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Primal/paleo anyone?

Just wondering if there are any  others on this path. New to this community but curious.
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Avatar universal
We don't disagree as much as it sounds -- it's always the same things we disagree on -- mainly overgeneralizing and, of course, The Great Soy War!  By the way, you said something interesting on your journal, I guess it is, about buffer zones, but you can't buffer away GMOs.  Yet we can't even get a requirement that companies even list they use GMOs on the label.  Like you, I fear letting this genie out of the bottle instead of confining it to fully sealed in places for many years to see what happened is going to haunt us big time.
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I agree with you! ( isn't that UNBELIEVABLE) :>) It's what they did to the grains (GMO) and what they added to the foods you can't read the ingredients
on the labels.  
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I have no beef with anything going on here, just wanted to clarify some things that are often misstated these days (not necessarily on here).  The Japanese and Scandinavians have the longest life spans right now and the best health, and both cultures consume a lot of grain.  The macrobiotic diet is very grain based, probably because it's based largely on Japanese principles.  The much lauded Mediterranean diets are all full of grains.  It isn't grains that are the problem, they are very good for you.  It's the type of grain and how processed it is for people who are otherwise very stressed, as we are in our very stressed out world and society full of toxins we put in our lives.  The Japanese eat white polished rice, everything we would recommend nobody eat, and yet they are very healthy.  The same was true of the Chinese before they polluted their society.  I'm not a fan of too much wheat or dairy, the first because it was invented by humans, not nature, the latter because adult mammals don't do dairy, but obviously most people seem to do okay with a moderate amount of both.  But it's not the grains that are the problem, it's something else that has caused us to have a problem with grains.  I grew up in the Fifties and Sixties, and very few people were fat despite the fact that was when people really started eating phony food.  So again, why are people fat now?  It's hard to say, but when you do have the problem you have to deal with it, and that's where the anti-simple carb problem comes from, but it doesn't seem to be a problem elsewhere or historically, as far as we know.  I think there's much more to this than the simple answers often given.  The other point I wanted to make is people always talk low carb, but fruits and vegetables are all carbohydrates.  So a low carb diet isn't healthy, as it would exclude vegetables.  Obviously, only some diets have gone that far as to limit the amount of vegetables (Atkins, for one).  So it isn't carbs that are the problem, it's certain kinds of carbs, and they're only a problem if everything is out of balance.  Which is why I always say, at this point eating is an individual thing because we really don't know what's going on enough to pin it down exactly, and I think it's a combination of things, most notably the replacement of age-old views of food and life that have been replaced by people only concerned with making money in every facet of life and have in that pursuit caused us to go very far out of balance.  
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Read the book Grain Brain by Dr. David Pearlmutter!
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Sorry, I sent that before I was done. I follow the primal blueprint more than strict paleo, and it works put to be high fat, moderate protein, low carb. And really, I eat so many damn fruits nvegetables every day its crazy, it just works out "low carb" because I'm not doing anything else carby.  It is definitely worth considering reintroducing certain grains eventually. I have also reintroduced dairy because I tolerate it well. Its about figuring out for your self what your best choices are. I'm of northern European ancestry with a little native American. im kinda guiding my choices with traditional foods.

And the hell with Atkins's. It runs on processed foods and artificial meal bars. I get people do ketosis but those meal bars just seem poisonous to me.
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Yeah, I don't deny our forebears might have eaten grains, but we eat them in ridiculous quantity today and that's what I had issues with. I discovered how much better I feel without gluten and my god, it's amazing.
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That was part of my point -- archaeologists have never found a site where grain wasn't found if there was a grain native to the area, so actual paleo people did eat grains even before they were able to prepare them to make them not so hard to chew.  This diet isn't so much paleo as it is just another modern high protein diet.  Might be good, might not be, but again, it's a fad diet that research will probably show doesn't work any better than any other diet and might be worse.  The people who live the longest in the world eat grains and not much animal, so there is that as well.  I have no idea the best way to eat, because I believe it differs on how well we digest particular foods, but there are certain principles that seem to be settled so I always say, study those and go from there.  I'd hate to do a diet, which is what happened with Adkins, only to find down the road that it turned out to be unhealthy for not following basic principles, but I also have an innate appreciation for people wiling to be the guinea pigs for the rest of us.  
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The few people that I know who do the paleo eat fish, meat, fruits and veg. They don't eat simple carbs or grains.
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I don't do it and don't know anyone who does, but keep one thing in mind about all fad diets -- they're usually wrong on the research.  These things are invented based on some solid principles but mostly to make money for someone.  Logically, what is a paleo diet?  Hunter gatherers would have eaten very differently depending on where they lived, and the notion they ate mostly animal doesn't seem to hold with most tribal cultures -- animals are far harder to catch than plant food.  There are people who did eat a lot of animals, but then, they didn't eat much plant food because there wasn't any -- think the Plains Indians, the Inuit, the Siberian natives.  But if you lived in South America, you had a lot of fruits and veggies to eat so you didn't have to always have animals to hunt.  Good to have, but they diet here would have been much more variable than on an island where there would be only fruit and fish.  And the notion that hunter gatherers didn't eat much grain is contradicted by archaeological digs, where they always find grains.  I think it's more important to study principles of food and eating than it is to try to follow someone's idea of the ideal diet -- it never is.  It's possible that urbanites evolved to require different diets just as domesticated dogs evolved to be completely different than wolves.  Who knows?  People are different, so whatever dietary lifestyle you choose, make sure you tailor it to known principles of healthy eating, practicality, common sense, and how you react to it.
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Avatar universal
I know a few people that do paleo and love it!
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