The Paleo Diet for Athletes? Points in the Right Direction

In today's dietary menu of processed foods, one has to really make an effort to try to eat right. By perusing through the regular supermarket, I can probably count with my fingers the number of good foods that are out there (outside the produce department).

If you eliminate all of the foods that have high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) in them, you probably eliminate more than half the foods in the supermarket. Heck, the ingredient is so prevalent that the stuff is in most baby formulas. I really don't think you want to start your baby's life on the wrong foot by introducing them to HFCS right away. High fructose has been shown in all sorts of different studies to promote obesity and is arguably worse than pure sugar, as fructose cannot be metabolized in the body as well as glucose can. So the body converts it to fat.

Of the remaining foods, if you eliminate your so-called "diet" foods like diet soda and sugar free gum, you really have very few foods that remain. The problem with these "diet" foods is that they contain artificial sweeteners like aspartame (Equal) and sucralose (Splenda). Both chemicals have been shown in studies to be extremely harmful to the human body despite the approval of the FDA. Read the links provided and do some Google searches and you'll come up with plenty of articles related to this.

So what is really left? One can argue soy products and grains are good for you, but are they? Grains are not normally edible in nature and is usually a kernal surrounded by a toxic sheath. Before technology, they weren't easily accessible to humans and therefore not normally in the human diet. Even with processing, grains have a slew of problems associated with them. You can read a good article here about these problems. Grains are a lot better than HFCS and artificial sweeteners, but chances are that maybe they should ideally be just a small part of your diet.

So what is left. Raw foods, nuts, berries, eggs, and meat. All of these were plentiful in the days before technology, back when there was no such thing as diabetes, obesity, and other related illnesses brought on by bad food. Such as which is promoted in the Paleo Diet.

And this is what intrigues me about this diet. It just seems the most natural diet out there and something that I'm currently trending towards. I won't follow the diet to the letter, but will gradually maximize on those foods recommended by the diet while I minimize those foods that it opposes. Will I have an occasional can of Coke on any given day? Sure, but if I limit those cans of soda to maybe 2-3 cans a week, that would be all the better.

As for doing this as an athlete, this might help me lose a little weight and even optimize performance in my workouts, if done right.

I'll probably talk more about this in the future when I discover more about it, but right now, this regimen shows a lot of promise.