By the time the Paleolithic era ended and the Neolithic era began some 11,500 years ago, humans had been evolving as nearly pure meat and fat eaters for more than a hundred thousand generations. The cataclysmic event that plunged the megafauna into extinction also melted the massive ice sheets of North and South America, wiped out coastal civilizations, and made procuring food substantially more challenging. Suddenly we were faced with a critical survival emergency and needed to adapt to changed circumstances.
Very rapidly (in evolutionary terms, at least), the majority of humans on planet Earth shifted from pure hunter-gatherers to semi-nomadic herders, and then to early farmers. By ten thousand years ago in what is now the Middle East, an entirely new, unprecedented form of food production got under way, the practice of agriculture. We hybridized and harnessed wild species of plants in a way that allowed for a constant, abundant, and stationary (albeit considerably inferior) food supply. Then once we figured out we could ferment and make beer from cultivated grains, there was no going back.
This period in human history is often called the dawn of higher civilization. But did we actually get elevated—or did we get crushed? Make no mistake: adopting an agricultural way of life changed everything for us, all right, but not all for the better. It opened the door to unprecedented, explosive population growth, although it allowed us to live in better-protected, safer, controlled environments. It also caused disastrous changes in human health and longevity and led to something else entirely new: ruling-class hierarchies, nation-states, and empires, in addition to full-scale war. And that may be understating it. In a groundbreaking and oft-quoted article published thirty years ago in the magazine Discover, Jared Diamond called agriculture “a catastrophe from which we have never recovered.”1 (As for the claim that agriculture marked “the dawn of civilization,” it’s worth pointing out that the oldest known structure ever discovered built by hunter-gatherers to date is Gobekli Tepe in what is now Turkey. This unique site was built in 9000 BCE, predating even ancient Sumeria, and its people lived a 100 percent hunter-gatherer lifestyle.)
The primary causes of death in Stone Age hunter-gatherers were accidents and infections. Their supposedly shorter life span was a statistical average attributable to circumstances relating to their comparatively hostile natural environment (and to estimated infant mortality, which significantly lowered the average). As long as we survived all that, odds were pretty good that we would make it to a healthy (if not far healthier than today) ripe old age.
But once the hunter-gatherer lifestyle began shifting toward growing and cultivating, human health and life span began to take quite a hit. There were much higher rates of infection from communicable diseases as humans lived in concentrated, stationary populations, and our reliance on plant foods increased our vulnerability to famine. A grain-heavy diet low in animal-source foods compromised our nutrition. In these early agriculturalists, cereal-based diets commonly led to numerous diseases associated with vitamin and mineral deficiencies, such as rickets, osteoporosis, and other bone disorders. Pellagra, scurvy, and beriberi, as well as deficiencies in vitamin A, iron, and zinc, were also rampant. Birth defects and degenerative diseases became more commonplace. And people became significantly shorter, too—implying some manner of nutrient insufficiency or adaptive conservation. (If you’d like to read more about the compromised health of early agriculturalists, I invite you to search my website for my article about a Neolithic-era man named Otzi—who provides us with remarkable insights into the results of switching from a strict hunter-gatherer diet to an agricultural one.)2
What we know today but didn’t know then was that the minerals contained in grains are poorly available to us, if at all, due to the presence of a substance known as phytic acid—a fact that makes the oft-touted, government-sanctioned phrase “healthy whole grains” not only a misnomer but, from a human biochemical point of view, an outright fallacy. In fact, the protein in grains, known as gluten, is not even digestible by any human. The surprising truth is that human life expectancy actually declined by half—relative to our supposedly short-lived Paleolithic forebears—early on into the agricultural revolution. Stature (together with bone density) and life expectancy got shorter, while our brains got smaller—a bit of a bum deal, if you ask me.3
