Dr. Loren Cordain is a professor in the De¬partment of Health and Exercise Science at Colorado state university. He is the author of over 100 peer reviewed scientific articles and abstracts published in journals such as American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, the British Journal of Nutrition, and the Euro¬pean Journal of Clinical Nutrition to name a few, and is without question the foremost authority on the topics of Paleolithic nu¬trition and hunter-gatherer life-ways. The Performance Menu would simply not exist were it not for his efforts. We would like to thank to Dr. Cordain for granting us this in¬terview and for his endless enthusiasm for this topic.


Why did you begin looking at the diet and lifestyles of our ancestors for answers to modern diseases?

I have always been interested in health, fit¬ness, diet and well being. Probably similar to you and many of your readers, over the course of my lifetime, I have experimented with various diets in an effort to improve my health as well as my fitness and athletic performance. During the 70s and 80s I had believed that the best diet was one that was low in animal foods, low in fat, and high in carbohydrates with plenty of brown rice, beans, and potatoes—similar to many veg¬etarian and near vegetarian diets. Unfortu¬nately, with this diet, I experienced chronic joint and back pain, many upper respiratory illnesses and could rarely train for extended periods without encountering some sort of musculo-skeletal injury.

In 1987, I read Boyd Eaton’s now classic New England Journal of Medicine paper on Paleolithic Nutrition (Eaton SB, Konner M. Paleolithic nutrition. A consideration of its nature and current implications. N Engl J Med. 1985 Jan 31;312(5):283-9.) and it made a lot of sense to me. I read everything I could get my hands on about the topic and start¬ed to collect and organize scientific papers related to the topic. Within a year or two I found myself with thousands of papers that started to form patterns about human health and well being. I also experimented with a modern day Paleo diet that was high in lean animal foods and devoid of grains, dairy products, refined sugars, salt and processed foods. Wonder of wonders, I began to feel better, and my chronic back and joint pains disappeared. Also, in my late 30s, I could train harder and longer with few injuries. In the ensuing 15 years or so, the study of Stone Age diets and their relevance to con¬temporary people became my passion.


You have published research on a wide va¬riety of topics, ranging from ophthalmol¬ogy to dermatology to autoimmunity. This is unheard of! How do you do it?

If you would have asked me 10 years ago if I were interested in dermatology, the answer would have been a flat out no. But as I stud¬ied the Paleo diet more and more, certain ar¬eas of inquiry led to others. It was a lot like hopping from stone to stone as you cross a low river: you kind of keep your head down as you step and don’t realize where the next stone will lead you. The ophthalmology question came about as I realized that non-westernized people rarely develop myopia (near sightedness). Similarly, in my readings I came across Dr. Otto Schaefer’s writings of tending to the health of the Inuit people in the far North as they made the transition from the Stone Age to the Space age in a single generation. He noted that they had no acne when they lived and ate in their tradi¬tional manner. This observation became the impetus for my work linking diet to acne.


Would you give an overview for our readers of what the Paleo Diet is and is not? What are some common misconceptions regard¬ing the Paleo Diet?

First off, it would be almost impossible for any westerner to exactly replicate a true hunter-gatherer diet. Most of us do not have access to wild game on a year round basis and most of us would be unwilling to eat the entire carcass (brains, kidney, liver, mar¬row, gonads etc). Similarly, we do not have access to wild, undomesticated plant foods nor the time to collect them on a daily ba¬sis. Additionally these plant foods would be barely edible to our cultivated palates. The thought of eating a crab apple when you are used to eating Golden Delicious apples would be a bit hard to stomach for most of us.

However, despite these shortcomings, we can substantially improve our diet by elimi¬nating or severely reducing dairy products, grains, legumes and processed foods and re¬placing them with lean meats, fish, seafood, and fresh fruits and vegetables.


Many of our readers follow the Zone by Barry Sears using Paleo friendly foods to fill the nutritional prescription advanced by the Zone. My nutritional requirements, according to the Zone (5’9”, 170lbs, 5% body fat), are as follows: 117g protein, 144g carbs and 144g of fat. This is a macronutri¬ent ratio of 20% protein, 25% carbohydrate and 55% fat. Would you comment on the amounts and ratios from a Paleo Diet per¬spective? Do you see any way to improve on the Zone ratios?

