Healthy Meal Plans

Everything You Know Is WRONG!

We all know what we’re supposed to be eating, right?

The government’s healthy eating guidelines tell us to base our diets on grains, supplemented with fruits and vegetables. We should eat a relatively small amount of dairy and lean meat, and use fats, oils, and sugar “sparingly.” If we do this, we’ll be thin and healthy.

Unfortunately, very few people in America eat the recommended diet, and even among those that do, obesity and disease is rampant. Weight loss programs promise to solve the problem, if we will only restrict our caloric intake and exercise more– and still, the weight won’t go away. Why not?

The problem lies with our genes. For a couple million years, humans evolved to eat what they could get by hunting and gathering from the land.

Our diet was a mix of meat from fish and other animals large and small, vegetables, and fruits in season. While wild grains were available, they were painstaking and inefficient to collect and process by hand, so they did not tend to make up a large percentage of the average hunter-gatherer’s diet. Then, about 10,000 years ago, someone got the idea to plant annual grains and legumes in the ground and harvest the seeds at the end of the season. Suddenly, agricultural humans were basing their diets on starches, not meat and vegetables.

Incidentally, soon after the advent of agriculture, both the average height and the health of humans declined significantly. Tooth decay became a major problem. The healthy, robust caveman had become a pale shadow of his former self.

Ten thousand years is an eye-blink in evolutionary terms. Eating the foods we commonly eat today is not unlike trying to feed your cat or dog a diet based on bread. They might live (at least for awhile), but they certainly won’t thrive.

So, what should we be eating instead? Short answer: we should eat what our distant ancestors ate. Sadly, grocery stores don’t carry mammoth steaks, but they do carry an array of vibrant produce and mouth-watering meat and fish. To replicate the pre-agricultural diet as closely as possible, choose meat raised on grass rather than grain and commercial feed mixtures containing antibiotics and other additives. This kind of meat is frequently available from farmers’ markets and the specialty areas of many large supermarkets. Avoid processed sugar, starchy grains, potatoes and legumes.

Dairy is a somewhat divisive subject among practitioners of this sort of “paleolithic” (Stone Age) diet. Cavemen didn’t have access to the milk of other animals unless they happened to kill a nursing female (imagine trying to milk a wild buffalo!). While dairy products are a source of high-quality protein, many modern humans are sensitive to it– often without being aware of it. For this reason, it’s worth cutting dairy out of your diet for a few weeks to see if a dairy-free diet makes you feel better and improves your digestion.

All this may seem like a massive change to your current eating habits, but if what you’re doing now isn’t working, why not give it a try for a month? You don’t even have to give up your favorite “forbidden” foods completely. To start with, schedule two or three open meals per week where you can eat whatever you want. The beauty of the paleolithic diet is that you never need to feel deprived. You can eat as much as you want of the foods that fall within the healthy eating guidelines, and if you’re craving a specific food that’s outside of the guidelines, you can still have it occasionally.

So, here’s my challenge to you: commit to the paleolithic diet for four weeks, and let me know about your results so I can post your story on the website. I think you’ll be surprised!