Why Ask Why? Ask Why Twice!

In my recent posts, I stressed that we should all choose foods for nutritional value first, flavor second. We have to do this because our sense of taste, which guided our caveman ancestors so well, is not suited to life in a calorie and fat rich environment like ours. Simply put, in our world of abundant calories and processed foods, you cannot trust your own sense of taste to help you eat right.

Hence my third rule, the one about choosing foods for nutrition first. This is not always as easy to do as it is to say. To help you do this, become very familiar with the word 'why'. To make sure that you are engaging your brain rather than your instincts, why is your best friend. In fact, it is so good to have around, that I am asking you to keep two "whys" nearby.

Whenever you are going to eat something is the time to pull out why. First ask yourself "why am I eating?" If the answer is anything other than "I am hungry," such as "I am bored," "I am upset," etc... then DROP THE FOOD! You are not eating to fuel your body, but for one of the dozens of other reasons we eat these days. If the answer is "I am hungry," then you passed why #1, and it is time to move on to the next one.

The next question to ask is "why am I eating this?" The type of food you choose to put in your body is the most important decision you can make. That food is what composes your body tissues, and gives your body and brain the energy to function. It should be the highest quality food available! If you cannot honestly answer question #2 "because this is high quality fuel for my body," you should choose something else to eat.

Like all of you, I am far from perfect. There are many times I answer question 2 "because it tastes good and I want to eat it." That is OK, as long as it is the minority, rather than the majority. I shoot for 90% good fuel with the occasional treat or indulgence. Whether you choose to eat the tasty treat or not, merely asking the question makes you mindful of the act, and will keep you from eating without reason. Asking will also keep excess pounds off your body, and keep you feeling great.

So remember: Why ask why? Ask why twice!

Fasting

Living like a caveman brings up the question of fasting. There are some "caveman inspired" diets out there that advocate periods of intense consumption, followed by those of complete fasting, simulating what they think a caveman might have eaten like.

While it is true that cavemen may have had some days where they were not able to get food, I do not recommend fasting as part of a modern diet. This is for several reasons:

1. Fasting slows your metabolism- When you don't eat, your body thinks it is starving. Remember, we are designed to live in a low calorie environment. The body quickly goes into metabolic shutdown, then fails to burn off the food that you do eat.

2. Fasting leads to overconsumption- Even if cavemen did not get foods on a given day, they had the same whole food, low calorie choices that were available to them the day before. They could not binge on twinkies when they were allowed to eat. Nor could they "cheat" on their fast, and eat convenience foods.

3. Fasting decreases performance- fasting can lead to fatigue, decreased stamina, dehydration, and decreased mental and athletic performance. Not exactly what you want if you have to do a job, or are trying to train your body to be fit and lose weight.

In addition, I don't know this for sure, but I suspect that cavemen fasted far less frequently than these diets suggest. I'll bet they had lower and higher calorie days, but most days they probably at least got some calories, enough to keep their metabolism going. Let's also remember that many cavemen probably starved to death due to lack of food. This is probably not the outcome you are looking for.

I do recommend a meat fast, however. It is very likely that cavemen did not get meat every day. Thus, our systems are probably not meant to get meat every single day. If you want to cut something out of the diet, start with animal products.

A final note: I know that many people around the globe fast due to religious beliefs. If you are doing it for those reasons, and understand the potential consequences, then fine. I just don't think it is a good weight loss strategy.

Cavemen Didn't Eat Three Meals

Most people in the modern era follow the same eating pattern. Wake up. Eat Breakfast. Go to work. Eat lunch during break time. Work more, then go home. Eat dinner. Go to sleep. This pattern is repeated over and over. The compartmentalizing of eating into meals to be eaten at certain times is an invention of society. It is convenient for structuring work days and social events, but it is not the best for maintaining health.

