What was the Caveman’s Diet?

The Hunter-Gatherer diet is also known as the Paleo or Paleolithic Diet. It derives from the basic hunter-gatherer diet that we used to live on for millions of years before a growing population, intensive agriculture and modern farming changed our diet.

Many bulk grown foods that we eat today including wheat, grains, legumes, dairy, maize and soya are not ‘natural’ foods that we are designed to eat, they exist because of the necessity to feed a growing population with a cheap source of plentiful food.

As the populations in the developed world have grown, it has become necessary to develop foods with a greater yield so that we don’t all starve, but the trade off for the adequate supply of these foods is that we are not ideally suited to digest them as well as we could do.

Hunter-Gatherer’s, What Did They Eat?

For thousands of years we existed as hunter-gatherers, either killing or finding different foods everyday to eat. Our bodies are designed to eat this way, eating protein from an animal we killed on one day, then maybe having fruit and berries the next, then many some vegetables, nuts or fish the next day.

These are the core foods that our Paleolithic ancestors used to consume

Our bodies are designed to digest different foods using different enzymes. If you eat one type of food be it Proteins, Carbs etc, your stomach will produce suitable enzymes to digest that type of food. Meals containing mixed food groups have only been eaten for the last 10,000 years or so, which is no time at all on an evolutionary scale and that is why so many people struggle to adequately digest their meals properly.

In the grand scheme of evolution, we have only been eating ‘processed’ foods for the blink of an eye

For each food that you eat, your stomach will produce a suitable enzyme to digest it, but if you eat combined proteins and carb’s at the same time the two enzymes fight each other and your food isn’t digested very well.

Foods to Avoid

The Caveman diet requires avoidance of modern foods that are not easy to digest including; wheat, potatoes, grains, legumes, refines salts, dairy, refined sugars and refined oils. Our bodies are not designed to eat these foods, which are mostly modern, and difficult for us to digest in volume.

The refined foods are really difficult for us to digest and is in part responsible for the obesity epidemic that seems to be sweeping the developed world. Only organic, natural foods should be in your diet, you shouldn’t eat anything that has been processed or refined.

What Did Cavemen Eat?

The caveman’s natural diet included; meat (organic naturally), fish, fruit, fungi, eggs, roots, nuts and vegetables. These are our natural diet, and one that we are designed to eat and digest efficiently.

Cavemen would generally eat these foods as they found them rather than make up complex mixed meals mixing proteins and carbohydrates which is the modern norm. With the correct recipes it is still possible to combine these foods together to make delicious, healthy meals that you can easily digest.