What was the Cavemen Diet

The Paleo diet is often also called the cavemen diet or Paleolithic diet. Our diet has changed over the centuries due to intensive farming, necessary to feed a rapidly growing population.We consider our modern diet to be healthy and natural, but it includes modern farmed foods including wheat, grains, dairy, legumes, soya and maize which are not a traditionally natural part of our diet.

As our population grew, it became necessary to develop our farming processes in order to be able to feed the ever increasing numbers of people. Corn and grains we a cheap solution to meeting our immediate needs but little thought was put into the long term implications of how this would alter our core diets.

A Caveman’s Natural Diet

For thousands of years we existed as hunter-gatherers, either killing or finding different foods everyday to eat. We are designed to be hunter-gatherers, eating nuts or berries for one meal, followed by maybe a fish the next day, or a rabbit, etc, then the next day some vegetables, or fruit. Your stomach produces different enzymes in order to digest different food types. A different enzyme for proteins and carbohydrates.

It is only in the past 10,000 thousand years or so that we have been mixing our food groups into complex meals, which is no time at all in evolutionary terms, and many of us find that our bodies struggle to properly digest mixed meals. For each food that you eat, your stomach will produce a suitable enzyme to digest it, but if you eat combined proteins and carb’s at the same time the two enzymes fight each other and your food isn’t digested very well.

Foods to Avoid

The Hunter-Gatherer diet is focused around avoiding the following foods; wheat, potatoes, grains, legumes, refines salts, dairy, refined sugars and refined oils. Our bodies are not designed to eat these foods, which are mostly modern, and difficult for us to digest in volume.

The refined foods are really difficult for us to digest and is in part responsible for the obesity epidemic that seems to be sweeping the developed world. You should avoid anything that has been processed in any way and only eat nature, organic foods.

What Did Cavemen Eat?

The diet you should stick to includes;meat (organic naturally), fish, fruit, fungi, eggs, roots, nuts and vegetables. These are our natural diet, and one that we are designed to eat and digest efficiently.

Cavemen would generally eat these foods as they found them rather than make up complex mixed meals mixing proteins and carbohydrates which is the modern norm. With the correct recipes it is still possible to combine these foods together to make delicious, healthy meals that you can easily digest.