What I eat and don't -- in the light of what I should be eating(or should I?).

Ah food!

Luv the stuff!

I love growing it, shopping for it, cooking it, sharing it...and digesting the victuals thereafter.

Every day is an exciting option of combinations of taste and texture with any number of  dishes to explore: so few days on earth/so many recipes.

As we have noted here in the past I have had to tweak my diet for a few very good reasons (compared to playing  faddish food ideology). As the drill unfolded  I shifted from Low Glycemic foods to Low Carbohydrate eating...and now I don't eat grains at all, no potatoes except sweet potatoes once per week, definitely no legumes, no sugar and little dairy except yogurt within a sort of Mediterranean regimen. It's a sort of "Meat, vegetable and tubers " diet.

En route I lost 10 kgm and rolled way back my blood glucose levels to almost diabetic free parameters. I'm now exploring various exercise approaches to see if I can pull these figures down even further.

My blood pressure has fallen but I still have more work to do in that regard.

While I feel I have exhausted my dietary options I've been reading around the topic of the Paleo Diet. Thats' not all I've studied as I have notched up a lot of nutrition science literature -- but 'paleo' is my latest focus.

I nonethless abhore the Paleo scene as it it panders to Narcissim and fuels itself on relentless fundamentalist hype. It can be  quintessential Yuppiedom.

The paleolithic diet (abbreviated paleo diet or paleodiet), also popularly referred to as the caveman diet, Stone Age diet and hunter-gatherer diet, is a modern nutritional plan based on the presumed ancient diet of wild plants and animals that various hominid species habitually consumed during the Paleolithic era—a period of about 2.5 million years duration that ended around 10,000 years ago with the development of agriculture. (ref)

But if you are diabetic you have to consider the paleo promise because it rules that dense carbohydrates , like all the grains and the legumes, can be problematical. (They are.)

So in my researches I came upon this interview with Mat Lalonde which makes so much good sense about Paleo or whatever...

So rather than being held hostage to schemata Lalonde recommends that a diet of meat, vegetables, and tubers is a good baseline diet and from there, people should tweak.

Simple. Right?

Watch the whole video...well worth your time.

Similarly, in regard to Paleo's eulogies toward a seemingly ever so healthy bush tucker past, Jenny Ruhl reminds us  that Saying Something Over And Over Doesn't Make It True.

That said, I think the Paleos do try to pull a package together that often relies on the latest science -- and thats' not just about what you put in your mouth. A major debate rages  primarily because the dietary guidelines we have been prevailed upon to follow these last 40 -50 years have been an unmitigated disaster.

That's the troof: just consider how fat we are; how much we suffer from diabetes and blood pressure...

Something is terribly wrong with what we eat inasmuch as so many of these health problems are dietary in origin.Why we eat what  we do has a lot to do with corporate interests -- with capitalism. We are consuming an extreme form of an habituation that set in some time back but which has been fostered and manipulated to create a sort of  chronic addiction: to sugars and dense carbohydrates, to refined vegetable oils and  to fast food. 

Even when we think we are eating healthy -- and looking after our best interests and those for whom we prepare food -- maybe we aint.

Take, for example, this brutal critique by Denise Minger:

This is one of those “gotta bust me some myths no matter where they come from” blog posts. And by that, I mean I’m about to challenge a story that’s been so well-circulated among paleo, low carb, and real-food communities that most of us have filed it away in a little brain-folder called “Things We Never Have to Question Because They’re So Ridiculously True.”
I’m talking about the late, great Ancel Keys, and his equally late (but maybe not as great) role in the history of heart disease research.

So I say: why not explore options at the radical edge of the nutrition debate? (And make up your own mind.)

Just don't starve or poison yourself or fall victim to  crackery and faddishness...