There is nothing wrong with believing that an animal is most at home in its Environment of Evolutionary Adaptation (EEA), pretty much by definition. My argument with the paleo-diet is its simplistic idea of what that environment is for Caucasians. There's plenty of evidence for genetic adaptation over the last ten thousand years to neolithic innovations such as grains, milk and alcohol.
The real bad thing in contemporary food is over-processing, specifically sugar-boosting, and that dense, so moreish sugar-fat combination which packs on the calories at the expense of fibre. You know who you are, breakfast cereals and cookies. Bread has been compromised, not because of wheat, but through added sugar and denuded fibre.
By cutting these bad boys out, all the diets in the first paragraph put you back in the EEA for contemporary white Europeans. I looked at some paleo-diet websites and saw a lot of good sense .. along with faddy nickel-and-diming over whether bananas were authentically paleo or not.
Conclusion: I guess I'm happy to be tagged as paleo without sweating the small stuff and without having to attend prayers.
The paleo diet is so much more than mere calories. The whole point of the diet is to not needing to count, because the specific palette of food you're consuming will create a healthy hormone balance within your bodies metabolism. In addition to that, by only eating vegetables that encourage growth of the bacteroidetes instead of firmicutes will keep your body from producing an unhealthy short chain fatty acid composition promoting weight loss. Eating omega-3 from healthy unprocessed meats will strengthen your fat metabolism by reducing stress on your body in the form of inflammation. Sugar is as you say the worst of them all, it's a major source for inflammation and makes you put on weight as well by overloading your glycogen storage if you eat both sugar and lots of fat.
ReplyDeleteI'm surprised how little people who try to discredit or disprove the diet without actually doing any digging around what it's about etc.
nice post
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