For anthropologists, one of the most telling signs of this nutritional compromise is the complex series of changes to the jaw that can be observed in the remains of grain-eating humans. Everything the hunter-gatherer ate, whether meat or the occasional side dishes of wild, uncooked vegetables, required vigorous chewing. Investigations of prehistoric skulls typically reveal a well-formed cranium with a capacious jaw easily accommodating thirty-two teeth. By contrast, the sedentary farmer ate soft, cooked foods such as cereals and legumes, which required less chewing. Over some generations, in conjunction with depletion of nutrients that determine skeletal integrity, this led to a reduction in the size of the jaws without a corresponding reduction in the dimensions of the teeth. The increasingly cramped space for teeth led to high levels of malocclusion (misalignment of upper and lower teeth) and dental crowding—an abnormality seen even in remains of the world’s earliest farmers some twelve thousand years ago in Southwest Asia,4 and persisting since then. As Weston Price discovered, dental abnormality and jaw malformation are associated with seriously compromised physical and mental well-being—so much so that they are key indicators of nutrition and health, often used by paleoanthropologists to determine if a set of remains is from before or after the development of agriculture. Today, around one in five people in modern-world populations has these problems, which have been called a “malady of civilization.”5
I could write an entire book about the unfortunate consequences we suffered by adopting a grain-heavy diet. But for the purposes of this chapter, let’s just keep it simple. Grains provided a source of foods that our ancestors’ stomachs couldn’t digest and their immune systems didn’t recognize. By relying on a year-round, largely starch-based diet for the first time in human history (along with gluten—a completely foreign protein in grains that our bodies couldn’t really use and which automatically compromised our health), we began developing diseases that were ostensibly new to our species. The advent of grain consumption has been linked with allergies, food sensitivities, autoimmune disorders such as type 1 diabetes, Hashimoto’s disease, asthma, psoriasis, and multiple sclerosis. It has been linked to essentially all autoimmune conditions, in fact, which so far number in excess of one hundred, with an additional forty diseases thought to have an autoimmune component. Other problems that began appearing after we shifted to agriculture include numerous cancers, pancreatic disorders, mineral deficiencies, arthritis, cardiovascular disease, celiac disease, epilepsy, cerebellar ataxias, dementia, degenerative diseases of the brain and central nervous system, peripheral neuropathies of axonal or demyelinating types, as well as autism and schizophrenia.6 The name now commonly given to these unfortunate conditions, “diseases of modern civilization,” almost makes them sound beneficially civilized (as is often the case with the word modern). This couldn’t be further from the truth; they constitute a tragedy of epic proportions. And virtually all of these conditions have been linked in some way with the consumption of grains, and particularly gluten.
Further, with this shift to carbohydrate intake, blood sugar rose from the conversion of starches, and humans developed the internal need to lower blood sugar through the release of waves of insulin 24/7. Each rise in blood sugar is basically an internal emergency that the body has to deal with. So the body has to be on constant alert. This change, more than any other, has fueled our modern-day obesity epidemic.
Since the advent of agriculture, we have spent five hundred generations—less than 0.4 percent of our evolutionary history—eating a diet that is increasingly unnatural to our species. Things really started to get freaky about two hundred years ago, during the Industrial Revolution, in an acceleration that has now culminated in a monocultural agricultural diet of largely refined foods. Today, 90 percent of the world’s food supply comes from seventeen species of plants (the ten most common are wheat, corn, rice, barley, soybeans, cane sugar, sorghum, potatoes, oats, and cassava), most of which were not present in the human diet during the majority of the time human evolution was occurring. Then factor in the rampant industrialization of post–World War II food production and the fact that most of these new staple food crops are grown with toxic chemicals, then processed and refined into products and by-products completely foreign to our physiology. They are packaged with preservatives for long shelf life (which increases commercial profit), further reducing any nutritional value. Today 90 cents of every food dollar spent in the industrialized world go for these nutrient-devoid, chemically laden Frankenfoods. The natural order of hunting and gathering could not be more subverted.
Our Paleolithic ancestors would have been baffled to see generations of modern humans diligently following a “food pyramid” built on a foundation of grains and legumes. Just as with grains, legumes are problematic, largely because of the nutrient-blocking phytic acid they contain compromising lectins, various thyroid-impairing and gut-irritating properties, and a high starch content (up to 60 percent). This follows an officially sanctioned directive that everyone should eat six to eleven servings of carbohydrates (grains) a day—for the first time in human history—in order to be healthy and slim. Paleolithic humans would have been equally baffled by the zealous mandates to avoid fat and cholesterol, especially saturated animal fat.
Our ancestors surely would have been astonished at our transformation from carnivores who hunt to live—lean, muscular, attuned to nature, cunning, and adaptable, with high endurance—into “carbovores” who acquire our nourishment from inferior foods produced by multinational corporations, constantly fight our weight, and are besieged with chronic health issues. We are a mere shadow of the robust, wild humans we once were.
