The Simply Reduce Diet

The real, real beginning of this blog, what got me thinking and moving in the direction of change, was our diets.  My husband and children have an allergy to corn.  Yeah, corn, and living in the US that pretty much translates to; my family is allergic to processed, prepared foods.  Tough yes, but a blessing.  We have eaten much better than we might have ever otherwise.

When you start trying to figure out something like a corn allergy you think it is mind-boggling.  That is until it leads to the question of what 'should' we be eating, and then your brain really starts going to mush!  There are so many conflicting theories and data out there.  Raw? Vegan? Vegetarian? Grain-Free, Bean-free, gluten-free, Phytic acid, Paleo, high-protein, no carb .....oh, my! Guess we'd better stick to air and water--oh, wait that is too polluted!

I have always been fascinated at the variation of food that humans ingest.  I did some biological research on an NSF scholarship, and if I fed those tiny little critters (you couldn't even see them) even a few grains of the wrong food you could kill them--they didn't just adapt for a while!  Humans have had such a varied diet throughout history.  Researches tell us one thing based on this high carb diet here, and the opposite of this group who ate no carbs. How can we make heads or tails of conflicting information.

I don't currently have any specific links (feel free to post them in the comments) about such studies.  Now that I am writing this blog, I will have a place to put them when I do come across them.

Across the board, from what research I have seen, wide-spread obesity is a relatively new trend.  So maybe we should change our approach.  Maybe not look at what they were doing right, but what we are doing that they did not.  And maybe, these specific diets that cut out food groups entirely are the opposite of what we need.  After all, is it not the variation of our food that allowed our species to thrive as it has?

My theory is that we NEED the variation.  What we should reduce are the processed foods and the preservatives that are inhibiting our bodies natural processes.  So grains that are made into highly processed and preserved foods should probably not represent the bulk of our diet.  But it is also perhaps not necessary, or even perhaps healthy to cut our grains out all together, just simply reduce them to make room for other nutrients.

The Simply Reduce processed foods, preservatives, refined sugar product, pesticides, genetically modified, antibiotic-laden foods Diet!  Completely doable!  You won't fail, because it's allowed, your goal is to simply reduce, one choice at a time.