An Ethical Tangent

Kathryn and Tavis were over for dinner last night. While Kathryn remains a committed vegetarian, Travis appreciates being a carnivore for one night. We had steak that I had barbequed.

Half way through my steak, listening to Kathryn talk about the ethics of eating factory made meat, and worrying about my health, I had another realization. There's got to be a way to incorporate 90% of the healthy food choices I've discovered, and remain more-or-less a vegetarian.

I looked on-line and, sure enough, there were lots of people out there with the same concerns, albeit mostly ethical. It looks like it's possible to have a "mostly paleolithic" diet (the paleo diet is the closest I've seen that comes to the ideal) if you were a vegetarian and were willing to incorporate eggs and fish. I'm willing to do that - to tell the truth the whole beef thing doesn't do much for me taste wise anymore.

So the food choices now, to obtain the 90% benefit, are:

• PROTEIN: Eggs, fish
• OILS AND FATS: Butter, Olive Oil
• FRUITS AND VEGETABLE: Everything except starchy vegetables (potatoes), easy on high sugar fruit (Bananas, Apples)
• NUTS AND LEGUMES: Most Nuts (Almonds, Cashews), No Legumes (Peanut Butter)
• GRAINS: White Rice, Quinoa
• DAIRY: Organic/Grass Fed Butter, Full Fat Greek Yogurt
• SWEETENERS: Splenda occasionally 

I'm hoping that with this change I'll feel better about my karma as well as better about my health.

Many who've learned about my new eating plan (I won't say diet, because that sounds so temporary) says "it's just like Atkins" - and much of it is. Actually, he's been redeemed quite a bit since his death. At any rate, I found this simple diagram that explains the difference between Atkins and Paleo from one of the blogs I checked out:

As you can see, Paleo incorporates most of Atkins, but doesn't allow/recommend any kind of sugar - real or fake. And it doesn't allow "low carb" processed food and grains like Atkins does - although I may just find that that's a part of my diet I don't want to give up (it's really hard when you crave Multi-Grain Cheerios at 8pm - although that's hardly low-carb). I'll read more to find out what the real health consequences of this are.

An interesting side-effect in all this is that I've lost about 7lbs in the last 10 days eating this way (leaving out the grains, the potatoes and the sugar). Not that I need to lose the weight, or even that that was some kind of benefit, but interesting nonetheless.

PS: Over the last week I've spent considerable time reading as much as I can about this, looking for contrarian positions on this whole paleo diet thing. I've yet to come up with anything that contradicts the research I found in Good Calories, Bad Calories, and Why We Get Fat. I'd recommend reading Why We Get Fat for a good overview of all the science in the first book - it's really inexpensive and you can download it onto whatever reader you use (Kindle, PC, Mac, Stone Tablet).