Paleo Diet!

[Skyblade]

long ass postI don't have a lot of personal experience with the Paleo Diet, or, for that matter, diets in general, beyond the ones my parents and sister have tried or looked at. That said, I do have some fairly strongly held opinions on the Paleo Diet, and I'll share them, and how I reached them, here.

My first encounter with the diet was pretty much a non-event, noticing the Paleo Diet Cookbook in our bookstore, which I saw while walking by. I heard it mentioned a few places, but never paid it any mind.

I first paid attention to the diet when my parents read an article in their Food Network Magazine about a study performed by US News and a panel of nutritionalists/health experts. In which, of the 29 diets rated, the Paleo Diet is tied for last place, scoring abysmally in every category.

I then took a look at the cookbook out of bemused interest, and very quickly came to a similar conclusion. It is easily one of the worst diets I've ever seen. Following its rules will, quite literally, kill you.


See, the Paleo Diet advertises itself as getting you back to "eating what our cavemen ancestors ate". However, the rules it gives you for doing this cut out a very important dietary supplement that the cavemen had access to. One which, in fact, you cannot live without. I'm speaking, of course, of salt.

In every cookbook or diet guide for the Paleo Diet which I have seen, salt is eschewed. It will tell you no processed foods, yes, but it also tells you no foods containing salt at all, and no salt supplements of any sort. If it has salt, you aren't allowed to eat it.

There is no culture, from any time frame, which followed this rule. In fact, there is no land dwelling animal species which followed this rule. While cooking or eating with salt may not be the norm, there's a reason why the term Salt Lick exists. Salt has been a dietary supplement since before mankind existed. You cannot live without it. The average adult needs approximately 500 milligrams a day, or you die (your nervous system probably needs it the most, but several of your organs use it as well, in addition to simple fluid maintenance throughout your body). Interestingly enough, the theoretical dietary salt of Paleolithic man was about 770 milligrams (excluding any supplements); high enough to survive, and higher than the diet's guides, but still far lower than any expert will tell you is a safe salt dosage.

But let's ignore the "absolutely no salt" part of it and just say it's limiting salt: There's still no evidence supporting it. Search for the studies if you want (there was one wide scale one done as recently as May of this year indicating that very low sodium intake can cause increased health problems), or simply doctoral opinions.

There is almost no medical reason, of any sort, to cut salt. A healthy human body, of any age, can process salt even with wide changes in the dietary intake. Remember all those experiments you did in science class with osmosis and semi-permeable membranes? Yeah, guess what, your body is full of plenty of such membranes, and tons of water, a combination which makes processing salt simple (though you do have to watch your water intake).

Its horrible treatment of salt is only one aspect, though. In pretty much any review of the diet by health experts I've seen, it's also been called out for cutting entire food groups, some of which are the only (or only easily affordable) source of other essential nutrients: No dairy? No calcium, vitamin D, magnesium or phosphorus. No grains? No fiber, few antioxidants, and again, some lost vitamins.

While we're at it, let's not forget that the diet itself is completely theoretical. The "caveman" diet it talks of is all supposition, with no proof to it. And the various health benefits it espouses (because all the problems we have now are supposedly based on our new diets) are even more tenuous. How does anyone know whether there were obese cavemen? Or cavemen with heart disease? Saying that these (and other) medical conditions were caused by the civilized diet and not anything else (such as simply living longer, or changes in exercise patterns) is not only completely unproven, but it has no scientific backing whatsoever.

There's also no strictures on the meat you can eat. Meat's good, go ahead and have it. Of course, that particular cut, with the nice marbling that will cook up deliciously is just full of saturated fats, but the diet doesn't care about that.


If you want to cut out processed foods, fine. But cutting out entire food groups, or eliminating the majority of what let us become a civilization in the first place is not the way to do it.

You can actually get the things you think the diet is cutting out from many fruits, leafy greens, and nuts. I'm pretty sure fruits and veggies are actually a better source for antioxidants than grains anyway. Aside from the salt, I'm not sure you're actually missing much of anything.

Unfortunately, I am not the primary source of pretty much any of the information in the article (aside from the salt notice, which was based on my personal studies of the diet's regulations). You might be surprised how easy it is to find information from various health experts, doctors, nutritionalists, etcetera who speak ill of the diet. Those reasons were not my own, and I also left out the way the diet cuts beans and legumes, and that doing so will also cut out several of those same nutrients (and an excellent protein source), thus removing another efficient source for those nutrients.

The basics of the diet, "More of cutting out pastas and breads. I'm trying to just eat veggies and fruit more" as Freya so elegantly put it, are perfectly acceptable. But there are tons of diets which argue along similar lines, and don't include many, if any, of the problems that I've seen raised about the Paleo Diet. Check out the US News study I linked. There are several diets there that follow similar rules, but which rate higher in nearly every category, from healthiness to efficiency at taking off weight.

It is not hard, at all to find problems with the diet. It has critics everywhere, and not a lot of evidence of any sort backing it up.

Oh, and even its premise has been debunked. It argues for a return of the Paleo diet which existed before agriculture arose, approximately 10,000 years ago, hence its cutting of farm based foods. But Humans have been eating grains far longer than that.

The diet is based on a flawed premise and supported with wild supposition. There are safer, healthier, and easier to follow diets that also seem to work better.

If it works for you, in whatever modified version of it you follow, great. Power to you. But if you're looking for a diet to start, I'm going to advise you to go elsewhere.