Since the agricultural food system and industrialized way of life became our default, we have not been faring well. With each subsequent generation exposed to a deteriorating environment and food supply, the human genome gets compromised and harmed. Humans today are diagnosed with disease 33 percent (fifteen years) earlier than our grandparents were.7 We are a far more fragile species today and more susceptible to compromise than our great-grandparents, our grandparents, and even our parents. Worse, it’s now said that today’s children are the first generation who are not expected to live as long as their parents. Age thirty has become the new forty-five when it comes to the onset of chronic disease. This is one of the most telling signs of our departure from our primal birthright, and one that any clinician will likely acknowledge, regardless of the type of medicine or healing work practiced. This is all new, it is not normal, and it is intimately tied to our nutritional changes, our toxic environment, and our collective amnesia about the importance of naturally occurring fat as humans’ original fuel and source of nourishment.
When it comes to defining the optimal human diet, there are a lot of different voices at the table, even—or is it especially?—within the niche of paleo and ancestral eating. Trying to achieve consensus in the paleosphere is like herding cats; everyone’s priorities are different. These days, it seems that almost anything gets a free pass—“paleo” blueberry cheesecake, hand-pressed tortillas, even entirely non-paleo foods such as white potatoes and rice—as long as it fits under the very accommodating banner of “real food.”
As you may have guessed, I don’t subscribe to that approach—which doesn’t always make me Ms. Popular in the paleosphere! Whether you enjoy the online debates, skirmishes, political posturing, and occasional head butting or not, it makes things extremely challenging for the average person to simply know what to do to stay or become healthy.
My intention in writing Primal Fat Burner is to provide you with a big-picture view of our genetic heritage as well as the specific challenges facing us today. I have distilled my research into a number of concise and relatively easy-to-grasp categories in order to cut through the confusion and mark a clear path forward that anyone can understand and follow.
From my point of view, there are five key ideas you must know about the ways we have diverged from our primal design and our original environment. These are the areas of compromise that we must address in order to restore balance and reclaim our primal birthright, because in nature, any time you go against your blueprint, some manner of disturbance and eventually chaos are sure to follow. If this sounds a little intimidating, please take heart: the Primal Fat Burner Plan will help you correct these five areas by making shifts in what is on your plate. These changes may be challenging, certainly, but you can do it. And you will derive transforming and empowering benefits as you reclaim your primal birthright of a healthy body, sound mind, and vital quality of life.
One of the most devastating—and little-discussed—drivers behind our post-agricultural decline is the shift in our primary metabolic pathways. That might sound fairly innocuous, like changing your cell phone service provider. Far from it. The transition from burning mainly fats for energy to burning mainly sugars is a root cause of many of our ills. Prehistoric humans’ meat-and-fat-rich, carbohydrate-minimal diet would have automatically given them a primary metabolic reliance upon fat; in other words, they would have largely been running on ketone bodies, the energy units from fat, along with free fatty acids. This metabolic function lets the body take advantage of fat’s tremendous energy productivity—fat supplies roughly twice the caloric energy per gram that carbohydrates do (but many times more than that in the energy units known as ATP, or adenosine triphosphate). Fat burning allows us to store great quantities of fat on our bodies, even when we are thin. The capacity to burn stored fat is an evolutionary adaptation that allowed our ancestors to survive the lean periods in between successful hunts, as well as innumerable other challenges.
As a nutritionist and avid paleo diet researcher, I had always hypothesized that early humans must have been able to consistently burn fat for fuel. After all, if Paleo Woman had to stop to refuel every two hours, as is often the case on carb-dominated diets, how would she have survived at all? About fifteen years ago, one of the most hallowed pioneers in the field of ketogenic research, Dr. Richard Veech, added more scientific credence to this hunch. He declared in a groundbreaking article in the New York Times Magazine that fat burning is, physiologically speaking, “the normal state of man.”12 Veech called our ability to use ketones energy “magic.” In a sense it is, creating steady and slow-burning energy even when there are gaps between meals, conferring protective benefits to the body, and enhancing the efficiency of the heart and brain by (according to Veech) a whopping 28 percent,13 all while avoiding the damaging tidal waves of sugar and related hormones that lead to weight problems and disease.
