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Food in focus

For millions of years man, like his close relatives the apes, subsisted on food they found while hunting and gathering. This included fruits in season, vegetables above and below the ground, nuts, seeds and meat from game, fowl and fish. These were the Paleolithic, or Stone Age times. Only as recently as 10 000 years ago, did they discover that previously indigestible foods, such as grains, beans and raw potatoes, could be ground and/or cooked to make them more palatable, and digestible. At this time, man was known as the Neolithic man, and he was an agriculturalist. Grains, beans and potatoes were all the rage, as they could be stored for long periods, where high in calories, and yielded seeds for planting. They also started to milk their bovines, and create different dairy products.

A growing fraternity of scientists, nutritionists and researchers across the world now believe that our digestive systems aren't genetically coded to handle grains, beans and potatoes (though some cope better than others), and, to a lesser extent, dairy products.

'Ninety-nine percent of our time on earth humans have eaten an entirely different diet. We did not learn to grow grains or domesticate animals until 10 000 years ago, not long enough to change our genetic program,' says Dr Artemis P. Simopoulos, former chairwoman of the nutritional coordinating committee of the National Institutes of Health in the U.S. and now president of the Center for Genetics Nutrition and Health in Washington.

British scientist Cindy Engel, author of Wild Health (click here for an extract) agrees, saying the Paleolithic or caveman diet, served us well for the vast majority of the 2.5 million years that we and our ancestors have been on the planet, and believes it still can.

She says that, for all our technological and intellectual advances, chronic ill health is rising in the West. In a century we've gone from heart disease as a rarity to being a major killer, and obesity from very rare to affecting 15 to 20 percent of us. But we now know there's only one percent difference between ours and chimpanzees' genes. So the logical conclusion, she and others maintain, would be the fact that the human physiology is adapted to wild foods and not the processed, cooked, refined, fermented and reconstituted variety we eat today, and that grains and dairy are all well and good for survival, but are not the ideal diet for optimum health.

For example, chimps and gorillas, our Paleolithic ancestors, ate 100 to 300 types of fruit or vegetation in a year. Today even the roughage freaks among us only manage around 20 to 30. Plus, our early diet had more than 100g fibre a day, whereas today few of us hit the 18g RDA (recommended daily allowance). Lack of fibre in the modern diet has been linked to increases in colon and rectum cancers, heart disease and diabetes.

Except for those who continue to advocate the 'high-carbohydrate/low-fat' diet which is really, historically speaking, the biggest fad diet in history, most of the better writers and thinkers in the field now agree that the closer we can get to the paleolithic ideal, the better. Most of the quibbling is over the details, how many carbs, what percentage of fat, and so on. She concludes: 'We just need to look at the bigger picture. Western medicine does wonderful things, but health fads come and go and can be so contradictory that we need common sense to base our healthcare on. If we can learn (or relearn) basic guidelines from what wild animals are doing, then we should.'

Dr. Loren Cordain, a renowned Colorado, U.S. expert in the area of Paleolithic nutrition and author of The Paleo Diet, says, generally, health begins to noticeably be disrupted when cereal grains provide 70% or more of the daily caloric intake. Versions of the paleo diet have been used to help patients with celiac disease, gluten intolerance and auto-immune diseases such as multiple sclerosis, and are also fed to triathletes wanting to be lean, mean and strong for their endurance events.

Similarly, Dr Oz Garcia, diet advisor to the Hollywood stars, says humans have not evolved enough to tolerate huge volumes of sugar and carbohydrates, and what they ate then, is what we should still eat now. For more information, visit OzGarcia.com.

It's important to note that the caveman diet is not a classic high-protein, low carb diet, despite the fact that it is advocated by some as such. Dr. Boyd Eaton published the Paleolithic Prescription in the 1980s, in which he argues that the cave man diet was low in fat, particularly saturated fat, low in salt and rich in dietary fibre from plant foods. His Paleolithic prescription for optimum health is said to be very much akin to the so-called prudent diet of the American Heart Association. His typical Paleolithic macronutrient profile offers 33% of total energy from protein, principally but not entirely animal protein as nuts are also high in protein, 46% from carbohydrates and a mere 21% from fat. Others argue that Eskimos and buffalo hunters' diets were high in fat, and those living on the coast got plenty salt. So, all to be taken with a pinch of salt and a good dose of common sense.

You don't have to be a complete Neanderthal to benefit from a hunter-gatherer inspired diet. Read Neander-guy and Caveman cuisine to help you keep perspective .

What to eat, and what not to eat

Do not eat

Include moderate amounts of monounsaturated fat in the diet in the form of oils such as extra virgin olive oil, and spreads of almonds, avocado, hazelnut, macadamia nut, olive and walnut.

Adapting recipes

Adapting your favourite recipes on food24 is as easy as omitting the foods you're not allowed to eat, and adding those you are allowed to eat. You can be as rigid or relaxed as you like. By omitting salad dressings, mayonnaise and mustard, unless it's all natural and you made it yourself, cheese, sauces; replacing bread stuffing with vegetable stuffing; serving mince over shredded cabbage or roasted aubergine; using lettuce leaves for pita pockets, spreading patés on cucumber slices, etc.

Use your imagination and you'll soon learn to enjoy food without grain product or potato in sight, just like the cavemen did. For contact details of delis and farm stalls as well as other specialist food stores around the country, visit our Gourmet shop section.

Also visit our Advanced search page, where you can custom-find recipes that are just right for you. Select from as many categories as you wish, for example by choosing Beef from Main Ingredients and Grill from Cooking Method, or Salads from Side Dishes and Vegan from Special diets.

Important: This is intended for your cooking information only, and is not intended as medical advice. Even if you're in tip-top health, see a medical professional before embarking on this way of eating, or any eating regime that eliminates certain foods or food groups.

Caveman diet recipes

Fish umai Butternut salad Red onion, mango and rocket salad Avocado and lemon liver Game chine over the coals Dried Mopani worms Beef carpaccio with red-hot pesto Pepper-seared tuna with cool-mango relish Raw food salad Oyster and bacon kebabs

Tip of the day

Best cooking method Choose cooking methods that cook the fat out of the meat, such as grilling, braaing and roasting on a grill, as opposed to cooking it back in, as happens with frying, deep frying, stir frying or even pot roasting and stewing, where the food sits in hot oil.