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We are made from the inside-out. As Hippocrates said: “All health begins in the gut.” He also said: “Let thy food be thy medicine, and thy medicine be thy food.” Most Americans have little to no sense of the knowledge and wisdom contained within this pair of indispensable, interconnected statements, the vast majority of whom regularly feed upon what unscrupulous, disease-promoting food corporations have contrived to manipulate our taste buds and the pleasure centers of our brains, with most of our conventional food supply inducing a state of chronic toxicity and systemic inflammation.
Indeed, more and more it’s found that inflammation and directly-connected ‘autoimmunity’ are the core causes of human disease, inseparable from everything from type 2 diabetes to ‘leaky gut syndrome’ to diseases once thought of as entirely mental and separate from the body, like anxiety disorders, depression and even schizophrenia, which more and more are proven to be byproducts of immunity gone awry, the ‘collateral damage’ from immune systems attacking unnaturalities produced by our artificial environments and fake ‘foods.’ This, in turn, blocks our body’s ability to create, disseminate and make use of the neurotransmitters that are critical to good mental health, most of which are actually produced in our gut (yay Hippocrates), not our brains.
75% of what Americans spend on healthcare is based upon the chronic toxicity induced by false foods and their cascading, inflaming, disease-promoting effects. 75%! Might this have something to do with why medical schools underemphasize nutrition? Why eliminate 75% of your own business? Hey, that’s ‘just business,’ right?
You’re the commodity.
Even when physicians are unaware of or turn a blind eye to this motive, and so aren’t actively involved in a rampant modern health crisis conspiracy, the all-illuminating financial motive remains, and directs the prevailing training of doctors. “Follow the money” remains the most revelatory means of understanding motive, by far. And the tragic result is that most Americans live their entire lives sick from their diets and don’t even know it, for the sickness is insidious in its debilitation, and most simply adapt to it and think of it as their ‘normal,’ never knowing what healthy truly is, and how it feels.
“Health” is nothing less than your materialization, and how you feel and what you’re physically and mentally capable of relative to your natural abilities at every moment of your entire life. And the vast majority of health is determined by what you consume, not by the pharmaceuticals sold to conceal this. Exercise reinforces the benefits of proper nutrition, but can never replace them. Food must always come first, for you can’t achieve complete health without being physically active, it’s true, but you can’t be healthy at all if your diet breeds the risk of disease and doesn’t properly fill the tank, maintain and protect the biological machinery through which you exercise, with lots of physical activity combined with poor underlying health actually being dangerous.
This brings us to the PROPER Diet for Human Beings: P.R.O.P.E.R.
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The PROPER Diet is:
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Paleo-Principle-Based
The PROPER diet is informed and led by Paleo principles; that is, by the convergence of the evolutionary and nutritional sciences. We coevolved with/to healthfully process certain natural resources, and only these should be considered food. Everything else compromises our bodily systems in some way, triggering inflammatory and other connected immune responses and breakdowns in our natural vitality and physiological functionality. Knowing how and why this is true of false foods and thereby excluding them is the imperative first step in consuming a PROPER human diet.
There are many excellent books and online resources supporting the science and logic behind a Paleo approach to eating, many of them noted at the end herein, and perhaps beginning with Cordain’s “The Paleo Diet,” most of which I agree with, some of which I take issue with and refine herein, based upon my own extensive research and experience. No, I don’t have the credentials. I’m an autodidact who’s studied nutrition on and off for decades. Perhaps you’re unaware that the vast majority of invaluable education takes place outside of official scholastic settings? Or that many, even most, nutritionists/dietitians shove their credentials down your throat to build their credibility before espousing outdated paradigms that only exacerbate health issues? One dietitian told me that “pizza is a complete meal,” as it provides all the macronutrients in abundance. It’s complete all right… completely filled with inflammatory substances and completely devoid of micronutrients. Pizza is the perfect food… for encouraging disease. She still recommends the old food pyramid… and might as well have drawn her dietitian certificate in crayon, as far as I’m concerned. Time to go back to school, and maybe not, this time, be trained like doctors, by the FDA and Big Pharma fabricating fact for profit!
