What Should I Eat?

I’m sure Allan is not the only one with questions about this crazy 80/10/10 diet we are on, so while sit here sipping a tasty banana/strawberry/peach smoothie, I’ll see if I can sort some of this out.

I, for one, am not mortgaging the family farm to buy Dr. Graham’s snake oil—just yet. I am willing to give it a try for a month and see if I can figure out where he is coming from.

As far as my comments yesterday about eating fruits because they make our mouths water, let me see if I can develop that idea by quoting Dr Graham in The 80/10/10 Diet.

How does one determine the correct food for any given creature? Let us suppose that you were given a baby animal and you had no idea what it was or what it was supposed to eat. Perhaps it was a gift from a foreign land. How would you know what to feed it?

The answer is relatively simple. All you would have to do is offer the creature different types of foods in their whole, natural state. That which it was designed for, it would eat. It would likely ignore all the other items, not even considering them as food. I have done this successfully with orphaned animals that I have saved.

The same technique would work with a human child. Put the child in a room with a lamb and a banana. Sit back and watch to see which he plays with and which he eats. We can be fairly sure of the outcome. Try again with fats versus fruits by offering a choice of (natural, raw, unsalted) nuts, seeds, avocadoes or olives on the one hand and any fresh sweet fruit on the other. Again we can safely predict that the child will choose the sweet fruit.

Crazy? Or, brilliant? He continues…

Our premise is that Nature served us correctly to start with. We recognize that we thrived and attained our high station, and that what was right for us then is still right for us now, as we are structurally and physiologically the same as we were during most of our sojourn as humans in nature. It is logical that, within our modern context, we can supply ourselves with natural foods.

If you can stomach that premise, then his nature-based, if-the-shoe-tastes-right-wear-it theory will lead you to the conclusion that we should be eating fruit.

(Not only that, he gives scientific evidence against eating just about every food that is not a fruit. But, I’ll save those topics for another day.)

Can we figure out what we should eat based on what we would forage for in the forest? It seems logical to do that with animals. I don’t give my dog the same food I would give a horse. Not only would she refuse it, but it would not work in her system.

I can’t argue with Allan’s comment that we are highly adaptable as a species. We are certainly capable of surviving on a huge range of foods, from natural to synthetic. But, what if we wanted to determine the correct food for us? Not just food that would help us survive, but food on which we can thrive? To me, natural seems the way to go, and Dr. Graham might be on to something. If we went back to simple, whole, natural foods, what would our health be like? What would our lives be like?