Modern Caveman: The Complete Paleo Lifestyle Handbook

Chapter 1

Why Question the Status Quo?

William Dampier, Walter Raleigh, Abel Tasman, and James Cook are not exactly household names today, but they were explorers who chronicled their experiences in meeting people from hunter-gatherer cultures. One thing that stands out in their writings is that they uniformly described the hunter-gatherers they encountered all over the world as being healthy, strong, and well muscled.

In his A New Voyage Round the World, Dampier describes the Moskito people he encountered in the following manner: They are tall, well made, raw-boned, lusty, strong, and nimble of foot. Abel Tasman’s description of the Maori people of New Zealand gives one the impression of Olympic gymnasts or high-level mixed martial arts fighters. Joseph Bank’s description of Australians encountered on James Cook’s journey notes that they were of a common size, lean and seemed active and nimble.

This is hardly a fluke. Prior to the dawn of agriculture, humans had brains 20 percent larger on average than we do today.¹ Considering that hunter-gatherers were the original inventors who laid the groundwork for language and art that we have inherited, it might not be surprising they had larger brains.

Though there are a number of theories for our decreased cranial capacity, and scientists like everyone else are often constrained to protect people’s feelings, the predominant theory is that the grain-based civilization enabled larger population densities and a specialized world in which average people didn’t have to be as smart to survive.² Even among modern populations, the negative nutritional impact on the brain of excluding meat from the diet in favor of grains and legumes can be seen quite starkly.³

Because this point is debated, it might not be enough to convince you. So let me ask: When was the last time you visited the dentist, and how much did it cost? From fossil studies, it has been consistently demonstrated that our preagricultural forebears had a virtual absence of tooth decay.⁴ Scientists analyzing skeletons from Sudan determined that the percentage of the population afflicted with tooth decay was less than 1 percent as hunter-gatherers, but the predominance of dental caries skyrocketed to 20 percent of the population upon the adoption of grain-based agriculture.⁵ Cavities are something we accept as a fact of life today, but given a diet that matches our evolutionary character, they either do not occur or are healed as they happen. Yes, given an ancestral diet, our bodies can actually heal cavities.⁶, ⁷

One very common objection to caveman diets is that the diets were fine for cavemen in the short run because cavemen only lived to be twenty-five to thirty-five years old. This line of reasoning reveals a misunderstanding of both statistics and causality. In hunter-gatherer cultures without access to medical care, child mortality is very high, with about half of children dying before age fifteen. This is what you’d expect in a relatively primitive environment without access to vaccines or modern medicine. How many of our children (and mothers) would have died except for modern surgery and the Caesarian section? How many of our children would have perished from whooping cough, tetanus, or smallpox without vaccines? How many of our children would have died from ear infections or infections from a compound fracture were it not for modern antibiotics? Yes, the average lifespan of a caveman was twenty-five to thirty-five years but only because of infant and child mortality in primitive medical conditions.

But as hunter-gatherers get older and successfully avoid myriad hazards, their life expectancy increases to about age seventy-two.⁸ Though this isn’t exactly ancient by modern standards, it’s also a lot older than stereotypes would lead us to believe and plenty old enough to indicate that their diet didn’t kill them off by age thirty-five. This is especially true given their lack of access to medical care. If you take away antibiotics, life-saving surgeries following accidents, vaccinations, antivenin for snakebites, and similar innovations, it’s doubtful our average lifespan would be very long either.

In fact, the results of a comprehensive archeological symposium on the health of Paleolithic and Mesolithic humans concluded, Taken as a whole, these indicators fairly clearly suggest an overall decline in the quality—and probably in the length—of human life associated with the adoption of agriculture.⁹

The aforementioned archaeological symposium took place in the 1980s, long before anyone put forward the idea of paleo, ancestral, or caveman diets or seriously considered that a hunter-gatherer diet might be ideal for our nutritional needs, yet the book compiled from that symposium sounds like an advertisement for such diets. For example:

In Upper Paleolithic times nutritional health was excellent. The evidence consists of extremely tall stature from plentiful calories and protein; maximum skull base height from plentiful protein, vitamin D, and sunlight in early childhood; and very good teeth and large pelvic depth from adequate protein and vitamins in later childhood and adolescence. . . . There is no clear evidence for any endemic disease.¹⁰

In another part of the book, the researchers point out that the switch from a hunter-gatherer diet sacrificed the nutritional value of the individual in order to support a higher population density.

