The fattening nonsense of traditional food pyramids.

A Healthy-Fit-You Food Pyramid.

5 min readJul 4, 2017

If you don’t know that yet — traditional food pyramids are full of crap.

Traditional Food Pyramids are based on nothing, but some “common sense”, that makes sense only, when food industry profits increase and maximum fattening/avoiding starvation are the goals.

Let’s take grains, for example. Who and when decided, that it is a foundation of healthy eating pyramid? Seriously?

Grains became widely available as a legitimate and cheap source of calories ONLY, when agrarian revolution happened and we, as species, could afford to produce grains on a massive scale, making it a cheap fuel, that doesn’t kill us right away, and can be used as a fuel constantly. For the most of human history, human evolution (before somewhere around the end of 17th century), we could not eat grains on a massive scale! We didn’t know how to produce them consistently, we didn’t even know we could eat them, before our food preparation got to a certain degree of development. We evolved and thrived into smart healthy capable species, being mostly hunter-gatherers, who could modify food supply, making it last, making it more nutritious. Grains only got to be a source of most of our calories (compare to being a source of most of our nutrition, that grains are definitely not), when food industry realized how cheap it was to avoid starvation, using grains, how easy it was to create so many products reaping so many financial rewards from food industry. Nobody thought about malnourishment and lack of essential vitamins, minerals and other nutrients per calorie in grains, about long-term health consequences, about existence of anti-nutrients in plants that kill people slowly — nobody thought about any of that, when grain-based diet was invented.

And voila, now we got grains at the base of our “healthy eating” food pyramid.

It’s really a food consumption pyramid that reflects what’s being sold and consumed by the majority of people. But what about healthy food/healthy eating food pyramids examples? Where are the grains? Take it from someone, who stopped eating grain products of any kind at the age of 13 — you don’t need any grains in your diet, and you will survive and thrive on grain-free (any grains) diet beautifully.

The other thing, that is a total nonsense — dairy products.

Calcium, great source of good gut bacteria, protein for vegans — did it ever occur to you, that dairy products were ALSO (with exceptions of few tribes around the world) not a part of a daily human diet for a LONG time, before we domesticated cows on an industry-wide scale, and before our food industry really took off. We used to get our calcium and all the healthy gut bugs just fine, from vegetables, grasses and fruits, meats and fish, nuts and seeds, tubers etc. — nobody was collapsing while walking and having brittle bones issues. Isn’t it at least fascinating, that in the era, when you can consume all the dairy you want (and in fact many do), we have so many problems with our bones, teeth etc.? It should be the opposite, shouldn’t it?

Having lived without consumption of dairy for many years, more than a decade, I also can attest, that you do NOT need any dairy products in your diet, quite the opposite, you’d be better off without them.

So what does make sense in our food pyramid?

Drinking water of course.

Eating lots of vegetables. Fruits are great too, but they were never a part of our regular food supply, since fruits are seasonal and regional. Too many fruits — too much fructose and blood sugar.

Eating lots of whole animal foods, with all the organs, bones, meats and fats in tact.

It seems like fatty fish especially, and animal products like eggs, grass-fed meats, rich in Omega-3 fatty acids, made a huge difference in our brain development and to this day, it’s impossible, literally, to be healthy long term without Omega-3 fatty acids and other saturated and unsaturated fats.

The more processed foods you avoid, the more recent additions to human diet, all the questionable processed items, you avoid (like grains and dairy and all the sugar of course), the better off you’ll be, you’ll live longer and healthier.

To properly guide your healthy eating, here I wanted to introduce to you 4 food pyramids, that do make sense, that are based on recent evolutionary, diet, nutrition, weight loss, metabolism studies, that I would recommend to look into. I am a fan of paleo food diet pyramid (whole foods mostly, 100% ideally). But your ideal food pyramid might be a combination of a few, with some foods are just not good for you personally, no matter how good they look on paper.

Look into these pyramids, notice common things and differences.

Ask questions, do more research.

Gundry’s MD, The Plant Paradox Food Pyramid.