So, I started writing this rather self-righteous post about how I think it's foolish when people go to what I consider 'illogical extremes' with their diet. I tried to use a survival analogy to illustrate my point - referring to the fact that our ancestors, the mighty cavemen, didn't restrict their diets. They *couldn't* restrict their diets, in the name of survival.

As I was writing it, I started looking around for information to back up what I thought was a really great point. Instead I found some research that indicates that cavemen DID in fact eat a restricted diet - not out of choice, but because it was all they had access to. And their restricted diet may have rendered them a lot heathier than modern man.

Once I realized the research slightly contradicted my entire analogy, I thought about deleting this whole entry. Instead, I decided to shovel up a big ol' slice of humble pie and publish it anyway. Even if my original point is now somewhat moot, it's still interesting to learn about the caveman diet. 

More interestingly, this very contradictory post can actually help to illustrate a very real issue in the Wellness World: contradictions are everywhere. One person may tell you to that cardio is better for fat loss, another may tell you that weight training is. One may tell you that a vegetarian diet is the best way to keep your heart healthy, another may tout lean protein as the source of a healthy heart. It's very difficult for the average end-user to know what's true and what's hype, and it makes the whole journey down the wellness path even more winding and convoluted than it needs to be. We have to band together to wade through the muck. So that's what this convoluted, time-stamped post now represents: wellness muck-wading.

What started as a quasi-Darwinian look at nutrition soon evolved into something else entirely. 

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"If it doesn't make sense, it probably isn't true."
(Thursday, October 29, 10:12am)

Truer words were never spoken (and we have Judge Judy to thank for that gem).

Sometimes when I'm pondering an issue that affects us as a species, I think in terms of evolution.

In order for us to evolve into man, the one and only thing we needed to master was survival. To this end, man learned how to do a lot of things that probably didn't come immediately naturally to him. He learned to drink water. How did he learn to do this? Let's assume it was trial and error. Probably sometime very early in our existence, when our first single-celled ancestors emerged from the primordial soup, we lost a few generations of organisms because we were just so gosh-darned thirsty but didn't know how to satisfy our thirst. Or, for that matter, what "feeling thirsty" even meant. Eventually we learned that if we drank water, we could stave off that thirsty feeling and - as a bonus - we didn't die as much.

As we grew from plankton to monkey to man, we learned a lot of things in this way. We learned that we needed to eat. We probably expended a few generations' worth of ancestors just figuring out what plants and organisms were edible and which were poisonous - or which ones would fight back and kill us if we tried to eat them. We learned to make weapons to take down these bigger, more murderous meals. We learned that their skin and fur kept us warm when the temperature got cold. We learned to make fire to keep us even more warm and we figured out that if we cooked our meat over that fire, we lost even fewer of our kin to illness.

We figured all this stuff out. Of course. it took a really long time to get to where we are now. Now we live in a world with flying machines, smartphones and crunchy tacos INSIDE soft tacos (how do they DO that?). But it can't hurt to think back to where we came from and how we managed to get here.

Which - to sum up this neverending preamble - is why I shake my head when I hear someone say that he or she is trying some kind of new eating plan that eliminates {food item/macronutrient}.

The fundamentals of nutrition are relatively simple: the food we take in is converted and used in a very specific way in our bodies to keep us survivin'. Moreover, we've been honing the skill of survival for millions of years. In our history as a species, nutrition has played one of the biggest roles in our ability to thrive, reproduce and evolve. 

Scaling nutrition back to very simplistic terms, we have our macronutrients: protein, carbohydrates and fat. Water is sometimes tossed in there as a macronutrient too. We have the vitamins and minerals. All of these things work in the body to regulate stuff and help build the tissues and cells and things that we need to, you know, exist. I'm REALLY simplifying this...

What if I told you that I decided I was going to go on a low-calcium diet? You'd probably recoil in horror at the inevitable loss of density in my teeth and bones. You'd remember back to everything you learned in your life about how drinking milk is necessary for us to "grow up big and strong."

Or maybe I'll try a low-Vitamin C diet. Think of all the calories I'll save if I never eat another orange again! I'll look super hot in my swimsuit this year, if you can overlook the scurvy-induced bleeding gums and skin lesions.

Or, okay. Let's put this in terms that modern-day 21st-century man can understand: What if I said I was going to go on a low-protein, high-carb diet?

*stunned silence*

Somewhere in very recent history, carbohydrates have been labeled "really bad" and protein deemed "super good." Fat suffered this same fate a few years ago too, before everyone jumped on the low-carb wagon. In fact, they're all totally unique, equally-necessary macronutrients that perform important roles and tasks for the proper care and function of our bodies. Every macronutrient, vitamin and mineral is equally important, and shunning one of them makes absolutely no sense.

Our genetic code, dietarily speaking, is built upon simple, intuitive eating habits. Rather than obsessing about what to eliminate from your diet, spend less time thinking about it altogether, and let your body have a logical sampling of all the macronutrients. The building blocks of basic nutrition are not open to interpretation. We didn't get to where we are today by eliminating one or more of  our necessary dietary elements.

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Eating Crow (a Good Source of Lean Protein!)
(Thursday, October 29 2009, 11:26am)

Well now I'm a little bummed, because I just read this article about the caveman diet, which says that in fact cavemen *did* have a restricted diet, and that modern man is not equipped to consume and digest all the refined carbohydrates we've been eating since the advent of agriculture.

The article went on to indicate that some of the common diet-related diseases we see occurring more and more often as time goes on - such as obesity and Type 2 diabetes - are because, at the genetic level, our bodies have not kept up with the technological advances of agriculture and food preparation. We are not programmed to thrive on our modern diet.

Cavemen didn't have a means by which to process and refine the grains that modern man eats in such abundance today. Sugar and salt as we know them didn't exist. Even dairy was scarce or non-existent. As a result, cavepeeps probably had healthier hearts and narrower midsections than the average modern man.  

Cavemen ate only what they could kill or procure from the plants around them, so it meant a lot of lean proteins, fruits, nuts and berries. It sounds a little Atkins-ish, except that the caveman diet wasn't restricted out of some desire to look hot in a loincloth - it was simply because only certain foods were available. 

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So What have we Learned?
(Thursday, October 29 2009, 4:04pm)

I still feel confident that the best way to eat is to eat in a way that makes logical sense. But maybe it has to make sense 400,000 years ago.

400, 000 years ago, there was no white rice, no white pasta, no white bread, no sugary candy, no salt shakers on the table. Cavepersons intuitively ate the things that were available to them, things that existed naturally in their world, and they were probably healthier, nutritionally speaking, than man is today.

So we could say that we've learned that we should avoid eating refined grains... but I feel like we probably knew that already. Eliminating refined grains is NOT the same as eliminating all carbohydrates, and even the cavemen knew that. They ate lots of berries and as many whole grains as they could dredge up. If a caveman had decided to NOT eat berries, he would have been eliminating one of his vital sources of nutrients - a deeply illogical move, especially since a caveman needed to have as much energy as possible, since he spent much of his day battling sabre-toothed tigers and inventing the wheel. The caveman needed to eat all of the naturally-occurring foods available to him, and so do you. 

If someone suggests that you need to eliminate an entire macronutrient in order to be fit and healthy, tell them, "No thanks. I'm trying to keep our species alive here."