Wednesday 5 May 2010

What I am not (eating)

I thought I'd spend some time explaining what sort of food I am eating. Then I realised an ideal natural evolutionary approach could be described as wild meat and fish (including shellfish), seasonal fruit and vegetables, nuts and seeds, some oils and a little honey. It's that simple.

What is more time consuming to explain is the food we should avoid and why. Here is a list of the most common foods found in the modern western diet that we should avoid at all cost:
  • No vegetable oils: Arguably one of the most heinous of all modern food inventions (with the exception of olive oil and some nut and seed oils). I am talking about soy bean oil, palm oil, rapeseed oil, groundnut oil and other similar oils. The worst of this bad bunch are the hydrogenated oils with large amounts of trans fats which should be avoided like the plague.
  • No grains: Examples include oats, rice, barley, wheat, quinoa, cous cous etc etc. This includes all grain derived food like bread, pasta, cereal.
  • No refined sugar: Sugar, syrups (like the evil glucose-fructose syrup) and glucose.
  • No artificial sweeteners: Aspartame, sucralose, saccharine etc.
  • No pulses: Foods like lentils, kidney beans, haricot beans, broad beans, peas.
  • No potatoes: Or potato derived products, sorry all you chip lovers.
  • No processed food: If it's been developed in a lab and produced in a factory, I'm not interested.
Astute readers will notice that I haven't mentioned dairy products yet. The consumption of this food group is fine if you have the genes to metabolise lactose. I'll talk about this subject in depth in a later post.

You can see that nearly all of these foods to avoid are recent additions to our diet (on the evolutionary time scale). Recent research has shown the body adapts genetically to the food we eat, we have been exposed to granulated sugar for about 1700 years and high fructose corn syrup for about 50 years. Give us another 20,000 years and we may have adapted to metabolise these 'foods' efficiently. Until then count me out.

1 comment:

  1. These figures are just basic guidelines, survival warehouse review however considerations should be made from the aspect of preserved foods, rather than fresh foods.

    ReplyDelete