You may have heard of something called the paleo diet, the idea being that to live healthy, humans should probably eat what their bodies evolved to eat. Cavemen did not eat Lucky Charms, Pop Tarts, Hot Pockets, or even bread. Recently, I’ve been reading stuff over at Free The Animal, a blog by Richard Nikoley, who went paleo three years ago and lost 60 pounds since. He avoids eating grains, vegetable oils, and the products derived from them. He also avoids grain-fed meat. He does not avoid all carbs and does not intentionally avoid any kind of animal fat. He maintains that a good paleo diet can be zero-carb or can include lots of starchy vegetables.
What I like about him is that he is not at all dogmatic about it. He does not care much to argue what exactly humans were eating in the Paleolithic era, as some paleo folks do, rather he uses the likely Paleolithic diet as a foundation and goes from there looking into scientific research. For example, humans have probably been eating wheat for a while, maybe we’ve adapted to it.
I’ve understood for some time that eating carbohydrates causes your pancreas to produce insulin which causes your body to store fat, while eating excess fat causes your body to simply burn it off. In other words, low-carb is good for weight lots and low-fat isn’t. However, we are told that avoiding cholesterol and fat, saturated fat in particular, is necessary for good heart health. Richard links to a lot of science showing this to be nonsense. First off, the cholesterol problem is more complicated than good (HDL) and bad (LDL). Second, your body produces almost all of the cholesterol in your blood. Eating more or less has basically no effect.
I want to eat like he does. The two difficulties I see would be finding and affording meat that is not grain-fed and avoiding wheat. Still, even if I just move partly toward this diet, my health should improve.
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