What is the Paleo Diet

The Hunter-Gatherer diet is also known as the Paleo or Paleolithic Diet. Modern Agriculture changed our diet because it became necessary to mass grow cheap food in order to feed the growing population.

The foods that we consider to be normal today, including wheat, oats, barley, dairy, legumes, soya and maize are all relatively modern foods, developed more because they can be grown cheaply in bulk than because they are good for us.

As the populations in the developed world have grown, it has become necessary to develop foods with a greater yield so that we don’t all starve, but the trade off for the adequate supply of these foods is that we are not ideally suited to digest them as well as we could do.

Hunter-Gatherer’s, What Did They Eat?

For thousands of years we existed as hunter-gatherers, either killing or finding different foods everyday to eat. Our bodies are designed to extract maximum goodness from a typical hunter-gatherers menu, fish or meat one day, fruit or berries the next, then some nuts or roots or vegetables and so on.

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 will try to generate different enzymes to breakdown each food stuff, but together these enzymes dilute each other and so your food will not be digested as well.

What Foods You Should Avoid

The Hunter-Gatherer diet is focused around avoiding the following foods; 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. You should avoid anything that has been processed in any way and only eat nature, organic foods.

What Did Cavemen Eat?

The diet you should stick to includes;meat (organic naturally), fish, fruit, fungi, eggs, roots, nuts and vegetables. These foods are our ‘natural’ diet and the foods we are designed to consume.

We would usually eat these foods as we found or caught them rather than combining them into complex meals as is the modern practice. With the correct recipes it is still possible to combine these foods together to make delicious, healthy meals that you can easily digest.