The Paleo Diet (2 page)

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To Lorrie, Kyle, Kevin, and Kenny for making it all worthwhile

The original version of
The Paleo Diet
first came into print in January 2002. After its initial release, my book gained popularity and sales were good for the next few years, but it did not achieve chart-topping levels and the national exposure for which I had hoped. Fast-forward eight years to 2010:
The Paleo Diet
has become one of America’s best-selling diet and health books.

This kind of sales history is almost unheard of in the publishing industry for successful diet books, which typically act like dwarf stars—they burn brightly at first and then fade away. Not so for
The Paleo Diet
, which started as a gentle glow and over the years has become hotter and hotter until now it is red hot. A diet book that once began as a ripple is now approaching tidal wave proportions.

Why? What is different about
The Paleo Diet
in 2010 compared to 2002? The material in the book has not radically changed, but the world has radically changed since 2002, particularly how we now communicate and inform one another about our lives, our daily experiences, and our reality. And herein is a clue to my book’s sustained and increasing popularity.

When I first started to write
The Paleo Diet
in 2000, the Internet was in its youthful throes (Google had been founded only two years earlier, in 1998), and most people still used telephones (not cell phones) to talk. The U.S. Postal Service remained healthy because Bill Gates’s foundational maxim “a personal computer in every household” had not yet taken firm hold, and snail mail reigned supreme. Then, “spam” simply meant canned meat. In the era of my book’s baptism, texting, blogs, Facebook, YouTube, and most of the other Internet and electronic wizardry we now routinely take for granted still lay in the future. Then, people found out about the world through newspapers, radio, TV, and weekly news magazines. Now, except for the
New York Times
and a few other mainstays, daily newspapers have dried up to a trickle. Who wants to hear about outdated weekly news in paid-for magazines when you can get it for free and instantly from the Internet anytime you want? Like newspapers and magazines, radio and TV are not nearly as convenient or as timely as the Web—you can get Web versions of these media, anyway—so why bother with the real things?

When I wrote
The Paleo Diet
a decade ago, electronic interconnectedness was primitive, slow, and noninclusive. Local U.S. news was unavailable, obscure, or unknown in places like Uzbekistan or Botswana and vice versa. In those days, scientists reported new discoveries in their specialized journals, but this information was rarely picked up by newspapers or the popular press. It took years or decades for many discoveries to have an impact on people’s lives. A decade ago, most people didn’t argue with their physicians’ diagnoses and prescriptions because “the doctor always knew best”—presumably because, then, the doctor was better informed than the patient was.

The Internet, Web sites, blogs, cell phones, and other various types of electronic wizardry have transformed our world within a mere decade or less. The electronic transmission of news and information and practical data to improve our lives, our financial situations, and our health has become humankind’s universal language. Anyone in the world who has access to either a computer or a cell phone can immediately connect with anyone else who has the same technology. We now can and do talk to one another in unprecedented numbers—by the billions. A local event can instantaneously become a worldwide happening. Today what your next-door neighbor knows is available not only to you and your close friends, but literally to the world.

With such vast and nearly total information connectiveness, a subtle but crucial upshot of this brave new electronic world has arisen. When someone comes up with an answer to a complex or even a simple problem that is correct and that works, it gains followers like a snowball rolling downhill. Such has been the case for
The Paleo Diet
. It simply works. In an earlier era, prior to the Web, when human networks were small and noninclusive, information flowed slowly or not at all. Accordingly, correct answers sometimes smoldered for years, decades, or longer before they became widely recognized and accepted. Fortunately,
The Paleo Diet
came of age at the same time that the Internet was being adopted globally.

Had I originally written about a diet—a lifetime way of eating—that didn’t work,
The Paleo Diet
would have simply faded into oblivion in the ensuing eight years since its publication. Yet it didn’t. My book continues to gain more and more supporters as people like you relate their personal health experiences with
The Paleo Diet
to one another via the largest and most comprehensive human network ever created: the Internet. If
The Paleo Diet
had caused you to gain weight, made you feel lethargic, raised your blood cholesterol, promoted ill health, and been impossible to follow, it would have fallen by the wayside like most other dietary schemes dreamed up by human beings. Yet it didn’t. In fact,
The Paleo Diet
movement continues to spread worldwide, thanks in part to the Web.

When people find correct answers to complex diet/health questions, they let their friends know, and thanks to the Internet, the momentum has accelerated. In the United States, the word “Paleo” has become part of mass culture, due in part to its popularity with the national CrossFit movement that is sweeping the country and recent coverage in the
New York Times
, the
Washington Post
, and other global media.
The Paleo Diet
has found wide acceptance not only with CrossFitters and athletes, but also with the medical and health professions, who have embraced it because of its wide-reaching therapeutic effects on metabolic syndrome diseases, autoimmune diseases, mental disorders, and beyond. In fact, there are very few chronic illnesses or diseases that do not respond favorably to our ancestral diet.

The novelty of
The Paleo Diet
is that a mortal human being like me didn’t create it. Rather, I—along with many other scientists, physicians, and anthropologists worldwide—simply uncovered what was already there: the diet to which our species is genetically adapted. This is the diet of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, the foods consumed by every human being on the planet until a mere 333 human generations ago, or about ten thousand years ago. Our ancestors’ diets were uncomplicated by agriculture, animal husbandry, technology, and processed foods. Then, as today, our health is optimized when we eat lean meats, seafood, and fresh fruits and veggies at the expense of grains, dairy, refined sugars, refined oils, and processed foods.

