Primal Diet
Primal diets and paleo-inspired cookbooks are gaining in popularity, so let's examine why this mega-retro style of eating is making a comeback a million years later.
Primal means primitive and diet means culinary preferences… and yes, we’re talking about folks who, in their heyday, could make Gollum look like he was a part of The Muppet Show!
So, while we’re using our imagination constructively, it’s not hard to infer that these people lived on all things ‘wild’, long before the dawn of ‘civilization’ and the conceptualization of ‘agriculture’. Their diet (if you can call it that) consisted of meat, offal and seafood that were hunted, and eggs, insects, fruit, nuts, seeds, vegetables, mushrooms, herbs and spices which grew in the wild.
Now, you might say… thanks for the history lesson, mate… so what? Haven’t you heard of the theory of ‘evolution’?
Yes, I have and so did the guy who published his book ‘The Stone Age Diet’ in 1975, while pursuing a delightful career in gastroenterology. His name was Walter L. Voegtlin, and he proposed that humans are carnivorous animals and that the ancestral Paleolithic diet was that of a carnivore — chiefly fats and protein, with only small amounts of carbohydrates.
Interestingly, he also suggested that despite ‘evolution’, our genetic makeup hasn’t changed all that significantly, and in following a diet such as this would facilitate ‘survival’ in this modern day and age, as these people were less prone to disease due to the nutrition that this diet provided.
I get the feeling that at this point you’re not at all charmed by the prospect of having to chase hapless creatures with sharpened instruments while muttering unintelligible monosyllabic sounds while signaling wildly with your hands and of course, the very idea of ingesting the constituents of the proposed diet should create a temporary (if not permanent) state of a ‘sudden loss of appetite’.
Well, you don’t have to… but if you want to experiment with this idea, you can start by avoiding foods that are a part of ‘agricultural produce’ such as grains, legumes, dairy products, salt, refined sugar, and processed oils to name a few.
As for the ‘controversial’ part of this concept, critics have attributed that the reason the Paleolithic man (and woman) did not contract diseases that are common to us depended on factors other than just the nutrition. Another argument is that pursuing a diet such as this is not realistically possible in today’s world due to our dependence on farming-based foods.
But whatever their reason to deny its effectiveness, this diet has been promoted by several respected nutritionists and researchers in the medical profession.
Now, if you’d like to have a go at this, consult your physician first!
Have you tried a primal diet, and if so, did you get good results?
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