The Paleo Diet

Geschatte leestijd: 8 minutenThe Paleo diet is the way we ate when humans first existed, when we were still cavemen. This way of eating is also known as the caveman diet or the paleolithic diet.

In this article, the benefits of the paleo diet according to its proponents are first described. Then the critics are discussed.

Inhoudsopgave

• De voordelen van het paleo dieet
• Het Paleo dieet en granen
• Waar haal ik dan mijn energie vandaan?
• Zuivel en paleo
• Wat mag ik wel eten bij het Paleo dieet?
• Kritiek op het paleo dieet
• Overgewicht door teveel calorieën
• “Eten als holbewoner onmogelijk”
• “Je bent geworden wat je eet”
• “Paleo dieet is meer dan eten”
• Is het paloe dieet gevaarlijk?
• “We weten helemaal niet wat ze aten”
• Conclusie

The benefits of the paleo diet

The Paleo diet is named after the Paleolithic period (from the Latin for “old stone age”), a period from about 2.3 million to 10,000 years ago. From that period onwards, agriculture and animal domestication emerged, but before that, our ancestors were hunters and gatherers. During the first more than 150,000 years of their existence, humans became very skilled at hunting animals and gathering food, and their bodies had fully adapted to this.

The entire human body was set up to eat what humans could find in their environment. People didn’t live as long back then – there were dangerous animals around, the environment was much more hostile than it is today, and medical facilities were not noteworthy.

At some point, about ten thousand years ago, people discovered how to grow food. Suddenly, humans went from being hunters and gatherers to farmers. There was no need to wander anymore, and hunting animals for food was no longer necessary. People formed communities, established villages, and settled in one place.

What we filled our stomachs with changed completely in a short period of time. We no longer just ate meat, vegetables, and the fruits that grew on trees and bushes, but we started to eat more and more grains – such as bread, pasta, rice, and corn. However, our bodies would never have had time to fully adapt to this way of eating and living. “People have become completely dependent on those grains, and we are also advised by the authorities to eat six to eleven servings of grains per day. As a result, the average person today is out of shape, overweight, unhappy, and has too much on their mind.”

In addition, modern humans suffer from all sorts of – wealth-related – diseases that could have been prevented. The Paleo diet is a way to return to the way of eating for which we are biologically designed. This way, we make better use of the capabilities of our bodies and live much healthier. Within the Paleo diet, you can eat anything a caveman could hunt (meat, fish) and find (vegetables, fruits, nuts). If the food did not exist or was not available in the Stone Age, then you don’t eat it.

The Paleo diet became popular through the bestseller The Paleo Diet by Loren Cordain, who based his ideas on the work of Walter Voegtlin from the 1970s [1].

The Paleo diet and grains

The main difference with our current way of eating is how grains are viewed in the Paleo diet. Grains consist of carbohydrates, and our body converts those carbohydrates into a sugar called glucose. Glucose is used by our bodies, among other things, as energy. Glucose that is not used can be stored as fat.

Our digestion largely tolerates carbohydrates from grains, but we would not have evolved to the point where we can live healthily on grains and get the most out of them.

Where do I get my energy from then?

Alright, no grains and no sugar. But you still need energy to function, right? Indeed, but within the Paleo diet, you don’t get the energy from carbohydrates to the same extent.

Our bodies are designed to work with a much lower amount of carbohydrates than we currently eat. If there are no carbohydrates at all, your body takes fat stored in your body and burns that fat to get energy.

As I mentioned earlier, your body is a very efficient machine. If your body receives fewer carbohydrates, it will have less glucose available for energy, and it will have to start burning your stored fat to produce energy. Perfect solution, according to proponents.

Carbohydrates are not automatically bad. They are just not essential for your functioning. Even Eskimos hardly eat any carbohydrates.

Dairy and paleo

Most people who follow the Paleo diet do not drink milk. In the Netherlands, milk has a different status than in other countries. Here, we drink milk throughout our entire lives, while in other, especially non-Western countries, milk is only consumed by children.

