In my life time I have seen many food diet fads come and go. Do you remember the following?
- Blood type diet
- Grapefruit diet
- South Beach diet
- Atkinson diet
- The Zone diet
Even my favored Slow Carb diet, featured in Tim Ferris’ book 4-Hour Body, is a fad. Unlike food fads of the past, which focused on a single food or aspect of the human body, modern food fads are marketed as a total nutritional solution for health and well-being.
Brenda Davis and Vesanto Melina published a great article comparing an actual Paleolithic diet with a modern Paleo diet. The article contains an excellent table that compares the past with the present.
Preagricultural diets—which essentially consisted of wild plants, wild animals, and wild fish—varied considerably, depending on location, season, hunting and gathering skills, available tools, and so on. People didn’t consume oil, sugar, or salt; anything from a box or bag, or the milk of other mammals.
The Paleo diet is the best food fad yet. Meaning, nutritionally there are some very good things about it. In practice, I don’t think people eat nearly enough vegetables. If someone is going to short their “Paleo intake”, it is most definitely going to be the spinach salad and broccoli. The rotisserie-roasted free-range organic chicken tacos on non-GMO blue corn soft tortillas will always make it onto someone’s plate.
The bottom line is that we all need to eat more vegetables and fruits.