40 Fun Facts About Paleo Diet

Alongside grains and dairy, strict versions of the paleo diet exclude which popular everyday drink?

Coffee has no confirmed history as a drink before the 15th century, when Sufis in Yemen brewed it to stay awake for night prayers.

Wild almonds, unlike the farmed kind paleo eaters snack on, can contain potentially fatal levels of which poison?

Cyanide was bred out of almonds by growers who selected sweet trees, one reason critics say modern produce is nothing like Stone Age food.

Which popular snack nut is banned on the paleo diet because it is botanically a legume?

Peanut plants push their pods underground to ripen, and the crop belongs to the pea family alongside beans and lentils.

Dr Mark Hyman promotes a diet that blends paleo eating with which other approach?

Veganism gives the pegan diet half its name and plants about three-quarters of its plate; one reviewer called the name a paradox, since paleo eating is built around meat.

Dairy animals came later, but which animal had Stone Age hunter-gatherers already domesticated before farming began?

Dog domestication is the only one known from the Ice Age; proto-dogs may have scavenged carcasses that hunters left at kill sites.

Because the paleo diet cuts out all dairy, nutritionists warn that followers can run short of which mineral?

Calcium shortfalls, along with low vitamin D, are a known risk of paleo eating and can weaken bones over time.

In 2013 and 2014 the paleo diet was the most searched weight-loss method on which website?

Google searches crowned paleo two years running, and by 2019 products with the word in their name were a market worth about $500 million.

Paleo advocates say they translate Stone Age eating for modern life, leaving out which likely prehistoric practice?

Cannibalism left its mark at Gough's Cave in England, where 14,700-year-old human bones were gnawed by human teeth and cracked for marrow.

Broccoli, kale and cauliflower, all paleo-plate staples, were bred from the wild form of which vegetable?

Cabbage in its wild form grows along the coasts of western Europe, and none of its famous offspring existed in the Stone Age.

Besides sugar, strict paleo plans tell followers to give up which seasoning found on nearly every dinner table?

Salt production can be traced back about 8,000 years, to a site in what is now Romania dated to roughly 6000 BC.

Walter Voegtlin, whose 1975 book The Stone Age Diet pioneered paleo eating, was which kind of medical specialist?

Gastroenterologist Voegtlin declared that humans ate nothing but flesh until 10,000 years ago; decades earlier he had treated alcoholism with aversion therapy.

Loren Cordain protected the phrase The Paleo Diet, title of his 2002 bestseller, with which legal right?

A trademark on the three words belongs to Cordain, a professor emeritus of exercise science at Colorado State University.

Which breakfast cereal pioneer praised the diet of primitive ancestors in the 1890s, long before paleo had a name?

John Harvey Kellogg drew the opposite lesson from today's paleo fans: he held that primitive people ate starchy, grain-based foods.

Which diet program, created by Melissa Urban and Dallas Hartwig in 2009, is like paleo but also bans honey?

Whole30 runs for a month, after which followers bring the banned foods back and note how each one affects them.

Australian chef Pete Evans, a vocal champion of paleo eating, was a judge on which television cooking contest?

My Kitchen Rules made Evans a household name, but his 2015 paleo cookbook for babies was condemned by health experts as dangerous.

Mark Sisson, creator of the paleo-style Primal Blueprint diet, sold his sauce and dressing company to which food giant?

Kraft Heinz agreed in 2018 to pay about $200 million for the brand, which the former Ironman triathlete had co-founded only three years earlier.

Like paleo, which low-carb diet named after an American cardiologist encourages eating large amounts of red meat?

Atkins published his plan in 1972, three years before The Stone Age Diet appeared, and both lean on meats high in saturated fat.

The word Paleolithic was built in 1865 from words for old and stone in which ancient language?

Greek palaios and lithos were joined by Lubbock, the English banker and archaeologist who also gave Britain its bank holidays.

Which prehistoric period brought the farming that the paleo diet tries to undo?

Neolithic farming began about 12,000 years ago in West Asia, bringing settled villages, herds of animals and the first fields of cereals.

Which food can many adults digest only because of a gene variant that spread after herding began?

Milk stays digestible for adults who carry lactase persistence, proof that human digestion kept evolving after the Stone Age: in most mammals the milk-digesting enzyme fades after weaning.

Extra copies of the gene for which saliva enzyme suggest that humans adapted to eating starchy foods?

