What Was the True "Paleo Diet"?
Ancient dental calculus, coprolites, and stable isotopes reveal that the true Paleo diet was never one thing, but hundreds of regionally varied diets.
Introduction
The modern "Paleo diet" movement — which prescribes a dietary regimen of lean meats, fish, vegetables, fruits, and nuts while excluding grains, dairy, and processed foods — claims inspiration from the eating patterns of Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers. The foundational premise is that human physiology is optimally adapted to the diet consumed during the approximately 2.5-million-year span of the Palaeolithic, and that the mismatch between this ancestral diet and modern industrial foods explains much of contemporary metabolic disease. While this premise contains a kernel of evolutionary logic, the actual diets of Palaeolithic humans were far more varied, regionally specific, and seasonally constrained than the modern dietary movement acknowledges.