Shape Magazine, You’ve Got It All Wrong
This is really killing me. I read, with great pains, an article on a recent post on Shape Magazine’s site.
Entitled “10 Easy Paleo Diet Recipes“, there is a collection of recipes that are so far off the mark, it made me cringe.
Let’s start with the fact that they included some of the following ingredients that are not remotely Paleo:
- Salt
- Ghee
- Cured olives
- Canned tomato paste
- Mozzarella cheese
While there are a couple of recipes that look Paleo, such as Steak with Mashed Cauliflower, the focus is clearly on taking standard American diet food by-products and replacing their ingredients with formerly-Paleo derivatives, still resulting in a high-glycemic, processed, refined ‘sweets and treats’ that are not what the Paleo Diet is all about, including:
- Pumpkin Bread
- Chocolate Sunflower Butter Cups
- Hazlenut Caveman Brownies
- Pumpkin Pecan Pancakes
I’ve said it before and I will continue to wax poetic about this. Far too many people are going to read this article, think that these recipes and meant to be eaten every day, begin eating them often and not see any healthy improvements or weight loss. They will not understand that Paleo means eating fresh, local veggies at every meal, with some wild protein and fat. They will then, after not having the results they wanted, tell others that Paleo does not work.
This is a huge problem!
We have to be vocal about this and whenever we see the misrepresentation of Paleo, we’ve got to call people on it. Writing a letter to the editor or sending an email to a blog which posts ‘paleo’ recipes that aren’t Paleo are just a couple of examples of how we can do this together.
This is not to be confused with the concept that we can all choose to eat however we want. Many people tell me that they ‘feel fine when they eat dairy’ or ‘don’t have any stomach issues when they eat gluten’. That’s fine. I’m not interested in trying to coerce anyone into giving up foods they don’t want to.
The issue is simple that this does not mean that ‘non Paleo foods that do not seem to cause an immediate reaction to any particular individual are therefore suddenly Paleo”.
Please.
If you eat fresh veggies, bison and blueberries, but you also put grass fed ghee on top or enjoy dipping your sashimi in soy sauce, it’s not Paleo. Just isn’t.
Call it something else.
