When it comes to our eating habits, it’s clear that we’re doing it wrong. We may be in the midst of health crisis, but there are few practical solutions for dealing with it.

But now a growing chorus of people are claiming that modern and processed foods are to blame, insisting that we should instead take an “evolutionary approach” to our diets and turn to foods that were eaten by our Paleolithic ancestors. Critics have responded by proclaiming it a misguided step in the wrong direction. Either way, Paleo eating has become a major lifestyle.

There’s no question that something’s terribly wrong with the way we eat. Nearly one in three Americans is overweight or obese, and rates of diabetes continues to rise. These conditions, along with steady rates of heart disease, cancer, and inflammatory problems, have led some to predict that the young generation now growing up will the first ever in our history to have shorter lifespans than their parents.

Part of the problem is that virtually everything we thought we knew about eating is wrong; the current health crisis is in no small part caused by widespread and pervasive food confusion – and much of driven and reinforced by the modern food industry. As counterintuitive as it might seem, we now know that saturated fats are good and that salt has been unfairly vilified. It’s becoming apparent that whole grains are extremely unhealthy, and that sugar is far, far worse than we previously thought, a conclusion that has led some experts to essentially describe it as poison.

At the same time, grocery stores are filled with fat-free and fat-reduced products – and the obesity problem persists. Fad diets have virtually no staying power, much to the delight of those offering them. We have become a fat-starved people, who, in its place, have substituted high density carbohydrates like bread, white potatoes, rice, and other sugar infused foods.

But like so many things in life, there often comes a time for corrections, and diet is no exception. To address the situation, a growing number of people are proclaiming that modern foods are to blame, or more specifically, those foods that came about as the result of the Agricultural Revolution and, more recently, the larger food industry. The answer to many of our health problems, they suggest, is to look at our evolutionary history and see what it has to say about what our bodies were actually meant to eat.

via Futurism News, Videos, Reviews and Gossip – io9.