The Paleo Diet: Ancestral Wisdom or Modern Anxiety in a Loincloth?

Do you need to eat like a caveman to unlock your primal potential? This week, we investigate the Paleo Diet, and its surprising 19th-century origins, its troubling ideological roots, and what the science actually says about eliminating grains, legumes, and dairy from your diet.

Spoiler: your gut bacteria have some concerns.

What We Cover

[00:00] Introduction — What comes to mind when you think "Paleo"? Fred Flintstone on steroids? Raw-dogging a turkey leg? The manosphere's favorite ancestral flex? We set the scene.

[03:00] The History You Didn't Expect — The Paleo Diet didn't start with CrossFit. We trace the ideology back to 1890s "wilderness cults," Gilded Age masculinity panic, and upper-class men doing caveman cosplay to feel less soft. Teddy Roosevelt, the founding of the Boy Scouts, and the original "return to nature" grift.

[09:30] The Founders — From Arnold DeVries (1952) to Walter Voegtlin's "The Stone Age Diet" (1975) to Loren Cordain's "The Paleo Diet" (2002). One of these guys was a eugenicist who also advocated for the mass slaughter of dolphins. Guess which one.

[10:45] The Rules — Grass-fed meat, wild game, fish, vegetables, fruits, eggs, nuts, and "healthy oils." No grains, no legumes, no dairy, no fun. We break down what's actually allowed, and why the whole framework is based on foods that didn't exist in the Paleolithic era.

[15:30] Who's Actually Doing This? — The demographics are... specific. Affluent white men, Silicon Valley, CrossFit, and the occasional Bernie Sanders. (His stepdaughter says he was "paleo before paleo was a thing." Okay, Bernie.)

[16:25] Paleo as Masculine Identity — How the Paleo Diet rebranded dieting, historically coded as feminine, into something rugged and virile. You're not counting calories, you're optimizing your biology like an engineer. You're not meal prepping, you're preparing for societal collapse.

[17:30] The Political Dimension — Distrust of the FDA, anti-regulation sentiment, nostalgia for an idealized past, and meat consumption as conservative identity. According to 2018 Gallup data, liberals are 5.5 times more likely to be vegetarian than conservatives.

[20:30] The Naturalistic Fallacy — "Natural equals good" is the philosophical foundation of Paleo — and it's a logical fallacy. Our ancestors died at 33 from infections and starvation. Evolution doesn't optimize for longevity; it optimizes for reproduction.

[27:00] The Science (Or Lack Thereof) — The mismatch hypothesis doesn't hold up. Evolutionary biologist Marlene Zuk's book "Paleofantasy" dismantles the idea that humans stopped evolving 10,000 years ago. We've adapted to agriculture — lactase persistence, smaller jaws, changed gut microbiomes.

[36:00] The Studies Are... Not Great — Small sample sizes, high dropout rates, comparisons to outdated diets, and confidence intervals that don't actually support the claims in the abstracts. We dig into the Mannheimer 2015 review and the Jacobs 2016 takedown.

[42:30] Potential Harms — A 2019 study found Paleo dieters had lower beneficial gut bacteria, higher TMAO (linked to cardiovascular disease), and less microbial diversity. Eliminating whole grains and legumes removes key prebiotics your microbiome needs.

[46:00] The Environmental Cost — The meat-heavy diet is expensive (~$12/day adjusted for inflation) and environmentally unsustainable at scale. If everyone ate Paleo, we'd need several more planets.

[50:45] Why It "Works" (Sort Of) — When people feel better on Paleo, it's usually because they're eating more vegetables, more protein, fewer ultra-processed foods, and paying attention to food quality. You can get those benefits without eliminating entire food groups humans have been eating for millennia.

[54:30] The Eating Disorder Connection — Restriction, moralization, and purity language can trigger orthorexia and exacerbate binge eating. The science shows Paleo can feed unhealthy obsession with "correct" eating, especially wrapped in masculine performance rhetoric.

[1:00:00] The Big Picture — Paleo isn't just a diet. It's an ideological package that reveals contemporary anxieties about gender, modernity, and identity. When traditional masculinity feels threatened, men find ways to reassert it, and you can buy your way back to nature for $500 million a year.

References

Books

• Arnold DeVries, Primitive Man and His Food (1952)

• Walter L. Voegtlin, The Stone Age Diet: Based on In-Depth Studies of Human Ecology and the Diet of Man (1975)

• Loren Cordain, The Paleo Diet: Lose Weight and Get Healthy by Eating the Food You Were Designed to Eat (2002)

• Mark Sisson, The Primal Blueprint (2009)

• John Durant, The Paleo Manifesto: Ancient Wisdom for Lifelong Health (2013)

• Marlene Zuk, Paleofantasy: What Evolution Really Tells Us About Sex, Diet, and How We Live (2013)

Peer-Reviewed Research

• Mannheimer et al., "Paleolithic nutrition for metabolic syndrome: systematic review and meta-analysis," American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (2015)

• Jacobs et al., "Paleo Diets Still Lack Evidence," American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (2016)

• Journal of Nutrition (2016) — Paleolithic and Mediterranean diet pattern scores and association with inflammation and oxidative stress markers

• Anton et al., "How diets work: popular diet methods reviewed," Nutrients (2017)

• Genoni et al., "Long-term Paleolithic diet is associated with lower resistant starch intake, different gut microbiota composition and increased serum TMAO concentrations," European Journal of Nutrition (2019)

• Science of the Total Environment (2021) — Sustainability and health impacts of Paleolithic diets

• PMC, "The Paleolithic Diet" (2023) — Analysis of wild vs. domesticated meat fat content

Surveys & Reports

• Gallup Poll, "Snapshot: Few Americans Vegetarian or Vegan" (2018)

• UC Davis Nutrition Information Sheet (2020) — Calcium, Vitamin D, and bone health concerns

Other Sources

• Adrienne Rose Johnson, food historian — on Voegtlin's advocacy for mass slaughter of dolphins and tigers

• Hodson & Earle (2018) — Research on meat consumption, political ideology, and social dominance orientation

• Dr. Peter Ungar, University of Arkansas — paleontological research on human teeth and diet