The food pyramid has been the foundation for nutritional advice from health professionals to the average Joe, but is it really he foundation for a healthy diet? The first food pyramid came out in 1992, with the basic recommendation of consuming a high carbohydrate low fat diet. Soon after the pyramid was released, serious research began showing that the food pyramid was actually misleading nutritional advice to the world.
In truth, the 1992 food pyramid over simplified the needs of the human body. Nutritionists knew that essential fatty acids, including omega3’s (commonly found in fish) where necessary for good health, yet it still appeared at the top of the food pyramid with the recommendation that less of essential fats is better for you.
The reason behind this recommendation was the fear of high cholesterol, which is associated with a high risk of coronary heart disease. As a basic recommendation to prevent people developing high cholesterol levels, the advice was to lower their saturated fat intake, found in oils and within the paleo recipe favourite red meat; which is the human bodies favorite source of protein, so it also appeared higher up in the food pyramid.
Early on in 1990, research began indicating that fat is indeed important for good health, so in 2005 a new food pyramid was put together. The main difference within the food pyramid was the promotion of a daily exercise program, a slight decline in the recommendation of grains and the higher importance placed on including healthy fats into the diet. Additionally, an internet website was designed to provide a food pyramid recommendation for your individual age, gender and activity levels. Although this provided improvements upon the previous 1992 food pyramid, it still gave a high emphasis on the recommendation of grains and dairy; these two commonly consumed foods are extremely detrimental towards our health.
The paleo diet is basic; eat what mother nature made available to the hunter gatherer. To simplify this further, eat meat (beef, game, fowl, etc), seafood, eggs, fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds to create your healthy diet recipes. Research has shown that our ancestors consumed an energy source in a ratio of 65% animal and 35% plants, including berries, fruits and plant roots and leaves.
These foods are what our bodies have been designed to eat and digest for over fifty thousand years, they are food sources which are available to us without needing to cook or process them. Animal meat, fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds have been our main food source since day one, even before we knew how to create a fire. These are the foods our body strives for, the human bodies where meant to live healthy on a diet full of artificial sugars and chemicals, then mother nature would have provided it to us in our food sources, mother nature didn’t decide to wait hundreds of thousands of years for our technology to be advanced enough to alter food sources, for them to suddenly become healthy.
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