The Healthiest Food Pyramid To Follow – Do You Know Which One?
The food pyramid has been the foundation for nutritional advice from health professionals to the average Joe, but is it really he foundation for a healthy diet? The first food pyramid came out in 1992, with the basic advice of consuming a high carbohydrate low fat diet. Within a short period after the food pyramid was introduced, an increasing amount of research began to indicate that the food pyramid was actually incorrect nutritional education to the world.
The reality was, the 1992 food pyramid over simplified the needs of the human body. Even nutritionists knew that good fats, such as omega3’s where important for optimal health, yet it still appeared at the top of the food pyramid with the recommendation that less of essential fats is better for you.
The real reason behind this recommendation was the concern over high cholesterol, which has been associated with a high risk of heart disease. As a basic recommendation to reduce the number of people being diagnosed with high cholesterol levels, the advice was to lower their saturated fat intake, which is not only found in some oils, but the paleo recipe favorite red meat; which is the human bodies desired source of protein, so it also appeared further up in the food pyramid.
When 1990 came around, research began indicating that fat is indeed important for the healthy function of the human body, as a result, in 2005 a new food pyramid was released. The main difference within the food pyramid was the addition of daily exercise, a lower recommendation of pasta, breads and cereals and the higher importance placed on including fat within the diet. In addition, an internet website was designed to provide a food pyramid recommendation for your personal age, gender and physical activity levels. Although this provided improvements upon the previous 1992 pyramid, it still placed a high emphasis on the importance of cereals, breads and pasta and dairy; these two food sources are extremely detrimental towards our health.
The paleo diet is basic; eat what was available to the hunter gatherer. To simplify this further, eat meat (chicken, beef, etc), fish and seafood, fruits and berries, vegetables, nuts and seeds to create your healthy diet recipes. Studies has shown that our hunter gatherer ancestors consumed an energy source in a ratio of 65% meat (and fat) and 35% plants, including berries, fruits and plant roots and leaves.
These foods are what our bodies have been created to eat and digest for 50 thousand years, these food sources are available to us without the need to cook or process them. Fresh animal meat, fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds and plants have been our main food source since day one, even before we knew how to create a fire. These are the foods our body strives for, If our bodies where meant to live healthy on a diet full of artificial sugars and chemicals, then mother nature would have provided it to us in our food sources, mother nature didn’t decide to wait thousands of years for our modern technology to be superior enough to alter food sources, for them to suddenly be healthy for us.
Tags: diet, health, nutrition, paleo diet