1. Hey Caveman, isn’t the Paleo diet all about meat?
Not true. You can eat fruit and vegetables to your heart’s content on a Paleo diet.
2. I will be missing out on important nutrients because I’m cutting out whole food groups.
Not true. Replacing “grains, refined oils, refined sugar and dairy” with “fruit, vegetables, nuts, eggs, fish and meat” gives you more nutrients, not less.
3. Without dairy, I won’t get enough calcium.
Not true. It is eminently possible to have strong bones and cavity-free teeth without having to milk a cow every day. Read my post on dairy for more information on calcium and dairy.
Good Paleo sources of calcium include:
Green vegetables
Fish
Nuts
4. Without grains I won’t get enough fibre.
Not true. Fruit, vegetables and nuts have ample fibre.
5. The Paleo diet is expensive.
In the short run it is more expensive, but in the long run it will save you money.
Unfortunately, bread, pasta, and cakes are cheaper than fruit, vegetables, fish, meat and nuts.
So yes, in the short run the Paleo diet costs more.
But in the long run it will save you money from time off work due to illness, and from having to pay for medicines to treat your high blood pressure, diabetes, autoimmune disease, cancer etc…
6. Palaeolithic humans never ate grains and cereals.
There is evidence of grain granules on grinding tools from all over the world suggesting that Palaeolithic man (or more likely Palaeolithic Woman) turned grains into flour as long as 30,000 years ago. They most likely ate these grains in very small amounts.
As opposed to a modern scenario of cereal for breakfast, sandwich for lunch and pasta for dinner – i.e. grains, grains and more grains. Would you be eating this way if you had to pick wild grains, thresh and then grind them yourself everyday? Far easier to reach for some ripe fruit from a tree methinks.
7. All Paleo food is weird.
Not true. What’s weird about fruit, vegetables, fish, meat, eggs and nuts?
Doing a google search on ‘weird foods’ brought up some truly outlandish (to me) foods.
You can stick to whatever you consider to be normal meat and fish. Nobody is forcing you to eat any of these weird and wonderful foods.
8. The Paleo diet is just another low-carb or Atkins diet.
Not true. Sweet potatoes, pumpkins, carrots, mangoes, bananas – the list goes on and on – all high carb foods. And all allowed on the Paleo diet.
9. I can’t eat all those eggs without increasing my cholesterol!
Not True. Eating whole eggs doesn’t adversely affect your cholesterol. Click here for an explanation of why you don’t need to worry about eating eggs.
10. Proponents of the Paleo diet claim that the human genome is largely unchanged in the last million years whereas others say this is not the case.
Of course there are ongoing minor genetic changes all the time. But overall the human genome is much the same since the birth of Homo Sapiens 200,000 years ago.
It has taken millions of years for Man and our metabolisms to evolve. And we continue to evolve, just as all animals do, but 10,000 years is not long enough to adapt to large amounts of grains, dairy, legumes, refined sugars and refined oils in our diets. Or to put it another way, our metabolisms have not yet adjusted to a diet where the majority of the foods consumed are evolutionarily new.