It struck me the other day just how much time I spend telling people what I eat. Then there's the inevitable discussion that follows, in which the usual questions are raised, to which I give the usual answers. And I thought - wouldn't it be nice if there was a 5-minute video which covers all that stuff? So I created one. Once I got started, it became something of a labour of love. I hope you enjoy it - and that it might save you as much time as it will save me!
For maximum impact, I recommend playing it full screen...
See Also:
Paleo/Primal in a Nutshell Part 2: Exercise
Saturday, 11 April 2009
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60 comments:
That is absolutely fantastic! This should become a hit! STraightforward and really well put together!
Thanks Chris - had a lot of fun making it!
Brilliant. I wondered why you had been quiet of late.
It won't win an Oscar, but this does more in five minutes to inform than a hundred years of Hollywood output. You are becoming a bit of a Paleo-Spielberg!
Yeah this was great! Hits all the bases.
What software did you use?
Seriously that has the potential to be a real internet sensation - it just needs Mark Sisson or someone like that to pick it up.
Thank you - explaining things in a way that people who find it difficult to read through all the info out there is so effective. You have a talent for this.
Holy cow is this fantastic! Great job. Can't wait for part II and beyond. Awesome!!!!
This is wonderful!!!!
I will be forwarding this to family, friends and co-workers.
They all need to watch it.......
Thanks for taking the time to put it together.
Marc
Excellent - just the sort of source we all need. Now if I could just get some of the cauliflowers I know to use their brains while watching it we'd get somewhere!
Thanks everyone for the great feedback.
Chris - I did it in PowerPoint. You can set it up to play itself using the custom animation features. Then I used a screen recorder to capture the presentation as it played, converted it to a WMV and uploaded to YouTube.
Annoying that YouTube won't let you pick the thumbnail image - they just give you 3 taken from various points in the video and you have to pick one of those.
I am going to ping Mark S - I think he'll appreciate the message of the video!
Methuselah,
This is absolutely fantastic! A great intro into the lifestyle that, to many people, can seem daunting, to say the least. I plan on referring many a "n00b" to this little clip in hopes that they can begin to see the light. Thanks for all the hard work and time invested in putting this together.
OUTSTANDING job!!! I'm posting this at my blog.
Thanks Keith, Jimmy - hopefully a great way to get the word out there.
Fantastic video! What an awesome way to introduce people to the lifestyle. So simple & easy to understand! I'd love to add this video to my website, of course giving you credit & linking your website, with your permission. Fabulous, just fabulous!
Eclectic Kitchen
Dana - thanks - sure, go ahead and include it on your site. You can get the embeddable HTML code from the YouTube page. It's on the right hand side.
Great stuff Methuselah! Very entertaining.
Cheers
Scott Kustes
Life Spotlight
Really well done. The message could not be made much clearer than that! Should be required viewing in every school (and by every parent).
That's excellent!
Have linked to it and the blog on my forum :-)
Nice one.
Finally! Now I can just email this link to all who wonder. Thanks
Great video, thank you.
Thank you! Thank you! More!
Great summary and video!
This is both good and funny. The background song is a nice touch. I think I'm going to see some people I know with cauliflowers atop their necks from now on. Heh.
Thank's so much! It helped me today to stay away from bread and cookies.
This is a really good video! I've also posted this on my blog.
Thanks John. Your blog looks interesting - have subscribed. Look out for Paleo in a nutshell part 2 on exercise....
Look at the quality of life, life expectancy and overall population of back then. Do you forget there are almost 7 billion people on this planet now? Agriculture is a method of population sustainment. DO you really expect everyone in the world to eat a free roaming cow? Be practical here.. Yea pharmie companies suck, but the video emphasizes the wrong things. Target the ethical issues of our society instead of faulting the foundational technologies that have made life much easier.
Hi Anon - thanks for your comment.
You are absolutely right - there is no earthly way the world could sustain an immediate and wholesale change to this approach to nutrition.
