Ming’s Wisdom

The food pyramid is a total lie. It has been taught to us since elementary school over and over, but reality is that the foods in it and their proportions have been exactly what’s making us unhealthy.

Here’s the food pyramid as we were taught in elementary/middle/high school:

Government food pyramid

We believed this food pyramid without questions when we were kids, but let’s take a chance to really think about its contents. The most important error in this pyramid is what was put at its base, the “breads and cereals”. Instead of going through all the details here, there’s an article that explains it better than I ever can (so read this before continuing to the rest of this article) : http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2010/09/19/paleo-diet-solution/#more-3109 (The author of Four Hour Workweek, Timothy Ferris, posted an excerpt from Robb Wolf’s book “The Paleo Solution“). Basically, all grains (wheat, rice, corn, and many others), have evolved chemicals that discourage animals from eating them, and since we as humans did not start eating them until 6000 years ago, we’ve never evolved to tolerate those poisons. The grains bore holes through the human intestinal lining, as well as triggering the immune system to start attacking itself, ending up in various diseases such as multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, diabetes, infertility, alzheimer’s, lupus, depression, and many more.

Interestingly, legumes (peanuts, soy, peas) and dairy (milk, cheese, yogurt) have the same effect, though to a lesser extent. Therefore, take out the portion of diary from the pyramid too. Candy and cake in the sweets on the top? The body isn’t adapted to the extreme amounts of carbohydrates either, so the top triangle should not exist either.

In recent years, many health “experts” have proposed revised food pyramids, such as this one:

Revised pyramid

Again, the grains are put as the staple, at the detriment of our health. Some legumes and and grains such as peanuts, soy, and corn are oddly bundled up with olive oil and added to the base of the pyramid as well. Legumes appears once again in the middle of the pyramid, somehow grouped with nuts. And calcium supplements are recommended at even larger quantities than meat. It should be immediately clear that man-made supplements taken at a larger quantity than natural foods eaten by humans for hundreds of thousands of years, should raise some alarms.

Now this is the ideal food pyramid that I, and a lot of researchers are proposing:

Paleo food pyramid

Notice how only natural foods are represented; nothing from cereal and bread companies promoting their products, nothing from man-made supplements. The key principle of this diet and lifestyle is based off evolutionary fundamentals. Basically, the body of homo sapiens has evolved over a million years during its history to consume a certain set of nutrients and operates best when the balance is what is expected. However, in modern history we’ve invented many foods that are absolutely unnatural and upset the balance of what our bodies expect to digest and use. Ten thousand years ago, people did not have calcium supplements, and they did not need calcium supplements. Instead, the magnesium found in the natural diet of meat and vegetables efficiently directed extra calcium out of the blood vessels (too much calcium in blood vessels causes heart disease and high blood pressure) and into the bones (improving bone density and preventing Osteoporosis and other bone diseases). This is only one example of how the Paleolithic diet helped us stay healthier. When the many systems of the body all get the rich blend of nutrients that we’ve evolved to eat, the complex processes in the body begin to align and develop amazing health.

I suggest that you give this topic a little more research to learn more about how it can benefit you. Also, it doesn’t hurt to give this diet a try, and stop believing so much in the old food pyramids that base their recommendations on studies that do not take into effect the fundamental mechanisms that govern how the body works as a complete system.

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This entry was posted on Monday, October 18th, 2010 at 13:05 and is filed under Health. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.