The Paleo Idea

Going back to Nature and not playing God is the best idea humans have ever come up with about health and nutrition. How communications shaped life, how stress and adaptation created variety, how the universal playfulness unveiled is a real fascination and will continue to be until the last breath.

To summarize our limitations to see the whole picture I’d like to mention what Jack Lalanne said:

“ If man made it, don’t eat it. “

That’s it -  clear and simple; and we have a problem. We like it complicated, it’s more fun.

Before describing the paleo idea I need first to give credit to Charles Darwin and  his work “Origin of the Species“ published in 1859.

Appreciation goes also to Dr. Weston Price - a successful dentist, who looked for answers in  pristine non-Westernized populations all over the world. In his book “Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, A Comparison of Primitive and Modern Diets and Their Effects” , published 1939, he studied a wide range of native populations showing  the common denominator of  healthy cultures. Their sacred foods always included some kind of saturated fat - eggs, caviar, raw milk, butter, liver and it was obvious to him that whenever western processed food civilization came into place, health rapidly deteriorated.

The illuminating spark for the modern paleo diet came from Dr. Boyd Eaton and PhD Melvin Konner. They  published their influential paper “Paleolithic Nutrition - A Consideration of Its Nature and Current Implications “  in 1985 in The New England Journal of Medicine.

As any good idea it was taken lightly at the beginning but since 1987 when professor Loren Cordain got introduced to the idea things gradually changed. He said: “This article made a lasting impression on me; it was the single factor that caused me to focus my research interests on ancestral human diets from that point forward.

One of the surprising points that Dr. Eaton made in a subsequent paper was that cereal grains were rarely or never consumed by pre-agricultural hunter-gatherers.

In the days and months after reading Boyd’s groundbreaking paper, I became engrossed in studying ancestral human diets, and I voraciously read everything I could about the topic”.

I consider professor Cordain to be the man who extended the idea to what it has become today - The Paleo Movement. His book  “The Paleo Diet” and the updated version “ The Paleo Answer “ may as well be viewed as The Paleo Bible. If you are just hearing about the paleo idea, prof. Cordain’s website thepaleodiet.com is a wonderful place to visit. You can also watch a general explanation on youtube - The Paleo Diet Explained.

In review the paleolithic period began 2.6 million years ago with the use of stone tools. It was the hunter-gatherer age, it was the happiest time of human existence. There was no chronic disease and no private property. There was a true interconnection, exploration, constant change and traveling, unconditional sharing and love and a lot of free time to think and play.

The paleo era was a significant chunk of time which shaped human species profoundly and put them at the top of the living chain. Due to its success the population grew in number forming a hard to control society which anchored people in permanently managed villages, with the arrival of farming, animal husbandry and private property. This settlement happened about  ten thousand years ago.

In evolutionary perspective ten thousand years is a blink of an eye and we are still children of nature. Yes, we are 21st century stone agers, thrown in rapidly changing human engineered environment  which mutates faster than a pancreatic cancer and leaves us isolated and lost in the network of life.

The Paleo Movement is our innate ability to cleanse ourselves, it’s our spontaneous remission. It’s a hopeful attempt to go back to our hunter-gatherers happy genes while living in modern society with all the good and the bad.