TCC: Your diet plan is a modified version of the Paleo Diet, also known as the “caveman diet.” How have you modified the Paleo Diet, and why do you feel it works?
Dr. Rey: We try in this book to say slow down, wait a minute. Stop drinking that bright blue drink. It doesn’t exist in nature. Stop eating those Cheetos. Let’s use common sense. Let’s go back to the ways we used to be. It’s not an accident that Okinawans in Japan live to 100. They primarily live on seaweed and fish. It just makes sense. Caloric restriction and eating natural things, that will make you live to 114. It is the soft diet of the Western societies that will kill you.
My book talks about the return to the Paleo Diet, the diet of our ancestors. We need to go back to the way we ate. We used to eat fruits and vegetables and lean meats, every three hours. So that’s about six meals a day and no doughy things like refined sugar, refined wheat. To make a long story short, the world’s in big trouble. I think it’s 70 percent overweight and 30 percent morbidly obese. You walk down every street, it’s appalling to see America today. And that’s the same throughout the world. My book is very timely. It tells people that you’re going to get into a lot of trouble unless you change today.
The average hunter and gatherer walks 15 miles a day. Why do I use the present tense when most hunters and gatherers lived in the Paleolithic era? Because there are still hunters and gatherers today. If you go to the Brazilian rainforests, you will find some tribes of hunters and gatherers. If you go to Africa, they are in a tribe. Do they have diabetes? No. Heart disease? No. Do they have hardening of the arteries? No. Nothing. We were designed to live the life of a hunter and gatherer. Continue reading
A new app for followers of the “caveman” diet has been launched to help bring the paleo-regime into the digital age.
