As my long-time readers know, we do not follow a paleolithic or primal diet at Nourished Kitchen (I just can’t give up fresh cream!), but I value the insights gleaned from this lifestyle choice and believe it has enormous and calculable value to a modern population. What is comes down to is this: for optimal wellness, we need to eat and live in the manner that nourished our ancestors through their evolution.
This morning I stumbled across two informative, witty and interesting videos posted by Pay Now Live Later discussing the merits and reasoning behind eating and exercising as our ancestors did.
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What fun videos! They make many good points.
I’m with you, Jenny — I love cheese and butter too much to go paleo. But we do eat a relatively low-carb diet. The grains we do eat are mostly whole grains and almost always properly soaked/sprouted and the sweeteners we use are traditional (like honey which has been around for 10,000 years). I just try to eat foods my great-grandmother would have eaten (or maybe my great-great grandmother).
Stumbling this post so others can enjoy! Thanks for adding it to Real Food Wednesday.
Check out CHEESESLAVE’s last post: Real Food Wednesday: May 20, 2009.
I saw them some weeks ago and showed them to my girl- she loved them – simple and easy- but one size fits all:
My daughter eats 90 % paleo with some butter, cheese and a little grain.- she picked that way of eating when she was a a baby – while I need more dairy
I eat 80 % paleo with milk, cheese, butter – but less grain.
I think in general people can benefit a lot from Paleo ways of eating
I like reading
http://www.marksdailyapple.com/ – gets quite inspired reading his blue print etc..
BTW it is interesting but actually dairy consumption seem to much olderer than once belived
people follewed herds earlier than the stayed and grew grains.
I keep my grains very low – but tonight I am having a homemade burger, and a beer cause it is holiday here in Denmark and the weather is lovely
Check out Henriette’s last post: Asparges.
Hi Jenny,
These videos are great! I posted wrote an article about them on my blog as well. It’s amazing how well they summarize a healthy lifestyle in just 5 minutes, and they’re quite entertaining as well.
Check out Vin | NaturalBias.com’s last post: How to Eliminate Sugar From Your Diet.
This is great!! I posted them on my Facebook. Thanks so much!!
I agree with you and the others that there is nothing wrong with milk products, especially fermented dairy. I don’t drink milk, but I do eat yogurt and kefir and such.
Check out Zeke’s last post: Eat your weed.
I really liked the videos, however there were some incorrect points in the first one..
Humans are actually increasing in height 10-30 millimeters per decade(in developed countries)and this is proven anthropologically by looking at clothing, shoes, armor ect.
We are designed to drink and fed breastmilk from infancy, cow and goat milk is a close substitute in many ways, which is why we have been drinking it for centuries. In fact cows milk contains more protein then breastmilk. However, a Harvard study did show that Whole, 2%, 1% milk showed more hormones due to farmer’s milking the cows 300 days/ year. Creating the likelyhood that they are milking during times when the cows are pregnant. This causes more hormones in the milk, which is shown to cause a hormone based cancer. If you drink skim-milk you are at a low risk because hormones are fat soluble therefore are not found in skim milk due to no fat content.
As far as grains go, natural whole grains are good for you and have been eaten for thousands of years. There is nothing wrong with eating a potato.
Historical Examples of Grain-Based, Starch-Based, Diets:
Barley – Middle East for 11,000 years
Corn – Central and South America for 7000 years
Millet – Africa for 6,000 years
Oats – Middle East for 11,000 years
Sorghum – East Africa for 6,000 years
Rice – Asia for more than 10,000 years
Rye – Asia for 5000 years
Wheat – Near East for 10,000 years
I don’t mean to be preachy, I am a biochemist and working on my medical degree/master of science degree in Cancer Biology I als am working for a University and have had cancer. This is my specialty, I completely agree with most everything stated, however just as the pharmacutical companies ect drop out things to prove thier points, so do these people.
Stephanie –
I think you’ve made some great points, but there’s still a lot to consider. For example, by drinking skim milk rather than whole you also miss out on the fat soluble vitamins too and those are critically important to human health; moreover, you miss out on CLA – a known cancer fighter. Of course, milk really isn’t essential to the human diet at all as evidenced by populations across the globe that survive beautifully and healthfully without including it in their diets. But, if you choose to drink it it should absolutely be whole and raw – never skimmed.
Regarding grain – we use it in our home, but there is absolutely no nutrient in grain that you can’t find in better quantities elsewhere and while you’re right that we’ve cultivated it for thousands of years, 10,000 years is a blink of an eye with regard to human evolution. The truth is that for the bulk of human history we survived as hunter gatherers, not as agriculturalists.
On human height – in developed nations where meat and fat consumption are high – are definitely increasing in height; however, modern, industrialized humans are STILL shorter than their paleolithic counterparts. We are taller than most agriculturalist societies. And that is evidenced by anthropological data.
Take a look at the Maasai. They drink fermented milk, they eat meat… and they are incredibly tall, especially for Africans.
I think there is a place for dairy even within a supposedly paleo dietary framework. Why? Because many of the animals we hunted in prehistoric times have died out, and they were major sources of fat! Dairy’s a great way to get that animal fat from lean animals and would also, in theory, help us preserve more animal life. You might have to kill bull calves to get more milk but you’d need to anyway because more than one bull per herd is incredibly disruptive and dangerous to the humans managing the herd. (If not to the cattle or other hoofed animals as well.)
Grains generally don’t like me. I think the only reason any culture survived using them at all is because what they do to us doesn’t kill us before we’re old enough to reproduce. I love grains, I grew up on pasta and bread but let’s face it, most of them don’t love me. I get away with rice, but try not to overdo it. Most of us these days don’t know how to prepare them correctly and I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s a major driving factor in the current diabetes epidemic.