For decades I have always believed that cavemen had the best diet as refined carbs such as bread, rice and pasta were not around at that time and therefore they were able to eat a lot more healthily and as nature intended.
I had no idea that anybody else agreed with my belief, let alone that there was actually a name for such a diet (what with being brought up in a Nigerian household in South London, with such foods as rice and yam being part of the staple diet.
My dear mother would often take offence when I would decline her jollof rice or pounded yam in favour of a steak and salad by retorting that if this caveman diet that I believed to be so healthy was any good, then why did they all die out...
?) so it was absolutely amazing to find out some years later whilst training to be a personal trainer that such a diet actually existed today.
What I was thinking for so many years about a caveman diet did make sense! The Paleolithic - or Paleo for short - diet is the caveman diet.
It consists of all that you can imagine cavemen basically ate when they were running around, catching dinosaurs to eat.
(Which coincidently must have been a workout in itself.
Those guys must have looked fit!) So what does this caveman diet consist of? We're talking nuts, berries, fruit, vegetables, fish and, of course, meat.
Nature's food and nothing else.
Nothing added, processed or refined.
Sounds perfect to me.
Why anyone would think that tampering with this healthy diet by adding refined carbohydrates to the formula would be a good idea is truly beyond me as it has long been proven that this is far from the case.
It is now widely acknowledged that those who consume high levels of carbohydrates within their diets are more likely to suffer from high cholesterol and sugar levels, as well as diabetes, obesity and heart disease.
All problematic symptoms that were non existent prior to mankind's introduction to, and unfortunate interest in, refined carbs.
This is an absolute fact that I am in no doubt of.
Just as I firmly believe that microwaves should be banned from the face of the earth and are a contributory cause of such major illnesses such as cancer...
but that's another blog topic for another day - which I will definitely elaborate on - as how anyone can feel safe about eating anything that has supposedly cooked through from frozen in less time than it takes to put on false eyelashes, all through the power of radiation, is totally off their heads and needs to be educated and saved.
Especially if they are also 'nuking' a meal in a microwave that basically consists of nothing more than refined carbohydrates.
Realise that refined carbs have not been around for that long in the bigger perspective of how long mankind has been on this earth.
The increase in the intake of carbohydrates has only really happened since the introduction of agriculture and even more recently, it's only been within the past century that refined carbohydrates have become more and more prevalent within the Western world's diet.
This correlates highly with the increase in the modern diseases previously mentioned and it would be foolish to ignore.