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Raw-Centric
Most of our evolutionarily-derived human anatomy was developed whilst we and our forebears were true, straight-from-the-Earth gatherers. Nutrient density, bioavailability and naturally-occurring enzyme and prebiotic counts are all highest when the foods we consume are consumed as soon to when gathered as possible, and without processing, including heat processing (cooking). The goal is for every meal to be at least 50% raw, below which the human body treats the cooking-denatured ‘food’ like a parasite, triggering gastrointestinal leukocytosis, an immunological inflammatory response. Most people trigger this with every meal and don’t even know it. Yes, fire allowed human beings to consume more macronutrients and calories and condense flavors and thereby make food more energy-rich and pleasurable, and was obviously pivotal to the development of the species, but consider the possibility that not all developments are natural or in our best interests, and that there’s a major difference between caloric energy and vital energy. Having energy in the tank is useless if the vehicle says: blah.
Generally speaking, if you have to process (including cook) something in order for it to be digestible, such as grains and legumes, it’s a good indication that it’s improper for human consumption. Raw produce, on the other hand, our bodies treat as medicine. And focusing on raw food also limits glycemic loads and allows for more satiety (fullness) per calorie, because more energy is expended by the body during the digestion and internal distribution process, thereby helping us stay lean. The amount of energy the body uses in the consumption, digestion and systemic distribution and utilization of the food is known as its ‘thermic effect,’ which can be considered like a ‘net caloric intake’ of the food; the amount of ‘gross’ caloric intake minus the calories consumed by the body in the aforementioned physiological processes, producing a net intake. And the thermic effect of raw produce and animal protein is far higher than with cooked produce and when comparing protein to the other two macronutrients, fat and carbohydrates, which both use only about a fifth of the energy required in the processing of protein, which is why lots of protein and fiber and lower, controlled quantities of fat and carbohydrate are central to any effective weight loss strategy. But as Cordain might say, that doesn’t mean that we eliminate or even minimize the fat and carbohydrate, but, rather, that we allow nature to control it; that we consume them from natural sources wherein it isn’t overly condensed (as with refined sugar and starch) or developed within sick animals force-fed grains, rather than eating their naturally ruminant, Omega-3-rich grazing food sources.
And since I’ve mentioned Cordain here, I’m compelled to say that the consideration of the value of raw foods is one of the ways in which he and I diverge. In fact, raw foods are underemphasized by Paleo advocates in general, with whom I mostly agree. So why do I diverge? Again, a massive amount of the nutritional density (micronutrient density) and the naturally-occurring enzymes that facilitate proper digestion and physiological utilization (bioavailability) are reduced, if not outright eliminated, by any form of processing, including cooking (though not all forms of cooking are equal in this respect, with the ‘low and slow’ and water-cooking steaming/boiling techniques serving you far better than high-heat frying, and with baking being somewhere in between). Then there’s the aforementioned gastrointestinal leukocytosis, the immunological, inflammatory attack involved in the consumption of any meal that’s mostly cooked; and the fact that the satiating effect (how full you feel and for how long) is far higher with the raw form of the food; and, especially relevant within the context of the hunter-gatherer consideration, because the ancestors who formed our genetic templates ate more food raw than cooked, much of it directly, right at the point of harvest, when the food consumed was as nutritionally dense as possible, as nutritional density and enzyme conferral begin to degrade as soon as the food is harvested. These are all excellent reasons to focus on raw food, and demonstrative of what’s lost when you don’t, and is also why I think that anyone with their own land, even a decent-sized lot, should be growing as much of their own organic food as possible, for all the aforementioned reasons and the spiritual and activity-based rewards received from the symbiotic practice of cultivation.
