Good evening, my name is Nico de Haan.
I have always been concerned about my health. I desire an active, healthy life, free of disease. Most of us want to be healthy and happy. It seems only natural to have these desires. What we do not want is to struggle. It should be simple and effortless to eat right, to get enough activity, in a fun and natural way. In today's world, our modern society has made it difficult for us. Difficult, because the information about diet, exercise and habitat is influenced by many outside agendas.
Today, the health and welfare of people is secondary, to the purposes of governments, large companies and other powerful groups, that wish to influence our lives. It may be for profit and control, rather than health, sustainability or the general good. To get at the truth means, we must battle past these influences. To me, it means investigating the natural structures of life, our food, our daily activities and even our social structure. Throughout my life, I seldom had a weight problem. When I gained some undesired weight, I merely increased my physical activity to compensate for the diet that was causing my problem in the first place. I always thought I was eating healthy, and through the years have tried many different eating regimes, in my quest to find the perfect diet. I tried a macrobiotic dietin the 60's, a vegatarian type diet in the 70's, a 40-30-30 diet in the 80's (40% carbohydrates-30% protein and 30% fat), the South Beach diet, Mediterranean diet, and the Atkins diet.
As a personal trainer, I was hesitant to recommend a specific diet to my clients, because all the information available was confusing. That all changed when I began researching, the Paleolithic or Primal Diet. Let me put this in perspective. When we look at people in our society today, we see many overweight individuals (over 50% of us), and obese individuals (about 1/3 of us). Many people are on some type of medication, whether over-the-counter, or prescription drugs. You probably know someone on medication. Today, most seniors are on about three perscription drugs. To me this never seemed normal.
I asked myself, "With all of our advancement in technology and access to medical information today, why are we in this situation?" To answer this question, I looked at the science of how our body reacts physically and emotionally to food. I also looked at the history of food, how our species evolved and what we ate. I looked at it from a sustainability perspective. It made sense for me to look at our past, because we are hard-wired by our genetic makeup, to eat and act in certain ways. After all, we have been successfully evolving on our planet, for many generations. In fact, we, as modern humans, have been here for 40 to 60,000 years, perhaps longer. As homo sapiens, for about 200,000 years, and our direct ancestors have been roaming the earth for more than 2,000,000 years.
Long term success of a species, depends on remaining healthy. It is our diet and lifestyle that sustains our health. For many thousands of years, before the advent of agriculture, our ancestors were hunters and gathers. We ate food from a wild environment. This is a fact, substantiated by the anthropological records. Agriculture was invented in the middle east, about 8-10,000 years ago. It slowly spread across the globe, arriving in Europe between 2-5,000 years ago and in North America, less than 1,000 years ago in a limited way. American Indian populations were still hunter-gatherers, when Europeans arrived. An important cultural change took place, when humans move from hunting and gathering, to a society based on agriculture. Our overall health dramatically declines.
In the early part of the 20th century, Dr. Weston Price studied primitive hunter/gatherer cultures. He discovered very healthy people, free from our modern diseases. They had straight, healthy teeth and great eyesight. Anthropologists, studying bones and other remains, made similar findings. The physical evidence shows, through these remains, that paleolithic males averaged 5’ 11’’ and females 5’ 6’’ around 30,000 years ago. About 6,000 to 10,000 years ago this changed to 5’ 6’’ for males and 5’ 0’’ for females, a decline od 5-6". Only in modern times, have we gained back our height, our eyesight not so much. Tooth lose shows a similar trend. In 30,000 B.C., adults died with an average of 2.2 teeth missing. About 6,500 B.C., they died with 3.5 teeth missing, and, in Roman times with 6.6 teeth missing. Our height and our teeth are known to be an important predictor of general health, heavily influenced by animal protein and fat. The record shows that our health declined, when our species began engaging in agriculture. After the switch to agriculture, we became shorter, with smaller brains, and we began to exhibit some of the modern diseases that are rampant today.
Agriculture allowed the storage of food, which created many advantages in controlling larger groups of people. People crowded into cities. Agriculture is credited with creating civilization, and with it, politics, organized religion and a debt system (money). As we emerged into the industrial age, these agricultural foods became food staples. Instead of improving on our health, the quantity of these manufactured foods and crowded living conditions, declined our health even further. What did improve were surviving bacterial infections and children's survival rates. But inflammatory diseases increased, and these are most of the modern diseases we see today.
