Paleo Diet Explained

März 22, 2017

Paleo Diet Explained | Coach

This article was first published in Men’s Fitness on 20th October 2014.

You've probably heard of the Paleo Diet but may not be sure of exactly what it is, the thinking behind it and how it could potentially benefit you. Read this comprehensive guide to find out.

However hard you work in the gym, it takes up about five hours of your week at most. Chances are, the rest of the time you’re behaving just like most other modern men: slumped at your desk, stuffing yourself with processed food, surfing the internet for hours and then going to sleep in a room full of bleeping, humming electronic devices.It’s normal behaviour in today’s hi-tech society, but a growing group of scientists, dieticians and fitness professionals think you should be going a bit more old-school. Well, a lot more old-school. Primeval, to be precise – like our hunter-gather ancestors in the Paleolithic era, which ended about 10,000 years ago. So how do you get to be as healthy as a caveman – and what are the benefits?

Train like a caveman

Professor Art de Vany is a respected figure in the field of economics. He’s 94kg with around eight per cent body fat and regularly competes in off-road motorbike events. And he’s 71 years old. De Vany puts his continued good health down to Evolutionary Fitness, a programme of his own devising that’s designed to mimic the way our cave-dwelling ancestors would have stayed in shape.

It’s simple, says de Vany, ‘Train, eat and play, but do it in an intermittent and unpatterned way. Intermittent, intense and playful exercise mimics the activity patterns that were essential to the emergence and evolution of the human species.’ De Vany’s workouts aren’t very structured. ‘I most often do 15 reps with a lighter weight, up the weight and do another eight reps and then up the weight again and do four reps. But I don’t count the reps – I feel the acid burn. And I never go to failure.’

De Vany doesn’t care for long runs, claiming that our ancestors would have been involved in brief scuffles rather than long, slow periods of exercise. ‘My cardio is sprinting in a field, altering the pace intermittently. I never put in the miles or time on a treadmill. It’s boring and worthless.’

Not everyone agrees with this last part. De Vany’s critics point to the practice of persistence hunting, where tribesmen chase animals over long distances until the beasts drop from exhaustion. Some anthropologists believe it was developed by early humans with no access to spears or slings, and it’s still practised to an extent by tribes such as the Kalahari Bushmen of southern Africa.

Is there a happy medium between the two philosophies? Possibly. You’ve almost certainly heard of parkour – the ledge-hopping, wall-clambering urban martial art beloved by French teenagers and minor Bond villains – but you may not have heard of its precursor, La Méthode Naturelle, invented by French naval officer Georges Hébert in the early 20th century.

Hébert used his time at sea to develop an exercise system based on the routine of various tribes he’d encountered on his travels, emphasising running, jumping, climbing, swimming and self-defence. He wasn’t a fan of competition, but believed in the philosophy of ‘being strong to be useful’. La Méthode Naturelle evolved into MovNat, an exercise regime that encourages participants to deadlift logs, run barefoot, climb rocks, swim and practise martial arts.

‘Before the rise of highly specialised sports, we were movement generalists,’ explains MovNat founder Erwan Le Corre. ‘Why run? Why jump? Why climb? Why lift? Why walk? Because we believe that even a highly civilised world holds a multitude of situations where our evolutionary capacities remain indispensable. It focuses on unleashing the wild movement potential in us and on reviving skills that have been proving to be the most efficient and vital ones for millions of years.’ The message: work out like your life might someday depend on it.

Eat like a caveman

So you’re working out Paleolithic style, but how are you fuelling yourself? ‘Seventy per cent of our calories come from foods a hunter-gatherer would never have consumed,’ says Loren Cordain, author of bestselling book The Paleo Diet (£9.99, Wiley), which works on the philosophy that humans have started eating unnatural things that are cheap and easy to produce.

Cordain suggests that you should be eating meat, eggs, fish, veg and nuts, while avoiding grains, potatoes, beans and sugar – all things he classifies as ‘neolithic food’. Some people take this to mean that you should abandon carbs almost entirely, but that’s an oversimplification. ‘One thing people have to distinguish between is neo-carbs and paleo-carbs,’ explains renowned strength coach Charles Poliquin. ‘With paleo-carbs the simple rule is: were they available to a caveman? Would he have access to grapes and raspberries? Yes. Bagels and pasta? No.’

