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Paleolithic Style Diet

Nutrition is highly individualized and often a philosophical debate among friends and family. What's important with nutrition is to find your right approach that your body responds to.  One of the more recent, yet ancient, approaches is a return to the Paleolithic Diet which mimics the diet of the hunter/gather society.  There are many different subtypes of the paleolithic diet but the commonality is elimination of grains and most sugar from the diet.  The diet emphasizes ample non-starchy vegetable intake, mild-moderate fruit intake, moderate to high animal protein intake , and mild/moderate healthy fat intake. Mark Sissom who wrote Primal Blueprint is one of the leaders behind the movement toward a paleolithic diet and he publishes a blog called Mark's Daily Apple. Sissom state that this approach when combined with short duration intense cardiovascular exercise and strength training reduces the likelihood of developing the triad of obesity, diabetes, and some risk factors for cardiovascular disease.

More at the core of the paleolithic lifestyle is reducing dietary/environmental sources of inflammation which are considered the underlying root cause of many adult chronic disease and certainly inflammaging.

Sissom bases a lot of his philosophy on the Weston Price Foundation which is a respected resource in nutrition.  Some paleolithic diets do not include dairy or legumes in their diet, however Sissom discusses incorporating some small amounts of dairy in the diet including fermented dairy products in the diet like yogurt .

My take is  that when we eliminate grains (including corn) and sugar from the diet, we are taking out a big portion of problematic foods in the standard American diet.  By problematic I mean those that are over-consumed.  Yet, if  grain reduction is not met with an increase in vegetable intake we will be losing a great source of vitamins and mineral in the diet and creating another problem.  And, a paleolithic diet is not appropriate for someone who has philosophical or religious beliefs against eating animals.  When trying a paleolithic diet, please make sure  you are ready to replace your absence of grains with more vegetables. In lieu of human tendency to under eat vegetables I always recommend a quality mineral supplement for anyone on a paleo diet. My favorite these days is Biomins II by Thorne Research.


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