Actually, There Were Many Paleo Diets

Actually, There Were Many Paleo Diets
The Huffington Post | By Meredith Melnick
Posted: 12/17/2014 2:24 pm EST Updated: 12/17/2014 2:59 pm EST

Paleoanthropologists are pretty amused by the faddish Paleo Diet. And now a review of studies on hominid evolution is using environmental and chemical evidence to prove, once and for all, that there was no such thing as "clean eating" during the Stone Age.

The research, published in The Quarterly Review of Biology, pretty clearly establishes that early humans didn't have any one eating pattern. Instead, diet in the era of early hominids was catch as catch can -- and, of course, regionally specific.

While hunter-gatherer groups in northern climates likely ate a diet heavy in animals, reported the researchers, those in more growth-friendly southern climes were probably plant eaters. Very few had what we might call "optimal" diets and instead ate for survival rather than performance. In other words, little virtue was likely ascribed to eating and food choice.

"Everyone would agree that ancestral diets didn't include Twinkies, but I'm sure our ancestors would have eaten them if they grew on trees," study author Ken Sayers, Ph.D., said in a statement. "They were simply acquiring enough calories to survive and reproduce."

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