why do i recommend paleo for most of my patients?

Start talking about politics,guns,religion, or rodent hunting, and people can get a bit worked up.  The same thing could be said for diets.  Many people have found a way of eating that they believe works for them, and don’t want to hear about anything else.  Great.  If this is you, you can stop reading right now and go back to whatever you were doing.  However, for many of you, the issue of what to eat is the elephant in the corner that spends its days taunting you.  Although the Vegan crowd will vehemently disagree with me, if you have any sort of chronic health problem, any situation where chronic pain is an issue, or you struggle to get to or maintain a healthy weight, it might be in your best interest to take the few minutes and read this post.   The number one reason that I recommend the PALEO DIET for most people in these different boats is that it controls blood sugar like nothing else I’ve ever seen.

If you have spent significant time on my website, you may have picked up on the fact that most disease processes start with an inability of people to control their blood sugar —- regardless of their readings.  We shouldn’t be surprised.  Here in America, we are being buried underneath a mountain of SUGAR.  When you spend as much time as I do combing through peer-reviewed literature, you start to see a pattern —- almost every disease you can name has serious ties to UNCONTROLLED BLOOD SUGAR.  This is true even for those who do not have full-blown Diabetes (HERE).  The Paleo Diet is so effective because nothing is better at helping you control your blood sugar.  But that’s not all.  The Paleo Diet cuts the most potentially reactive foods from your diet so that your Immune System cannot make antibodies against them. 

The two most common foods that would fall into the “reactive” category are easy to name.  Wheat (GLUTEN) and dairy.  For many reasons (HERE are a few of them), today’s foods (particularly true of with grains) are very different from the foods that were eaten by our great grandparents.  Today, nearly everything is pasteurized, homogenized, GMO’ed, loaded with ANTIBIOTICS and HORMONES; and that’s just for starters.  The Blood Sugar / Gluten connection has been shown to be an important factor in virtually all AUTOIMMUNE DISEASES (HERE is a list), ALZHEIMER’S DISEASE, PARKINSON’S DISEASE, NEUROPATHY, MIGRAINE HEADACHES, DEPRESSION, Seizures, MULTIPLE SCLEROSIS, and a host of other Neuro-degenerative Diseases.  If you want to begin understanding how all of this works together, just take a moment to read THIS POST. 

Another way that the Paleo Diet helps the three specific problems mentioned at the top of the page is that this diet does not feed the bacteria or viruses that are contributing to the acute illnesses that we treat with antibiotics (DYSBIOSIS).  And in case you have not heard, chronic viral and / or bacterial infections are being touted as a causal factor in a wide variety of chronic disease processes.  The Paleo Diet helps shut down Dysbiotic overgrowths of pathogenic bacteria, while providing a food source for the good bacteria.  This is a much bigger deal than you might have realized.  Not only is 80% of your entire Immune System found in the gut (HERE), it has many other functions as well (HERE).   Lean more about GUT HEALTH and solving LEAKY GUT SYNDROME by following the links.  But Paleo will do more than that.

Because the Paleo Diet is a vegetation-based diet, it has the ability to provide detox power to your system on a daily basis.  The problems related to chemical toxicity as well as ESTROGEN DOMINANCE will be helped by a Paleo Diet just because it provides the raw materials to restore / refurbish the P-450 Cytochrome System (HERE).  This is the way that your body gets rid of all chemicals, whether it is DRUGS (pushed or prescribed), Estrogen or synthetic estrogens, MSG, ASPARTAME, pesticides, herbicides, or heaven-only-knows what else. 

The cool thing about the Paleo Diet is that it calms down and sometimes c _ _ _ _ (even if it does so, the FDA says that I could never use the word “cures” here) INFLAMMATORY PROCESSES that run rampant throughout the body.   As I have contended before, I am not sure that one in a thousand people (many healthcare providers included) really understand what Inflammation is, or its widespread effects on health.  Although things like Gluten, Uncontrolled Blood Sugar, TRANS FATS, and a whole host of others may get the credit, they do their dirty work via the process we call Inflammation.  If you are chronically ill, chronically sick, or chronically OVERWEIGHT, you need to understand Inflammation.

I hear person after person tell me that they can’t get healthy because they are too sick (or fat) to exercise.  Forget the exercise for now.  Health is probably at least 90% diet.  Start eating the right way and watch your health dramatically improve — even without exercise!  If you want to get a better picture of the way that Gluten and Blood Sugar are related to sickness and disease in general, just follow THIS LINK.