“Veganism and the Paleo Diet are actually the same philosophy.” When I first heard these words during a meeting of the Austin Primal Living Group (the paraphrased citation goes to the group organizer, Bryan Barksdale), my initial reaction was one of immediate rejection. But as Bryan explained his claim, I was overwhelmed by its insightfulness. So overwhelmed was I, that I no longer could put off writing this essay about my transition to the Paleo lifestyle. But before I launch into the philosophical underpinnings of the Paleo Diet, let me introduce you to the generally accepted motivations for the diet itself, as well as my own, more personal reasons for having adopted it into my life.

According to Wikipedia, the seminal work on the Paleo Diet is attributed to Walter L. Voegtlin from the 1970s, but from my own experience, it seems that more people hear about it through the modern version articulated by Dr. Loren Cordain of Colorado State University. I suspect the reason for this is that a Google search for “paleo diet” returns his website as one of the first results; moreover, the website is generally well-done and easy to navigate, so people are likely to stay and hang around for a bit. If you’re interested in reading about it for yourself, I do recommend that you check out the site at http://www.thepaleodiet.com.

Although I am sure that there is an “official”-sounding way to describe the Paleo Diet, I mostly just think of it as “eating what you were meant to eat.” And this actually leads to a more overarching disclaimer, which is that this essay is mostly my own interpretation of what the Paleo Diet is and represents. As I recommend all sentient beings with higher cognitive functions do, you should go out and research the primary sources for yourself and formulate your own views and apply your own common-sense filters before forming your opinions on the matter.

With that said, the idea behind the Paleolithic Diet is this: humans (the term here is used loosely) have been around in one form or another for on the order of a million years. Over this time we have been subjected to countless evolutionary pressures; it follows then, that we are the collective sum of the adaptations acquired over this time. Incidentally, “Paleolithic man,” as he and she existed 20,000 years ago, embodies all of these genetic traits by definition, but the interesting part is that Paleo-John and Paleo-Jane, if you will, are genetically the same as their modern counterparts (iJohn and iJane?). This preserved genetic makeup is certainly a curious case of resistance to evolution, and I’ll go into some of the reasons below for why this might have happened. But if we accept this premise, then the Paleo diet makes complete sense: if we are still Paleo man, then we should eat like Paleo man.

Essentially, the entire claim rests on this premise of still being Paleo man, which seems reasonably simple on the surface, but actually has some meaningful consequences. Specifically, there are certainly people who are no longer like their Paleolithic ancestors in meaningful ways: these are people who have adapted to eating dairy and wheat, among other things. It seems that there are indeed groups of people who exhibit traits that are strongly congruent with staples of the modern diet. I am decidedly not within this lucky gene pool, however, and statistically, neither are you.

So why did we all stop eating like Paleo man if we are still, physically, Paleo man? Well, something changed around 8,000 BC. It was, of course, the agrarian revolution—the beginning of settled civilization as we know it. We’re all familiar with the major impact that grain cultivation and husbandry has had on the human race, but I would argue that there was a more subtle effect that is often overlooked in these kinds of discussions. To me, it seems that with the rise of civilization, our immunity to traditional evolutionary forces has grown proportionally; instead, the new evolutionary requirements have become predominantly cultural in nature, as food and other necessities were procured in a societal context. This is especially true today, though unfortunately for America, it seems that the general populace is selecting for strange traits such as the desire to own Hummers and willingness to put blobs of silicone in convenient places. Well, evolution isn’t perfect, I suppose.

Returning to the point, as population growth took off during this tiny, 10,000-year blip on the evolutionary time line, we have basically filled the world with swaths of Paleo man, albeit a more “cultured” version thereof. But the astute reader will have realized, by now, the incongruence of the whole situation. What is a hunter-gatherer’s body supposed to do in this modern world, devoid of any hunting or gathering? Well, let’s take a look around and see for ourselves.

Most apparently, we have unprecedented levels of not only obesity, but also general cases of being overweight; this much is obvious. But more insidiously, this particular outcome is only obvious because it’s so easily seen; the bigger threat to our collective health have been the silent killers, such as cancer, diabetes (which fortunately has gained lots of awareness in past years), autoimmune disorders (more on this later), depression, and degenerative diseases. For decades, modern medicine’s response to these problems has been to apply sledgehammers with long chemical names and harsh side-effects have become an accepted cost of doing business. Fortunately, alternative medicine is starting to make legitimate inroads in modern society (I define “alternative medicine” to loosely be any kind of medicine that does not immediately prescribe sledgehammers as treatment).

