Man 20,000 years ago: We ate from the land, and we ate from the sea: plants and animals. We were strong, healthy and active. We would effortlessly fall asleep at night and naturally wake with the sun. We would spend our day actively on foot searching for food: nuts, berries, seeds, hanging fruit, vegetables, or hunting for game: deer, bison, hog, rabbit, fowl, fish.
Fast forward to today, the age of processed agriculture: We eat from drive-through windows, and we eat from vending machines: packages, wrappers, and cereal boxes. We have trouble falling asleep and even more trouble waking to the shrill scream of alarm clocks. We, on average, are smaller (in height....NOT around the waist), more fragile (degenerative diseases such as osteoporosis run rampant), and take pharmaceutical medication for everything from digestion issues to difficulty sleeping. Obesity rates are climbing. Depression rates, anxiety, and sleep disorders are shooting through the roof.
A low-fat diet is encouraged by our government because of a completely unscientific and outdated "lipid hypothesis" suggesting that saturated fats and cholesterol in foods are what make you fat and cause heart disease.
You will find no credible, irrefutable scientific evidence anywhere that supports the outrageous theory that eating cholesterol and fat causes heart disease. Never, because it doesn't exist. Any study that supports this theory, under scrutiny, has been and will always be proven false. There is however, a substantial amount of scientific data supporting the theory that chronic inflammation causes heart disease. Guess what source of food contributes to chronic inflammation? Grains.
Unfortunately, it seems too late. The low-fat, high grain diet theory has become common sense. It's on the food pyramid taught to our increasingly obese and diabetic children: Eat plenty of grain based carbohydrates: preferably whole grain, little to no saturated fat, and the cholesterol equivalent of a single egg and you will be healthy.....Millions of innocent Americans: trusting in this piece of age old "wisdom" are anything but healthy.
Many of us struggle daily with a diet that is linked to depression, mood swings, ADHD, heart disease, chronic inflammation, cancer and diabetes. When we don't see any results (the great majority), we blame ourselves for messing up, or we blame our genetics.
Here's the problem, nowhere in nature do mammals eat a diet primarily based on grains. The only animals that survive well on grain based diets are certain species of birds. Mammals not only survive, but thrive primarily on plants and animals. Grains were not even introduced to the human diet until very recently, and since then, not only have we grown smaller, but our brain size has shrunk by an estimated 10-15 percent. In other words, a grain based diet may actually be causing us to "devolve".
The saturated fats and cholesterol in plants and animals promote healthy hair, teeth, skin, nails, hormone production (particularly testosterone....primal man had no Viagra and the leaders of tribes would have children sometimes in their 80s), mood regulation, brain development and energy metabolism. The protein in plants and animals promotes muscular and tissue repair and development, and the vitamins and minerals contained in plants and animals promote healthy cell function.
If you are at all unhappy with your dieting success and you eat a large amount of grains, it may be more than worth the effort to look into this. I recently published a review on what I believe to be a life-changing collection of information containing the missing link to dieting success. Check it out for more information.