Diet Review: The Paleo Diet

Okay, in my never-ending search for the best diet, I came across one that I had never heard of the other day, the paleo diet.  I am sure everyone else has heard about this one, since it has been around since the 1970s, but somehow I completely missed it.  Apparently, it is making a comeback, so if anyone has tried it, let me know.

Basically, the paleo diet is a diet that takes us back to yesteryear, or, to be more precise, between 10,000 and 2.5 million years ago (the Paleolithic era).  The diet basically has one hearken back to the days when we ate berries and nuts as the staple of our nomadic diet.  That is, our ancestral human diet.  According to Wikipedia (the source for all knowledge), the paleo diet consists mainly of fish, grass-fed pasture raised meats, vegetables, fruit, roots, and nuts.  You can't eat grains, legumes, any dairy products, salt, refined sugar, or processed oils. 

The diet kind of reminds me of Atkins, but with a far cooler premise and name.  I mean, how great would it be to go to a dinner party and say, "Oh, sorry, I can't have any of that cake.  I eat like a caveman."  Ultimately, that is the premise:  if a caveman didn't eat it, you can't eat it.  What I don't know about the diet is whether you can go to the grocery store to buy things, or if you have to forage for it.  For some reason, I just doubt that eating things like this "clam stew" every day is going to help me look like a caveman.



 Apparently, according to Wikipedia, this is a "paelo-style dish."  Personally, I just thought cavemen killed things and then ate them raw, but apparently it was our ancient ancestors that developed bouillabaisse, not the French. 

Looking out my bedroom window, I can see cattle eating grass right now.  So, I assume if I take a spear and "hunt" one down, then I am free to eat it (putting the legal issues of killing another person's cow aside, of course).  It seems to me that one reason why there were no fat cavemen was probably because they had to go days without food while tracking down a mammoth.  I mean, if they could just go to the local butcher and pick up all the meat they wanted, I doubt if their diet would have worked quite as well. 

And, of course, there is the big question looming in the back of my mind:  do I really want to look like a caveman at all?  I mean, a short, very hairy, rather stalky gent is not exactly what people think of when they think "fit."  Not that I am saying this diet will make you shorter or hairier, I am just saying that hawking it as the "caveman" diet is probably not the best marketing move.

Anyway, despite all of the hype about the caveman diet lately (there are currently 58 paperback books on amazon.com dedicated to the topic), US News & World Report, which apparently has an annual "diet guide," ranks the paleo diet as the worst of all the diets it evaluated in 2011 and 2012.  Since there is no way that US News & World Report could be wrong about something like this, I suppose that it may be worth a try.  Have you heard of this diet?  Have you tried it?  Let me know how it went....