Beyond the Paleolithic prescription: Commentary

Abstract

In their recent paper, Drs. Turner and Thompson1 question whether the assumption of a Paleolithic life as the human standard is complete because of its “relying primarily on genetic understandings of the human diet.” According to the authors, the Paleolithic assumption focuses too much on “a single model of human ancestral diets” and on “cultural evolution outpacing genetic evolution” as a “fundamental cause of disease in the modern world,” thereby “resulting in an incomplete view of the flexibility and variability in human dietary behavior and health in the past and present.” We would like to comment on several statements of Drs. Turner and Thompson as follows: 1. Despite the “incomplete view,” all interventions with a Paleolithic-type diet have shown favorable effects, as also noted by the authors, and were even superior to Mediterranean and diabetic diets with regard to cardiovascular disease risk factors, glucose tolerance, and appetite and body weight regulation.2–6 2. A basic misunderstanding may come from the following sentence: “Fetal imprinting and other epigenetic processes during development underscore the importance of the fetal environment in shaping long-term body composition and metabolic health …