Paleo and keto are both very popular and trendy diets that have shown to assist weight loss and give a variety of other health benefits.
Both involve restricting the consumption of certain foods, especially processed foods. Both also encourage the use of nutrient-rich foods like meat and vegetables but discourage eating grains or legumes.
So what is the actual difference between them?
What Is the Keto Diet?
Proponents of the keto or ketogenic diet try to stimulate ketosis in which the body uses fat rather than carbohydrates for energy.
To that end, a follower of the keto diet will calculate their macronutrients to help them get there. They will need a diet high in fat and low in carbohydrates. Typical macros ratios look like this:
- Carbohydrates: 5 to 10 percent
- Protein: 20 to 30 percent
- Fat: 60 to 80 percent
In addition to helping someone lose weight, the keto diet can help them control their blood sugar. It’s a combination that has caused it to become an increasingly popular option.
What Is the Paleo Diet?
The paleo diet, often called the caveman diet, revolves around the idea that human beings should eat the same way as their ancestors did during the Paleolithic period.
Its proponents argue that modern processed foods and food production systems are bad for your health. The paleo diet thus eliminates processed foods, grains, legumes, and most types of dairy, for cavemen did not eat those.
On the other hand, followers of the paleo diet will eat meat, fish, eggs, nuts, seeds, fruits, and vegetables. They will also eat some oils and fats and minimally processed sweeteners like maple syrup or raw honey.
How Are Keto and Paleo the Same?
While the two diets do differ from each other, they share some similarities. Both keto and paleo strongly end the following guidelines.
Emphasize Whole Foods
Whole foods have been subjected to little or no processing. Both the paleo and keto diets recommend eating whole foods like vegetables and meat while shunning processed products. They especially urge you to avoid processed oils, fats, and sweeteners.
Don’t Allow Grains and Legumes
Both paleo and keto strongly urge you to avoid grains and legumes – albeit for different reasons.
Followers of the paleo diet, for example, don’t eat grains and legumes because cavemen didn’t eat them.
Grain and legumes also contain antinutrients, which are compounds found in some plants. Antinutrients interfere with your ability to absorb nutrients. If you eat a lot of foods that contain antinutrients, they can also upset your digestive system.
Followers of the keto diet don’t eat grains and legumes because they contain a lot of carbohydrates. They can, therefore, knock your body out of ketosis.
Eliminate Added Sugar
Both the paleo and keto diets also call for the elimination of added sugars. In both cases, they do so because many such products are highly processed.
Paleo, however, does allow some sugars, providing they aren’t processed. You can thus use sweeteners like honey or maple syrup.
The keto diet, by contrast, forbids all added sugars, because they contain a lot of carbohydrates.
Encourage Eating Healthy Fats
Both diets encourage eating healthy fats – either monounsaturated or polyunsaturated.
Healthy fats slow down the digestion of carbohydrates and make you feel full. They help your body absorb certain nutrients, aid memory, heart health, and hormone function. Healthy fats also make food taste good.
Good sources of healthy fats include fish, nuts, seeds, and certain unrefined oils, like avocado or olive oil.
By contrast, both diets say you should avoid processed and unhealthy fats like trans fats.
How Do Keto and Paleo Differ?
Despite the above similarities, there are still significant differences between keto and paleo.
As already mentioned, keto and paleo embrace many of the same rules – but for different reasons. Both diets discourage using added sugars, for example. Keto forbids added sugars because they are high in carbohydrates, while paleo restricts their use because many added sugars are also highly processed.
Here are some other differences.
Keto Is About Micronutrients, Paleo About Ideology
Keto emphasizes the distribution of macronutrients, which are nutrients that the body needs for fuel. There are three macronutrients: carbohydrates, fats, and proteins. The keto diet requires you to eat these in a specific ratio to keep the body in ketosis.
Paleo, by contrast, pays no attention to macronutrient distribution. You may eat what you like, provided it is on the list of allowable foods. It emphasizes ideology and lifestyle.
As mentioned before, paleo’s proponents believe humans should eat what their prehistoric ancestors did. The paleo diet also recommends short and intense bursts of exercise, which are believed to reduce the stress that longer workouts might cause.
Paleo recommends stress management techniques like meditation or yoga too. The combination of diet, regular and intense exercise and stress management can lead to optimal health.
Paleo Allows Carbs
While the keto diet restricts all carbs, the paleo diet does not.
Both diets restrict the consumption of grains, most legumes, and anything processed. Paleo, however, does let you eat carbohydrates providing they come from whole foods.
If you’re following the paleo diet, you can eat fruits, vegetables, and unrefined sweeteners like honey as much as you would like.
Hypothetically, you could also follow a high-carb diet if you eat mainly fruits and vegetables since, unlike keto, paleo is not explicitly low-carb.
Keto Allows Dairy and Soy
Paleo restricts the consumption of most dairy and soy foods since cavemen didn’t consume either. The one dairy food allowed on the paleo diet is grass-fed butter. Soy is made from the soybean, which is a legume, so it’s off-limits.
Keto, by contrast, encourages the consumption of dairy products, providing they are low in carbohydrates and high in fats. Thus, you can have lots of heavy creams, unsweetened yogurt, and butter, but you can’t have ice cream or milk.
Soy foods like soybeans, tofu, and tempeh are also permitted, providing they fit the macronutrient balance.
Keto or Paleo?
Most of us are going to find the paleo diet somewhat easier to follow, simply because it allows more choices in food. The paleo diet is also less socially isolating since it doesn’t require dieters to follow a strict macronutrient balance.
Both points make it easier for us to enjoy ourselves at parties or restaurants.
By contrast, anyone on the keto diet generally has to stick to food they prepare themselves.
That said, keto can benefit people with certain health conditions. For instance, an early version of the diet was developed in the 1920s – believe it or not – to treat people with epilepsy.