Cordain also points out that hunter-gatherers traditionally ate the entire carcass of any animal, including organs, tongue and bone marrow, making for a diet that wasn’t just low in energy but high in fat. The idea that high-fat diets have been unfairly criticised is the basis of modern eating plans such as The Zone, which suggests that around 30 per cent of your daily calories should come from ‘good’ fats.

De Vany agrees, but has his own ideas about exactly when you should be chowing down. ‘Don’t eat three square meals a day. Skip meals now and then, but snack on nuts or celery.’ The sprightly geriatric claims that stuffing your face with a huge steak occasionally then fasting for 15 hours or so mimics the eating patterns of our ancestors, but this is an extreme viewpoint.

‘That could slow down your metabolism,’ says personal trainer Ian Turrell. ‘Which isn’t necessarily a good thing.’ The answer: stick to your six smallish meals a day, but make sure they’re from things that were alive until fairly recently.

Think like a caveman

So far, so good. You’re working out in bursts that mimics the terror of a full-scale mammoth hunt. You refuse to eat anything that you couldn’t have killed with a spear or ripped from Mother Nature’s bosom. But are you really embracing the caveman lifestyle? Probably not – especially if you work in an office.

‘The human body was never designed for the modern post-industrial environment,’ says Dr Stephen Ilardi, author of The Depression Cure (£14.99, Perseus Books), who advocates living more primitively to keep yourself contented. ‘The hunter-gatherer lifestyle is profoundly anti-depressant. They do things that change the brain more powerfully than any medication, and for most of human history, everyone benefited from the anti-depressant effect of this lifestyle. Our stone age brains just aren’t designed to handle the relentless pace of technological evolution.’

Ilardi recommends that patients adopt five elements of caveman-style activity: doing ‘interesting’ physical activities, getting regular exposure to sunlight, increasing exercise, connecting more with others socially and getting more sleep. This last one is crucial – unless you’re getting eight hours a night, chances are that you’re sleep-deprived. And if you’re waking up in the middle of the night, you’re making things worse. More than three seconds awake, says Charles Poliquin, shuts down production of melatonin, a hormone critical to building muscle.

Poliquin’s solution is simple – and primal. ‘We’re designed to live in caves,' he says. 'Your bedroom should be pitch dark. And unplug everything: TV, alarm clock, cellphone. They all emit radiation. Get rid of these things and you’ll reduce stress and sleep better.’

De Vany also contrasts the often depressing nature of modern life with the caveman’s existence. ‘Depression may have been helpful to keep our ancestors from killing one another when they were confined to caves or other shelters during long winters,’ he says, ‘but it’s triggered in many ways in modern life. You canwatch TV, read a magazine or the internet and find someone with whom to compare yourself in countless ways. And since they’re specialists at looking good in some aspect, or they’re richer than you, or better at sports, you’ll almost always come back from the experience feeling that you aren’t quite good enough.

'This is a huge contrast from when our ancestors lived in small bands of around 25 other people,' De Vany says. 'Every person was important to the survival of the band, had value and contributed in some way. Now you can see thousands of other people and the comparison is almost always hard on your pride or sense of worth.’

He insists that we should think more primitively because we aren’t suited to modern comfort and convenience. ‘Imagine being on a trail with the formidable predators that roamed the earth then. Life was a very long camping trip with no camp stove or energy bars. We had to find and kill our food. So, if you take this highly developed mind and put it in an office cubicle doing spreadsheets all day, you’re using ancient brain modules in a strange and possibly unhealthy way.

‘If you take a hunter-gatherer whose only possessions were those he or she could carry, and you put it in a penthouse with every possession one could ask for, it isn’t satisfying to a mind made to live in a different time and place. Life was a far greater mystery then, far more dangerous and far more cognitively demanding than the lives we live now. What we might call an adventure now is what life was like then, every day.’ On the plus side, there's almost no chance a sabre-toothed tiger will eat you at your desk.

One Million Years PT

Paleo expert Mark Sisson outlines his exercise blueprint for caveman health.

Sprint Once a week, max. Go for short bursts at maximum intensity – so 20 seconds on and up to two minutes off. Hill or sand sprints will dampen the impacts and increase resistance, but grass, trail, exercise bike or swimming sprints work too. Running on concrete should be your last resort.

