Paleolithic Foods

A lot of diet experts and academics have withheld comment on the Paleo diet.  I understand their hesitation to embrace a lifestyle that is rather radical without extensive data and research.  It’s true that longitudinal studies have no been completed to show the effectiveness of the paleolithic lifestyle on people.  One thing, however, that I think trumps all of that is your own body.  If you give the paleo diet a try for 30 days, do you feel better?  What is your body telling you?  Given the wide array of human response to dietary lifestyles, this may be more important than any study that could come out.  Listen to your body, understand its messages, you’ll be fine.

Keeping with our theme of Doctor’s discussing their opinions of the the paleo diet, here is an intesting YouTube video of Dr. Joseph Kaye discussing the paleo diet.  I like being informed and Dr. Kaye seems to be a good proponent of the diet.

Here is a very interesting article written by Dr. David Katz of the Yale Prevention Research Center.  In it he discusses the merits of the Paleo diet, but also warns of the “devilish” details in its implementation that people must be aware of.  Katz discusses the recent poor ranking of the paleo diet among “diet experts” most of whom scored the diet very low.  Katz, however, was one who did not.  He does have his caveats for people considering the paleo diet.  They are nuanced, but he wants to emphasize they are not criticisms meant to write off the entire diet.  Here are some excerpts of his article.

I explained … that I am a proponent of our true ancestral diet, while dubious about its many modern variants. The notion — expressed in much of Prof. Cordain’s own work — that our ancestors ate a lot of meat, has invited modern carnivores to run up their “Paleo diet” banner and claim to be eating under it.

In other words, his criticisms, were not of the paleo diet, but of the diet as used today by heavy meat eaters, not staying true to the concept of “lean meats”.

But they are not, because modern meat is not Stone Age meat. There were no wild corned beef, salamis or pastramis in the Stone Age, so processed meat is certainly off the Paleo diet menu. There were no grain-fed cattle; no pigs fed slop; and no domesticated feed animals raised without demands on their muscles, either.

Feel free to read the rest of the article, it is interesting throughout to get a respected doctor’s opinion of the paleo diet.

I wanted to take another look at the paleolithic food pyramid.  As you can see the standard paleolithic diet is built off the protein-rich lean meats and fish.  However, I think you can alter this somewhat so that the vegetable portion can become almost like a base.  There are quite a few successful paleo diet friends of mine that have eliminated lean meats entirely from the base of the pyramid.  So essentially their base is fish and vegetables, what many people would call a pescatarian.  Of course, you need to really focus on your protein intake at this level.  Focusing on high protein vegetables will help, but as I wrote in there are many high protein foods in the paleo diet to replace meat.

This is actually a pretty good video on the paleolithic diet, completed by a biology high school student.  It’s garnered a decent number of hits for such a video.  I thought I’d share it with you all because its information and short.  Kudos young man!