“We found marked improvement…after advice to follow a Paleolithic [SANE] diet compared with a healthy Western diet…The study adds to the notion that healthy diets based on whole-grain cereals and low-fat dairy products are only the second best choice in the prevention and treatment of type 2 diabetes.”– S. Lindeberg, University of Lund

How do we avoid this inSANEity? We need to be pragmatic and ask: Is there any way of eating that is proven to keep folks free from obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and cardiovascular disease—aka the “diseases of civilization?”

Yes. We can eat the way we did before civilization. We can eat so much SANE food that we are too full for inSANE food.

Pre-Civilization Diet

Today’s Typical Diet

Government Recommended Diet

Unless our metabolism  completely transformed itself in the last 0.02% of our evolutionary history—the 12,000 years since we first started farming, filling it with food that it is not designed to digest will cause a clog. University of London researcher John Yudkin notes:

“For a fairly considerable [evolutionary] alteration to occur in a population, something between 1,000 and 10,000 generations [25,000 to 250,000 years] are needed…. If there have been great changes in man’s environment that occurred in a much shorter time…there are likely to be signs that man has not fully adapted, and this will probably show itself as the presence of disease.”

More simply: We did not change, but the quality of our diet did. It is making us heavy, diabetic, and sick.

“100,000 generations of humans have been hunters and gatherers; 500 generations have been [farmers]; ten [had access to modern food processing]; and only one has been exposed [to food-ish product engineering]” – S. Boyd Eaton, Emory University

A study from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas showed that our modern diet increases nearly all the risk factors for the diseases of civilization when compared to a pre-starch and sweetener diet. Similar work at the Haimoto Clinic and Duke University Medical Center has shown a more natural diet to be the best diet available for hormonal healing.In a University of Melbourne study, middle-aged Australian hunter-gatherers started out lean and free from type 2 diabetes, then switched to a diet inspired by the government’s guidelines and became overweight and type 2 diabetic. Then they reverted back to their natural diet. In only seven weeks, the tribesmen lost an average of 16.5 pounds.

The list of clinical studies proving the same results goes on. But the bottom line is, as S. Boyd Eaton from Emory University tells us:

“Following a diet comparable to the one that humans were genetically adapted to should postpone, mitigate, and in many cases prevent altogether, a host of diseases that debilitate us.”

Let’s turn now to how we can do that. How to eat more and exercise less—smarter.

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