Paleolithic Diet May Help Control Diabetes

Caveman cuisine is all the rage. Way back in the day, it was just what everybody ate. Now it’s called the Paleolithic diet. Devotees dine on lean meat. They consume a cornucopia’s worth of fruits and vegetables. They eschew grains and dairy products. They chew on raw nuts, but forego legumes such as beans and peanuts.

Beyond those broad guidelines, people disagree on the finer points of Stone Age eating habits. The diets of our ancient forebears undoubtedly varied depending on what was available in the part of the globe they inhabited. But think “unprocessed.”

Two UCSF physicians and some of their patients with type 2 diabetes are hoping that the Paleolithic diet will merit more than fleeting popularity as just another futile food fancy.

The initial research findings are striking. Without losing weight, participants in a preliminary study improved blood sugar control, blood pressure control and blood vessel elasticity. They lowered levels of blood fats such as cholesterol. And most amazingly, participants achieved these results in less than three weeks — simply by switching to a Paleolithic diet.

Human Evolution Lags Changing Lifestyles

The original Paleolithic diet dates back to before the advent of agriculture. That’s a milestone humans reached 10,000 or more years ago.

Advocates reason that humans evolved to live healthily as hunter-gatherers. They say our species hasn’t evolved quickly enough to adapt metabolically to changes in our diet due to agriculture – and certainly not fast enough to thrive on the new, processed creations of the food industry. According to the current crop of would-be hunter-gatherers, that’s why we suffer the chronic diseases of modern society. Among the metabolic afflictions, diabetes now is epidemic.

Two anthropologists wrote about the hypothesized benefits of a Paleolithic diet a quarter century ago in the New England Journal of Medicine. Even so, the diet only has become a topic for mainstream discussion over the past decade. Too few studies have been conducted to draw conclusions about the diet’s merits or drawbacks. Diet studies tend to be expensive to fund.

People with diabetes are more likely to have heart or kidney disease, or to develop these diseases later. High blood pressure and diabetes are the two major risk factors for kidney disease. Undesirable levels of blood fats, or lipids, are associated with heart disease. A Paleolithic diet might be able to help lower these risks.

To look for more hard evidence for the potential health benefits of a Paleolithic diet, UCSF kidney specialist Lynda Frassetto, MD, and her collaborators conducted a study supported by the Clinical Research Center at UCSF. The nine participants were sedentary and out-of-shape, but otherwise healthy. They ate a normal diet for three days, ramped up to a Paleolithic diet over a week, and then stuck to it for another 10 days.