Staying Healthy in the Fast Lane

staying healthy in the fast lane

Since considerable grain consumption and production is only
about ten thousand years old, some say that grains are not optimal
to eat because we couldn’t have evolved that fast from our hunter-
gatherer, or Paleolithic, roots.
Indigenous diets are created from a group of people over hun-
dreds or even thousands of years using their traditional knowl-
edge to make a complete diet of local foods.^4 An indigenous diet
could be a hunter-gather type diet or a diet that has evolved over
hundreds of years in a particular location, like in some of the Blue
Zone areas of the world: Okinawa (Japan), Sardinia (Italy), Nicoya
(Costa Rica), Hunza (Pakistan), or Ikaria (Greece). Today’s mod-
ern indigenous diets have traditional people eating local and fresh
foods that are in season. If an indigenous population lives near a
river or ocean, they might consume fish, local vegetation, fruit, and
some form of unrefined starchy foods. If they live inland, they may
be more vegetarian, with some grain, starchy vegetables, and root
crops; or they may eat hunted game or free-ranged domestic ani-
mals with the same whole-food vegetarian base.
One key component when healthy indigenous cultures eat ani-
mal products is that they are usually free-ranged or wild animals.
Instead of the animals consuming feedlot grains and beans and
other things (hormones and antibiotics), the animals feed on local,
usually green, vegetation that has a better fatty acid profile than
feedlot food. In other words, domesticated free-range-fed animals
(or wild animals) should have a more anti-inflammatory fatty acid
profile compared to our mass-raised and mass-slaughtered feedlot
animals. Wild and free-range animals are generally more lean and
not as fatty as factory-farmed animals. Also, the quantity of meat
that modern indigenous cultures eat is generally less than what
present day urbanized societies consume.^5
There is a lot of debate about what our natural diet should be
(and there isn’t going to be agreement anytime soon). You can go
on the Internet and see the polarity of beliefs on what the best diet
is. Instead of looking at the differences, let’s look at what is com-
mon to many of the diets, and then let’s look at what the people
who live the longest eat in order to come up with some basic guide-
lines. Then, I hope, it won’t be so confusing. Because it really isn’t!