Salt is my favorite flavor

I love salt. If they had salt licks for humans, I would buy two.

Mmm...deeeliciooooous....

My friend Christian likes to ask impossible questions as a drinking game- usually a version of "Would You Rather". Like, would you rather be covered in pinstripes, or explode confetti out of your orifices when you sneeze? Or, would you rather have ears you could remove and leave lying around for spying, or have wheels instead of feet?

And then, "Would you rather....give up sweet snacks and coffee, or salty snacks and beer?"

Easy peasy. I'd give up sweet snacks and coffee. I'd miss them, for sure. And I don't need the beer (that's why God gave us gin and tonics). But give up salty snacks? NEVER.

So I was relieved and gratified to read in the NYTimes of a recent study showing that, not only is there no correlation between low-sodium diets and lower rates of heart disease, it's actually possible that super-low sodium diets are bad for  you.

YESSSSSS.

Ah HA! and Happy Weekend

Cavemen did not do this.
But they wanted to.

Of course there was always lots of evidence of, or at least discussion of, the possibility that the Paleo diet wasn't all it was cracked up to be. For me, it definitely wasn't a good fit.

This piece refutes one of the central claims of Paleo-purveyors, which is that the reason Paleo dieting is good for you is that our bodies haven't had time to adapt to the grains that are now in our diets but weren't when we were cavemen. The article points out a number of examples in which adaptation happened extremely rapidly- much more rapidly than the 30,000 years or so that have elapsed since grains were cultivated agriculturally, ground up, and used to make delicious carb-y bread. Further, some foods, like tomatoes, weren't available to cavemen either, and Paleo diets don't outlaw those.

The author points out that this fact isn't to say that the Paleo diet won't help you lose weight. It's just that any restrictive eating plan where you cut out whole food groups and think intensively about what you're putting in your pie hole probably would.

I would only add to that that while we may have been eating grains for the last 30,000 years, it's really only in the last 30 years or so that we have started eating so many crazy, super-processed grain products. Because they are delicious, of course, but they are completely devoid of nutritional purpose, and they are making us fat. So while cutting out grains entirely probably isn't necessary (or even a good idea), getting rid of the junk carbs almost certainly is.

Happy weekend all!