Advocates of the Paleo Diet

As one of the newest, hottest diet trends to circulate around the United States, the Paleo Diet is essentially a high-protein, low-carb diet based on the speculated diets of our caveman ancestors. With its emphasis on poultry, lean meats, whole fruits and vegetables, as well as nuts but not grains, legumes, dairy, or anything refined or processed, the theory behind the diet is simple. As quoted by an online review by U.S. News & World Report: “if the cavemen didn’t eat it, you shouldn’t either.” Since our hunter-gatherer fore-bearers never had to eat the highly-processed, antibiotic-and-hormone-heavy food we eat today, they were much healthier, lived more active lives, and never suffered from the “disease of civilization” so many people in the U.S. and around the world deal with today.

So what is really to blame here? According to advocates of the Paleo Diet, humans were physically and developmentally on the right track until the Agricultural Revolution some 10,000 years ago, which spurred widespread grain production and introduced grains and therefore “toxins” into the food chain. Unfortunately however, while the Paleo Diet may seem promising, a recent combing of the scientific literature reveals the Paleo Diet, in its most extreme versions, to be nothing more than a dietary gimmick that relies on heavy restrictions of carbohydrates to achieve weight loss, essentially just mere short-term solution that fails to solve more long-term problems.

As emphasized again and again by author Robb Wolf in his popular book, The Paleo Solution: The Original Human Diet, “Agricultural diets of today make us chronically ill.” The Paleo Diet, by forcing us to eat more like our caveman ancestors, fixes all of our detrimental, highly-processed, ca...

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...y with occasional adjustments every now and then, does seem to produce some marginal benefits for overall health, promoting significant decreases in blood sugar, insulin, and cholesterol levels. The Paleo Diet however, is only just a quick short-term fix and certainly not for everyone. Anyone can lose weight on a diet but maintaining that weight loss is usually much easier said than done. It takes not only enormous will power and dedication but also incredible belief in the diet’s effectiveness to keep dieters going on their exhausting diets and most dieters, no matter the diet, eventually give up on their weight loss regimens. Given that it seems to make little difference in the end whether we restrict things in our pantries or not, maybe, the best diet in the world is just to have, as famously stated by Julia Child, “everything in moderation…including moderation.”