Review Monday - The Peat Whisperer | Paleo Lifestyle Magazine
January 28, 2013 By Leave a Comment
As I stated on Facebook yesterday, I firmly believe that being Paleo means following a general template for eating in order to maximize your own personal health, not strictly following a regimented diet. To that end, I’m constantly looking at ideas outside of Paleo as a way to tweak what I’m eating in order to maximize my energy and my health.
This “evolving” of my own personal diet is what led me to read Danny Roddy’s book, The Peat Whisperer, which has many similarities to Paleo-style eating, however, is rooted in a much different idea for what is optimal for our bodies.
Throughout The Peat Whisperer, Roddy goes over the work of Dr. Raymond Peat, which, as best I can explain, is that we want our metabolic rate to be as high as possible so that our bodies produce as much energy as possible, and the way we do this is by feeding sugars to our cells.
Again, this is a high level summary, which I’m sure is leaving a lot to be desired.
Basically, the idea expressed throughout The Peat Whisperer is that our bodies operate optimally when they are burning sugars as opposed to fats. This sort of flies in the face of what many who follow Paleo-centric eating have been led to believe, i.e. our bodies operate optimally when burning fat.
So, what are the similarities between The Peat Whisperer diet and eating Paleo? Both are very pro seafood (especially oysters and shrimp), though Roddy argues for eating leaner fish. Both “diets” are very pro saturated fats and trying to maintain a balanced Omega-3 : Omega-6 ratio. And, both are anti grains, legumes, and soy.
See, like I said, a fair number of similarities.
At the end of the day, I thought Roddy’s book was incredibly interesting and, to some degree, it has caused me to slightly alter how I eat on a daily basis. This basically means I’m incorporating more fruits and natural sugars into my diet. I’m not adding refined sugars or anything like that to my diet, but I’ve started putting more berries and orange juice in my breakfast smoothies and I’m actually starting to drink a small bit of milk with at least two meals per day (before I had cut out dairy completely).
After a few weeks of this I’ll reassess and see how I feel, but about a week and a half into this Paleo-Peat way of eating, I feel just as great as I did when I was much more aligned with the “strict” Paleo.
I think it worth taking a look at The Peat Whisperer, if even just to find out you completely disagree with it!
What are your thoughts on this? Have you heard of this before? Do you think there are some merits to this? Leave your comments below and share with the community!
