This essay explores the advantages of following a Paleolithic type diet. That is, to eat the foods our bodies have been ingesting and evolving on over the last 10 million years. Today’s highly refined grain, sugar, and carbohydrate based diet has been introduced into our lives only in the last .4% of the time we have walked upright on this planet. This drastic shift in our nutritional intake is the basis of many new age diseases of modern man.
The Paleo Diet is not a weight loss fad diet; it is a lifestyle of a bad food free diet. It has very few of the heart clogging fats found all over the typical Western diet. It is void of over-processed foods, refined salt, refined sugars, processed oils, grains, and dairy. It is based on the way we, as hunter-gatherers, 2.5 million years ago, ate and evolved. Their diet included more low-fat proteins and healthier fats than we eat today, fewer carbohydrates, much less salt, and not a single kernel of wheat, rice or corn. According to Eaton and Konner (1985), the modern grain wasn’t introduced into our diet until the agriculture revolution 10,000 years ago. Therefore, for 99.6 percent of our time on this planet we did not eat grain based food. Up to that point, every human being on the planet thrived on fresh fruits, vegetables and lean meats. That’s less than 200 generations since we gave up on that healthy lifestyle and switched to agriculture.
Some opponents feel that there is no need to follow the Paleo Diet due to the fact that our bodies have had a chance to evolve over the last 10,000 years to accept and adapt to foods such as grains, dairy and fattier meat cuts.
Feldman and Cavalli-Sforza (1989) find that the medical problems we see today can be attributed to the “m...
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...Sobal, and Bisogni (2003), participants characterized their jobs as including long hours, inflexible schedules, overtime work, and shift work that left them feeling that they did not have the necessary personal resources in the form of time or energy for routine household tasks such as preparing meals that met their own ideals.
To some, it makes much more sense in todays fast paced, over stressed, over worked lifestyle to forgo the time consuming meal prep, for the quicker sit down or drive-thru and order your meal routine. For those people, it is possible that a small amount of education and persuasion may help steer them into a healthier lifestyle.
There are however, those practical steps that can be taken immediately to improve your choices for you and your family. We need to work on getting our diets back to the way they were before the agriculture revolution.
He claims that a better diet requires spending more time and resources on food, just like the people of the past did. Pollan attributes their surpassing health to this practice, but in his article “How Junk Food Can End Obesity”, David Freedman paints a different story. Freedman describes how examinations of ancient non-Western remains revealed “hardened arteries, suggesting that pre-industrial diets…may not have been the epitome of healthy eating” (514). This discovery seriously undermines Pollan’s assumption that we should follow the lead of our ancestors because even though they spent a greater amount of resources on food and ate absolutely no processed foods, they still suffered from some of the same diseases which Pollan claims his eating habits will curb. As an opponent of processed foods, or “foodlike products” (Pollan 426), Pollan advocates eating whole foods. As many people have a similar opinion, he is not alone in this, but he is misinformed. Freedman reveals that after examining the nutrition labels on various unprocessed, whole foods, he found that many contained more fat, sugar, and sodium than processed foods (512). If unprocessed foods underwent the same scrutiny as processed foods, perhaps this common misconception could be prevented. The basic premise of Pollan’s essay is that a better diet will lead to better health. While we could all benefit from a better diet, “findings linking food type and health are considered highly unreliable (Freedman 518). Freedman discusses the multitude of nondietary factors such as air quality and exercise that render such studies untrustworthy. Pollan might be a well-respected author of nutrition books, but this does not mean that his theories are free of
In the book, “Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals” by Michael Pollan, Pollan writes about the mad-made problems associated with our food chain that compromise the quality of the food we eat. The journey was from the industrial farms of Iowa and feedlots in Kansas to organic farms and slaughter houses in Virginia to finally, the supermarkets in which we all shop at. Pollan not only traced the ecological path of food from cultivation to consumption but also the evolutionary path of our diet over the years. His points show how we as humans have so many dietary options but so little information about what we should eat and where our food comes from.
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...
Presently only one all the more thing before we begin on some yummy Paleo diet meals, there are the individuals who say that the Paleo menu is very constrained. As you will see just on the list below, this could not be further from the truth. Enjoy!
