Do’s And Don’t Of The Paleo Diet

Paleo Diet Information

The Hunter-Gatherer diet is also known as the Paleolithic or 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.The foods that we consider to be normal today, including wheat, oats, barley, dairy, legumes, soya and maize are all relatively modern foods, developed more because they can be grown cheaply in bulk than because they are good for us.

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.

Hunter-Gatherer’s, What Did They Eat?

It has only been in the last couple of thousand years that we have stopped being hunter-gatherers, in that time our diet has changed drastically. Our bodies are designed to eat foods that we have hunted or found, this is because this way you tend to eat one type of food per meal, nuts one day, fruit the next, meat the next and so on.

Your body produces a different enzyme depending on whether it is trying to digest proteins or carbohydrates. Meals containing mixed food groups have only been eaten for the last 10,000 years or so, which is no time at all on an evolutionary scale and that is why so many people struggle to adequately digest their meals properly. The enzymes necessary to digest proteins and carbohydrates don’t work together very well, so when you eat combined foods you create two enzymes that can’t digest everything you have eaten.

What Do You Need To Avoid

The Caveman diet requires avoidance of modern foods that are not easy to digest including; wheat, potatoes, grains, legumes, refines salts, dairy, refined sugars and refined oils. We are not designed to be able to digest these foods that are not natural food stuffs to us. The refined foods are particularly difficult to digest which is why they are often stored in the body as fat. You should avoid anything that has been processed in any way and only eat nature, organic foods.

So What did Hunter-Gatherers Eat?

To be healthy, energetic and full of vitality, your diet should include; meat (organic naturally), fish, fruit, fungi, eggs, roots, nuts and vegetables. Hunter-gatherers would eat these foods as they found them rather than mixing them together as we do today. With the correct recipes it is still possible to combine these foods together to make delicious, healthy meals that you can easily digest.