Still, I am not saying that medicine is fake or should not exist—that would be ridiculous. Scientifically speaking, there is no doubt in my mind that these sledgehammers are quite effective, but that doesn’t change the fact that modern medicine is overly reliant on treating symptoms as opposed to investigating causes. In fact, the idea that there exists a pill for every problem (or even non-problem) is a notion deeply embedded in our cultural psyche, yet it is one that we have relied on with little success.

So where does the Paleo Diet fit in with all of this? In short, the Paleo Diet is about working with our evolutionary past as opposed to trying to transcend it. Actually, the desire of leaving behind our brutish past is a theme that has largely resonated throughout civilized history. “We were meant for so much more” or “we don’t need to do that anymore” are common party lines of “high culture” trying to shed its animalistic past. But is it really in our best interests to ignore a million years of evolutionary pressure and change? Can we really decide based on the last 100 years of industrialized existence that we can safely ignore what we have been forced to internalize for a time scale that is four orders of magnitude greater?

Now, I’m not saying that we should all revert to primitive behavior and burn down the bastions of civilization (I suppose this would mean nuking the Earth from orbit—it’s the only way to be sure, after all), but I bring this up because it is a false dichotomy that common counter-arguments like to appeal to. Culture and society are not inherently incompatible with a primal approach to diet and exercise. In fact, much of the modern Paleo Diet is about working within the constraints of modern society. It’s about mimicking the diet that our bodies evolved to eat within the realities of our world, not going off to sea and auditioning for Castaway.

So what does all of this mean for me? Well, I originally discovered the Paleo Diet in the context of gluten intolerance and Celiac Disease. I think it is wonderful that gluten’s evil ways are being exposed and that Celiac Disease is entering the collective conscience, but if you haven’t heard of these surprisingly common, yet oft-overlooked ailments, do yourself a favor and read up on it. There’s a good chance (statistically speaking) that you or someone you know may benefit. Technically, since you are reading this, it probably means that you know me personally, and so there you go!

Although I haven’t gotten tested for official Celiac Disease, I’m pretty confident that I am gluten intolerant. If you have ever wondered how messed up skin can get and still (kind of) recover, look no further than my own, which is the result of years of unknowing abuse by gluten, the substance that seems to trigger a pretty devastating auto-immune response against my skin. (By the way, if you are an enemy reading this, please have mercy on me during your future attempts at my destruction and do not use gluten as a means of termination—it is too slow and painful). My response to gluten intolerance was simply to go on the Paleo Diet. So far, it has been incredibly successful.

Along these lines, the Paleo Diet boasts countless testimonials ranging from weight management to athletic performance to chronic conditions. Yet I hate saying it like that because, again, it evokes the image of the magic pill. But really, when you think about it, there is no pill or magic at all. If you can visualize in your mind how you might feel after a month of eating nothing but McDonald’s (watch Supersize Me if you can’t), then you are already accepting the notion that your diet can have real effects on not just your weight, but also your mental facilities. Furthermore, if you can accept that eating certain things can make you sick very quickly (food poisoning, for instance), then is it really any harder to accept that eating certain things can make you sick very slowly? Worse, what if you don’t even know that you’re eating that thing?

It follows then, that if you ate the “right” things, your body and mind would work the way they’re supposed to work; or at the very least, they wouldn’t be or feel broken. Interestingly, this brings up a caveat about the Paleo Diet that I personally believe very strongly: if there’s nothing wrong with you, save yourself the trouble and just keep living the way you do. The more fortunate of you out there are actually perfectly fine eating traditional diets (perhaps because you happen to have favorable agrarian genes). You may have no problems, be healthy, fit, and have amazing skin despite eating all the things I cannot eat. You’re probably tall and good-looking too. In fact, I hate you. But seriously, although I believe everyone will benefit from a Paleo-like diet, there’s no doubt that its requirements are not sustainable across the entire planet (although one could argue whether our current behavior is sustainable, either). Living primally also tends to be more expensive in our current economy since grains and legumes are the cheapest calories and protein you can find, respectively, and replacing these with various meats can add up quickly, especially if you care a lot about the source of the meat.

But an equally valid caveat goes in the other direction: the Paleo Diet is not a panacea. If you already have cancer for instance, the Paleo Diet will not stop cancer (if it did, someone would be very, very rich by now). It will also not save kittens or baby seals from being clubbed to death when people say horrible things. But it will, however, have a good chance of working on things that are chronic and auto-immune in nature. The important thing is to realize that, barring truly exceptional circumstances, you were not born to be sick. If you have nagging inflammation, tend to put on weight quickly, have autoimmune reactions, have low energy, or other things of a similar nature, then there is a good chance you may benefit from eating a more natural diet; in other words, there may be something in your current diet that is making you sick, albeit very slowly. My rationale for going all out on the Paleo diet was this: it’s the least expensive and most reversible thing I can try; I literally had nothing to lose except the problems I was trying to solve.

