Palaeolithic diet: Should we all eat like cavepeople?

It's still the square meal from the 1970's with some small adjustments. Eat a small plate that looks like that. The meat portion should be 4 ounces or so.

You're referring to KFC's Double Down I assume, but if you look at it's nutrition facts (1) it's not as bad as you think, especially for a Paleo/Atkins based diet. And it's delicious.

1 - http://fast-food-nutrition.findthebest.com/l/1377/KFC-Origin...

Ime it's been most problematic to get "real food" on the go, on travels, airports, etc. I feel like there's a disruption waiting to happen here in many western countries (for example in Thailand it's relatively easy to get fast-food made from fresh ingredients just-in-time).

Aren't these health agencies also associated with governments which frequently give preferential treatment and funding to certain groups within the food industry?

I suspect, with no research other than my own life (anecdote of one), that this is the fundamental benefit of any diet like paleo. Start with "food," avoid things in the ingredient list that are not "food" as much as possible.

For example, when buying peanut butter (arguments for or against legumes aside), prefer the one where the entire ingredient list is "peanuts."

Your ingredient list should be zero (produce and meat) or very short.

There is a burger joint in Santa Cruz, CA (aptly named "Burger.") that has a menu item called "The Snooki" which is a chili burger that uses two grilled cheese sandwiches as the bun. They have some other interesting items but that one just screams "heart attack."

When you cut out processed foods, and grains, you are left only with pretty much only healthy foods, so it's no wonder they feel better. But that isn't the same as saying all grains and processed foods are bad for you.

From personal experience, I would say the average weight gain per year in the US is a few kilograms, let's say 2. This is 18000 calories in excess, which is just about 50 calories a day, or basically one apple too many. The clear lesson to be learned is to cut back on the apples.

There are some studies that agree with my anecdotal evidence: http://www.livestrong.com/article/142567-average-increase-we...

I have friends who've been all over the whole low-carbohydrate and grain-free fad. They're still fat. That's probably partly due to the quantity of what they're eating, plus there's a lot of junk food that doesn't contain carbohydrates.

Myself, I like my carbohydrates, and I eat a fairly large amount. And most of the other triathletes I train with, or endurance guys - they also eat a stackload of carbohydrates, and are pretty darn healthy looking. Also, most professional cyclists/runners are probably also quite carbohydrate heavy.

So I don't get it when people say carbohydrates are evil, and you'll get fat eating them. I don't think we know enough about the science to go one way or the other on something like this.

If it works for you, sure. But I suspect a lot of it's just due to being more attentive to what you're eating, and having good self-control. Eat less and exercise more - that's been the line since the 1970's, so it's hardly anything revolutionary.

Heck, our ancestors probably figured out if you ate less, you'd lose weight...

To me, this is an argument for eating real foods, and a reason to be skeptical of things like soylent. But I don't think you can get from there to saying it doesn't matter what you eat, or that anybody with a rationale behind their food choices is delusional.

- eat what you can kill

- eat what you can gather

- eat only stuff that can be eaten raw (that includes meat and fish)

Didn't they? Is that based on the median age, or the average? Because the average age tends to be skewed by infant mortality.

> , and there's the little thing called evolution, too.

The central argument is that our bodies haven't changed significantly in the time between "cavemen" and present day. So evolution is central to the argument of its usefulness. Whether it is correct that the evolutionary forces is relatively insignificant is, perhaps, up for debate.

All the people complaining about this diet being a fad are just regurgitating the fads from their childhood as facts. Vegetables and fresh fruit needn't form anywhere near a majority of a diet for you to be healthy, there are enough traditional societies for this.

The problem for the modern diet is that we have the appetites of an animal that should burn about ~4000 calories a day yet only expend around ~3000 on average.

Now if you want to be healthy as well as skinny instead of lowering your calorie intake you're much better off increasing your exercise.

I agree with you that the caveman parable is silly but you are also drawing a false conclusion. It probably wasn't a caveman's diet that caused him to die young.

> So, there’s no hard and fast evidence yet that we should be eating like cavepeople. It is of course unhealthy to eat a diet which mainly consists of highly processed foods like white bread and sugary cereals, but this doesn’t mean that all dairy products and grains need to be avoided unless you have a specific problem with them.

Once we made the switch to a non-paleo diet is when we really started to advance beyond hunter/gatherers.

Literally none of that is true, these are just old diet fads that have become folk knowledge.

People have managed to survive for thousands of years in the arctic circle eating nothing but fatty foods, people have survived in the fertile crescent for thousands of years eating nothing but cereals for thousands of years.

The human body can adapt to just about any sort of food.

What people nowhere have adapted to do is sit in a chair for 14 hours a day and not move.