Paleo and Primal Are Not Interchangeable Words

Poor use of language, especially in naming a particular subject, can lead to poor thinking and unnecessary disagreements.  There are those in the Paleo and Primal communities that disagree, sometimes heatedly, on what is an allowed food and what is not.  At times, this is because people will browse a Primal page, when what they really are looking for is Paleo.  Thinking they are the same, they will defend their position on a false premise.  In fact, they are not interchangeable words.  While the two diets are very similar, they are not exactly alike.

  There exists a certain amount of discrepancy of what ancestral man ate.  They are in the Paleolithic and Primal communities, respectively.

Author Zeljko.filipin, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

What Are the Similarities?

The Paleolithic Diet and the Primal Diet are far more alike than they are different.  The base of their pyramids are the same.  Fruits, vegetables, and meat should be the center and the staples of your diet.  Both advocate the elimination of bread and grains, including whole grains and corn.  After the birth of agriculture and more complex civilizations, bread, grains, legumes, and rice became staples of the human diet.  However, our genes and bodies evolved over two million years, and have not changed structurally.  Hence, eating cereals, breads, and grains as the base of your diet is akin to a carnivore eating mainly plants.

Both philosophies also strongly advocate the elimination of processed food.  Chemical processing not only destroys many of the nutrients in food, but also introduces an array of harmful chemicals.

Excess sugar, especially in the form of high fructose corn syrup should be avoided.  The same goes for gluten.

Food synergy is a tenet of both diets.  They not only recommend that you eat a bulk amount of fruits and vegetables, but a wide variety of them as well.  Different families, different colors accentuate different nutrients and vitamins.

Now, the Differences

The first fundamental difference between the Paleo and the Primal is the the philosophy towards saturated fats.  The Paleos believe in minimizing saturated fats, believing that a bulk intake is harmful.  They believe that it raises cholesterol and is additionally the culprit of many cases of heart disease.  The Primals, on the other hand, embrace saturated fats, highly touting coconut oil, grass fed butter, and eggs.

Legumes are the second source of discrepancy.  They are disallowed on a Paleo diet, believed to harbor a high concentration of antinutrients, namely lectins.  While Primals agree that legumes should not be a major part of the diet, they do not completely eschew them.

Dairy products contain the third disagreement.  Like legumes, the Primals do not advocate massive intake of dairy, as that was not the main source of the human diet before the birth of agriculture.  The Paleos avoid dairy completely, believing that early humans did not consume it at all, and also making reference to the casein protein binding to many vital antioxidants in fruits and vegetables, rendering them useless.  Primals share that concern and believe that dairy should be consumed away from meals on that point.  They also are very select about the dairy that is allowable.  They advocate kefir and raw, unprocessed cheese for their probiotic content.  Milk is occasionally permissible if it is raw.  Both philosophies avoid factory, pasteurized dairy.  Pasteurization destroys the probiotics in milk.  Additionally, many factory farms treat their cows with the hormone rBST, believed to be the culprit of an array of potential health problems.

A short version is that the Paleo diet is somewhat more restrictive than the Primal diet.  However, they do have many common tenets that are gaining increasing acceptance in mainstream nutrition.