Paula Deen’s recent announcement that she has type 2 diabetes comes as no surprise to most folks; diabetes currently afflicts approximately 25 million Americans, 80 percent of whom are obese, with the major contributing factors being diet and genetics. High fat, high carb, and high sugar diets are cited as being the primary culprits, and lack of exercise (which boosts the good cholesterol, HDL) are contributing factors, as well. Diabetics are advised to avoid sugar and fast-burning carbs to maintain a steady insulin level, and avoid fat because of heart disease, the secondary illness often caused by diabetes.
But what about the Inuit people who ate nothing but fat and blubber? As a culture, they didn’t begin developing diseases like diabetes and heart disease until they adopted a more “modern” diet. By nature, their diet was organic and “free range,” a term we hear and see more now in Wegman’s and Whole Foods supermarkets. Why is it that many indigenous cultures had fewer industrialized health problems until they left their traditional way of eating? That answer is too long for this article alone, but the following info might be good food for thought.
There are folks who believe it’s not what you eat, as much as where it came from, and how it lived or was grown. Proponents of the Paleo Diet, and the Weston A. Price Foundation, advocate a traditional, pre-industrialized diet that focuses on organic, pastured foods with no hormones or antibiotics, and no processed foods. This “back to nature” approach has been touted as a cure for many of our modern ailments such as Fibromyalgia, Lupus, asthma, Crohn’s, ADD, autism, and even MS, according to Dr. Terry Wahls.
Wahls, who lived an active, vibrant life, developed MS and found herself confined to a motorized wheelchair; in researching her disease, she found she needed to “eat for my mitochondria.” She adopted a paleo-style diet, put her MS into remission, and took back her life. The Cheeseslave, and CaveGirlEats blogs are two of hundreds of blogs dedicated to this type of lifestyle; the Cheeseslave blog has over ten thousand Facebook followers currently.
Weston A. Price, a Cleveland dentist, documented hundreds of cases of facial and dental deformity in children of native populations whose parents had switched from their traditional eating patterns to modern, processed foods. He theorized that the more a population moved away from their traditional ways of eating, the more chronic illness manifested in those populations due to nutritional deficiencies. Certain vitamins, like vitamin K2, are only found in grass-fed butter; others are found in organ meats that we no longer eat as a society. His research is still regarded today as canon by a wide readership, from organic enthusiasts to raw milk advocates, and formed the groundwork for the foundation that bears his name.
So, based on this information, it’s entirely possible Paula Deen could still eat the foods she loves, providing she made a few changes. Her meats, eggs, and dairy would all have to be pastured and grass-fed. All her vegetables would be organic, and the sugars she’d use for that shoofly pie might be brown rice syrup, date or even stevia. Her pie crusts would be made with soaked flours and home-rendered lard from pastured pigs – not the store bought lard, which undergoes high-heat processing and comes from megaculture farms. All in all, that delicious, comfort food cooking of hers could continue and she could keep her “Butter Queen” title intact, as long as she uses grass-fed Kerrygold butter.
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