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Organic
For the sake of our health and the health of the planet, everything we eat should be as naturally-derived as possible. When you think of the term “organic,” it typically means ‘grown without the use of chemicals and other unnaturalities,’ including fertilizers and pesticides that cause both human and environmental ruin, including cancer, denuded land and tainted water supplies. But I’d encourage you to extend the term “organic” to mean the most natural and least-detrimental-to-the-environment form of the food as possible, whether plant or animal. Remember that you’re not just what you eat, but what what you eat eats. And when it comes to animals, they’re anything but created equal.
The difference between an animal living its entire life in confinement, producing stress hormones throughout, and fed mostly inflammatory grains, and the same animal grazing on its natural fare in an outdoor environment is immense, and not just from an ethical standpoint in consideration of the life of the animal, but from the standpoint that unnatural animal lives produce unnatural meats with inflammation-inducing fat and hormone profiles. You take in everything unnatural that is absorbed by or produced within your food. Thus, you want truly wild (not just ‘wild caught’), naturally living and grazing food sources. If any part of the process was manipulated by man’s unnatural fertilizations, hormones, antibiotics, confinements etc., it’s not organic, and your body absorbs the effects. This means CAFO meats are out, which constitute the majority of the animal supply. Look for local suppliers of as naturally derived foods as possible.
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Produce-Focused, Probiotic and Prebiotic
Despite what many say and believe, Paleo doesn’t mean carnivore-centric. It primarily means being a gatherer. Our bodily constructs are far closer to those of herbivores than carnivores. Overall, produce is far more beneficial to the human body and entails far less risk in consumption compared to animal products, especially when it comes to cardiovascular and digestive health and cancer risk. The vast majority of the life-protecting, quality-of-life-enhancing micronutrients offered by Mother Nature are found in produce; especially raw, organic produce consumed as close to the source of harvest as possible. Smartly selected animal products should constitute a minority of your consumption, not just for your health, but for ethical and environmental reasons as well.
“All health begins in the gut,” said Hippocrates, a man who understood human health far better than most modern primary care physicians, and yet lived two-and-a-half millennia ago! The terms “probiotic” and “prebiotic” are inseparable, while also being inseparable from the term “produce-focused.” Why? The ‘good bacteria,’ aka ‘probiotics,’ that play innumerable long-underestimated roles in supporting human physical AND mental health, with more such benefits being understood and studied all the time, and which can be directly increased in the body through the consumption of fermented fare like kimchi, sauerkraut and kombucha, are more importantly indirectly supported through ‘prebiotics,’ the food upon which the probiotics feed and from which they multiply, with the food preferences of the probiotics being produce, especially raw produce, and especially still the vegetable matter offering large quantities of insoluble fiber. Supply the invaluable colony of good-health-imparting bacteria in your gut, the legion of microscopic health allies, with more troops (probiotics), yes, but, even more importantly, I’d argue, symbiotically pair that strategy with supporting the legion’s ability to multiply and flourish by feeding it what it wants, and most needs, to grow in the mutualistic partnership between that legion and its host: YOU. That means fruits and vegetables.
You’ll see in this “produce-focused” section another divergence from Cordain (who I still recommend that you read!), who emphasizes ‘lean animal protein’ as the most important factor in the healthiest possible Paleo approach. He asserts that as long as you’re getting enough produce, and there’s some good fat in your diet (to stave off ‘rabbit starvation’), that “there’s no such thing as too much protein.” A quick review of why I think this is incorrect, through many interconnected factors: (1) Our anatomy is much more in line with herbivores than carnivores, and eating like a carnivore will therefore incur unnatural effects. (2) Produce (especially raw and organic) imparts far more of the protective and vitality-boosting micronutrients than does animal food, and, thus, emphasizing animal foods necessarily displaces the produce that delivers those indispensable nutrients. When you emphasize the animal over the plant, you drastically reduce your micronutrient intake. (3) There are ethical, financial-and-carbon-cost and ‘contradictory studies’ arguments to be made here; briefly: there’s an entirely avoidable ethical cost to killing (having them killed, for most of us) and consuming more animal protein than your body actually needs and can healthfully process; monetarily, the quality animal products that you should be eating tend to be more expensive and less available than produce, especially in certain disadvantaged areas of the world; the environmental cost of animal foods is far higher than of produce, in terms of the amount of plant calories that go into the animal and the relative cost of that caloric conversion, and also in terms of the carbon cost and the environmental tolls of the waste and runoff etc., which are many times higher in animal ‘raising’ operations than with organic produce farms; finally, many studies suggest that processing and secretion of excess animal protein stresses our biological apparatuses in many ways, including the kidneys, intestines, colon and, if you’re eating feedlot animals, the cardiovascular system, with some studies showing a link between excess animal consumption and cancer risk (as in the “China Study”).