Amylase starts breaking down starch in the mouth, and peoples with starch-rich diets tend to carry more copies of its gene than those who eat little starch.

Which people of Tanzania, among the last full-time hunter-gatherers, forage for honey, tubers and baobab fruit?

Hadza men bring in the honey, meat and baobab while women dig tubers, and in 2015 only about 1,300 of them remained.

The !Kung, one of six forager groups behind Loren Cordain's paleo figures, live on the edge of which African desert?

Kalahari foragers were tracked for just one month in the study Cordain used, one reason critics call his picture of Stone Age eating incomplete.

Loren Cordain's paleo data drew on which Arctic people, traditional hunters of seal, walrus and whale?

Inuit eating sits at one end of a wide range: Alaska's Nunamiut got 99% of their calories from animals, while the Gwi of southern Africa got 25%.

Barley and lentils, both off the paleo menu, were first farmed more than 10,000 years ago in which region?

Fertile Crescent farmers tamed eight founder crops, among them einkorn, emmer, chickpeas and flax, along with cows, goats, sheep and pigs.

Corn, banned on paleo as a grain, was bred in southern Mexico about 9,000 years ago from which wild grass?

Teosinte still grows in Mesoamerica as four wild species, while corn is the only domesticated member of the same genus.

Chicken, a staple of paleo dinners, was domesticated mainly from which wild Asian bird?

Red junglefowl are much smaller than their farmyard descendants and far more wary of people.

Beef cattle descend from which wild ox, now extinct, that Stone Age artists painted on the walls of Lascaux cave?

Aurochs share the Hall of the Bulls at Lascaux with horses and stags, and their tamed descendants now supply the world's beef and milk.

Which fitness brand, founded by Greg Glassman in 2000, has gyms called boxes that may steer members toward paleo eating?

CrossFit grew out of workouts that Glassman, a former gymnast, devised at 16 by mixing gymnastics with weightlifting.

Richard Wrangham argues that cooked food fuelled the growth of which human organ about 1.8 million years ago?

Brain growth is the centrepiece of Wrangham's book Catching Fire, which also credits cooked tubers for humans' smaller teeth and jaws.

The oldest likely evidence of cooked food, about 780,000 years old, is the heated teeth of which kind of animal?

Fish teeth heated at Gesher Benot Ya'aqov, beside the Jordan River, put cooking far back in the Stone Age, long before our own species appeared.

Stone Age hunters ate which Ice Age giant and then built dwellings from the leftover bones?

Woolly mammoth bone dwellings number more than 70, most of them on the East European Plain, and Neanderthals built with the bones too.

Ancient skulls show that which dental problem grew more common once farmers began eating carbohydrate-rich crops?

Tooth decay also rose when Indigenous North Americans moved from a hunter-gatherer diet to one built on maize.

Olive and coconut oils are allowed on paleo, but which refined oil does Harvard's review of the diet name as banned?

Canola began as a trademark of the Rapeseed Association of Canada, built on the country's name, for a rapeseed bred to be low in erucic acid.

Sweet potatoes, sometimes allowed on paleo when white potatoes are not, belong to which family of flowering plants?

Morning glory kin, sweet potatoes are only distantly related to white potatoes, which paleo plans avoid for their high glycemic index.

Which tropical root, the source of tapioca, may be eaten in moderation on paleo along with sweet potatoes?

Cassava is native to Brazil, where its roots are also grated, pressed and roasted into a coarse flour.

Sugarcane, the plant behind the refined sugar that paleo bans, was first domesticated on which large Pacific island?

New Guinea's Papuan farmers first grew the cane mainly as food for their pigs, long before anyone refined it into sugar.

Ohalo II, a 23,000-year-old camp where foragers gathered wild barley and other cereals, lies on the shore of which lake?

Sea of Galilee waters rose and buried the camp, preserving seeds from foragers who gathered cereals long before farming began.

A 2019 US analysis ranked paleo as harder on the environment than an omnivorous diet but gentler than which diet?

Ketogenic eating began in the 1920s as a hospital treatment for children with epilepsy, decades before it became a weight-loss trend.

Which New Yorker writer, author of The Sixth Extinction, called the paleo diet's emphasis on meat a disaster?

Elizabeth Kolbert objected to the high energy cost of producing meat; her book on mass extinction won a Pulitzer Prize.