It has been suggested that a major contributor to chronic disease in modern industrialized populations is a mismatch between our contemporary dietary patterns and our fundamental nutritional needs, which were shaped over the slow course of human evolution. This, of course, is the primary argument behind the Paleo diet. So what exactly do we mean by mismatch , and how does this manifest itself? Think about a doughnut, and more specifically how it is created. It requires refining a bunch of whole foods into purified ingredients, which are then reconstituted into a hyper-palatable, energy-dense product with a fantastic shelf life. Needless to say, for most of our history as a species, such foods simply did not exist. Okay, that is a pretty blatant example of evolutionary mismatch. But other dietary aspects of mismatch are much more subtle – and probably don’t come to mind when you think about a Paleo diet. Yet they may matter just as much with respect to health and anti-aging. On th