Giving The Paleo Diet A Go

I’ve decided to give the Paleo diet ago, just for the fun of it.
“Who wants to eat a diet our ancestors ate when the average life expectancy was 25?” – A Comedian I Heard Recently Whose Name I Can’t Remember. (Anyone know, to save me doing the actual research?)
I’m pretty convinced that my CFS is due to emotional trauma, but I can also see that feeding my body food that our ancestors didn’t really evolve with probably isn’t the healthiest thing in the world to do. It seems that CFS makes us more sensitive to everything, so it makes sense to avoid foods that we haven’t had enough time on an evolutionary scale to really adapt to.

My resolve started to waver though when I came across this TED talk titled “Debunking the Palio diet”:

While the first half of the talk does a good job of pointing out that our paleolithic ancestors probably didn’t have access to any of the foods that are included in the modern Paleo diet, I’m not convinced that the diet has actually been debunked here.

As far as grains go, the examples that she gave as evidence that our ancestors did eat grains was from tens of thousands of years ago; very late in the Palaeolithic era, which lasted 2.6 million years. It still makes sense to me that for most of that time, our ancestors didn’t know how to mill grain and it wouldn’t have been a part of their diet.

At the end she makes these points about what we can learn from the actual diet of our paleolithic ancestors to consider for a healthy modern diet:

• Some of them ate lean meat occasionally.
• They ate far less sugar.
• Their diet was diverse.
• They ate mainly fresh foods.
• They ate mainly whole foods.

These are the very principles that the Paleo diet seems to be based on. So much for debunking!

I’ll let you know how it goes.