Paleo diet: the myth

A good friend recommended me to look up the paleo diet after reading yesterday's post. So, while I was eating my breakfast, I searched it on YouTube, and foud this excellent TEDx talk about why the paleo diet is nonsense.




The paleo diet is basically an idea that we humans should go back to eating more like the pre-agricultural humans. It claims that eating primarily red meat, while avoiding high-sugar agricultural foods and dairy products, is the healthiest and most natural diet for humans.

However, this falls short on multiple points.

First, consider how short average life spans the ancient humans had. Sure, the world was much more dangerous for humans back then, and many probably were killed by predators, the weather, or other factors, but I doubt everyone would have been. The average represents the whole, so unless some died extremely young and the rest lived extremely long, in which case the average hits a vacuum in the middle, we should consider the posibility that their typical lifestyle limited their natural longevity, while some may have died prematurely as a result of predation or other adverse conditions.

The rest is explained in the video, which I warmly recommend you to watch. It basically covers how we humans actually are not adapted to eating mostly meat. Rather, we are deisgned to feed primarily on plants. However, toady, we have many processed, high-sugar and low-fibre plants that are not good for us, and this is probably what sparked the myth that a plant-based diet is bad for us. Surely, if you eat unhealthy plants, you will not be very healthy – that is just common sense! But eating whole foods, including the less juicy bits, is much better for us, as the fibres are essential for the health of our intestines, which in turn is critical for us to take up nutrients effectively.

Don't get me wrong though: there are parts of basically all plants that we should not eat. But eating some of the chewier bits that are edible improves your health. Also, as the video points out, many wild varieties of the vegetables and fruits we know today are not very useful to humans; most of our plants have been modified by selective breeding to produce more of the parts we like and less of what we do not need.

That is all I really wanted to say. Please enjoy the show!