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Paleolithic Food Pros And Cons

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Paleolithic diets are based on a simple concept, “If a caveman didn’t consume it, neither should you.” Any food that was unavailable to the hunter-gatherer population of humans of old, you simply avoid. To understand what kind of food was available back then, we must first understand the history of agriculture. The “Neolithic Revolution” (which happened around 10,000 BC) brought on the mass domestication of various plants; this paved the way for incredible economic growth, but also the inadvertent drastic increase in the fragility of the human body due to the narrowed diversity of available foods. Instead of eating a variety of meat, as humans have done for thousands and thousands of years, we have been depending on various mass-produced grain-based foods and our bodies have not acclimated well to this change. …show more content…

Faced with an overabundance of easily accessible food, we struggle to limit our consumption. More importantly perhaps, we struggle to eat the nutrients our body needs. Grains are only the beginning of the problem however. It is fair to assume our Neanderthal ancestors would not have had access to refined sugar products (such as high-fructose corn syrup that is ubiquitously available now), salt, artificial flavouring, or even as much dairy products as we consume on a regular basis (Kamb, 2010). According to the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention, approximately 52.4% of adults across the United States are overweight, over 20% of those are considered obese. These numbers are only getting worse and they appear a direct byproduct of our sudden change of diet. Therefore, I believe that Paleo diets are the better decision moving forward for a majority of the population as it is more sustainable, healthier, biologically balanced, and it is a diet that can turn into a permanent

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