In some cases, there’s a marketing or branding thing going on. Dr. Loren Cordain wrote “The Paleo Diet” and that’s a brandable name. In fact, it’s trademarked. The “Paleolithic Diet” is basically the public domain version of that name. And it means the same thing. Now, in the CrossFit community, everyone just says “Paleo” and that’s that. Even people who would differentiate themselves from Cordain and “The Paleo Diet” brand will shorten Paleolithic to Paleo in conversation.

One thing I can say for sure about the term “Caveman” is that the media likes it. Probably because it’s descriptive, simple and piques curiosity. They can even incorporate a little Geico humor into article titles: “Paleolithic diet is so easy, cavemen actually did it.” I say, anything that gets the Paleo (there, I used the “slang” myself) community some good press is great. This is a real movement that’s happening and I believe the implications are going to be huge. But, the question remains: “What exactly is a caveman diet?”

With that question in mind, I decided to some digging.

The Caveman Diet

Early this year, The New York Times did a piece called: “The New Age Cavemen and The City.” It was definitely a good article (And it was in the Fashion section of all places!?!). John Durant from hunter-gatherer.com was front and center in the article. They also mentioned Cordain and Tony Budding from CrossFit got to comment too. But all through the article, the authors and the interviewees revert back to the “Paleo” term. As a side note, I checked google AdWords today and “Caveman Diet” is searched over 22,000 times a month – someone is talking about it. The New York Times article had some other interesting stuff in it including a mention of Art De Vany. I hadn’t heard of him until now and his blog looks pretty interesting. I’ll be checking that out later.

More digging didn’t really turn up much. As far as I can tell, Caveman Diet is interchangeable with Paleolithic or Paleo and no one is really trying to brand it. Or, if they are, they’re not doing it very well because I can’t find anything but Paleo references in articles that come up for “caveman diet.” I will say that newspaper articles with Jim Durant seem to include the Caveman Diet term an awful lot…

As a funny aside, WebMD has an article called “Eating Like a Caveman” and referred to Paleo eating as “The Flintstones Diet.” Some friends of mine joked once that Fruity Pebbles must be Paleo…

I see this as an exciting time. The world is changing rapidly and a great diet and lifestyle – Paleolithic – is getting a good amount of positive exposure in the press. It works for me…

I predict that, sooner or later, the Paleolithic way of eating will be widely recognized as the template for a healthy human diet and the technology we currently communicate with is going to drive that recognition. Ironic, to say the least.

ttys

Adam