Understanding Paleo: The Good, The Bad And The Ill-Founded

Paleo means 'old.' The Paleo diet refers to the 'Old Stone Age,' or 'Paleolithic' ('lithic' - of stone) era, which is a pretty important time period. It covers about the time from 2.6 million years ago to about 10, 000 years ago. That's longer than humans have been human. It's also 99% of the time human have been human.

And that's the premise behind Paleo.

And most of that history took place not just before cars, smartphones and skinny jeans, but before agriculture, metal tools, cities, villages, houses, horses...

It's a new way to look at the world. Look at the mirror - what's looking back, Paleo advocates say, is a caveman or a cavewoman.

So we should eat like cavepeople. 

Paleo advocates have plenty of evidence on their side. In hunter-gatherer societies like those we spent 99% of our history living in, most people will know about 150 people - extended family, kinship groups and clan contacts. How many people do most people actually know? At the most, about 150. How many of their thousands of Facebook friends do most people have even the most rudimentary personal relationship with? About 150. 

Paleo is famous as a diet, so let's talk about that.

The Paleo diet is restrictive and prescriptive

You're not supposed to eat anything that wouldn't have been available to our hunter-gatherer ancestors - no grains, especially, but also no legumes, no processed foods, nothing that's a product of the agricultural revolution. I've even seen some Paleo people rehashing an old vegan argument by asking if white potatoes were Paleo (vegans sometimes agonize about honey in the same way). 

Obviously, Paleo can be a narrow way to live. But it's claimed by its advocates that it can help reduce chronic illnesses and have amazing, if not miraculous, impact on health. One leading Paleo advocate, Robb Wolf, claims that a Paleo diet puts arthritis into remission. It's especially popular with people who want to lose weight and with people with allergies and autoimmune conditions, especially celiac sufferers and (mostly self-diagnosed) gluten-intolerant people.

There are good arguments in its favour. Paleo advocates point out that human beings have lived on what we could call the 'agricultural diet,' whose caloric staples are fat and carbohydrates from grains, for only about ten thousand years and in some populations far less than this. Prior to this humans ate a diet in which the primary sources of calories were probably carbohydrates from roots, tubers and nuts, and animal fats. This at least appears to be correct.

See Also: Suprising Problem Foods For The Paleo Diet

The remainder overwhelmingly comes from protein: it accounts for between 25% and 50% of hunter-gatherer diets. If modern hunter-gatherers are a good model for how our ancestors ate, that that link in the Paleo chain appears unbroken - though critics point to opportunities and resources modern hunter-gatherers have that ancestral humans didn't have.

Paleo seems at first to make sense.

It's argued against on a couple of major points. Some people say Paleo misinterprets the scientific evidence about how our ancestors lived. Others argue that Paleo goes against current theory on healthy eating and exercise. 

Paleo Is Right For The Wrong Reasons?

Paleo is hostile to grains but it's also hostile to dairy. Paleo people say adults shouldn't use dairy products. They point to a worldwide prevalence of lactose intolerance of about 75% (some populations are almost entirely lactose intolerant, others have very low prevalence: the closer you are to being white European, the less likely you are to be lactose intolerant), and observe that lactose intolerance is the rule in mammals. After weaning most mammals lose the ability to digest the sugar in milk with an enzyme called lactase. People who aren't lactose intolerant have a relatively recent (c. 7, 000 years) mutation called lactase persistence. 

Dr. Ganmaa Davaasambuu, of the Harvard School of Public Health, ran a study on modern cows' milk.

Dr. Davaasambuu says, 'the milk we drink today is quite unlike the milk our ancestors were drinking; the milk we drink today may not be nature's perfect food.'

So what's changed? Modern cows are milked something like 300 days a year, pregnant or not (they're also fed hormones). By contrast, Dr. Davaasambuu pointed out, cows owned by Mongolian nomadic societies are milked for human consumption only about five months a year, and only in the very early stages of pregnancy, when hormone levels in milk are low.

Probably. The fact is that if you're Paleo, you're already missing out on a lot of the most dangerous ingredients in food - the synthetic additions to meat, fish and dairy that no-one would want in their diets, and the overwhelming welter of short-chain carbohydrates that we now know are the cause of the so-called 'obesity epidemic.' 

The Ice-Man Cometh

Let's talk about some of the evidence we have about how our ancestors really lived.

Ötzi the ice-man is the name given to a corpse discovered in the Alps near the Austria-Italy border. He was so well-preserved that local cops opened a missing persons investigation with a view to foul play before closer examination made it obvious that Ötzi was at least a few thousand years old - about 13, 000 as it turns out, the line between the new stone age ('neolithic') and the Bronze Age in Europe, a period sometimes known as a the chalcolithic (' bronze stone') age. ]

Why care about Ötzi? Because he's the oldest 'natural mummy' ever found: when he died, the atmosphere freeze-dried him. He still has his last meal in his stomach. He still has teeth, hair, skin, internal organs, clothes, weapons, and even dried mushrooms that he was probably carrying for their medicinal properties. That's pretty important. Obviously, we can't deduce what the old stone age was like from Ötzi - he's not old enough. But we can look at his body, diet and what we know of his life and compare him with the hunter-gatherer populations that exist today. That way, we can see whether Paleo claims about agriculture are realistic or whether modern problems come from a modern, post-industrial lifestyle specifically, in which case we'd need a different cure.

So when we look at Ötzi, what do we find?

Broadly speaking, Ötzi seems to support the Paleo hypothesis, that eating and living like an ancestral, paleolithic human is healthier than the alternatives. Ötzi had serious dental decay due to his high-carbohydrate, grain-heavy diet which both eroded his teeth mechanically and exposed them to bacterial decay. By contrast, tooth decay is rare amongst even modern hunter-gatherers and there is little doubt that it it is a disease of high-sugar diets. He had other degenerative diseases we don't find in older human skeletons too. 

But Ötzi is just one person, and bad genetics or other lifestyle choices may have played a part in his ill health. Experts attribute his bad teeth to a grain-heavy diet - but he still had all his teeth at 40 when he died.

See Also: Chicken, Fish, Beef, or Pork: Which Meat Is Best for Paleo, Primal, and Low-Carb Diets?

Oh, and Ötzi was lactose intolerant, according to genetic analysis. 

Paleo is sometimes a cult, and sometimes a wish-fulfillment exercise for people who want to imagine themselves as cavemen. But it's also a sensible way to approach life, by asking what human beings are evolved to do. As long as it's taken with a pinch of salt, and not allowed to become a belief system, it's probably beneficial most of the time.