Some Thoughts on a Palaeolithic Diet

I have been asked what I think of a Palaeolithic diet. I will not, at this moment, discuss it in detail, but I want to sum up my view on this controversial diet in a relatively brief way.

Roughly, a modern Palaeolithic diet is what has been assumed to be a Stone Age diet, comprising foods available before the Neolithic revolution - that is what people used to eat before the introduction of agriculture – or perhaps I should say what we believe they used to eat: a hunter-gatherer diet.

The theoretical premise for promoting this diet is that the human genetics would have changed very little, if at all, since the Neolithic revolution and that we are all adapted to the food the human species ate before that. Thus the risk for and frequency of many modern, degenerative diseases would be reduced by a Palaeolithic diet.

I'm completely in agreement with the importance of diet for health, and also with the assumption that human genetics hasn't changed since before the introduction of agriculture. Moreover, I wrote in “Why Dietary Supplements are Needed”, why – in my opinion – both vegetarian and animal foodstuffs are better wild. Thus I agree, the quality of food is better in picked, wild vegetables, roots and fruit than in domestically grown plants – and the meat from hunted wild animals is of a higher quality than meat from domestically raised livestock. Yet I disagree that our genetics would be ideally adapted to a Palaeolithic diet. There is one big error, and I will soon come to that.

Research on human remnants from thousands of years back, and comparison between agricultural and hunter-gatherer populations, show no difference in indications of arthritis or cardiovascular disease, that is atherosclerosis. Neither is there any scientific evidence that adherents to a Palaeolithic diet in our times would show any less tendency for cardiovascular disease, cancer, or diabetes, three of the greatest degenerative diseases.

Usually critics of the Palaeolithic diet also mention the short lives humans obviously had during the later Stone Age. If most people die before they are 30, they won't have time to develop degenerative disease, even if the conditions of their lives are bad. How about using their diet as a model if they died that early?

I agree with that point. Something about their lifestyle was terribly wrong. Human genetics does not predispose us for such an early death. Physiologically, they were not well adapted to the way in which they actually lived. There might be many reasons for that and I'm not going to analyse and compare them. I think, however, there is one big factor that has been overlooked in this context. If we are going back to before the Neolithic revolution, why not take another step back, to the great revolution that preceded the Neolithic, an even more profound deviation from nature? I'm referring to the ability to control and use fire! When we, as a species, started to cook food, that was when we took the definite step away from nature into an artificial lifestyle, and that, I suggest, is the point when human health began a downward slope and most degenerative disease was born. Our genetics has not changed since the Neolithic revolution, but it has been largely unchanged for a much longer time than that. Our organism still has not adapted to cooked food. In my opinion that is proved by the existence of digestive leukocytosis. The immune system considers cooked food (but not raw) as attacking alien substance, which triggers a defence reaction.

Many studies also support the fact that raw food is healing while cooked food is not. Such results, however, are often suppressed for economic reasons.

Might the adherents of a Palaeolithic diet reason correctly while coming to the wrong conclusion? They do realise that human genetics hasn't changed in a long time and that something in the modern diet is wrong; but when they try to adjust their diet after genetic predisposition, are they searching their ideals far enough back in time?

I think not. And we must not forget that cooking is a prerequisite for eating most forms of meat. Mammal meat contains a lot of saturated fatty acids, and today we know that fats are involved in most, perhaps all degenerative disease.

Related articles:

Why Dietary Supplements are Needed

The Essence of Health: Food & Thinking

Copyright © 2013, 2021 Meleonymica/Mictorrani. All Rights Reserved.

All my articles on health & medicine can be found here.

You find all my writings on Read.Cash, sorted by topic, here.

Also, please join my community: The Mechanisms of Health (d52e).