All of this to say: be selective about your animal consumption, and emphasize wild seafood because it offers you the best fat profile while also being the least taxing of the environment.
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Environmentally-Conscious, Exploratory and Experimental
Being aware of the environmental impact of your food choices is connected to the aforementioned factors, and is thus inseparable from the health impact of what you eat. Local and organic foods are far less carbon-emitting than the alternatives, often shipped across the world in polluting, high-carbon-cost crafts, with the shipping industry being one of the biggest culprits in environmental ruin and global warming. Per the last section, produce also produces far less runoff and waste/emissions than do animal raising operations. Of all available animal products, wild seafood has the lowest carbon cost while, again, also offering the healthiest fat profile. Ideally, you want the environment of the food you eat to reflect an awareness of its impact upon both the local and global environments, both of which tend to be reflected in how they affect your health as well.
And by ‘exploratory and experimental’ it’s meant that the PROPER framework needn’t be viewed as restrictive, and may include an immense variety of foods. In fact, the greater the variety, the greater the diversity of supplied nutrients, the greater the conferred health benefits. Per the previous letter in the acronym, the number of qualifying probiotic and prebiotic foods itself is staggering. There are literally thousands of plant foods provided by Mother Nature that fit within this framework, the majority conferring special medicinal benefits on top of the micronutrients that they offer. And the more exploring and experimenting you do, the less restricted you’ll feel, the more you’re likely to appreciate the fact that enhancing human health and your culinary skills aren’t mutually-exclusive aims, and the more likely you’ll be to keep working within a quality-of-life-boosting Paleo framework. So don’t shy away from a food just because it’s ‘exotic’ or ‘not what most people eat.’ Organ meats, for example, though often possessing a texture that many find disagreeable, contain a hidden treasure trove of uncommon nutrients that can help bolster health, as do sea plants (seaweed, kelp etc.), which are the actual source of the nutritional darling Omaga 3 fatty acids, forming the base of the oceanic food pyramid, seafood being rich in this vital nutrient because of aquatic plants.
As Cordain writes: “As you gradually wean yourself from salty, sugary, and starchy foods, your taste buds will become attuned to the subtle flavors and textures of wonderful real foods.” He’s touching on an important point here: we’re neurochemically corrupted by what the food industry conditions us to think of as food. For the ugly truth is that modern food corporations are no better than shady drug dealers hanging out on street corners looking for gullible, uneducated, undisciplined marks to turn into addicts, the difference being that their fare is on almost every street corner, is better concealed by food propaganda and social acceptability, and kills you more gradually and insidiously, hiding inside your semi-sickened state of ‘normality.’ In fact, much of what they unnaturally stuff into foods actually qualifies as a drug, defined by its manipulation of biochemistry, and, as with drug dealers, their fare corrupts the senses and hijacks the neurochemical reward pathways of the brain, turning modern man into an addict of unnaturally stimulating, gradually deleterious artificial foods. So, if you love your kids don’t show your love with pizza, or with McDonald’s per some of their f’d up commercials that I’ve seen trying to trick you into equating their toxic compounds with love (selling disease as love must be the epitome of evil!), but teach them the immense salubrious satisfaction bestowed upon the consumers of Mother Nature’s endlessly enriching fare!
