What is Paleo?

The Paleo diet is often also called the caveman diet or Paleolithic diet. Hunter-Gatherers used to eat a simpler diet long before intensive farming introduced cheap easy to grow foods to service a growing population.

We consider our modern diet to be healthy and natural, but it includes modern farmed foods such as;  wheat, grains, dairy, legumes, soya and maize which are not a traditionally natural part of our diet.

As the populations in the developed world have grown, it has become necessary to develop foods with a greater yield so that we don’t all starve, but the trade off for the adequate supply of these foods is that we are not ideally suited to digest them as well as we could do.

A Caveman’s natural Diet

It has only been in the last couple of thousand years that we have stopped being hunter-gatherers, in that time our diet has changed drastically. We are designed to be hunter-gatherers, eating nuts or berries for one meal, followed by maybe a fish the next day, or a rabbit, etc, then the next day some vegetables, or fruit, but the evolution of man and the necessities of feeding a rapidly growing population on earth have altered that..

Your body produces a different enzyme depending on whether it is trying to digest proteins or 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.

For each food that you eat, your stomach will produce a suitable enzyme to digest it, but if you eat combined proteins and carb’s at the same time the two enzymes fight each other and your food isn’t digested very well.

Foods to Avoid

The Hunter-Gatherer diet is focused around avoiding the following foods; wheat, potatoes, grains, legumes, refines salts, dairy, refined sugars and refined oils. We are not designed to be able to digest these foods that are not natural food stuffs to us.

The refined foods are particularly difficult to digest which is why they are often stored in the body as fat. You should avoid anything that has been processed in any way and only eat nature, organic foods.

What did cavemen eat?

The diet your body is designed to be able to divest includes; meat (organic naturally), fish, fruit, fungi, eggs, roots, nuts and vegetables. These foods represent our natural diet across millions of years, it’s only been in the past 10,000 years that we have combined foods together into indigestible meals.

With well thought out recipes it is still possible to eat fantastic tasting food that you will be able to easily digest and absorb the most nutrition from.