The Paleo Why-It
on February 03, 2012
It’s no secret that the ancestral health community is full of punsters, but I think I just took the steak with that one. I’d say that I was on a roll except I don’t eat ‘em. It’s not that I’m against baked goods or anything—I happen to love bake-un, as a matter of fat. Wait, what was the point of this post again?
Oh, right! I wanted to talk about the real reason why I’m working so hard to optimize my diet, and how those reasons have changed over the past year or so. As many of you know by now, I started looking for answers in April/May of 2010 because of my recurring skin issues. When I was in college, I wrote it off as stress-related, which it surely was in part, but was left quite befuddled in the first half of 2010 when my stress-free life as a well-paid software engineer didn’t actually fix the issue. In fact, things got worse in many respects. What happened?
After I settled down in Austin in mid-2009 and got used to providing my own food, I really felt empowered to make the right choices. At the time, it was obvious to me what the “right” choices were: I would just follow the expert-assembled food pyramid! I therefore proceeded to build my base around the two things that I now know to really bother me (in the autoimmune sense): wheat and dairy. In my implementation, I was eating—uncontrollably eating, that is—one combination that I thought was supposed to do me good: knäckebröd med smör och ost. Or in words you might actually recognize, Wasa crackers with butter and cheese. At first I believed myself to be in heaven (“healthy stuff is this good?”), but the persistent acne and skin inflammation didn’t seem right. Nor did the daily 2 pm coma.
But let’s fast-forward to the past few months, where I have found myself in the next state of diet enlightenment: revelry in an ability to thrive. Not cheating is pretty easy when you’re not at a disadvantage in any way. Besides having healed the most obvious physical blemishes, not having oily skin anymore is nice. Not getting sunburns is nice too. Not needing a princess hygiene kit is super sweet. Having a six pack that refuses to go away is quite ok once you get used to it. Being mentally alert the entire day is empowering. Being in a good mood all the time is infectious. Having health-conscious and active friends who think crossing rivers and climbing trees is a good way to spend the afternoon is exciting. And realizing that what I have (i.e. good health) is considered a luxury in today’s society is pretty ego-boosting.
Yet I feel myself coming off this high recently and settling behind a more nuanced motivation for my diet. What is there beyond feeling so enabled in life for the first time? I think there is a clear answer to that, but I hesitate because I fear that I may be speaking too naively on a subject I have no experience in. But let me chance this one thought: when us 20-somethings in the ancestral health community say that we are “optimizing” our diets, I think all of us mean that we intend to have beautiful babies. I suspect that this is the case because the “primitive” peoples that Weston Price visited all said basically the same thing when they were asked why they eat the way they do. And we’ve all read his book, right?
When you think about the fertility problems many in our generation are experiencing as well as the rise in disorders like autism and combine it with potential epigenetic effects, I don’t think we should take chances with our future children’s health. Therefore, it’s no surprise that so many paleos try really hard to improve not just their diets but also their lifestyles and environments. Humans have always been about adapting their environments to themselves, not the other way around. It strikes me as silly, then, that the vast majority of us are accepting the current environment as a given and simply hoping that the next generation will somehow adapt to it. I suppose it would be ideal if one could plop down a baby tomorrow that could be fueled by industrial food with no adverse effects, but we all know that it can’t happen in one or two generations, and not without some brutal natural selection. Indeed, because we can no longer plead ignorance about the effects of an industrialized food supply as the previous generation could, it kind of forces our hand. So if you’ve already read this far, you probably realize that you don’t really have a choice—what you have instead is a responsibility.
