The Paleo Diet is a sexy proposition: eat tons of meat, and look smugly upon the world secure in your knowledge that those around you are living less virile and foolish lives. As the last two sentences show, it’s a diet easy to praise, and easy to poke fun at. On the one hand it’s a kind of anti-diet, on the other it seems so much like the sort of thing that was designed to catalyze a populist uprising that it’s easy to sneer at. It also looks like the kind of thing that’ll be ripe for parody in 10 years, when everyone’s moved on.

With all that being said, PaNU , a Paleo-Diet blog, written by an MD is a fascinating, if verbose read. I find it easy to agree with the anti-processed food, anti-corn fed beef, anti-cereal grain propaganda, but I find it less hard to believe in the strong pro-meat bias Paleo practitioners show. From what I know, paleo diets varied geographically to a large (and in fact largely unkown) extent, and the prevalence of predominantly carnivorous diets seems unsettled.

I’m pretty fascinated by it, but what I see is a lot of speculation, with a lot of science about why it should work, but since it’s so new, no studies as to weather it does work, especially as practiced in a modern context. Of course like any diet conceived of in one’s lifetime, there’s no real way to know what its long term effects are, as even the early adopters will follow you into old age, at which point the data isn’t so useful.

So, what am I doing for food at the moment?

  1. Eating more vegetables

  2. Eating plants with my grains (because I do love my grains)

  3. Eating more meats

  4. Nearly completely stopped eating sugar

  5. Cooking as much as possible myself

As far as exercise, I’ve been doing what PaNU recommends already, based off research I obtained from other sources quite some time ago. Most of my excercise is strength training, and the cardio I do is predominantly intervals. I actually made these choices predominantly because from the research I’ve read they give the most bang for the (time) buck, and I only have so much time to work out.