Acting Paleo vs Living it

The Deceptive Allure of the Paleo Diet: Are We Solving the Problem or Just Playing Dress-Up?

We live in an age of instant solutions. A cough? A decongestant. An itch? An antihistamine. We’ve been trained to believe that every ailment has a quick, targeted fix. In our sterilized, fast-paced world, we see microbes as enemies to be annihilated with antibiotics and hand sanitizers. We demand comfort, control, and immediate results.

Into this modern predicament walks the paleo diet, promising a return to our roots and a solution to our woes: obesity, autoimmune disorders, low immunity. The promise is simple: eat more meat, fewer carbs, and voilà—you’ll be thinner, healthier, and cured.

And it works, to a point. People do lose weight. They often feel better. But is the paleo diet the true solution? Or are we, in our modern hubris, missing the entire point of what it meant to be paleolithic?

The Problem Isn't Just the Meat, It's the World We've Built Around It

Let’s be clear: the issue isn't necessarily with eating meat. The problem is the context.

If all eight billion of us adopted a meat-centric diet, the environmental cost would be staggering. The thousands of tons of water needed for a single kilogram of beef, the methane emissions, the polluted waterways—it’s an ecological spiral. We'd have to grow vast fields of plants to feed the animals that feed us, a wildly inefficient loop when we could simply eat the plants ourselves.

But let’s set aside the environmental argument for a moment. Let’s assume we have abundant resources.

The deeper deception lies in our misunderstanding of the paleolithic life we're trying to emulate.

The Paleolithic Reality: A World Away from Our Supermarkets

Close your eyes and picture paleolithic man. He did not live in a world of chairs, air conditioning, and supermarkets. His life was defined by a single, relentless driver: hunger. For him, hunger wasn't a fleeting sensation; it was the central problem of existence.

Did he eat meat? Yes. But did he feast on lean, sanitized cuts every day? Absolutely not.

Hunting was a brutal, life-threatening struggle. A deer or a mammoth wasn't a packaged product; it was a dangerous adversary. A successful hunt was rare, and even then, he had to compete with wolves and other predators. There was no refrigeration. He ate what he could, often consuming the entire animal—skin, hair, and all—because waste was a luxury he couldn't afford.

So, what did he eat most of? Plants.

In between hunts, he was a master forager. His life was spent in intimate contact with nature, gathering leaves, stems, shoots, tubers, and roots. He experimented constantly, learning through trial and error which plants were edible. His diet was overwhelmingly composed of fiber from a staggering variety of plant families.

The Lost Kingdom: Why Your Microbiome is Starving

This is the heart of the matter. The paleolithic man wasn’t just eating 30 different species of plants; he was consuming 30 to 80 different plant families.

Think of a plant family like Solanaceae (tomatoes, eggplants, peppers) or Cucurbitaceae (melons, cucumbers, gourds). Each family has its own unique signature of phytochemicals. To break down these diverse plants, the gut needs a correspondingly diverse army of microbes.

This is the magic we’ve completely lost.

Every wild plant the paleolithic man ate came with its own "workforce"—a rich microbiome living on its skin and leaves. When he ate a tomato, he wasn't just eating the fruit; he was ingesting the microbes that knew how to unlock its nutrients for his body. He was a walking, talking ecosystem, built from the fibers, juices, and microbial citizens of a hundred different plants.

Now, look at our modern "paleo" plate.

Our vegetables are sterilized, scrubbed clean of any microbial life. Our diets are pitifully limited, relying heavily on just a few families, primarily Poaceae—the grasses (wheat, rice, oats, barley, sugarcane). We’ve gone from 80 families to a measly five, with the grass family skyrocketing from less than 1% of a paleolithic diet to over 60% of ours.

The Paleolithic man might have derived 40-50% of his calories from meat but the rest was from a variety of plant material. To get the remaining 50% from plants that haven't been bred for high yields meant consuming a lot more plants than what we are consuming today. It was not about sterilized cleaned veggies, handpicked ripe fruits and packaged tubers and flours. It was about eating plants in the wild; leaves, shoots, raw berries, tubers, roots and if lucky perhaps a ripe fruit or two. As a result the quantity of vegetable matter consumed was quite high. But it was not just carbs, it was a lot of complex carbs and a lot more fiber. Furthermore, each leaf, root, berry and shoot came with its own microbiome ( as it wasnt sterilized)

Back to modern version of Paleo:

What do we have now? Paleo movement today is supposed to be mostly meat and very little of carbs. In letting go easy carbs we have mistakenly let go the most important bulk that constituted the diet of Paleolithic man- FIBER & MICROBIOME

Even the meat we eat is a pale imitation. The game our ancestors hunted was itself a product of a wildly diverse diet. The deer, the bison or the gazelle themselves foraged in the wild. In the wilderness with rich biodiversity they consumed a variety of herbs covering anywhere between 50 to 100 different plant families. That rich biodiversity was concentrated in their flesh.

Today, our farmed animals are fed a monotonous diet of… you guessed it, mostly Poaceae family members - predominantly Corn along with harvested dried , packaged and sterilized Fodder. Their meat is then processed, packaged, and further sterilized !!!

So, what are we left with? A diet with dead packaged no effort meat , critically low fiber, minimal plant diversity, and almost zero integrated & essential life-giving microbiome.

We have created an awesome sounding 'PALEO' diet with awful lot of ingredients. We’ve taken one component—the meat—and ignored the entire ecosystem that made it powerful.

The True Path: Seeking Discomfort to Find Comfort

Our modern diseases—autoimmune disorders, obesity, chronic inflammation—are not the problems themselves. They are manifestations. They are the result of an environment that is interacting with our ancient biology in a profoundly wrong way.

We have conditioned our world for maximum comfort, and in doing so, we have made our bodies weak and confused. Our hypothalamus doesn't know if it's summer or winter because every day is a controlled 23° C or 72° F. Our immune system never learns to fight because we sterilize every surface.

The ironic truth is that the comfort we seek is creating deep, systemic discomfort. The way out is to consciously seek the very discomfort we’ve been avoiding.

• Embrace the Elements: Get cold. Get hot. Let your body remember how to regulate itself. Turn off the AC and the heater sometimes.

• Ditch the Sanitizer: Let there be a little dirt. Get your hands in the soil. Expose yourself to the world and build a resilient immune system.

• Prioritize Biodiversity: The single most important change you can make is to diversify your plant intake. Aim for 30 different plants a week, not just 30 different cuts of meat.

• Respect Your Body’s Rhythms: Align with the sun. Experience true winters and true summers. Let your circadian rhythms and hormonal cycles recalibrate.

The paleo diet, as it's popularly sold, is not a farce as a concept, but we have made a mockery out of it. The modern version of this diet as followed by most is a lame attempt to imitate our ancestors while clinging to our sterilized, comfortable worldview.

The real paleo lesson isn't "eat more meat." It’s this: We are not separate from nature; we are of it. Our bodies need the chaotic, diverse, challenging environment they were designed for. We should stop trying to build a world to suit us. Instead, we should learn to adapt to the world we were made for. That is the true path to health.

Rather than imitate a time period that no longer exists,we should try to embrace the benefits that our modern advancements have given us access to. The Paleolithic man did not have access to global markets the way we have. Rather than try to imitate them poorly, we can structure our lives in a way that best suits our modern requirements.

More on this in the next blog. On how we can create a diet that a Paleolithic man would envy!