Archive for April, 2011
What is The Paleo Diet?
The Paleo Diet is a new phrase to describe an old thing: the kinds of foods that humans ate for the millions of years during which our digestive systems evolved. The basic idea is that the optimal human diet is the one that we evolved to digest. Given that almost everything has changed over this long period of time, and life in the modern era does not resemble life in the palaeolithic era, the diet can best be described by what was not eaten during that period.
Approximately 99.99% of the time that our digestive systems evolved, a period of about 5 million years, four classes of food have not been part of our diet, either because they didn’t exist, gathering them was too difficult, we could not digest them, or some combination of all three. Those food classes are: grains, legumes, dairy, and refined sugar.
Thanks to the advent of agriculture about 10,000 years ago, those foods are now the staple diet of modern humanity. As it turns out, the more we have adopted grains, legumes, dairy, and refined sugars into our diets, the more we have developed what are coming to be known as diseases of civilization.