Full-body workouts Between one and three a week, of up to an hour. If you go to the gym, do deadlifts and squats. If you work out at home, do press-ups, pull-ups and variations of these, such as the Tarzan pull-up where you lace your fingers around a bar and alternate which shoulder you touch at the top.

Move slowly/play/rest Do anything that raises your heart rate to 50-70% of its maximum for a total of up to six hours a week. This could be anything from a five-a-side match to walking the dog – the key is that it shouldn’t feel like work. If you feel as though you’ve overdone it on the other days, do less.

Cave menu

Paleo pioneer Todd Dosenberry outlines what should be in the modern-day hunter-gatherer's shopping basket.

Bacon More than half of its fat is monounsaturated and polyunsaturated. Aim to get the organic and local kind - try a farmer's market - and match it with eggs and some dark leafy greens for a healthy breakfast.

Berries Packed full of antioxidants and vitamins - eat them with coconut. If you're on a budget, the frozen kind are cheap and fine.

Ground beef The 100% grass-fed, organic kind gives best results, but beef is packed with vitamins, minerals and heart-friendly linoleic acids. Eat it in chilli, burgers or fried with veg.

Coconut Low in sugar, rich in manganese, high in fibre and delicious. Organic shredded coconut is cheap from ethnic shops. Eggs cooked with coconut oil taste amazing.

Any downsides?

As with any restrictive diet, Paleo has its fair share of criticism, including from the British Dietetic Association. A spokeswoman for the organisation said, ‘There isn’t any proof that it improves health, and its demand that you exclude food groups essential to health such as dairy, grains and legumes could leave people seriously deficient in essential vitamins and calcium, not to mention constipated from the lack of dietary fibre.’

There’s also a lot of criticism in that we don’t actually know exactly what cavemen ate and can only guess. Additionally, why are we holding up our ancient ancestors as pillars of health when they rarely even lived to their 40s? Another hole-picking point in the theory behind the diet is that many believe it’s foolish to think we haven’t evolved at all over the past 10,000 years.

Due to the fact you can’t eat grains, dairy or legumes (which includes peanuts – that’s right, no more peanut butter) means that making the Paleo Diet feel interesting and varied often involves a fair amount of creative cooking, and you’ll find plenty of unusual recipes online, where people sub in vegetables to replace grains. This can make the diet difficult to keep up when eating out or travelling and most people who eat Paleo will find that they have to make concessions occasionally to make the diet work for everyday life.

Paleo go?

A lifetime without peanut butter and Greek yogurt may juts be too much for many to bear. The diet is restricted and there are debates about its health benefits. But, by using Paleo as the basis for your diet and leaving flexibility for the odd bowl of porridge and peanut butter sandwich, you’re likely to see the benefits. Be warned though, the diet tends to involve a fair amount of kitchen chemistry and unusual kitchen ingredients that take time to source and cook. Cookery-phobics need not apply (or will have to get used to a very limited menu).

For more paleo tips, click here ^[1]

Paleo power

Eat like a primitive man to boost your training results with this paleo-friendly steak recipe and meal plan

Breakfast

2 poached eggs offer all the essential amino acids that your muscles need to build and epair themselves.

Lunch

Chicken salad with black olives, spinach leaves and cherry tomatoes provides plenty of muscle-building protein and immunity-boosting vitamin C.

Snacks

Strawberries, oranges and mango are high in vitamin C, which increases the production of immunity-boosting white blood cells.

Dinner

Beef steak (serves 1)

Ingredients
1 large fillet steak
A handful of broccoli florets
A handful of cauliflower florets
1tbsp olive oil
A sprig of thyme

To make
Heat the olive oil in a frying pan. Cook the steak for 4-12 minutes according to preference, turning halfway through. Steam the veg for 5 minutes. Garnish the steak with the thyme and serve.

Broccoli is high in chromium, which the body needs to build muscle, reduce body fat and produce energy.

Cauliflower is rich in iron, which provides energy to your muscles, and folate, which helps produce new muscle cells.

Olive oil contains plenty of heart heart-healthy monounsaturated fats, which help to protect against heart disease.

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