A New Health Report Ranks The Paleo Diet Dead Last—But Is It Really That Bad? (2024)

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A New Health Report Ranks The Paleo Diet Dead Last—But Is It Really That Bad? ›

Among some of Paleo's criticized points: It's hard to sustain, too high in fat, and shuns entire food groups often thought to be healthy. Even the Macrobiotic diet, which one panel expert called "a mix of sound dietary guidance, mysticism, folklore, and nonsense," ranked higher.

This diet can put you at risk for deficiencies in calcium and vitamin D, which are critical to bone health. At the same time, you may consume saturated fat and protein far above recommended levels due to eating so much meat. This can cause an increased risk of kidney and heart disease and certain cancers.

The bottom line

A paleo diet may help you lose weight or keep a healthy weight. It also may have other helpful health effects. But there are no long-term clinical studies about the benefits and potential risks of the diet.

The paleo diet can't be a faithful replication of what our ancient cousins ate because there was no single Paleolithic diet — their diets varied wildly. Also, the plants and meat we eat today differ from those available to our ancestors. And the paleo diet bans legumes and grains, which some Paleolithic people did eat.

Additionally, raising animals for food requires large amounts of feed, land, and water, and it often leads to deforestation and biodiversity loss. Given its emphasis on animal proteins, the Paleo diet can have a relatively high carbon footprint.

Both paleo and keto diets have anti-inflammatory properties but work differently in managing inflammation and related health conditions. The paleo diet is better for managing autoimmune diseases, while the keto diet is better for managing diabetes and metabolic syndrome.

Foods that can be inflammatory: Highly processed foods, like corn chips, fried foods and too much red meat, sugar, wheat, rye and barley in people with gluten allergies of celiac disease.

Although many humans choose to eat both plants and meat, earning us the dubious title of “omnivore,” we're anatomically herbivorous. The good news is that if you want to eat like our ancestors, you still can: Nuts, vegetables, fruit, and legumes are the basis of a healthy vegan lifestyle.

The Paleo diet not only misunderstands how our own species, the organisms inside our bodies and the animals and plants we eat have evolved over the last 10,000 years, it also ignores much of the evidence about our ancestors' health during their—often brief—individual life spans (even if a minority of our Paleo ...

Paleo recipes can almost always be used as clean eating recipes because the paleo diet focuses on similar standards for ingredients. However, clean eating recipes cannot always be used for paleo because they may have grains, legumes, and dairy.

Why are people questioning the Paleo diet? ›

There is however concern that individuals following the Paleo diet may be at risk of falling short of obtaining important nutrients and fibres from whole grains, high fibre grain foods and legumes which may have a negative impact on chronic disease risk over the lifespan^{(6, 18-23)}.

“The paleo diet is all about unprocessed, natural foods: Think vegetables, fruit, meat, seafood, natural fat sources, nuts, seeds, and eggs,” says Ginger Hultin, RDN, nutritionist based in Seattle.

Strict paleo dieters exclude all grains from their diets — including rice — primarily due to their high phytate content. Although it's technically prohibited, many people still consume small amounts of white rice while following a paleo diet because it's lower in phytates, compared with other types.

Symptoms can include headaches, fatigue , weakness, hazy thinking (brain fog) and irritability, which can result from reducing carbohydrate intake. For somen, low-carb flu can take days to subside, but for others it can take a couple of weeks. Some may not even experience these symptoms are at all.

However, more research is needed to fully understand how the paleo diet affects gut health. Some research findings suggest that following a paleo diet long-term could negatively affect gut health by reducing the abundance of beneficial bacteria and increasing numbers of TMA-producing Hungatella bacteria.

This makes sense Paleo replaces grains with fat, which is much more calorie-dense, so the volume of food consumed on Paleo is often much smaller. This obviously makes for smaller bowel movements, especially if you're also going from eating a calorie surplus to eating a calorie deficit (less food overall).

This diet may lead to significant weight loss (without calorie counting) and major improvements in health. Anthropologists also speculate that the paleo diet influenced anatomic and physiologic changes in humans, including increased brain size and reduced gastrointestinal tract size ( 1).