The Paleo Diet

I often get asked what the paleo diet is and why I follow it. Now I have a link to share :)

For a few years now, I’ve been eating primarily a ‘paleo’ diet. In a nutshell, eating paleo means eating the way our prehistoric ancestors would have eaten — or at least eating what our prehistoric ancestors would have eaten (hunting and gathering strictly optional).

(It’s short for paleolithic, by the way)

Why eat a paleo diet?

The theory is that our human bodies have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to eat naturally-occurring foods — meat, vegetables, fruit, nuts and seeds — but in the last few thousand years we’ve introduced foods that our bodies aren’t designed to digest: grains (such as wheat), dairy and processed foods that are lacking in nutrients.

The agricultural revolution (about 10,000 years ago) marked the point where most humans started to cultivate crops and started to farm animals. We began to harvest grains from grasses, such as wheat, oats, barley and corn and fundamentally changed our diet.

The great thing about agriculture is that it allowed us to feed ourselves more easily — or at least without hunting day-by-day and moving around to follow seasonal changes in food sources. It allowed us to cater…