Paleo Diet

The term, Paleo Diet, is short for "Paleolithic Diet". This short term has developed as an abbreviation, easily pronounced and remembered, in the past 15 years or so. With Dr. Cordain's book, The Paleo Diet, published in 2002, it has become the most widely used popular term when referring to our ancestral ("paleo" means old) diet, that preceeded the advent of modern agriculture.

Many nutrition scientists now agree that it is a way of eating for optimum health. The reason this way of eating promotes optimum health is because it is mimicking the way our Paleolithic ancestors ate. Over a 2 million year period our genes adapted to a diet in which all food had to be hunted, fished, or gathered from the natural environment. Though this environment has changed dramatically, the human genome has changed less than 0.02 percent in the past 40,000 years. Thus, most people eat a diet that is not in sync with their genetic needs, and sooner or later end up with health conditions that are largely preventable.

Below is a summary of technical aspects of the Paleo Diet, taken from one of Dr. Cordain's articles with other scientists:

"There is growing awareness that the profound changes in the environment (e.g., in diet and other lifestyle conditions) that began with the introduction of agriculture and animal husbandry approximately 10,000 years ago occurred too recently on an evolutionary timescale for the human genome to adjust.  In conjunction with this discordance between our ancient, genetically determined biology and the nutritional, cultural and activity patterns of contemporary western populations, many of the so-called diseases of civilization have emerged.  In particular, food staples and food processing procedures introduced during the Neolithic and Industrial Periods have fundamentally altered seven crucial nutritional characteristics of  ancestral hominin diets: 1) glycemic load, 2) fatty acid composition, 3)  macronutrient composition, 4) micronutrient density, 5) acid/base balance, 6) sodium/potassium ratio, and 7) fiber content.  The evolutionary collision of our ancient genome with the nutritional qualities of recently introduced foods may underlie many of the chronic diseases of western civilization."

From the abstract of: Loren Cordain, S. Boyd Eaton, Anthony Sebastian, Neil Mann, Staffan Lindeberg, Bruce A. Watkins, James H. O’Keefe, Janette Brand Miller. Origins and evolution of the western diet: Health implications for the 21st century. Am J Clin Nutr 2005;81:341-54.

See Dr. Cordain's book The Paleo Diet, our page on Paleolithic Diet, or see our home page for more on the general aspects of a Paleolithic Diet.