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Category Archives: Omega-3
BMJ vs The Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee: Does a Healthy Diet Win?
Anyone who follows the U.S. nutritional guidelines has almost certainly been frustrated at some point or another by the conflicting advice and sometimes hopelessly outdated marketing material – think the Food Pyramid that still graces the walls of many elementary school classrooms. The frustration has reached the point that cries of government corruption and inappropriate influence of big food industry lobbyists are frequently heard. Case in point, the February 2015 draft of the U.S. Dietary Guidelines,1 published every five years, prompted over 29,000 public comments compared to a couple thousand in 2010. The outcry has been so strong it has…
The Inuit and The Paleo Diet
The Inuit have long been used as a shining example that low carbohydrate approaches to diet can work.1 2 3 4 In fact, traditionally they consumed very little vegetables or any other typically Western foods, and subsisted mainly on fish, sea mammals, and land animals.5 And despite this diet (which would horrify most mainstream dieticians) the Inuit traditionally had very low rates of disease.6 By contrast, the traditional Western diet has been correlated with a plague of health issues.7 8 9 As a further example of just how nutritionally poor the Western diet can be, one third of all cancer…
Vitamin D and Omega-3 Supplements on The Paleo Diet
Choosing a Paleo diet and eating more in tune with how we’ve evolved provides the body with a robust amount of essential protein, healthy fats, gluten-free carbohydrates and nutrient dense veggies. An ancestral approach to eating also provides your body with key nutrients, vitamins and minerals the way nature intended. Does this mean that supplementation is unnecessary if you’re following a Paleo lifestyle? It’s a complicated question. Most articles and blogs about supplements inevitably discuss the benefits or drawbacks of multi-vitamins. Research shows that if you eat a diet centered around the most nutrient dense foods – quality meats, veggies…
Are Oats Paleo? National Geographic Asks
The firestorm continues to spiral out of control following the publication of the article titled “The Importance of Dietary Carbohydrate in Human Evolution” in The Quarterly Biology of Review.1 Now, a new paper titled “Multistep Food Plant Processing at Grotta Paglicci (Southern Italy) around 32,600 cal B.P.” published in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)2 fuels the misconception that our hunter-gatherer ancestors may have consumed oats in large quantities. I was approached by National Geographic to set the record straight. I read the PNAS paper. Nowhere in the paper did the authors indicate that people at…
Keep It Simple: Doctors Say Sound Nutrition Should Replace Calorie-Counting and Pharmacotherapy
When we think about enormously complex problems, like the social and economic burdens of chronic degenerative diseases, we sometimes presume that the solutions must also be complex. Complex problems, however, often have simple, straightforward solutions. Imagine you’re an astronaut living on a space station powered by enormous solar-powered generators. Your worst-case scenario would be for those generators to break down and for you to be missing the tools required to fix them. In 2012, astronauts aboard the International Space Station found themselves in precisely this situation. One of the station’s power distributors went down, but when the astronauts ventured outside…