But I have no expectations or ambitions that this will happen any time soon. It will take decades for such a shift to take place, globally. Which is just as well, because that's how long it will take for the oil tanker of people's thinking to turn so that they realise this is the best thing for their health. My video is intended to help catalyse that slow realisation.
However, there are people who are in the fortunate position to be able to adopt this diet now, and my hope is that the video will help them realise this. I am sure you will agree that I will certainly not destabilise the global food system with the tiny proportion of the global population this video persuades to change their habits.
Since these are my goals, I will leave it to others to address the undoubtedly important ethical issues facing society and certainly don't intend to suggest they are any less important than those I raise in the video. The existence of other important issues does not disqualify these issues from discussion.
I can not begin to thank you enough for this. My boyfriend and I are so tired of trying to explain to friends and family our food choices. I've posted this on my blog and hopefully it will help.
Bless you!
Anon,
If you had told any Westerner 30 years ago that laptop computers would be living on nearly every school-aged kid's lap one day, they would have laughed in your face (provided they could have even conceived what a laptop is!). Same goes with the automobile, air travel, and cell phones. Have you noticed that organic foods are not only becoming more widespread but also cheaper? The point is that market forces are very powerful, and just because you can't today see how the planet can support the paleo lifestyle doesn't mean that one day we won't figure out how to do just that. And besides, what should a body do: forsake personal health today because of a putative, possibly never-realized trade-off with living sub-optimally in the future? Be practical here.
Thanks Colleen!
That was excellent.
Where did you get the fish farm pic - it looks disgusting. Are all fish farms like that?
Sue - got it from here: http://easyveganvisions.com/25.html. Given the nature of the site, I am quite sure this is not representative of all fish farms - but for the polemical purposes of the video it suited me to use a 'worst case' image.
Glad you enjoyed the video.
Thanks for that!
Thank you for making it so accessible and easy to understand! Brilliant job!!!
Marianne x
That was magnificent. It covers all the bases. Best five minute summary of healthy eating I've ever seen.
Although it passes a good message the video is too biased and even close to hypocritical.
If we've been evolving for 2 million years, and only now are eating produced goods (or whatever you call it), shouldn't the same be for farming (since we've only been doing it for 10,000 years?)
Shouldn't the ideal be a true hunter-gatherer lifestyle be defended (and not a farming one)
Shouldn't one not eat cows, or eat farm grown foods (which only exist for the last 0.5% of our life)? Because we haven't evolved in the last 10,000 years so we aren't built for eating animals who roam freely in the pasture, nor food grown in controlled farm environment.
We should only eat animals who are built in a predatory environment and wild berries and herbs!
I'm all for more natural grown foods, but you've made the message so overcritical (scientist are either good or loony tin-foil wearing ones?) that the message for anyone who isn't against all evil mega-farm cooperations is lost...
Hope to see you eating wild game and wild berries and herbs from now on!
John - thanks for your comment. I am not sure whether you are agreeing or disagreeing with me but you certainly appear to agree on the central point, which is great.
To your point about hypocrisy, I am sure if you examined my daily diet under a microsocope, you'd be able to find ways in which I fail to measure up to what the video promotes; but my objectives were to create something that depicted an ideal - it is up to others to choose how close to that ideal they try to live. Hypocrisy implies criticism and although I may have used some light-hearted cauliflower analogies, I hope this was not construed as criticism by most people.
By making the video I certainly didn't intend to imply that I am a paragon of virtue in this regard - like most people I have to make compromises and simply do the best I can. If that leaves me open to accusations of hypocrisy it's a price I am prepared to pay for the sake of getting something out there which spreads the word.
So so so great! Funny, intelligent, sarcastic (but not too much)...it's on my blog and Facebook. It was picked up from there and posted on petranekfitness.com (an awesome crossfit box in L.A.). It's viral, alright! -The good kind!
