"Forget low fat, no fat, cutting carbs or even counting calories.
If you really want a healthy diet that lasts, and works, Dr. Atkins isn't your guide. The caveman is, according to a natural-foods diet increasingly catching on in kitchens across America.
Its adherents say the men and women who ran around in animal pelts eating nuts, grains, fruits, vegetables, lean meat and other foods in their purest forms could teach us all a thing or two about the benefits of whole foods in boosting the body's energy and wellness and warding off disease.
Emphasis on RUNNING around when you include grains, which have now become quite problematic over the millenia.
The idea is to bring our bodies back to the basics, to a time when it was so easy, a caveman could do it.
For thousands of years, the people of the Stone Age lived free from heart disease, diabetes or other chronic killers that plague much of today's society — and had the energy to run from stampeding herds of wooly mammoth to boot. You'd hardly call that a fad diet.
Only in the past few generations, in fact, did we begin to muck up our foodstuffs with additives, preservatives, corn fillers and other artificial products designed for prepackaged convenience and price competitiveness. And in the process, diseases spiked. If we returned to the nutritional habits of our cave-dwelling ancestors, and cut back on the additives polluting the average American diet, we'd live longer, higher-quality lives, the whole-foods gospel goes.
"We have more hospitals, more medicine, more resources than ever before, but the number of chronic diseases has increased exponentially," said Plantation chiropractor Dr. Jeff Berard, who delivers the whole-foods message in free bi-monthly seminars across South Florida. "In the Paleolithic era, they ate what Mother Nature gave them in the form she gave it to them. And research on their bodies, when their bones have been excavated, show that they did not have diabetes, they didn't have heart disease."
They also didn't have rotten, crowded, or missing teeth.
"Nutritionists, dietitians, and cancer and other disease sufferers have been promoting the benefits of back-to-the-basics nutritional purity for decades. But for the mainstream public, a diet rich in natural or whole foods burst onto the wellness scene about five years ago and has recently spiked in popularity.
In April, a spokeswoman for the American Dietetic Association called "a back-to-the-basics approach — getting away from highly processed foods and back to whole foods" the "biggest trend" for 2011.
Of course, like any growing movement, the whole-foods diet, especially the version that seeks to mimic the caveman's diet, has its detractors. A 2011 survey of experts by U.S. News & World Report ranked the so-called Paleo diet the worst of 20 studied, saying there was little evidence to support its effectiveness, and critics suggest the caveman's disease-free existence was rooted in other factors as well.
But Jason Monty, for one, is a believer. A former nightclub bouncer and lifelong athlete, Monty started studying for a new career in massage therapy and learned about the effect that nutrients and additives have on the body. He cut all fillers, additives and preservatives from his diet — and ate mainly rice, eggs, beans and produce. In less than a month, his cholesterol dropped from 230 to 190, and in the eight months since, he's lost 115 pounds.
"I think more clearly, I wake up before the alarm, I feel better than I ever have," said the 25-year-old Port St. Lucie man. "I couldn't go back to eating the food I ate before, or my body would immediately tell me it's not supposed to be there. My stomach would start rumbling, I started feeling sluggish, bloated."
Berard, who owns the Spine & Sports Rehab Institute in Plantation, said there's good reason for Monty's rebounded health.
"Once you give your body what it needs, it stops craving what it wants," said the chiropractor, whose latest wellness seminar was at the Florida Blue Center in Sunrise on Tuesday.
Berard's whole-foods mantra is that as human beings, we have a genetic composition that hasn't evolved much from the early days of man. Our bodies still crave clean water and the pure foods and active lifestyles of our ancestors.
But since the end of the Cold War, with the advent of packaged foods and the explosion of the restaurant industry, additives have taken over our food supply, replacing nutrients such as omega-3 fatty acids, raising our cholesterol and subjecting us to a wider array of diseases."
It actually started long before that--enter politics, rationing, WWII, and farm subsidies. Actually, whenever there was rationing in the U.S. (all the way back to the Revolutionary war), there was an effort to conserve the decent foods for the troops while the home-front had to make due with the leftovers, which usually meant starches.
Nowadays, we throw WWII-style farm subsidies into the mix, and that's why a Big Mac is cheaper than a salad. It's also why we can ultimately blame Congress and the administration for our obesity epidemic--vote-buying has consequences.
This recent commodity spike has had two blessings: higher market prices mean lower subsidies, and more expensive grain products mean eventually less production and consumption (even in the Third World--they're now eating peanut-and-dairy-based paste). Pretty soon, the only consumers of grains will be the birds--livestock feed is already switching over to algae, flax, grasses, seeds (such as chia), and other fodder.
"I used to think I didn't eat processed food," said Janee Comartin, a mother of seven living in Davie. "What we learned from Dr. Jeff is that any time they add coloring or flavor, it's processed. You want to stay as close to nature as possible."
But rather than going cold-turkey on the processed foods, Berard said the healthiest approach is "transitioning" to a purer diet by adding whole foods — probiotics, omega-3s, water, fresh produce, vitamin D — into your day. Healthy eating, though, isn't just a matter of choosing the right foods. It's being able to afford them. The sad fact behind America's struggle with obesity is that the unhealthiest foods — fast-food restaurant fare, prepackaged products, sodas — are the cheapest and most accessible.
Enter politics again--in an effort to steer us into demanding more subsidized crops, making an artificial market for them, we're tantalized into buying junk food to help support factory farms so Congress doesn't have to carry the entire load. This is our food supply: all junk that wouldn't sell otherwise if it weren't made into breads, pasta, soda, pre-packaged convenience foods...these so-called "foods" are made cheap and accessible FOR A REASON!
"But Judith Cappeluzzo, a Hollywood stay-at-home mom raising six kids in a single-income family, says eating the right food is just a matter of priorities.
In order to splurge on pricey produce, pure orange juice, whole chickens and other unprocessed foods, the family sacrifices some creature comforts the rest of us take for granted: new clothes, a new car, cable TV, dining out.
Along the way, Cappeluzzo said, she is teaching her children to be aware of what is in their food and to appreciate how to make meals from whole, pure ingredients — a "lost art" once passed down through the generations.
"I think this generation has lost the ability to cook," she said. "Now, if you bake a cake out of a box, that's considered scratch."
Cappeluzzo is right. There's something to be said for doing things "the old way," and learning from our ancestors, even if they came 10,000 years before us."
Not only did farm subsidies serve to steer us toward obesity, but they're also steering us toward helping to prop up the Medical Industrial complex--now you see how our economy has REALLY kept itself running the past 30 years or so? It's a vicious circle: birth, become dependent on disease-causing foods, then dependent on disease-fighting drugs, and then newer, stronger disease-fighting drugs to take the place of the old ones coming off patent, eventual death, and another one is born to start the process over again. Multiply that times our country's entire population, and you see just how big the money is!
Now you have to pay money to ride this merry-go-round in the form of health care insurance. I'd rather spend my money on better-quality foods that actually nourish me.
Remember when doctors used to get paid in chickens, eggs, jam, or quilts? That's because we needed them so seldomly, we didn't keep money around just for them.
If you're in doubt about exactly what we're supposed to eat, take a cue from nature: birds eat grains and seeds, squirrels eat nuts, horses, cows, and other ruminants eat grass, pigs and chickens forage, fish eat algae and bug larvae, and we eat all of THEM plus fruits, vegetables, eggs, and drink water. No politics involved, and no health insurance needed.
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