These foods soon replaced many of the other foods we had consumed, for most of our existence. These new foods were grains: wheat, barley, sorghum, oats, rice and later corn or maze. Also cultivated were: beans or legumes, vegetables, potatoes or tubers, roots, as well as fruits and nuts. As a contrast, early humans’ diet was largely based on animal consumption. Many anthropologists have noted the importance of man’s dependence on animal products for their nutritional needs.
Let's look at it another way. If we were to observe animals in their natural wild habitat, we gain knowledge about what they eat, their physical activities and their social structure. Our hunter/gatherer ancestors certainly knew a lot about the animals they hunted, and of course, the animals that hunted them. Today, as a society, we seem to know less. If we were to raise these animals in captivity, it would make sense to feed them what they would naturally eat in the wild. We would feed wild lions, fresh meat; wild deer, plants and berries; wild buffalo, grass and so on. When an animal is sick at the zoo, it is an indication that it's environment and/or diet is wrong. Today, we feed many domesticated animals; cats, dogs, cows, pigs and farmed fish, with modern agricultural human food. As a consequence, our dogs and cats have many modern human diseases, like kidney disease, autoimmune disease, dry eyes and arthritis, just to name a few. Factory farmed animals we eat today are fed grains, so they need antibiotics and other drugs, just to keep them alive.
If we want to find the perfect human diet, it makes sense then, to look at what we ate during our evolutionary past, surviving in a wild natural environment, when we were hunter/gatherers. Why were we healthier, as hunter/gatherers? Why are modern hunter/gatherers healthier then we are, and why did our health decline, when we changed to this modern diet? One clear difference is the food.
Let's look at the food that our hunter/gatherer ancestors ate. First of all, the food was wild and uncultivated. Whether it was animal food or plant food, it was fresh, most likely killed or gathered that day. The animals and plants were local, from the surrounding area, probably within 5 or 10 miles local, and plants were seasonal. The food and water was fresh, free of chemicals, pesticides and contaminants. Slowly, this all changed. For the last 50 years, and increasingly today, our society has forced us into a low-fat/high-carbohydrate diet, based on information that fat is bad. We have been told carbohydrates are healthy, and that protein is available from agricultural foods, like grains, legumes or beans and other plant food. Nutritionalists, the medical community, our government, and major food companies have all sold us on this diet. This mades it extremely difficult for us to eat any other way. What is not generally known, is that these agricultural foods are difficult for us to digest. Most of their nutrients, especially the proteins, are not available to us, and digesting them causes inflammation and irritation. This is why many cultures combined grains with other foods, to make a more complete protein. For example rice & beans combine to make them easier to digest.
Like their proteins, the vitamins and minerals in grains, beans and other seeds, are also difficult to digest, making their nutrients unavailable to us. There are toxins in grains and beans that dicourage the seeds from being eaten by predators. Remember that seeds are the reproductive parts of the plants. They are embedded with these toxins to protect them, to ensure their survival to create the next generation. This is why many cultures used soaking, sprouting, fermentation, distillation and extensive cooking to remove these poisons. These processes work to remove many toxins, but not all of them. Today's food processing use none of these methods, in fact, modern processing makes them less nutritious. Fats from grains, beans and other seeds have an unhealthy omega 6-3 fat ratio. They are much higher in inflammatory omega-6 fat, and lacking in anti-inflammatory omega-3 fat.!
Grains also have a natural addictive morphine in them, making them very hard for many people to give up, by creating withdrawal symptoms. This contributes to the over- consumption of breads, pasta, cookies, crackers, cakes, donuts, bagels, pizza, potato chips, fast food and other processed food. Large modern food companies use this fact, to compel people, to eat their products. Eating these nutritionally weak foods also leads to over-consumption of other proteins, further leading to obesity.
Here's why. Studies show that what we eat influences our bodyweight, our body composition, our hunger, our satisfaction with food, and so, the amount of food we eat. All foods have different proportions of macronutrients: carbohydrates, fats and proteins. Carbohydrates and fats are either used as sources of fuel or stored as body fat. Proteins are used to build and maintain the structure of our body, our muscles, bones, and organs. The body can also can convert these proteins to carbohydrate to be used either, as sources of fuel, or stored as body fat. Most Americans today, consume a diet of about 15% protein, 40% fat and 45% carbohydrate . Scientists refer to this as a high-fat diet, and it leads to an overweight and obese population. In reality, it is both a high-fat and high-carbohydrate diet. This high-fat and high-carbohydrate diet is mostly from unhealthy food. We are told that the culprit in this diet is fat, and fat is responsible for the problems with obesity, heart disease, cancer and diabetes. Instead, fat is the primary and preferred fuel of the body, while glucose, or sugar, is merely a secondary fuel.
In muscles at rest, the primary fuels are free fatty acids from stored body tissues and fat from the liver, which is fat we eat. These are known as ketones. Blood glucose, which is sugar, and muscle glycogen (carbohydrate) is used as an emergency fuel for the muscles when we become active. Muscles prefer to burn fat and only rely on carbohydrates as a secondary fuel, kind of like a booster shot. It's like having a reserve fuel tank when you need it.
A low-carbohydrate diet, one consisting of 15-25% carbohydrates, increases muscle tissue and decreases fat tissue, because this pushes fuel into the active tissues, the organs and muscles. This stimulates the release of fat from the fat cells, causing an increase in muscle mass and a loss of body fat. It is important to understand this relationship between eating carbohydrates and storing fat.
Scientists have wondered for a long time, whether fat could come from non-fat sources. Farmers for years have known that, when animals are feed grain, instead of their natural grass-fed diet, they rapidly convert these carbohydrates into body fat. The same thing happens to us.
A high-carbohydrate diet leads to a rapid conversion of carbohydrates to fat, which is known as lipogenesis. This fat making, or lipogenesis, is taking the fat into fat cells, the body tissues, and this fat when consuming a high-carbohydrate diet, cannot be used as fuel. Studies have also shown that a high-carbohydrate/low-fat diet increases body fat, even if you eat it as a low-calorie diet.
This implies that a high-carbohydrate/low-fat diet, can affect your body negatively, even if you consume less calories. You get fat, while starving your body. Remember, I said that fat was the primary fuel of our body. So, with so much fat being produced in the body by lipogenesis, the question is: why is this fat not used as fuel? Let’s look at what happens when we consume carbohydrates.
The body converts these carbohydrates into glucose (blood sugar). The pancreas responds by releasing the hormone, inulin to counteract the effect of the sugar, by converting it to fat to be stored, in the fat cells of our body. The hormone insulin regulates fat storage, into those fat cells. The hormone glucagon regulates fat release, from the liver, to be used as fuel. When insulin is creating fat storage, the other hormone glucagon is depressed, shutting down fat burning. The body then uses its secondary fuel (sugar or glucose) instead.
We are either sugar burners or fat burners. Let’s look at how each of these fuels effect us. Sugar burns rather fast, like rocket fuel, great for energy but not longevity. If we were to start a campfire in the woods, the kindling, the paper and twigs would burn like sugar does in our body, very quickly. Therefore we have to eat, on a continuous basis. However, fat burns slowly, like a large log, that we place on the campfire, something we can forget about for a while. Carbohydrates burn very fast, which means we have to eat continuously, to keep the fire going. However, fat burns slowly like a log, which means we eat, are satisfied, and free to go about our day, without being a slave to constant cravings. The amount of carbohydrates consumed is directly proportionate, to the fat storage, taking place in our bodies. Consume small amounts of carbohydrates, store small amounts of fat; consume large amounts of carbohydrates, store a large amount of fat; and this fat from carbohydrates, unlike the fat we eat, is not available as fuel. And, highly refined carbohydrates are stored the quickest, because they digest much faster than carbohydrates that contain fiber, like fibrous vegetables. When our fat burning is shut down, excess protein is also converted to carbohydrates, and this protein conversion to carbohydrates, just adds to the storage of fat in our body. This is what is happening to the average American today.
Like all nutrients, there are good ones and poor ones. Healthy proteins and fats come mainly from animals, birds, fish, shellfish, reptiles, and insects. It's important that the animals we eat, eat their natural diet. Example: cows eat grass, not grains. Fish eat other fish, shellfish or bugs, not soy beans or grains. The diet of the animals we eat makes a huge difference in the omega 6-3 ratio composition. Their natural diet has a normal omega 6-3 ratio like wild salmon, but feed them grains and the same things happens to them as happens to us. They lose the healthy anti-inflammatory omega 3 fatty acids and increase the flammatory omega 6 fatty acids.
