For some reason, I am often called upon at work to give pronouncements on whether what someone is eating is a “good” food or a “bad” food. I don’t like doing it but they badger me until I give them an opinion anyway.
Healthy or unhealthy?
Most of the time, the colleague asking the question wants to know whether what they’re about to eat is healthy or unhealthy.
I don’t particularly have a problem with that question because I follow a fairly easy rule of thumb when it comes to what’s healthy or unhealthy. I particularly like the rule because it’s one that doesn’t require a doctorate in advanced double-blind, placebo-controlled study-reading.
My rule of thumb is that if a caveman wouldn’t have eaten it then I probably shouldn’t eat it. This is often referred to as the Palaeolithic diet, or paleo diet.
For a more detailed briefing on the paleo diet, check out Anna’s introduction to the paleolithic diet (part one), which gives a summary of the issues and a list of resources and her follow up introduction to the paleolithic diet (part two), which goes into the archaeology a bit more for those people who yearn for the science behind it all.
What’s so special about cavemen?
The paleo diet is based on a couple of basic observations as follows:
- cavemen ate a fairly limited diet by modern standards as there were very few fast food outlets and they had to catch and gather their own food;
- as a result of eating the same things for a very long time (like 100,000 years), cavemen adapted to that diet;
- having adapted to the diet, cavemen experienced very low levels of disease.
How is this different from any other diet?
As you’ll note from the above points, the facts of the matter are unlikely to change significantly. Basing my diet on a set of facts that can’t change is reassuring because of the sheer amount of research that takes place into nutrition every year.
I would be aggrieved if I found that I had followed a diet in good faith for most of my life only to find in old age that it was completely the opposite of healthy.
After all, one year there might be a dozen or so studies out there that suggest that milk is great for you and then the next year there are even more refuting it. So in one year, you might expect nutritionists to be advising people consume milk and the next you might expect them to advise avoiding it.
I’m just using milk as an example, by the way, as it seems to have a bit of a chequered history for the experts.
So what does a paleo diet look like?
The exact contents of a paleo diet tend to vary slightly according to who you speak to but substantially the diet includes:
- Meat
- Fish
- Eggs
- Vegetables
- Fruit
- Nuts and seeds
I was explaining it to a co-worker the other day and they suggested that the paleo diet is basically Atkins plus vegetables, which I wasn’t totally unhappy with as a concept.
So what’s missing?
Sometimes it’s easier to see what isn’t there. This is not an exhaustive list but it should give you an idea:
- Processed foods (well, obviously)
- Sugar
- Bread and pasta
- Rice
- Unfermented dairy (milk, some cheeses)
But you eat yoghurt, right?
If you read my post about what I’m eating to diet, you’ll see that I use a little bit of yoghurt before my workouts. If you were feeling uncharitable, you might suggest that I don’t follow a paleo diet because of this.
However, Anna tells me that fermented dairy is kind-of paleo because it’s partly digested and therefore easier for the body to cope with. Apparently, we would have occasionally have eaten partly-digested milk in the stomachs of the animals we hunted. Nice thought.
Moving swiftly on.
As complicated as it gets
So that’s about as complicated as I like to get when thinking about healthy or unhealthy foods.
I am sure that over the next couple of decades there will be plenty of studies done that suggest that each item on the good list above is healthy and (probably) an equal number of studies done to suggest that they are unhealthy.
After all those studies, the paleo diet will still be around. After all, it has been around 100,000 years already so what’s another ten or twenty?
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