Dinosaur Diet?

Lindsey will probably be upset that I’m posting this today instead of yesterday, which was my day to post (Oops!).  Hopefully she’ll forgive me when she finds out I decided to do some real research into the Paleo diet to better understand what she’s working on.  (By the way, I had been pronouncing it Pa-Lay-O, when it’s supposed to be Pay-Leo.  Linz got a good laugh the first time she heard me say it.)  Anyway, on to the content.

The diet basically calls for a return to the caveman diet, under the assumption that cavemen were healthier than Americans are today.  Of course, that’s not really a far stretch, since Americans are as a whole, obese, overeaters who don’t exercise enough, myself included.  Cavemen on the other hand had to spend all day foraging for food, hunting, and fighting/running away from dinosaurs.  I assume the hunting/fighting dinosaurs may have gone hand-in-hand, but who knows.  Some cavemen may have just done it for sport.

So, what did cavemen eat?  Well, they ate nuts, fruits, and vegetables that grew naturally, which means yes to apples, berries, bananas, and no to refined grains (bye bye bread, bye bye rice!), and they ate meat, dinosaur meat to be precise, but in the absence of dinosaur meat, fish and lean meats are preferred.  Now, the Paleo diet advocates not drinking milk, which I find a little confusing, as I would assume cavemen drank milk.  Perhaps cave buffalo were harder to milk than our modern day cows.  Who knows?

A few years ago I tried the Atkins diet, which had a similar premise – cut out the carbs.  I had some success with it too, but it and the Paleo diet share a common “flaw”: it involves the complete elimination of certain food groups.  That’s one of the major reasons I failed at sticking to the Atkins diet: I missed the rice.  As a Filipino, rice has been a staple in my diet pretty much from the time when I first began eating solid foods.

But enough about my person weaknesses, let’s look at the good and the bad of the Paleo diet.  The good: very low salt content and carnivore friendly.  The bad: some people with low will power (like me) may find it hard to follow, and completely leaving out certain food groups does present some health risks, namely not having all the right nutrients.  For example, there is a deficiency in vitamin D, calcium, and carbohydrates.  You really have to go out of your way to get these nutrients.

It’s definitely not a diet I’d be able to stick to, if past experience is any indicator, but it certainly has some good points.  It would definitely take a lot more discipline than I’m capable of, dietwise.