page_title: Paleolithic diet
section_title: Genetics
hierarchical_section_title: Paleolithic diet / Genetics
caption_attribution_description: English: Melvin Konner
context_page_description: The Paleolithic diet, Paleo diet, caveman diet, or stone-age diet is a modern fad diet consisting of foods thought to mirror those eaten during the Paleolithic era.
  There are different variants of the diet; some are predominantly plant-based but the most recent popular variants focus on animal products. The diet avoids processed food and typically includes vegetables, fruits, nuts, roots, and meat and excludes dairy products, grains, sugar, legumes, processed oils, salt, alcohol, and coffee. The ideas behind the diet can be traced to primitive diets advocated in 19th century. In the 1970s Walter L. Voegtlin popularized a meat-centric "Stone Age" diet, and in the 21st century, the Paleo Diet was popularized in the best-selling books of Loren Cordain. As of 2019 the paleo diet industry was worth approximately US$500 million.
  In the 21st century the sequencing of the human genome and DNA analysis of the remains of early humans has found evidence that humans evolved rapidly in response to changing diet. This evidence undermines a core premise of the paleolithic diet, that human digestion has remained essentially unchanged over time.
context_section_description: The stated rationale for the paleolithic diet is that human genes of modern times are unchanged from those of 10,000 years ago, and that the diet of that time is therefore the best fit with humans today. Loren Cordain has described the paleo diet as "the one and only diet that ideally fits our genetic makeup".
  The argument is that modern humans have not been able to adapt to the new circumstances. The agricultural revolution brought the addition of grains and dairy to the diet. Advocates of the diet argue that the increase in diseases of affluence after the dawn of agriculture was caused by changes in diet, but others have countered that it may be that pre-agricultural hunter-gatherers did not suffer from the diseases of affluence because they did not live long enough to develop them.
  According to the model from the evolutionary discordance hypothesis, "many chronic diseases and degenerative conditions evident in modern Western populations have arisen because of a mismatch between Stone Age genes and modern lifestyles." Advocates of the modern paleo diet have formed their dietary recommendations based on this hypothesis. They argue that modern humans should follow a diet that is nutritionally closer to that of their Paleolithic ancestors.
  The evolutionary discordance is incomplete, since it is based mainly on the genetic understanding of the human diet and a unique model of human ancestral diets, without taking into account the flexibility and variability of the human dietary behaviors over time. Studies of a variety of populations around the world show that humans can live healthily with a wide variety of diets and that humans have evolved to be flexible eaters. Lactose tolerance is an example of how some humans have adapted to the introduction of dairy into their diet. While the introduction of grains, dairy, and legumes during the Neolithic revolution may have had some adverse effects on modern humans, if humans had not been nutritionally adaptable, these technological developments would have been dropped.
  Since the publication of Eaton and Konner's paper in 1985, analysis of the DNA of primitive human remains has provided evidence that evolving humans were continually adapting to new diets, thus challenging the hypotheis underlying the paleothic diet. Evolutionary biologist Marlene Zuk writes that the idea that our genetic makeup today matches that of our ancestors is misconceived, and that in debate Cordain was "taken aback" when told that 10,000 years was "plenty of time" for an evolutionary change in human digestive abilities to have taken place. On this basis Zuk dismisses Cordain's claim that the paleo diet is "the one and only diet that fits our genetic makeup".
  Paleoanthropologist Peter Ungar has written that the paleo diet is a "myth", on account both of its invocation of a single suitable diet when in reality humans have always been a "work in progress", and because diet has always been varied because humans were spread widely over the planet.
  Anthropological geneticist Anne C. Stone has said that humans have adapted in the last 10,000 years in response to radical changes in diet. In 2016 she was quoted as saying "It drives me crazy when Paleo-diet people say that we've stopped evolving — we haven't".
  Melvin Konner has said the challenge to the hypothesis is not greatly significant since the real challenges to human non-adaptation have occurred with the rise of ever-more refined foodstuffs in the last 300 years.
caption: Melvin Konner, co-author of a 1985 paper setting out a hypothetical basis for the paleolithic diet.
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