Free The Paleo Diet by Loren Cordain

allowed civilization—cities, culture, technological and medical achievements, and scientific knowledge—to develop. These were all good things. And yet, there was a huge downside. The Agricultural Revolution is also responsible for much of today’s obesity and chronic disease. The foods that agriculture brought us—cereals, dairy products, fatty meats, salted foods, and refined sugars and oils—proved disastrous for our Paleolithic bodies.
    Nobody could have anticipated this revolution or its consequences. The early farmers didn’t have some great plan to overthrow the old system. They were just looking for better ways to feed their families in the face of a rising population and dwindling food resources. It all started in the Middle East about 10,000 years ago, when some enterprising people started to sow and harvest wild wheat seeds. Later, they domesticated barley and a few legumes and then livestock—sheep, goats, and pigs. They still picked wild fruits and vegetables and still hunted wild game, but the die was cast; the diet had changed dramatically.

Hello Grains, Hello Health Problems
    The archaeological record clearly shows that whenever and wherever ancient humans sowed seeds (and replaced the old animal-dominated diets), part of the harvest included health problems. One physical ramification of the new diet was immediately obvious: early farmers were markedly shorter than their ancestors. In Turkey and Greece, for example, preagricultural men stood 5 feet 9 inches tall and women 5 feet 5 inches. By 3000 B.C., the average man had shrunk to 5 feet 3 inches and the average woman to 5 feet. But getting shorter—not in itself a health problem—was the least of the changes in these early farmers. Studies of their bones and teeth have revealed that these people were basically a mess: they had more infectious diseases than their ancestors, more childhood mortality, and shorter life spans in general. They also had more osteoporosis, rickets, and other bone mineral disorders, thanks to the cereal-based diets. For the first time, humans were plagued with vitamin- and mineral-deficiency diseases—scurvy, beriberi, pellagra, vitamin A and zinc deficiencies, and iron-deficiency anemia. Instead of the well-formed, strong teeth their ancestors had, there were now cavities. Their jaws, which were formerly square and roomy, were suddenly too small for their teeth, which overlapped each other.
    What had gone wrong? How could the benign practice of agriculture—harnessing nature’s bounty—have caused so many health problems? We now know that although the population was soaring, the quality of life—as well as the average life span—was in a nosedive. The new staples, cereals and starches, provided calories but not the vital nutrients of the old diet—lean meats, fruits, and vegetables. The result—ill health and disease.
    The health picture got worse over the years with the arrival of salt, fatty cheeses, and butter. Our ancestors learned to ferment grains, make beer, and eventually distill spirits. Selective breeding—and the innovation of feeding grain to livestock—steadily produced fatter pigs, cows, and sheep. Most meat wasn’t eaten fresh—fewer people hunted—but instead was pickled, salted, or smoked. Fruits and vegetables became luxuries—rare seasonal additions to the monotony of cereal and starch.
    More recently—just 200 years ago—the Industrial Revolution brought refined sugar, canned foods, and refined white flour to the average family’s table. Food was processed in earnest by the mid-twentieth century with the invention of trans-fatty acids, margarine, shortening, and combinations of these fats mixed with sugar, salt, other starches, high omega 6 vegetable oils, high-fructose corn syrup, and countless additives, preservatives, coloring agents, and emulsifiers.
    Imagine a Paleolithic human confronted with a Twinkie or even a pizza. He or she wouldn’t even recognize these modern-day treats as