Hello Paleo

I think a round of applause is necessary for all that human kind has achieved over the course of the ten thousand years or so since we lived as not much more than cavemen. Fast track through the formation and disintegration of ancient civilisations, bypassing recent history to the here and now. Look around the room you are in and appreciate the wonders of recent technology. The computer you are using to read this hub, the flat screen TV that is such a integral part of the modern family it should take on your surname and the so smart phone that seems to own you, so dependent upon it for information, reminders and Internet access you have become. These things are fantastic and make the computer age revolutionary but what, as a citizen of state of the art, are you planning to have for dinner tonight? May I suggest that most of you will be serving Pasta, Potato, Rice, Cereal and Breads on your tables at some point in the next 24 hours. Filling ourselves with these lets be honest fairly tasteless foodstuffs is the accepted way to eat, we don't question it. These white foods fill us up and prevent hunger and have been served for generations. These very foods allowed world populations to boom and produce the world we live in today. There is only one problem with them, they are not the foods we were designed to eat. Consider them as a kind of 'foody' padding, they accompany the tasty part of a meal to wad it out and make the meal bigger and more filling.

"The Agricultural Revolution allowed us to abandon forever our previous hunter-gatherer lifestyle"

"the problem is that we are genetically adapted to eat what the hunter-gatherers ate"

Loren Cordain, Ph.D. author of The Paleo Diet

Cereal foods were cultivated when man began farming to meet the demand of feeding more and more people. Once farming methods were established it meant that all food didn't need to be foraged or caught daily. Early convenience foods were born and we moved away from our hunter-gatherer past. Feeding growing numbers of people was vital and so we continued to produce more and more cultivated crops until the tasty and essentially more nutritious part of the meal, the meat and vegetables got smaller although for centuries there has existed a divide between diets of the rich and poor. Land owners and noblemen ate plenty including meat, fish and game along with vegetables but the poor suffered surviving on little more than bread and cheese and potato, when famine struck resulting in food shortages the poor starved and died in their thousands from disease and malnutrition.

The Paleo diet is what human beings evolved eating, it makes sense, therefore, that it provides us with exactly what our bodies require. No more and no less. It is food in it's most natural state. Simple, delicious and good for us. Eating the Paleo way stimulates weight loss and stabilisation because you are not taking on board heaps of empty carborhydrates that the body doesn't need in the form of bread, rice and pasta. These man made foods were not around in the millions of years that man survived before food cultivation brought them to our tables. Another side effect of eating Paleo is the pure feeling of wellbeing and energy levels the likes of which you may never have experienced.

The health benefits are off the scale. Seriously. So many of the diseases and ailments of modern man are caused or exacerbated by what we feed ourselves including heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes and high colesterol.

I will now tell you how Paleo is in real life... fantastic! I am about a month in. Until about 6 weeks ago i had read one article on Paleo and didn't give it much more thought. Just before Christmas my 16 year old son suggested he would like to try it. I consider myself quite supportive on the parent front so I agreed to help. After a couple of false starts mainly due to not fully understanding the basic principles we are off and running. Now what I am about to confide may come as a shock, it is certainly a revelation to be exiting the mouth of a self confessed sugar-a-holic.... I don't miss dairy foods, I don't miss cereals, and i don't miss sugar (on a daily basis, but more of that later).

After i had vacuumed up the contents of 'The Paleo Diet' by Loren Cordain which is mind blowing in it's facts and explanations of the health benefits, and had an understanding of the science behind it, I was sold, sold to the whole ethos of a brand new way of eating, and how to produce regular meals and adapt old favourite ones that the family enjoy, even with a husband who isn't totally convinced.

It seems that the longer you eat fresh vegetables, fruits, lean meat and fish the more you want to eat them. Before I embarked on this way of eating, I read through the list of dos' and don'ts' and my honest reaction was to think that there wouldn't really be much that I could eat and how was I going to survive without a huge doorstep of bread with a slab of butter on a Sunday morning. The only way I can explain it is this, it is as if my body knows which foods are best for me and given the choice now I choose to have fried banana with toasted pumpkin seeds. Okay you may miss salt for a while, but honestly if you stick with it you will find that vegetables suddenly have depths of flavours that were missing before and dried garlic powder makes a great substitute for the old habit of shaking salt over everything.

The thing is, you are allowed to have cheat meals too. The idea of this is really what gets you through the first couple of weeks. Just knowing that if you crave a slice of toast and butter or a bit of chocolate you can do so. The basic rule of thumb is out of a week's total of meals you could have cheat items in 3 meals so it's not all bad. Just be warned though, after a few weeks you probably won't want them. Strange but true, even as I mentioned before for someone who thought I couldn't live without chocolate, cakes and biscuits. My long craved for cheat breakfast of toast, butter and honey virtually stuck in my throat and felt as though I was trying to eat cardboard! A cheat meal for me is usually ice cream or chocolate. For those who like a tipple, it's okay to have a glass of red wine too. There is a God.

Paleo food is beautiful in it's simplicity. Understanding the principles are more complex though and in my opinion it is important to do a little reading up on the subject so you have an understanding of why you eat certain foods and not others. I recommend you do some reading on the net or purchase a book on the subject. There are more than several books with the name of Loren Cordain on them and there is a good reason for this. He has extensively researched the subject and although comically he stresses he didn't invent the diet, nature did, he does seem to be somewhat of a Godfather to Paleo. Under his guidance is where I started, it seems as good a place as any.