A Paleolithic Diet Guinea Pig?

An opportunity may have fallen into my lap to be a guinea pig in a Paleolithic Diet study and documentary. I was talking to a friend of a friend on Facebook who is some kind of documentary filmmaker or something like that, and we got to talking about the Paleolithic diet. I think she brought it up.

I told her I try to follow a Paleo diet when I can and have trouble adhering due to all the non-Paleo foods that are everywhere in America and tempt me daily.

That’s when she told me about her study documentary and asked if I would be interested in being a subject, since doing so would require 100% adherence to the dietary guidelines of the study. Win-win. I told her I would love to participate and now I am just awaiting follow-up.

Right now, the possibility to be a subject in this study and documentary is on the table, but that’s all. I don’t have any further details, but I hope it pans out. Naturally, I will keep you updated.

If you need a little background, the Paleolithic Diet is based on human evolution and genetics. Its premise is that 10 million years of hominid evolution can’t be wrong. The genome and biochemistry of Homo sapiens has been modified by natural selection as our ancestors foraged an omnivorous diet in nature, before agriculture. Most humans thrive on this diet, because if they didn’t, they would not survive in nature.

The diet is made of up vegetables, lean wild-caught meat, fruits, nuts, and any other kinds of foods that grow wild in nature and can be foraged. Agricultural foods are a relatively modern development and our genome has not adapted to it yet. Because we are omnivores, we can get some nutrition from agricultural foods, but there are also negative side effects of a modern agricultural based diet. The latter is high in salt and the wrong kinds of fat. We are not optimized for processing grain and high calorie foods, so we process them inefficiently, and store a lot of tha calories as fat. The Paleo diet was a low glycemic one, high in fiber, so calories did not get stored as fat and hunter-gatherers were much leaner.