Slow and Steady

Should We Eat Like Our Caveman Ancestors?

On one hand, this way of eating encourages the inclusion of more fruits and vegetables and cutting out added sugar and sodium — which aligns with the 2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans. Instead, their diet is largely defined by what they do not do: most do not eat dairy or processed grains of any kind, because humans did not invent such foods until after the Paleolithic; peanuts, lentils, beans, peas and other legumes are off the menu, but nuts are okay; meat is consumed in large quantities, often cooked in animal fat of some kind; Paleo dieters sometimes eat fruit and often devour vegetables; and processed sugars are prohibited, but a little honey now and then is fine.

It encourages practitioners to give up the fruits of modern culinary progress - such as dairy, agricultural products and processed foods - and start living a pseudo-hunter-gatherer lifestyle, something like Lon Chaney Jr. in the film One Million BC Adherents recommend a very specific ancestral” menu, replete with certain percentages of energy from carbohydrates, proteins and fats, and suggested levels of physical activity.

The list of foods that are not paleo, meanwhile, is a great deal longer; it includes cereal grains like wheat, corn, and rice; pseudo-cereal grains like amaranth and quinoa; legumes, dairy products, most vegetable oils, sugar, and anything that contains corn syrup or artificial coloring or flavorings or preservatives, which is to say, just about everything a contemporary American consumes.

Start with breakfast for few days, as this is the easiest place to start as most people eat it at home, and it tends to be the least Paleolithic meal of the standard 3. For weight loss you will eventually need to reduce your carbohydrate intake, but ignore this initially as most people have high carb intakes and this can continue for the first few days that you are on this diet.

The Paleo diet, as its name implies, espouses the theory that we should attempt to eat like our cavemen ancestors because this is what our bodies are evolved to do. Though what cavemen actually ate is far from clear (recent research suggests they enjoyed porridge , for example), the Paleo interpretation means lots of meat and seafood proteins, nuts, animal fats, and some vegetable oils, and little to no grains, dairy, or sugars.

Slow and Steady

Saturday, 9 January 2016

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