I started drafting a blog post about the ‘Paleo diet’ about a year ago in response to Yummly adding PaleOMG to its list of recipe sites and like most things I write, I made a start and never finished. Given that London is getting its own Paleo restaurant and a prominent London food market has a new Paleo themed stall, it feels like the right time to finish up that draft.

The Paleo – or Primal – diet is based on the premise that prior to modern civilisation and food production the human diet was healthier. Comprising of meat, seafood, fruit, vegetables, (and some) nuts and seeds, this was the diet of the earliest Homo Sapiens. The logic follows that because that is the diet our bodies evolved with, it is the best for us. This means skipping dairy, legumes and grainy foodstuffs that require cultivation such as rice, wheat, barley, oats, beans, pulses, peanuts and oilseeds.

There is a wealth of easily found material on Google challenging the nutritional and historical claims of the Paleo diet. My go-to resource is this excellent PDF presentation by Alan Aragon. I’m going to try not to dwell on the glaring inaccuracies promulgated by Paleo enthusiasts, but rather focus on what it is about the Paleo diet that makes it so attractive and so popular right now.

The Paleo diet is a marketers dream; a perfect storm of both seeming to make perfect sense when it’s explained in a sentence or two (it’s the diet our bodies evolved with!), combined with the pervasive notion that natural is tantamount to good for you. The allure of the Paleolithic era to those who live fast-paced, complicated lives is undeniable, when we think about the ‘caveman’ era, we think about a simpler life, living for nothing but eating, sleeping and procreating. Don’t we all sometimes wish things to be that simple? The Paleo diet taps right into this semi-subconscious desire and reeks of privilege.

When it comes to body image, the society we live in demands unrealistic expectations of women. Society teaches women from a young age that it is better to look a certain way. Is it the same for men? No. Don’t agree? There are plenty of other places read about that. As such, the notion of dieting generally seems to be dominated by women, perhaps in an effort to meet the unfair standards imposed on them. Consider conversations you may have had with people about the Atkins diet, juicing, detoxing or general slimming at any point in your lives. For me anyway, it feels like I have these conversations more with women than with men.

With this gender imbalance in mind, the more I’ve read about the paleo diet online and spoken to people who have tried it, the more I think that the paleo diet bucks this trend. Not only does the Paleo diet have the natural plus logical(!) thing going for it, there’s something about the evocation of the Paleolithic era that reinforces the traditional notions of masculinity like no other dieting framework. Before the Paleo diet, it was hard to believe that any marketed (read: fad) diet would be so well aligned with the values of male dominated activities like weightlifting.

It’s interesting — and in some ways refreshing — to see a man-focussed diet fad. I just wish it was one that aligned more closely with evidence-based nutrition. Maybe next time.