Posted on 03/13/2012 1:49:49 PM PDT by Brookhaven
Have you heard the saying strong is the new skinny? What if you could have both?
It may be as easy as taking a fresh look at the past. The Paleo Diet, or the caveman diet, means eating and acting like a caveman. To sustain the diet, you can only eat things you gather, hunt or pick.
Pinecrest resident Thad Foot, 38, said the diet gives him strength to do stand up paddle boarding.
I want to get stronger, he said.
Tara Grant, 37, did the same diet for a different reason.
I had polycystic ovarian syndrome, said Grant. Now, its gone. I had endometriosis. Now its gone!
At 250 pounds she also had an extra 100 pounds on her. Thats gone too for this primal girl in a modern world. Shes followed the Paleo Diet for two years. Her goal is to stay fit.
Foots goal is to stay strong and by this spring be able to paddle board from Bimini, in the Bahamas to Miami.
The two went back in time and started eating and exercising like cavemen. Foot made it easier for himself and put an entire garden in his backyard so that all that good food could be readily available.
The dos on the diet: fruits, veggies, nuts, berries, meats. The donts on the diet: rice, pasta, bread, anything processed, junk food.
All this was discussed among the hundreds of researchers, scientists, doctors and nutritionists from around the world who discussed the Paleo Movement.
At a sold out symposium in California the focus was Ancestral health. The ides is that our DNA has changed little since the late Paleolithic Era. That means our bodies are better suited from prehistoric, not modern times.
Mark Sisson, the author of the book The Primal Blueprint said, We are hunters, gatherers, living in the twenty first century with all this technology and we dont know what to do with it.
The mismatch could explain why we have so many complex degenerative disorders including heart disease, stroke, diabetes, high blood pressure, osteoporosis and so much more.
I’ve been eating like this for a while now. Best thing I ever did. Even feel better during my workouts.
Cindie
My wife has done this diet along with Crossfit and it has worked very well for her.
But to say this cures heart disease and all other ailments is stupid. Cavemen didn’t live until they were 80...they died in their teens and 20s. Lucky to live to 30 (guessing here). But as life expectancy goes up so do our ailments. We no longer die from freezing or being eaten by a tiger.
Hum. Sounds good.
I am thinking that humans have made a “bread” for muli-thousands of years. Generally a flat bread with no yeast, ground grains mixed with water and put on a hot rock.
Also dying in your thirties, or even forties if you were lucky, because you were now not fast enough to catch a mammoth or escape from the sabre tooth tiger, kept cavemen from getting those diseases of old age.
This doctor used the Paleo Diet to cure her multiple sclerosis!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLjgBLwH3Wc
It's nuts, not condoms, that are health foods.
“Some humans” made bread. Some other humans continued to lead the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. They can actually live on nothing but seal meat and a handful of berries in Summer.
I tried this, but I had to reimburse my neighbor for his cow.
Gotta eat cow. "Cavemen have no stupid law!" I argued, to no avail.
Sorry, Fred, you're a goner.
I think the overall issue is eating well.
It says no rice, but most citizens of countries that use a lot of rice tend to live long lives and are very healthy, compared to those that live Western style diets.
The reason the AVERAGE life expectancy was only 20, was that childhood mortality rates were so high combined and that injuries (like a cut or broken leg) were fatal. Cavemen didn’t just drop dead at 20. If you made it to adulthood as a caveman, the odds are that you would live a long time.
It’s the same reason the AVERAGE life expectancy in 1900 was only 40. The child mortality rates were high, which skewed the average.
The Bible says a man’s lifespan is 70 years (Psalms 90:10), yet the AVERAGE lifespan at the time was only 30. Again, people weren’t just dropping over dead at 30. It was the high child mortality rate that skewed the AVERAGE life span numbers. If you made it to adulthood, you had a good chance of living a long life.
Even if you take childhood mortality into account, during paleontological times, most people still didn’t live into their z0’s or 80’s.
You were considered pretty old if you made it to 60. Just look at the primitive tribes today to see that this is true.
I agree — brown rice and wild rice are good to eat. The trick is not to eat processed white rice or so-called “instant” rice.
Do the people who live on seal meat and berries enjoy this limited diet? Given that people such as indigenous Alaskans have tasted other food, are they nonetheless satisfied when they do the traditional diet? Aren’t they going to grab a slice of pizza when they get the chance?
I agree. One of the things human hunter-gatherers “gathered” was wild wheat. Which they made into primitive flat bread.
For some reason people who never experienced primitivism wax romantic in their celebration of primitivism yet ignore the fact that as soon as you give a primitive a match, he no longer wants to rub sticks together to make his fire.
The specifics of this diet really boil down to:
1) Eat fresh meat, fruit, nuts, and vegetables
2) Avoid processed and unnatural foods
All the hoopla aside, I don’t see how that isn’t a formula for being healthy.
The problem with an exclusively seal diet is the surplus iron you ingest ~ plus the livers. There are divided opinions on whether or not those livers are toxic to ordinary humans ~ total lack of data on the matter, but I've seen Sarah Palin sit down to eat with her inlaws, and they wolf down the liver like nobody's business. Even I would think twice about it.
You usually need some sort of biological mechanism for excreting surplus iron quickly and efficiently.
White rice has plenty. The “process” is to shuck the husk bran and germ from the rice. While that has a few extra nutrients (including carbohydrates) that may or may not be insufficient in someone eating a modern diet - the #1 nutrient of brown or wild rice is still carbohydrates.
Raw energy! Good stuff.
Most of those Asian nations with longer life expectancies really like, and tend to predominantly eat, white rice.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.