The Caveman Diet

In remote caves in Europe and Asia, drawings depict ancient battles, cavemen hunting beasts long disappeared from the earth. Anthropologists for years have studied these pictures and the lives of our hairy, thick-skulled ancestors.

But now another group, fitness buffs, is paying closer attention to the caveman. Why?

He wasn’t fat.

What was his secret? Why are 100 million Americans overweight today when the Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons who preceded us were so lean and ripped? They looked like, as Snooki would say, “gorilla juiceheads.”

The devotees of the Paleo Diet believe it’s the way they ate.

“The essential principle is we spent 19 million years evolving to eat a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and 10,000 years ago we had the agricultural revolution,” says Lurene Grenier, 28, of Severna Park, who has been eating the Paleo diet for two years. “The upside of that revolution is it helped build up society. The downside is it made us very sick.”

Thus, the Paleo diet is an attempt for humans to “eat the way we did before the agricultural revolution,” says Grenier, who works as a security researcher and trains clients at a Glen Burnie gym, Crossfit BWI.

That means no grains, no dairy and, above all, no sugar. Or, in other words: no Joe Squared pizza, Starbucks’ macchiatos or Sugarbakers’ red velvet cake.

“It’s basically the opposite of the government’s food pyramid,” Grenier says.

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