This was origianlly a response to your Email, but what better subject to resurrect the blog...

Well, I was thinking this morning that with Wally gone, you have the opportunity to retune your eating habits. I would be honored to help design an eating plan for you – but with the caveat that I haven’t been eating like this for long enough to know if it’s benefiting ME or not. My seat-of-the-pants impression is that I FEEL better, but who knows how much of that is placebo effect – or “paleo-cebo” effect... (Sorry, you know I have no will power against bad puns).

As far as the ‘no grains’ thing goes, consider that grains, which are tough little critters, have to be found (or cultivated) in quantity, sown, husked, ground or milled and finally cooked in order to be rendered digestible to humans. (Otherwise the hard grains pass through the digestive tract intact). Our hunter gatherer ancestors did not do this, based on archaeological evidence of human diet and studies of the few hunter gatherers that still exist. (I.e. Africa’s !Kung tribe, Australian aboriginals, etc.) They ate wild lean meats, vegetables, fruits, seeds and nuts. These ancient and modern hunter gatherers had virtually no incidence of the diet-related health problems we have now, like heart disease and diabetes, and most cancers - for 400,000 years, or so.

For them, grains were “starvation foods,” eaten in really lean times. A mere 10,000ish years ago, came the agricultural revolution. Grains became a staple, as did dairy (hunter gatherers probably had little luck milking mastodons, or giant tusked deer). So guess when heart disease, cancers and other diet related ailments start showing up in the archaeological record?

This is all more eloquently put in “The Paleo Diet” by Loren Cordain, PhD. Cordain is an expert on stone age nutrition, and I’ll bring you the book, when I come – It is, of course, backed with tons of science. Over all, it’s like Atkins, except that it's not, because you eat (most of) those veggies with carbs as well as fruit, which we always suspected we should be eating, even while losing weight on Atkins. Cordain is very much in favor of eating meats, though he recommends game meat, grass fed beef and free-range chicken. Corn-fed beef is not only higher in fat than grass-fed cows, but has a much higher Omega 6 to Omega 3 ratio, which is not ideal. Not to mention, the hormones, the antibiotics, the petro-chemicals.

Anyway, I’m happy to do your shopping for you when I come – between Haggen and the new Trader Joe’s, finding quality food will be easy. Oh, and that Food Pyramid? Mostly driven by politics, and the economy of farm subsidies. Big surprise.