Yes, humans can adapt to different conditions and find some way to compensate (for better or worse). When you restrict or eliminate dietary fat intake, for instance, your body will respond by becoming more efficient at manufacturing and storing fats from other things in the diet—mostly carbohydrate. As carbohydrate replaced fat in our diet, our bodies came to expect sugar as fuel and our fat-burning metabolism began to fall idle. Fat burning is your primary metabolism only if your diet is very low in sugars and starches.
Over the centuries, and of course particularly in the last half century as carbohydrates have become increasingly refined and stronger in their sugary impact, we have come to adapt ourselves metabolically to an unnatural dependence on glucose as our primary source of fuel. The results have been disastrous for us (though quite profitable for Nabisco, Kraft Foods, General Mills, Kellogg’s, and other multinational Frankenfood cartels). Persistent weight gain is one of the more obvious and highly visible consequences of running on sugars, but metabolic disorders, tumor growth, autoimmune conditions, and neurological diseases are even more insidious, because they are less obvious, but just as debilitating or deadly, effects of these poor dietary choices.
The plan described in Primal Fat Burner retrains your body to do what it already knows how to do: flip on the fat-burning switch though a simple diet low in carbohydrates and high in healthy, natural fats, thereby restoring the metabolic advantage that we once enjoyed but have missed for far too long.
As we systematized our food sourcing, the newcomers to our diet (grains and starches) increasingly pushed the wise elders (healthful fats in their naturally occurring, intact state) off the table. But when combined with the new and unnatural carbohydrate overload, eating any fat was suddenly like throwing a match onto a keg of dynamite—it produced very harmful effects on almost every area of health, most notoriously cardiovascular health. First came the reduction of the variety of fats and fat-soluble nutrients we consumed as animal-sourced foods declined (it is critical for the body to get a wide variety of different fats and fat-soluble nutrients that serve and support different functions in the body). Then the rampant industrialization of food brought the twisted advent of refined and highly processed vegetable oils (which exploded our intake of omega-6s, rancid fats, and trans fats, while depriving us of needed omega-3s), leading to rampant inflammation, cardiovascular disease, even more cancer, and various forms of chronic pain.
In just the last fifty or sixty years, the wholesale demonization of naturally occurring fats, especially saturated fats, compounded these effects and created a collective fat-phobia from which we are only beginning to emerge. As it turns out, the idea that naturally occurring dietary fats cause cholesterol problems (as if naturally occurring cholesterol were a problem) and related disease processes is a colossal myth—and we’re not talking the sweet Cinderella kind of fairy tale, but instead the dark and twisted Brothers Grimm kind.
I’ll share more about the grievous errors of the heart-fat hypothesis in Chapter 8. Here’s a preview: The experts and policy makers got it categorically wrong. Fat is not, and never was, the bad guy. Fat in its naturally occurring form, and eaten without carbs, does miraculous things for our bodies and brains. But man-made fats, including refined, hydrogenated, and interesterified vegetable and seed oils, plus the carbohydrates we now consume in vast and unnatural excess with dietary fats, are a different story. They are the villains that cause life-threatening diseases and illnesses.
The Primal Fat Burner Plan will guide you to eat more of the macronutrient that ultimately did the most to help our species survive and evolve: quality, natural, unadulterated fats from quality, unadulterated animals and a few certain plant foods (tropical oils, some nuts, avocados, and olives). And it will help you eat much less of the macronutrient that has caused so much unnecessary and unnatural suffering: carbohydrates from sugars and starches.
Our radical new reliance on foods we did not evolve to eat is taking a massive toll on our health. Grains and legumes, as well as commercial dairy (and for many people raw dairy, too) have “antigenic” (i.e., anti-genome, or anti-body) properties that can cause the body to fight them as if they are unwanted invaders, creating rampant inflammation. Every single time we hybridize grain, we create an average of 5 percent new proteins that our genome has never seen before and doesn’t know how to recognize. Collectively, our inflammatory response to many post-agricultural foods—and this includes, but is certainly not limited to, gluten-containing grains—is a growing reality. In addition, we are dealing with genetically modified (GMO) foods that irritate and inflame the body in ways that we don’t yet even fully understand.
The inflammatory influence of antigenic foods is associated with an epidemic of autoimmune disease,14 including Hashimoto’s disease, rheumatoid arthritis, autism, and multiple sclerosis (among so many others), as well as psychiatric disorders such as depression, anxiety, attentional disorders, bipolar disorder, and even Alzheimer’s disease.15 They are also linked to obesity and weight gain and to an unprecedented occurrence of chronic pain in young children and adolescents.16 These foods can even damage or impair the gut’s ability to absorb nutrients from food, so that we get even fewer nutrients from already compromised food sources.
