The Paleolithic diet or the caveman diet is one of the newly developed diets that as the name describes consists mainly of foods that the cavemen of the stone age or the Paleolithic era used to eat, as humans started evolving and adapting to climate change and got to learn how to cook using fire it is mainly around the time their brains started getting bigger and more complex and their gastrointestinal system getting smaller and more efficient.
This diet is dependent upon foods that are only natural coming from the earth as fruits, vegetables, nuts, and lean meats but nothing that is processed or man-made can be consumed.
This primitive diet first started in the 1970s and gained popularity in the 21st century through the famous book” the paleo diet: lose weight and get healthy eating the foods you were designed to eat” by the scientist Loren Cordain which sold millions of copies all over the world.
Benefits of the paleo diet
The aim of this diet is to mimic the eating style of people in the stone age who were constantly actively hunting and gathering the food they eat totally from nature and without any processing. this lifestyle is what made those people healthy and with fewer chronic diseases that we suffer from at the moment in the industrial world we live in due to the lack of physical activity and sedentary lifestyle and the types of food we choose to eat from fast food that is full of fat and salt to snacking on highly processed food that is full of harmful chemicals and additives that is way cheaper to mass-produce to sustain the growing population but unfortunately, all those factors have been linked to the emerging rise in cases of obesity, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, hypertension and cancers and through eliminating these factors you decrease the burden of these diseases off yourself and ensure a better quality of life and longevity.
We don’t know exactly what people in the stone age used to eat as it differs from region to region according to the type of land they resided, whether, it is a land full of crops meaning their diet is high on fruits and vegetables, or a place that is inhabited by animals making their diet more protein-rich, whatever food they consumed the most important factor is that it was natural and not processed in any way that sort of gives this diet freedom to design the meals as you prefer with no certain rules or regulations as long as you keep away from the types of food that are packaged and stick to all-natural whole foods.