The Paleo Diet

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This essay explores the advantages of following a Paleolithic type diet. That is, to eat the foods our bodies have been ingesting and evolving on over the last 10 million years. Today’s highly refined grain, sugar, and carbohydrate based diet has been introduced into our lives only in the last .4% of the time we have walked upright on this planet. This drastic shift in our nutritional intake is the basis of many new age diseases of modern man.

The Paleo Diet is not a weight loss fad diet; it is a lifestyle of a bad food free diet. It has very few of the heart clogging fats found all over the typical Western diet. It is void of over-processed foods, refined salt, refined sugars, processed oils, grains, and dairy. It is based on the way we, as hunter-gatherers, 2.5 million years ago, ate and evolved. Their diet included more low-fat proteins and healthier fats than we eat today, fewer carbohydrates, much less salt, and not a single kernel of wheat, rice or corn. According to Eaton and Konner (1985), the modern grain wasn’t introduced into our diet until the agriculture revolution 10,000 years ago. Therefore, for 99.6 percent of our time on this planet we did not eat grain based food. Up to that point, every human being on the planet thrived on fresh fruits, vegetables and lean meats. That’s less than 200 generations since we gave up on that healthy lifestyle and switched to agriculture.
Some opponents feel that there is no need to follow the Paleo Diet due to the fact that our bodies have had a chance to evolve over the last 10,000 years to accept and adapt to foods such as grains, dairy and fattier meat cuts.
Feldman and Cavalli-Sforza (1989) find that the medical problems we see today can be attributed to the “m...

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...Sobal, and Bisogni (2003), participants characterized their jobs as including long hours, inflexible schedules, overtime work, and shift work that left them feeling that they did not have the necessary personal resources in the form of time or energy for routine household tasks such as preparing meals that met their own ideals.
To some, it makes much more sense in todays fast paced, over stressed, over worked lifestyle to forgo the time consuming meal prep, for the quicker sit down or drive-thru and order your meal routine. For those people, it is possible that a small amount of education and persuasion may help steer them into a healthier lifestyle.
There are however, those practical steps that can be taken immediately to improve your choices for you and your family. We need to work on getting our diets back to the way they were before the agriculture revolution.

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