Is the primal diet like SAD as far as Tons of rich food? page

[ancestral_stars]

I wasnt sure of how to title this post.

I hear a lot about how the SAD diet tricks your brain by providing certain things in super high amounts. Overstimulation of the brain with extremely high amounts of sugar/fat/salt (three things that were supposed to be hard to come by but vital in the day). In the primal/paleo diet we get the bulk of our calories from fat. I guess I am just wondering if we are doing the same thing - as far as way of thinking.

We are in a rather unique position of being able to obtain unlimited amounts of fat- and high quality at that. We can buy that extra virgin coconut oil and grass fed meat any time of year no matter where we live thanks to the internet.

Root vegtables are maligned as a nasty carb cheat. And fruit /dairy whatever is also a "naughty" thing. Thinly veiled as "well if you can handle it" but that is usually said with such distaste that one wonders...

I grew up in the country. Small acerage certainly but unusually dense in food. My neighbors down the street had cows.. but we had fruit trees, nut trees (hazelnut and walnut), sweet peas, plums.. cherries.. berries.. mushrooms.. Well the list goes on. We also had chickens and can imagine if it were back in the day we could hunt/fish too.

I guess what I am wondering is- is it truly primal to live on nothing but the best? Did we really catch an animal daily- maybe 3x a day. The amount of animal eaten on this diet is quite amazing. I am no vegetarian and never have been. Downright unnatural in my opinion but I digress. But my fantasies of being a "mountain woman" and living in a hollowed out tree (ok from childrens novels when I was a kid) did not include the ability to kill that much in the way of animals. Root vegtables, fruits, berries, nuts, and a FAIR amount of animal/fat seems to be more likely.

Are we falling into the SAD trap of being able to obtain super high calorie/quality foods at any time? Only self control stops us.. I cant imagine that is entirely primal???? I LOVE my uncured beef bacon, omega eggs, raw pastured dairy of course. But nothing feels more "natural" then trying that ugly obscure root from the farmers market that came from a local weed or the stinging nettle plant or the unusual small apple. I dunno. I guess I feel that the primal diet probably has the right idea (in fact my body screams that it does) but I dont think we were built on the ability to get excess especially quality excess.

[badly_dubbed]

which is why there are days i eat little to no meats.

marks Big ass salad - without the chicken/beef pork fish etc

IF'ing a day here and there will also mimic this to an extent

Grok and his follower may also have had "stores" of dried meats, whether or not they ate those when no kill was had is anyones guess.

[Misabi]

Sure, HG's may not always make a kill every time they hunt, but if you take down a beast the size of a large pig, deer, buffalo etc. you don't need to hunt 3 times a day.

On the other hand, the primal blueprint isn't a handbook of how to be a caveman or a caveman re-enactor for that matter.
It's about looking at how we evolved for cues of how we should eat/live, backed up by science. To be used, along with modern technology, to give us the best of both worlds and for life and health. Not just "if grok did/didn't do it, should we?", but does the science back up that we should eat this? What's the mechanism that shows x is harmful or beneficial.

We can see this for gluten being bad, we can see this for sat fat not being bad. Does this mean that we should eat all the fat that we can get our hands on? Probably not. Does it mean that we should eat in a pattern to mimic what we 'think' an HG from 10,000+ years followed?.. Are you going to reenact a famine caused by drought and make your family walk for hundreds of miles to follow the migrating game? Probably not.

Personally, I'll eat when I'm hungry ( most of the time), I'll eat some animal at least one a day, most likely at each meal and I'll carry on living in the comfort of my house, with my mod cons. Though I watch less tv than I used to and drive less too.

[Ayla2010]

Sure, HG's may not always make a kill every time they hunt, but if you take down a beast the size of a large pig, deer, buffalo etc. you don't need to hunt 3 times a day.

On the other hand, the primal blueprint isn't a handbook of how to be a caveman or a caveman re-enactor for that matter.
It's about looking at how we evolved for cues of how we should eat/live, backed up by science. To be used, along with modern technology, to give us the best of both worlds and for life and health. Not just "if grok did/didn't do it, should we?", but does the science back up that we should eat this? What's the mechanism that shows x is harmful or beneficial.

We can see this for gluten being bad, we can see this for sat fat not being bad. Does this mean that we should eat all the fat that we can get our hands on? Probably not. Does it mean that we should eat in a pattern to mimic what we 'think' an HG from 10,000+ years followed?.. Are you going to reenact a famine caused by drought and make your family walk for hundreds of miles to follow the migrating game? Probably not.

