Due to popular demand (johan, bor, katlette) this thread is dedicated to the Paleolithic diet. At first i want to give you a brief summary on the basics of the paleo diet:
The paleo diet itself is based on what humans consumed before the agricultural revolution which took place ten thousand years ago. We know that health of humans began to decline with the introduction of grain and starch based nutrition. Early humans did not show any signs of diabetis, high cholesterol or high blood preassure,... While humans - after the introduction of grains and starches to their diet - suffered all these diseases and even more. Moreover it is obvious that our human DNA has not changed tremendously over the past 400.000 years. In fact it is identical to 99,9998% to our present DNA patterns. By noticing this, it seems logiacl that humans simply haven't adopted to the grain and starch based diets of today and are better off following a diet which their early ancestors followed.
There are several disadvantages of the modern high carb, low fat diet approach but the most obvious and most disastouros disadvantage is INSULIN RESISTANCE. Your bodys insulin receptors simply down-regulate due to the constant overflow of insulin in the blood (due to carb intake) and therefore higher and higher insulin levels are necessarcy to clear glucose from someones blood. The logial outcome of this scenario is TypII diabetis. But high insulin levels have even more drawbacks.
Insulin regulates your blood preassure (insulin causes sodium retention and therefore fluid retention with goes along with high blood pressure) and cholesterol level (by stimulating and cholesterol building enzym ewithin your liver). Moreover it is directly linked to developing fat depostis (especially around your waist and visceral fat as those have the most insulin receptors).
This seems to be the main cuplrit of the modern day high carb approach. Nevertheless there are an abundance of other negative aspects of a grain/starch based diet. But i will not disscuss these right now, as this abstract should only give you a quick overview of what the paleo diet is about.
Following a PURE Paleo diet (there are less restrictive regimes of course) means:
1) No grains / starches
2) No dairy products (those have shown to increase risk for heart diseases. The only exception here is whey protein as is has an immune boosting effect).
3) No artifical sweeteners (Did you know that aspartame can cross the brain barrier and destroy brain cells btw?)
4) As sweeteners only use honey or stevia (only in small amounts as stevia triggers an insulin response just like cylamate)
5) As carb sources eat only vegetables, nuts or fruits.
6) Carb intake should not be over 100g/day prefered is under 60g.
7) No legumes (beans / peanuts)
8) No processed foods (beacause of the high trans fat content)
9) No alcohol (even though some wine may still be benefical)
I for myself am slightly fructose intollerant. That is why i don not consume an abundance of pure fructose based fruits for my daily carb needs. I opted for bananas instead, even though they are starch based they should have also been available to our ancestors in the paleolithic past. Moreover a lot of fructose could do you more harm than good in the end. In fact rats are feed a high fructose diet to develop insulin resistance. Plus there are other drawbacks to fructose. That is why i feel bananas are a better choice over high fructose fruits.
So this was a brief overwiev of the paleo diet as i understand it. Of course i could not go very much into detail, but if there are questions to certain points feel free to ask.
AleX