In the Primal Fat Burner Plan, you will remove the most common antigenic and irritating foods and focus on eating foods to which we are genetically better adapted. This single step alone carries massive potential for reversing suffering. (You can read more about autoimmune conditions in Chapter 8.) Don’t worry about being hungry: you will be eating plenty of nutrient-dense foods to provide for all your needs. Cravings will become mostly a thing of the past.
The catastrophe that agriculture unleashed affected not just human bodies but also the environment. Count among the harsh costs of agriculture the following: the decimation of soils and ecosystem diversity, erosion that depleted soil further and altered landscapes, and the loss of innumerable healthy watersheds, leading to widespread desertification across close to two-thirds of our planet’s landmass today. Factor in soil-depleting pesticides and chemicals, the development of mass feedlot operations that raise animals in unnatural, unhealthy, and inhumane ways, the widespread use of genetically modified cattle feed and human foods, and the fact that rapacious corporate interests have simply hijacked vast amounts of human food production (and laws governing it), and you end up with the troubling reality that much of the food people eat today is quite different, nutritionally speaking (if it is even definable as food any longer), from the real food of yesteryear.
The unprecedented deterioration of the quality of our soil, air, water, and food supply has led to a startling reduction of available micronutrient density.17 It is an unfortunate paradox: with such an abundance of food available, we are increasingly less well nourished. This is not merely an inconvenience, as it has very serious consequences for our day-to-day vitality, to our resistance to disease, and ultimately, to the robustness of our genome.
As far back as 1936, the United States Senate stated, “The alarming fact is that foods . . . now being raised on millions of acres of land . . . no longer contain enough of certain vitamins and minerals. We cannot get all our daily essential nutrients from the food we grow and eat.”18 That was just a teaser: fast-forward to the start of the twenty-first century, and research showed you would need to eat ten servings of spinach today to get the same level of minerals you would have gotten from just a single serving about fifty years ago.19 (Spinach is an extreme example, but not completely an outlier.) The National Academy of Sciences issued an alert in 2001 stating that it now takes twice as many vegetables to get the daily requirement of many nutrients than previously thought.20
Our modern practice of constant and intensive farming, combined with widespread use of pesticides and herbicides, has left our precious topsoil greatly weakened; it simply cannot feed the same level of nutrients to the plants, and therefore to us. Hybridization of plants has caused declines in nutritional value and increases in antigenicity. Food is picked days or weeks before it is fully ripe or ready, so that it can be shipped to consumers. Sometimes it is sprayed with preservatives and still called “organic.” Even organic produce is not always significantly better if grown by massive industrial farming operations in depleted soils before traveling long distances to consumers.
And that’s just talking about the plant foods. The fat and nutritional profile of animal-source foods has changed so much that I recommend that you eat meat from free-roaming game and livestock that exclusively eat fresh grass outside in the fresh air and sun (what I call exclusively pasture-raised, or grass-fed AND grass-finished as the phrase “grass-fed” is now usually a catchall for “grass-fed and then grain-finished”). This meat is radically different from that of feedlot or factory-farmed animals that are contained and given agricultural feed for part or all of their lives. Fully pasture-raised animals are also the most unlikely kind to harbor pathogens, such as dangerous and sometimes deadly acid-resistant E. coli.21 But only about 3 percent of beef sold in the United States is 100% grass-fed and grass-finished. That means the majority of meat eaten today is essentially degraded in nutrition and higher in risk-increasing anti-nutrients. Please avoid buying or consuming grain-fed or feedlot meat wherever possible.
Through the unnatural ways we grow and raise our food today, we have created a perfect storm of malnourishment. According to the World Health Organization, at least 30 percent of the world’s population is suffering from iron deficiency anemia, and at least half of us are deficient in vitamin D, a critical fat-soluble nutrient. In fact, malnutrition has become the “new normal” and now affects a third of humanity, according to a study that warns of the devastating human and economic toll of undernutrition and obesity. The newly released 2016 Global Nutrition Report states unambiguously that “every country is facing a serious public health challenge from malnutrition.”22
It’s extremely common for people following all kinds of diets (including very-well-intentioned, plant-filled diets) to be deficient in most of the fat-soluble nutrients as well as minerals such as magnesium, iodine, and important B vitamins such as choline and B12, which are essential for health, brain function and development, and overall wellness—not to mention deficiencies in the omega-3 fats EPA and DHA. We don’t even fully know the extent of the decreases in other vitally important natural compounds such as natural folic acid, flavonoids, and other phytonutrients, because they were not measured in the past.