Nutritional science is not static. What we once believed to be true ten years ago is invariably replaced by fresh knowledge based on better experiments, more comprehensive data, and a newer understanding of how our bodies work. When I first wrote
The Paleo Diet
, a great deal of the dietary advice I offered was cutting edge—so much so, that it was looked on with skepticism by scientists and the public at large. Here’s a perfect example. One 2002 online review of
The Paleo Diet
read, “Claims of improving diseases from diabetes to acne to polycystic ovary disease may be a little overstated.” I feel vindicated knowing that the original dietary recommendations I made for type 2 diabetes, acne, and polycystic ovary syndrome have been confirmed by hundreds of scientific experiments.

Especially gratifying are a series of epidemiological experiments from Dr. Walter Willett and colleagues at the Harvard School of Public Health that linked milk consumption and the occurrence of acne. Even more convincing evidence for the diet-acne link comes from Dr. Neil Mann’s research group at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, where acne patients were actually fed high-protein, low-glycemic-load diets and reported significant improvement in their symptoms.

Anytime a diet/health book survives eight years, the hindsight rule (hindsight is 20/20) surely has to come into play. Indeed it did with this book, as reflected by my current updates and edits to the original volume. The elegance of
The Paleo Diet
concept is that the essential idea (the evolutionary basis for optimal human nutrition) is fundamentally sound and will never change; as Boyd Eaton, the godfather of Paleolithic nutrition commented, “The science behind Paleolithic Nutrition is indisputable; however, we will continually hone the concept as newer information accumulates.”

So, what’s new in this edition, and what are the noteworthy changes?

The first revision involves recommended oils. We are now down to only four: olive oil, flaxseed oil, walnut oil, and avocado oil. I no longer can recommend canola oil at all, and the only oil I believe should be used for cooking is olive oil. My friend and noted nutritionist Robert Crayhon always said to “let the data speak for itself,” and I believe his words ring true. The rationale for these new recommendations is solely based on new facts that have emerged. You can find this updated information in this revised edition.

Another shift is that I have softened my stance on the saturated fat issue as more and more data become available, including information from my recent evolutionary paper on the topic.

Finally, as scientists begin to unravel the mystery of autoimmune diseases, it is becoming apparent that multiple nutritional elements of the Paleo Diet may protect us from these one hundred or more illnesses that afflict nearly 10 percent of the U.S. population.

All of this information, along with the tweaks needed to bring
The Paleo Diet
up to date in 2010, is to be found within this edition. I’ve also just published a new book,
The Paleo Diet Cookbook
, which contains more than 150 Paleo recipes. I owe a debt of gratitude to each and every Paleo Diet supporter for making this concept known to the world.

I am the storyteller, but the tale I tell would not have been possible without the dedication and lifework of countless scientists from many diverse fields. I am particularly indebted to my friend and colleague S. Boyd Eaton for enlightening me with his seminal
New England Journal of Medicine
article “Paleolithic Nutrition” and then for generously recognizing me in the midst of a sea of faces. I have had countless hours of discussion (both on and off the electronic ether) regarding diet, disease, and anthropology with many notable scientists, physicians, and interested lay scholars. Without their encouragement, passion, knowledge, and enthusiasm, I suspect that this book would not have been written. Thank you, Boyd Eaton, Jennie Brand Miller, Neil Mann, Andy Sinclair, Mike and Mary Dan Eades, Artemis Simopoulous, Bruce Watkins, Dean Esmay, Ward Nicholson, Don Wiss, Ben Balzer, Clark Spencer Larsen, Mike Richards, John Speth, Norman Salem, Joe Hibbeln, Stephen Cunnane, Kim Hill, Craig Stanford, Robert Crayhon, Robert Gotshall, Joe Friel, Kevin Davy, Lynn Toohey, David Jenkins, David Lugwig, Soren Toubro, George Williams, Luisa Raijman, Michael Crawford, Staffan Lindeberg, Ray Audette, Wolfgang Lutz, Ann Magennis, Art DeVany, Ashton Embry, Bill DiVale, Pat Gray, Char-lie Robbins, Irvin Liener, Nicolai Worm, Tony Sebastian, Robert Heaney, Stewart Truswell, and Pam Keagy. Finally, many thanks to my agents, Carol Mann and Channa Taub, for working indefatigably to get this book off the ground, and to my editor, Tom Miller, for his commitment to and enthusiasm for the Paleo Diet as a book concept.

This book represents the culmination of my lifelong interest in the link between diet and health, and of my fascination with anthropology and human origins. Although these scientific disciplines may at first appear to be unrelated, they are intimately connected. Our origins—the very beginnings of the human species—can be traced to pivotal changes in the diet of our early ancestors that made possible the evolution of our large, metabolically active brains. The Agricultural Revolution and the adoption of cereal grains as staple foods allowed us to abandon forever our previous hunter-gatherer lifestyle and caused the Earth’s population to balloon and develop into the vast industrial-technological society in which we live today.

The problem, as you will see in this book, is that we are genetically adapted to eat what the hunter-gatherers ate. Many of our health problems today are the direct result of what we do—and do not—eat. This book will show you where we went wrong—how the standard American diet and even today’s so-called healthy diets wreak havoc with our Paleolithic (Old Stone Age) constitutions. It will also show you how you can lose weight and regain health and well-being by eating the way our hunter-gatherer ancestors ate—the diet that nature intended.

The reason for this book is very simple: the Paleo Diet is the one and only diet that ideally fits our genetic makeup. Just 333 generations ago—and for 2.5 million years before that—every human being on Earth ate this way. It is the diet to which all of us are ideally suited and the lifetime nutritional plan that will normalize your weight and improve your health. I didn’t design this diet—nature did. This diet has been built into our genes.

More than twenty years ago, I read a book that endorsed vegetarian dieting titled
Are You Confused?
I suspect that this title pretty much sums up how many of us feel about the conflicting breakthroughs and mixed messages we hear every day from scientific and medical authorities on what we should and shouldn’t eat to lose weight and be healthy.