Thoughts on paleo

The paleo diet is a pretty big thing right now. Though I haven’t been tempted to try it, I’ve been interested in learning about it because it seems like the concept has a decent thesis: Eat what humans are built to process and we’ll be healthy.

But the execution seems to have some flaws to me. I’ll let an expert explain this.

I was listening to NPR’s Fresh Air yesterday after work, and my idol, Terry Gross, introduced the guest, evolutionary biologist Daniel Lieberman. The topic: How modern life contributes to the diseases and ailments we deal with today. I immediately freaked out (in a good way), hoping he’d address diet.

He didn’t discuss plant-based eating and how that can prevent and reverse tons of conditions that are on the rise, but Lieberman is a paleo skeptic. In fact, he says, paleo diet adherents are dead wrong about a lot of assumption about the paleolithic lifestyle – it really depends on where in the world one lived, which is logical.

“The Paleo diet also has a kind of simplistic approach to this question, almost creating a bunch of rules that don’t necessarily make any sense from an evolutionary perspective,” he said.

He goes on: