The Paleo Diet - Loren Cordain [8]
In other words, built into our genes is a blueprint for optimal nutrition—a plan that spells out the foods that make us healthy, lean, and fit. Whether you believe the architect of that blueprint is God, or God acting through evolution by natural selection, or by evolution alone, the end result is still the same: We need to give our bodies the foods we were originally designed to eat.
Your car is designed to run on gasoline. When you put diesel fuel into its tank, the results are disastrous for the engine. The same principle is true for us: We are designed to run best on the wild plant and animal foods that all human beings gathered and hunted just 333 generations ago. The staples of today’s diet—cereals, dairy products, refined sugars, fatty meats, and salted, processed foods—are like diesel fuel to our bodies’ metabolic machinery. These foods clog our engines, make us fat, and cause disease and ill health.
Sadly, with all of our progress, we have strayed from the path designed for us by nature. For instance:
• Paleolithic people ate no dairy food. Imagine how difficult it would be to milk a wild animal, even if you could somehow manage to catch one.
• Paleolithic people hardly ever ate cereal grains. This sounds shocking to us today, but for most ancient people, grains were considered starvation food at best.
• Paleolithic people didn’t salt their food.
• The only refined sugar Paleolithic people ate was honey, when they were lucky enough to find it.
• Wild, lean animal foods dominated Paleolithic diets, so their protein intake was quite high by modern standards, while their carbohydrate consumption was much lower.
• Virtually all of the carbohydrates Paleolithic people ate came from nonstarchy wild fruits and vegetables. Consequently, their carbohydrate intake was much lower and their fiber intake much higher than those obtained by eating the typical modern diet.
• The main fats in the Paleolithic diets were healthful, monounsaturated, polyunsaturated, and omega 3 fats—not the trans fats and certain saturated fats that dominate modern diets.
With this book, we are returning to the diet we were genetically programmed to follow. The Paleo Diet is more than a blast from the past. It’s the key to speedy weight loss, effective weight control, and, above all, lifelong health. The Paleo Diet enlists the body’s own mechanisms, evolved over millions of years, to put the brakes on weight gain and the development of the chronic diseases of civilization. It is the closest approximation we can make, given the current scientific knowledge, to humanity’s original, universal diet—the easy-to-follow, cravings-checking, satisfying program that nature itself has devised.
The Problems with Most Low-Carb Diets
The Paleo Diet is a low-carbohydrate diet—but that’s where any resemblance to the glut of low-carbohydrate fad diets ends. Remember, the Paleo Diet is the only diet based on millions of years of nutritional facts—the one ideally suited to our biological needs and makeup and the one that most closely resembles hunter-gatherer diets. How does the Paleo Diet compare with the low-carb fad diets and the average U.S. diet?
Modern low-carbohydrate weight-loss diets are really high-fat diets that contain moderate levels of protein. They don’t have the high levels of protein that our ancestors ate—the levels found in the Paleo Diet. Actually, compared with what our ancestors ate, the carbohydrate content of these modern weight-loss diets is far too low. Even worse, almost all of these low-carbohydrate diets permit unlimited consumption of fatty, salty processed meats (such as bacon, sausage, hot dogs, and lunch meats) and dairy products (cheeses, cream, and butter) while restricting the consumption of