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Palaeolithic Lifestyle

I have been following the Paleolithic lifestyle for nearly a year now. You may know it as the ‘caveman diet’, although this does not do justice to the concept.

The premise is that by eating what our ancestors ate and exercising as they exercised, we optimize our health and fitness. Since they ate like this and exercised like this for hundreds of thousands of years, natural selection dictates that our bodies will be designed to function best under those conditions.

Central Philosophy

Two of the concepts central to the philosophy are:

1. We have been farming for only 8-10 thousand years ‘ an evolutionary drop in the ocean. Paleolithic man did not eat wheat or dairy.
2. Frequent, long aerobic exercise is a modern phenomenon. Paleolithic man exercised briefly, intensely and infrequently, either to escape or pursue prey. Daily 60-minute sessions on the exercise bike were not a feature of his life.

For more resources on the subject, there are links in the references section to some websites and blogs that do justice to the theory and practice.

When you adopt this lifestyle you find yourself doing a lot of thinking as you try to fit aspects of your life into the Paleolithic context ‘ the aim is to tailor your life to best fit what our bodies were designed for. Should I walk to the train station or take the bus? What would our ancestors have done? I’ll walk.

Intermittent Fasting

One example is variation in eating patterns. Our ancestors did not usually have access to three meals a day, so the supply of food varied. Our bodies evolved to take advantage of periods of food scarcity by doing repair work in the absence of the burden of digestion. To me this makes perfect sense from an evolutionary perspective. Accordingly, roughly twice a week I do not eat until dinner, a practice known as intermittent fasting.

You can adopt the Paleolithic lifestyle without fasting like this ‘ but it’s just a good example of how I have applied ancestral thinking to my life. For more on the theory of intermittent fasting, there is a link in the references section.

Modern Context

It has been tempting to allow evolutionary thinking to inform all my decisions about fitness and nutrition. Clearly this has to be within practical and commonsense boundaries according to the modern context I find myself in – if I had a dollar for every time some joker asks why I don’t wear a loin cloth to the gym or eat with my hands I would be a rich man. But jokes aside, recently I have started to wonder whether there could be nutrition and fitness practices that have no basis in ancestral behaviour, but nevertheless are optimal. As a staunch believer in evolution as the reason for everything, initially I found this confusing ‘ but I now have three rationales to explain my thinking:

1. Natural selection is subject to trade-offs
2. Chance dictates that there may be circumstances that are good for us in spite of our ancestors not having been regularly exposed to them
3. Natural selection can only select behavior that occurs

Water and Thirst

To illustrate the first two points, I’d like to use the example of water and thirst. Admittedly there is scant evidence for the benefits or otherwise of drinking beyond our thirst – but in the context of that uncertainty, it still worth developing the example.

The purist Paleolithic argument would be that to function optimally we should follow our thirst and drink as much water only as we want. However, there are a number of factors other than optimal physical functioning that could have influenced the evolution of the thirst mechanism.

If our thirst required our ancestors to drink too much or too often, their hunting success or safety might be compromised – or perhaps it would lead to water stores in their caves being depleted too quickly. Thirst may have evolved based on the trade-off between optimal physical functioning, safety, hunting success and sensible use of resources. If so, then in the modern environment, where some of these factors no longer apply, drinking beyond our thirst may in fact have benefits to our bodies in spite of not being in tune with our evolved thirst.

The counter-argument to this is that our bodies would have evolved to work best at levels of hydration resulting from our ancestors obeying their thirst. This leads to the second point about chance: just because we did not generally drink beyond our thirst when we were evolving, it doesn’t mean drinking beyond our thirst can’t be good for us. It might simply be that in the complex system of the human body, by chance it is good for us to do so. There may, as it happens, be no knock on effects to other processes of remaining permanently fully hydrated.

Perhaps by drinking beyond our thirst we are giving the body what our thirst would have evolved to demand in a safer world.

Warming Up

To illustrate the third point, take the example of pre-exercise warm-up.

The fact that pre-exercise warm-up has benefits teaches us that in a modern context our behavior sometimes needs to go beyond that of our ancestors. The modern warm-up replaces the adrenaline rush our ancestors would have had before intense exercise (since it would usually have involved hunting or being hunted.)

Yet we also believe our ancestors lifted heavy objects in the course of their daily life, perhaps when building shelter. It is unlikely an adrenaline rush would have preceded such tasks, so I suggest the likelihood of injury would have been just as high as it is for modern man in the gym. Yet I doubt our ancestors would have been seen rotating their shoulders and jumping on the spot just before lifting a heavy log. It does not occur to modern man to warm up (or we would not need to be taught to at school) so I suggest that it would not have occurred to our ancestors to warm up either, which is why the behavior did not evolve to be innate.

For natural selection to evolve optimal behavior, that behavior has to occur in the first place.

I concede there is a reasonable counter-argument to the warming up example. Whereas modern man has a tenancy to roll out of bed, stagger to the gym and then cannot wait to get onto his 1-rep max on bench press, our ancestors might have been less likely to willfully seek out the heaviest thing they could lift and would in any case be more likely to exert themselves in the course of the day when they would have been far more active and therefore in a warm state already. They may also have been more resilient to injury due to the greater variety of exercise they performed.

Massage

So perhaps an additional example worth citing here would be massage. There is recent evidence, albeit using rabbits as subjects, that there may be significant muscular benefits to post-exercise massage ‘ there is a link to this in the references section. So this could be an optimal fitness-related behavior which is unlikely to have spontaneously occurred in ancestral life and therefore would never have got the chance to be ‘selected’.

Ancestral Meat Consumption

All this leads me to the issue that first got me thinking about ancestral behavior not always being the best guide for modern man.

In the ongoing debate about whether the Paleolithic diet is better than our modern diet, the battleground often centers around how much meat was in the diet of our ancestors. The amount of meat they actually ate, say the critics, was a small percentage of the overall diet, so the protein-rich, meat-based diet recommended for the Paleolithic lifestyle does not make sense. Champions of the Paleolithic lifestyle argue that our hunter gatherer ancestors did just that ‘ hunted ‘ and that meat therefore made up a large part of their daily calories. Katherine Milton has an alternative perspective, and Loren Cordain’s perspective can be seen on his website, the address for which is also in the references.

However, I can’t help wondering whether my points 1 and 2 have the potential to render this argument less important. Even if our ancestors didn’t eat meat every day, surely it could still be optimal to do so? It may be that our bodies would have worked more optimally if we had eaten meat every day, but we simply couldn’t catch enough prey to get it. Modern man is able to eat the amount of meat our ancestors would have eaten given the chance.

By chance it may be that our digestive systems do not suffer adversely if we eat more meat than our ancestors did when evolving.

Open Mind

So whilst the fundamental tenets of the Paleolithic lifestyle remain rooted in mimicking our ancestors, it seems sensible for us Paleolithic ‘lifestylers’ to look to science as much as we to our ancestors to help us understand what is optimal. Perhaps our challenge is not only to apply hunter gatherer principles in a modern context but also to recognize that natural selection is not foolproof and keep an open mind about whether precise mimicry is always the optimal path.

One last thing to add: there are people (some of whom are mentioned in the references) who have spent longer thinking about this and whose medical, scientific or other credentials better qualify them to examine these questions. I would welcome theirs and anyone else’s perspectives on my humble musings.

References

Paleolithic Web Sites and Blogs.

• Mark’s Daily Apple
• The IF Life (Intermittent Fasting)
• Arthur Devany
• Loren Cordain

This is not an exhaustive list, just the ones I spend a lot of time on and a good start if you are new to the subject.

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