Torin Perreyclear
Kimberley Austin
Biology 2B
22 April 2015
Extra Credit Assignment—A Review of the Paleo Diet
` The paleo diet has been a source of much ridicule, praise, and controversy among health enthusiasts and nutritionists. The diet emphasizes foods that a person would eat if they lived in the Paleolithic age: between 10,000 to 2.6 million years ago. Proponents of this diet emphasize high meat and produce intake while avoiding dairy products, grains, legumes, and sugar. Paleo advocates accentuate that this essentially what a caveman would eat, not having access to any sort of livestock or harvested food and eating only what could be hunted or gathered. Their logic is that when humanity existed before agriculture and farm animals humans were lighter in weight, taller in height, and did not suffer from the same diseases modern civilization suffers from today. Evidence of this is claimed to be found in human specimens of those from the Paleolithic period and of those from the subsequent Neolithic Period. The Paleolithic man score a 97.7% on the Pelvet Inlet depth Index—a measurement of overall health of a people based on anatomical data of people from human samples that inhabited the Balkans, Ukraine, North Africa, and Israel—compared the Neolithic man’s score of 75.6% (Nicholson). Despite this, the paleo diet was reported to be the least healthy diet on the U.S. News and World Report’s list of healthy diets and is still a topic of debate today (Wilson). There are some inherent deductions that the Paleo diet proponents make such as considering the human genome to be same for present day humans as it was for our Paleolithic ancestors. This is not as absolute as one may think; for example, with the advent of the domestication of livestock the human digestive system has become familiarized with milk from various animals—all of which contain the disaccharide