Paleolithic diet

The Paleolithic diet, Paleo diet, caveman diet, or Stone Age diet is a modern fad diet consisting of foods thought by its proponents to mirror those eaten by humans during the Paleolithic era.^[1]

The diet avoids food processing and typically includes vegetables, fruits, nuts, roots, and meat and excludes dairy products, grains, sugar, legumes, processed oils, salt, alcohol, and coffee.^[2] Historians can trace the ideas behind the diet to "primitive" diets advocated in the 19th century. In the 1970s, Walter L. Voegtlin popularized a meat-centric "Stone Age" diet; in the 21st century, the best-selling books of Loren Cordain popularized the "Paleo diet".^[3] As of 2019^[update] the Paleolithic diet industry was worth approximately US$500 million.^[4]

In the 21st century, the sequencing of the human genome and DNA analysis of the remains of anatomically modern humans have 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.^[5] Paleoanthropological evidence has indicated that prehistoric humans ate plant-heavy diets that regularly included grains and other starchy vegetables, in contrast to the claims made by proponents of the Paleolithic diet.^{[6][7][8][9][10]}

Advocates promote the Paleolithic diet as a way of improving health.^[11] There is some evidence that following it may lead to improvements in body composition and metabolism compared with the typical Western diet^[12] or compared with diets recommended by some European nutritional guidelines.^[13] On the other hand, following the diet can lead to nutritional deficiencies, such as an inadequate calcium intake, and side effects can include weakness, diarrhea, and headaches.^[14]