Lesson 1: Why Eat A Low-Carb Diet
Low-Carb Foods
You are probably familiar with the abundance of low-carb products that have entered stores and restaurants. I want you to forget about those products. I want you to think instead about the foods that were available our ancestors. They caught or picked everything that they ate. They did not open boxes or bags, and their food did not last, unspoiled, for years. (What do these immortal foods do in our bodies? We’ll find out later.)
The foods we were designed to eat are whole and natural. They are unprocessed and unpreserved. The plan is simple.
This was the diet of our pre-agricultural ancestors, and it provides all we need nutritionally. It is, in fact, far more nutritious than our modern Western diet which includes more food groups.
"All major dietary components are covered–(i.e. vitamins, fats, protein, fats, carbohydrates, antioxidants and phytosterols etc.) This is for the simple reason that [the paleolithic diet] is the only diet that is coded for in our genes–it contains only those foods that were 'on the table' during our long evolution, and discards those which were not.”–Dr. Ben Balzer, family physician.
There is debate over whether or not our pre-agricultural ancestors cooked their foods, when they began cooking (because we know that they did, obviously), and whether raw or cooked is better for us. To summarize my recommendations, I believe that eating a partially raw diet is important for optimum health. Unless you are knowledgeable about raw meat food safety, meats should be cooked. If you choose to eat legumes and tubers, which are not recommended, they must be cooked to reduce toxicity. It is interesting to note that most plant foods can be eaten in greater quantity when cooked than when raw because they are more easily digested when cooked. Cooking is a form of processing, and like all processing, it is a way of predigesting our foods before we eat them. For more information on the effects of cooking various foods, visit http://www.beyondveg.com/tu-j-l/raw-cook...
There are good reasons to not eat anything other than lean meats, fruits, and vegetables. Agricultural foods such as grains and dairy products are implicated in the development of a number of diseases referred to as Syndrome X (Type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, high cholesterol, and others.) We will talk about these diseases, which were virtually unheard of before agricultural times, later in the course.
Most agricultural foods do not occur naturally, cannot be eaten raw, and are heavily processed. Another characteristic of these foods is that, when overeaten, our bodies don’t reliably signal fullness as they would with natural foods. You may have noticed that there’s often room for dessert, but not for another helping of steamed vegetables.
