As a child visiting the zoo, the author recalls being surprised by signs that read "do not feed the animals." The irony wasn't lost on the author; why would the food be any more dangerous for the animals than it might be for humans? It wasn't until adulthood and becoming a physician that the author fully understood that the sign was also a warning to humans. This realization prompts a reexamination of the modern Western diet and a consideration of whether our prehistoric ancestors had a more suitable diet. The mythic hominid hunter-gatherer subsisted on a diet of game, root vegetables, berries, and nuts, devoid of refined sugar or fiber-free carbohydrates. Many present-day Western diets attempt to emulate this Paleolithic diet by eliminating sugar and refined starch foods. The idea behind adopting this mythical diet is that our bodies are likely to be best suited to a diet that our bodies evolved along with over the course of a hundred thousand years. By contrast, the agricultural revolution spanning only ten thousand years hasn’t allowed our genome, and consequently, our metabolism to catch up to the change to a diet of processed grains.
Understanding the Paleo Diet
The Paleo diet, also known as the Paleolithic diet, is an eating plan based on foods humans might have eaten during the Paleolithic Era. The main principle of the Paleo diet is to prioritize foods that humans would have eaten during the Paleolithic era, pre-farming and industrialized agriculture. A modern paleo diet includes fruits, vegetables, lean meats, fish, eggs, nuts, and seeds - foods that in the past people could get by hunting and gathering. The Paleo diet encourages an optimal balance of protein, healthy fats, and mostly non-starchy carbohydrates. It doesn't include foods that became more common when small-scale farming began about 10,000 years ago. Farming made foods such as grains and legumes more easily available, and it introduced dairy. Also, farming changed the diets of animals that people ate. The paleo diet idea is that these changes in diet outpaced the human body's ability to change, or adapt.
Benefits of the Paleo Diet
The Paleo diet can prevent obesity by cutting out most processed foods, sugar, dairy, and grains. Instead, it removes high-calorie foods common in today’s diets. Cutting carbs is one of the most popular ways to lose weight. The diet eliminates familiar carb sources like rice, pasta, and bread. Protein is an essential macro for anyone who’s trying to lose weight. It can slightly boost your metabolism and help you feel full on fewer calories. The paleo diet emphasizes protein-rich foods such as lean meats, fish, and eggs. A growing trend of consuming processed and ultra-processed foods can be a significant reason behind obesity.
In general, a paleo diet has many features of recommended healthy diets. Common features the paleo diet has include the emphasis on fruits, vegetables, lean meats and the avoidance of processed foods.
Potential Drawbacks
The main concern about paleo diets is the lack of whole grains and legumes. These foods are considered good sources of fiber, vitamins, proteins and other nutrients. Also, low-fat dairy products are good sources of protein, calcium, vitamins and other nutrients. Whole grains, legumes and dairy also are generally more affordable and available than foods such as wild game, grass-fed animals and nuts. For some people, a paleo diet may be too costly. The long-term risks of a paleo diet aren't known. Some people doubt the idea that the human body didn't change, or adapt, to foods that came with farming.
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Exploring Intermittent Fasting
One additional element of the Paleolithic diet is now coming into focus and is becoming more frequently deployed: exposure to periods of relative starvation. Due to seasonal variations in food supply and random catastrophes including war and drought, primordial man was exposed to periods of famine. Our ancestors evolved to respond to periods of fasting. It is notable that early colonists observed that Native Americans appeared to encourage voluntary periods of fasting to be better prepared for future shortages. It has been repeatedly demonstrated in research of the animal kingdom from worms to monkeys that caloric restriction and fasting appears to make animals healthier and longer living.
Intermittent fasting (IF) is a broad term for any eating pattern that limits food intake to specific times of the day. For thousands of years, fasting has been practiced for spiritual purposes, as a method to help treat various diseases, or because of a simple lack of food. Today, intermittent fasting (IF) is a wildly popular eating style with goals of weight loss, mental clarity, and more. Unlike traditional fad diets that dictate what you can and cannot eat, intermittent fasting focuses on when you eat, which can be a powerful practice when coupled with healthy menus.
Common Intermittent Fasting Methods
16/8 Method: With the 16:8 fast, you focus your food consumption within an eight-hour window, such as 8 am to 4 pm in which you can eat. Nonetheless, you should eat healthy and not binge.
