The Paleo Diet in a Nutshell

The paleo idea is the most profound paradigm human species have come up with scientifically. It is so because it realizes how restricted we are in understanding life. It follows nature instead of telling it what's right and wrong. It goes all the way back to the paleo era when there was no agriculture and no separation between humans and nature. It was still an unified network where everybody stood in place. Hunter gatherers were arguably the happiest people in human evolution. There was no property, no chronic disease, no wars. There was lots of free time, abundance, movement, communication, curiosity, and exploration. From nutritional side of view there were plants and animals. So that's it. This is what it means to hunt and gather. This is the paleo diet.



Well, let me bring you back to 21st century. Things are not that simple any more, are they? Plants are not the same, animals are not the same. We managed to mess up everything real quick. Add to this the powerful idea of "pleasure" and we have a whole different ball game.
A great deal of good contemporary diets step on the pristine paleo platform, then take "pleasure" in consideration, add all the social, and cultural layers and create mixtures of what might work on the long run. And this is what " diet in a nutshell" series is all about.
The first stop is the paleo diet itself. It calls for vegetables as your main source of carbohydrates. What about fruits you might ask. Well, fruits today are not the same as they were during the paleo period. They are a lot sweeter and contain higher fructose levels. Fruits back then would be very close to most vegetables now. In this respect berries are still very similar to the paleo fruits. For this matter fruits should be eaten in moderation, especially if they are high in sugars. Honey is also a paleo carb which was not easy to find and get, but when the chance presented itself it was eaten excessively. There were no starches except tubers which were eaten rarely. Wild grass and its seeds were really the last resort because of the high content of toxins. So there were no cereals. There were no fruit juices or vegetable juices either. This is the paleo answer on juicing. The only way to cleanse and detoxify was fasting. So the majority of the carbs were vegetables and fruits.
What about fats? There were no extracted or isolated oils. Vegetable fats were taken primarily from nuts which were time consuming to collect and break. Most of the fat though was mixed together with protein which came from animals. Good resources were the animal's inner organs (especially the liver and the brain ), as well as fatty cuts of meat, fish, shellfish and eggs. The closest choice nowadays to the wild game is the grass fed beef. Pork and chicken (and other birds) are accepted but they are not an absolute paleo food. On the other hand wild fish and shellfish is a truthful paleo fat and protein example. There was no milk, cheese, butter or any other dairy product. It was quite a challenge to milk a wild animal.
Eggs are a wonderful and nutritious paleo food but similar to honey it was hard to find, so they were consumed occasionally.
Water was not chlorinated or disinfected, nor was any food. Combining meals wasn't an issue either. Vegetables mix with meat very well although I would assume that when pray was killed our ancestors did not go: " I think this steak needs some steamed asparagus" or "I am missing a sweet potato for crying out loud", they just ate what was present.
So this is it - "Paleo Diet in a Nutshell" - plants and animals.