The Paleo Diet - Loren Cordain [22]
Normally, purely high-fat foods allow our appetites to self-regulate. For example, you can only eat a certain amount of pure butter before your body says “Ugh” and you become full and stop eating. However, when a high-glycemic carbohydrate sneaks in along with fat, you can continue eating the fat long after you would normally be full. The carbohydrate makes the fat taste better than it would alone (particularly if some salt and sugar are added), so you eat more. But the high-glycemic carbohydrate also may fool your body into thinking that it’s still hungry.
When you eat a doughnut, for example, the high-glycemic carbohydrates cause your blood insulin level to shoot up. At the same time, your blood level of a hormone called “glucagon” tends to fall. These chemical changes cause a cascade of events that may result in impaired metabolism by limiting the body’s access to its two major metabolic fuels—fat and glucose. The other important result of these chemical changes is hypoglycemia—low blood sugar, which paradoxically stimulates your appetite, making you feel hungry even though you’ve just eaten. These high-fat, high-glycemic carbohydrate foods perpetuate a vicious cycle of being hungry and eating and never being satisfied. They cause excessive rises in your blood sugar and insulin levels and promote rapid weight gain.
High-fructose corn syrup can make this bad situation even worse. Fructose powerfully promotes insulin resistance. It’s added to almost every processed food imaginable; we get most of it from soft drinks, sweets, and baked items. But it’s also an ingredient in most low-fat or nonfat salad dressings—foods many of us buy in an attempt to be more responsible, to count calories, and to limit as many unwholesome ingredients as possible. The best approach is to stay away from these foods. Stick with humanity’s original fare: fruits, vegetables, and lean meats.
What to Expect on the Paleo Diet
The key to the Paleo Diet is to stay with this wonderful way of eating. I can guarantee that you will immediately feel better. Your energy level will increase; you won’t have to endure that late-afternoon tiredness or “blah” feeling. In the morning, you’ll wake up charged and ready to greet the new day. You’ll feel better with each passing day, and as the weeks go by, you’ll notice that your clothes feel a bit loose. Your weight will gradually drop—week by week—until your normal, healthy body weight is restored. For some people, this may only take one or two months; for others, six months to a year; and for those with severe weight and health problems, a year or more. But the bottom line is that it will happen.
Many people also experience clearing of their sinuses, less stiffness of their joints in the morning, and normalization of bowel function. Indigestion, heartburn, and acid stomach are reduced and may even vanish completely within a few weeks of adopting this diet.
People with high cholesterol and abnormal blood chemistry can expect to see improvements within two weeks of starting the diet. Blood triglyceride levels will drop within days, and the good HDL cholesterol will rise rapidly as well. In addition, for most people on the Paleo Diet, total blood cholesterol and LDL cholesterol drop within the first two weeks.
The Paleo Diet is particularly helpful for people with type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure, kidney stones, asthma, acne, and osteoporosis. There is also a significant body of evidence suggesting that the Paleo Diet may be helpful in certain autoimmune diseases such as celiac disease, dermatitis herpetiformis, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, and Sjögren’s syndrome. It even reduces your risk of many types of cancer.
So eat well, lose weight, and be healthy with the Paleo Diet.
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How Our Diet Went Wrong and What You Can Do about It
The blink of an eye. That’s how long, in the grand scheme of human history, we have grown food and domesticated livestock. It’s been only 333 generations since this change