Although I don’t normally follow celebrity gossip I did end up following a link today to learn that Ashton Kutcher has ended up in the hospital after attempting to live on an all fruit diet (yes all fruit, no nuts, no pulses, no veggies) and damaging his pancreas.
I had a friend in college who attempted to live exclusively on grilled cheese sandwiches with a similar result. I don’t think he will ever live it down. When he was released from the hospital he was subjected to the same sort of ribbing I wanted to give Mr. Kutcher.
“What were you thinking? You are not a koala. You cannot live on one type of food!”
And as soon as I had that thought a memory flashed in my mind.
When we were diagnosed I remember telling people that we had been lucky to learn that our health problems could be cured quite simply by avoiding only three foods. We just needed to not eat gluten, dairy or corn. Which always led to the same response which was…
“Wow, so no cheese, no milk, no wheat and no corn…wow, you can hardly eat anything, I mean, what CAN you eat?”
I don’t know why I didn’t expect that response, but I didn’t. Once I got over my shock I would explain that aside from wheatgrass the entire produce section was available to me as was the entire meat case. Rice was an option. We limit nuts in honor of our friends with nut allergies, but we can eat them. There are hundreds of things for humans to eat and I only needed to avoid three of them and my horrible stomach pain would be gone. This seemed like a good deal.
“Yeah,” they would say, “but wheat and dairy are in everything”
And then it hit me.
As a society we are doing what Ashton Kutcher did and what my friend did at 19 (and never again I might add, he and his entire family are in excellent health) and trying to live on three or four foods. It doesn’t work. Maybe it would if the foods included sweet potato and kale, but I still suspect there would be problems.
We are not koalas or pandas. We are primates. Most primates need to eat a variety of foods. We need to eat veggies and fruit and beans and seeds. Like chimpanzees, we can eat some amount of fish and eggs and meat. We can handle some amount of grain. But to live exclusively on grain and dairy…two things you will never see an adult primate eat at a zoo…is unlikely to work out well and it may be the reason that both the paleo people and the vegans are doing well. They are eating a variety of foods and they are eating foods that are fed to primates while avoiding foods that are not safe for apes to eat.
So enjoy some beans and some rice and some veggies and some fruit. And remember, you can eat almost all of the actual food food in the store and real food includes chocolate and coffee.
And once you get used to eating real food, you will never go back.
After all, you are not a koala.
We wonder why we get sick or fat or feel unwell. We feel lousy because we don’t eat like humans. Humans did not evolve to live on an all grain and
Here is a quick biolo