Barry Sears is a friend and I think that his message is a good one overall in that he is on board with the notion that our current day nutritional requirements were deter¬mined by our ancestral past. I don’t believe that there was a single “Paleo Diet” for all pre-agricultural humans but rather a range of diets that varied by geographic locale, season and food availability. Consequently there was no single macronutrient ratio that would have encompassed all Paleolithic people. However, that being said, if one contrasts the range of diets which were pos¬sible for Stone Agers to the current western diet, the protein intake would have always been higher than the current western value (~15% energy) and the carbohydrate con¬tent would have always been lower than in the typical U.S. diet (~50% energy). I rec¬ommend that your readers visit my website, www.thepaleodiet.com, and download my scientific paper (Cordain L, Brand Mill¬er J, Eaton SB, Mann N, Holt SHA, Speth JD. Plant to animal subsistence ratios and macronutrient energy estimations in world wide hunter-gatherer diets. Am J Clin Nutr 2000, 71:682-92.) for more information on this topic.


The “Thrifty Gene” hypothesis states obe¬sity and related modern diseases are the re¬sult of adaptations by our ancestors. These adaptations, it is assumed, were in re¬sponse to an inconsistent food supply and thus the ability to store fat efficiently was a survival advantage. In light of your re¬search it appears that our ancestors seldom suffered from a lack of food and in general consumed an excess of calories. Does the “Thrifty Gene” hypothesis need to be re¬vamped?

I refer your readers again to my website and this paper for a detailed answer to this ques¬tion: (Cordain L, Miller J, Mann N. Scant ev¬idence of periodic starvation among hunter-gatherers. Diabetologia 1999; 42:383-84).

Basically, we believe that for most hunter-gatherers there was a seasonal waxing and waning of body weight as food sources became more and less available; however whole scale starvation rarely occurred be¬ cause hunter-gatherers were not dependent upon a single crop or foods source. With the Irish potato famine, starvation killed an enormous amount of people because they were almost entirely dependent upon a single crop for the majority of their food calories. In contrast hunter-gatherers utilize hundreds of plant and animal food resourc¬es and simply move on as they become de¬pleted.

We believe that built into the genes of vir¬tually all pre-agricultural humans was a ge¬netic adaptation to a high protein, low car¬bohydrate diet. When dietary carbohydrates are restricted, these genes are an asset in that they conserve glucose for the brain and placenta, which preferentially use glucose as an energy source. When dietary carbo¬hydrate is available in virtually unlimited supplies (i.e. after the advent of agricul¬ture), these genes now become a liability in that they tend to promote peripheral insulin resistance and its associated diseases and maladies (obesity, type 2 diabetes and the metabolic syndrome).


Our readership tends to be from the strength athlete arena and it is not diffi¬cult to get them to eat more protein. You however have influenced some of the best minds in endurance training, in particular triathletes, to adopt a higher protein, higher fat, and lower carbohydrate diet. How did this happen and what have the results been thus far?

I guess it initially happened because of my own dietary experiments in the early 1990s. I have been a runner throughout my entire adult life. Following adoption of a diet with more protein and less refined carbs, I actual¬ly noticed an improvement in my recovery from runs as well as increased freedom from upper respiratory illness and musculo-skel¬etal injuries that allowed me to train with greater intensity.

I introduced these concepts to Joe Friel, the U.S. Olympic Triathlete coach in 1995 who was quite skeptical at first. The following passage represents Joe’s feelings about this type of diet for endurance athletes:

“I have known Dr. Cordain for many years, but I didn’t become aware of his work until 1995. That year we began to discuss nutrition for sports.As a long¬time adherent to a very high-carbohy¬drate diet for athletes, I was skeptical of his claims that eating less starch would benefit performance.Nearly ev¬ery successful endurance athlete I had known ate as I did, with a heavy em¬phasis on cereals, bread, rice, pasta, pancakes, and potatoes. In fact, I had done quite well on this diet, having been an All-American age-group du¬athlete (bike and run), and finishing in the top 10 at World Championships. I had also coached many successful ath¬letes, both professional and amateur, who ate the same way I did.

“Our discussions eventually led to a challenge. Dr. Cordain suggested I try eating a diet more in line with what he recommended for one month. I took the challenge, determined to show him that eating as I had for years was the way to go. I started by simply cutting back significantly on starches, and re¬placing those lost calories with fruits, vegetables, and very lean meats.

“For the first two weeks I felt miser¬able. My recovery following workouts was slow and my workouts were slug¬gish. I knew that I was well on my way to proving that he was wrong. But in week three, a curious thing happened. I began to notice that I was not only feeling better, but that my recovery was speeding up significantly. In the fourth week I experimented to see how many hours I could train.

“Since my early 40s (I was 51 at the time), I had not been able to train more than about 12 hours per week. When¬ ever I exceeded this weekly volume, upper respiratory infections would soon set me back. In Week Four of the “experiment,” I trained 16 hours with¬out a sign of a cold, sore throat, or ear infection. I was amazed. I hadn’t done that many hours in nearly 10 years. I decided to keep the experiment go¬ing.”

“That year I finished third at the U.S. national championship with an excel¬lent race, and qualified for the U.S. team for the World Championships. I had a stellar season, one of my best in years. This, of course, led to more ques¬tions of Dr. Cordain and my continued refining of the diet he recommended.”

