♪Would The Real Paleo Please Stand Up, Please Stand Up♪!

link

Before we get started, did you know plants can see?!

Fad diets, why do they always come up short?!

Our relationship with our food goes far deeper than the few functions our culture recognizes. Our culture encourages us to look at our world (nature and our food) as if it is a machine, dead and lifeless. We tend to forget to remember that it is all alive, fluid, intelligent and conscious.

Western culture gives far too much recognition to macro nutrients (fat, sugar/carbs, protein) and have only recently begun to consider the micro-nutrients (vitamins, minerals, etc). Just because a food has "nutrients" in it, doesn't mean that our bodies can use them, this is called bioavailability. Not every calorie is created equal.

I have found that our dominant western culture doesn't recognize what I consider the most essential elements and relationships with our food. I'm going to start complex, but I will make it really simple at the end :)

Vital Energy

(chi, qi, prana, etc)

All of life, including plants contain life promoting energy, connected to the energy you feel when you bite on tin foil, or when we power a light with a potato. The moment we disconnect a plant from it's energy source (pick it) it begins to lose this energy and slowly become lifeless. This isn't some unnoticed phenomenon, our mouths can taste it (nothing compares to biting into a tree ripened fruit plucked straight from the earth), or greens in how they lose their vigor hours after being picked.

Microbiological Life

(fungi, bacteria, mitochondria, etc)

A single teaspoon (1 gram) of rich garden soil can hold up to one billion bacteria, several yards of fungal filaments, several thousand protozoa, and scores of nematodes. -Kathy Merrifield

Living (soil not sprayed with poison) soil contains an abundance of life! These other beings are not only for keeping healthy soil and plants they are essential for digesting and breaking down our food. They are also responsible for up to 30%(possibly more) of our gene expression! We're not just independent human cells, we're a symbiotic world of organisms (trillions of other living organisms, even outnumbering human cells operating this thing called a body!) We need to maintain a healthy diverse balance of these organisms in order to function optimally. This is where fermented(living) foods play such a vital role. If the food comes from healthy soil, the dirtier the better :) "eat dirt" is actually a healthy suggestion (if you have healthy dirt) :)
Link

Potential Hydrogen

(Commonly known as 'ph')

Maintaining a balanced to slightly alkaline ph is something our bodies are constantly striving to achieve. A detour from this balance can kill us. Consuming a high acid diet (this includes protein, which is an acid) wrecks havoc on our system as our bodies strive to maintain balance by pulling alkaline deposits (from bone, teeth, etc) to balance the system. Having a slightly alkaline diet is essential for proper function. link

Medicinal Quality

(Food as medicine)

Anything we eat is either curing dis-ease or bringing dis-ease. Consuming highly medicinal foods regularly ensures a healthy ecosystem and promotes proper balance. Nature has provided us powerful plants especially psychotropic and highly medicinal plants like flowers, leaves and fungi (virtually non-existent in our dominant diets) to cure ourselves of any ailments. Nature has provided us powerful medicine to be found virtually anywhere. Check out wild lettuce and dandelion as just two simple prolific examples of 'weeds' as medicine. All this without the chronic 'negative side effects' of western medicine. Best part, plant medicine is often accompanied by extremely positive/enjoyable effects! :)

Raw (living) vs Cooked (less living)

The majority of our food loses some of the functions mentioned above namely vital energy and biological life when heated past 42 C. Sometimes heating can change an alkaline food into an acid. Further, heating food past this temperature changes the molecular structure of many chemicals, decreasing their bioavailability and sometimes worse (like turning them into a toxin). Why do you think cooking food decreases/alters the flavour of our food so drastically? It's not just the flavor that we're diminishing/altering. I don't consume a fully raw diet, and some foods are healthier cooked (I'll explain a post later on this). However, getting regular raw foods in our diet will ensure we aren't missing out on these vital [enzymes].(http://www.healingdaily.com/detoxification-diet/enzymes.htm)!

