Low-Carb Living

Lesson 8: Feeding the World

Global Food Supply

Westerners can convert to a paleolithic diet more easily than people in poorer countries because we have a wide variety of lean meats, fruits, and vegetables from all over the world available at our local grocery stores.

I mentioned eating raw vegetables instead of cooked and choosing to include limited amounts of agricultural foods into our diets as ways of stretching the food supply. Gardening and foraging are also ways to create food outside of the global food supply. Almost anyone can plant and grow a small vegetable garden somewhere in their yard, and a surprising number of edible plants can be found around most neighborhoods. Wild plants are usually more nutritious than domesticated ones, and the available varieties of wild plants are likely to be more diverse than what you can find at the supermarket.

We can also help the global food supply by eating in-season foods that are produced locally. This is healthier for us, and it promotes the production of foods for local consumption rather than for export.

In addition to eating unprocessed foods (instead of larger quantities of processed, predigested, ones) to control our appetites, we can follow our cravings to more accurately satisfy what our bodies need. When you choose natural foods such as fruits, vegetables, nuts, and meats to satisfy your cravings for sweet, salty, or fat, your needs will be adequately satisfied so you won’t overeat.

Improving the nutrition of the foods we produce will allow us to meet our nutritional needs with less food. We can choose healthier pasture-fed meat over grain-fed. Pasture-fed cattle produce lower-fat, more nutritious meat for us than grain-fed cattle. Pasture-fed cattle also produce meat higher in conjugated linoleic acid that may prevent cancer, and higher in the cancer- and heart disease-fighting antioxidants: Vitamin E and selenium.

Since many diets around the world are deficient in good omega-3 fats, another practice we can implement is the use of omega-3-rich vegetable oils such as flaxseed and canola instead of less healthful ones.

This wraps up the course. The next section contains Internet resources for further study.

To your health!

  1  2  3  4  5