Personally, I'll eat when I'm hungry ( most of the time), I'll eat some animal at least one a day, most likely at each meal and I'll carry on living in the comfort of my house, with my mod cons. Though I watch less tv than I used to and drive less too.

I like this.

[abstractpersona]

I also grew up in the country.
Check out the Too Long; Didn't Read at the bottom of this post.

Fruit/nuts: we had apples, pears, lemons, plums, bananas, blackberries, black grapes, chestnuts, tangerines, oranges, mandarins.
Vegetables: we had potatoes, carrots, onions/garlic, spices, all sorts of dark leafy vegetables, cabbages. Can't remember what else, but atleast 95% of our produce came from the backyard or we would ask our neighbors.
We also had lettuce but it was fed to the rabbits. When we moved to USA, my mom even asked one of us kids to take a cell phone picture of lettuce being sold in stores and restaurants, to send to my sister in Portugal. My sister thought we were teasing her.

Meat: We killed 2 pigs per year and we also had chickens. My dad bought one cow per year. Sometimes we raised a couple goats and rabbits, ducks, but rarely. My dad sometimes hunted birds and rabbits.
We lived close to the ocean so we frequently had seafood: sardines, salmon, LOTS of codfish, crab, octopus/squid, shrimp and more than I can remember now.

Okay, let's talk about fruit. Our fruit was all hanging from out trees, not in the fridge, so my mom couldn't smack my hand for "eating too much" like parents do today.
But, even though any of us could simply reach for the fruit, we rarely ate it. It really depends on time of the year, but we didn't really eat much of it. The plum tree was right out of the kitchen door and I remember eating no more than 5 per summer. Lemons were often used for cooking. Chestnuts didn't last long, at all. I think we ate them all in one or two sittings. We had some black grapes around October, but most of them were turned to wine and sold over the year. We had some bananas but pretty much just sold them to other families. We didn't eat them all ourselves. Blackberries didn't last long either, that always made me mad, I love blackberries! I remember maybe eating 2-3 pears per Summer, a little more apples. We did, however, eat plenty of citrus in the winter.

Non primal things:
If we had corn, we'd shuck it and keep it for the chickens, and my mom might make some fresh corn-bread.
We did eat rice sometimes, but certainly not as much as people do nowadays.
We did have a few bean dishes, but rarely ate it. However, there was always lots of meat on the bean dishes. Our bean dishes have more toucinho (2 inch(?) slabs of bacon) than beans in it.
If for some reason we had soup for dinner (which also had meat in it, usually pork sausage, chorizo), we would always have another meat dish after soup. Never soup alone.

As a five year old little girl, I ate more meat and fat per meal than the average American adult per DAY.
I was never sick. I got chicken pox at the same time as my brother and sister did, but most years I didn't even get so much as a cold. Even nowadays I don't get sick (except early this year when I reacted to medication).
I joke that I could walk into a plagued town, hug and console everyone, and I would not get sick. It's that good.

My morning snacks and afternoon snacks while I was a child:
Preserved meats and full fat cheese, meal leftovers, tuna, tea, coffee, full fat milk, sometimes bread with the cheese and meat.

I track my food on PaleoTrack, and even though I eat so much fat and meat, I'm rarely past 800 calories per day. I'm totally stuffed on two meals per day, one of them generally is eggs (and soon I will start eating sardines for breakfast). Honestly I don't think I'd be eradicating species of the face of the earth anytime soon.

Do you think a lion hunts 3 times a day? They have huge lion prides, and they can kill ONE huge beast and share it among all of them. The strongest lions get the best parts of the animal, the rest have to make do.
If each lion (about 20 in a pride, I think? It's been a while) had to kill their own animal, yes, then I would see what you're concerned about.

Humans are also generally in big groups, so instead of hunting 3 small animals for each person, I'm sure they could also hunt one big animal, and preserve/dry/whatever the leftover meat.
Even so, I think their first choice is fish, generally. Which can also be preserved if needed.

I really recommend you read this when you've got free time.


* * * TL;DR * * *
You can decide to eat only "so-so" because in past times, we might have not access to top quality food all the time. Good, you do that. More for me.
Knowing what I know, I would not subject myself or my children to it. I joke with my boyfriend that if we find ourselves pregnant but on limited financial means, he'd better eat PB&J sandwiches [*] while I (pregnant) eat good food! That's just how it is. I don't want to have unhealthy children.

Survival of the fittest, bud!


[*] Just kidding, I'd cook him something better than that... I'm not that cruel... :P