Hi ffskier. After having to reinstate a few vegetables because I discovered the carnivore WOE wasn’t working for me (severely decreased energy and constipation), I am seeing things in a different light. I have begun to eat far more intuitively. And I am looking more into how my ancestors would have eaten. Yes, mainly meat, fowl and fish, but they would also have grown vegetables and eaten seasonal fruits and berries. Amber O Hearn shares a passage, of William Banting’s lowcarb WOE in 1864 (described in his own words) and it shows he mainly ate meat, fowl fish, but also vegetables and fruits, but in small quantities. As well as a piece of toast or a rusk. And that to me seems a balanced diet. It is when we try to optimise diets, aka, eat the rainbow variety of vegetables and fruits, but don’t consider just how different all supermarked fruit is from homegrown, there is a problem.
I still remember biting into our own homegrown apples and pears when I grew up, in my own country Norway, as my mom and my grandparents grew fruit trees, as well as vegetables in their gardens. The apples my mom grew were pleasantly sour, the pears not too sweet. She also grew strawberries, rhubarb, blackberries, black currants, red currants, gooseberries, etc, and in the summer we harvested wild blueberries together with my brothers in our mountains. My greatest joy was when we all went out into the fjords and bought cherries from the local farmers. There was also a local farm shop that sold butter, eggs and cheese, and although we didn’t go there that often, as the food in that shop was more expensive than in the supermarked, my grandparents on my father’s side, would buy their eggs, cheese and butter from there. Whenever my brother and I went to stay at their house, we were treated to good saturated fats, and berries in the garden. My grandparents on my mother’s side were much less fond of fat, but their garden was indeed full of berries and fruits.
When all people have left is the supermarked, where they can buy seasonal fruit year round, it becomes a problem. It is consumed in too large quantities, in altered forms (perhaps larger than they would have been, and certainly much, much sweeter). As to honey, unless people were buying raw from a local beekeeper or kept bees themselves, the honey you get in the supermarked is just sugar. Now raw milk interests me. I have long been toying with the idea of buying some from a local farm that sells it in our village, as ordinary homogenised milk, makes me ill. I believe it isn’t that raw milk is some kind of superfood as some people claim, but that milk in itself is highly nutritious when it’s assimilated well, and perhaps the body can assimilate raw milk products better.
I think one of the problems with Dr. Paul Saladino’s advice though is that he doesn’t consider that while he can afford to source the best of fruit from local farms, raw milk, free range eggs, organic and grassfed meats, raw honey from some local (or his own) beehive, a lot of people just don’t have those resources. The second problem about his advice is that Dr. Paul Saladino is a very active man, as in incredibly athletic, a surfer, not to mention he does some body building as well, so his body obviously requires a lot more carbs than the average couch potato. The third problem with his advice is that he doesn’t stress enough the part about being metabolically healthy (as I believe his focus there was on the metabolically healthy) when following this particular advice, and what might work very well for an active healthy person such as himself might not work as well for a recovering diabetic, or for that matter, a recovering couch potato-ish carb addict. Now I feel very lucky in that I’ve never been addicted to carbs, never been that much into food, I like how it tastes of course, but I can eat one single strawberry (which I find too sweet these days) and leave it at that. Or say, half of an avocado, or a small handful of berries. So although I’m sure Dr. Paul Saladino’s advice will benefit some, it won’t benefit everyone. But that’s the thing about any WOE, it’s highly individual the way it works, depending on so many different factors.