Eating Like a Caveman

It's Day One of my caveman diet, and I'm sitting down to a breakfast unlike any I've eaten before. Next to the sliced banana are two fluffy scrambled eggs and a boneless chicken breast. No oatmeal. No bagel. No milk.

Experts call this the Paleolithic diet, a menu plan based on what our hunting and gathering ancestors probably consumed 40,000 years ago. Proponents believe that by eating the way Fred and Wilma Flintstone did, we could help ward off many of the modern ailments that bedevil us, including obesity, diabetes, and heart disease.

The idea of going back to a hunter-gather diet isn't new. In 1988, S. Boyd Eaton, MD, an associate clinical professor of radiology and an adjunct associate professor of anthropology at Emory University, co-authored a popular book called The Paleolithic Prescription. Lately, web sites devoted to the Paleolithic diet have been springing up, with loyal followers sharing their experiences, along with suggested menus. "If it's a fad, it's the oldest fad going," says Loren Cordain, PhD, an exercise physiologist in the department of health and exercise science at Colorado State University, Fort Collins. "The whole world ate this way for thousands of years."

As I soon discovered, the forbidden foods list can make the Pritikin Program seem generous: no dairy products, grains, potatoes, cereals, salt, yeast, anything in a can, alcohol, or caffeine. (I negotiated a keep-the-caffeine clause with my editors.) What I do get to eat in abundance are lots of fruits, vegetables, wild game meats, and fish like salmon.

The World's Oldest Diet Sparks New Controversy

Can a prehistoric menu really make us healthier? In an article in the March 2000 issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Cordain, Eaton, and several colleagues reviewed what is known about the diets of 229 hunter-gatherer societies, gleaned from the Ethnographic Atlas, which summarizes information from 1,267 world societies. The diets varied widely, but in general were heavy on protein (up to 35% of total calories) and low on carbohydrates (about 25% of total calories), compared to typical American diets. The hunter-gatherer's fat intake -- about 40% or more of total calories -- was very much like ours in modern America, but our ancestors ate less saturated fat, Cordain says.

According to its advocates, such a diet today could offer important health benefits. The unprocessed carbohydrates typically eaten by the hunter-gatherers -- high-fiber fruits, for instance -- are digested slowly, thus avoiding the problem of large amounts of glucose being dumped into the bloodstream at once. Exposure to large glucose loads, many nutritionists now think, could create insulin resistance, leading to such ailments as obesity and type 2 diabetes. The Paleolithic diet, being rich in fruits and vegetables, is also rich in antioxidants, which have been shown to lower the risk of cancer and heart disease.