In our society today, we have come to shy away from fat. Healthy fats, are essential fatty acids; essential, because our body needs them to stay healthy. Healthy fats also can be found in ghee, lard, coconut oil and in small amounts in nuts, seeds and some unprocessed vegetables. Unhealthy fats are in grains, beans, vegetable oils, corn oils, margarine, canola oil and soybeans oil, and should be avoided. The problem again is modern food technologies. When these oils are heated above 400 ̊F, the shape of the fatty acid molecules change, turning it into a toxic fat, called trans-fat. These fats turn rancid when applied to medium or high heat, and cause free-radical damage in our bodies.
We use fat in many ways, but one of the more essential uses of fats in the body, is to create and maintain cell membranes. Consuming the wrong types of fats, like trans-fats, will cause the membranes to be unhealthy and ultimately malfunction and die. The confusion comes from the fact that, in the 1940's and 50's, studies connected saturated fat and cholesterol with heart disease. Those studies have long ago been proven false, but are still used today to promote the low-fat diet propaganda.
Processed food has a great advantage to food manufacturing companies, because it can be stored for a long time. Most corn and other grains are stored for 5 years or more, before they reach the dinner table, not exactly fresh food. Another important factor to consider is Glycation. Glycation was first discovered in 1987.
When we eat carbohydrates, they digest and become glucose. Glucose is blood sugar, which circulates through our body and binds to all the proteins in our body. These glycated proteins, then, make the very damaging substances, called free-radicals. They then, attack all the cells that make up our muscles, skin, brain and organs. All degenerated diseases come from glycated proteins. Alzheimer's, Parkinson's disease, heart disease, and cancer all come from glycated proteins and not from fat and cholesterol.
So when we eat a piece of fruit, some bread, pasta, potatoes, or other carbohydrates, like potato chips, popcorn or sodas, it goes through our digestive system and is broken down into blood sugar or glucose. This glucose binds with all the proteins in our body and begin to clump together with the proteins next to it, like glue. These glycated proteins, damage all our tissues; our skin, our organs, our brain and our blood vessels. It's like we are being glued together.
In our arteries, cholesterol comes into these blood vessels and plugs up these holes trying to repair them. The damage accumulates as we get older, and we produce more cholesterol, trying to reduce the damage. Cholesterol has been blamed for our problems, when it is, in fact, the glycated proteins that are doing the damage. Now the drug companies come in and sell us statin drugs, to lower the cholesterol, causing even further degeneration. This glycation process ensures that a high-carbohydrate/low-fat diet ages us, creating all the degenerative diseases we have today.
So we can see the role carbohydrates play in this, and it doesn't matter what kind of carbohydrates they are. What is everyone recommending today? A high-carbohydrate/low-fat diet. But that's not what we should be eating.
Carbohydrates we should be eating are certain green plant foods, because they contain antioxidants. Antioxidants are considered nonessential nutrients, meaning that they are not required for life, but they do have powerful benefits for our health. Antioxidants are nutrient compounds, naturally produced by our bodies and also come from eating antioxidant-rich foods. They can be vitamins, minerals, or other plant chemicals. They protect our cells from free-radicals, those highly reactive oxygen molecules created in the glycation process. Free-radical damage, is a primary cause of aging and degenerative diseases.
Antioxidants are also responsible for the bright colors in certain fruits and vegetables. Plants naturally produce these antioxidants to protect themselves against stress, caused by intense sunlight and harsh growing conditions, as well as from viruses, bacteria, and fungi. When we eat these green plant foods, we get the same antioxidant protection for ourselves.
Another way we can improve our health, our weight, and reduce the risk of chronic disease, is to limit our intake of fructose, including fructose found in fruit. Even though fruit is much healthier than soda, too much of it can be nearly as detrimental to our health. It is a quantity issue and once you exceed the limit, you are asking for trouble. This was less of an issue in ancient times, because they were consuming wild fruits. These wild fruits were smaller and more closely resemble what a blueberry is today.
