The main premise of the paleo diet centers around the idea that the average human body has not yet sufficiently adapted to eating foods that have become available since the invention of agriculture 10,000 years ago.
This includes seemingly benign foods like grains and beans, to the more obvious antagonists like industrially processed junk food.
Due to eating foods that exist outside of our evolutionary metabolic milieu (as Dr. Kurt Harris would say), people now deal with chronic “diseases of civilization” like heart disease, diabetes, and obesity.
“Paleo” is a shortening of the term paleolithic, referring to the period of human history that lasted from approximately two and a half million years ago to 10,000 BC. Evolutionarily speaking 10,000 years is just a blink of the eye, especially considering that humans have existed in their modern form for 200,000 years and as a closely related group of species for much longer than that.
During this time, humans ate varying amounts of meat, seafood, vegetables, fruit, nuts, and tubers. If it weren’t for the harshness of living in the wilderness, the primitive human could probably have expected to live a long healthy life eating this kind of diet.
Foods that humans have typically eaten:
- meat
- seafood
- vegetables
- fruit
- nuts
- tubers
It’s pretty difficult to argue with the healthfulness of a diet full of those kinds of foods. What sets the paleo diet apart from other gimmicky diets is that it does not focus on outlining what you can eat. Instead it identifies foods that you should avoid.
Just like a hunter-gatherer in the wild should avoid the strange looking berries that caused the rest of his tribe to get sick, so should modern humans avoid foods that lead to chronic illness. What really surprises people, is that foods they have been told for years are healthy are turning out to be not so good.
Foods that humans should consider avoiding or limiting:
- refined or processed sugars
- gluten grains
- legumes
- grain and seed cooking oils
- dairy
- processed food in general
So why are these foods bad for us? Well most importantly, refined sugars like you see in so many manufactured foods these days have a dramatic effect on insulin and blood glucose levels. Naturally occurring sugars (like in fruit) typically have their glycemic effect blunted somewhat by the presence of fiber, which slows the rate of digestion.
Products like soft drinks, sodas, candy, etc. usually contain industrial sweeteners like high fructose corn syrup. They’re metabolized into the bloodstream quickly and send your insulin levels on a roller coaster ride. In the short term they could cause weight gain and insulin resistance, in the long term type 2 diabetes is likely to develop.
Gluten grains are bad because of the various proteins and anti-nutrients they contain. Most of us have probably heard of or at least know a person who has Celiac disease, a severe autoimmune disorder related to gluten. The percent of prevalence among Western populations is estimated at roughly 1%, but probably up to 30% – 40% of the population still suffers from a low level of gluten intolerance.
Chronic gluten exposure has been shown to cause increased intestinal permeability (or “leaky gut”) even in the absence of Celiac disease. Other compounds like lectins (also found in legumes) and phytates further exacerbate autoimmune issues and serve to make many useful nutrients bio-unavailable.
Generally speaking, grains probably adapted the use of these chemicals to keep animals from digesting what are essentially their reproductive parts. Considering the poor amount of nutrition they provide, gluten grains aren’t worth having to deal with all of the side effects they cause.
Are all grains bad?
Corn and rice aren’t as bad as gluten based grains, but as a food source they aren’t particularly nutrient dense. As well, the highly refined and processed versions of these grains are certainly problematic because they typically induce a high glycemic response coupled with a significant starch-based carbohydrate load. When compared to more nutrient rich vegetables which don’t wreak havoc with your blood sugar or intestinal track, these other grains just don’t seem very worthwhile either.
What about eggs?
Eggs are a great source of fat and protein, although there are compounds within the egg whites which could pose problems for some people with a sensitive gut. According to Dr. Loren Cordain, it’s the second most common food allergy. Just be mindful of this, as a food source becomes less useful if it causes chronic inflammation. Some may point to the high cholesterol content as another reason for caution, but there is a growing body of evidence illustrating that earlier studies vilifying cholesterol were severely flawed.
What about dairy?
Dairy products present a sort of gray area and point of contention when it comes to the paleo diet. It can be argued that there are certain dairy foods like grass-fed butter that can be healthful despite the fact that they are derived from milk. The high amounts of saturated fat usually give people caution, but newer research is now indicating that it isn’t the cause of heart disease like we have been lead to believe.
It should also be kept in mind that grass-fed and pastured cows produce milk that contains more useful nutrients, and a more favorable omega 3 to omega-6 fatty-acid ratio. There are however some obviously problematic compounds found in dairy products.
Lactose intolerance (leading to gut irritation) is well known and there is also the protein casein which operates in a similar fashion to gluten. Many people will be susceptible to the negative reactions which these compounds cause. Generally, it is best to remove dairy along with gluten, and then later on try adding back less problematic dairy foods like butter and full fat yogurt and observe how your body responds.
Give it a try!
As you can see, the paleo diet consists of some pretty simple principles. Avoid food that your body isn’t adapted to eating.
Where the diet gets tough is when you realize that the bulk of food in the grocery store does not fit into this paradigm. But, armed with this knowledge, you are now in a position to make informed choices that will help you towards living a much healthier and vibrant life.
Do you want to: Lose weight? Feel better? Have more energy? Reduce inflammation and pain? Reverse diseases like rheumatoid arthritis, ulcerative colitis, lupus, autism, diabetes, and obesity? Look, feel, and perform at your best ever?
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16 Responses to What is the Paleo Diet?
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I actually (try) to eat a modified paleo diet modeled after Mark Sisson’s Primal Blueprint. When I’m training a lot, I usually eat my fair share of grains, but I’ve certainly replaced a lot of carbs with fats. I generally don’t eat rice or pasta anymore and have replaced them with quinoa.