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Real
Natural; whole; nutritionally-intact; the form of the food available to our ancestors.
Everything that you eat should be a real food. Processed foods are out, their nutrient densities grossly diminished, almost always with inflammatory flavor enhancers and preservatives added. Almost every form of packaged food will have something in it that violates Paleo principles. Soy, corn and wheat and nasty, unnatural preservatives are in almost everything made by the corporations that offer us their chronic poisons, tricking the gullible, uneducated majority into thinking that it’s ‘food.’ Ideally there won’t be an ingredient list, because it’ll be unpackaged produce, but if there is, you have to read it.
As with all things, being a so-called ‘cynic’ protects you (cynicism is mostly misunderstood); that is, knowing, not just believing, that anything that has to do with human behavior, especially for-profit capitalistic human behavior, is loyal to greed only, doesn’t give a damn about your best interests, and will do anything they/it can to make you think otherwise, with ‘unscrupulous’ and ‘it’s just business’ being the same thing, fitting within the oxymoron of ‘business ethics.’ If they can get away with it, they will. It’s that simple. With this in mind, and with ‘grocery shopping’ being the most undervalued human skill considering its impact upon the quality of human life, never forget that the outer packaging of any processed ‘food’ is simply sales manipulation. It’s food propaganda. All that matters are the ingredients, and how they were processed, or not.
And as a final note on my divergence from many Paleo advocates: they often claim that it’s ‘easy’ to eat Paleo in the modern world, even for those eating out a lot and/or perpetually ‘on the go.’ It’s not. The fact is that it’s near impossible to fully adhere to a Paleo protocol if you’re eating out or on the run with anything less that an iron-clad pre-prepared collection of Paleo meals at your disposal, and when not fully in control of your food supply in general, as the food industry, and especially the major corporations supplying processed, convenience and/or fast foods, have zero regard for the insights of Paleo and the quality of life value of those insights, and zero regard for your best interests, per the previous paragraph. It’s disturbing, quite frankly, how difficult it is to maintain Paleo or any of its offshoots, like Whole 30, in our ‘food is disease’ modernity, where we’re forced to remain forever vigilant of food corporations and even well-meaning friends and family testing our resolve, sneaking chronic poisons into most everything. Even if a meal sounds Paleo from reading the menu or hearing it described by your mom when she lays it in front of you, chances are it isn’t; chances are that there’s something in it that violates Paleo principles, most often in the oils used to cook it and/or the seasoning, dressing and sauces, where inflammatory fats, grains and soy love to lurk.
I’ve heard the ‘Paleo is easy’ motivational strategy in several books, pretending like it’s easy in order to induce people to follow it, but not only is this incorrect, it ends up backfiring, as people invariably struggle finding the strength to discipline themselves to the diet, and so end up berating themselves and giving up, because it’s supposed to be easy, so how can they do it if it’s so difficult even at the outset? So don’t believe it! The truth is it’s hard to stick with Paleo, requiring a constant battle within yourself and with the uneducated, exploitative, unscrupulous world at large! And you should give yourself credit for any movement in the right direction, and even more so if you have the strength to stick to it for even a week at first, much less for a ‘whole 30 days,’ or to successfully make it your lifestyle right out of the gate. But the point remains: it’s always hardest early on, but if you can acquire the knowledge and summon the discipline to eat like this for life, and not let slipups and ‘cheat days’ derail you completely, your life will be fuller as a result!
Lastly, within the context of ‘real food,’ I’m a stalwart advocate not only of ‘food is medicine,’ but of Mother Nature providing most of the real medicine, Big Pharma providing mostly concealers with insidious side effects turning you into a dependent. And while the list of natural medicines is endless, let me quickly advocate for Psilocybe cubensis. In controlled, regular micro-to-low-macro quantities of 0.5 to 1.5 grams per 2-4 days this resurgent natural medicine is a miracle worker in relieving anxiety and depression, at opening the third eye and enhancing spiritual connectivity with everyone and everything, at expanding one’s creative prowess and inclinations, and at dredging up and facilitating the therapeutic, cathartic processing and releasing of festering psychological wounds. I’m certain it’ll be a primary tool in the belt of future therapists.