Hopefully you have a better understanding now what the Paleo Diet is about; I realize I haven’t gone into the specifics of what foods the diet actually consists of, but that’s intentional. There are many resources online dedicated solely to determining what’s “paleo” and what’s not. Initially, I had to consult many of these sites because so much of my cooking depended on grains or legumes that I didn’t know what to eat, but now I just have an intuition about what’s paleo and what’s not, and that’s really how I know that I “got it.” Essentially, it comes down to a very wide assortment of meats, eggs, vegetables, fruits, and nuts, but again, I’ll leave the details to other resources. Instead, I want to return to the original claim I made at the beginning of this essay about Veganism and the Paleo Diet.

So I’ve implicitly spent the last few minutes of your life telling you that you should eat meat because this is what we’ve evolved to eat. So what kind of rhetorical device am I about to pull out of my bag of tricks to convince you that Veganism and the Paleo Diet are actually very similar philosophically? Nothing too fancy is required, I hope.

If I understand Veganism correctly, the majority of practitioners do not do it for health reasons per se (although they may strongly believe that they are indeed healthier this way); rather, they do it out of protest against the animal industry. And this is fair enough: no one in their right mind would say that feedlots, mechanized butchering, systematized animal suffering, and the many other horrendous things that go on in industrialized husbandry are acceptable. Oftentimes, I feel like I cope by tuning out these facts, especially when I am staring down some delicious bacon at the grocery store. If I had to ask myself how it got here, then it would no longer taste very good, so I’ve simply stopped asking myself the hard questions. I imagine the vast majority of consumers are the same. Vegans certainly have the legitimate moral high ground here, and I respect their enduring adherence to their ideals.

Yet amazingly enough, this disdain for animal cruelty is also an underlying tenet of the Paleo Diet, or more generally, of all primal lifestyles. The people in the primal community come from all walks of life, but they have one thing in common: a true reverence of nature. This is why you’ll find many of us barefoot, on rocks or trees, or in the water during our day-to-day lives. This love of nature is what allows us to see our dietary predilections not as a curse, but simply as a necessity. In the same way that no one in their right mind would advocate a large-scale roundup of lions for the genocide of gazelles, or attempt to get alligators to develop a taste for delicious cake instead of small animals, we simply see our dietary heritage for what it is: natural. Indeed, none of us believe that the animal industry as it exists today is good or natural in any way; this is why we try our best to source our meats and vegetables locally as much as we can. The idea here is to be a part of nature, not transcend it. Our failing, in Veganism’s eyes, is that we do not always practice idealistically what we preach; others may simply see this as effecting change from within the system’s constraints. A path of lesser resistance, if you will.

And so it follows that if veganism is the idealistic application of these ideas, then the modern primal lifestyle (try that for an oxymoron) is really the pragmaticespousal thereof. Our underlying motivations are actually very similar, but our manifestations happened to go in completely different directions. To me, this is interesting because for these two superficially diametric groups, at the end of the day, there’s not much to disagree on at an ideological level. And out of respect for my vegan friends, there’s really nothing that I think we should disagree on. We may have different thoughts on what is most practical, moral, and so forth, but our intentions are certainly equally worthy. When it comes down to it, if one feels that Veganism is enabling oneself to live to his or her full potential, in the way that the Paleo Diet enables me to do the same, then isn’t that really all that matters? But again, as sentient beings with higher cognitive functions, we owe it to ourselves to occasionally think critically of our choices and ask whether we are truly as healthy as we could be, but also in as responsible a way as we can conceive. As such, I expect all my vegan, vegetarian, Standard-American-Dietarian, ramenarian, pizzanarian, and cannibal friends to hold each other accountable on this journey (well, alright, I don’t actually know any cannibals). We should welcome and look forward to each other’s enlightened debate and commentary.

With that, I wrap up my very long treatise on the Paleo Diet. Hopefully, I’ve done a good job helping you understand my own interpretation of it, as well as provided some of the reasons why it has appealed to me. I brought in the comparison to Veganism because the original realization felt profound to me, but also to provide some perspective in hopes of offsetting a potentially biased reading of my exposition. I’ve done my best to communicate my opinions and thoughts without resorting to party lines or dogma, and I hope you will return the favor. As an increasingly significant part of my life, I want you to understand that I do not wish to use the Paleo Diet to set myself apart; quite oppositely, it has been the one thing that has brought me closer to our heritage as humans, as animals, and more generally, as a few small instruments in Mother Nature’s never-ending symphony.