Firstly I want to thank you for taking the time to check this blog out. I hope it has something to offer you. I am a qualified Naturopath and Counsellor.

All my life I have had a passionate interest into anything to do with health and well being. As a kid I loved animals and had many pets. All the pet care books I read recommended diet as being of particular importance to a pets health and resistance to illness. Key to this was aligning the animals diet as closely as possible with the type and variety of foods that they would have access to in the wild. Further to this encouraging the exercise, socialising and behavioural patterns seen in their wild state would increase their sense of well being and health. I found this fascinating and wondered how it would apply to humans as well.

At the time I was vegetarian for ethical reasons, and in the days before the internet, most of my health information came from vegetarian oriented books. I was convinced at the time that a raw plant based diet like our primate ancestors would be optimum for health.

A bit longer down the track the internet gave me access to enormous amounts of information. I read an essay by Art Devany on eating like our ancestors. He recommended a lot of lean meats, seafoods, nuts, seeds, vegetables and fruits. This was at odds with my ethical and nutritional views but given I have always had an exceptionally curious nature I delved into reading about hunter gatherer diets and theories on what Paleolithic era humans may have eaten. I recalled at the time watching documentaries as a kid on hunter gatherer tribes in the jungles of the amazon and New Guinea and at how healthy, happy and fit they looked.

Soon I became pretty convinced that a raw food vegan diet was not optimum for everyone, and after some changes in my ethical views, a few years later I returned to eating some meat. My energy levels, muscle tone and mood all soon improved.

Since then I have remained very interested in what has popularly become known as The Paleo Diet, or The Primal Diet, and as a general rule these ideas inform the way I choose to eat and prepare food.

I am not dogmatic about it at all, I am too much of a foodie, and at times just too bloody lazy to obsess over eating strictly in a “Paleo” way. We really do not know what our ancestors ate, and the evidence from contemporary hunter gatherer groups shows that humans can thrive on a huge variety of foods and macronutrient ratios. That being said, I think evolutionary theory needs to be applied more in the areas of health and nutrition, as it has been done in other areas of biology and even in veterinary science. Whole foods, unrefined foods, and foods that could easily have been available during our evolutionary history I think should form the baseline of what we recommend people eat to stay healthy.