10 January 2015

The Problem with Paleo: Natural Food is Not Healthy

Friends have been trying to convince me to go on a paleo diet, which effectively is the idea that you should eat natural food that cavemen would normally have eaten. This means you eat things that you may have picked off a plant, e.g. nuts. It also includes minimally cooked grass-fed meat.

The theory is that processed food today is filled with so much crap that we must get back to basics. We must get back to the food that we were designed by evolution to eat, food that is untouched.

The problem with this idea is that this is a fantasy. Clean food untouched by mankind is virtually impossible to find.

The world we live in today is nothing like the world our ancestors lived in. Today our oceans and farmland are all contaminated with heavy metals. There is mercury in your fish and there is arsenic in your vegetables. The meat we eat is highly processed with growth hormones and antibiotics.

As such, processing food can be seen as a good thing because it allows food to be cleaned. It allows the toxic chemicals to be removed.

For example, rather than eat fish and get mercury poisoning, fish oil pills, which are highly processed, are often tested for mercury. Cavemen would not have taken fish oil pills, but I'd rather rely on a fish oil pill for my omega 3 fatty acid than rely on fish. This is because the processing removes toxic mercury.

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