Why You Should Choose The Paleo Diet

What is Paleo?

The Hunter-Gatherer diet is also known as the Paleolithic or Paleo Diet. Modern Agriculture changed our diet because it became necessary to mass grow cheap food in order to feed the growing population.Many foods including dairy, wheat, grains, legumes, soya and maize are not natural foods that we are designed to eat. Modern farming methods made them a necessity despite their unsuitability for us to digest.

In order to prevent growing populations from starving, intensive farming developed hardy crops that were cheap and plentiful to feed the masses. Less consideration was given to the suitability of those foods to our delicate digestive systems.

A Natural Caveman Menu

We existed for many thousands of years, gathering foods we found or hunting for meat and fish. Our bodies are designed to eat foods that we have hunted or found, this is because this way you tend to eat one type of food per meal, nuts one day, fruit the next, meat the next and so on. Your stomach produces different enzymes in order to digest different food types. A different enzyme for proteins and carbohydrates.

It is only in the past 10,000 thousand years or so that we have been mixing our food groups into complex meals, which is no time at all in evolutionary terms, and many of us find that our bodies struggle to properly digest mixed meals. The enzymes necessary to digest proteins and carbohydrates don’t work together very well, so when you eat combined foods you create two enzymes that can’t digest everything you have eaten.

What Foods Do You Need To Avoid?

The Paleo diet is focused on avoiding all the modern foods that are not natural to our diet. Many of our modern foods that we assume are healthy are in fact not much good for us at all, these include; wheat, potatoes, grains, legumes, refines salts, dairy, refined sugars and refined oils. Our bodies are not designed to eat these foods, which are mostly modern, and difficult for us to digest in volume.

The refined foods are really difficult for us to digest and is in part responsible for the obesity epidemic that seems to be sweeping the developed world. Any food that has been processed should not be eaten, only natural organic foods should be on your plate.

What Did Cavemen Eat?

The diet of a hunter-gatherer or caveman was a simple organic diet of foods that were naturally available to them, including; meat (organic naturally), fish, fruit, fungi, eggs, roots, nuts and vegetables.

These foods are our ‘natural’ diet and the foods we are designed to consume. We would usually eat these foods as we found or caught them rather than combining them into complex meals as is the modern practice. By combining these foods correctly you can still eat great tasting meals but meals that are easy to digest and gain the maximum nutrition from.