The Caveman Diet

Sunday, 14 March 2010 00:00

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The Caveman Diet

Berries, roots, nuts and the occasional hapless creature. Would you try it and would it make your life better? asks dietitian columnist Keri Strachan.

Should we revert to the hunter-gatherer diets of our ancient ancestors? Will it curtail the modern epidemics of obesity, hypertension, diabetes and heart disease? Considering how our modern day diet has changed in the last 10,000 years this may seem a good idea. But how practical will this diet be?      

It is regularly suggested that we should be reverting to our hunter-gatherer diets of our ancient ancestors in order to curtail the ongoing epidemics of obesity, hypertension, diabetes and heart disease. If we consider briefly how our modern day diet has changed in the last 10 000 years one may be enthusiastic to take this stance, particularly at this time of year when we make our resolutions for the year ahead.

A hunter-gatherer or Paleolithic diet typically consists of wild animal food sources (such as meat, bone, marrow and organs) and uncultivated plant sources (such as fruit, vegetables, nuts), excluding all grains, dairy and legumes. To put this into perspective our ancestors who ate this way lived from 2 million years ago until 10 000 years ago, when they began cultivating plants and domesticating animals.

The benefits of this “wild” unprocessed diet are of course the greater level of activity required to forage and gather food supplies as well as the leaner meats sources from the wild animals, and the rich sources of polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fats, fibre, vitamins, minerals, antioxidants and other phytochemicals from the high intake of plant food sources. But importantly hunter-gatherers were not free to determine their diet, rather it was predetermined by their environment, for example they would not have eaten meat every day.

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