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The idea, or ideal, of a purer nutritional lifestyle practiced by more technology-ignorant communities is tempting when you think of all the chemicals and artificial additives poured into our food and all the really good food we overlook.

Metabolic and physiologic improvements from consuming a paleolithic, hunter-gatherer type diet. Frassetto LA, Schloetter M, Mietus-Synder M, Morris RC Jr, Sebastian A. Eur J Clin Nutr. 2009 Feb 11. [Epub ahead of print] PMID: 19209185 doi: 10.1038/ejcn.2009.4

I imagine most readers of this blog would expect a group of subjects to do better on a Paleolithic diet as compared to a standard American diet, but there are few studies actually making the comparison. One was posted yesterday in the Advance-0nline-Publication section of the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition that shows subjects following a Paleolithic diet made major metabolic changes, and made them rapidly

Dr. Michael Eades on the Paleolithic diet\nDr. Michael Eades has posted an absolutely spectacular commentary on the Paleolithic diet concept: \n\nRapid health improvements with a Paleolithic diet

Estimation of the net acid load of the diet of ancestral preagricultural Homo sapiens and their hominid ancestors. Sebastian A, Frassetto LA, Sellmeyer DE, Merriam RL, Morris RC Jr. Am J Clin Nutr. 2002 Dec;76(6):1308-16. PMID: 12450898

The 'carnivore connection'--evolutionary aspects of insulin resistance. Colagiuri S, Brand Miller J. Eur J Clin Nutr. 2002 Mar;56 Suppl 1:S30-5. Review. PMID: 11965520

Beneficial effects of a Paleolithic diet on cardiovascular risk factors in type 2 diabetes: a randomized cross-over pilot study. onsson T, Granfeldt Y, Ahren B, Branell UC, Palsson G, Hansson A, Soderstrom M, Lindeberg S. Cardiovasc Diabetol. 2009 Jul 16;8(1):35. [Epub ahead of print] PMID: 19604407 doi:10.1186/1475-2840-8-35

Evolutionary health promotion. Eaton SB, Strassman BI, Nesse RM, Neel JV, Ewald PW, Williams GC, Weder AB, Eaton SB 3rd, Lindeberg S, Konner MJ, Mysterud I, Cordain L. Prev Med. 2002 Feb;34(2):109-18. Review. PMID: 11817903 doi:10.1006/pmed.2001.0876

The Paleo Diet is a way of eating in the modern age that best mimics the nutrition of our evolutionary and genetic heritage - the ancestral, Paleolithic diet. For millions of years our hunter-gatherer ancestors ate combinations of lean meat, seafood, plants, fruit, and nuts. But today in America, more than 70% of our dietary calories come from foods that our Paleolithic (Stone Age) ancestors rarely if ever ate ... and that modern humans are not genetically adapted to eat. The result is epidemic levels of cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, obesity, osteoporosis, arthritis, acne, gastrointestinal disease, and more. Professor Loren Cordain is widely acknowledged as a leading expert on the diet of our Paleolithic ancestors.

The material presented on this site comes from individuals with years of hard-won experience either practicing alternative diets or observing those who do. As you'll find, no two writers will necessarily agree on all topics. A unifying theme, however, is the intent to squarely acknowledge and discuss the sometimes serious problems that can occur on alternative diets but often go unreported, and to go beyond the simplistic dogmas readily available elsewhere--in fact almost everywhere--to "explain them away." A sense of admirable idealism is often a motivating factor encouraging people to take responsibility for their own health and to explore different diets. However, the development of emotional attachments to philosophies underlying such diets can often end up becoming far more important for some individuals than the results they obtain--or fail to. One result has been widespread refusal in the alternative diet community to face health and behavioral problems that may arise on these diets. A common thread in what you'll read here is that a kind of subjective, "blinded naturalism" has become more or less endemic in the vegetarian, raw-food, and alternative diet movements, which can lead to serious health troubles.