The Warrior Diet: Dietary intake for the Warrior Diet is somewhat similar to a Paleo Diet where you eat whole, unprocessed foods that resemble what they look like in nature.
"Just Say No" Fasts: Whenever you choose to spontaneously skip a meal, you should continue to drink lots of liquids, so never attempt to limit your intake of water but avoid sugar-laden or fatty drinks.
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12-Hour Fasts: Time-Restricted Eating is a great approach for beginners, as it simply involves not eating between dinner one day and breakfast the next day. A majority of people have practiced this eating pattern by accident.
Presently, one popular way to voluntarily restrict feeding times is to follow a schedule of intermittent fasting. The plan is to avoid night time snacks and compress meal times into a schedule of 8 to 12 hours. For example, an individual may finish supper at 7 PM and then not eat until 7 or 8 the next morning. The type of foods eaten is unchanged but the schedule of feeding is restricted.
Benefits of Intermittent Fasting
The benefits of fasting seem to mimic those of calorie-restricted diets, which have been used successfully for weight loss and weight maintenance. The benefits of intermittent fasting go beyond weight management and include numerous benefits for improving your metabolic health. Moreover, fasting offers specific benefits that only occur during the fasting window. Human studies on fasting have shown that fasts of 12 hours or more can improve fat oxidation and metabolic rate by inducing a state of mild ketosis for increased energy expenditure. Eliminating sugary drinks and consuming plenty of water is very important when you are following a fasting diet. Some studies show positive effects after very brief fasting periods, such as the reduction in markers of inflammation, which have been linked to metabolic syndrome.
While eating throughout the day, insulin is frequently secreted to deposit excess glucose into a storage form in the liver and muscles called glycogen; the excess is converted to fat and stored in adipocytes. The excess fat contributes to reduced satiety with meals resulting in overeating. The frequent stimulation of insulin and the excess of adipose tissue appears to cause a resistance to this hormone with resultant elevated blood glucose levels. While fasting, in trying to simulate our ancestors’ exposure to famine, insulin secretion is decreased, glycogen stores are partially depleted and fat is mobilized from adipocytes while reducing body weight, potentially restoring Insulin sensitivity, correcting hyperglycemia and reducing mitochondrial redox stress.
Considerations for Women
Due to a difference in hormonal makeup, women have special considerations when fasting. Intermittent fasting is not a good idea for women under 18 years of age, those with a lean body profile, or those with medical conditions, such as hypothyroidism or a history of eating disorders. It is always best to ask your physician about an appropriate fasting protocol for you.
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Combining Paleo and Intermittent Fasting: A Powerful Synergy
Combining Paleo and intermittent fasting is a step that some people hope could help in this regard. Perhaps we are meant to regulate our bodies by having occasional and/or seasonal bouts of eating and not eating, in similar fashion to our ancient ancestors had to.
Those are only the scientifically proven benefits. Combining the principles of the Paleo diet with those of intermittent fasting will supply your body, not only with the optimal nutrients necessary to thrive but also supplying them in the way in which humankind spent the last ten thousand years or more becoming accustomed to.
The main principle of the Paleo diet is to prioritize foods that humans would have eaten during the Paleolithic era, pre-farming and industrialized agriculture. The Paleo diet encourages an optimal balance of protein, healthy fats, and mostly non-starchy carbohydrates. Intermittent fasting also improves health by increasing autophagy, a natural detoxification process that cleans up damaged cells and encourages new cell growth.
Benefits of the Combined Approach
Going Paleo for 3-4 weeks before you try intermittent fasting can help your body adjust to lower glucose levels and encourage the body to use more healthy fats as fuel instead. And without the blood sugar spikes caused by processed foods and many grains, your body is more prepared to handle a longer period without food at all.
Improved Metabolic Health: This combined approach can be helpful in avoiding or treating central adiposity and metabolic syndrome. With repeated fasting and substitution of Omega 3 fatty acids in the diet, the hope is to reduce the overall inflammatory effect of the previously resident Omega 6 fatty acids. An additional hope is that with reduction in obesity will restore Leptin sensitivity allowing for enhanced satiety with meals and subsequent weight loss.
