Paleolithic diet

s]]The modern diet known as the **paleolithic diet** (abbreviated as 'paleo diet' or 'paleodiet') is a way of eating. It is also called the 'caveman diet', 'Stone Age diet' or 'hunter-gatherer diet'.

It is based on the wild plants and animals which humans ate in the Paleolithic era. This was a period about 2.5&nbsp;million years long: it ended around 10,000&nbsp;years ago, when people began farming. The term "Paleolithic diet" may also refer to what people actually ate back then instead of the diet today.

Meat, fish, vegetables, fruit, roots, and nuts make up most of the modern Paleolithic diet. It does not include grains, legumes, dairy products, salt, refined sugar, and processed oils. The diet is much lower in carbohydrates than is usual today, and much higher in protein.
Authors and researchers recommended and changed the diet in several books and academic journals.
Paleolithic nutrition is based on the idea in evolution that modern humans are genetically adapted to the way their Paleolithic ancestors ate, and that human genetics have not changed much since people began growing their own food. Therefore a good diet for today may be similar to that of paleolithic people.

The basic idea is that the diet is healthy because our body is adapted to make use of it. Two studies of the Paleolithic diet in humans have shown health benefits.

This way of eating is somewhat controversial among nutritionists.
and anthropologists.
Some argue that if hunter gatherer societies did not suffer from certain diseases, this was because their diet was less calorific or for other reasons. They also say today's version may not really match people's diet in the Paleolithic period.

## Background consensus 
There is a wide consensus that present-day diets in first world countries are causing serious health problems. One expert review said:
:"Obesity is a disease which, unlike others, is obvious. You don't need to be an expert to know that obesity is increasing...  When I was at school in England, fat kids were rare. But in the last decade rates of obesity in English 11–15-year-olds have almost doubled, and in 2004 more than 25% of these schoolchildren were obese. This disaster is characterised as ‘a public health timebomb’, because obese children who remain obese as adults – as most do – are twice as likely to die by the age of 50. It is also reckoned that over 50,000 English children now [have or will develop] ‘adult-onset’ diabetes which, as the name implies, was until recently practically unknown in children. Rates of this type of diabetes in British children have increased by a factor of 10 in the last five years.

Ideas about paleolithic nutrition come from evolutionary biology. The reason for eating like this is that natural selection had enough time for Paleolithic humans' bodies and metabolisms to get used to the food that they could eat then. But in the 10,000&nbsp;years since people started farming, natural selection has not had enough time for people's genetics to change to get used to the new diet. more than 100,000 years ago, and perhaps as early as 200,000 years ago. However, Loren Cordain has said that the new evidence shows that grains were not eaten much back then, and he has also said that eating of wild grass seeds of any kind needs technology and processing to make the food possible to eat, and that this technology was probably not around 105,000+ years ago.

## Disagreements 
Disagreements are not about the background consensus described above. It is about how good the Paleolithic diet is as a solution to that problem. It is also about whether the argument behind the diet is a sound argument.

Not everybody agrees with  evolutionary reasons behind the Paleolithic diet.

## References