Customer Reviews

NeanderThin: A Caveman's Guide to Nutrition

5 star:		(59)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I became interested in the Paleolithic Diet after starting Atkins. I lost weight quickly and easily by cutting carbohydrates. There really was something to this low-carb stuff!

I began reading other diet books like Protein Power and scoured the Internet. There were a lot of online references to something called the Paleolithic Diet. One book was mentioned time and time again, Neanderthin, by Ray Audette.

I got ahold of the new edition and became a convert. The book tells that while our diet has changed since the advent of agriculture, our genes have not had time to adapt. We still have the old hunter-gatherer DNA. The grains, refined sugars and carbohydrates in our diet today are making us sick. Our bodies can't handle this new stuff.

The book tells you what foods to eat and what to avoid. Well written with an extensive bibliography.

Very highly recommended. The book has changed my life.

Bob Hodgen

After seeing Ray Audette on 48 Hours I stepped on the scale and found myself at 180 lbs., 5 lbs. more than I had ever weighed. At 43 I was looking my age and felt it. The Neanderthin approach appealed to me. It made good, logical sense. I got the book and started on January 20th. My weight has steadily gone down yet I have not gone hungry nor felt deprived. The amazing side effect is that my energy level has gone through the roof. I have been on hyperdrive, feeling great and just plain happier with life! After ten weeks on this diet I have lost 13 lbs and now am just 2 lbs. over my college weight. At this rate I will be back to my high school weight in another ten weeks. I feel good enough to get back to pumping iron to help things along. Since my wife was doing the cooking she has been on it too and has lost 15 lbs. This is a plan I can and will stick with. It's so easy! The results are so good I can't imagine going back to my old eating habits. I just don't want many of the foods I subsisted on before. I would urge anyone to get this book and give it a try. Looking better and feeling better are a great way to go through life.

I lost a lot of weight using the Neanderthin diet plan. But it is also a plan for life. I will stay on this diet forever. I feel so much better. My arthritis is gone, as a result of being on this diet. I had arthritis so bad I could hardly walk, it was even painful to stand...now the pain is gone.

This book does a good job explaining why certain foods are paleo, and why others are not. This was very helpful to me. I now get very sick if I eat "foreign proteins" like gluten and dairy. This book has also helped my son who was severely injured by childhood immunizations. The book has helped me to put him on a diet that avoids foreign proteins and stresses on the immune system. My son is making great gains and recovering.

This book would help almost anyone with an auto immune disease to recover and to get healthy again. I have lost weight and feel better. I highly recommend this book.

I have always listened to nutritional advisors and medical experts with regards to my diet. I ate the recommended fat free diet and thought the weight gain, myopia, infections, recurring illnesses (like colds and flus) were a normal part of life. I felt like a failure as my weight went steadily up and my health decreased.

I got the first edition of Ray Audette's book Neanderthin and every edition since then. This new edition is the best yet. It makes so much sense and explains in an easy to understand format for the average person why a diet similar to our ancestors is the best for us.

This book definitely changed my life for the better, with improved vision, health, and weight loss. It also provides answers to common questions asked by skeptical family members and friends about the Paleo way of eating. I highly recommend this book and this way of life.

I'm a low-carb dieter who lost 47 lbs on the Atkins diet last year. During that time I felt great, slept better, skin cleared up, had wonderful energy and also experienced other little side benefits to the weight loss that are too numerous to get into here. However, after several months I plateaued at about 25 lbs above my ideal, and of course I wanted to jump-start my weight loss again. So, I did a little investigating, discovered the Neanderthin diet and decided to give it a try.

