Humans evolved for two million years with a diet that varied very
slowly over the millenia before the introduction of
agriculture about 12,000 years ago. Since then there have been
many other changes in our diet: dairy products, refined sugars,
oils, "grain-fed cattle", et cetera.
On the evolutionary time scale, 12,000 years is almost nothing and
Hostess Twinkies have been with us for even less time. It is almost
certain that the human metabolic system is much better geared to
what paleolithic man ate than to what the average person eats today.
The caveman got far more exercise than the average American. He
didn't run marathons or anything, but he did walk instead of
driving his car. If you don't get any exercise, no diet is going
to help you. The bottom line is that if you don't get exercise,
you're not going to be healthy. But you knew that.
In fact, if you're trying to lose weight, the more exercise you
do, the better. Unfortunately, if you're not in shape, it seems
to take a huge amount of exercise to burn just a few calories. I
burn, during a solid workout, about 600 calories per hour. But I
have a friend who raced in RAAM, the bicycle Race Across AMerica
where the winners ride from the Pacific to the Atlantic from
California to Georgia in about 8 or 9 days by riding for 21 hours
each day. They have a huge problem getting in enough food to
continue, and he once joked that he'd like to write a book that
would surely be a best-seller: "How to lose weight on 10,000
calories per day."
Thus a possible approach to nutrition is to try to make our diets
match, in some sense, what the cavemen ate. Obviously, this can't be
done exactly, but it can be approximated and even improved in some
ways, and that's what these web pages discuss. Here are the main
topics:
What is the theory behind the caveman diet?
Other topics (for possible inclusion later):
Recipes
Links
The diet itself looks quite a bit like the currently popular low
carbohydrate diets like Atkins, Zone, South Beach, et cetera, but
is probably less fanatical than most of them.
The author (who is not a physician and is not necessarily recommending
this diet to anyone else) started experimenting with this diet in
approximately December of 2003 and has been modifying it as he learns
more and more. So far, it seems to work for him.
You will notice that this is not a "save the planet diet" or an
inexpensive diet. The earth didn't support too many cavemen, and
there is no way it could possibly support the current six billion
people if they all tried to eat like this.
On the other hand, there is some interesting archeological data that
shows that if you examine the skeletons of people from before the
agricultural revolution 12,000 years ago or so, the skeletons indicate
that the cavemen then were quite a bit healthier than the people whose
skeletons are found in early agricultural communities. Switching from
a quite varied diet to diets that typically had huge amounts of just
one type of carbohydrate was not a healthy thing to do, but it sure
could keep a lot more people alive, although less healthy, on average.
Return to Tom's home page.
What did the cavemen eat?
What to eat and what to avoid on the caveman diet.
How to modify the diet for high intensity athletic activity.
What is the glycemic index and glycemic load?
What are the health benefits of the caveman diet?