The Nutritional Institute

TOTAL SPORTS PERFORMANCE - Dec 2014/Jan 2015

The Paleo diet has progressed from being the name given to a historic era, to a best-selling book, to a collection of so-called Paleo products and extreme profiting. Ian Craig describes what the Paleo diet is and what it is not and what it means to the athlete. 

The title of this article is named after one of my favourite books, The Paleo Diet for Athletes by Loren Cordain and Joe Friel. It is based on one of my second favourite books, The Paleo Diet by Loren Cordain! The premise of the original book by Cordain, top researcher in evolutionary medicine, was that we should be eating more like our ancient ancestors who lived 10,000 to 20,000 year ago in the pre-agricultural, hunter-gatherer era. What these hunter-gatherers ate was just that: what they could effectively kill and gather from nearby areas. It included lean meat, poultry, seafood (if they lived near water), fresh fruit and vegetables and nuts and seeds. Very significantly for our modern learning, was that they didn’t consume grains, legumes (beans, lentils, peas), dairy, refined sugars, processed foods, or many high-glycemic fruit and vegetables. 

Cordain’s original book, The Paleo Diet, when it was released in 2002, took the dietary world by storm – it made a lot of sense to a lot of people and influenced significant dietary changes. The story behind the second book with Joe Friel is that Cordain, who was old friends with the famous triathlon coach, challenged Friel to try his diet for a month. Joe had been eating the standard high-carbohydrate diet, that was common with athletes at the time, and very much still is. For the month, he traded in his breads, cereals and pastas for lean meats and vegetables; at first he felt much worse in energy, but as he drew into the third week of the trial, his energy soared in a way that he hadn’t experienced for years. He was 51 at the time and he had not trained from more than 12 hours per week for years – in week 4, he managed to complete 16 hours, without repercussion of injury or illness. Joe was therefore sold on the idea and went about using it with his athletes. However, what he found out was that some of the athletes struggled with it at the higher intensities and volumes of training. The reason for this is because carbohydrate is the first choice of fuel for exercise, especially when training hard. So, for them to give up their grains and starchy vegetables, meant more reliance on fat metabolism, which is a much slower fuel.  

Hence, The Paleo Diet for Athletes was born in 2005. The principle of this diet was to follow the original diet to a point, but the more training that was completed, the more carbohydrate should be supplemented into the diet. This could be achieved by eating a bit more fruit or starchy vegetables or by including some brown rice with dinner or some oatmeal with breakfast. 

Paleo today

I think, so far so good. To an extent, we should have left things there and accepted Cordain’s easy to understand principles of what is Paleo. But almost a decade has passed and an awful lot of money has been earned from the term ‘Paleo’. 1001 Paleo products have been developed in the name of this evolutionary period in time – bars, shakes, cereals, nut butters, coconut creams, milks and butters, dried fruit, the list goes on. 

My trouble with these commercialised products that are supposed to represent a by-gone era, is that, no matter how hard I try, I can’t picture a caveman pulling open a wrapper of a protein bar for his mid-morning snack, nor can I imagine his wife spreading almond butter on flax crackers to share with the cave-kids. 

In the excitement to make a few bucks, we’ve forgotten that inclusion on Cordain’s list; processed foods. Sure, protein bars that use dried fruit, nuts and egg protein powder, but no added rubbish, are almost always better than the offerings from the muscle brands, but don't call it Paleo. Just call them healthy protein bars, for goodness sake! 

Is Paleo high-protein or high-fat?

The modern-day diets are no better. Somehow, probably because a 20,000 year old way of eating is lower in carbs than today’s dietetic thumb sucks, high-protein or high-fat, low-carb diets are being referred to as ‘Paleo’. For example, prestigious professor of sports science at Cape Town University, Tim Noakes, has recently gone on the dietary high-fat/low-carb band waggon. The fact that he has no nutritional training doesn’t seem to matter, but his ‘revolutionary’ dietary approach has been termed as Paleo. Besides his ‘carb-free’ pasta, bread and tortillas, the signature chocolate smoothie in his best-selling recipe book contains 150ml full-cream milk, 50g butter, 200ml coconut cream and 1 tbsp hot chocolate powder. Unless the cavemen have started milking cows and raiding wheat fields, I don’t see the connection, although this particular smoothie might do a pretty good job of putting you off dairy for life. 

To finish, I would like to reference a new Paleo book, published in 2013, that does make some sense. Paleofantasy by Marlene Zuk, professor of ecology, evolution and behaviour at the University of Minnesota, suggests that we’re perhaps not so stuck in our hunter-gather genes than these Paleo principles would have us believe. In other words, it is perfectly possible that some of us can gain nourishment from more modern forms of agriculture, such as dairy farming and grain production because our genes have shifted to accommodate the changes in dietary behaviour over the past several thousand years. I will just interject here to say that it is probably in our best interests to freeze these evolutionary developments at 100 years ago – what we have done to our diet in the last century simply dishonours our ancient ancestors.