I couldn't find a similar collage that Bexy posted a couple of years ago, so I made a new one:
I'm nearly 60. For the last 40+ years I've been interested in "what's a proper diet", as the words of Hippocrates struck a chord with me. 2,500 years ago (after observing what people ate, and what problems they had) he said something along the lines of "
Let your medicine be your food, and let your food be your medicine." A proper diet avoids a whole host of medical problems.
At around 35 years old I had early-onset arthritis, just like my mom. I tried cutting back on red meat and other things that might cause inflammation, but nothing worked. 10 years ago I started taking a tablespoon of flax oil (concentrated alpha-linolenic acid + DHA) and a tablespoon of cottage cheese (makes the oil water-soluble) at the suggestion of a friend to reduce my risk of cancer. 3 weeks later, my arthritis utterly disappeared. Similar results have happened with several other people I know since then.
6 years ago I was diagnosed 'hypothyroid'. Thyroid hormone is the speed control, the throttle on your metabolism. If it's too low, you get lethargic and fat, and your heart rate can run dangerously slow. If it's too high, you lose weight and your heart races. You can die from either extreme. My levels weren't ridiculously low, so I ignored medical advice and did nothing ( I do that a lot.
) I had none of the symptoms of hypothyroidism, so my body was OK with the low thyroid levels.
Today, as I'm trying to heal from surgery for a broken wrist, the healing isn't progressing as it should. Flesh wounds (including the surgical site) weren't healing immediately after the surgery, so I went back to my old diet without the doctor's additions. I'm an organic vegetarian, but I also eat grains since everyone says it's an essential food group. Bingo! The bone and incision started to heal. Within a month the incision is fully healed, but sadly the bone growth has stalled again.
The natural state of the body is to heal from injury. If it didn't, we'd never survive childhood. Something was wrong, so I started researching EVERYTHING in my diet and current 'conditions'. Researching the hypothyroidism, I got a link to Celiac's Disease (an intolerance to one of the proteins in wheat, oats and barley). People with Celiac's are 4 times more likely to get autoimmune thyroid disease than others, so that's a clue. OK, maybe accepted wisdom on the 4 basic food groups is just flat fucking WRONG.
We're animals. For the last 2.5 million years of our evolution, our body has slowly adapted to the foods we eat so that we can survive and thrive. We've changed from carnivores to omnivores, and have enzymes and gut bacteria to break down a wide range of meats, fruits, vegetables and nuts. 10,000 years ago (at the end of the last Ice Age) we transitioned from hunter-gatherers to farmers, making the daily process of feeding ourselves easier. We grouped together and produced culture. That's a Good Thing. We added various grains, legumes and milk (and milk products like cheese) to our diets, as they were simple and easy to farm in quantity. That's where the problem began.
Fast-forward 10,000 years. Before World War II, all food was 'organic'. No 'mystery meat', no 'perservatives' (biological poisons), no chemical laboratories producing strange concoctions and calling them 'food'. In the '50s, the incidence of cancer started to rise, finally leveling off in the '80s. That's a giant warning sign that we're doing something fundamentally wrong. Medical science starts looking for cures for the cancers that are nearly epidemic (compared to the Old Days), instead of looking at what CAUSES the cancers.
In the '70s and '80s, medical science also noticed some strange things. They'd been noted before in a few people, but they weren't really recognized as applying to ALL people. Some people were intolerant of milk. Some seemed to get sick or die from eating wheat. The (artificial) coconut oil and palm-kernel oils that they'd recommended to get people away from butter was worse than butter was, so they invented trans-fats. The food industry also increased both the types and amount of sugar that they were putting in pre-packaged food. People across the board started gaining weight... bad weight, pure body fat, not muscle mass. Fast-forward to the 2000s and suddenly trans-fats are amazingly bad, and butter isn't as much evil as earlier thought. People across-the-board are 25 pounds FATTER than they were in the '70s. HUGE damned warning sign that our diets suck rocks!
My recent research shows that SOME people with autoimmune thyroid disease halt the progression of the disease when they go on a strict gluten-free diet. It's not 100% because it's damned hard to utterly eliminate gluten contamination, when as little as 10-20 parts per million can cause an inflammatory response in some people. If you cook my gluten-free bun on an oven rack that's just held a wheat bun, you've poisoned me with enough gluten to cause a problem. Yes, for some people it's truly that bad. I don't have Celiac's, but ALL of us are intolerant of gluten, to varying levels. We don't have the enzyme(s) to break it down properly, and it causes numerous problems as a result. Research supports that gluten-intolerance causes or aggravates around 200 different medical 'conditions'.
So, I'm looking at the whole industry of "what's a good diet for the average person" and looking hard at my 'organic vegetarian' mode that I've been on for 10 years. I eat a lot of tofu (soy curd) and other legumes to make up for the animal protein that I gave up. One of the research articles I'd read strongly suggests that soy and other legumes can CAUSE the autoimmune thyroid problem I have. Shit. I may have poisoned myself, trying to do The Right Thing.
OK, so back to basics: let's get rid of the soy and legumes, and I certainly don't see cheese as a viable alternative to get the protein to proper levels. Back to meat, not much choice. So, meat, veggies, and some other non-gluten carbs. Guess what that's called?
The Paleo Diet that Gina has been on for a while now. She's doing quite well, by the way.
I've just tossed out 3/4ths of the stuff in my refrigerator, and I'm headed down to the Farmer's Market to go
foraging for food. Good hunting!
