The Paleo Diet - Loren Cordain [21]
Many nutritionists would say that the example diet is healthful because it contains large amounts of carbohydrate (55 percent of total calories) and a low total fat intake (34 percent of total calories). This is also the message that most Americans have heard loud and clear—that healthful diets should be high in carbohydrate and low in fat. Unfortunately, when it comes to actual practice, most high-carbohydrate, low-fat diets look pretty much like our example of the typical American diet—a nutritional nightmare that promotes obesity, heart disease, cancer, and a host of other chronic illnesses.
Why You Can’t Overeat on the Paleo Diet
Most of the foods we crave—and that make us fat if we eat enough of them—contain some combination of sugar, starch, fat, and salt in a highly concentrated form. (If you think about it, sugar, starch, fat, and salt are pretty much the recipe for all the foods people tend to overeat.)
In nature, a sweet taste is almost always associated with fruit. This is what drew our ancestors to strawberries, for instance—the desire for a “sweet.” However, as a bonus, they got much more than the sweet taste—fiber, vitamins, minerals, phytochemicals, and other healthful substances that improved their chances of survival. Similarly, our Paleolithic ancestors sought foods with a salty taste. Salt is absolutely essential for your health—but you don’t need much of it. The trace amounts of salt found in fresh fruits, vegetables, and lean meats were just right for our ancient ancestors—who also got a hefty dose of potassium along with the sodium. Today, almost all processed foods are grossly overloaded with salt.
Real Food versus Fake Food
Today, much of our food is also fake. What does this mean? It’s created, not natural, food. See for yourself. How about a snack of dry white flour? Of course not; by itself, flour is bland and tasteless—you’d choke on it. However, if you add water, yeast, salt, vegetable oil, and sugar and then bake the result, suddenly you’ve got white bread. If you take this same mixture, deep-fry it in hydrogenated fats, and then glaze it with sugar, it becomes tastier still—a glazed doughnut. Or you could add bananas and walnuts to the original dough, bake it, and coat it with sugar and margarine, and you’ve got banana nut bread with frosting.
If you want to feel more virtuous about the whole thing, you can substitute whole-wheat flour and honey and call it “health food.” But the bottom line is that none of these highly palatable food mixtures even remotely resemble the foods that nourished all human beings until very recently. In Paleolithic times, starchy foods weren’t also salty; now we have potato chips and corn chips. Sweet foods were never also fat. Now we have ice cream and chocolates. Fatty foods were almost never also starchy. Now we have doughnuts that are not only fatty and starchy, but sugary as well.
It is extremely easy to overeat processed foods made with starch, fats, sugars, and salt. There is always room after dinner for pie, ice cream, or chocolates. But how about another stalk of celery or another broiled chicken breast? Many overweight people can easily polish off a quart of ice cream after a full dinner. How many could—or would—eat an additional quart of steamed broccoli? The point here is that it’s very difficult to overeat real foods—fruits, vegetables, and lean meats. Fruits and vegetables provide us with natural bulk and fiber to fill up our stomachs. Because they are low-glycemic, they also normalize our blood sugar and reduce our appetites. The protein in lean meats satisfies our hunger pangs rapidly and lets us know when we are full. Two skinless chicken breasts for dinner may be filling—and two more might be impossible. Can we say the same for pizza slices?
Fake foods distort our appetites, allowing us to eat more than we really need. The most insidious—doughnuts, corn chips, vanilla wafers, croissants, wheat crackers—have a terrible one-two