Paleo eating (part three)

This week, I’m doing a series on the paleo diet, which is a very short-hand way of describing the way I eat at the moment.

On Monday, I gave a brief description of the paleo diet and where you can find more resources. On Tuesday, I listed some of my favourite paleo meals that Anna and I have cooked over the last couple of months.

This post is just a collection of my rants and raves about various different things that really grab me when it comes to the paleo diet and food in general. Enjoy.

What I usually say when asked about my diet…

Most of the time, when asked about my diet, I talk about my rule of thumb for healthy and unhealthy foods, which is that if a caveman ate it then I can probably eat it. This is popularly known as the paleo diet, or Palaeolithic diet.

This doesn’t always go down well with people, for some reason, probably because they don’t have to use their imaginations very much where I work. Just for them, I came up with the idea that there are two kinds of food:

real foods; and
fake foods.

Real foods and fake foods

For those of my colleagues who gave up using their imagination when they left school, I came up with another rule of thumb. My fall-back rule of thumb is that if it’s a real food, then I can probably eat it. If it’s a fake food then I probably shouldn’t.

It’s intended to capture broadly the same foods as the paleo diet but it’s probably a bit less strict. This is actually no bad thing since it’s usually the same people who can’t cope with imagining cavemen who can’t imagine living life without their coca-cola and croissants anyway.

I came up with the idea of real versus fake foods when I was watching this great film by Jim Jarmusch called Ghost Dog. The film stars Forest Whittaker as a modern-day samurai who carries out assassinations for his mobster boss in payment of an old life debt (yes, OK, it’s probably a guy-film). Forest is a great actor and he invests a deep melancholy into the character, which is only lightened by occasional visits to a friend, who owns an ice-cream van.

One day, his friend greets him with excitement, telling him that there was a programme on the radio that morning, extolling the virtues of ice-cream and expounding its health benefits.

“It’s fantastic”, he shouts, “they say ice-cream’s great for your health. It’s exactly like food.”

For some reason, that really stuck in my head. Like food. Not actually food but like food.

In other words, fake food.

Fake foods

Fake foods often start out life as real foods but are then processed. Processed is a strange word that doesn’t really tell you very much. It tells you that someone, somewhere has gone to the trouble of putting the real food through a process.

In practice, processing usually means that sugar is added in some quantities. Obviously, colours and preservatives are typically added, which aren’t renowned for being hugely healthy, but it’s the sugar that’s the rogue agent.

What’s wrong with sugar?

Are you kidding me? Sugar is evil. Don’t believe me? Check out this list of 146 reasons why sugar is ruining your health. If you’re really interested, it cites scientific references at the bottom. By the time I got to the bottom, I figured that it might have been easier to list the ailments that sugar didn’t cause.

And if the amount of sugar wasn’t bad enough in processed foods, you should see the amount they put in candy.

Candy? Don’t you mean chocolate?

Don’t get me started. This is a really easy way to wind me up.

Yes I know I’m British but I use the word candy advisedly. What we call “chocolate” in this country contains about as much chocolate as I do. And no, that’s not an invitation to open me up to find out!

Sometimes, I get so fed up of people at work telling me how much they love chocolate and couldn’t give it up and that’s why they can’t lose weight, I bring some 90% cocoa solids chocolate in for them to try. It’s at that point that they discover that the real taste of chocolate is quite a bitter flavour and that they’re not really a “chocoholic” but a “sugarholic”.

And for the record, the taste of real chocolate is amazing. But you need to get used to it. A bit like proper beer, really.

And with that, I think I need a drink. Cheers.

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