so eating them everyday wouldn't be really on. Same with various fruits and veg. Big doses of red meat may have been the case, especially in winter, but any detrimental side effects of that would be massively offset by the exercise needed to get the meat in the first place. Why do you think these guys had such high bone densities? Long walking with occasional bursts of power*. Hunting it down in Tescos doesn't really count. The quality of the meat would be at issue too. Modern cattle are very far removed from the prey of years back. The ancient prey would have been more muscled with much much less fat in the tissues.

That goes for a lot of the food. I mean salmon are in season for maybe 4-6 months of the year and something grown in a cage on dodgy food is hardly the same. It's not even close. Having caught and eaten wild salmon and trout the difference in texture, colour and taste has to eaten to be believed.

There are also the psychological aspects of the hunt itself. It might release hormones and brain chemicals that are beneficial. Something you don't get with buying it in a shop. I've seen this myself with fishing. You do get into a groove that is almost meditative. You also get a sense of place and nature that is very hard to describe. If you were relying on that for actual sustenance I suspect the effect would be even higher. I know when you do succeed the "high" is there. That surely has a healthy effect, missing in crossing items off a list at the deli. maybe the missing secondary effects of hunting may have some bearing and explain the bad effects we see in heavy meat eaters in the modern world. It may explain why the Maasai, Inuit and others with very high cholesterol, high animal fat diets escape those effects(in a big way too). I May sound like a hippy here:D , but not really as I'm trying to catch, kill and eat something. PETA would not be happy....

Also would this "caveman" diet be good for women? I'm not so sure as hunter gatherer women tend to eat far more veggies than the men. Might go someway to explain why there seem to be far more vegetarians among women even today.

I'm sure you could get a program together of exercise teamed with diet that would come close to hunter gatherers. Interesting thought, but most of what I've read on the subject seems unnecessarily faddish to me.

* you could take this caveman theory to the realm of exercise in general. You could argue we're not really designed to do long drawn out bouts of high energy exercise(Marathon walking? Certainly. Marathon running etc? No). We evolved to be strong with bursts of speed and strength when required. It may explain why interval training is much more successful than sustained effort. I was reading in new scientist recently that for fat burning stopping halfway through an hour of cardio increases the fat burning massively, compared to keeping going. Stands to reason given our evolutionary history. Might explain also why things like crossfit type training is so successful.

PeakOutput

i was listening to this on news talk today. no dairy products. meat and nuts sounds very similar to alot of whats recommended here