The paleolithic diet gets its name from the Paleolithic (stone age) era, a period (2.5 million years ago) when humans had not yet figured out agriculture.
Since they didn’t know how to grow a crop, humans sustained life by hunting and gathering.
Therefore, most of what they ate was either animal meat & seafood (hunting) or raw vegetables, nuts, insects, and fruits (gathering).
And meat and unprocessed food was the kind that was prevalent in the early 1800s in the US when people loaded themselves up with eggs, meat, etc.
In the late 1800s, due to advancements in technology, manual labour decreased significantly, but the food, more or less, remained the same.
This made people feel gassy and heavy.
In the 1890s, John Harvey Kelloggs started the idea of cereal breakfast, and it caught on in the form of corn flakes, wheat flakes, etc.
In 1906, John’s brother added sugar to the cereal mix and so began the ‘dessertification’ of breakfast.
By 1975, sugar had become a cause of distress for consumers, thanks to an increase in food research and chronic diseases such as obesity, diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease.
An outcome of the ongoing food research was a book by Walter L Voegtlin called The Stone Age Diet, which reintroduced this diet, claiming that it would make modern human beings healthier.
Under the Paleo diet, sugar, processed food cereals, grains, and milk products are prohibited.
Since 1975, the Paleo diet made appearances here and there but became soaringly popular after the publication of the book The Paleo Diet by Loren Cordain in 2002.
While the diet is popular, there are various counter-points against it, the main one being that it is based on the basic assumption that humans have not evolved in the last 2.5 million years.
