The Paleolithic diet, Paleo diet, caveman diet, or Stone Age diet is a modern fad diet consisting of foods thought by its proponents to mirror those eaten by humans during the Paleolithic era. The diet avoids food processing and typically includes vegetables, fruits, nuts, roots and meat and excludes dairy products, grains, sugar, legumes, processed oils, salt, alcohol, and coffee. Historians can trace the ideas behind the diet to "primitive" diets advocated in the 19th century. In the 1970s, Walter L. Voegtlin popularized a meat-centric "Stone Age" diet; in the 21st century, the best-selling books of Loren Cordain popularized the "Paleo diet". As of 2019 the Paleolithic diet industry was worth approximately US$500 million. In the 21st century, the sequencing of the human genome and DNA analysis of the remains of anatomically modern humans have found evidence that humans evolved rapidly in response to changing diet. This evidence undermines a core premise of the Paleolithic diet, that human digestion has remained essentially unchanged over time. Paleoanthropological evidence has indicated that prehistoric humans ate plant-heavy diets that regularly included grains and other starchy vegetables, in contrast to the claims made by proponents of the Paleolithic diet. Advocates promote the Paleolithic diet as a way of improving health. There is some evidence that following it may lead to improvements in body composition and metabolism compared with the typical Western diet or compared with diets recommended by some European nutritional guidelines. However, following the diet can lead to nutritional deficiencies, such as an inadequate calcium intake, and side effects can include weakness, diarrhea, and headaches.
History and terminology Adrienne Rose Johnson writes that the idea that the primitive diet was superior to current dietary habits dates back to the 1890s with such writers as Emmet Densmore and John Harvey Kellogg, the founder of the eponymous breakfast cereal company. Densmore proclaimed that "bread is the staff of death", while Kellogg supported a diet of starchy and grain-based foods in accord with "the ways and likings of our primitive ancestors". Arnold DeVries advocated an early version of the Paleolithic diet in his 1952 book, Primitive Man and His Food. In 1958, Richard Mackarness authored Eat Fat and Grow Slim, which proposed a low-carbohydrate "Stone Age" diet. In his 1975 book The Stone Age Diet, gastroenterologist Walter L. Voegtlin advocated a meat-based diet, with low proportions of vegetables and starchy foods, based on his declaration that humans were "exclusively flesh-eaters" until 10,000 years ago. In 1985 Stanley Boyd Eaton and Melvin Konner published a controversial article in the New England Journal of Medicine proposing that modern humans were biologically very similar to their primitive ancestors and so "genetically programmed" to consume pre-agricultural foods. Eaton and Konner proposed a "discordance hypothesis" by which the mismatch between modern diet and human biology gave rise to lifestyle diseases, such as obesity and diabetes. The diet started to become popular in the 21st century, where it attracted a largely internet-based following using web sites, forums and social media. This diet's ideas were further popularized by Loren Cordain, a health scientist with a Ph.D. in physical education, who trademarked the words "The Paleo Diet" and who wrote a 2002 book of that title. In 2012 the Paleolithic diet was described as being one of the "latest trends" in diets, based on the popularity of diet books about it; in 2013 and 2014 the Paleolithic diet was Google's most searched weight-loss method. The Paleolithic or Paleo diet is also sometimes referred to as the caveman or Stone Age diet.
Foodstuffs
The basis of the diet is a re-imagining of what Paleolithic people ate, and different proponents recommend different diet compositions. Eaton and Konner, for example, wrote a 1988 book The Paleolithic Prescription with Marjorie Shostak, and it described a diet that is 65% plant based. This is not typical of more recently devised paleo diets; Loren Cordain's – probably the most popular – instead emphasizes animal products and avoidance of processed food. Diet advocates concede the modern Paleolithic diet cannot be a faithful recreation of what Paleolithic people ate, and instead aim to "translate" that into a modern context, avoiding such likely historical practices as cannibalism. Foodstuffs that have been described as permissible include:
"vegetables, fruits, nuts, roots, meat, and organ meats"; "vegetables (including root vegetables), fruit (including fruit oils, e.g., olive oil, coconut oil, and palm oil), nuts, fish, meat, and eggs, and it excluded dairy, grain-based foods, legumes, extra sugar, and nutritional products of industry (including refined fats and refined carbohydrates)"; and "avoids processed foods, and emphasizes eating vegetables, fruits, nuts and seeds, eggs, and lean meats". The diet forbids the consumption of all dairy products. This is because milking did not exist until animals were domesticated after the Paleolithic era.
Ancestral diet
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