Tag Archives: Marion Nestle

The Paleo Diet – the latest attempt to rehabilitate meat

The latest attempt to rehabilitate meat, and sell it to us as healthy food, is the so-called Paleo diet. Don’t fall for it! As with all the previous attempts, this one falls way short of good health and a sustainable or compassionate diet. Unfortunately many in the public will grasp onto anything that tells them what they want to hear.

This heavily meat-centered diet, which excludes all beans and grains (significant prohibitions), relies upon the excuse that the caveman ate that way, so we should too. For this new diet in particular, the assumptions and the reasoning really need to be questioned.  We’ll do just that. Then we’ll review what we really do know and what facts we can count on.  But we can tell you right now that the healthy vegetarian diet is still the healthiest diet there is.

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No Meat in Public!

A growing number of people want the president to stop eating meat in public. As Health Educator in Chief, many people expect President Obama to set a good example by eating healthier food in public and at the many official photo opportunities.

Now let’s be clear: it’s no-one’s business what a political leader eats in his or her private life. But these are photo ops, each one carefully arranged by the White House in order to create an intentional image. And time and again, they feature exactly the food products that federally funded research has shown to cause heart disease, diabetes, obesity, cancer, and other health problems, and that health officials are encouraging us to avoid.

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