Thursday, September 8, 2011

The New City Farmer's Diet - You Can Eat Cereal for Dinner!

This morning found me starving for a fulfilling breakfast and my typical morning fare of cereal, fruit, and coffee was just getting old.  Looking for a menu change, I opened my fridge and re-discovered that I had made a salad last night for dinner consisting of romaine lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, red cabbage, baked chicken, olive oil and an acai-pomegranate infused red wine vinegar...good enough!

While eating last night's dinner for breakfast this morning, my girlfriend was just staring at me as if I have lost my mind and asked, "what are you doing?"  "Eating my dinner for breakfast.  I'll eat my breakfast for dinner," I quipped.  And then it hit me - who made up all these rules for breakfast?

Diets come and go and I have noticed that the most popular diets (i.e., the ones that make the most money for the authors of these diets and not necessarily the most effective for losing weight) are the ones that have a series of steps and have a catchy name.  Basically, these authors create a complex system of eating food during certain times, that have "x,y,z" nutrients that stimulate "a,b,c" hormones that alter "1,2,3" metabolic processes.  Sure, to a point, this may be true, but a healthy diet does not have to be this complicated.

While I understand the great influence of foods on health, the human body is not "wired" for eating cereal only in the morning.  Since the end of the Paleolithic Era (about 10,000 years ago), nutrition research has made a full dietary circle back to this caveman's diet, which has been determined to have many health benefits .  This diet (also known as the Paleo diet, Stone Age diet, or hunter-gatherer diet) is an agrarian dream that is rich in unprocessed fruits, vegetables, nuts, natural meats and fish.  It mostly excludes legumes, grains, dairy, oils, and sugars.  It is these lacking nutrients that makes this type of diet controversial to most experts. No whole grain cereal and dairy for Fred Flinstone, et al.

Cereal made its debut in the U.S. in 1863 by Dr. James Caleb Jackson, but it wasn't popular until W.K. Kellogg and his brother Dr. John Harvey Kellogg accidentally discovered Corn Flakes and fed it to their patients. Also, one of their patients, C.W. Post, loved it so much, he created his own cereal.  Kellogg and Post cleverly marketed and packaged their cereals, but it wasn't considered breakfast food in U.S. until its popularity in Europe filtered in after World War II.  Nothing in cereal's history ever stated that it must be eaten for breakfast.  I rest my case.

American Gothic Photo
Courtesy of the
Art Institute of Chicago Museum
I have often read that farmers used to eat a very large breakfast of meats, grains, dairy, fruits, and vegetables in anticipation of their labor intensive day.  Probably where the steak and eggs for breakfast comes from.  Fueling with a high calorie meal for a long day of work in the field made sense to these farmers, so why aren't we doing the same?

In contrast, the city dweller's diet is the reverse of the farmer's diet.  We city folk, on average, eat little to no calories in the morning.  We sit all the way to work (as evidenced by Chicago's daily grid lock), sit in front of a computer all day, and conveniently order lunch to go.  We steadily ramp up the calories as the day progresses, and end the day with a calorie-dense dinner, and for what?   In anticipation of a rough night of checking e-mail, watching cable, and sleeping?

OK, this may not apply to everyone, especially those with children.  But parents reading this should refrain from sending me comments because statistics show that most kids now are likely to be overweight and parents are one of the likely causes. Read more from the journal Lancet how by 2020, 75% of the U.S. will be overweight if trends continue unabated.

But don't lose hope!  I have now created an "uncontroversial" diet by adding dairy, whole grains, and olive oil to the old farmer's diet and renamed it
"The New City Farmer's Diet" and without further ado, here are the steps:

Step 1.  Breakfast
An energy dense, all natural meal that is typically eaten for dinner. (~1,000 calories)

Step 2.  Lunch
A medium all natural calorie meal. (~500 calories)

Step 3.  Dinner
A low calorie meal of whole grain cereal, low fat dairy, and fruit - basically breakfast. (~300 calories)

Step 4.  Snacks & Fluids
Sprinkle in some nuts, water, coffee, wine and/or beer. (~200 calories)

Step 5. Exercise
You can't be healthy without it - get over it and exercise daily.

Step 6. Repeat

My girlfriend said I should write a book on this.  I just wrote it!   See steps one through six.  It's more of a handout than a book, but it has all the makings of a best seller - it has steps and a catchy name.

I could have added a gazillion more steps, conjured up some exotic scientific explanations, and inferred nutritional research to validate my madness, but I'm way too lazy.  It's hard to make money off of a diet handout though, so print this out and mail it to me and I'll sign the copy for you, but please enclose a check for $19.99 for shipping and handling charges.

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