What is the Paleo Diet?
The Paleo diet is often also called the caveman diet or Paleolithic diet. Modern Agriculture changed our diet because it became necessary to mass grow cheap food in order to feed the growing population.
Many bulk grown foods that we eat today including wheat, grains, legumes, dairy, maize and soya are not natural foods that we are designed to eat, they exist because we of the necessity to feed a growing population with a cheap source of food.
As our population grew, it became necessary to develop of farming processes in order to be able to feed the ever increasing numbers of people.
Corn and grains we a cheap solution to meeting our immediate needs but little thought was put into the long term implications of how this would alter our core diets.
The Eating Habits of Hunter-Gatherers
Up until the last few thousand years, we lived by hunting our food or eating nuts, berries, roots and vegetables that we gathered. Our bodies are designed to eat this way, eating protein from an animal we killed on one day, then maybe having fruit and berries the next, then many some vegetables, nuts or fish the next day.
Your stomach produces different enzymes in order to digest different food types. A different enzyme for proteins and carbohydrates.
We have only been eating a modern diet of complex mixed food groups for around 10,000 years and that is why so many people struggle to digest their meals properly, they are eating foods they are not designed to eat in combinations that their stomachs can’t deal with.
Your stomach creates an enzyme for each food you eat, if you combine carb’s and proteins then the enzymes fight each other and you will struggle to properly digest anything very well.
What Foods Do You Need To Avoid?
The Paleo diet is centered on avoiding modern processed foods and foods we aren’t naturally accustomed to digesting, including; wheat, potatoes, grains, legumes, refines salts, dairy, refined sugars and refined oils. We are not capable of eating these foods easily which is why you can struggle to do so.
The refined produces are especially difficult to digest which is why they often end up converting into human fat. Any food that has been processed should not be eaten, only natural organic foods should be on your plate.
What Foods Can I Eat Then?
The diet of a hunter-gatherer or caveman was a simple organic diet of foods that were naturally available to them, including; 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 well thought out recipes it is still possible to eat fantastic tasting food that you will be able to easily digest and absorb the most nutrition from.