Caveman diet
From RationalWiki
The caveman diet, sometimes promoted with brand names like "NeanderThin", is a fad diet. One of the more ludicrous fad diets out there, it is based on eating only those foods which a hunter-gatherer society would have eaten, such as meat and raw vegetables and fruit. Excluded are grains and other foods that are products of large-scale agriculture.
In practice it is a combination of two popular fad diets at the same time, the low-carb diet and the gluten-free diet, although some go further and avoid milk, eggs, cheese, and meats which are products of agriculture (beef, pork, and poultry) in favor of meats like venison. For others, eggs are considered okay since they are theoretically something that can be gathered in the wild. Alcoholic beverages are also limited in this way: beer and most liquor are off limits since they are produced from grain, but wine is okay since grapes can theoretically be picked in the wild. Honey and maple syrup are okay, refined sugar and artificial sweeteners are not. At the extreme it may consist of an entirely raw foodist vegan diet but which (unlike most vegan diets) excludes any grain or soy based products. At another extreme it may be a mostly meat-intensive diet.
As an often low-fiber, very high-fat diet it is not particularly healthy. Yet its proponents would have you believe the "caveman diet" is the way humans were intended to eat - ignoring the fact that cavemen used much more energy than a modern human working to gather food and thus instinctively went for the foods with the most calories and fat, essentially making the caveman "diet" do the opposite of what it was intended for. In fact, for much of human existence, the wealthy became fat and their obesity was respected as a sign that they could afford to eat well. Proponents counter that it is not a high-fat diet because meats from agriculture are high in fat while meats from wild game are lower in fat, and that it is also a high fiber diet because of the emphasis on raw fruits and vegetables - which is true in theory but those attempting to follow this diet wind up finding it so difficult to follow in practice that they wind up buying all of their "caveman food" from the supermarket and getting a high fat diet anyway. Proponents also claim that the human digestive system is adapted to the diets of the paleolithic era and has not evolved since, and that the widespread incidence of diabetes and other diseases can be traced to the shift to a grain-based diet due to the advent of agriculture. This claim is not widely accepted if at all within mainstream science. Indeed, evidence suggests that Europeans have evolved over the last five thousand years specifically to eat an agricultural diet, including changing from a straight-on cutting bite to a shearing overbite.
The theory behind the caveman diet also seems to suggest that for optimal health, humans should stop all attempts to retain any semblance of hygiene (i.e. stop showering, brushing teeth), wear thick animal pelts instead of clothing, stop taking any medicine for any reason, abandon technology such as planes, cars, and even bicycles, form small tribes, etc.
[edit] See also
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