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!
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