Similarities between communities always strike me as interesting. In this case it’s the “Primal” and the non-consumer that has been brought to my attention. First off, I’d like to figure out a new name for, or way of explaining, the dietstyle known alternately as primal/paleo/caveman. Those names bring up associations for people that I would like to avoid…oh, have I not mentioned here that I eat this way? K, let me back up a step -
So, for an on-again-off-again span of nearly 2 years now I’ve been following a dietstyle that defies the Conventional Wisdom (heretofore referred to simply as CW) of eating healthy from a western standpoint. I eat no cereal grains (wheat, rye, barley, etc), I eat lots of healthy fats (eggs, coconut oil, olive oil), lots and lots of veggies, and basically nothing that comes in a package or has an ingredient list. That is to say, I eat real, whole food. This dietstyle is called different things depending on which website you’re reading. I started out at Mark’s Daily Apple and have expanded from there. Mark refers to it is Primal, based on the assumption that this is how our hunter/gatherer ancestors ate for thousands of years before the invention of agriculture. Others use Paleo, referring to either the Paleolithic era, or to the words actual root meaning of ‘old.’
For a variety of reasons, I’m not fond of any of these naming schemes. I eat this way because it makes me feel great, gives me more energy than I’ve ever had, is helping me lose weight (finally!), and is more in line with how our digestive tracts and endocrine systems evolved. that last one’s important, non-technically speaking, our systems use and need fat. Our brains are protected by layers of it, our livers thrive on it, and our muscles burn it for energy. On the other hand, cereal grains and simple carbohydrates like sugar are essentially toxic to these same systems. Over years of overeating these substances, we can develop a tolerance to them and even start burning them in place of fats, but our bodies can’t do this for long before the liver starts converting the excess into fat deposits and we become resistant to the effects of insulin. I won’t even go into the blood sugar issues, mainly because I’m still trying to wrap my own head around the facts and fictions.
Here’s the bottom line – I feel lied to.
I feel that the “expert” food scientists have been lying to us for 50+ years, basing their “facts” on sketchy science and ignoring other facts when they were inconvenient to the story they were trying to tell. I feel that the advertising world lies to us each and every day when they push food products on us, calling them healthy because they’re fortified with nutrients that were first removed from the actual food. I feel that the advertisers have also been lying every time they push some new consumer gadget as the next must-have. Chances are if you wait a week you’ll see that what you already have is working just fine for the same purpose and that new one would just go into the waste stream.
Back to the naming problem, if I’m not comfortable using Primal/paleo/caveman, etc…what should I say when people ask why I don’t get the toast with my omelet? Or when I bring my own lunch every day, and it’s a huge salad with steak? I’ve been toying with just saying I eat an evolutionary diet. That has its own issues. I’ve tried just saying that I eat a specific blood sugar regulating diet, which just rolls off the tongue doesn’t it? For now I just stick with what I don’t eat, grains. Then if the person wants more info, I go into more details…and if they don’t, neither do I. What I don’t want to do is shove this down anyone’s throat. I would love to see more people make the leap past CW into better health, but feel that if I get pushy they’ll just tune out (I know I would). This is also why I’m going back to school for a degree in Nutrition and Exercise Physiology. It’s easier to change the system from the inside.
Sorry for the rant. Some times it’s cathartic to just let it out…and being lied to is a particular pet peeve of mine. If you want more information about either of these topics, please don’t hesitate to ask in the comments and I’ll throw some links up for you, there’s plenty out there if you know where to look. Oh, and I’ll revisit the comparison of these two communities, minus the rant, as soon as I calm down.
