Although the Paleolithic diet is commonly considered a fad, it is actually an improvement of the common modernized Western diet because it reveals health benefits, such as reduced levels of blood sugar, blood lipids, and blood pressure (Lindeberg 9). These improvements have the potential to reduce the risk of prevailing diseases like cardiovascular disease, diabetes and some types of cancers (Lindeberg 8). The arrival of agricultural farming and domesticated animals marked the end of the Paleolithic era of diet. People no longer relied on hunting and gathering their food from the wild, rather, they began to grow and harvest plants, and raise their own animals (Frassetto et al. 948). In addition to this lack of adjustment, the modern western diet shows evidence that early in the onset of agriculture farmers did not receive adequate nutrition in comparison to ancestral diets (Sudano and Gregorio 186). These factors provide evidence that the Paleolithic diet is actually beneficial in comparison to the modern western diet, because of the lack of adjustment to the quick changes in modern diet, the evidence that shows decreases in prevailing diseases, as well as the fact that the introduction of agriculture showed signs of anemia and irregular growth patterns.
The human body has not been able to adjust to the drastic changes in the modern diet, such as the introduction of agriculture and domesticated animals (Frassetto et al. 947), that have occurred over the past 10 000 years. Frassetto and colleagues noted that “As the 10 000 or so years since the beginning of the agriculture and animal domestication began, that is less than 1% of Homo evolutionary time…” (947). Therefore, in comparison to the length of time that human beings lived ...
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...c diet reveals health benefits that have potential to reduce the prevalence of common western diseases, such as cardiovascular, type II diabetes and some cancers.
Works Cited
Frassetto, Lynda A., et al. "Metabolic and physiologic improvements from consuming a paleolithic, hunter-gatherer type diet." European Journal of Clinical Nutrition 63.8 (2009): 947-955.
Jew, Stephanie, et al. "Evolution of the human diet: linking our ancestral diet to modern functional foods as a means of chronic disease prevention." Journal of medicinal food 12.5 (2009): 925-934.
Lindeberg, S. "Dietary Shifts and Human Health: Cancer and
Cardiovascular Disease in a Sustainable World." Journal of gastrointestinal cancer 43.1 (2012): 8-12.
Sudano, Maurizio, and Franco, Gregorio. "Ancestral diets and modern diseases." Mediterranean Journal of Nutrition and Metabolism 4.3 (2011): 181-189.
As the Western world experiences increasing occurrences of certain diseases, society is focusing not only on finding the source of this phenomena but also on finding a solution to the problem. In his essay “Escape from the Western Diet”, Michael Pollan places the blame on the Western diet, arguing that people need only to change their eating habits in order to prevent many chronic diseases. While the author makes a compelling argument, his usage of logical fallacies, his questionable credibility, and his apparent bias weaken his point; nonetheless, I agree with his overall surmise that the western diet should be improved.
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...
According to Gibbons and her research if the modern man were to start eating as their ancestors had they would see a reduction in certain diseases such as heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and high blood pressure. She also notes that certain aspects of a Paleolithic diet can be to harsh for a modern human such as a red-meat heavy diet like that of the Inuit tribes of Greenland. Another problem Gibbons points out is that the bodies of modern humans would not be able to breakdown some foods because our digestive systems have evolved to a point where we have problems breaking down such
In an agricultural society people started to farm and there were less to no hunting which changed their diets dramatically. When people were hunting and gathering they were getting a healthy and a well-balanced diet. Before agriculture people ate many various wild plants and animals therefore, they had better nutrition. For example, the Kalahari Bushmen’s daily intake was “2,140 calories and 93 grams of protein” (Diamond 2). Also when Diamond is comparing the two societies, he talks about the balance of nutrients and diet, also he states that the “Kalahari Bushmen eat a variety of 75 or so different wild plants” and receive more calories than needed. As the people switched over to agriculture, the amount of food they had become more plentiful and predictable but unhealthy. Nowadays, more people are overweight especially in the western area of the world. This proves that people before agriculture were healthy and had a decent
Calioglu, Arpi. “Eating Healthy.” Total Health 17 (1995): 42. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Roesch Library, Dayton. 18 Oct. 2002 <http://library.udayton.edu>.
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