Early nonagricultural diets appear to have been high in minerals, protein, vitamins, and trace nutrients, but relatively low in starch. In the development toward agriculture there is a growing emphasis on starchy, highly caloric food of high productivity and storability, changes that are not favorable to nutritional quality but that would have acted to increase carrying capacity.

This, then, is the key to understanding the current dominant diet recommendations supported by governments. These recommendations focus on caloric sources such as grains that can be produced abundantly and cheaply, supporting a higher number of human beings at lower cost. But these are the same caloric sources used to fatten up feedlot cattle for slaughter, representing a preference for quantity over quality. Obviously, the higher population density of humans that agriculture enabled came with benefits in terms of leisure, specialization, and technological progress. I am not advocating a return to the primitive. Rather, my aim is much smaller: to persuade you that your individual health would benefit from adopting a modern caveman diet.

My Saga

Toward that end, I am going to explain the personal saga that got me interested in ancestral diets in the first place. Along the way, I will explain what led me to question the status quo and why you should question it too.

At the ripe old age of thirty-six, my primary care doctor informed me that I had borderline high blood pressure and if I didn’t get my cholesterol under control, I’d be dead in short order. My inflammation markers were sky-high as well. The thing is, I had been eating what might have been the world’s most politically correct diet. I was already eating a diet that was supposed to keep my cholesterol down.

I was eating tofurkey. I was eating lots of whole grains. In fact, I would literally take whole wheat kernels and cook them mixed with (heart healthy) oatmeal in a thermos overnight. I eschewed all forms of animal fat and only ate healthy fats like canola oil. I drank soy milk and rice milk. I would make pot after pot of beans rather than eat the meat I had been told would kill me. I combined it with corn bread to make a complete protein. I was very close to being a vegetarian.

When I explained this to my doctor, he shrugged and said I was doing all the right things but simply had bad genes and would need to go on statin drugs right away and stay on them for the rest of my life.

What’s worse, even though my doctor’s reasoning was incorrect, I could feel in my own body that I was heading nowhere fast. Even though I had been an accomplished martial artist (and was still actively involved in martial arts), had run hurdles in high school and college, and had generally maintained what everyone says is an ideal lifestyle, I was in pain every day.

My joints hurt, particularly my knees. The bottoms of my feet were so tender that I would wince when I stepped. I had nearly constant gastrointestinal pain that would often debilitate me for days. I kept trying to eat vegetables, but my gastrointestinal tract couldn’t hack most of them, so I took vitamins.

I had no doubt that my doctor was right about my eminent demise, but I was unconvinced about the need for statins and doubly convinced that there was nothing wrong with my genes. One thing I knew was that Mother Nature didn’t invest millions of years in my evolution so my genome would be incompatible with a healthy lifestyle.

So I started digging. My doctor had told me that my bad genes were going to kill me in spite of eating a diet that would make the American Heart Association proud, and his solution to the problem was to give me drugs that would compensate for my bad genes. It never even occurred to him to question the diet. When I looked up the potential side effects of the statin drugs my doctor wanted to prescribe, they included memory loss, impotence, muscle pain, and more. It seemed to me that medication of that sort should be an absolute last resort because it had the potential to make my life barely worth living at an early age.

Remembering my experience with lactose and the food pyramid (I am lactose intolerant, so it is absurd for the government to specify that I need milk to be healthy), and having read a couple of philosophy books in my life, I considered that it might be time to question my premises. That is, it was time to question the premise that the food recommendations put forward by the USDA and my doctor were optimal for my genes rather than question the quality of my genes.

Thus, I embarked on a mission to understand what was wrong with my diet. Though my home lab would impress a kid, it wouldn’t impress a scientist at a modern university, because the technology is largely 1950s and homemade. Instead of a gas chromatograph and mass spectrometer, I use thin-layer chromatography and a homemade light spectrometer that uses a prism from an old periscope. I used microcontrollers, heating elements, and an old cooler to make my own incubator. My microbiological techniques were straight out of the 1940s and 1950s. Still, I set out on my quest with the gear I could build myself and a desire to figure out what was wrong.

