Lessons from the Real Paleo Diet

And the answer is, ‘yes.’ I think there’s three main lessons we can learn: First, there’s no one correct diet, but diversity is the key. So, depending on where you live, you can eat very different things, but you need diversity. We lack the ability to synthesize many nutrients that we require for life, nutrients and vitamins, and we are required to get them from our foods. Eating a diet that’s rich in species, has high species diversity is very important.

Now unfortunately in American diets today, the trend is going in the opposite direction. If you go and you take a processed food off a grocery store’s shelf, it doesn’t matter if it’s cake batter, mayonnaise or coffee creamer, increasingly there is only three species in almost everything we eat. We have corn, soy and wheat. That’s opposite direction we need to be going.

Second, we evolve to eat fresh foods, in season, when they are ripe. That’s when they have their highest nutritional content. But, of course, we have to also talk about food storage and preservatives, because in large urban societies, you can’t always eat everything fresh; food spoils. Some foods preserve naturally well; these include things like seeds and nuts, and that’s why traditionally they’ve been so important to agricultural populations.

But we can preserve them in other ways, through salting, through sugar, vinegar. We can pickle them, we can smoke them, we can dry them, we can add artificial preservatives.

What I find very interesting about this is that these all work in the same way. They work by inhibiting bacterial growth. But we have to keep in mind that our gastrointestinal systems are also full of bacteria, good bacteria that do many good things for you: they digest your food, regulate your immune system, promote mucosal function.

If you eat foods full of preservatives, how does that affect your microbiome, your good bacteria within you? And the answer is, ‘We really don’t know.’ And it’s something we’re only starting to investigate.

And third, we evolved to eat whole foods in their complete package, with their fiber and their roughage and everything. It turns out this is really important, that your foods are not just the sum of the calories and the vitamins. But even the parts you can’t digest are very important. The fiber that you eat regulates the speed at which the food travels through your gut. It modulates metabolism, it slows down the release of sugars, it has all sorts of functions, it feeds the good bacteria that live in your gut.

And increasingly we’re seeing that low fiber diets are associated with microbial communities that cause things like obesity and diabetes. What’s unfortunate also in the globalized system of processed foods is that we’re losing these connections, we’re losing the whole food, and we’re eating reconstituted, concentrated foods, and we don’t get the benefits of having, for example, the fiber and pectin in the fruit juice because it’s been filtered out. We’re losing all of this balance.

And, as an example of how this thing gets so out of balance, we can eat so many more calories, so much more food in a very small package without realizing it, and that short-circuits our abilities to know when we’re full and when we’ve had enough.