Lots of wellness experts recommend the paleo diet for enhancing your wellbeing, but are you really eating the same things as your caveman ancestors? According to John Williams, PhD, and Lou Schuler, author of the Home Workout Bible, ‘The paleo diet gets a lot of things right. First and foremost, it’s a simple and effective system for reducing your daily calories without starving or depriving yourself of important nutrients. The recommended foods include most of the best protein sources—meat, fish, poultry, eggs—along with plenty of fruit, vegetables, nuts, and seeds. It’s hard to go wrong with a diet in which 100% of the foods are unprocessed, with no added sugar or salt. But no one should ever claim with a straight face that it represents what people actually ate in the Paleolithic, an era that started roughly 2.5 million years ago and lasted until the rise of agriculture about 10,000 years ago.’ In fact, some of the actual choices on the original paleo menu will give you a whole new appreciation for modern foods:
1. Stomach Stew: Paleo people used to love a bit of Chyme or the semi-digested stomach contents of animals. ‘Imagine you’re a caveman living in an ice age,’ note Williams and Schuler. ‘You have zero access to plant food for months at a time. Along comes an unsuspecting herbivore, looking for moss and lichen and whatever else it can scrape off rocks or bark. After you kill it, those stomach contents give you the first hot meal of the day—no microwave required—and provide nutrients you wouldn’t otherwise get, including active live cultures to aid digestion.’ However, the desire for stomach stew didn’t stop in the Paleolithic area. Williams and Schuler point out, ‘Inuits of the 19th and 20th centuries were observed eating partly fermented, pre-digested mush from the rumen of reindeer. Deer, like cattle and sheep, are called ruminants because they digest food through a circular process of chewing, digesting (in a part of the stomach called the rumen), regurgitating, chewing again, and repeating.’
2. The Original Gatorade: You might be worried about the contents of your energy drinks, but that’s nothing compared to what the Comanche drank in the 19th century. Pulitzer Prize-winner Sam Gwynne, author of Comanche-inspired novel Empire of the Summer Moon, writes, ‘Children would … squirt the salty bile from the gallbladder [of animals] onto the liver and eat it on the spot, warm and dripping blood.’ All fluids were appreciated, including ‘warm curdled milk from the stomach of a suckling calf.’ Yum.
3. Man ham: Williams and Schuler comment, ‘Today we think of cannibalism in terms of the Donner party—something desperate people do during desperate times. But archaeologists and historians have found lots of evidence of cannibalism throughout human history, including the remains of 11 juveniles who were butchered and eaten 800,000 years ago at a cave in Spain. Our close cousins, the Neanderthals, were also known to have feasted on their own.’ For the Tonkawa tribe, who rivalled the animal fluid-drinking Comanche, ‘the goal was to absorb the mojo of their badass enemies,’ Williams and Schuler explain.’ In fact, there is an eyewitness report of dead-guy goulash from Noah Smithwick, one of the rare palefaces to live and travel with Indian tribes in the 1800s. According to Smithwick, ‘Having fleeced off the flesh of the dead Comanche, they borrowed a big wash kettle … into which they put the Comanche meat, together with a lot of corn and potatoes – the most revolting mess my eyes ever rested on.’