The caveman only drank milk as a baby; otherwise, it was inconvenient to obtain milk. There is no other animal besides humans that drinks milk when they are older.

What can I eat on the Paleo diet?

No grains, no processed foods, and no milk. That leaves only the foods that occur naturally:

• meat: grass-fed, not grain-fed. Grains cause the same problems in animals as in humans.
• poultry: chicken, duck, turkey: anything with wings.
• fish: preferably not farmed fish, as the mercury and other toxins in them can make you sick.
• eggs: look for eggs enriched with omega-3 fatty acids.
• vegetables: you can eat as much as you want, as long as you don’t fry them.
• oils: olive oil, coconut oil, avocado oil, naturally occurring oils.
• fruit: these contain natural sugars and can contain more calories. Don’t eat too much if you want to lose weight.
• nuts: these are good as snacks, but since they contain quite a few calories, it’s better not to eat whole bags at once.
• tubers: sweet potatoes and yams. These contain quite a few calories and carbohydrates. This makes them very suitable for replenishing your blood sugar immediately after a workout, but don’t eat too much of them.

Criticism of the paleo diet

Beautiful story, but now for the other side of the coin:

It is precisely the argument about dairy that contradicts the usefulness of the paleo diet. The gene that breaks down lactose used to become inactive after the child was no longer an infant and no milk was coming in. However, in the West, people have been eating and drinking dairy products for 7,000 years, resulting in a mutation that makes this gene (in most cases) no longer inactive. There have been more adaptations/mutations over much shorter periods than the 150,000 years referred to by proponents of the paleo diet. For example, blue eyes only emerged between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago. So we adapt faster than the “paleo fantastics” (as they are called by critics) would have us believe.

The idea that humans during the 150,000 years of the Paleolithic and beyond would not have had time to adapt to other foods therefore does not hold up.

Overweight due to excessive calories

The prosperity diseases that Paleo advocates believe are caused by eating the wrong type of food are, according to critics, mainly caused by the amounts and not the types of food.

The health concerns of the industrial world, where calorie-packed foods are readily available, stem not from deviations from a specific diet but from an imbalance between the energy humans consume and the energy humans spend.

W.R. Leonard

“Eating like a caveman impossible”

The idea that humans have hardly changed is mainly because we don’t have built-in routers in our butt or cameras in our eyes yet. We look at humans and essentially see the same being as thousands of years ago. However, humans are a factory composed of different departments with their own tasks and personnel. The fact that the factory looks the same from the outside does not automatically mean that the processes and personnel are unchanged.

Think, for example, of the bacteria in the stomach and intestines that help digest food. Since bacteria reproduce much faster, they can also evolve much faster. Since the beginning of humans, you can roughly determine the number of human generations at 3,000. With bacteria, you can have 3,000 generations in a week! [7] Each new generation offers the chance of mutations.

The chance that we have the same bacteria in the stomach and intestines as during the Paleolithic is therefore very small. Since these play an important role in digestion, even with the diet of that time, it would be impossible to deal with food in the same way. The same food may enter, but has a different effect.

Critics point out that the Paleolithic lasted a very long time during which humans had to deal with large variations in available food. Humans were already flexible eaters early on, as evidenced, among other things, by studies of traditional societies living on completely different diets [2]. More importantly, it is impossible to eat like cavemen! The types of plants and animals that people eat have evolved so much that this food simply no longer exists in its original form.

“You are what you eat”

In his book “Food for thought: Dietary change was a driving force in human evolution,” William Leonard describes how humans evolved in response to food [2]. The change in availability would be the biggest driving force behind the adaptations of the human race, so we really are what we eat and therefore cannot only eat what we are.

“Paleo diet is more than eating”

Many people only focus on the nutrition of paleo. However, people in the Paleolithic did not only eat differently but also had to provide much more energy to obtain food.

