A review of The Paleo Manifesto by John Durant

The Paleo Manifesto: Ancient Wisdom for Lifelong Health

By John Durant

My wife has recently discovered a new inner light into her own personal fitness. She’s eating right and working out like crazy. She took me to one of her leg-day workouts and almost made me start crying.

One of the reasons of her success she attributes to some of the little recipes for the Paleo Diet. When I asked what that meant, she started giving me tidbits about the lifestyle, in part to what she has learned on author John Durant’s website, HunterGatherer.com. So I was very interested in finding out a bit more information just to see what was making my wife so fit and healthy. I could go no further than his book The Paleo Manifesto: Ancient Wisdom for Lifelong Health.

However, this book is almost too heavy for just a layperson wanting more information. The word Manifesto is absolutely correct: It is almost everything you would ever in a million years want to know about this topic.

One of the most interesting bits to me was his interpretations on the Bible being so obsessed with hygiene and tying right into the Paleo lifestyle. All those rules in parts of the Old Testament were there for a reason, even if they could not scientifically specify them yet. There is a theme throughout this part, as well as the whole book, of going back to that type of existence.

Parts feel like a science textbook, like when he describes the diet of man from 530 million years ago. However, he sprinkles in his own personal experience with these diets and brings it to a modern age quite well. And the lifestyle includes more than the diet. He describes in another section how to bring this standard of living into exercise and sleeping, into re-aligning with the sun. I personally don’t know how I would ever function without my alarm clock, to wake up naturally the way he wants me to, but I somehow feel that the idea is sound. Maybe I should give my boss a copy of this book. Parts of the book seem a little preachy when he gets into how animals are treated by the meat industry, but he is trying to debunk the myths that vegans have perpetuated.

The Paleo Manifesto: Ancient Wisdom for Lifelong Health is an extremely authoritative book on its subject matter that is written in an accessible format for a modern reader. Whether or not in mterested in the Paleo lifestyle, it does provide an interesting romp through man’s history and its diet.

I received this book from Blogging for Books for this review.
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