Reading further through The Glycemic Load Diet, its becoming apparent that this doctor had begun living the Paleo Diet before it became a thing a few years after his book was published. If nuts weren’t so expensive here in Canada, it’s not a terrible diet if you have to cut something out. Certainly safer than Keto or the Atkin’s variants out there, not to mention safer than diet pills and so many of the gadgety/proprietary-food-product heavy diets that also exist.
The issue modern first-world people have is moderation. We live in a society that teaches lavish extravagance at whatever income level you are at. Live poor? Such lavishness is trips to the corner store every week. Live middle class? It’s eating out at least once a week and thinking cookies are a grocery item. Live wealthy? It’s trips to the winery and high-end foodie date nights. When this kind of thinking is considered normal, teaching moderation feels like “dieting”. Moderation doesn’t merely impact what you eat and how often or how much you eat of it. It also impacts your finances in ways that most first-world people never consider.
A third group of people exist for whom money isn’t a problem, nor is stress. They can successfully manage both and could teach you how to do it. Unfortunately, their bodies have health problems that have caused weight gain or loss. Address the problems and address the weight issue as a bonus. Many times, health-related issues can be solved with nutrition, treating food as medicine for a certain period of time. Some foods discovered around our area, when treated as medicine, actually have the same warnings and time-frames of usage as conventional medicine. They can even have side effects that must be noted, and could even interfere with other medications! As a result, using food as medicine isn’t something that should be taken lightly. Understanding what existing medications are doing and why the doctor prescribed them is helpful in putting together nutritional regimens that complement the doctor’s efforts, rather than complicate them.
God gave us the plants and animals for our food. I’ve shared verses about that over the past couple months on the publicly viewable side of my Webtalk profile that you can scroll through to read. We simply have to buck the advertising machine, buck the media machine, admit that both we and our resources are limited, and learn to live within those limitations to realize a healthier lifestyle. Some people joke that the Paleo Diet is for hunter/gatherers. You can engage with it in the grocery store, but regardless of where you get your food, it cuts out nutrition that may be necessary for someone out there.
Nutrition is not a one-size-fits-all, although many diet pushers try to say that. Diet is only part of the overall health picture. Following something like the Paleo Diet really only helps those for whom the starch group of foods have caused trouble. Not every people group has had the same level of access to starchy foods as they do now. If your ancestral heritage comes from one of those people groups, then you might benefit. If your doctor has said you are suffering gluecose-related problems and to cut out starch from your diet, give it a try. But don’t jump on the bandwagon because it’s the latest fad to shoot across your screen. The gluten-free bandwagon has made that diet far more expensive for those who desparately need it because too many people who don’t need it have driven up the supply and demand curve. I know people personally who struggle to afford what they need to survive, because too many fad adopters got on board when they should have stayed off.
Unfortunately, the doctor who wrote The Glycemic Diet engages in broadstroking as if everyone would benefit from such a diet, not just those battling some form of diabetes. This kind of behaviour encourages bandwagon hoppers because a doctor has done the encouraging. If a doctor promotes it, it must be good right? If a doctor says everyone should do it, then let’s all jump on board! Such thinking couldn’t be more wrong. Almost every diet and diet gadgety-food product out there claims to have one or more doctor endorsements. You can’t be eating every diet out there simply because a doctor said everyone should. That’s foolhardy to put it gently. What your body needs, another may find problematic. The more we realize this for ourselves, the better off many will be.