The hypothesis behind the paleolitic diet seem to me to be based on at least two basic assumptions which are erroneous at best:

  • The hunter-gatherer diet is healthier than our own
    While it would be near impossible to separate the effects of modern medicine, improved sanitation etc. from those of modern nutrition, I think it would be callous to insist that the latter have no credit in the increased longevity of modern men. However, even without getting into this somewhat sticky argument, a carbon rich diet has served those of us in the northern hemisphere well - it is better designed to stave off cold and provide short term energy supplements for farmers who do not have access to protein in the long winter months (since they don't hunt and don't slaughter many animals before the spring season of lambing/calving). The lack of this resource is compensated for in hunter-gatherer peoples by a larger percentage of body fat, as can be evidenced in the distinctive buttocks of the !Kung San and the Himba.

  • No human evolution has occured in the 10,000 years we've been farming grains
    This is patently untrue. We do not have the metabolic systems of our Homo Sapiens (we are Homo Sapiens Sapiens) ancestors, and as for humanoids of a million years back, such as the Neanderthal and the Homo Erectus before them, the differences are untold.

    It is a well documented fact that Native Americans and Indigenous Australians are more susceptible to obesity than the white colonists whose diets they now share. This is because the European settlers have had several millenia in which to gradually adjust to a more carbon rich and sugar heavy diet which we are not only better equipt to deal with but but also more in need of. It is not a coincidence that the traditional staple food of our culture is bread - through much of our history it was a synonym for food.

While it is always advisable to re-examine one's diet and keep it balanced and healthy, an optimum cannot be reached by arbitrarily settling on some half-imagined utopian natural state. There is a fine balance to be struck between a healthy respect for the past and a somewhat hippy adulation of it, and in my eyes at least this suggested diet plan it tipping the scales a little.