The Ideological Underpinnings Of The Paleo Diet

According to Loren Cordain, the man widely credited with popularizing the Paleo Diet (a name which he has trademarked), the paleo diet is based upon the idea of mimicking, as closely as possible, the diets of our “pre-agricultural, hunter-gatherer ancestors,” specifically as they supposedly existed during the titular Paleolithic period. Cordain, a professor at Colorado State University, claims that adhering to this diet will “help to optimize your health, minimize your risk of chronic disease, and lose weight.” The Ideological underpinnings of the diet are based on the premise that modern food is extremely different form the food that early humans had been evolutionarily adapted to eat. It proposes that this disparity between the foods that
Though they were sweet, and relatively palatable, they bore relatively little in common with the non-paleo gingerbread cookies that they were supposed to be imitating. The taste, though sweet, was more nutty than it was gingery and the coconut was very noticeable. The texture missed the mark by an even wider margin. They turned out quite chunky and chewy rather than the hard crispiness expected from a good gingerbread cookie. While the finished product was not particularly unpleasant, it did not do a particularly good job of imitating the non-paleo original
The idea of trying to mimic the diets of Paleolithic humans is inherently flawed. Almost none of the foods that are radially available in an industrialized society would have been available in the Paleolithic period in any identifiable form. Nearly all of them are the direct products of artificial selection over a long period of domestication or cultivation. There are other problems with the Paleo Diet. Ultimately, these cookies, like much of the food endorsed by the paleo diet, bare little resemblance to the foods consumed by people in the Paleolithic