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The PROPER Spartan
Finally, if you really want to be lean and mean you’ll exclude starches altogether, including normally Paleo-OK’d potatoes, sweet potatoes and yams, sticking with more fibrous vegetables, fruits (your main carbohydrate source) and leaner natural meats, while also doing away with additives in general, including all added fat and carbohydrate; i.e. anything not innate to the whole natural food. That is, eliminate all the unnecessary and often inflammatory oils and sugars and sugar substitutes and unnatural preservatives used in both cooking and saucing/dressing, cooking with water instead and using salt, vinegar and spices for flavoring, and natural flavorings such as coconut aminos, fish sauce and ‘umami mushroom powder,’ such that your diet hones your metabolism. Carbohydrate dependency also has an appetite-stimulating effect, which tends to snowball. In contrast, as it is with the wonderful world of adherent carbohydrate-controlled plant foods, the number of health-fortifying and natural-medicine-containing ‘herbs and spices’ is staggering, and if you condition yourself to creatively seek flavor there instead of relying upon tritely added fats and carbs, your health will blossom!
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On Food Preparation: The 4 Culinary S-Keys
(1) Spices and Sauces
Where most of the flavor lies. Make your own, as it’s creative fun and you can keep it healthy.
(2) Simplicity
Honor the ingredients, rather than muddling and overcomplicating things such that you conceal the natural characteristics of the food.
(3) Selectivity
Quality over quantity. Your food can only ever be as good as your simple ingredients allow.
(4) Slow and Low
Cook on lower heat for longer periods. Things just meld better and are more likely to reach their full form this way; as with relationships.
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A PROPER Template: Super Salads and Seasonality
As a means to adhere to the quality-of-life-and-longevity-boosting effects of the afore-outlined principles, I thought I’d end this paper by sharing the most consistent strategy that I personally employ in assuring success: The Super Salad Strategy. Essentially, I break down the food that I eat into three categories: (1) cooked meat and vegetables (2) raw vegetables (3) raw fruit. Most meals that I prepare end up incorporating the first two, often ‘finished’ by the third, along with whatever I’m drinking (commonly coffee, water, tea and/or kombucha), the third category consumed as ‘snacks’ and post-meal sweet ‘desserts.’ That is, I’ll cook some of the food, lets say my turkey, onion and sweet potato meal this morning, in minimal olive oil plus water and salt/spices, and I’ll place this atop the raw vegetables, the mixed spinach and kale plus diced cucumber and tomato, in this case, sometimes with vinegar added, before mixing it all together (for me often in an oversized bowl, or even a salad bowl). If I want something sweet to boost my energy slightly afterward I’ll have fruit, in this case a grapefruit and some red grapes, and/or some lower sugar kombucha (I like the Synergy brand).
For both the continuity of the strategy and the nutritional benefits I highly recommend mixing up all the specific foods, thinking of the produce in terms of the rainbow effect; that is, eating across the rainbow of colors conjured by Mother Nature, as the color of the fruit or vegetable is a clue as to its micronutrient composition. Repeating this pattern for most days I end up consuming around fifty percent raw food, including lots of ultra-nutritionally-dense greens and phytonutrient-rich fruits, always consumed along with whatever I’m cooking, which may only be the meat (leaning towards wild seafood, i.e. pescatarianism, for all the reasons mentioned earlier in this paper, especially the benefits of seaplant-based Omega 3’s and the untrustworthiness of conventional meat suppliers), thereby making my meals cleaner and unlikely to trigger gastrointestinal leukocytosis.
