The Right Protein
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- Your diet style must be aligned with your biology, with human physiology
- Science can now tell us exactly what our cells require to express health
- Science tells us: a diet rich in wild plants, game and fish is how humans thrive
- Protein plays a critical role in hormone balance
Your genes dictate your needs. If these needs are met, you have the greatest chance of experiencing optimal health. If these needs are not met, you will express sickness.
If you want to improve your future, know your past.
If you want to live like the healthiest humans to ever walk the earth, look to your hunter-gather ancestors. Your ancestors enjoyed a diet rich in fresh plant foods and wild game and fish. Anthropologists are now able to decipher remains found in ancient villages like a modern CSI crime scene unit. And geneticists decode our genome and read it like an owner’s manual.
You have inherited a gene that specifically requires and expects a diet rich in wild plants, game and fish. The game was wild, grass-fed, and all natural; the fish wild-caught. There was no industrialized farming, no feed lots and no antibiotic and hormone-laden, corn and soy-fed beef available.
There is no evidence of our ancestors experiencing chronic disease.
A diet-style that includes high quality protein and nutritionally dense calories not only supports an active life, but also provides great satiety as well as a thermostatic effect for those interested in ‘becoming lighter’. Protein also plays a critical role in the hormonal balance of your metabolism – a major lynch pin in our current obesity and chronic disease epidemic.
Beyond the obvious dangers associated with chemically-raised beef, poultry and farmed fish is the distortion in fat content and omega 3 to omega 6 fatty acid ratio. Grain-fed cattle are extraordinarily higher in fat than the range-fed animals that our ancestors ate. Compounding this threat is the unnaturally high concentration of omega 6 fatty acids that grain-fed animals contain. This creates an unhealthy imbalance in the body at the level of the cell membrane, which ultimately is the gatekeeper for health.
A best practice for the Bonfire diet style is to secure a reliable source of high quality, lean cuts of grass-fed or wild meat and fish. Talk to your local grocer or butcher, join a local CSA (Community-Sponsored Agriculture). Organic, free-range eggs are a perfect protein.
All of the Bonfire ideal diet style recommendations are made within the context of an Ideal Lifestyle. All factors interact. This is the true essence of Holistic Living. We do not live in a vacuum.
We must look at the totality of the lifestyles of our ancestors for guidance, and not reduce their behaviors into separate categories for our reference. If you want to eat like a hunter and gatherer, you must live like one too.
- Eat like one – first, a plant-driven diet = lots of wild plants, nuts, seeds and berries -> and wild/natural animal protein (vegetarianism wasn’t part of human history/evolution)
- Move like one – move, sweat and pant – every day
- Think like one – reduce your chronic stress burden, get enough sleep, and …
- … build a bonfire and dance with your tribe just to celebrate surviving another fantastic day.
Final note: for those having questions about the idea that a vegetarian diet might be a healthy diet, we encourage you to do some reading/research on the subject. Loren Cordain, PhD has covered this area of science quite thoroughly.
LINKS:
For great beef, try Dr. Paul’s long-time ‘beef dude’ – rancher extraordinaire John Brady at Brady’s Beef in Idaho (yes, they ship):