The Paleo Diet

An old movie called Quest for Fire opens with our ancestors seated by a fire, munching on a variety of foods. Large insects buzz about the flames. All of a sudden, one of our relatives shoots out his arm, clumsily grabbing an insect out of thin air. He stuffs it into his mouth, munches heartily, and continues staring into the fire. His colleagues dig around the soil for tuberous vegetables and scrounge for fruit in nearby trees later in the movie. Welcome to the world of Pleistocene haute cuisine. Researchers believe that for hundreds of thousands of years, our daily diet consisted mostly of grasses, fruits, vegetables, small mammals, and insects. Occasionally we might fell a mammoth, so we would gorge on red meat for two or three consecutive days before the kill spoiled. Once or twice a year we might get sugar, running into a beehive, but even then only as unlinked glucose and fructose. Some biologists believe we are susceptible to cavities now because sugar was not a regular part of our evolutionary experience, and we never developed a defense against it. Eating this way today (well, except for the insects) is called in some circles the paleo diet.

So, it’s a bit boring. And familiar. Eating a balanced meal, with a heavy emphasis on fruits and vegetables, is probably still thebest advice for pregnant women. For the non-vegetarians in the crowd, a source of iron in the form of red meat is appropriate. Iron is necessary for proper brain development and normal functioning even in adults, vegetarian or not.

Notes:

Look to our ancestors for best practices for diet.

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Brain Rules for Baby: How to Raise a Smart and Happy Child from Zero to Five

Books, Brochures, and Chapters>Book: Medina , John (2010-10-12), Brain Rules for Baby: How to Raise a Smart and Happy Child from Zero to Five, Pear Press, Retrieved on 2011-07-27

Folksonomies: parenting pregnancy babies child development