Klonoff, D. C. (2009, November). The Beneficial Effects of a Paleolithic Diet on Type 2 Diabetes
All of these reasons might help explain the popularity of the Paleo Diet, they do not explain why it became popular when it did. One factor that might explain the timing of this fad is the rise of social media. Though Cordain’s book was released in 2002, the diet really took off in the late 2000s, by which time social media sites had become extremely popular. As previously discussed, Food preference has an important role as a signifier (Sahlins 1976, 169-172). This is especially true of the Paleo Diet, given that the chief benefits it offers over other diets is what it communicates about the participant to other members of society. Social media made it much easier for people to communicate these signals to a large group of people, as the person
The article ‘The Evolution of Diet’ by author Ann Gibbons published in National Geographic looks at the impact of changes in the diets of indigenous people. Gibbons looks at the differences in the diets of six indigenous people groups and the impact of globalization has had upon them. Gibbons also looks at the health issues that are attributed to the new diets of these people along with the possible benefits that can be gained by following a form of the Paleolithic diet.
The documentary, Forks Over Knives, examines the controversial idea that our society’s typical dietary habits are to blame for many of today's most serious health issues. From the video, we learn that diseases which can be caused, or exacerbated by, poor dietary habits include heart disease, diabetes, stroke, and hypertension. The documentary explains that the food we eat on a regular basis does not contain the proper nutrition that our bodies truly need to function at their most optimal and healthful level. Caldwell Esselstyn and Colin Campbell both support the idea that eating a strictly plant-based diet is the most supportive and ideal way to obtain the nutrients necessary to living a life free of disease. In particular, Caldwell Esselstyn asserts that those who are already plagued with disease can reverse the damage and symptoms simply by eating a plant-based diet.
There is no surprise that food is important in all aspects of our lives—it is shared amongst families, celebrated as a major part of our culture, and crucial to our daily routine that keeps us fit, healthy, and active. Today’s western culture glorifies a skewed perspective on how food is supposed to fit into our lives. Somehow this perception has led us to believe we no longer have the time or money it takes to prepare a wholesome, healthy meal that is shared at the dinner table with family. Instead, we are trained to want a meal that is fast, cheap, and easy. This meal is usually highly processed and filled with sugars and fats. This has led us to a problem of epidemic proportions characterized by the rapid increase in obesity and diabetes.
The Paleolithic Diet, also referred to as the Paleo Diet, is consuming foods similar to what hunter-gatherers had during the Stone Age. The purpose of this research is to see whether this particular diet is the best lifestyle to follow and if it is the most beneficial diet for humans. Today, more people are focused on losing weight and finding a way to keep weight off for long periods of time. By reverting back to what our ancestors did during the ancient times by surviving off of natural foods from the earth, will we see the most beneficial changes? This paper looks at multiple research conducted on people who changed their lifestyle to match that of the hunter-gatherers, and what changes were made in their body by doing this. Overall,
Nutrition is a very controversial and confusing topic. One day coffee is bad for you, but the next day it is good. Alcohol is detrimental for our health one day, but the next day red wine is the elixir of life. There are dozens of diet plans and they promise a leaner and healthier body. There is the 3-Hour Diet that involves constantly eating small portions of anything we want to eat. The latest diet craze, the Paleo Diet, is based upon eating foods that our “hunter-gatherer ancestors” would have thrived on during the Paleolithic era. And there is the Blood Type Diet, the South Beach Diet, the Macrobiotic Diet, the Mediterranean Diet, and the list goes on. But who and what should we believe? Well, there is an optimal diet for humans and the answer might surprise many.
In this paper, I will be comparing and contrasting The Paleo and The Bulletproof diet to the omnivore’s diet. The sources I am using are Dr. Perlmutter’s Bulletproof diet (Since this is the one that is currently most popular) a modified version of The Paleo diet, …s thing on Ted Talks and Michael Pollan’s book “The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals” which explores the omnivore’s way of eating.
... and taking into account people’s lifestyles today, it seems that achieving the same kind of health is quite difficult, if not absolutely impossible. With all the fast food chains lurking right outside our doorsteps, with all of the restaurants tempting us to take a bite, it is really quite difficult to achieve and eventually maintain a much improved lifestyle.
Thanks to many researchers, such as Loran Cordain, mankind has successfully developed the Paleo diet, a dietary plan modeled after the paleolithic age that consists of lean natural meats, vegetables, fruits and nuts. Unlike,the diets previously mentioned the Paleo diet has all the essential nutrients such as protein, Vitamin D and B-12, that make humans develop lean muscle, have more energy, lose weight, and be able to live a healthy lifestyle. For these reasons, the Paleo way should be the diet of choice in order to make America healthy again.
The first time I heard of the Paleo Diet was while having coffee with my Mom and one of her friends. She mentioned being on a diet that I had never heard of before. When I asked about it, she told me about the Paleo Diet and all of issues that it could help with. From that point on the Paleo Diet peaked my interest. I wanted to know what issues the diet could help with and what going on the diet meant. I considered going on the Paleo Diet multiple times, but I could never find a good enough incentive. This project was the perfect opportunity to try it out.