12/19/2002 04:54:30 PM|||Travis|||

I started keeping my goals in my personal diary, rather then here. It is great to be focused again on the things that I want to accomplish in my life.

Recently Jake and I have been going diet crazy, becoming more and more skeptical about what we are eating and trying to come up with an adequete description of "good health." So far, the reocurring theme that we found is that nothing is safe and that most foods are extremly problematic.

We take our diet through the evolutionary perspective. What I mean by 'evolutionary perspective' is that our bodies are essentially cave men, thrown into a modern world that includes so many things in our diet that a cave man would NOT have. Such as, bread (and that is a big one), pasta, snacks, sugar (a really important one), etc. Almost anything that has carbohydrates in it is bad.

That is not to say that you should eliminate all carbohydrates, as some nuts, berries and the occasional fruit is good. But it all must be ate with a tinge of guilt, since the cave man's fruit is radically different from the large, juicy fruit that stores sell today.

Veggies are the exception and should be the staple of all diets. They have carbohydrates that take a long time to break down, providing continous energy throughout the process. Say yes to spinach!

The ultimate diet also has lots of fat. Yes that is right, fat. NOT saturated fat, because this is just stored glucose, or stored carbohydrate (carbs eventually break down into glucose in your blood.) The good fat are poly-unsaterated, such as those fats found in nuts, fish and in certain types of oils, mainly olive oil. These should be the common in the diet, along with adequete servings of protein through chicken, turkey or some other lean meat.

Meat is really problematic because the meat of today is so much radically different from the meat of 10,000 years ago. The modern beef growing industry does something like this -- it takes cows and gets a baby. Once it is old enough, the cow is sent to the feedlot, away from the pasture where there is actual grass - good cow food. Once in the feedlot it is shoved into a pen, and fed large amounts of corn, which is hard for it to digest but since it has so many carbohydrates. The cow is extremly stressed (not a happy Californian cow, like the commercials want us to believe) because it is shoved in a pen. Ontop of all that, the cow is pumped full of growth hormones so that it can get to market size faster, and is then pumped full of anti-biotics so that it can survive all of the rampant diseases running around in feedlots.

Then the stressed, hormone pumped, antibotic cow is chopped up and placed in your burger. Yum.

Needless to say, meat is not the same as it was 10,000 years ago. It would be MUCH better to buy grassfed beef, which is where the cows are left on the pasture their whole life, and fed their veggies in the form of grass. These cows are get none of the drugs and none of the unheathy carbs that the other cows are fed.

The main problem is the fat content of all this food that we commonly eat, it is way off-balaced. In nature, a harmoneous balance exists between omega-3 and omega-6 fats. In a modern diet, that has changed to almost 10-1. Omega-3 fats are commonly found in fish, but are almost non-existent in our diet. Corn-fed beef has a ratio of 8-1, and mcdonalds has something like 30-1. This is why fish oil or Omega-3 fats are comming under the spotlight for being extremely healthy. They bring the balance back into the right direction.

The ultimate goal of course is to extend you life with a proper diet. Looking for things in common when looking at centurians (people who live for a hundred years) the results are that those who have a high tolerance for insulin live longer.

Everytime your pancreas has to inject insulin into your blood stream to counter-act something that you ate, bad things are happening in your body. The more bread, sugar, etc. that you eat, the more insulin you have to release to counter it and the more problems this causes. For example, Type-II diabetics are those people that eat sooooo unhealhily that insulin no longer even works! The resistence is so high that it is no longer effective, and the blood sugar increases in their viens.

It is said that someone with a blood glucose value of 126 is a type-II diabetic, because their insulin is no longer lowering their blood sugar within a tolerable range. But what about somone with a BG value of 125? Are they fine?

I actually have to inject insulin myself, since I have type-I diabetes ( a MUCH more serious condition, I don't even see why they call it 'diabetes'.) I now take heed each time I take a shot into my body, since i know that each unit of insulin slowly increases my resistence to insulin, and this insulin resistence is exactly what the centurians did NOT have.

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