A brief summary of the basics of this diet: eat no technology-dependant foods. By that, author Ray Audette meant that if a food needs technology beyond a sharp stick or stone to process it to become edible, or to exist in its present form, it was never a natural part of our human diet, which had its origins with hunter-gatherer societies. What foods absolutely must be processed and/or cooked are: grains, including wheat, rice and most others; starchy vegetables like potatoes and yams; legumes, including peanuts, beans and peas. Refined sugars and artificial sweeteners are absolutely unnatural, although a small bit of honey is fine. Modern fruits are okay but must be eaten sparingly due to the fact that they have been altered over thousands of years to barely resemble the wild originals that our ancestors snacked on, usually much larger and with a much higher sugar content. Fermented foods are of course absent without our technology, so that excludes cheeses, vinegars and alcohols. Dairy products are also absent from the lives of hunter gatherers for obvious reasons. That leaves us with meats, fish/seafood, eggs, nuts, most vegetables, greens, and small amounts of fruits and berries.

I tried the hunter-gatherer diet for about one month. Just as with Atkins, I felt wonderful and had all of the other side benefits of the low-carb diet, but my weight loss was still stalled. You see, the allowance of fruits on this diet was too great a temptation and I overdid it there. Longtime dieters may be familiar with the term "trigger", which is anything that causes your cravings to resurface. Some people like me have carb triggers so sensitive that even fruits can activate them. So, reluctantly I concluded that I would have to replace the Neanderthin diet with a low-carb diet that forbid me to have any fruit, at least during the weight loss phase. When I am finished and at my goal weight, however, I will return to the Neanderthin diet to maintain my excellent health, as I can't imagine a life entirely without strawberries, peaches and melons!

I should note here that the authors Audette and Gilchrist do not advocate this diet as an aid to weight loss per se, but for reversing health problems and improving overall fitness. They theorize that diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, obesity and many other curses of civilization are the byproducts of an immune system response to unnatural foods like grains: they show how you can trace the origins and progression of these conditions from the time grains and other technology-dependant foods were introduced into a culture. Examples in our European culture point to the Industrial Revolution as the biggest health problem of our history, when steam powered mills made refined white flours and sugars commonly available and cheap to the masses. Until then heart disease and diabetes (just to pick two examples) were so rare as to be unheard of; now they are epidemic in the USA, which by the way consumes more refined flour and sugar per person than any nation in the world.

Audette's theories and explanations make perfect sense to me, a non-scientist. They may partly explain why other low-carb diets are successful for weight loss. I can also see the sense in removing refined and processed foods from my diet, along with all the chemicals and trans fats that come with them. It's just too bad that a hunter-gatherer diet has a built in flaw, namely that the diet food industry can't cash in on it (remember, no artificial sweeteners or processed foods), and therefore it won't get the kind of publicity that diets like Atkins and Protein Power have had. Hopefully, the good word of mouth from satisfied dieters will spread and eventually get Audette nd Gilchrist the acclaim they deserve for helping so many people get back their health and quality of life.
-Andrea, aka Merribelle

A long term believer that simple carbs put on the pounds, NeanderThin is the cleanest approach to low carb eating I've read. Spending most of my adult life battling with a weight problem, I've learned that what I refer to as lean eating is the only long term way for success (unless you become an athlete). I've been highly against the early advice of the Atkins type diet because it promotes consuming pounds of bacon, etc. Get real - this is clearly not the way to health. Fresh produce, minimal cooking and no pasturization. Meats, fish and NO PROCESSING. You feel better and stay leaner. It's really simple and shouldn't be feared as two difficult. I really disagree with the preface where Eades states that this is more restrictive. He includes any amount of complex carbs your body accepts just states that higher complex carbs (fruit/veggies) will slow weight loss. There were some minor references in the book which are assumptions or opinions and are not backed up in research(and possibly not all together true)which I thought discredited it a bit, BUT the vast majority of Audettes statements ARE followed up with references to the research that has been done. A little extreme (makes you think a potato chip will cause extreme problems) but anyone who practices low simple carb eating can tell you 1) your body will tell you it's the proper way to eat, and 2)after extended periods of time, adding simple carbs in will make you gain weight quickly. NeanderThin has renewed my committment to this way of life. I've bounced back and forth with it for the last couple years (after 15 years on) put on 40 pounds and became sluggish. Two weeks into the program, I've dropped about 12 pounds without trying, and after about 1 week I got my energy back - so it's back to the gym and 30 pounds to go. I would recommend this book to anyone affraid of Atkins or the Protien Power books - it's simplistic and 'clean'. By the way -, five years ago, I wanted to drop about 10 pounds fast and decided to follow atkins - It made me sickly and light headed - it ended with a binge of vegetables and fruit which I craved uncontrollably - Audette has the proper balance - it's eat naturally. Sorry for the poor spelling.