Enhanced Nutrient Intake: After a period of not eating, the body is more sensitive to insulin and breaking the fast with foods that cause insulin surges can be problematic and uncomfortable. During your fast, your body was being fueled from internal sources that consisted of fat and protein. It would make sense to break the fast with a similar diet, one that consists mainly of palmitic acid. This would mean eating animal fat. Once again, a Paleo type diet, based on whole, nutrient dense foods is the optimal and allows the body to continue to reap the benefits of the fasting period.
Practical Tips for Combining Paleo and Intermittent Fasting
Prioritize Protein and Healthy Fats: Making sure you’re getting enough daily protein is essential to prevent muscle loss when fasting, especially for older adults. If you’re trying to build muscle, you’ll have to be even more aware of this and potentially increase your protein intake.
Ease into It: There’s no need to force yourself to eat only within an 8-hour window on your first day of intermittent fasting. If you’re worried about feeling hungry, feel free to slowly train yourself to extend your fasting period 30 minutes to an hour at a time from when you would normally start and stop eating on a given day.
Drink Plenty of Liquids: Liquids are okay while fasting, so hydrate well. If you’re having trouble with hunger or low blood sugar, drinking coffee with MCT oil has been found to stabilize blood sugar during fasting periods.
Be Mindful of Food Choices: Besides keeping track of your eating schedules, you should be mindful of what you eat during the non-fasting windows. You want to support that by making healthy food choices.
Scientific Evidence and Research
Contrary to popular belief, what you eat between fasts can make or break your experience. Simply put, fasting (especially if you’ve never practiced it before) is a bit of a shock to your body on various biochemical levels. If you’re eating a high-carb diet or a typical Western diet now, making a quick move to intermittent fasting can be especially challenging. This will lead to them feeling shaky, light-headed, exhausted, and irritable. They may then feel “better” once they get their familiar spike of glucose during their feeding window, but because they are still eating processed carbs and sugars, they will crash immediately during their fast. Now, contrast this with someone who has been eating a Paleo Diet of natural carbohydrate sources that don’t spike their blood sugar. To truly succeed and thrive on an intermittent fasting regime, we recommend that you first shift to a way of eating that is closer to The Paleo Diet guidelines before you try intermittent fasting.
Many studies of paleo diets included small numbers of people. Also, they only lasted from a few weeks to a few months. The definitions of the diet also vary from one study to another. One large study looked at the benefits of self-reported, long-term dietary patterns in young adults from Spain. The researchers found that the paleo diet was linked to lower heart disease, or cardiovascular, risk factors.
Research on Intermittent Fasting
Modern research on fasting has exploded, with hundreds of studies showing many benefits of intermittent fasting like increased stress resistance, decreased risk of diabetes, longevity, and even reduced cancer risk.
Intermittent fasting - whereby participants limit their energy intake to about 25 per cent of their usual diet (500kcal for women and 600kcal for men) on two self-selected days per week, led to slightly more weight loss than the other diets. This work supports the idea that there isn't a single 'right' diet - there are a range of options that may suit different people and be effective. In this study, people were given dietary guidelines at the start and then continued with their diets in the real world while living normally.
Potential Risks and Considerations
If you are new to a Paleo lifestyle and coming from an unhealthy diet and a big, refined carbohydrate-heavy breakfast, the change might feel rather extreme. Occasionally it can be challenging to eat enough calories when there are fewer meals eaten and some people struggle to eat enough healthy, nutrient dense food in a limited daily period. Although a Paleo diet (and all of Pete’s Paleo meals) does focus on nutrient density, if your caloric requirements are higher, a fasting protocol may not be the optimal choice for you.
While IF has a lot of research supporting its benefits for many people, some people simply do not respond well to fasting of any kind, minus the normal hours they are asleep at night. The key with IF is to be very mindful of how you feel as you transition to consistent fasting. If you ever feel dizzy, lightheaded, physical weakness, brain fog, unusual hormonal changes, or any other side effects, stop immediately. You may need to address an underlying health issue or take a closer look at your macronutrient intake before attempting fasting again. Some kinds of fasting may be more tolerable than others, so you may be wise to start with the least invasive version (time-restricted feeding with a 14-hour fasting period) and monitor yourself carefully.