How well do you understand the concepts behind Paleo Diet? Do you follow it out of a quasi religious conviction, looking down on Vegans and Pollanesq type locovores as if they were infidels? I believe there are some very good reasons why the Paleo Diet is the optimal diet for human beings, but I don’t believe that in real life anything is perfect and nearly everything operates in a range. If Paleo is so optimal why do other people who become Vegans and who follow other dietary systems report that they have similar benefits to those reported by Paleo Dieters? I think we can isolate a few core rules that describe the optimal range for humans, and they don’t include dietary dogmatisms like “grains are evil.”
1. Eat fewer calories than most Americans do today.
2. Avoid highly processed foods.
3. Eat mostly plants - including some raw veggies and fruit.
4. Include good fats.
If you consider a Raw Food dieter they certainly are going to be in this optimal range and so is a Vegan. The people who are not in this range are, for example, supposed Vegans/Lacto-Ovo Vegetarians who eat a ton of junk food and as such consume far too many simple carbs and bad fats. So when I hear a Vegetarian complain that he or she is fat because of genetics implying that Vegetarians should all be skinny because they don’t eat meat, I want to scream. Every single human being on this planet is a genetically charged fat storage device. Some of us are better at it than others but in the Evolutionary Environment of our Ancestors, humans who did not store fat well would have died out. More important than your genes is the environment in which they express themselves. If you are inactive and eat too many calories, your genes will do what they were fine tuned to do: store fat. And it becomes a metabolic snowball effect. Once you hit a certain point your metabolism begins to slow to where storing more and more fat gets easier and easier. Interestingly the opposite is also true. Individuals who are between 7% and 10% body fat are more easily able to store calories as lean muscle than people with higher percentages. But ask anyone who regularly maintains a percentage of body fat at that level and they will tell you it is hard work. In 2008 I was fat because of a combination of my behaviors - plural. Not just because I ate brown rice, not just because I ate animal protein, not just because I had stopped working out, not just because I did not eat a lot of raw veggies and not just because I was genetically predisposed to obesity. If the point of diet, not a weight loss regime, is to eat in the range that is optimal for your body and psychological makeup then there must to be a number of choices and we need to think within that range, not within a narrow, quasi religious subset of it that focuses on the mostly politicized aspects of what we eat.