Because I had so many intestinal problems and was often in pain from them, I figured that would be a good place to start. I remembered reading an old medical book from the 1800s in which doctors described a phenomenon known to them as autointoxication, in which ordinary gut bacteria went awry and made people sick. Doctors did a lot of purging back in those days—usually with nasty stuff nobody should ever consume—but purging was the treatment, so I tested the results of taking saline laxatives, and sure enough, fasting and then purging with a laxative made me feel better until shortly after I started eating again.

I realized that, political correctness aside, something was wrong with what I was eating. I won’t bore you with the endless details of my experiments in a primitive laboratory and will instead cut to the chase of the personal saga. Within a few years, I had made headway and was doing somewhat better by eliminating soy and wheat from my diet, but it took one more step for me to make the leap into ancestral diet.

Though I had made some progress in researching diet on my own the hard way, a few years ago my friend Adrianne asked my opinion on the theories of a veterinarian who calls himself Dogtor J. Though my research had produced a number of valuable conclusions—including the finding that I shouldn’t be eating soy or wheat—those conclusions weren’t linked by a cohesive principle that would allow me to extrapolate and generalize, because I was mired in germ theory (the interactions between food, gut bacteria, the compounds they produce, and the effects on health) and had insufficient resources to move forward. Dogtor J provided the unifying insight linking my discoveries together into something that made sense: evolution.

Dogtor J’s ideas are the same fundamentals that underlie caveman diet: Evolution isn’t a fast process, so we are genetically optimized for the diet consumed by our distant hunter-gatherer forebears. Depending on which authority is consulted, the human family tree separated from other primates about four and a half million years ago, whereas modern agricultural staples entered our diet only six thousand years ago or even less in many cases.

As a result, our predominant genes are more compatible with the diet of hunter-gatherers than with the heavily grain-based diets we currently consume. In other words, instead of faulting our genes for being incompatible with the diet we feed cattle in order to fatten them up for slaughter, we should adapt our diet to meet the needs of the genes we already have.

How is my health? Eleven years have passed since my doctor’s dire prediction. I am taking no regular medications. I have only rarely been ill at all. I no longer have constant pain, my digestion works great, and I feel better than I did when I was thirty. My blood pressure is what it was when I entered a military academy at age eighteen.

My life has been transformed, and I believe what is contained in this book can transform your life as well.

Question Everything

The man who was my doctor when I was thirty-six is a good man. He’s a man of science, absolutely brilliant, and undoubtedly well-intentioned. If I were to die, I wouldn’t mind having him raise my child in my stead. How is it that he gave me such bad advice?

As a student of science, I have read hundreds of books on the sciences—including books that are hundreds of years old. One thing that stands out is that at each stage of our development, we considered ourselves to be at the pinnacle of human knowledge while ridiculing the knowledge accepted only a few decades prior.

This is evident in those sciences pertaining to human health. It is interesting to read a medical book from the 1920s excoriate prior practitioners for using leeches while simultaneously advocating the use of arsenic to treat infections. Those doctors had no idea that today we would look with horror upon the mercury and arsenic they used routinely. Most people of science today act without realization that one hundred years from now, it is likely that much of what they believe so steadfastly today will also have been proven wrong.

Another thing that stands out, oddly enough, is an amazing degree of conformity with the accepted ideas of the day. Sometimes progress in the most basic of matters takes decades. One instance that comes to mind is ulcers. A doctor in the 1950s demonstrated quite clearly that stomach ulcers were caused by a bacterium and could be cured with antibiotics. Because he stood outside the mainstream beliefs of his day, he was ignored, and ulcers were treated surgically (and many people suffered and died needlessly) for many decades thereafter until—of all things—an article in the National Enquirer called attention to the pointless costs and deaths of this modality.¹¹

Conformity in sciences is the rule rather than the exception. Conformity is not always bad, because it allows us to have a society in which we are confident in our ability to be physically safe. For example, almost everyone agrees that attacking other people is wrong. Without broad conformity on this issue, it is doubtful human societies could even exist. Even so, enforced conformity has likely been a major cause of delays in the advancement of human knowledge in nearly every field, and these delays harm people who could benefit from improved knowledge. No field makes this more obvious today than the field of diet.

In 2012, Dr. John Ioannidis of Stanford University and Joshua Nicholson of Virginia Tech published a paper entitled Research Grants: Conform and Be Funded.¹² Though human limitations mean any analysis of practically anything will be less than perfect, the authors demonstrated that in the life sciences, the most influential, innovative, and cited research was the least likely to be funded and that funding tended to enforce conformity with existing views.

