Key Story Summary
- The Paleo diet is based around the idea to live and eat like our ancient ancestors.
- The concept of one ancient diet pattern fitting our current genetic makeup is wrong.
- Humans have an amazing ability to adapt to new sources of food and can thrive utilizing many different eating patterns.
Maybe this writing comes on the downward trajectory of the Paleo diet trend, but nonetheless, some principles of the diet are based on inaccurate science and have yet to be broadly voiced.
The Paleolithic diet (Paleo) is based on the idea that today’s chronic conditions like diabetes, obesity, and cardiovascular disease are because our diet doesn’t match the way we used to eat or live.
Paleo insists that we should best mimic the lifestyles of our ancestors, both through diet and activity to reduce our modern day ills. Generally, these ancient peoples hunted and gathered their foods. Today, we push manufactured buggies across laminated floors with fluorescent lighting illuminating our path.
I’d say that’s a good start to living the ancient life…kidding.
Paleo advocates for a high consumption of animal meats, the avoidance of dairy and a majority of grains, and the elimination of processed sugars/carbs/anything.
There are a lot of good readings on Paleo for you to better understand its principles and criticisms (check a good one out here) but for now, let me get to my point. The idea of minimizing processed foods and becoming more active in our lives is great and I’m fully in support of some of the behavioral changes that coincide with the adoption of Paleo.
But while the hope of this diet to restore us to older times is alluring, I believe there are a few basic problems with the foundations of Paleo. It assumes:
1. There was one ancestral diet pattern that can be used to improve health.
2. We (and our foods) stopped evolving thousands of years ago.
3. Evolutionary pressures selected for a healthy body in old age.
No One Diet
The idea that all hunters and gathers consumed large amounts of meat, berries, fruits and avoided grains, dairy, etc. is wrong.
All humans are descendants of tribes from the lands of Africa. During this time, humans were hunters and gatherers and had not yet begun the art of farming. From our home of Africa, humans began to venture out into the world, migrating to Europe and Asia, crossing the Bering Strait, settling in the Americas, both North and South, eventually occupying every single continent.
During these journeys, whole food groups may have been frozen or nonexistent and diets may have lacked diversity for years.
For Paleo to suggest a single optimal diet ignores our ancestral trek over thousands of miles and encounters with new, exotic (and lack there of) foods. Humans have an amazing ability to adapt and flourish in almost any environment or diet, which still occurs today, even among the glorified hunter-gatherer, as seen in the image below.
Still Evolving
After our ancestors crossed the Bering Strait, some continued onward while some stayed put. Those who stayed in the regions of Alaska and Canada faced harsh conditions and ate little to no fruits or vegetables.
Instead, they relied on fatty marine animals to keep them alive. But according to current nutritional guidelines, high fat (specifically saturated fat) diets with little to no vegetables are linked with heart disease. With science at our side, the Inuits of the Arctic should have high rates of heart disease but in fact, they do not.
While it was once thought the omega-3 fatty acids found in fish were the key to their longevity, it appears these people acquired a genetic mutation that allows them to consume extraordinary amounts of fat and remain relatively free of our modern disease.
Similarly, humans acquired a mutation in the gene lactase, allowing us to consume milk and reap its nutritional benefits. Most animals, including humans, lose this gene after childhood but during rough times, humans who could consume dairy were healthier and better able to reproduce, spreading the lactase mutation to further generations.
And even if we were to assume our genetic material hasn’t changed since our time on the Savannah, our food no longer resembles that of days past. Over thousands of years, humans have bread vegetables and fruits and animals to be as plump and tasty as possible. For instance, the banana of today looks nothing like a true “banana”.
Surpassing Evolution’s Selections
While Paleo advocates rightly shun excessive carbohydrates, they embrace abundant red meats and eggs (along with beaucoup de veggies) as a means for proper health, because that’s how we supposedly evolved.
But there are too many findings contradictory to this diet which say otherwise. Most scientific panels believe too much red meat isn’t good for long term health and a report of the longest-living populations in the world suggest minimal consumption of animal meat is key for optimal health.
If ancient diets full of meat were so good for us, why has plaque been found in the arteries of ancient mummies?
Plaque may have actually been a commonplace in hunter-gatherer times. From an evolutionary pressure perspective, there would be no reason to select out genes that caused humans to get plaque in their arteries. Most heart attacks don’t kill an individual until they’re in their 60s, long past the reproductive years of life.
Fortunately, evolution was still at work long after childbearing years, favoring families that had grandparents. If a family had an extra pair of hands to help with childcare, both mother and father could forage and hunt, improving the survival of the entire family. Therefore, evolution selected for families and its members that could survive long into their 50s to act as grandparents.
Selection for grandmothers has been well documented in other animals, including elephants, where families with these elders were more successful and longest-lived.
But even if grandparents were selected for, they were likely around 40 or 50 years old when extra child rearing was needed. And since plaque in the arteries wouldn’t have killed the individual until a decade later, there would have been no evolutionary pressures to weed out genes that led to plaque formation and subsequent heart disease.
Now that humans are living into their 80s and 90s, cardiovascular disease is becoming much more common. Paleo likes to suggest that meat isn’t the culprit because “our ancestors ate it,” but our ancient bodies weren’t selected for life beyond the grandparenting age.
The premise of Paleo seeking to reverse the increase in chronic disease due to our modern, sedentary lives, is extremely encouraging and even I used to follow Paleo as much as I could. Ultimately I stopped after realizing that no matter how much I try, I’ll never be able to achieve this theoretical, idealized lifestyle because I don’t live in that past world.
For improved health in today’s world, I’ve designed my own tiered diet plan: the T-Tier. With this tier, you can choose your level of health and follow the simple and concise plan of action. Stay tuned for its release on this site.
If you are an ardent follower of Paleo or looking for a new way to eat, remember that just as the parables in religious texts aren’t meant to be taken literally, neither should the principles of Paleo.
The Healthy Pharmacist 
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