Abstract
One recent diet receiving public attention is known as the Paleolithic diet, which essentially prescribes that we need to regain our connection with the eating patterns of the Paleolithic era, roughly between 2.6 million and 10,000 years ago. The logic behind the Paleo diet states that since this period our eating habits have developed so rapidly that our bodies haven’t been able to keep up evolutionarily. In other words, humans are biologically designed to eat a certain way and the disparity between this and the way modern humans eat happens at the expense of our health. Though this sounds logical, it makes several assumptions that aren’t necessarily true. It assumes that human genetics haven’t changed significantly since Paleolithic times, that humans didn’t eat certain foods before the agricultural revolution, and that hunter-gatherer diets can be reduced down to one category. For these among other reasons the Paleo diet has some fundamental flaws.
How to Cite
Belvin, N., (2015) “A Critical Analysis of the Paleolithic Diet”, Capstone, The UNC Asheville Journal of Undergraduate Scholarship 28(1).
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