The Paleo Diet

The conventional wisdom on diet seems to be that reduced consumption of meat can lead to weight loss, heart health, and lowered cholesterol. Most doctors recommend cutting back to about 3-4 servings per week, interespersed with vegetables and starch. A growing group of dieters, however, are defying this wisdom, adhering to something called The Paleo Diet, which mirrors how our ancestors ate during the Paleolithic era - lots of meat, no processed foods, and very little starch. 

John Durant, a Paleo enthusiast, blogger, and soon to be author, believes that his way of life is the solution to modern obesity and diet-related diseases. "For millions of years, we didn't have an obesity problem because we ate foods that our metabolism was adapted to," Says Durant - and his point is well taken. Just recently, NPR posted a piece about how meat was the catalyst for our ancestors' increase in size and brain function. But those ancestors also didn't live long enough to develop issues like heart disease. 

For now, there are no long-term studies on the effects of the Paleo diet, but it has attracted a following among active twenty-somethings, and seems to be gaining steam. Who knows, maybe the solution to our diet-related diseases is a return to the caveman eating habits of our past. 

We Evolved to Eat Meat, But How Much is Too Much? from NPR's The Salt.