In today’s over-advertised culture of fad diets, and miracle weight-loss pills, how is the average health conscious consumer supposed to weed out the good from the bad?
To answer this question, let’s look back into our past for a minute.
What we know as humans (the genus Homo in one form or another) have been on Earth for about 2 million years, and their predecessors were here up to 7 million years ago. Combined, these early humans had around 9 million years to adapt to a diet that remained relatively unchanged for most of that time. We became, through millions of years of evolutionary trial and error, a species of omnivores who were able to derive energy from both plants an animals. This ability to eat a variety of foods allowed us to maximize our energy intake from our surroundings, but it also helped keep our population in check, because only a certain amount of calories could be obtained from hunted animals, and foraged plants (many plants in their raw forms, like grains, beans and potatoes, are inedible and even toxic to humans).
This all changed around 10,000 years ago however, with the remarkable discovery of cooking. Cooking granted us access to calorie rich food such as grains, beans, and potatoes because the heat destroyed enough of the toxins and enzyme blockers to render these plants edible, forever changing human histroy, and in turn, our diet. The effect of cooking had an enormous effect on our food intake- perhaps doubling the number of calories that we could obtain from the plant foods in our environment. Other advantages were soon obvious with these foods:
- they could store for long periods (refrigeration of course being unavailable in those days)
- they were dense in calories- i.e. a small weight contains a lot of calories, enabling easy transport
- the food was also the seed of the plant- later allowing ready farming of the species
These advantages made it much easier to store and transport food. We could more easily store food for winter, and for nomads and travelers to carry supplies. Food storage also enabled surpluses to be stored, and this in turn made it possible to free some people from food gathering to become specialists in other activities, such as builders, warriors and rulers. This also caused an explosion in the human population and in turn set us on the course to modern day civilization. Agriculture, factory farming, and the refining and processing of food into… something other than food, were technologies what were soon to follow.
What does this mean for me?
For millions of year our bodies had to adapt to eating mostly meat, fish, fowl, and the leaves, roots, and fruits of many plants. This diet has been coded into our DNA, and it is the diet that humans function most optimally on. Proof of this can be found in the few remaining hunter-gatherer tribes still living in the world. Most, if not all are strong, fast, have straight teeth and perfect eyesight. Also, cases of arthritis, diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, stroke, depression, schizophrenia and cancer are also absolute rarities.
The common factor: Lack of exposure to a Western diet!
So why fight your genes? If you need a diet to follow, why not follow the one that your body has been designed by time for?
How do I follow a Paleolithic Diet?
I will borrow from CrossFit’s Greg Glassman on this one. He has very succinctly reduced the Paleo way of eating into a few simple words.
Eat meats and vegetables, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch, and NO sugar.
That’s all folks. So simple a 5 year old could figure it out. Memorize this line, ingrain it in your mind, tattoo it on your body if you must. These words: Eat meats and vegetables, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch, and NO sugar, should ring in your head every time you are thinking about food.
To elaborate a little, what Coach Glassman is saying when he shortened the Paleo diet to this simple sentence is:
- Try and keep your food shopping to the perimeter of the grocery store.
- If it comes in a box, or needs a nutrition label to tell you what is in it, IT’S NOT FOOD!
- If doesn’t expire, IT’S NOT FOOD!
- If you are eating out, get extra veggies and skip the potatoes, fries, sweet potatoes, etc.
- Do not eat grains, pasta, bread, rice or beans, all of which wouldn’t have been available to our Paleo ancestors.
- Make sure you are eating enough good fats. (Fish Oil especially!)
Yes this is a low carbohydrate diet, and what carbs you do consume should be coming from green, leafy vegetables. More on why we should all be lowering our carb intake can be found in my article on triglycerides. Also, as mentioned above, evidence of the lower-carb, Paleo diets effects on the body can be seen in the body compositions of the few remaining indigenous tribes scattered throughout the world.
More details about the Paleo way of eating can be found in Loren Corain’s excellent book: The Paleo Diet: Lose Weight and Get Healthy by Eating the Food You Were Designed to Eat
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The final word.
For every food decision you make, ask yourself this question first: Would a caveman have eaten that?
We may not live in a Paleolithic world, but our body, and it’s biological process are very much a relic of that era. On the time line of human history, our advances in food technology are very recent (2 million vs. 10,000 years), and with evolution being a slow process, our bodies haven’t had a change to catch up to our brains.
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, not all calories are created equal, and the quality of food you eat is just as important as the quantity.
“Pink grapefruit is relatively rich in anti-oxidants, and ruby red grapefruit provides an added bonus: lycopene, the phytochemical that helps prevent the ‘bad’ (LDL) cholesterol from oxidizing and damaging artery walls.”