Meet the New Paleo Diet: The Benefits of Eating Bugs

Photo Credit: REUTERS/Francois LenoirYou’ve probably heard of the Stone Age diet craze known as the Paleolithic Diet, made popular most recently by Dr. Loren Cordain’s best-seller The Paleo Diet. The premise is simple: If our early human ancestors couldn’t have eaten it, we shouldn’t, either. It’s the one time, it seems, that being like a caveman is a good thing.

The theory goes (and archaeological evidence corroborates) that early hunter-gatherers, while they may not have lived as long, still had some major health advantages on most of us modern humans. They were much taller, averaging 6-foot-5 to our 5-foot-11; had stronger, heavier bones; had more robust immune systems; and were leaner, tougher, and hardier than we are today. Higher levels of physical activity also played a vital role in cave people’s vitality, and so did their high levels of wild food consumption: wild game meat, gathered greens and fruits, and healthy fats such as nuts.

Cordain suggests that prior to the agricultural revolution, early humans ate this Paleo Diet for 2.5 million years. The 10,000 years since the popularization of farming — or just 333 human generations — he says, is clearly a drop in the chronological bucket when compared with the millennia leading up to it. Thus, he maintains, the hunter-gatherer diet our ancestors lived on is far more deeply and indelibly imprinted into our DNA than our habits of the last few thousand years. I’m inclined to agree with him. In fact, I’m going to see his 2.5 million years and raise him a few millennia, and show you what we were really designed to eat. The real Paleo Diet would have included bugs. Lots and lots of bugs.

“From the time mammals first appeared until 50 million years ago — a total of 150 million years, three quarters of the entire time mammals have existed — our ancestors were primarily insectivorous,” write S. Boyd Eaton and Dorothy A. Nelson in their paper “Calcium in Evolutionary Perspective.” “Given the slow and conservative nature of genetic evolution, this long-standing adaptation for insect consumption must have made a significant impact on our genetic heritage. Consequently, the nutritional properties of insects have relevance for understanding the forces that have shaped the nutritional requirements of present-day humans.”