Hi ,
This last weekend I read the book “The Paleo Solution” by Robb Wolf. I have been a fan of the concepts of eating the way our ancestors did before we developed agriculture, but somehow I had never gotten around to reading this basic primer in eating the Paleo way. I want to tell you, this is a great book and I highly recommend it.
Robb has a very engaging writing style, which makes the book absolutely fun to read. It has all the latest scientific research, without being tedious or difficult to understand like so many books tend to be. So it is not a fluff fad diet book. But it makes the science easy to understand if you are interested. At the same time it is structured in such a way that if you are not interested in the science, you can skip it. He actually marks the science stuff in block areas and tells you to skip this if you are not into the rigorous explanations that reveal the trail of discovery to this most appropriate way for modern humans to eat.
What is Paleo eating? It is about eating in the way our genes are designed for us to eat. Genes change very slowly over hundreds of thousands of years, so our modern genes are basically the same as the genes of our ancestors from 50,000 to 200,000 years ago. About 10 thousand years ago we created agriculture and started eating foods that were never a part of the human diet before, e.g. grains, legumes, and dairy. A few thousand years later we also invented alcohol. A few hundred years ago we developed the ability to mass produce sugar, and in the last 50 years we have created thousands of chemicals to add to our foods – none of which do our genes have any idea what to do with.
Paleo eating is a return to the fresh and natural foods we were designed to eat. What does that really mean? It means:
Vegetables
Fruits
Natural meats
Seafood
Nuts and certain seeds
Healthy Fats (saturated and mono-saturated)
What does it mean you don’t eat?
Grains
Dairy
Legumes
Sugars and Starches
Processed foods and Chemicals
Alcohol
Vegetable/Seed oils
What happens when people eat the way that their genes are designed to eat? The modern chronic diseases of this century reverse – really. Diabetes reverses, heart disease reverses, atherosclerosis reverses, osteoporosis reverses, dementia’s reverses, autoimmune diseases reverses, IBS, colitis and bowel disease reverses, the chances of cancer drop dramatically. Modern Paleo diet research basically is proving that it is our current western diet that is the root cause behind most all our modern illnesses.
When I first encountered this whole approach to health there was hardly anything written on the subject. Robb’s book was one of the first. His mentor was Dr. Loren Cordain, an exercise physiologist and nutrition professor who has also written several books on the Paleo lifestyle. Now however, there are tons of books – recipe books abound for every type of cuisine, and shopping guides and even restaurant guides.
A few years ago the only way to possibly eat Paleo was to learn to cook your food at home or restrict your restaurant choices to those that served steak, potatoes, and salad. But food choices are opening up more every day. A lot of the reason for this is the growing awareness of gluten sensitivity as a driver of inflammation and autoimmune disease. The Paleo diet is perfect for folks that need to avoid gluten.
It is also perfect for all the people I know with bowel issues. It seems to me that IBS, colitis, and Crohn’s diseases are all over the place these days. Practically everyone I know is close to someone who has one of these. Our modern diet of processed convenience foods is playing havoc with everyone’s innards. Paleo returns us to the foods our body knows how to handle.
So I heartily recommend Robb’s book – get it here:
And I recommend his website: robbwolf.com. There is a lot of good information there as well.
Enjoy,
David