“I was soon recommending it to the athletes I coached, including Ryan Bolton, who was on the U.S. Olympic Triathlon team. Since 1995. I have writ¬ten four books on training for endur¬ance athletes and have described and recommended the Stone Age diet in each of them. Many athletes have told me a story similar to mine: They have tried eating this way, somewhat skepti¬cally at first, and then discovered that they also recovered faster and trained better.”

Your readers may be interested in knowing that Joe and I have completed our book “The Paleo Diet for Athletes,” which explains fully how to implement the diet and why it works from a scientific perspective. Our book will be published by Rodale Press and is scheduled for an August 2005 release. You can purchase it online at Amazon right now.


Your updated website has excellent infor¬mation and resources available (www.the¬paleodiet.com). Two of my favorites are the discussions of acid base balance and lipids. Would you explain why acid base balance is of concern and how the Paleo Diet ad¬dresses the issue? Regarding lipids, would you help our readers to understand saturat¬ed fat as it relates to cardiovascular health and its dietary role from a Paleolithic per¬spective?

Acid base balance is a topic that is either unknown or barely known to the typical reg¬istered dietician (RD) or physician because it is rarely addressed in text books on nutri¬tion, despite hundreds of articles written on the topic in scientific and medical journals.

In a nutshell, all foods report to the kidney as either acid or base. Meats, grains, cheese, legumes and salt are all acid yielding, where¬as all fruits and vegetables are base yielding. The typical U.S. diet produces a slight met¬abolic acidosis, which, over the course of a lifetime, can cause or exacerbate a variety of illnesses and diseases including hyper¬tension, stroke, kidney stones, osteoporosis, gastrointestinal tract cancers, asthma, exer¬cise induced asthma, insomnia, airsickness, high altitude sickness, age related muscle wasting, renal insufficiency and Meniere’s Syndrome (ear ringing).

Dietary saturated fats tend to promote the artery clogging process known as athero¬sclerosis because they cause LDL cholesterol levels to increase in the bloodstream. At one time, it was thought that saturated fats were virtually the sole cause of atherosclerosis; now we know that there are other dietary, environmental and genetic elements that are as important or more important in eliciting this disease process. Chronic inflammation is absolutely essential for atherosclerosis to occur and may be even more important than dietary saturated fat in causing athero¬sclerosis. High glycemic load carbohydrates are associated with total body markers of in¬flammation (C Reactive Protein or CRP) and they also negatively influence blood triglyc¬erides and HDL cholesterol, two additional blood lipid particles that are important in the development of atherosclerosis.

There is no doubt that Stone Age people rel¬ished the fattier portion of the carcass of any animal they brought down. However, as we have pointed out in a recent paper (Loren Cordain, S. Boyd Eaton, Anthony Sebas¬tian, Neil Mann, Staffan Lindeberg, Bruce A. Watkins, James H. O’Keefe, Janette Brand Miller. Origins and evolution of the western diet: Health implications for the 21st cen¬tury. Am J Clin Nutr 2005;81:341-54. ), satu¬rated fat in wild animals waxes and wanes seasonally, and there simply was not a year round source of saturated fat in most hunt¬er-gatherer diets.


You have worked with some well known and highly respected researchers and cli¬nicians including Dr. Boyd S. Eaton (The Paleolithic Prescription) Joe Friel (The Tri¬athlete’s Training Bible) and Dr.’s Michael and Mary Eades (Protein Power:Lifeplan). What are some of your current and future projects?

I am currently focusing my efforts on the link between diet and acne. We believe that the typical western diet promotes acne via its high glycemic load, its low level of omega 3 fatty acids and it’s insulin promoting dairy products. At my website, you can download a few papers I have written on the topic. I am also working on a paper explaining why hunter-gatherers abandoned their foraging lifestyle for agriculture and another paper explaining why Paleolithic hunters risk life and limb to preferentially kill megafauna like mammoths and other large dangerous animals.


In the past, seasonality and locality would have greatly altered the amounts and types of foods available. In climates above 40* latitude north or south, winters would have greatly reduced the amount of carbo¬hydrates available, at least in forms such as gourds, fruit and many edible greens. Do you feel it important to emulate this sea¬sonal change using modern foods? For ex¬ample, more meat, nuts and greens in the winter, with summer and fall being heavier in fruits and other plant material?

I do believe that these issues would have been part of the environment that shaped the human genome. However, I do not know how their adherence or lack thereof would influence fully modern humans attempting to emulate a Paleo diet with contemporary foods. I do know that in contemporary pop¬ulations, people tend to gain weight during the winter months. Perhaps reducing car¬bohydrates during this period could prove useful for some.