Today I want to talk about healthy food. "Healthy" food.

I'm sure a lot of people have fallen into using the term because if someone asks you what your diet is about you might just say that you're trying to eat "healthier" and this way of speaking ends up portraying certain foods as healthy and others as unhealthy. I do believe there is such a thing as an unhealthy food, but I'm not so sure healthy could accurately describe any food. I don't think pomegranates or blueberries are any healthier than potatoes or steak.

When you can, it's always a good idea to cross reference other examples of species. Was there food that could be considered healthy for people 200 years ago? Or 1000 years ago? Or how about for moose or squirrels?

I think the answer lies with Weston A. Price. He went around the world to find out what was going wrong with peoples' teeth and what he found out was that people who weren't trying were the ones that had no trouble. They just ate the food that was available to them. They lived in an unaltered environment. The idea of certain food being healthy does have some relevance because it seems that the majority of food we have available to us (if not all of it) isn't as nature intended. The extent that food can even be healthy is simply our body's ability to utilize it. And something having Vitamin K or Omega 3 fat is really only healthy in the context that members of our society are deficient in those micronutrients. So it's not that the food is healthy, but that it fills an unsatisfied need for the majority.

I think that there are certainly trends in nutrition. When low-fat hit the scene, it had a lot of power. We look back and it seems like a plot to cause a lot of chronic illness and increase medical costs... or profits... or... whatever. But I think the reason it caught on was because it worked. It probably solved the majority of health issues that were happening at the time. And through some combination of people spending many years on low fat diets and the alteration in our food supply to cater to the low fat appeal we have ended up in a pretty lousy state.

That's why the Paleo diet seems to work so effectively. But not for everyone. Because it's a remedy for the symptoms of a typical diet in a typical body. And as time has gone on and we've been able to see what happens when people go on a Paleo diet for a while we see that it solves a lot of problems but actually causes some new ones. Paleo has been redefined now to include more carbohydrates but originally it was basically a natural foods lower carbohydrate diet. As people have run into problems which generally equate to carbohydrate deficiency, they have dropped the idea that Paleo means low-carb and instead you should titrate carbohydrates to the necessary point. This is the Paleo diet now, but let's not pretend that it's always been that way.

And that explains why they are always coming out with new diets and why "we can't figure out the right diet." Because there isn't one. There are remedies for the ruts that we get into, but there really isn't going to be a solution in the modern world. And whether a natural environment provides for a perfectly healthy diet or not is a mystery as well. That's why the Paleo diet is so great, because it was founded through skepticism. And that means that even the people that follow it will be skeptical enough to reform their opinion as changes are needed. And there seems to have been a Zeitgeist the past few months that you really do need to eat more carbohydrates.

And who knows if our problems are even related to our food supply. Now we are finding out that there are estrogenic agents in plastics. At the very least it could just mean you shouldn't store your food in tupperware or heat it up in the microwave. At the most... well... there are people that are heavily anti-estrogen and they think it is implicated in pretty much all health problems we face.