And don’t forget to take your medicine! For the nutritionally-informed there’s little to no difference between ‘food’ and ‘medicine,’ per the aforementioned Hippocratic adage, with the difference typically being about ritual and tradition more than anything – the fact that some medicines have made their way into the kitchen whilst others are considered restricted to teas, tinctures, capsules etc., not just because of taste, but because we’ve been conditioned as consumers to draw a line between food and ‘supplements.’ Without opening Pandora’s Box again, you’ll no doubt have realized that I believe that what the average conditioned consumer considers ‘medicine,’ pharmaceuticals, and what they consider ‘alternative medicine,’ the natural medicines that are the only things that should be considered medicinal, are misnomers representing a paradigm that needs to be reversed and set on its head, with natural foods and medicines considered ‘medicine’ and pharmaceuticals considered ‘alternative medicine,’ and even then only in acute cases where a drastic intervention is necessary.
As an example medicinal regimen, in addition to the ‘food is medicine’ approach that anyone nutritionally-informed takes, I currently ‘supplement’ my daily intake with these medicines as well, taken in various forms, sometimes in ACV-based ‘Fire Cider’ tinctures, sometimes in teas, and often in capsules, always experimenting with their combination, and with some taken regularly 2-3 times per day, some as ‘PRN’s,’ as needed to address symptoms of pain, anxiety, stress and occasional depression (all connected, of course):
Brahmi (Water hyssop/Bacopa Monnieri), Gotu Kola, Kava Kava, Ashwagandha, Lion’s Mane, Ginkgo Biloba, St. John’s Wort, Wild Lettuce and Golden Teachers (P. cubensis).
Lastly, one of the hidden insights of the atavistic Paleo approach to nutrition is that our hunter-gatherer forebears only consumed what was available to them, and most of the concentrated carbohydrate sources, including both starchy tubers and fruits, were only available during certain seasons. I think that this factor plays a pivotal role in the modern diet’s inducement of metabolic, neurological, autoimmune and carcinogenic (cancerous) disorders, all of which, while classified differently, are inseparable (the fact that separation is an illusion is a central philosophical tenant); that is, most modern human beings not only consume too many carbohydrates in general, but consume too many carbohydrates year-round.
All four of the major aforementioned classes of disorders respond well to low-carb, ketogenic and intermittent fasting techniques (all variations of the same carbohydrate-controlled consumption pattern), all of which are natural, reflecting both the seasonality and scarcity endemic to human history. Much can be said about intermittent fasting that I won’t get into here, except to say that when the body isn’t constantly engaged in the consumption, processing, distribution, storage and waste management that come with feeding, it can divert resources to other activities, and research shows that, as counterintuitive as this may seem, not taking in nutrients all the time makes the body stronger and better able to heal.
Amongst the four aforementioned interrelated disorders metabolic functionality issues are the most obvious effects of constant and over-consumption of carbs, as carbs stress the pancreas and lead to the insulin resistance core to metabolic syndrome leading to type 2 diabetes. But the other three are connected to the same issue, as cancer feeds off of blood sugar, and the chronic inflammation associated with constant carbohydrate intake triggers or exacerbates most neurological and autoimmune disorders, including everything from the mental health disorders to epilepsy to arthritis and dozens of others.
You can address these risks by lowering your carbohydrate intake in general, especially of what I call ‘condensed carbohydrate’ food sources, like starches and sugary drinks. But you can also extend the Paleo guidelines to include a consideration of what’s naturally available to you in your area during different times of year, which is as Paleo a factor as any other, thereby eating lots of locally-available fruit in the spring and summer, and maybe throwing in some sweet potatoes in the fall, but then drastically reduce your carbohydrate intake and ‘go keto’ for all or the majority of the fall and winter.
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Recommended Further Reading:
- The Paleo Diet (Cordain)
- Whole 30 (Hartwig)
- It Starts With Food (Hartwig)
- The Paleo Approach (Ballantyne)
- The Wahls Protocol (Wahls)
- Nom Nom Paleo (Tam and Fong)
- Wheat Belly (Davis)
- Eat For Life (Fuhrman)
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Free PDF copy of “The Proper Diet:”