Popular media is filled with reports on “the newest health study”, and ” the latest health product”, and the sad truth is that we eat it up. We have become lazy as a society, and are always looking for the next magic pill that will make us look better, or feel more healthy. The hard to swallow (no pun intended) reality is that there is no magic pill, and healthy eating can be achieved only through smart choices and hard work.

The general vibe I get from people when talking about nutrition and their diet is a feeling of being overwhelmed, and understandably so. It is hard not to feel overwhelmed by today’s health crazed media constantly feeding us study after study after study all based loose correlations and bad science.

I am here to tell you that it doesn’t have to be so difficult. You may not know it, but your body knows exactly what is and isn’t good for you. Acne, allergies, diabetes, heart disease, cancer… the list is long on human ailments that have been linked to a Western diet that is high on carbohydrates and refined sugar. A short search on Google Scholar reveals study after study showning that cultures with diets that have remained relatively unchanged for hundreds if not thousands of years show little to no signs of most common Western diseases. Could it be that perhaps our brains have gotten too smart, and left our bodies in the evolutionary dust? I would argue yes.

If we look at the time line of human existence on Earth (roughly 2 million years), modern agriculture, cooking, and food production practices have only been around for about 10 000 years. That’s less than 1% of out time on this planet. Taking this into consideration, it should come as no surprise then when our radically changed diet causes all kinds of diseases to pop up. Our bodies simply haven’t had time to adjust. Though we may be sending people into space with our brains, we are still living in caveman bodies, and it is for this reason of slow digestive evolution that I advocate a Paleolithic way of eating.

Meat, vegetables, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch and NO SUGAR!

Pretty simple.

Don’t be fooled by the four letter word, this is not a diet in the modern definition of the word. This is the way your body wants to eat. It is the way we have evolved to eat. It requires no special foods, no book you must follow, has no late night infomercials, and no easy payments of $49.99. All it requires is a choice. A decision to choose not to eat products that aren’t food. Everything you really need to know about diet, nutrition, and food is summed up in these simple words:
YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT.

Feed your body crap, feel like crap. Simple.

Eat real food.

Related Topics

• Paleo Diet in a Nutshell.
• Supplementation. Macronutrients vs. Micronutrients.
• Which diet is the best?

Meat, vegetables, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch, an NO SUGAR. Quite simply the easiest and cheapest change you can make to your lifestyle if you want to mprove your overall quality of life.

Related Topics

• The Paleolithic Diet
• Supplementation. Macronutrients vs. Micronutrients.
• Which diet is the best?

Supplementation implies that you have a void in your basic diet that needs to be filled. It is a solution to a symptom, and not a cause.

Nutrition is at the foundation of health and well being, and every culture in the world already knows the secret to good health: You are what you eat!There is little room for argument surrounding the fact that your body can only repair and fuel your body with the food that you are feeding it. If you are feeding yourself refined, modified, denatured, and otherwise chemically altered variations of food, then how do you expect your body to perform? To use an analogy, would you pour dirty gas into your car and expect it to perform at an optimal level? Probably not.

To restate what I have said in earlier posts, food should not be broken down into micronutrients. There is a popular trend in the media right now to tout the latest magic bullet pill, vitamin, or antioxidant as the cure to X health risk. The problem with this approach is that our place in nature is a part of a larger system. Our genome didn’t evolve to eat the extracted vitamin C from citrus fruits, or isolate whey protein from milk, or iron pills, we evolved to eat the WHOLE FRUIT, and drink WHOLE MILK, and eat WHOLE VEGETABLES… seeing a trend here?

The three macronutrients of protein, carbohydrate, and fat are the building blocks of human life. Keeping your food in the rawest form you can before digestion ensures that you are getting as much nutrition as you can from the food you eat. Excessive heating, processing, and nutrient isolation removes much of the digestive enzymes from food that helps your body process and break down these foods into useful compounds. Without these enzymes, many foods get treated by the digestive system as a threat and trigger a stress response.

Supplements often lack many of the chemical components that allow the body to use them properly. To compensate for this, most supplements increase the amount of raw product you have you ingest to absorb a significant amount of whatever nutrient you are supplementing for. This practice can often lead to allergies caused by repetitive exposure to compounds that agitate the digestive system.

