What's Wrong With The Primal Diet and Paleo Diet?

They didn't have much choice. Aside from a few berries, seaweed, tubers and whatever other greenery they could gather in their home's short summer, they were left with only animals to hunt.

Unfortunately, over the last 10,000 years farming civilizations have seized most of the land previously inhabited by hunter gatherers in the equatorial and subtropical regions of the world, where our species had its start.

If they were still extant, these would be the people we would do well to study. The Eskimos and other hunter gatherers remaining generally inhabit arctic, subarctic, and desert lands that are not useful for agriculture. The poor quality of their land ensured they were not destroyed, but it also ensured the diet they ate had to be at least supplemented by animal foods, if not predominatly made of it.
Except in far northern regions, scientific consensus has shifted in the last few decades from the assumption that hunting provides the main source of food for hunter gatherers to today's view that hunting was merely supplementary (1).

In fact, there is no indication of the use of animal foods until the relatively recent appearance of anatomically modern humans (2). How long has the species been hunting? Only within the last 100,000 years, according to one estimate (3), and less than 200,000 according to another (4).

Fossil teeth belonging to human ancestors found in eastern Africa suggest a fruit-based diet, and stone tools at a a 1.5 million-year-old site in Kenya were used to process plant materials, not meat (5).

Among the !Kung of the mid 1900s, who lived in the desert and supplemented their plant diet with a fair amount of meat (roughly 30 percent of volume), people lived much longer than the average Eskimo. In one study of the !Kung carried out before the large-scale introduction of western foods, out of 466 !Kung, 46 (17 men and 29 women) were over the age 60, a percentage that compares favorably to that of elderly populations in industrialized societies. The elderly among the !Kung were noted for their continued vigor till close to their death, unlike the Inuit, who are considered near decrepit at 50 (6).


Several extant hunter gather cultures provide better examples of a healthy primal diet diet than the Inuit.

The Yanomamö of the Amazon rain forest have been significantly changed by contact with civilization, but the first anthropologists to visit them there in the 1960s found a group of hunter gatherers who ate an almost entirely vegetarian diet composed mostly of raw and cooked fruit, vegetables, cooked tubers, and a small amount of animal food (8).

Their great health and longevity impressed scientists, who have made numerous studies of them. Their freedom from cardiovascular disease and low blood pressure are especially noted (9).

Another group called the Trobriander, who live on Kitava, one of the Trobriand Islands in Papua New Guinea's archipelago, is of interest. They may be one of the last groups in the world eating pretty much the same diet their ancestors ate thousands of years ago.

The residents of Kitava live on root vegetables (yam, sweet potato, taro), raw fruits (banana, papaya, pineapple, coconut mango, guava, watermelon), many types of leafy green vegetables, and small amounts of fish  (10-12). Less than 0.2% of their caloric intake comes from Western food, such as dairy, sugar, grains, and alchohol (13). Their total fat intake averages 20 percent of calories consumed, which is quite low compared to fat intake among industrialized societies or the 75-percent-fat diet of the Inuit (11).

It's hard to figure out exactly how long the residents live. Their island is infested with malarial mosquitoes that infect many of the populace, and the lack of adequate medical care means they have a very high infant mortality rate.

Still, during one recent study, out of 2,300 inhabitants of the island, 6 percent (138 people) ranged in age from 60 to 95. (14, 15). The 95-year-old woman was in complete possessions of all her mental faculties and reasonably physically active.

Inhabitants told researchers no one had ever died from a heart attack or stroke, or even had exertion-related chest pains. Other than falling out of coconut trees, drowning, rare homicides, and various other accidents, they could not recall any cases of sudden death so common in the Western countries.

None of the elderly residents exhibited dementia or poor memory.

 
The primal diet and paleo diet have several flaws, the most prominent being its low intake of carbohydrates from nutrient-rich fruits and vegetables, high intake of animal foods, and, consequently, high fat intake.

The Primal Diet and Animal Foods

It's possible very low intakes of animal protein will not impair health or cause disease, but there's a fair amount of evidence showing the more meat you eat, the more disease prone you are.

Although primal diet eaters may scoff at studies of modern humans because their diets are otherwise horrible, there are hundreds of studies correlating increased meat intake with increased disease.

Even when animal protein intake is extremely low (the equivalent of three chicken nuggets a day), a person's risk of cancer, heart disease, a host of other diseases, and early death is considerably higher than when a person eats less meat (16).

One study of Seventh Day Adventists who follow vegetarian diets found men living an average of 83.3 years and women 85.7 years. That's 9.5 and 6.1 years longer than the average Californian lives, respectively. Even those Adventists who ate meat just once a week lived shorter lives than those who ate it once a month (17).

Another studied the meat intake of half a million Americans and found the prevalence of cardiovascular diseases and cancer decreased with declining meat consumption while age at death increased (18).



Even though raw fruits and vegetables play a role in the paleo diet, because of the high intake of meat, there isn't much room for them.

This is a huge mistake for anyone interested in longevity and health, as fruits and vegetables keep us young and vibrant.

Learn more about the huge role fruits and vegetables play in our health and longevity here.


Paleo diets contain way too much fat. The oft-idealized Eskimos get an unbelievable 75 percent of their calories from fat, and this has consequences.

Read why high-fat diets are harmful here.

I've yet to meet a Primal diet or Paleo Diet practitioner who managed to stay on their diet 100 percent for more than a year.

Inevitably cravings send them backed to cooked, processed food, and most often, various types of carbohydrates such as bread and pasta.

The reason for the high rate of failure is tied to the fact that we need simple sugars to fuel every cell in the body, from the muscles to the brain, and if we don't take in carbohydrates the body is left in a perpetual state of craving.

Find out how you can get satisfied on your diet by controlling cravings with your mind and diet.  


It just doesn't make sense to think of our ancestors as eating meat-centric diets, nor the pre-contact Inuit as particularly healthy.

It would be a far better idea to base a primal diet off of fruit-and-vegetable-centered hunter gatherers like the Yanomamö or Trobriander, who have much better health than the Eskimos.

Better yet, anyone would do better fueling themselves with a healthy raw food diet made up entirely of raw fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds. Find out how this amazing lifestyle compares to the primal diet here.