When you eat a big meal, particularly one of our modern fat and processed sugar laden ones, your blood sugar spikes, then plummets. Within two to three hours, you begin to feel hungry, fatigued, irritable, and shaky. Your body is telling you that you need to eat again. Since the next meal time has not arrived, you reach for a snack. Most of the time, what is available is some form of processed crap. You scarf this down, leading to another sugar spike and crash. This is good for the people who make the processed crap, but not for your waistline.

Cavemen ate very differently. They wouldn't wait for a meal time to eat. They would eat whenever they could. If they came upon a food source, and they were hungry, they ate it. Since they had no way to store the food, and could only keep as much as they could carry, and still outrun or evade a predator who wanted to eat them, cavemen would eat very frequently. I suggest eating six or seven small amounts of food daily, never getting completely stuffed, and never getting too hungry.

I emulate the cavemen in this respect. I eat small amounts of food at frequent intervals during the day. In our modern world, this requires some planning. I carry a cooler with me to work, filled with multiple fruits, vegetables, and other whole food snacks. Whenever I begin to feel hungry, I pull out one of my snacks, and eat it.

This strategy has several advantages. First, you avoid the spike and crash cycle of conventional eating. Second, since you are planning to eat frequently, you have healthy snacks handy, rather than reaching for twinkies or cookies. Finally, you never get really hungry, so you are never tempted to overeat. Eat frequently like a caveman and you will avoid overeating, the afternoon crash, and wanting to club your co-workers on the head due to hunger induced irritability!

If taste doesn't work, what should we do?

Last time I mentioned that our caveman ancestors were driven by their taste instincts to foods which were best for them. In their world of scarce food, that meant calorie dense nutrition sources with sugar and fats. These foods packed the most bang for the buck, so it made sense to eat as much of them as you could when you found them, as you could never be sure when your next meal would arrive.

In our modern world, food is everywhere. In the space of a century or two, we went from not having enough food to having far too much. Sadly, there are parts of the world where people are still starving, but on the whole, we in America have too many calories. As such, if you follow your taste like your ancestors did, and eat as much of those sugary and fatty foods as you can, you will end up looking like I did. Obesity is partially the result of our primitive taste not being well suited for easy convenient food.

Thankfully, we have an advantage that our caveman ancestors didn't... our intellect. Once you are aware that your tastes will steer you in the wrong direction, you can engage your brain to put you back on the right course. To do this, you have to imagine yourself in the place of a caveman, and eat like they ate.

Cavemen would have eaten a diet very heavy in vegetables, roots, and grains, as these are the most abundant food sources. Fruits would have been next in quantity, as they are available only seasonally. Meats and animal products would have been the smallest component of their diet, as animals are pretty hard to catch. Cavemen also did not process their food, but ate it as it grew in nature, with some cooking in many instances.


In order to eat like your body needs, follow the caveman nutrition rules:

1. Eat Foods in Their Natural State
2. Eat a wide variety of fruits and vegetables, and very little if any meat, eggs or dairy
3. Choose foods for nutrition, not flavor

Now you know how to follow rule number 3!

Why Taste Doesn't Work

Why is it that we have to choose foods for nutrition first, flavor second

In caveman nutrition, I mentioned that cavemen chose food based upon taste. This worked well for them. Our sense of taste was designed to help us thrive in an environment with a scarcity of calories. In such an environment, calorie dense foods were the ultimate prize. As such, we are wired to view foods with lots of calories in the form of sugars and fats, as tasting good. Very sensible, in a world with few calories to find, where starving to death is a real possibility. When a caveman found such a food, he would eat as much of it as possible, because he never knew when he would find it again.

Fast forward 10,000 years or so. We live in a world with too many calories, which are far too easy to obtain. As if that weren't enough, we also have the ability to arrange these calories into unnatural forms, combining the fats and sugars and removing those meaningless vitamins, minerals, and fiber.

What does this mean to us? It means that in order to emulate a caveman's nutrition, you must use your evolved brain. Where a caveman could follow his instincts to the types of food he should eat, you must think about what you are eating every time, and choose the foods for their nutritional value, NOT their flavor.