If you feel that you need to supplement your diet with a protein source, or vitamin, you should probably step back and take a look at where your real food diet is failing. A paleo based diet of meat, vegetable, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch and no sugar, combined with proper proportions for your body type, should be providing all of the macronutrients, and consequently all of the micronutrients that you need to thrive.

Related Topics

• Milk. Part 1
• The Paleolithic Diet
• Milk. Part 2

With all the diets (meaning eating habits, not weight loss solution) out there, how do I know which one is right for me and my lifestyle, budget, etc. I assume you will promote the Paleolithic diet, which seems like one of the best to me, but what makes it better than the rest and do any other diets out there follow the same lines?

The fact that you even have to ask this question is a telling sign of the state of our general food culture right now. We have lost touch with what food once represented. An activity that used to be at the hub of our social culture, a daily ritual, that brought together whole communities and promoted social interaction has been reduced to fast food and protein bars.

The meaning of the word “diet” has been heavily construed in today’s saturated food market. From what used to simply mean the general kinds of foods we consumed as a community, has evolved into a definition that is now used excessively to mean a restriction of foods, or an adherence to only eating certain types of foods. The Atkins Diet, The South Beach Diet, The Graprefruit Diet, etc., the list goes on and on.

The major issue however, is not with the term diet, but in fact with the term FOOD. We have lost touch with what food really is to us as humans, mostly because we have far too much choice in the supermarket. In reality, we have gone almost full circle in our quest for sustenance. Hunting and gathering enough edible, energy providing food from our environment, which was once a daily task and required most of our time and energy, was eventually replaced by technology. Better tools allowed us to hunt more efficiently, cooking opened the door to new calorie packed plants that were once toxic, and eventually farming and agriculture allowed us to stop searching for food, but rather have the food come to us. Today however, as these technologies have advanced in leaps and bounds, we are faced with millions if not billions of choices, all touting themselves as food. To close the circle, we have returned almost to our hunting and gathering ways, only now we hunt for natural ingredients, and scour the supermarkets in hopes of gathering REAL food from the myriad of impostors.

Thus, the meaning of “diet” has transformed from all that we did eat, to all that we don’t eat in only a few short decades.

To answer your question, I want you to first figure out what food means to YOU. What is your end goal, the reason why you put
If you believe as I do that human brains have evolved much faster than human bodies, it is not a stretch to reason that the best choices we can make for fueling out bodies are one’s that closely resemble what our Paleolithic ancestors would have found in their natural surroundings. Meats, vegetable, nuts, seeds, fruit, and little starch and NO sugar.

Furthermore, the phrase “You are what you eat” still holds very true, and I will echo it many times in future articles. You can only rebuild and heal your body out of the proteins and fats you consume. If you are feeding your body processed, denatured, hydrogenated foodstuffs (I refuse to call these these chemical concoctions food), then it should come as no surprise to you when your health suffers.

That being said, this way of eating is not a “diet”, it’s a filter through which you should analyze any food that goes in your mouth. As author Gary Taubes captures in his must read book Good Calories, Bad Calories: Fats, Carbs, and the Controversial Science of Diet and Health, not all calories are created equal, and the quality of food you eat is just as important as the quantity.

Some tips on reshaping your lifestyle, and restocking your refrigerator:

• Try and keep your food shopping to the perimeter of the grocery store (this is usually where the fresh produce is).
• 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!)
• The further removed (both in processing steps, and in distance ) from the source your food gets, the less nutritious it is.

To address your budget concerns, following these simple steps when grocery shopping or eating out will also save you money, as you will no longer be spending it on useless foodstuffs that don’t provide your body with what it needs to thrive, nor will you be spending as much on medical bills when you stop getting as sick. The twisted relationship of the food and medical (read:pharmaceutical) industries is a subject for another article.

To finish this response, I will leave you with a question:

Why worry about saving pennies on good food, and then spend thousands of dollars on medical bills?

You are what you eat. Eat good food, stop getting sick, get out of the hospitals and off the drugs. Start living your life. Your body is a vehicle for fun. Fuel it properly, and keep it in good shape, it’s the only one you’ve got.

Live, laugh, love.

For more reading on the Paleo way of eating, check out my article on the subject, or visit the Paleolithic Deit link in the sidebar.

Related Topics

• Paleo Diet in a Nutshell.
• The Paleolithic Diet
• Diet: Another Four Letter Word

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.

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.

Related Topics

• Supplementation. Macronutrients vs. Micronutrients.
• Milk. Part 1
• Paleo Diet in a Nutshell.