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physicians, and interested lay scholars. Without their encouragement, passion, knowledge, and enthusiasm, I suspect that this book would not have been written. Thank you, Boyd Eaton, Jennie Brand Miller, Neil Mann, Andy Sinclair, Mike and Mary Dan Eades, Artemis Simopoulous, Bruce Watkins, Dean Esmay, Ward Nicholson, Don Wiss, Ben Balzer, Clark Spencer Larsen, Mike Richards, John Speth, Norman Salem, Joe Hibbeln, Stephen Cunnane, Kim Hill, Craig Stanford, Robert Crayhon, Robert Gotshall, Joe Friel, Kevin Davy, Lynn Toohey, David Jenkins, David Lugwig, Soren Toubro, George Williams, Luisa Raijman, Michael Crawford, Staffan Lindeberg, Ray Audette, Wolfgang Lutz, Ann Magennis, Art DeVany, Ashton Embry, Bill DiVale, Pat Gray, Char-lie Robbins, Irvin Liener, Nicolai Worm, Tony Sebastian, Robert Heaney, Stewart Truswell, and Pam Keagy. Finally, many thanks to my agents, Carol Mann and Channa Taub, for working indefatigably to get this book off the ground, and to my editor, Tom Miller, for his commitment to and enthusiasm for the Paleo Diet as a book concept.

PART ONE

Understanding the Paleo Diet

Introduction

This book represents the culmination of my lifelong interest in the link between diet and health, and of my fascination with anthropology and human origins. Although these scientific disciplines may at first appear to be unrelated, they are intimately connected. Our origins—the very beginnings of the human species—can be traced to pivotal changes in the diet of our early ancestors that made possible the evolution of our large, metabolically active brains. The Agricultural Revolution and the adoption of cereal grains as staple foods allowed us to abandon forever our previous hunter-gatherer lifestyle and caused the Earth’s population to balloon and develop into the vast industrial-technological society in which we live today.

The problem, as you will see in this book, is that we are genetically adapted to eat what the hunter-gatherers ate. Many of our health problems today are the direct result of what we do—and do not—eat. This book will show you where we went wrong—how the standard American diet and even today’s so-called healthy diets wreak havoc with our Paleolithic (Old Stone Age) constitutions. It will also show you how you can lose weight and regain health and well-being by eating the way our hunter-gatherer ancestors ate—the diet that nature intended.

The reason for this book is very simple: the Paleo Diet is the one and only diet that ideally fits our genetic makeup. Just 333 generations ago—and for 2.5 million years before that—every human being on Earth ate this way. It is the diet to which all of us are ideally suited and the lifetime nutritional plan that will normalize your weight and improve your health. I didn’t design this diet—nature did. This diet has been built into our genes.

More than twenty years ago, I read a book that endorsed vegetarian dieting titled Are You Confused? I suspect that this title pretty much sums up how many of us feel about the conflicting breakthroughs and mixed messages we hear every day from scientific and medical authorities on what we should and shouldn’t eat to lose weight and be healthy.

But here’s the good news. Over the last twenty-five years, scientists and physicians worldwide have begun to agree on the fundamental principle underlying optimal nutrition—thanks in part to my colleague Dr. S. Boyd Eaton of Emory University in Atlanta. In 1985, Dr. Eaton published a revolutionary scientific paper called “Paleolithic Nutrition” in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine suggesting that the ideal diet was to be found in the nutritional practices of our Stone Age ancestors. Although a few physicians, scientists, and anthropologists had been aware of this concept, it was Dr. Eaton’s writings that brought this idea to center stage.

Dr. Eaton applied the most fundamental and pervasive idea of all biology and medicine—the theory of evolution by natural selection—to diet and health. His premise was simple: our genes determine our nutritional needs. And our