Let me begin by saying that I basically agree with the premise of this book. However, there are many, many errors and fictions that detract from an otherwise important and useful message. I'm a medical anthropologist who has had a life-long struggle with obesity and an active interest in the evolutionary role of nutrition. When I saw this book recommended at the Eades website, I bought it but was aghast at the poor use of available resources in its preparation. The book lays out its argument in a psuedoscientific format, based largely on speculation and half-digested facts. Ironically, it ignores several important resources that would haved strengthened its premise, while pursuing some silly, fad notions and food myths. For example, the reader is enjoined to eat only those botanical foods that can be eaten uncooked-- supposedly because they're more "natural-- and avoid cashews because they require heat "processing." The author fails to mention that cashews, an excellent source of fiber and monounsaturated fats, are "naturally" processed in the heat of the sun (that's how they're eaten by Native Brazilians), which removes the toxic oils. Alas too, when the author endeavors to write about the role of a protein diet in the course of early hominid evolution, the errors become even more glaring.
This is sad because the premise, i.e., the advantageousness of a high protein, moderate carbohydrate diet advocated by the Eades, Sears and every other nutritionist worth their salt, is clouded by an array of myths and half-digested facts.
This is not the proper forum for a detailed list of the glaring errors in this book and the reader should be advised that the author's enthusiasm has likely overwhelmed his facts. Read this book with caution and rely on the Eades books for responsible and solid, research-based nutritional information.

I have been fighting allergies for 12 years with little success. Allergists never could pin down what was causing the problem. I was getting sinus infections every few months. I rarely felt well enough to exercise and my glucose and cholesterol started to shoot up. Eventually I was taking medications for both the glucose and cholesterol but they were still too high. 3 months ago I started this diet. I felt better after 2 weeks. I was able to start regular exercise again. I was concerned about the cholesterol but when I went last week for my blood test my cholesterol was cut in half. My glucose was cut in half. My HDL/LDL ratio was much better. All my blood readings were back in normal. My doctor could not believe it. If I maintain these results next time we will start reducing the medications. In addition I lost 5 pounds. I'm convinced that it works.

Adopting the Paleolithic Diet is more than just about losing weight, but about feeling better, having more sustained energy, and breaking out of the grain-carbohydrate-allergy cycle that many people suffer from.

One reviewer complained about inaccuracies in the science behind Neanderthin; problems & fine points of the science have been discussed elsewhere and will no doubt be corrected in subsequent editions.

But the fact remains that Neanderthin works! In four months I shed that pound-a-year flab that had accumulated since leaving college, I have more sustained energy, and am free from lifelong grain-and milk-caused allergies.

I recommend Neanderthin most wholeheartedly! We are raising our two-year-old daughter the Neanderthin way.

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Neanderthin cuts a swathe through the medical mysteries of obesity and chronic disease. It clearly shows how our health problems relate to major changes in the diet some 10,000 years ago. It holds aloft a new gold standard in nutrition- the Paleolithic Diet, the diet of ancient man. The Paleolithic Diet is 2 million years old and looking stronger than ever.

The new edition is expanded with more detail on the relationship of food and disease, what to eat, how to go about the diet, an easy to follow exercise program and more recipes.

Ray Audette's personal odyssey is inspiring. His history of nutrition is fascinating. His explanations for obesity, arthritis and other diseases are convincing.

If you diet hasn't given you the results you need, grab Neanderthin and go for it. It certainly worked for me.