The Paleolithic Diet

Dear Friends,

The downward spiral of ill-health is worsening! Aren’t you seeing this within your practices? Of late, in my phone and luncheon meetings with doctors, this topic has come up. Doctors are telling me that their patients are more frequently chronically ill, and that their diseases are more resistant to correction. People are not only becoming sicker, but becoming so in greater numbers. Is this true for you too?

What’s the problem?

The answer is very clear isn’t it? It’s pollution, pathogens, stress, and disastrous life-style choices. Especially, when it comes to what has become of our dietary habits. We are totally derailed from what our bodies require on a regular basis to be well and healthy, to be able to look forward to a robust longevity. Our food train is off the track. A total dietary makeover is necessary for us to escape the fate of limping through old age plagued with painful chronic degenerative diseases.

As far as diets go, where do we begin? Let’s consider a few approaches.

The Paleolithic Diet

Using our hunter/gatherer forefathers as the gold standard for this diet, the Paleolithic food and medical scientists have come to the following assumptions and conclusions:

• We are creatures born out of an evolutionary process. Our genetics, the genetics of life itself, was born 4 billion years ago. Life came out of non-life, and non-life (the physical environment) was shaped by life. Life and the environment evolved, creating a platform from which the human animal evolved about one million years ago—the family of hominids from Australopitheanes to Homo habilis to Homo erectus and to Homo sapiens.
• The recommended foods to be eaten according to followers of the Paleolithic Diet are foods our genetics evolved with and depend upon now in sufficient qualities to be well functioning—lean meats, fish, lots of varieties of vegetables and fruits, starchy root vegetables and nuts—all the foods found out in uncultivated nature. So, the proper Paleolithic diet contains lots of phytonutrients from organic fruits and vegetables, a good ratio of omega 3s to omega 6s, high concentration of minerals, vitamins, trace elements, and high soluble fibers from vegetables.
• Foods not to consume or to consume in limited amounts are grains, dairy, beans and of course today’s highly processed foods.
• Proponents maintain than grains and dairy came into our diet only 10,000 years ago, not long enough for our genetics to adjust to or digest successfully. Therefore grains and dairy are implicated in most all of our modern degenerative diseases—overweight, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, autoimmune disease and the list goes on.

The Paleolithic Diet was brought to light in the 1987 New England Journal of Medicine classic paper entitled, Paleolithic Nutrition: a consideration of its nature and current implications, by Boyd Eaton MD. A new book, Food and Western Disease: Health and Nutrition from an Evolutionary Perspective by Staffan Lindeberg MD/PhD 2010, perhaps the leading apologist on behalf of the Paleolithic Diet today, is well worth your reading.

We will continue the dietary discussion next week, covering different diets and their presuppositions for health and longevity.

Sincerely yours,

Seann Bardell

BioImmersion.com

Clinical Note:

Starting next week in Clinical Notes we will begin a series of one to two minute videos highlighting each of the Therapeutic Foods. We hope you will find them to be a helpful encapsulation of each of our products for your patients.

The Last Quiz Answer:

This cute, maybe even cuddly looking creature is a Tasmanian Devil. It is the “world’s largest carnivore.” That is to say the largest carnivore in the marsupial family—weighing about 26 pound and measuring 2 1/2 feet in length. Pound for pound it’s a terror on wheels. Its oversized head houses sharp teeth and its strong musuclar jaws can inflict one of the most powerful bites of any mammal. The Tasmanian Devil eats pretty much anything they can get their teeth on, and when they find food they are vorocious, consuming everything—including hair, organs and bones. They are cuddly, don’t you think?

Want a good investment? Consider Shai Agassi and his company Better Place. Shai is an Israeli entrepreneur. He is the founder and CEO of Better Place which has developed a model and infrastructure for employing electric cars as an alternative to fossil fuel technology. Click on the above Better Place and also Will Israel’s Electric Cars Change The World?