Perspective: Stone Me, Not Yet Another Diet Craze; the Latest Diet Fad Involves Looking Back to Our Ancestors. but, as John Von Radowitz Explains, You Have to Take a Long Hard Look Back to the Stone Age

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Byline: John von Radowitz

Diets seem to come and go like A-list celebrities. Just as Atkins has started to seem passe, a new way of eating is being hailed as the key to slim and stay healthy.

Only it's not really new. For this is the stone-age, or palaeolithic, diet that can be traced back two million years to a time when the earliest humans speared mammoths and dug roots up from the ground.

The food eaten back then had to be either hunted or gathered from the wild. Agriculture, and the birth of human civilisation, did not come until more than a million years later.

Advocates of the palaeolithic diet are passionate in their belief that it is what Nature intended us to consume.

The fundamental claim is that humans evolved as an omnivorous species with genes adapted to natural, raw foods.

Stone-age dieters argue that when about 10,000 years ago we discovered fire and learned how to cook, we started going off the rails food-wise, and have continued ever since.

The …