Paleolithic Diet - Nutritional Factors and Health Effects

Nutritional Factors and Health Effects

Since the end of the Paleolithic period, several foods that humans rarely or never consumed during previous stages of their evolution have been introduced as staples in their diet. With the advent of agriculture and the beginning of animal domestication roughly 10,000 years ago, during the Neolithic Revolution, humans started consuming large amounts of dairy products, beans, cereals, alcohol and salt. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the Industrial revolution led to the large scale development of mechanized food processing techniques and intensive livestock farming methods, that enabled the production of refined cereals, refined sugars and refined vegetable oils, as well as fattier domestic meats, which have become major components of Western diets.

Such food staples have fundamentally altered several key nutritional characteristics of the human diet since the Paleolithic era, including glycemic load, fatty acid composition, macronutrient composition, micronutrient density, acid-base balance, sodium-potassium ratio, and fiber content.

These dietary compositional changes have been theorized as risk factors in the pathogenesis of many of the so-called "diseases of civilization" and other chronic illnesses that are widely prevalent in Western societies, including obesity, cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, osteoporosis, autoimmune diseases, colorectal cancer, myopia, acne, depression, and diseases related to vitamin and mineral deficiencies.