The Paleo Diet Moves From the Gym to the Doctor’s Office
There certainly are areas worthy of study in evolutionary medicine, but the Paleo diet craze is not science, and it could be dangerous to your health.
Average life expectancy has gone up as we moved away from “paleo style” diets - that’s due to a number of factors, but a large measure of that life expectancy rise comes from our modern methods of food preservation, food selectivity, diet, and cooking.
During paleo times people were lucky to get beyond age forty, now average life expectancy is 78 or better last time I checked.
Those raw, indigestible sugars and proteins might cause you to lose weight, but there are substances in them that cause gas, bloat, harmful health effects, and damage to internal organs. I haven’t even mentioned the effects of germs yet either. You could lose weight at the price of your life.
Except there’s a small problem, according to one of the people who helped coin the term evolutionary medicine: No one actually practices evolutionary medicine because it’s only a theory.
Randolph Nesse, a professor of psychiatry and psychology at the University of Michigan, might be called a father of evolutionary medicine. He co-authored an influential paper in 1991 called “The Dawn of Darwinian Medicine,” which made a persuasive case for more research into how evolution by natural selection can help explain what makes us sick.
When Shots asked him about his thoughts on the Paleo Physicians Network, he said, “I don’t like it much.”
Nesse is all for basing studies off of the theory of evolutionary medicine, but he says those studies haven’t happened yet. “Doctors know very little about evolution so I would like to distance evolutionary medicine from any direct application in the clinic until we can do some real trials,” says Nesse.