Increasing numbers of people are starting to follow the so called paleo, cave-man or stone age diet in order to help them achieve everything from losing weight easily to alleviating the symptoms of diabetes. There is also a lot of anecdotal evidence to support that it can help people lower their cholesterol, cure their coeliac disease and get rid of their can. In addition it is said to help people cure people of their in-tolerances and allergies. The question is whether these claims are true and whether there is scientific evidence to back up these claims.
Now before we continue I need to remind you that you should not make any decisions that can effect your health without consulting with a doctor, nutritionist or other health professional. While there is nothing wrong with educating yourself about your health you should be wary about what you read, see and hear about on the internet.
That said it is always good to educate yourself about healthy eating and most of us already have a fairly good instinct for what is healthy and what isn’t. However the paleo diet does have some nuances that some people might not be familiar with, such as the dangers of grains and grain based foods such as bread and pasta.
But considering the above it can’t hurt to investigate how you can improve your health by improving your diet. In the case of the paleo diet, its followers believe that in order to be healthiest that we can be we should try to eat as closely to what our ancient ancestor ate in the paleolithic era (stone-age) because that is what we evolved to eat. This would be the counter argument for it being a fad diet since it’s what we should naturally eat in the same way that lions evolved to hunt and eat zebras.
We do have to take into account that we are living in the 21st century. This isn’t about re-enacting the past. There is no need to dress in furs and live in a cave. It’s about combining the best of our current life-style with what we can figure out about the past through archaeological and anthropological research. Using this knowledge we can give our stone-age bodies a better chance at achieving health in the modern era.
What do we have to back up the idea that eating this paleo diet is good for us? Besides lots of anecdotes there is an increasing body of research that point to this being the optimal way of eating for human being. People such as Robb Wolf, Loren Cordain, Mark Sisson, Gary Taubes and Art De Vany have done a lot of research into nutrition and are finding that it is helping people achieve the best health they have ever had in their lives. There are even cases of vegans and vegetarians being convinced by the evidence and reasoning behind this way of eating.
