The Paleo Diet Research

Charles Darwin told us scientifically who and what we are, and showed us how. Throughout the hundred years of scientific and technological advancements, scientists haven’t doubted Darwin’s idea of evolution. Outside of biology and geology, Darwin made what we know today as agriculture and medicine happen. Like Dr.Allmon said in his Darwin and Evolution lecture, we live in Darwin’s world. We can see Darwin’s effects on literature, social sciences like psychology, sociology, history, linguistics, economics, language, popular culture, secularization, religion, and philosophy today. The idea behind Evolutionary Studies is to integrate different academic areas with the foundation being evolution. Fields of study that seem to have nothing
Paleo supporters validate this because cavemen didn’t face health diseases since they ate a certain way. The Paleo Diet recommends eating lean meats and fish, fruits, vegetables, nuts, and seeds. When on the Paleo Diet you are to avoid dairy, processed foods, grains, sugars, starches, and legumes. Hamilton Stapell said in his lecture Evolution and Human Health 70% of the American diet represents the processed industrial food. Processed foods are a huge problem that is a root cause of many of the health issues faced by Americans. Stapells main argument for promoting the Paleo diet was personal testimonies showing weight loss. However, showing before and after pictures of people losing weight isn’t evidence enough for most people. There are hundreds of factors that go into a person’s physical appearance, so it’s hard to say eating like our ancestors solely gave these results without clinical research. Nonetheless cutting out processed foods and dairy would benefit people and the environment
We are not in the stone ages anymore; we know the implications of meat and dairy industry on the environment. “Animal agriculture is responsible for 80-90% (34-76 trillion gallons annually) of US water consumption” (Anderson). The statistics to produce 1 pound of meat, 1 lb eggs, 1 lb cheese, 1 gallon milk, are 2,500, 477, 900, 1,000 gallons respectively (Anderson). A criticism of plant-based diets is that they are extreme, but what we are doing to animals and our planet is extreme. A severe change needs to be made in order to help reverse the damage we have done to the planet, and it is as simple as changing how we eat. Dr. Jennifer Rooke shuts down a common criticism of plant-based eating, that vitamins such as B12 are not being ingested from plant products. “Cattle no longer feed on grass and chickens do not peck in the dirt on factory farms”, so animals do not naturally absorb B12 (Rooke). Pesticides often kill B12 producing bacteria and insects in the soil, and heavy antibiotics kill B12 producing bacteria in animal’s stomachs (Rooke). Essentially the meat industry now gives a B12 vitamin to animals, so when a human eats the meat they get B12. “90% of B12 supplements produced in the world are fed to farm animals” (Rooke). Instead of murdering animals for food and contributing to greenhouse gas emissions, deforestation, and species extinction, why