There is no single "Hunter-Gatherer Diet". There have been innumerable hunter-gatherer tribes who ate different foods depending on their time in history, geography, season, and culture. Yet they had many commonalities in what they ate -- and didn't eat.
Similarly, this growing evolutionary movement goes under many names. Here's my list. Am I missing any? What other terms does this movement go by? Are their more neighboring tribes? What terms do you use and why?
- Ancestral (Ancestral Diet, Ancestral Health)
- Caveman (Caveman Diet)
- Evolution (Evolutionary Fitness, The New Evolution Diet, The Evolution Diet)
- Human (Human Diet)
- Hunter-Gatherer (Hunter-Gatherer Diet)
- MovNat (MovNat Lifestyle)
- Native (Native Nutrition, Native Diet)
- Neanderthal (Neaderthin, Neaderthal Diet)
- Paleo (Paleo Diet, Paleolithic Diet, Paleolithic Lifestyle, Zone Paleo)
- Prehistoric (Prehistoric Diet)
- Primal (Primal Diet, Primal Lifestyle)
- Stone Age (Stone Age Diet)
- Miscellaneous: Meatatarian, Comanche Diet, Pre-Columbian
And approaches that share some commonalities, despite including more grains and dairy:
- Warrior Diet
- Weston A. Price / WAPF
List updated on 07/05/10.
Comments
I found this page while
I found this page while doing a Google search for my company "New Evolution". Thought it was kind of funny, I'm actually a fan of the diet/life style. And I remember seeing you on the Colbert Report too!
Hilarious. It all comes full
Hilarious. It all comes full circle.
I eat in a way that I labeled
I eat in a way that I labeled a "Pre-Columbian" diet. I wasn't cognizant of all variations of the Paleo diet when I came up with this.My eating style came about from being diagnosed with type 2 diabetes a few years ago. I am native American on one side of my family and had watched diabetes become epidemic in the Native community in my lifetime. I had thought I had dodged the bullet because of my Anglo side, but no such luck..I didn't want to become dependent on diabetes drugs, so I tackled the problem by reasoning that there was a time (before the reservation days) when type 2 diabetes was virtually unknown in the native population. So I dropped everything that was not a food source before Europeans showed up. Fortunately I live in an area where buffalo and venison are relatively easy to come by, and I was able to access traditional vegetable foods without too much trouble.Along with this I began practicing intermittent fasting on the chance that there was something to the "thrifty gene" theory.Consequently, all my blood glucose readings and my A 1c tests have been completely normal for the last couple of years.
Good post!Warrior diet isn't
Good post!Warrior diet isn't technically hunter-gatherer. It incorporates intermittent fasting but Hofmekler is OK with grains and some dairy. Good diet with a lot of useful principles in it, but us Paleo types will need to read between the lines of his recommendations.The CrossFit community does a variation called Zone-Paleo. This is Paleo diet in Zone proportions. Not exactly primative, but helpful for many.John, would you agree with me that "Paleo" is becoming the catch-all name for these types of diets? Pros and cons to this?Adam
Fed by Sun and Air as
Fed by Sun and Air as well
Neanderthin (but it seems
Neanderthin (but it seems to lack credibility)
Neanderthin started it all
Neanderthin started it all for me. Some other names:Native Nutrion or Native DietNeanderthal DietPrehistoric DietThe Evolution DietMeatatarian Since I live in Texas, I tell friends and family (who think I am weird) that I follow "The Comanche Diet" as they ate almost exclusively meat from buffalo.
French doctor Jean Seignalet
French doctor Jean Seignalet called it the «ancestral diet» and claimed it could cure a lot of auto-immune diseases.
Ancestral
Ancestral
I have been using Primal so
I have been using Primal so far because I got started on this using Mark Sisson's The Primal Blueprint to get started on it. But as terms go, I like Ancestral. Everyone likes knowing "where they came from" and Ancestral sends us back to what our forefathers and such were doing to stay not only healthy, but alive!
Right, of course -- added.
Right, of course -- added.
The nice thing about the term
The nice thing about the term "Ancestral" is that it encompasses the entire phylogenetic history of each individual to which the term applies. So the ancestral diet of John the hunter-gatherer includes himself (ontogenetics), his parents and grandparents (epigenetics), and his ethnicity, species, genus, family, order, class, phylum, and kingdom (phylogenetics). We breath oxygen using lungs because we are a terestrial tetrapod. We need to get B12 from meat because we are human, we need adequate sun to make vitamin D because we are primates, we are not adapted (much) to eating grains (especially those containing gluten--pigeons and mice are adapted to eat grains), we are not adapted to eat bamboo leaves because they contain incredibly high levels of cyanide (pandas are adapted to eating bamboo and have microogranisms in their gut that detoxify the cyanide), etc...None of the other terms (except perhaps evolutionary) captures this perspective. They are either too narrow such as "stone age", "paleolithic", "cave man", & etc. and focus primarily on a period from about 2.5 mya to the present, or they are too broad such as evolutionary which encompases things way beyond the scope of our phylogenetic history, such as how super bugs evolved because of overperscription of antibiotics.I still love all of these terms for what they are accomplishing in overturning CW, but I had to share my reasons for prefering ancestral.
Points well made. I also
Points well made. I also like that ancestral doesn't sound gimmicky.