The unfortunate truth of their contention can be demonstrated by the fact that our medical, scientific, and lay communities uncritically accept a number of premises regarding health that are far from absolutely true and often outright false. In fact, if you have previously accepted the current standard views on diet and health, you will soon read convincing evidence that much of what you have been told is wrong.

Obviously, it is not practical for each of us to individually confirm every belief that we hold. Not only would it be inordinately time consuming but it’s also not realistic to expect that we all have the tools, equipment, training, and funding to double-check things. So we rely on experts. The problem is that the experts also rely on experts. The end results were my being in constant pain and my doctor recommending the very things that had put me in that condition in the first place—and the recommendation to take medication that had the potential to destroy the quality of my life as a solution.

Why I Wrote This Book

After exploring Dogtor J’s ideas, I started finding some books on Paleolithic or caveman diet. The books were very valuable in describing in detail the reasons why we shouldn’t be eating grain, but these books also had frustrating deficiencies. For example, though the books posited that we ought not eat legumes, they tended to focus their reasoning for that proscription on soy alone and ignored detailing why we shouldn’t eat other legumes.

But perhaps the largest deficiency lay in the fact that although the authors at least had the fortitude to effectively question an entire scientific establishment on the wisdom of eating grains, legumes, and dairy, they uncritically accepted the established party lines on saturated fat, cholesterol, and salt among other things. They ignored or barely addressed the role of diet in mental health and completely ignored the role of gut microbes in health. They failed to distinguish between omega-3s from plants and omega-3s from animals—and that distinction is crucial. In some cases, their dietary lists even excluded foods that cause no problems and have been shown to be healthy. In other cases, the guidelines specified foods that were too expensive for most people to afford—particularly for a family. Most of the books also ignored the flip side of diet: exercise.

So, that was why I wrote this book. The underlying evolutionary principles of a caveman diet are entirely valid, but we do not live in Paleolithic times; the recommendations have to be consonant with what is practical and affordable for people. Furthermore, existing works in my opinion are sound to the extent that they question established dietary guidelines, but they do not go far enough in their questioning.

Nature is an amazing artisan. You were designed to be healthy, strong, and happy. You are already halfway there because you have nature’s amazing design in the DNA contained within the cells of your body. All you have to do is give that DNA the materials and conditions it was optimized to use, and you’ll see the results.

Finally, I have a disclaimer before we dive into the meat of things. This book represents my opinions based on research. I am not a medical doctor and nothing in this book is intended to diagnose or treat any disease. Parts of this book discuss exercise. You should get a physical exam and clearance from your doctor before undertaking any exercise program.

¹ J. Hawkes, Selection for Smaller Brains in Holocene Human Evolution.

² D. Bailey and D. Geary, Hominid Brain Evolution: Testing Climatic, Ecological and Social Competition Models, Human Nature 20 (2009): 67-79.

³ A. Vogiatzoglou et al., Vitamin B12 Status and Rate of Brain Volume Loss in Community-Dwelling Elderly, Neurology 71, no. 11 (2008): 826-32.

⁴ K. Gruber, Oral Mystery: Are Agriculture and Rats Responsible for Tooth Decay? Scientific American, February 6, 2013.

⁵ D. L. Greene G. H. Ewing, and G. J. Armelagos, Dentition of a Mesolithic Population from Wadi Halfa, Sudan. American Journal of Physical Anthropology 27 (1967): 41-55.

⁶ W. Price, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration (La Mesa, CA: Price-Pottenger Nutrition, 2008).

⁷ R. Nagel, Cure Tooth Decay: Heal And Prevent Cavities With Nutrition—Limit and Avoid Dental Surgery and Fluoride, 2d ed. (Ashland, OR: Golden Child Publishing, 2010).

⁸ M. Gurven and H. Kaplan, Longevity Among Hunter-Gatherers: A Cross-Cultural Examination, Population and Development, Review 33, no. 2 (2007): 321-65.

⁹ M. N. Cohen MN and G. J. Armelagos, Paleopathology and the Origins of Agriculture (London: Academic Press, 1984).

¹⁰ Ibid.

¹¹ P. Ewald, The New Germ Theory of Disease (New York: Anchor Books, 2002).

¹² J. Ionnidis and J. Nicholson, Research Grants: Conform and Be Funded, Nature 492 (2012): 34-36.

