The Paleo Diet

I started taking the Paleo Diet seriously about two weeks ago, and it seems to be helping.  What sort of forced my hand was a terrible bout of allergies.  The claim made by Paleo advocates, which appears to have had merit, is that allergies, which are a type of autoimmune disorder in my understanding, are the result of a preexisting substrate of inflammation caused by low grade food allergies.  In Celiac Disorder, for example, people are CLEARLY, immediately, reacting to wheat. 

But the claim is made that in most all other people, even those exhibiting no symptoms, there are underlying physiological traumas happening which are necessary but not sufficient for a host of diseases, up to and including cancer and heart disease.  I don’t see anyone claiming you will live forever if you abstain from grains, but they certainly predict a much longer life.

I got to thinking that psychological trauma is like that, too.  It exists in the darkness, in the background, but creates the necessary substrate for cognitive and emotional disorders.  You can have a lot of trauma and be relatively unaffected, just as many people have Big Mac’s regularly across long lives without any apparent negative effects.  But you are primed for it.  Given new challenges, the stage is set for dysfunctional reactions.

And further, you are not abundantly HEALTHY.  You are less than you could be.

The thing is, EVERYONE has traumas in their lives.  Everyone.  At a minimum the birth is traumatic, even for C Sections.  You are now in the cold place where you have to breathe and eat.

The task in life is to develop the capacity for emotional digestion.