Local Foods In Season

Eating foods in season, isn't just a hip thing to do, it's also the cheapest thing to do! Nature provides food for us that is best adapted for seasonal demands. Short example: The same organisms that cause the flu in humans are present around the plants that are in your environment, and these plants create medicine to protect themselves. So, by consuming the local plant, you consume medicine for your specific environments. (This is a highly simplified example, for more see or read 'The Secret Life of Plants') This expands to seasonal adaptations as well, where the plants growing in a particular season are better adapted for providing you optimal health, comfort and vitality for that season. This also ensures diversity in our diets throughout the year.
Link

Complex Food Combinations

As a culture we have a created a paradox of eating, we have limited overall diet diversity, while simultaneously combining intensely diverse foods at meal time. Some foods should not be consumed at the same time (especially complex carbs and animal proteins) As each food category requires a unique stomach environment to digest the food. Sometimes these environments conflict resulting in 'indigestion'. Contrary to popular belief "protein farts" are not healthy nor normal. Our digestion process is much more complex than just in the gut, so even if we do not fully follow these rules we still partially digest most foods. This recommendation is to better fully digest our food gaining the most benefits from it.
link

Eat The Rainbow

Metaphysical: Each color represents a vibrational frequency that corresponds to an energy portal (chakra) in our bodies. Physically speaking they are vibrating at different frequencies and these frequencies interact with our bodies and denote varied amounts of nutrients. So, simply it's important to get a good diversity to nourish our whole beings and imbibe ourselves with all the frequency patterns required and nutrition to thrive. Plus it tastes delicious and looks beautiful :)
Link

Taste It All

Proving eating healthy is not boring :)

Many people have certain flavors they enjoy, whether it's sweet, umami, sour, astringent, pungent, bitter or salty. Each flavor has various chemical and energetic qualities that are required for balance. Ayurvedic and Chinese medicine often use flavors to determine healing qualities of foods. Often times we find we completely ignore a flavor category, this causes a imbalance as we're not receiving the nutrients associated with that flavour! link

Sound Complex?

Let's make this simple!

How did humanity evolve for hundreds of thousands of years before the advent of agriculture (relatively new invention) and industrial agriculture (intensely recent invention)? We walked around from singular (non-combining) food source to food source. Plucking food right off the tree/bush/vine and into our mouths, straight from the healthy soil into our bodies. For meat eaters, our ancestors didn't go on a hunt, just to come back and mash some seeds and bake bread to make a sandwich. They had a fire ceremony and ate the deer, alone! (Maybe after quickly gathering a few leaves and herbs for flavour and medicine.) Our food was Inevitably local, inevitably in season, inevitably high in qi (energetically alive, within a few hours of gathering), inevitably from healthy and diverse ecosystems. So, the only reason it's "complicated" today, is because our culture made it so!

This beautifully ties into intermittent fasting which has become a powerful health trend lately. (an upcoming post) Also something that occurred naturally before agriculture, as it may have been several hours to days between finding feasts!

Doing what we would have naturally done for millennia (before modern agriculture) is the best thing for us, what a coincidence! It's almost like we evolved this way... Simply eating food straight from earth when we found it and when we needed it, in as much diversity as all of nature provided!

So, why do fad diets not work? They're just not OG enough ;)

Good news is, the problem is a solution, in this case multiple solutions :) In my next post I'll explain why creating a cure for our diet woes will also cure our ecological and personal-economic ailments as well; and what I'm doing to grow this transition.

I hope this was able to help some of you along your journey! Until next time! Further, I'll be breaking this up and elaborating on each of these topics another time :)

Rieki

• Dedicated to creating high-quality, detailed, original content!

Home gardening hacks, for those convinced to grow thier own food as I am:
Grow Food Not Lawns! Simple Hacks To a No-Cost Organic Food Paradise! (Part 1: From Grass to Mass-terpiece)
Grow Food Not Lawns! Simple Hacks To a No-Cost Organic Food Paradise! (Hack 2: Free Plants)
Grow Food Not Lawns! Simple Hacks To a No-Cost Organic Food Paradise! (Hack 3: Abracadabra From 1 to 24+)