No energy issues on my long runs either!
Cheers,
- Fitz.
.-= Fitz´s last blog ..Training Journal: 3.29 – 5.2.10 =-.
As long as you are cutting out the refined sugars, you are ahead of everybody else for sure! Bernd Heinrich talks a little bit about running on a high fat diet in his book Why We Run
You write that dairy is a gray area for the paleo diet. No it is not. Dairy is not paleo in any way shape or form. Dairy is a gray area on the “primal” diet. And it may be a gray area on PaNu, which is not a paleo diet, but a diet created by Kurt Harris.
Don,
The factor that all these different diets have in common is to remove grains and refined sugars, arguably the most harmful neolithic agents in the human diet. I subscribe to the idea that accomplishing those two things accounts for the bulk of the benefits of any of these paleo-inspired diet plans.
Obviously, I tend to lean more to the Kurt Harris approach, but I understand why you maintain a strict definition of what Paleo is or is not, and I respect that.
[...] that you’re eating more fruits and vegetables with less processed food. Consider a 1-2 week Paleo Diet to detox from the typical American fare. You may even consider switching to the diet on a more [...]
Question: Do you think that the paleo diet is practical en masse, with the hunger issues facing the world today?
I’m not an expert on food economics, but I suspect that much of the world’s overpopulation problems stem from mass agriculture and a reliance on cheap low quality grain based foods. I think if people relied more on local sustainable agriculture and livestock husbandry, populations would be more in-line with the available resources.
I think paleo dove-tails well with pasture raised animals and organic farming, and in some ways is more sustainable then the habitat destroying farming techniques that are used to grow monoculture crops of wheat and soy beans.
[...] what type of eating plan this is all about, David Csonka at Naturally Engineered summarized the paleo diet well: The main premise of the Paleo Diet centers around the idea that the average human body has [...]
One glaring inconsistency to me… How come the fiber in fruit is enough to overcome the damaging effects of fructose but the fiber in grains is not enough to overcome any negative derivatives there?
And I think this might help in regards to Emily’s question:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug. You seem to suggest that grains/mass agriculture was the cause of overpopulation whereas understanding this gentleman seems to depict how high-yielding crops is often credited with “saving a billion lives” in places that were already overpopulated.
It’s possible that the fiber in fruit doesn’t completely mitigate the damaging effects of fructose anyway, since hunter-gatherers gorging on fruit in the summer time could benefit from the resulting insulin resistance and fat gain to survive the winter.
In this scenario however, the damage (and “damage” could be accurate considering the high levels of uric acid released during fructose consumption) would be temporary, as opposed to chronic fructose consumption found in modern populations.
So, whereas it is beneficial for populations consuming it for a short period out of the year, it is more deleterious to health when consumed in large quantities every day.
I don’t know why you would assume plant fiber would have a similar effect or for a completely unrelated plant or plant-based chemical. The reasons which fructose and the various compounds found in grains are harmful are for different reasons. They’re also completely different kinds of compounds. Fructose is a sugar, whereas gluten is a collection of proteins.
As far as overpopulation goes, here is a link to a great anthropology lecture which mentions the relatively stable population levels found in paleolithic hunter-gatherer groups. http://fora.tv/2010/11/06/Teresa_E_Steele_The_Evolution_of_Human_Diet
It was not until agriculture was developed, that a more predictable food supply was created which could support large sedentary populations and an escalating population growth rate.
Your suggestion that higher-yielding crops saved lives in places that were already over-populated is still misplacing the “chicken for the egg”. Those locations were overpopulated to begin with because of agriculture, they were already trying to subsist on wheat, maize, or sorghum. They just happened to experience famines or their food technologies were lagging behind their population growth.
I’ve been writing about bowel problems caused by grains and ended up here. An excellent post.
A 2006 study showed that gliadin which is a component of gluten (which is in several grains), acts on a chemical called zonulin.
Zonulin decides how big the pathways in the intestinal wall are. If these pathways get too big, then larger molecules can pass through, and is thought cause immune responses that lead to food sensitivities, IBS, and all kinds of issues.
I went on the paleo-diet when the doc couldn’t find anything wrong with me. I lost 50 pounds and felt great. Unfortunately I fell off the wagon (corn and rice) and found 30 of those pounds back.
Thanks for the info.
Shawn´s last [type] ..Leaky Gut Syndrome
Thank you for sharing your experience Shawn. Have you found that it is primarily the gluten-based grains that cause your IBS, or do dairy foods contribute as well?
Cow’s milk and cheese but not goats milk for some reason. DEFINATELY dairy problems with cow’s milk. It makes me sick as heck.
Shawn´s last [type] ..Leaky Gut Syndrome
“Products like soft drinks, sodas, candy, etc. usually contain industrial sweeteners like high fructose corn syrup… In the short term they’ll cause weight gain and insulin resistance, in the long term type 2 diabetes.”
WILL cause or COULD cause? Just one example of the overstatements in this article that make me skeptical of the entire content.
Marv, thank you for the feedback. The language I used might seem more authoritarian than I intended, so I’ll look into editing that as needed.
Consequently, there is a lot of research that points to increased sugar intake as a cause for obesity and cardiovascular related diseases. Here are a few links to such research:
http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(00)04041-1/fulltext
http://www.ajcn.org/content/86/4/899.short
Let me know what you think.
Terrific work! That is the kind of info that are meant to be shared across the internet. Disgrace on the seek engines for not positioning this publish higher! Come on over and talk over with my website . Thank you =)
paleolithic diet´s last [type] ..1