Chapter 2

Fundamental Premises of the Modern Caveman Diet

Evolution, Groups, and Individuals

The fundamental premise of the caveman diet is as simple as evolution. In fact, it is evolution. Human beings separated from other primates somewhere in the neighborhood of four million years ago. Over those four million years, we coevolved with a hunter-gatherer diet. Over the past 6,000 to 10,000 years, we have developed large-scale agriculture that has shifted our dietary intake from that of hunter-gatherers to that of an agricultural and herding society. The idea behind the caveman diet is that evolution is not a particularly fast process and that, in general, our bodies are better adapted to thrive on what we consumed for 98 percent of our specifically human evolution as opposed to what we have consumed for the latter 2 percent of our evolution.

Every other idea in the caveman diet is a corollary of this evolutionary premise. In general, caveman diet supposes that the predominant foods of civilization combined with our current sedentary lifestyle gives rise to the so-called diseases of civilization, such as metabolic disorder.

The premises of a caveman diet are imperfect. For example, early humans occupied a variety of ecological niches. One group of humans may have eaten more seafood, whereas another would have eaten more herbivores. Humans closer to the equator would have had more access to fruit, whereas humans closer to the Arctic would have had little access. As a result, there would be differences in adaptation.

These differences in adaptation can be seen in individual differences in food tolerance to this very day. Because of this, it is impossible for me to say with extreme specificity that you, in particular, should eat lobster. For all I know, you may have a shellfish allergy that would make eating lobster your last fatal mistake. Therefore, while there are matters I can and will address broadly, it is more important that you pay attention to the principles rather than the specifics.

A related imperfection in the caveman diet is that it fails to account for individual differences in genetics. Though evolution is slow, it can respond swiftly in the face of selection pressures. You can see this in our selective breeding of everything from chickens to crops. If you feed people a diet containing something harmful, over time those who survive will be better adapted to the new diet than those who died. This is no different from the phenomenon of antibiotic resistance. A given antibiotic may kill nearly all bacteria of a certain variety, but those that survive will ultimately give rise to descendants who aren’t harmed by that antibiotic at all. This level of adaptation does not, however, render the historical diet harmful; it just makes the new diet less than immediately lethal.

One example of this is the ability to digest lactose. Though most humans worldwide can’t digest lactose by the time they reach adulthood, there are segments of humanity who digest lactose with sufficient ease to keep ice cream manufacturers in business. In fact, individuals from the various segments of humanity who have the ability to digest lactose have gained that ability through distinctly different genetic pathways,¹ demonstrating convergent evolution within a relatively short time span of 6,000 to 10,000 years.

This indicates that, to some degree anyway, human evolution has adapted to cope with the foodstuffs of the agricultural and herding diet that followed our caveman diet. This means that though the caveman diet has a scientific basis that is as sound as evolution, there will be aspects that will differ as a result of more recent evolutionary pressures affecting humanity in different locales.

Every human is a unique individual and a product of a slightly different genetic path than any other person on earth. Though some broad correlations can be drawn between certain dietary adaptations and population groups, such correlations are irrelevant on an individual basis because nobody completely conforms to any given average. As but one example, my ancestry is wholly European and about half of that is from Ireland and Britain. Based on this, you’d assume I can digest lactose, but, in fact, I cannot. So the degree and details of post-Paleolithic adaptations are very individual and can’t be easily ascertained simply on the basis of superficial factors.

Blood type diets also fall short. Though they attempt to compensate for differences in individual genetics, the science behind them is scanty at best, and the fundamental premises are flawed. For example, the blood type diet assumes that blood type O is the oldest human blood type, whereas microbiological analysis indicates that type A is likely the oldest.² There is no correlation between dietary adaptations for which we can test and a person’s blood type except in a fashion that is so broad as to be useless to an individual.

So a common failure of approaches to the caveman diet is that they assume all humans are identical, that all of their evolution stopped 10,000 years ago, and that thus they should all eat the same things. Though this is certainly broadly applicable, when you get down to details, every person is a bit different. Even so, the primary premise of the caveman diet is that even though there has been some evolution since caveman times, the degree of evolution has not been so great as to negate the benefits of eating as our ancestors did.

The Core Caveman Diet

When people ask me to explain the caveman diet, they are shocked that the explanation is so simple. You can eat meat, fish, eggs, fruits, nuts, and vegetables. In other words, you can eat everything that a hunter-gatherer in the Paleolithic era could have