The Paleolithic Diet

Dear Friends, Over the last couple of months I have run into people who always raise the Paleolithic diet This month’s e-news is a part of a continuation of articles providing some perspective on hot topics in nutrition currently circulating in the media. For the month of May we will be covering the Paleolithic Diet. In recent years there has been significant consumer interest in optimal diet and lifestyle; particularly with curiosity surrounding the role of nutrition in ideal health outcomes. As readers search for dietary excellence, they are faced with a multitude of nutritional concepts that all claim to have 'the secret' to optimal health and vitality. One of the more popular diets in the media is the Paleolithic diet, that our long ago ancestor's ate, before the industrial revolution and well before pocket societies were established. This diet has received much attention as of late, following the release of Dr. Loren Cordain's book 'The Paleo Diet.' As a society we are dying of diseases of affluence and modernization. Therefore, The Paleo concept in nutrition would make perfect sense to its followers. In an attempt to reclaim our health, it would seem logical to review the evolution of diet. However, many readers use Dr. Cordain's book as their justification to consume a high meat, high fat diet, despite a mountain of evidence indicating that meat dominate diets are actually the problem and result in premature aging and disease. Here are some points to consider; · Paleolithic people were cave dwellers who ate for survival and out necessity, not because they had a profound understanding of nutritional excellence. They would consume anything that contained useable calories to avoid starvation. There is a difference between eating for survival and eating for health longevity. Hunter/gatherers did not live long, healthier lives - they died of exposure, starvation, being eaten by animals, infections and natural disasters. · These stone age peoples were not the carnivores that the proponents claim. The reason for this is; hunting and killing animals is not easy and those humans were bipedal beings who were considerably slower than the animals that they were seeking to eat and they had no technology to assist in hunting and killing prey (they had no means of storing food for any period of time either). Visualise yourself chasing down a beast with your bare feet/hands and flat blunt teeth- this would actually be quite amusing! · Many people have come to the conclusion that these beings predominately lived on animal flesh because the bones of animals were discovered near campsites. The remains of plants do not survive in same way that bones do. It would be more plausible that, our ancestors, out of necessity, ate locally growing wild plants and moved about to locate them. They killed and ate animals when they could, but these opportunities were few and far between. This is somewhat irrelevant in that we are not hunter/gatherers or cave dwellers anymore and humans are not dying of infectious disease or starvation, but of disease's of dietary excess, body pollution and poor lifestyle choices. Cave dwellers didn't live long enough to experience degenerative disease. There is no successful population that lives or has lived on a meat based diet. In John Robbins book Healthy at 100,1 he presents the research on the worlds longest living and healthiest peoples such as, the Hunzan's, Abkhasians , Okinawans and Vilcabamban's. The average individual in these cultures lives to 110 years of age, happy, vibrant, active and coherent. They consume low fat plant based diets, with little or no meat. Conversely, Dr. Joel Fuhrman presents cultures contrast to those outlined in Healthy at 100. The Inuit Greenlanders have the worst longevity statistics in North America and this can be due to their high consumption of meat and low consumption of fresh whole foods. Legitimate research shows that these people have higher rates of cancer and die 10 years younger than the average general population of Canada. We do not want to duplicate the life spans of Canadians or that of societies living considerably shorter lives than them." The Masai in Kenya are a tribe that hunt and eat a diet rich in meats and wild game and they have the worst life expectancy in the modern world. The average lifespan for a Masai women is 49 and for men it is 45 and if they reach the age of 60 they are considered to be very old. Adult mortality rates figures on the Masai, show that they have 50% chance of dying before the age of 59. Although the Masai's short life spans is linked to their harsh living conditions, their diets high in meat and low in fresh whole foods still take their toll. Dr. George Mann, who once was an advocate of the Masai diet, went extremely quiet several decades ago when he conducted autopsies on 50 Masai men in their 40's who had the atherosclerosis of men in their 90's. If these men hadn't died so young, they would have had the same degenerative conditions as us in Western countries. Throughout history humans have migrated all over the planet, at times enduring scarcity and famine, conversely experiencing much abundance. Just because humans consumed a particular diet (due to availability or lack thereof) does not mean that following these dietary patterns is optimal or consistent with health longevity. Scientists have now been able to conclusively determine the best diet for ideal health by measuring the diet/lifestyle versus the disease rates of various populations world wide. We now know that greatly increasing the consumption of fruits, vegetables, legumes, raw nuts, seeds and whole grains (and greatly decreasing the consumption of animal products) offers profound increased longevity potential. This is due in part to a broad symphony of life-extending phytochemical nutrients that a vegetable-based diet contains. It is important to note that some of the healthiest cultures around the world consume small amounts animal foods and always have (2-3 serves per week), but the majority of total weekly calories consist of wide variety of unrefined plant based material, with organic animal foods used as condiments.