The case against the Paleo regime

OThe most durable defenses in meat food is that we have evolved to do so and that we must therefore continue to do it. The assertion judges that our ancestors of monkey and hominin were frequent, even compulsory meat eaters, and that we therefore remain compulsory meat eaters. More recently, this idea was invoked to promote another magic diet that would reverse weight gain and maintain degenerative diseases at a distance, the so-called “Paleo”.

The argument focuses mainly over a period of our evolutionary history during which our brain has grown quickly while our digestive system is shrinking, which is taken to reflect a food transition from meat plants. From this, supporters suggest a causal link in which meat was the essential fuel that propelled the development of larger brains during our evolutionary transition from monkeys to abstract analysts.

But the evidence that eating meat requires smaller digestive paths is limited. About 400 to 600 calories and 10 to 20 grams of protein per 100 grams, nuts and seeds are low -volume and high density foods for which small stomachs are enough. Complete your greens with peanuts and honey, and you can do well as a compulsory and plump and compulsory plants.

Do you want more digital specificity? Suppose we explore the replacement of modern beef with various plant alternatives and calculate the quantity of each vegetable food we would need to fully match the calories and beef proteins. For each plant, we obtain two responses, one for the amount of plant we would need to consume to replace the energy found in the portion of beef, and another for the amount of plant we would need to consume to obtain the proteins found in a portion of beef. From these two responses, we choose the upper mass, to make sure that we cover both energy and proteins.

The environmental case against Paleo diets is strong.

To test if plants can correspond to the nutritional value of meat, I compared 59 plant foods with beef. Among these, seven – almonds, kidney beans, peanuts, pistachios, chickpeas, lenses and soy – are more protein and energy than beef, requiring an average consumption of 800 grams to replace a kilogram of beef. Six others – Barley, Hazelnuts, oats, nuts, buckwheat and Spelt – are only slightly less energy and protein than beef, requiring slightly more mass consumption (20% higher on average) to obtain energy and equivalent proteins found in the beef.

The idea that our diet requires meat thus confronts the roaring opposite winds. While the ancestors of the Pleistocene of these nuts and legumes differ considerably from their modern counterparts, the message is clear: if more than 2 plants out of 10 are just as rich in energy and protein as meat, the first hominins to eat plants could have investing relatively modest efforts in the collection of foods based on plants to obtain the equivalent protein found in meat in meat in meat in meat in meat in meat in meat in meat in meat in meat in meat in meat Meat, without any driving on serious risks. This is why I find the argument according to which the expansion of the brain of our ancestors had to rely on the voracious meat which eats without persuasive.

Even if our exceptional analytical skills required meat to fuel this evolutionary upgrade, given to what extent our lives are considerably biologically, socially, environmental, physiologically and nutritional, our lives are those of our evolutionary precocious, what is this association useful to guide food choices today?

In fact, 4.5 million patient health records show that modern meat eaters are faced with health risks, and not with advantages: increasing your consumption of non -transformed red meat by 100 grams per day increases your cardiovascular risk by 5 to 16%, and double the consumption of double red meat almost the chances of death. Even if meat has played a role in our evolution, therefore, its modern omnipresent overconsumption is accompanied by significant health costs.

The physiological and biochemical challenges of modern regimes must resolve and protect us – long lives, little need for physical activity and unlimited food supplies – certainly have little overlap with the challenges with which our ancestors are confronted: predation by greater predators, unpredictable food supply and brief and violent life.

The consumption of wild animals is mainly out of words for the question to be fulfilled.

With this, let’s review the Paleo diet. Suppose, despite these differences that change the situation, a paleo regime is wise nutritionally for modern humans; Is it deployable? I would not even say at least, because it is practically impossible to find meat, cereals or green vegetables which even vaguely resemble their paleolithic predecessors. For example, even the grass trash or bison meat with farm grass, the modern raw analog closest to the fauna of the chased Pleistocene, is always 2 to 3 times more serious than wild meat and surely even more distinct in micronutrients. Likewise, how similar their natural counterparts are, for example, arugula or hyper-high strawberries?

In my resolutely non -maintained courtyard, wild strawberries are also distinct in the form, in size, taste and abundance of their modern grotally huge counterparts of the supermarket because a modern dairy cow is from its offspring to the aurochs of the Holocene. An indirect indicator of this comparison is the difference between organic products and conventionally cultivated counterparts, where large differences in micronutrients are observed, but probably underestimate the differences we are looking for, because modern organic products are anything but wild. Although additional research is necessary, the case of a paleo diet which can be reasonably characterized as promoting health in the 21st century is still to be done. A recent effort to assess the Paleo diet concluded that current evidence is insufficient to recommend it even for diabetes management.

A previous research report described the Paleo diet as “an expensive and not adequate diet on the nutritional level with a high carbon footprint”. As for the chances of success of future efforts to corroborate the alleged advantages of the Paleo regime, I find that an effort was published in the journal Utopian studies.

Although the nutritional case for a paleo diet is disputed in the scientific literature, the environmental case against Paleo regimes is strong, mainly because of its strong accent on meat, in particular beef and other products of animal origin.

Of course, the environmental costs of Paleo diets are linked to mass production of beef, and not to the type of consumption of wild animals promoted by some in the “Meat is essential” camp, the most convincing and eloquent by Steve Rinella, Outdoorsman, author and founder of Meateater.

But the consumption of wild animals is mainly out of words for the question to be fulfilled, because we are interested in the statistics of the population, not the impressive skills of an ontodoorsman (which are very Dear to my heart, and which Rinellla puts beautifully and convincingly). If you do not know what distinction I draw here or why it is important, try to remember the last time you have killed your meat, run it on the ground, wear it on your back for several kilometers and cook it on an open fire, as Rinellla describes it. Also endearing and constraints of these exploits are not more relevant for modern regimes at the population level that Robin Hood only concerns modern tax policies.

This article was adapted with the permission of an extract from the MIT Press reader Eat planetary.

Lead image: Hmorena / Shutterstock

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  Published on July 21, 2025

  Gidon Eshel is a research teacher at Bard. He finished a post-doctorator at the Harvard Center for Planetary Physics, where he was a global and climate change of the Noaa, and received a Radcliffe scholarship in 2016. He is the author of Eat planetary.