The Other Side of the Rainbow

Rainbows and diet have nothing, and I mean nothing in common… To this, I pause, because I am not so sure. I mean, in school, we were taught to eat a mostly plant-based diet. After all, plants are incredibly healthy, right?

Superfoods are the cure-all. They help you lose weight, and they help you eliminate. They increase your sight and help you sleep through the night. They give you energy, and who knows, they may even keep away your enemy! If that will sell it, they’ll probably use it! But, back to the rainbow. We were taught to eat a rainbow of color every day. 

 Do you remember all the colors in the rainbow? Let’s review and give a sampling of foods that match the color. Red- red peppers, pomegranates, and beets. Orange- oranges, carrots, and sweet potatoes. Yellow- yellow peppers, bananas, and lemons. Green- kiwi, spinach, and kale. Blue- blueberries and blue corn. Indigo- trust me, you don’t want me to go there. You do know I have shade perception issues, right? No, blue raspberry water ice does not count! Violet- yeah, I probably shouldn’t go there either! You get my drift though, that rainbow thing is really all-inclusive when it comes to the plant-based ideology.

What happens though if we go over the rainbow? Way, way back to a time when Walmart didn’t exist, and microwave was not a word, fast food was anything you ate after a prolonged period of not eating, and bread making was a beautiful, slow process that lasted several days. No one knew anything about canned energy drinks or plastic water bottles, and super food was the best meal grandma made. What on earth then did they eat on the other side of the rainbow?

On the other side of the rainbow many, many years ago, humans typically ate more of what was local to them. Animal foods were often a staple in the diets of our ancestors. Organ meats, bone marrow, raw milk, and local fruits and vegetables, some grains, and fat- yikes! They ate fat, and their hearts kept beating, their arteries weren’t blocked up, obesity wasn’t an issue, and humankind continued!

So, when did the rainbow begin to tilt? I have reason to believe it began a subtle shift during the Industrial Revolution, with the dietary rug being snatched out from under us around the middle of the 1900s. Dr. Ancel Keys was quite instrumental in shifting the thought process surrounding saturated fat and cholesterol. In Nina Tiecholz’s fantastic book, THE BIG FAT SURPRISE Why Butter, Meat & Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet, pg. 44, she writes “…Keys aggressively drove home his study’s “main takeaway” point, that eating saturated fat leads to high cholesterol and that high cholesterol leads to heart disease.”

One unfortunate event lead to another, and this paradigm became widely accepted.

In NOURISHING TRADITIONS by Sally Fallon with Mary G. Enig Ph.D., pg 5 states, “Before 1920 coronary heart disease was rare in America…. Today heart disease causes at least 40 percent of all US deaths.”

Truth be told, if you eliminate one thing from your diet, you will replace it with another. What did we replace meat and fat with? You got it- plants. What kind of plants, specifically? Mostly grains like bread, cereal, rice, and pasta- you know, the base of the food pyramid. These items are also high in carbohydrates. Butter, lard, and tallow, to name a few, were replaced with margarine and vegetable oils. Animal products were villainized while plant-based products and manufactured, processed products were elevated. This narrative has now continued for generations. Are we healthier today? I would venture to say a loud, resounding no! 

In an article by Christopher Wanjek entitled, Heart Disease and Diabetes Risks Tied to Carbs, Not Fat, Study Finds, he says that a new, but small study reveals that doubling saturated fat intake does not increase saturated fat levels in the blood. On the contrary, carbohydrates are linked to both heart disease and type 2 diabetes. You may read the article here. 

So friends, do you know what foods contain very low or no carbohydrates? You got it, animal foods. Meat, organs, fat, cream, butter…. Did I mention superfoods? No, no, I didn’t. Somewhere over the rainbow, they knew much better than that. I used to believe in eating a rainbow of color every day, but I too finally slid to the other side.

If you are anxious, overweight, in pain, diabetic, tired, suffer from headaches, allergies, or migraines, or you’re just not functioning at your highest potential, question everything and look over the rainbow.