Paleo Diet

[Lucyw84]

Hi I have been looking into doing the paleo diet. Alot of my friends follow it that I do Cross Fit with and have recommended it to me as it can help stabilise your blood sugar levels. Has any body tried this? Thanks

 

[dawnmc]

Paleo is just low carb, well its actually eating proper food, without the junk or starchy stuff.

 

[douglas99]

Paleo is just low carb, well its actually eating proper food, without the junk or starchy stuff.

It's not low carb, it's high protein, so you may need to be careful.
Fruit, tubers, allowed on paleo, but can be heavy on sugar and carbs.
No dairy, but I've seen advocates suggesting almond butter, ghee, coconut oil, olive oil as alternatives. I doubt cavemen had the refineries to produce them, so a bit of a stretch.
So paleo, but only the hunter diet, with access to a few shops, and not the general left by the campfire scavengers of the rest of the tribe.
I looked at it briefly, but decided a balanced healthy diet, with lower fat was right for me.
But if you do adjust it, and watch the balance it could be a good one.

 

[Yorksman]

Get hold of a copy of this book:

A Culinary Journey Through Time: A Cookery Book with Recipes from the Stone Age to the Middle Ages

Sabine Karg of Copenhagen University has an impressive list of publications:

http://saxoinstitute.ku.dk/staff/?id=23 ... edarbejder

Paleolithic an mesolithic hunter gathers would eat more or less whatever they could get their hands on and no one invented arable farming because they thought it a good idea to cultivate grass seeds to eat which they weren't already eating. It's the same with flax. No one decided to cultivate linum without prior knowledge of its usefulness as a plant for both food and cloth. It's the degree of processing that is different today. Preserved stools in places like caves show shells and husks of many grass seeds and pulses and we know they ate lots of nuts because we find charred hazelnuts in mesolithic hearths on places like Marsden Moor, ironically an upland moor where they had summer hunting camps. Typically 100 g of hazelnuts has 17g of carbohydrate but 10g of that is dietary fibre.

 

[Yorksman]

I looked at it briefly, but decided a balanced healthy diet, with lower fat was right for me.
But if you do adjust it, and watch the balance it could be a good one.

Hunter gatherers ate a balanced diet but did so because they had different seasonal hunting and gathering grounds. Too many think that they hunted and stayed in one location. They didn't. They also gathered and they moved around the landscape. All had a lacustrine, riverine or esturine 'base'. So on the east coast of the northern UK they would gather edible plants, sea gull eggs and shellfish and hunt for small boneyfish that swam in shoals which were easy to net from the shore. But, they needed furs for clothing and bone and antler for tools and hunting weapons. They also needed flint for cutting edges and arrow points and also needed the right sort of wood for bows and spears etc. They didn't have these locally so they had to set off for them. Flint was to be had in the chalklands of the Wolds. This flint was then taken to the summer hunting grounds in Marsden where the flint was napped whilst they sat by their fires waiting for the herds to arrive. The herds would provide them with meat, furs, bone and antlers but, it's been a few months since they left their coastal base but they survived by knowing where to get river fish and what foods they could gather and dig out of the ground on their journey. They would then return with the produce of their hunt.

They didn't drink milk before the neolithic. The lactase persisent gene (13910 C/T) in europe is dated to the middle neolithic and is an example of co-evolution of humans and [cattle] farming.