What is the Paleo Diet?
If someone told you to eat lots of fresh vegetables, fruits, lean meats & poultry, wild fish & natural, unprocessed fats in order to nourish your body with healthy foods, you probably wouldn’t be all that surprised.
If they continued on & suggested cutting out sugar & refined grains, you still would likely already have some sense that those are not really all that healthy & shouldn’t be thought of as such.
Are you with me?
If that same person then added the idea that you should omit all grains, all dairy & all legumes, then you might start to wonder…why?
I did, too.
But then i read the Paleo Diet by Dr. Loren Cordain.
Basically, we humans are not meant to be eating grains, legumes (this includes soy & peanuts) or dairy (unless you’re an infant & you’re ingesting dairy…from the same species).
How can such a broad statement be made?
Well, it’s not something I, or anyone, just made up on a whim. One of the beautiful things about this way of eating is that it’s actually based on science.
If you think in terms of what people ate during the paleolithic era, & you do not need to be savvy in the sciences to guess, it would have been food that could either have been picked or foraged, & eaten as is, or an animal that either ran across the land or swam in the sea.
Why?
Both grains & legumes contain anti nutrient properties. While growing from the ground, these very components serve to protect them from pesticides & predators, but when we ingest them, they work against us by adhering to many of the vitamins & minerals in our food, preventing us from properly absorbing them & causing microscopic tearing in the intestines, thus increasing intestinal permeability.
Over time, ‘leaky gut’ syndrome ensues, whereby proteins are able to leak into the peritoneum causing inflammation, infection & subsequently a whole host of maladies throughout the body, not just in the gi tract but also in the body as a whole.
This helps set the stage for acne, joint pain, exacerbation of auto immune disease, chronic fatigue, IBS, colitis, Crohn’s Disease, cancers & so on & so on & so on.
As far as dairy products are concerned, they’re the most acidic items we can consume. Dairy products create an acidic ph in the body & in attempt to buffer the ph back to alkalinity, the body leaches calcium from the bones. Over time, this leads to osteopenia & osteoporosis. The most important thing to look at here is actually calcium balance over calcium intake. You’re actually better off eating a cup of kale with 37mg of calcium than a 300 mg calcium-containing cup of cow’s milk!
So… why not try Paleo?
Even if you’re a skeptic to the extreme, the fact that you’re visiting this site in the first place suggests you’re at least intrigued.
There’s no reason not to give it a try.
Ps: now you can bid on one 1 hour true Paleo nutrition consult with Nell Stephenson, author Paleoista via our Shobha’s Home for Girls & Women Silent Auction. Start bidding today!