One effect of this nutritional starvation is obesity, paradoxical though it may seem. If the body is short on key nutrients that it needs in order to function, you may be compelled to keep eating, unconsciously seeking what is nutritionally missing. Your constant appetite frequently drives you toward “empty calories”—high-calorie foods with very little nutritional value. The result is a double negative; you come to weigh more and more over time, and your body is starved of nutrients that could help your metabolism work at its best and keep your immune system resilient.
In Part Four I will show you affordable ways to find meat that is raised in such a way that it has its intended nutritional profile and how to obtain fully organic vegetables from better soils. You will also learn to make cultured vegetables to provide key nutrients that other foods cannot offer.
We need abundant fat-soluble nutrients from quality animal-sourced foods, along with plentiful antioxidants and phytonutrients from healthfully raised plants, more than ever today in order to resist toxic stressors and detoxify from them. Virtually everything we consume or put on our bodies every single day contains compromising chemicals. That’s an unprecedented burden for our primal bodies to bear. We need large servings of leafy greens and other non-starchy vegetables, as well as cultured vegetables, to fortify ourselves against environmental toxicity, radioactive fallout contaminants, pollution from electrical and magnetic fields (EMFs), and antibiotic-resistant superbugs. We need unadulterated foods from the purest sources possible. This means avoiding irradiated, chemically treated, and genetically modified foods as much as we can, supporting our local farmers and those raising animal foods ethically and sustainably.
If you’ve been reading closely, you may be wondering why I have not mentioned seafood more often as a source of key nutrients. As of this writing, I am far too concerned about contamination levels from methylmercury, PCBs, disastrous oil spills such as that in the Gulf of Mexico (and the chemicals used in their cleanup), and innumerable other toxins, along with the current serious and growing threat of ocean radiation (from the still active Fukushima nuclear disaster), to condone significant seafood consumption. After painstaking research, I have arrived at the disturbing conclusion that seafood caught in the Northern Hemisphere may in fact no longer be safe. I am aware this commentary is something of an outlier and an unpopular one in the nutritional world today. It is a subject blatantly ignored by the corporate media. But from a purely rational, scientific perspective, fish eating currently has a big question mark over its head. But if you truly love seafood, seek out products from comparatively clean and safe sources (see “Nourishing Resources” on page 285).
In Part Four, you will find a balanced approach to animal-sourced foods based on moderate portions of meat, some eggs, and small and occasional (and optional) portions of quality fish. You will also enjoy plenty of foods that support your detoxification system, including lots of vegetables (cultured and otherwise), such as cruciferous ones loaded with anti-cancer indoles and glucosinolates, as well as certain kinds of sprouts, for their fresh, delicious taste and cleansing effects.
The way we relate to food psychologically and emotionally is another change from our evolutionary history. With day-to-day survival no longer at stake for the majority of us, and abundant food supplies fairly cheap, food has morphed away from its original purpose—sheer sustenance and quality nourishment—and has instead become a mere source of entertainment and comfort, and a way of filling our personal voids. The entire meaning of food has expanded, and as a result many gaps (or would that be booby traps?) have appeared, all too easy to fall into. Never before in our evolutionary history have we expected meals to be novel, convenient, and titillating. None of these things is entirely negative, but these expectations very often get in the way of making good choices. How often has someone subverted your nutritional goals by admonishing you to “live a little” and indulge in whatever dessert they like best? Emotion and rationalization can make all kinds of trigger foods or sabotaging foods momentarily acceptable!
As a clinical nutritionist, I advise clients to hold on to a bigger-picture perspective: is living about a getting a brief high from a fleeting indulgence, or is it about enjoying ongoing energy, clarity, and real symptom-free health because you made consistent, quality choices that actually support the health of your body and brain? And when it comes to the catchphrase “everything in moderation,” by what (or whose) standard might the term moderation be defined . . . or rationalized? Who today can afford (much less enjoy) “moderate” inflammation, endocrine disruption, health, immune dysfunction, or health compromise?
