The Paleo diet is, in its simplest expression, the diet eaten by Palaeolithic man, i.e. people living anywhere from 10,000 to 2,500,000 years ago.

There are, as you might imagine, a couple of problems with the idea of eating exactly as these 'cavemen' did. Firstly, they lived an awfully long time ago! Even at the more recent end of what is commonly termed the Paleolithic period, ten thousand years is a long time.

That huge time span makes it extremely hard to say exactly what people did eat. Within recorded history we can, of course be pretty sure about people's diets, but past a few thousand years, into the paleo, we're really guessing. There will be some very well educated, scholarly type guessing going on, but it's still guessing. When you're dealing with largely fossilized and geologic records it just isn't easy to see what people ate for a paleo breakfast, let alone a full paleo diet.

The second problem in defining a true paleo diet is evolution. Just as man has evolved over the millennia, so has our food. Modern, cultivated foods are considerably different from their original, wild varieties, and even from the ancient cultivated foods which would have been much closer to the native type - certainly no dwarf hybrids or dodgy GMOs in the original paleo diet!

The modern Paleo Diet

So before we get too depressed at the thought of having no idea what the paleo diet actually was, what do we actually mean when we say we're going paleo or following a paleo recipe?

Again there's a simple and a slightly lengthier explanation. In brief, then, on a paleo diet we eat nothing that Paleolithic peoples wouldn't have eaten and as much as possible of what they would have consumed.

So what does that mean in real, food on plate, terms? Plenty of vegetables, eggs, some meat and fish and some fruit, nuts and seeds really. That's about it. To put it another way, no grains, no refined sugars or sweeteners, no legumes, no potatoes, no dairy, no preservatives, additives, processed, emulsified, manufactured junk!

Another way of looking at it is that if you can't eat it raw then you probably shouldn't be eating it at all. You might not want to eat a raw food diet but you'll find that most everything on a paleo diet could be eaten raw if necessary. Veggies, fruits, nuts and seeds and yes, meat and fish can all be eaten raw. As mentioned, you might not want to chew on raw meat or fish, but you'll do a lot better with that than with raw potatoes or wheat for example.

The Paleo diet in practice

Practically speaking the paleo diet, for most people, revolves around plenty of fresh vegetables with good quality meats, fish, eggs, fruit, nuts and seeds. There are different ideas about the rights and wrongs of various degrees of 'strictness' when it comes to what constitutes a 'proper' paleo diet.

Some people argue that it's okay to replicate modern foods by making paleo versions, such as cauliflower pizza base and sweet potato brownies. Paleo recipes like these often involve the use of modern equipment such as food processors, blenders and even ovens - hardly the paleolithic open fire in the mouth of a cave! The objectors often insist that all food should be chewed and 'as nature intended' - no soups and smoothies for them.

The best advice, as with so many things, is to find what works for you. The starting point, however, should certainly be to stop eating grains, sugars, potatoes, legumes and anything else that gets heavily processed before you can eat it. Whether or not you stop eating dairy products opens up a whole new argument - the debate between paleo diet and primal eating. That's one for another day!