If you look at survival programs nowadays, you often see that everything is a trade-off between: “How much energy does it cost me and how much energy does it yield?”. Hunting wild game for three days and then coming back with only one chicken will obviously have a very different effect on your body than sitting at your job all day and buying a roasted chicken from the butcher every day. Not only do we eat more because more is available, we also use much less energy for it. This can negatively affect the energy balance from both sides.

There is therefore a movement of paleo advocates who see it as a lifestyle with everything that comes with it, which seems like a wiser choice than the one-sided approach.

Is the paleo diet dangerous?

The British Diabetic Association has declared the Paleo diet the worst diet that celebrities promote. It would be unbalanced, time-consuming, socially isolating, and “a sure way to create a deficiency in certain nutrients”.[5]

“We don’t know what they ate”

What was eaten during the Paleolithic is mainly based by Cordain on research among six marginal traditional population groups such as the aforementioned Inuit (Eskimo is a derogatory term) [3]. So we look at a tribe in the Amazon and say, “If they eat like that, then we must have eaten the same way back then.” A Yanomamö Indian has very different dietary habits due to his environment (the rainforest) than an Inuit in the Arctic. You don’t need to have studied cultural anthropology to understand that different areas yield different types of food. Nevertheless, these kinds of different groups have been examined to gain insight into how we used to live and what we used to eat.

Moreover, there is the problem that this is often not corrected for, for example, hunting techniques that were developed in later years and are therefore not comparable to how people hunted back then. Finally, this also does not take into account what was eaten outside the camps. Many hunters, for example, eat during the hunt.

In short: We actually guess to a large extent what we ate exactly and in what quantities. Trying to copy this is therefore impossible because you don’t know what the original looked like [6].

Conclusion

The Paleo diet is a nice idea, but based on certain assumptions that are incorrect or insufficiently demonstrable. It is of course good to be critical about what you eat and how your body responds to it. However, it seems too simplistic to suggest that our bodies struggle with all forms of nutrition that have emerged since the Paleolithic.

That processed, refined forms of modern food can contain substances that may be harmful has already been known. By placing the line between “old food” and “new food” a few hundred thousand years in the past, however, a lot of food is excluded to which many have already adapted for thousands of years, such as dairy.

The message that various additives such as colorings and flavorings are probably not beneficial to health is old and probably not as profitable anymore. A caveman diet sounds a bit more catchy and hype-sensitive. This is evidenced by the fact that in 2013, “Paleo” was the most searched keyword on Google of all weight loss methods [8].

If you want to track your Paleo diet like a modern caveman with a food app, use the FITsociety app.

References

1. Cordain, Loren (2010). The Paleo diet Revised. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. p. 10.
2. Leonard, William R. “Food for Thought: Dietary change was a driving force in human evolution”. Scientific American.
3. Eaton, M.D., S. Boyd; Shostak, Marjorie; Konner, M.D., Ph.D., Melvin (1988). The Paleolithic Prescription: A Program of Diet and Exercise and a Design for Living. Harper and Row. p. 79. ISBN 978-0060916350.
4. Leonard, William R. (December 2002). “Food for thought: Dietary change was a driving force in human evolution” (PDF). Scientific American 287 (6): 106–15.PMID 12469653.
5. “Top 5 Worst Celebrity Diets to Avoid in 2015”.British Dietetic Association. 8 December 2014. Retrieved February 2015. An unbalanced, time consuming, socially isolating diet, which this could easily be, is a sure-fire way to develop nutrient deficiencies, which can compromise health and your relationship with food.
6. Peter S. Ungar; Mark Franklyn Teaford (1 January 2002). Human Diet: Its Origin and Evolution. Greenwood Publishing Group. pp. 67–.ISBN 978-0-89789-736-5.
7. sharecare.com/health/immune-lymphatic-system-health/bacteria-evolve-faster
8. “Top diets review for 2014”. NHS. Retrieved2014-11-24. The paleo diet, also known as the caveman diet, was Google’s most searched-for weight loss method in 2013.