What is Paleo Diet?

Paleo diet had a boom in popularity in the last few years, and a lot of people are following it with varying degrees of success. But do you know what the paleo diet is? By analyzing the name one can always imagine what it is - it’s a paleolithic diet. It’s a diet based on what pre-historic humans ate, from about 2 million to 10,000 years ago. So, many of the modern ingredients that we are very used to being cut off entirely, and some others made essential, to mimic the diet of those “cavemen”. This diet is also called Paleolithic diet, but others call it the Stone Age diet, the caveman diet, the hunter-gatherer diet, or the pre-historic diet. The main purpose of this diet is to help maintain more balanced eating habits without the use of typically “farmed” ingredients. If it’s a product of modern agriculture, such as a lot of different grains, dairy, and many legumes, then it’s off. The reason for this is the discordance hypothesis: the idea that our modern food is not really what we should be eating to be healthy. Want to know more about the paleo diet? Keep reading!

Why Paleo?

A lot of people report having great results in losing weight and gaining more energy by going on a paleo diet. People also use this diet when they want help planning meals that don’t rely too much on the modern food industry’s products, which are generally processed foodstuffs. People also want to follow the paleo diet to potentially avoid health problems such as obesity, heart disease, and diabetes.

Restrictions

First, let’s talk about what people eat when going on a paleo diet. In this diet, there’s no bread in it, at all. Or anything with flour or similar in it. There was nothing like this in the Paleolithic age. You would also not use any oil, or sugar, but also not anything dairy-related. So no cheese at all. That’s because milk only got into our diets after animals got domesticated, that is, after the Paleolithic.

Of course, anything that is processed, any ingredient that is the direct result of the modern food industry is strictly forbidden under this diet. There were no refined fats or carbohydrates in the stone age, so there should be none in the diet as well. Of course, replicating the foodstuffs of thousands of years ago is not feasible, so people going on paleo diet will have to adapt to the more modern counterparts of what was usually eaten back then.

Source: Photo by Jakaria3704 from Pixabay

What to eat?

The paleo diet consists mainly of fruits and vegetables, lean meat (usually from grass-fed animals or even wild game), fish, nuts, roots, and seeds. Legumes such as cucumbers and tomatoes are fine, and also are carrots, celery, onions, and garlic. The diet also relies heavily on fruits such as oranges, apples, and avocado. Basically, anything that a hunter-gatherer from the stone age would have available is what the paleo diet is all about.