Modern cultivated fruits are much larger, which means they have a lot more sweet inside and less skin. The sweet "pulp" or "flesh" of the fruit is where much of the fructose is, whereas the skin holds the antioxidants. Since wild fruits were much smaller than today's fruits, they had a much larger proportion of their volume as skin and seeds. They provided a healthy source of antioxidants, with limited amounts of fructose. It's important to eat a wide variety of antioxidants because they help to resist aging and disease. One of the main benefits of following a Primal-type diet is the enormous amount of antioxidants in organic produce. In addition, I also recommend Organic Green Supplements to get these antioxidants. We need them today more than ever, because we are continually exposed to toxins in our modern environment. Today, though, we have largely replaced vegetables with cereal grains and this has lowered the quality of our health.
Health in the 21st century is a learned skill. It is an adaptive trait. Nearly everyday, we hear some news of a person who has walking pneumonia, a heart attack or someone dying of cancer and other modern disease. Very sad, but I believe, a wake up call. The main enemy today is sugar, and by sugar I do not mean just sugar. I mean all the so-called food that gets the same responses from our body. When our body is busy getting rid of glucose, by releasing insulin, the regular processes of maintaining the everyday maintenance of our body, that is, keeping our immune system at peak working condition, stops. Our body is too busy getting rid of the sugar to pay any attention to repairing us. We are on stand by, susceptible to any lurking virus or bug, ready to step in and take control. We cannot afford to let our defenses down, because in this overcrowded and pollution- filled environment, we are more susceptible to infections than ever before.
Remember that sugar, candy, bread, pasta, donuts, pastries, cakes, cookies, fruit juices, soft drinks and most modern fruit, along with many processed foods, turn to sugar or glucose in our body. This begins the process of using insulin to counteract the sugar to get rid of it, because our body sees it as a poison, something it needs to eliminate, urgently. While this is going on, the sugar and insulin are both being stored as fat. When the sugar is gone, we become extremely hungry, usually in about two hours. Sugar burns very fast, healthy fat, burns very slowly, and all of us have plenty of fat for fuel. That is why fat is the preferred fuel for us. It burns slow and steady, and we have a lot of it. To be a fat burner, we have to consume a high-fat diet, not a high-carbohydrate diet.
The diet I recommend, has a ratio of about 40-50% fat, 35-40% protein and 15-25% carbohydrates. Our ancestors had this approximate ratio and this is best for our overall health. Optimal for athletes is 50-35-15.
This diet is high in healthy fat, moderate in healthy protein and low in healthy fibrous carbohydrates. You can see how different this is from what we eat today. What makes this diet a success, is managing our feelings of satisfaction with plenty of healthy fats. Then, eating a moderate amount of healthy proteins and a low amount of fibrous carbohydrates is a winning combination.
Why fibrous carbohydrates? It limits our intake of them, and prevents exposure to insulin and thus, glycation. Reducing sugar and fructose intake, will decrease antioxidant stress, so we need less carbohydrates. Therefore, the carbohydrates we eat, will work better and last longer.
So create satisfaction, by eating enough healthy fat. Build a strong body with healthy protein. Optimize antioxidant intake with fibrous vegetables and limit sugars, fructose, and processed foods. It's not complicated. We need to know what to eat, but more important to learn is, what not to eat. Avoiding starches like grains, beans, legumes, potatoes, processed foods, pasteurized dairy products, fast foods and beverages and any other food you may be allergic to. Reduced your fruit intake if you are trying to lose weight and you will take a giant step towards a healthy lifestyle.
Living A Primal Lifestyle is rather simple concept. To me it means going back to basics. A Primal Lifestyle Diet can put us on the road to natural wellness. It produces powerful results, more quickly and effectively than other diets or weight loss programs. It also means eating the way nature intended, by consuming local, organic seasonally available food.
We used to be part of the natural world, that’s what we did for millions of years. It’s only in the last 10,000 years that we intentionally changed that natural order. When we give up annual mono-crops and restore the land back to grasslands and forests, then the animals, the birds and all other species will return. When we do away with commercial agriculture, sustainability, once again, will return. This is how we can build a relationship with nature. To see others and our habitat as an extension of ourselves. We are part of nature and we share this planet with the bacteria, the plants, the insects, the birds and the animals. This is what makes all life possible. We all sustain each other. Destroy them and we destroy ourselves.
Today, we desperately need a serious resistance movement. A resistance movement to end mono-crop agriculture and go beyond civilization. I call this movement "Prime Resistance." It is a resistance movement, on an individual level. Change ourselves and we change the world. If we change the food, we change the land and the environment. This is how we reinstate our most important personal freedom, our health.
We do it by Living A Primal Lifestyle.
Nico de Haan