Paleolithic diet is so easy, cavemen actually did it.

[elleng]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/01/AR2010010101611.html?hpid=artslot

[Warpy]

1. We know they ate grains

but they ate them whole, pounded into mush and cooked--or just pounded into mush and mixed with whatever else they had. Their flours were nut and acorn flours. They ate legumes, they just didn't grow them. They ate whatever they could find that wouldn't make them sick and some of the stuff that did, at least for medicinal purposes. A lot of what they ate was nutritionally poor, meaning it was lots of fiber for little nutrition. They picked their chewing gum off the trees in the form of semi hardened sap (I did that when I was a kid, some of it wasn't bad).

The diet was amazingly varied, much more so than you're going to find at a Whole Paycheck or anyplace else, for that matter. When agriculture came about, foodstuffs started to be restricted to what grew best on one's plot of land. They even ate sugar, although it was in the form of honey.

A more grain based diet became the norm because grains supplied a lot of calories the leaves and roots turned up by daily foraging hadn't. They represented an improved diet, one that could be stored in winter.

I find this diet to be more a fad than anything else. I prefer the Pollan take: "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants." Bitman further suggests limiting flesh foods to about half a pound per person per week, using it as flavoring instead of main event.

Just don't think you can forage a paleolithic diet at Whole Paycheck. You can't. You probably wouldn't like it if you could. There is a good reason we stopped eating a lot of the stuff they did, it didn't taste very good and didn't offer a lot in the way of nutrition.

[Retrograde]

2. paleolithic ice cream?

Made with coconuts? There are several foods mentioned in that article that humans have developed - spaghetti squash, modern non-bitter lettuce, modern apples as opposed to their crabapple-like ancestors - plus foods from all over the world which paleolithic humans wouldn't have had access to.

Now if the person profiled here starts eating the parts of animals most Americans turn their noses up at (like those high-cholesterol brains) and actually gathering wild plants I'll be impressed. Otherwise this is nothing but another eating fad wrapped in pseudo-scientific babble.

[Tab]

3. I just got back from the Paleolithic

and I can assure you that finding Krispy Kreme's there is a total bitch. Tabouleh, not so hard.

[elleng]

4. Welcome back!

[hippywife]

7. ...

[NashVegas]

5. If You Look At the Finest, Most Exotic/Exclusive Menus

The higher something is on the gourmet chain, the more likely it springs directly from the hunter/gatherer diet.

[hippywife]

6. As the Frugal Gourmet used to call it all

"peasant food." :hi: