What’s Paleo?

The Caveman diet comes from the Paleolithic era, so is often called the Paleo diet. Hunter-Gatherers used to eat a simpler diet long before intensive farming introduced cheap easy to grow foods to service a growing population.

We consider our modern diet to be healthy and natural, but it includes modern farmed foods including wheat, grains, dairy, legumes, soya and maize which are not a traditionally natural part of our diet. As the populations in the developed world have grown, it has become necessary to develop foods with a greater yield so that we don’t all starve, but the trade off for the adequate supply of these foods is that we are not ideally suited to digest them as well as we could do.

A Natural Caveman Menu

Up until the last few thousand years, we lived by hunting our food or eating nuts, berries, roots and vegetables that we gathered. Our bodies are designed to eat this way, eating protein from an animal we killed on one day, then maybe having fruit and berries the next, then many some vegetables, nuts or fish the next day.

Food list ready reckoner

Your body produces a different enzyme depending on whether it is trying to digest proteins or carbohydrates. It is only in the past 10,000 thousand years or so that we have been mixing our food groups into complex meals, which is no time at all in evolutionary terms, and many of us find that our bodies struggle to properly digest mixed meals.

Your stomach creates an enzyme for each food you eat, if you combine carb’s and proteins then the enzymes fight each other and you will struggle to properly digest anything very well.

What Do You Need To Avoid

The Paleo diet is centered on avoiding modern processed foods and foods we aren’t naturally accustomed to digesting, including; wheat, potatoes, grains, legumes, refines salts, dairy, refined sugars and refined oils. Our bodies are not designed to eat these foods, which are mostly modern, and difficult for us to digest in volume.

The refined foods are really difficult for us to digest and is in part responsible for the obesity epidemic that seems to be sweeping the developed world. Any food that has been processed should not be eaten, only natural organic foods should be on your plate.

What Did Cavemen Eat?

The diet of a hunter-gatherer or caveman was a simple organic diet of foods that were naturally available to them, including; meat (organic naturally), fish, fruit, fungi, eggs, roots, nuts and vegetables. These are our natural diet, and one that we are designed to eat and digest efficiently.

Cavemen would generally eat these foods as they found them rather than make up complex mixed meals mixing proteins and carbohydrates which is the modern norm. With the correct recipes it is still possible to combine these foods together to make delicious, healthy meals that you can easily digest.