There is nothing wrong with food tasting good, but that must not be the primary objective, if you wish to eat healthily.

More on just how to choose the proper foods in the next entry.

Where do you get your protein?

That is the first thing I am usually asked when I tell someone I don't eat meat. We have an absolute obsession with protein in America. We debate endlessly about what is the right amount of protein to take in. Protein, named from the Greek prōteios, meaning "of the first quality" has long believed to be the most important nutrient.

Recently, due to the advent of low carbohydrate diets, protein intake has been scrutinized. People somehow feel that they are not getting enough protein, and need to get more. We buy protein shakes, amino acid pills, and eat large quantities of meat to increase our protein intake.

While it is true that low protein intake can cause a form of malnutrition called kwashiorkor, taking in too much protein has some negative consequences as well. The high protein load is hard on the kidneys, and can lead to kidney failure. Also, the acid load (proteins are made up of things called amino acids) forces the body to buffer itself by freeing up calcium from bones, weakening them.

In America, recommendations vary widely on the amount of protein that should be in the diet. The World Health Organization is clear on the subject, however. Protein should be between 5-15% of daily calories. I think this is probably close to the right answer. A good way to try and identify the nutrient needs of a mammal is to look at its milk. The initial studies done on human protein requirements were done on rats. Rat milk is about 50% protein. Human milk is only 5% protein. If the food that we consume during infancy, when we are growing the most is only 5% protein, why should we need any more protein than that as adults? We don't.

Eat a diet with a wide variety of fruits, vegetables, grains, beans, and nuts, and you will get all of the protein that you need.

Vegetarian Supplementation

I'll just say it up front. I am not a big fan of vitamins. I think they are a waste of money, and nutrients outside of whole foods have not been shown to have any real benefits.

That being said, if you are going to eat little or no meat, there are a couple of nutrients you may need to supplement, because of our modern way of processing food.

Vitamin B12: Vitamin B12, or cobalmin, is a vitamin used in the manufacture of hemoglobin, which carries Oxygen in the blood. Animal products are the only source of B12 easily available today. Cavemen used to get B12 from the bacteria in the dirt on the food they ate, but nowadays we clean and sterilize our food because of the nastier stuff that we have put into the ground, so this is no longer a good source. For a vegetarian source of B12 these days, there are supplements available for purchase, or you can add nutritional yeast to strongly flavored foods that you cook (because it tastes kind of bad). If you don't get enough B12, you will get pernicious anemia. Your body can store this for a wicked long time. 1000 micrograms about once a week is enough.

Vitamin D: This one is true whether or not you eat meat. If you live anywhere north of southern Florida, in the winter the sun is not strong enough to give you all the vitamin D you need. Vitamin D is in most milk like products, such as soy milk, but only enough to prevent you from getting rickets. If you want to have a good dose, 2000 International Units (IU) daily is probably enough.

Iron: This one is not a must, as iron is plentiful in many green leafy vegetables, such as spinach and kale, but many vegetarians do not get quite enough, especially if they eat mostly processed foods. If you follow my Devolve diet, you don't need to worry about this, but taking a supplement once or twice daily won't hurt.

That is pretty much it. No multivitamins, please! You get most of these nutrients in abundance if you eat a whole food vegetable based diet, and are just wasting your money producing vitamin rich urine.

For more on nutrition, check out my previous posts, or www.devolvehealth.com

One of my friends and colleagues who is an obstetrician emailed me this comment:
just read your view on vitamins and I loved it. I constantly struggle with the pre-natal vitamin disscusion. for me it mostly goes like this: "While I would never tell you not to take your vitamin, it is merely a supplement and not a replacement to a healthy diet. Our bodies were designed to absorb our nutrients from food and not a pill. So eat a variety of fresh foods and you won't need to worry if you forget to take your vitamin." I'm not sure how ACOG would feel about this, but I do honestly believe it. We focus so much time on the type, brand etc of the vitamin and NO time to what really matters-- fresh, from the earth, unprocessed food!! love to read your posts. 

