Why the Standard American Diet will Wreck Your Health – The Prelude

The standard American Diet is far different than the diet of our ancestors, even just 150 years ago.  The typical dish that an American would eat now does not in any way resemble their plates.  If we look back at the foods that our forefathers consumed, compared to what we consume, the differences are dramatic.  However, this change did not occur overnight.  Rather it was a slow and methodical alteration of the food supply that has left us consuming things that we have to ask ourselves at times if they are even really food.  Think about that for a moment.

Is the Standard American Diet really food?

The standard American diet has left us in a paradox of asking if the food that we eat is really food.  This may initially seem like a bit of a ridiculous question, but when you consider what you mostly find on the shelves of grocery stores, the idea does not seem to farfetched.  Simply, outside of the produce section and a small area of the meat counter, foods come with labels and labels imply that something is different than when it was originally found in nature.  More importantly, the more that needs to be disclosed on that label, the more that foods is likely damaging your health.

Full Disclosure on the Label

The labels of food are very telling and help to further answer this question.  If you were living the Paleo lifestyle and eating food that you theoretically had to pick, gather, hunt or fish for, you would not be consuming several different foods at one time most likely.  You would be consuming the food you found or the game you captured.  Most importantly, this food would not have come with a label.  Apart from the reality that there was no government entity to promote labeling, the same can be said when you are hunting and gathering in the grocery store.  The foods in the produce section do not come with a label.  There is only one ingredient in these foods and that is the food itself.  The same goes for protein choices at the meat counter.  It is only when you start moving along into the prepackaged foods that you begin to see multiple ingredients, leaving you wondering why some of these ingredients were necessary in the first place.  This is the typical profile of the standard American diet food.  It needs a label because legally the manufacturer needs to disclose what it contains.  Food should only contain food, NOT chemicals and compounds that you need a degree to pronounce the name of.

This is simply a starting point for what is wrong with the standard American diet.  However, this is an important one and will help provide you with some structure as you are looking to make changes to your own diet.  Over the next few blog posts, we are going to explore the main problems with the standard American diet and how as a society we have drifted so far away from one of the simplest things that we need to stay healthy, real food.  If you want to help reinforce why you should be sticking to the Paleo Lifestyle and following the Paleo diet, stay tuned because the information to come could literally be a life changer.