Wednesday, February 26, 2014

Eat Like a Caveman (And Lose Weight)

How to Eat Right is a topic that gets a lot of attention these days.  Fad diets abound and their popularity rises and ebbs like the daily tides.  What is the truth?  What is the right way to eat?  How, in today's hectic world, can a person eat healthy without spending all of your time preparing food and all of your money buying it?

The answers to these questions are simple and even refreshing!  First, what is the truth?  To learn the truth about the right way to eat, let us look at our ancestors.  If we look at our diets today we see the diet of our agrarian forefathers.  We live in "the breadbasket of the world," and we see bread and grain products permeating our diets; foods with high energy concentration.  Before mechanized farming, those who worked the farms worked very hard and the amount of grain products that they ate merely replaced the energy that they had burned.  Presently, we are not active enough to burn that amount of energy and our breadbasket diets are working against us, causing obesity, diabetes and heart disease.

Next, let's look back further to the Paleolithic Era to see how we were built to eat. These were the cavemen, the hunter-gatherers.  Although they didn't have cell phones and LED TVs, they are considered to be modern humans as our physiology has changed little since then.  Yes, the men were approximately twice as tall as the women, but internally we are little different from them.


As you can see, it really didn't matter what they ate, but since they had not yet developed cultivation of crops and whole kernel grains are very hard to eat and digest, they had very little grain in their diets.  They ate a great deal of meat, fruits, nuts and vegetables.

What we find today is that if we limit our grain intake to zero to two servings of whole grains per day, six half-cup servings of vegetables and zero to three servings of fruit per day and 8 ounces of protein (meats and dairy) for women and 12 ounces of protein for men.

There is much more to discuss on this topic, so next week come back and we will discuss

Why Fried Food Isn't So Bad After All!

Wednesday, February 19, 2014

Living Healthy Really Is Within Your Reach

Life is tough, and to meet its demands we have to stay at our best.  We now know that there are four basic lifestyle choices that we must make in order to attain and maintain optimal health.  These are known as HLCs (Healthy Lifestyle Choices) and they are:

1. Not Smoking
2. Maintaining Healthy Body Mass
3. Adequate Exercise
4. Proper Nutrition

These choices seem simple at first glance, but implementation can at times be very difficult.  Not smoking, for example, is already very well publicized, but for the nicotine addict that one can be nearly impossible to handle.  We have learned that nicotine is as addictive as heroine, and that is why smoking cessation is such huge business.  Nonetheless, about 12 times as much money is spent on statins, a class of heart medications, than is spent on smoking cessation even though smoking cessation is 17 times more effective in treating and preventing heart disease, according to the World Health Organization.

That's just one example and the media is replete with information regarding that topic.  The remaining three HLCs are even more complex and over the next weeks I will embark on a series to help demystify the healthy lifestyle.  It really is easy to do with minor adjustments to your current lifestyle.  You will still be able to eat at restaurants, watch TV, play on the computer and have a real life! It comes down to the 7 Rs, as we will discussing in coming weeks.

So, come back next week as we learn how to eat a normal meal, like enchiladas or fried chicken, in our first installment

EAT RIGHT!