Caveman Nutrition 103

Yesterday, we talked about what cavemen probably ate. To review, they likely ate a wide variety of fruits, vegetables and nuts, which were readily available. The likely ate little meat, as that was harder to come by. Finally, they ate what was nutritionally valuable. They were lucky enough to be able to trust their sense of taste in this.

How then to translate this into a diet in the modern era? Here are the three simple rules I try to eat by as much as possible.

1. Eat foods like they grow in nature
2. Eat a wide variety of fruits and vegetables, and very little if any meat, eggs, or dairy
3. Choose foods for nutrition first, flavor second

I am far from perfect in applying these rules, but I try to abide by them most of the time. They fall in line with what cavemen would have eaten. They would not have prepared their food. They would have eaten what they had access to, and they would have chosen foods for their nutrition, which was synonymous with flavor in their era.

If you want to be healthy, have energy, and lose weight, apply these rules to your life. You don't have to count calories, carbs, or anything else. You can eat when you are hungry. You don't have to feel deprived. Just stick to the big three rules and the rest will take care of itself.

Caveman Nutrition 102

So it is obvious that cavemen did not eat what we eat. What should we be eating then? Well, let's look to the caveman again. Last time I said that cavemen ate mostly fruits, vegetables, and nuts. They probably augmented that with whatever meat they could catch. Basically, they ate whatever they could find.

It is highly likely they also ate variety. We did not start eating the same things daily until we began to grow our own food. This became even more common once industrial farming began. Now we grow only a few types of fruits and vegetables out of the thousands that exist.

They also chose foods for nutritional value. They did this using their sense of taste. In a caveman's world, food that tastes good is also good for you. It has a high number of calories, and lots of high quality nutrients for building body tissues. High calorie foods are very important when you live in a world where calories are hard to come by. When a caveman found those foods, he ate as much of them as he could, since he did not know when he would find them again.

In one sentence, a caveman ate a wide variety of fruits and vegetables, and chose them for nutritional value. We'll discuss how to turn this into a functional diet in the next section.

Caveman Nutrition 101

When you think of cavemen and what they eat, what comes to mind? I always thought of a whole bunch of raw meat, and that's about it. Perhaps this is an artifact of our meat obsessed culture. I pictured some muscle bound man hunting mastodon and other giant beasts.
If you really think about it, however, this is implausible. Our earliest ancestors were nearly identical to us physically, but lacked weapons or other ways to kill. Given this, it is not likely they were chasing down mastodon, who are stronger and faster than we are. It seems that my picture of a big pile of raw meat is simply wrong.
It is far more likely that primitive man existed on a diet of mostly vegetables, with some fruit and nuts, and very little meat. Why? Because vegetables are available year round. The leafy greens grow most of the year, even in cold climates, and when they are not around, root vegetables (potatoes, turnips, and carrots) are. Fruits and nuts are only available part of the year, because they are seeds. Seeds only come out during times of plant reproduction (spring, summer, and fall), and are only ripe during part of those times. Finally, animals are REALLY hard to catch. If you don't believe me, go try and chase down a healthy rabbit the next time you see one, and see how far you get.
Why does this matter? Simple. Our bodies are essentially the same as our primitive ancestors. Thus, we are designed to eat what they ate. We live in a society where fruits, vegetables, and large quantities of meat are easily available for purchase. In our modern world, looking at a caveman can help us choose what to eat.
We consider ourselves evolved, and in many ways we are. Our approach to food is not one of them. We are killing ourselves with what we eat, because we have strayed from what we were supposed to be eating. The Standard American Diet is filled with meat, salt, and processed sugar, and very light on vegetables, fruits, and nuts. Looking at the previous paragraphs, it is obvious that we are not supposed to eat that crap. If this is what we call "evolved," then we need to devolve back to our primal roots and eat more like Thag, our figurative caveman ancestor.

More on what we SHOULD be eating in Caveman Nutrition 102