Back in 2003, when Loren Cordain’s bestselling book The Paleo Diet was all the rage, I remember trying to explain to my five-year-old son that Daddy was going to eat a ton of meat to make him big and strong. I struck an ape pose, made a growling noise and then Tommy offered to share his Percy Pigs with me. After mumbling something about “real meat” I went off to the shops. My three children were still very young and our house seemed to be full of non-Paleo garbage such as alphabet spaghetti, Babybel cheese and those execrable Percy Pigs. Becoming a caveman really appealed to me.
I bought into the claim that our genes have not evolved since the Palaeolithic era (about 10,000 years ago) and therefore we should eat only meat, fish, fruit and veg (plus nuts and seeds) and banish anything “modern” such as grains, legumes, beans, all dairy products and potatoes. It sounded plausible. Also, simple and reassuringly masculine. Our hunter-gatherer protein-loving ancestors were guys (presumably undone by a woman one day saying, “You know what? I’m going to grind up all the stuff in that field and bake it into a cake”).
Clearly I was not the only one. The actress turned wellness guru Gwyneth Paltrow, never one to miss out on a good trend, says she recently abandoned the Paleo diet after following it with her partner, the TV producer Brad Falchuk.
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My journey from Percy Pigs to, well, pigs was strictly A to B, but Paltrow has made stops everywhere on the nutrition map, starting with macrobiotics.
“I was just so amazed that we had this power in our hands that if we treated ourselves well and hydrated and ate whole foods that we could just feel so much better,” she recently said on her Goop Podcast. “I was sort of intoxicated by that idea and I still feel that way to this day.”
Worries about “inflammation” eventually drove her and Falchuk to Paleo, but now — put down that mammoth steak and summon the elders to the fire pit! — she is “a little bit sick of it”.
Gwyneth Paltrow with her partner, the TV producer Brad Falchuk
STEPHEN LOVEKIN/VARIETY/PENSKE MEDIA /GETTY IMAGES
“I’m getting back into eating sourdough bread, cheese –— there, I said it,” she added (presumably having changed out of her loincloth, scrubbed out that cave painting of a hunting party stalking an antelope and replaced it with a picture of a cheese sandwich).
Well, I have to say, I am way ahead of Gwynnie here. I got heartily sick of Paleo within a month of starting it. On paper (or should that be a stone tablet?) it was a solid idea. I was a low-energy dad with a taste for my children’s leftover Coco Pops and fish fingers. At first I enjoyed shopping like a caveman. It is so much simpler when you swipe the meat aisle into your trolley, add a few fruits and vegetables and head home.
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But it turns out that scientists know very little about the proportion of meat to veg that our ancestors ate. I found digesting so much meat hard work. And I soon felt like a Luddite denying myself peas (I really like peas) or other modern sissy inventions such as lentils and chickpeas, just because cavemen hadn’t yet come across them.
It was like having to consult the world’s least-informed nutritionist before every meal. “Sorry, mate, too modern and trendy,” this notional half-ape with a huge overhanging forehead would grunt just as I was about to put a peanut to my lips (it’s a legume, so not allowed). And I soon began to crave cheese too.
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Palaeolithic man cooking with fire supposedly led to a surge in human brain size because digestion improved and our bodies were able to absorb more nutrients. But I have to say Paleo quickly made me more stupid. I began to come up with prehistoric solutions to distinctly modern problems. Someone cut me up on the school run? I’d lean out of the car window and make a gorilla noise. When a teacher at parents’ evening said my son could sometimes be rough with the class hamster I got annoyed.
Gwynnie bailed out of Paleo because she was bored. I don’t want to be indelicate but it was my gut that finally insisted I pack it in. The message was clear: “I’m fine with Coco Pops and pasta, but try putting another animal through me and we’re done.”