John at Hunter-Gatherer has a very short and sweet explanation of getting healthy via paleo:
Here is a simple way to understand how to be healthy. This is the shortest history of humanity you’ll ever read (three words): wild, domesticated, industrial.
Wild: Humans lived as hunter-gatherers in the wild (~1-2 million years, including recent ancestors)
Domesticated: Humans domesticated plants and animals during the Agricultural Revolution, and lived as farmers and herders (~10k years)
Industrial: Humans built the industrial food system and started eating processed foods (~100 years or fewer)
Nearly all conventional health authorities recommend that you move from an Industrial Diet (processed foods, soda, Pop Tarts) to a traditional Farmer’s Diet (whole grains, dairy, organic). It’s a good first step. I’m simply recommending that we go one step further back in time, to a Hunter-Gatherer Diet.
And that’s it! Really, that’s it. It needs to be no more complicated than that. Remove processed foods. Remove farmer foods. DONE.
Check out the full post for more details. Of course, that’s the short and sweet version, but you can certainly make it more complicated.
Just as there are “flavors” of vegetarianism, there are flavors of paleo. Me, I tend to treat “paleo” as the diet described by the above, and “primal” as the described by folks like Mark Sisson or Kurt Harris (which typically includes dairy).
Of course, the jury is definitely out on the importance of going back to eating/living as we did in the wild. It’s not all or nothing as far as eating as our “domesticated” ancestors did.
Eating like Grok certainly will improve your health (since you’re certainly omitting the likely culprits as far as lifestyle-related diseases). But I’m with Paul Jaminet, who asks “why the Paleo and traditional food communities should not reach a mutually pleasing synthesis:”
- The Paleo community should accept low-toxicity starchy plants as a healthy part of the human diet; recognize that Paleo cultures were willing to eat any food that was nourishing and low in toxins; and recognize traditional food preparation methods as genuine Paleolithic technologies for food detoxification that enabled a broadening of the diet.
- The traditional foods community should recognize that Neolithic foods like wheat are among the most toxic foods, and that in practical life it is not always feasible to detoxify highly toxic foods, so that it a “Paleo” style diet will most often be most healthful for most people.
I’m not going full-blown Weston Price just yet, but do like the idea of including a moderate amount of starchy carbs (mostly potatoes, peas, rice) to meals.
It’s entirely possible that these are gateway carbs to more problematic ones, but if nothing else, these may be useful training wheels for folks trying to get off the soda and Pop Tarts!
