Tag Archive for: Paleolithic diet

Your Perfect Diet

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Continuing what I learned from the podcast, I hope you had the chance to listen to it as well. I checked out Dr. Daniel Lieberman’s research, and he is a leading expert in his field. There are three facts that stood out to me.

Three Facts

The first thing I learned is that hippopotami have less body fat than the typical human being! It seems incredible that animals who are that round can have so little body fat. Assessing body fat was my job when I was in grad school, and whether that’s absolutely accurate or off by a bit, I’m not going to try to assess body fat in a hippo any time soon.

Second, as time proceeded, our digestive systems changed: our small intestine became longer and our large intestine became shorter. Our digestive system has adapted to cooked foods; that means our microbiome has shifted over the millennia, and less time is needed for fermentation in the gut to extract nutrients.

Third, the typical protein intake never really exceeded 30% of total dietary intake. We can survive on any type of diet as long as we get enough of the raw materials to take in or to make the nutrients we need such as hormones and vitamins.

The Bottom Line

There’s no perfect diet for everyone—we are too genetically different, raised in different environments, and process foods differently. The key is to find the perfect diet for you that gets you to a normal body weight and allows you to stay there. These recommendations never change: eat less. Eat better. Move more. For life.

What are you prepared to do today?

        Dr. Chet

Reference: Zoe. August 6, 2026. The Evolutionary Science Behind Why You Can’t Lose Weight.

Paleolithic Diet: More Hype than Hope?

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Over the weekend, I was listening to a podcast about the Paleolithic diet. Daniel Lieberman, the expert being interviewed, has focused his research on the Paleolithic era. I found it quite interesting based on the number of gurus and influencers that continue to say that era was the diet we should mimic for optimal health. You can listen to it yourself at this link, but two factors stuck out to me.

First, the foods that were available during that time bear no resemblance to the foods available today. I’m not just talking about processed foods; the plants and even the meat sources were very different.

Second, cooking changed the way our ancestors ate. Cooking allowed more variety of plants to be eaten because it broke down the matrices in plants, which released more nutrients to be digested and absorbed. More nutrients could also be released from the animals and allowed more of the animals to be eaten. Bone marrow is definitely not a recent discovery.

There are a couple more points that I’ll cover Saturday, but listen or watch the podcast and see if you can figure out where I’m going.

What are you prepared to do today?

        Dr. Chet

Reference: Zoe. August 6, 2026. The Evolutionary Science Behind Why You Can’t Lose Weight.

Low Carb vs. High Carb

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The debate never seems to end over which diet is best: high carbohydrates as recommended by the USDA; or low carbohydrates as promoted by those following one of the Paleolithic diets; or an Atkins diet type of approach. The different diets aren’t just supposed to be good for weight loss, they’re also supposed to help reduce the risk of diseases such as heart disease and diabetes.

In a recently published study, researchers attempted to answer the question: which diet is best, low carb or high carb (1)? They recruited overweight subjects with metabolic syndrome to participate in a . . .

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