Using food emotionally becomes even more dangerous in conjunction with stress—especially the chronic stress that is a norm for virtually everyone today, and which in and of itself leads to its own state of dysregulation. Blood sugar spikes from sugary or starchy meals, the resultant floods of insulin, and the constant high levels of cortisol from an overactivated fight-or-flight mechanism generate frequent, rapid surges and crashes that are inflammatory and anxiety-producing—causing more stress! All of this helps our sugar-burning metabolism to become even more firmly established, and makes our cravings for sugar (to deal with stress) even stronger.
Shifting to a principled primal fat-burning diet is supportive in multiple ways. You feel more satiated and more clear-thinking as you eat, able to automatically make better food choices along the way because your eating is no longer propelled by an uncontrollable appetite or cravings. An effective state of ketosis also stabilizes your nervous system and clears your emotional lens, allowing you to handle stress better, free of the constant overarousal of the nervous system. When irritating and antigenic foods are removed as well, this stable state typically gets even better.
And by the way, good, nourishing food full of healthy natural fat is titillating and extremely enjoyable to eat—try drizzling duck fat on your veggies or sinking a spoon into a rich coconut curry and tell me that it isn’t! Primal Fat Burner helps you to make more consistently conscious, wise choices about the food you put inside your living matrix. It can help shift even a hardened carb- and junk-eating habit.
Today’s challenges to health and longevity can seem complex and overwhelming. The health of Americans is among the most compromised of any industrialized nation. Just a few short years ago the United States ranked twenty-sixth for life expectancy among industrialized nations, right behind Slovenia.23 Now the United States spends much more on health care per capita than any other nation in the world, and yet today we rank an even more abysmal thirty-fourth in longevity! Yep—now we’re tied with Costa Rica, which spends one-tenth of what we spend on health care per capita. Why are costs so much lower there? Maybe it’s because the health care (read: disease management) industry in the United States prioritizes profits over health. The estimated annual economic cost to the US health care system of dealing with obesity and its related metabolic conditions alone has ranged from $215 billion to $300 billion in 201124, 25—and the cost is expected to double by the year 2030.26
And all of this is occurring despite the fact that enlightening new science is emerging every single day about the negative impacts of a carbohydrate-laden diet and the health-promoting potential of fats, along with many other areas of cutting-edge research into nutrition, disease, and longevity. Why hasn’t this new information prompted a revolution and caused the masses to take back their health? How could something so simple as changing the food on our plates, a real choice that can save lives and prevent so much suffering and heartache, not have taken deeper root? Have our brains really shrunk so far or been so compromised by poor nutrition that the truth and reason cannot sink in, or are we too depressed (or addicted to nutrient-devoid sources of culinary entertainment) to act? Maybe so. But I’m here to tell you there is hope! Optimizing your nutrition still has the potential to ignite better thinking and decisive action.
As I noted earlier, the number one cause of bankruptcy in the United States is a serious medical diagnosis such as cancer, diabetes, chronic illness, or other potentially life-threatening conditions.27 It doesn’t matter whether you have money or not, whether you are a Fortune 500 executive or flipping burgers at McDonald’s, or whether you have great insurance or no insurance. The cost of being diagnosed with a serious illness—both the cost to your savings and the cost to your quality of life—is something that you cannot afford.
It’s time to go against the grain (pun intended) of what our well-meaning but otherwise misguided neighbors, coworkers, family, and friends are eating and set a different example. Wouldn’t it be better to see and treat food as the source of our fuller potential and fight consciously for our health by forging our own self-determined and enlightened path forward through today’s unforgiving health landscape? (That’s what Primal Man and Primal Woman would do, after all!)
The famous physicist Max Planck once said, “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” To paraphrase this, he is basically saying that science typically advances one funeral at a time.
We must be the new generation and awaken to new science. We must be willing to construct a new paradigm of health that makes sound scientific and evolutionary sense. It is not nearly as difficult as it sounds if we take control of what we can. We do this by ensuring that our bodies receive everything they need in order to be maximally resilient, and by avoiding unnecessary compromise wherever possible. The human body is miraculously capable of generating its own health and well-being, as well as (at times) even compensating for setbacks. When we maximize quality nutrients in alignment with our genetic compatibilities, we improve our odds of optimizing our health. So dig into that wilder, more primal urge within you to do things differently and challenge the norm—to evolve and discover a new, better way of being. Getting a little primal will pay off in more ways than you might imagine.