On the “Crazy” Side…
Although the paleo diet contains tons of healthy foods that you should be eating, skeptics wonder if cutting out whole food groups with a super-strict eating plan is the right way to go about it. A dietician and spokesperson for the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics interviewed by the Huffington Post noted that people who follow the paleo diet may not get enough B vitamins, calcium, magnesium, and phosphorus.
Also quoted in the article was a professor of nutrition at NYU, who commented that because the paleo diet is so strict, it can be incredibly hard to stick to, leading to off-diet binges that cancel out all of the good aspects of the diet. Instead, she said, it may be wiser to take a more moderate approach – taking some points of the paleo diet like favoring whole foods, while leaving in other healthy options that give you a wider range of foods to eat and enjoy.
Skeptics also note that the premise of the diet – that human genetics are essentially stuck in the past and cannot benefit from a modern diet – is made on shaky ground. Anthropologists today simply don’t have a full picture of what our ancestors ate. Beyond that, although humans have not evolved in great strides over the past 15,000 years, scientists contest the idea that humans are incapable of adapting to new and different diets.
The Bottom Line
At this point, it seems like there’s just not enough research to know whether or not the paleo diet is definitively healthy or not. However, while the premise and strict practice of the diet may range into the “crazy” territory, principles of eating whole foods are based in fact. So even if you don’t decide to eat like a caveman, picking and choosing aspects of the paleo diet that fit your lifestyle may be a good way to shift your diet in a healthier direction.
Sources:
- https://www.webmd.com/diet/features/diet-review-the-caveman-paleo-diet
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19209185
- https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/20/paleo-diet-healthy_n_1898529.html
- https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1046/j.1467-3010.2000.00019.x/abstract