The core principle for a true understanding of health is called the paleolithic principle. Humans have been around in more or less the same form for millions of years. Biologically speaking, we are pretty much the same animals that we were two or three million years ago. The paleolithic principle of nutrition is the notion that, by studying the history of human evolutionary biology, we can learn what the ideal foods are for humans.
The invention of agriculture, and with it the dawn of modern civilization, occurred about 10,000 years ago, a length of time that constitutes a tiny blip on the human time-line. The industrial revolution occurred even more recently, a mere couple of centuries ago. Yet our typical diet has changed radically in this time, and is now full of “foods” that would have been unrecognizable as such during the first several million years of our existence.
Evolution takes a lot of time; much more than 10,000 years. So it follows that we have not had time to properly adapt to these new foods. As hunter-gatherers, we relied heavily on meat, including fish, poultry, wild pigs, and especially large ruminants such as the ancestors of modern cows, sheep, and bison. Does it make any sense that humans would have evolved so that saturated fat is harmful to our health, when it was the only type of fat in our diet for millions of years? Natural selection does not work like that.
