The Origins of the Paleo Diet

A graduate of the University of Southern California, Tammy Olson launched her career at Marsh & McLennan and went on to head sales at the company's subsidiary, Mercer. Now the vice president of client services at Hixme, Tammy Olson enjoys cooking in her leisure time and prepares a variety of paleo foods.

Although the “Paleo Diet” has become trendy in recent years, its origins lie with Paleolithic-era humans, who had no access to many food items popular today, including processed sugar, dairy products, beans, and grains. Instead, our early ancestors ate only what they could obtain by hunting and by harvesting from their environment.

The diet’s recent rise to popularity began with a study conducted by Walter Voegtlin, who wrote the Stone Age Diet in 1975 from his research on the benefits of consuming higher amounts of protein. A decade later, Melvin Konner and Stanley Boyd Eaton published an article on paleolithic nutrition in the New England Journal of Medicine.

After American nutritionist Dr. Loren Cordain discovered these writings, he published a book titled The Paleo Diet in 2002. He trademarked the name of the new diet and set it on its path to popularity.