Health Benefits Of The Paleo Diet

Our modern culture seems to be obsessed with diets that will give us the perfect body with minimum amount of exercise, and there is always a Holy Grail diet that people swear by and the paleo diet is the most popular one at the moment. The idea of the paleo diet has been around since the 1960, but didn’t really come back until “The Paleo Diet” book was published by Loren Cordain in 2001 that it began to grow again in popularity (Magee, 2014). The paleo diet simplicity and reasoning is the main reason it is so popular, it basically says we should eat like our cavemen ancestors and avoid all modern and especially processed foods, since our bodies never evolved to eat them in the first place and that is the reason we get fat. The “Scientific” reasoning definitely sounds good and the attraction of eating more proteins, fruits, vegetables and avoid carbohydrates and sodium definitely attracts people to the paleo diet even more. So what is the paleo diet exactly? Paleo is very simple as it says to only eat the food available to our cavemen ancestors, before humans started farming and also no sodium (Berardi, 2014). You are allowed to eat fresh lean meats, fish, fruits, vegetables, eggs, nuts and seeds and healthy fats like olive oil and coconut oil and you are not allowed to eat any processed food, wheat, dairy, refined sugar, salt, potatoes, grains, legumes and refined vegetable oils like canola (McMillen, 2016). Since there is no processed foods allowed, you are forced to cook everything fresh yourself, but you don’t have count calories, the paleo diet does sound very simple when break it down like this. When you look at the paleo diet, just the cut of sodium and sugar will have a major positive impact on the dieters already. We hear every day how we should avoid sugar to lower our chances of diabetes and minimize sodium intake to lower our blood pressure and when these two are actually eliminated from the diet completely will be the most positive impact on the dieters health. The banned of processed foods also makes the dieter actually …show more content…
We will have to have people of various weight levels from under, average and overweight to participate to see the difference and impact of a paleo diet makes. It is a really important to have a diverse and a large sample of people to participate the study of this diet since people’s body can vary greatly in how they react and process certain foods and a larger sampling group would minimize this factors. Since we are looking at the effectiveness only, we will have to find people with similar levels of daily physical activity to rule out the factor of exercise and use percentages of difference from the starting weight, blood pressure and blood sugar levels to measure and compare the participants in the paleo study. We will have the participants take detail notes on their daily food consumption and the measurements of weight, blood-pressure and blood-sugar levels before the start of the diet to get a baseline first and of course during to keep track how the changes is in diet is affecting the participants. We will have a control group that is not on the diet and a group that is one and will run the experiment as long as possible to gather as much data as possible for a more conclusive