"One of the problems - if it could be called a problem - in writing this blog and moderating the comments is most readers are pretty intelligent. Occasionally I have the angry vegetarian wander in, take me to task for my errant ways, and, after a comeback or two on my part, drift away to never be heard from again. Thanks to the confirmation bias, this blog pretty much selects against the non-meat eater. So, I tend to forget how many people there are out there who are pretty much clueless about basic nutrition, and how many people there are who bobble through life spouting cliches they've heard along the way as great nutritional truths. Based on the comments I get on this blog, it seems to me that most people are pretty nutritionally sophisticated and reasonable."

"Meat eating made us human. The anthropological evidence strongly supports the idea that the addition of increasingly larger amounts of meat in the diet of our predecessors was essential in the evolution of the large human brain. Our large brains came at the metabolic expense of our guts, which shrank as our brains grew. In April 1995 an article appeared in the journal Current Anthropology that was an intellectual tour de force and, in my view, an example of a perfect theoretical paper. "The Expensive-Tissue Hypothesis" (ETH) by Leslie Aiello and Peter Wheeler demonstrated by a brilliant thought experiment that our species didn't evolve to eat meat but evolved because it ate meat. It was our gradual drift toward the much higher quality diet provided by food from animal sources that allowed us to develop the large brains we have. It was hunting and meat eating that reduced our GI tracts and freed up our brains to grow. As I wrote at the start of this post, the evidence indicates that we didn't evolve to eat meat - we evolved because we ate meat."

"Should you eat low carbohydrate and high saturated fat, or high carbohydrate and low fat, that is the question? This question is causing a tremendous back and forth in the medical and nutrition industry. It is unbelievable that the medical profession has not at least thoroughly tested the question. How is it that a magnificent experiment had been going on for 2.5 million years, the hunter gatherer Paleolithic life. This continued up to and until about about 10,000 years ago, with the advent of agriculture. After that time is when the diseases of the metabolic syndrome started to appear. This information is a matter of history. If a layman like me can recognize the validity of an experiment that continued for 2,5 million years, and produced healthy individuals, relative to the diseases of the metabolic syndrome, such as: obesity, diabetes type 2, cardiovascular disease and stroke, and some cancers to name just a few, then how is it, that the consensus opinion of the medical profession and nutritionists think that the hunter gatherer lifestyle of our ancient ancestors is unhealthful or dangerous? The consensus opinion says that low fat (trim all visible fat from the animal protein) and high carbohydrate food is the "healthy eating" choice for us. I personally know that instead of being healthy,it is unhealthy, because by following my doctors advice over the last 50 years many of the above mentioned diseases started to appear on my charts. "

"Grains might have been an important part of human diets much further back in our history than previous research has suggested. Although cupcakes and crumpets were still a long way off during the Middle Stone Age, new evidence suggests that at least some humans of that time period were eating starchy, cereal-based snacks as early as 105,000 years ago. The findings, gleaned from grass seed residue found on ancient African stone tools, are detailed online Thursday in Science. Researchers have assumed that humans were foraging for fruits, nuts and roots long before 100,000 years ago, but cereal grains are quite a new addition to the early prehistoric gastronomic picture. "This broadens the timeline for the use of grass seeds by our species," Julio Mercader, an assistant professor at University of Calgary's Department of Archeology and author of the paper, said in a prepared statement. "

Mozambican Grass Seed Consumption During the Middle Stone Age Julio Mercader Science 18 December 2009: Vol. 326. no. 5960, pp. 1680 - 1683 DOI: 10.1126/science.1173966 The role of starchy plants in early hominin diets and when the culinary processing of starches began have been difficult to track archaeologically. Seed collecting is conventionally perceived to have been an irrelevant activity among the Pleistocene foragers of southern Africa, on the grounds of both technological difficulty in the processing of grains and the belief that roots, fruits, and nuts, not cereals, were the basis for subsistence for the past 100,000 years and further back in time. A large assemblage of starch granules has been retrieved from the surfaces of Middle Stone Age stone tools from Mozambique, showing that early Homo sapiens relied on grass seeds starting at least 105,000 years ago, including those of sorghum grasses.

Meat eating made us human. The anthropological evidence strongly supports the idea that the addition of increasingly larger amounts of meat in the diet of our predecessors was essential in the evolution of the large human brain. Our large brains came at the metabolic expense of our guts, which shrank as our brains grew.