Thanks Karen - will swing by and check out the site and your blog when I get a chance.
That was friggin awesome. You're gonna get a lot of attention from the CrossFit world here in a little bit as I've already found a couple of sites linking to this...
Thanks Mike!
High quality work, thanks for such a wonderful video.
I really liked your video, part 1 & 2 and thought you did a great job of conveying the essence of paleo diet. My only concern is that some people might have trouble hearing the message because they feel insulted w/the implication that if they're not eating this way, they've got heads made of cauliflower.
Someone commented on your blog that it's not realistic to thing everyone or even most people could eat wild meat or the equivalent.
I think most Americans could eat the closest thing to wild meat: grassfed meat.
According to Richard Manning, author of eight books, including "Rewilding the West," "Against the Grain," and “The Amazing Benefits of Grass-Fed Meat” in the April/May 2009 issue of article in the Mother Earth News, we could potentially produce the same amount of meat we currently do if we converted half of the corn and soybean fields to pasture raising of cattle. Not only that, we might cut carbon emissions by roughly 144 trillion pounds and reduce petrochemical use.
For the on line version of the article click here, https://www.motherearthnews.comwww.motherearthnews.com/Sustainable-Farming/Grass-Fed-Meat-Benefits.aspx
Rachel - thanks. I guess that was the gamble I took with the tone. On the one hand I wanted to make them fun, as that helps spread the message, but as you say, that can also put people off. I hope most people take it in the good-natured way it's intended.
I think you are right that given sufficient political will the land could support this diet - I guess the challenge is turning around the commerical oil tanker that is the current food production profile. It will just take time. Thanks for the link - will check it out.
Point taken, the video was very well presented...but it kind of just left me feeling hopeless. According to this even if I eat fruits and vegetables, those are bad for me? How do I get THIS as opposed to THIS; meaning fruits and vegetables grown the right way as opposed to the wrong way, and animals raised the right way? Am I supposed to learn how to hunt and farm? Are there stores that sell foods made like that? I have noticed none near me...
Trey - it can be a challenge to find foods that have been grown organically and not intensively farmed etc. But it can be done.
Don't despair - the video shows the ideal and it doesn't mean that unless you can do everything it says you can't make a difference.
Depending on what do you eat already, you might be able to make a big difference to your health simply by eating the right foods but not necessarily all organic / pasture raised.
I would recommend first getting the food types right (avoiding bread, rice, potato, dairy etc and focusing on meat, fish, nuts, eggs, fruit veg) - then start to explore the potential to make the sources of those foods less industrialised when you feel ready.
This video is incredible! You've done such a great job of explaining the need to respect evolution in an entertaining way and in just 5 minutes!
This is the best stuff I've seen on YouTube! I'm a big believer in the paleo lifestyle, so I guess I'm a bit biased.
I have a blog about natural health where I talk about evolution quite a bit. I included your food and exercise videos in my latest post.
Thanks Vin - appreciate it. Nice blog by the way - very slick design.
I truly love this - it is hilarious and smart!
Love the video! Time well spent. :) Going to spread the word.
Thanks Ryan!
Why the picture of cauliflower for the dumb-dumb brain? Caulifower is healthy for our brains! Isn't it? A picture of a rock for the dumb-dumb brain would be more appropriate. Wouldn't it? I meet people with rocks for brains all the time. They should stuff their heads with cauliflower so they'll have cauliflower brains and be smarter.
Kate... I guess what I am suggesting is not that people who eat cauliflower would be stupid, but that if they had a cauliflower for a brain then they would be stupid. This is because whilst cauliflower provides excellent nutrition when eaten, when actually used to replace the current content of one's cranium it's cumputational powers might be sufficiently inferior that decisions around the best nutritional choices might be adversely affected...
I noticed in the video that potatoes were in your list of the bad foods. I am curious as to whether you avoid all tubers as a part of this diet as I would think that gatherers like the peoples from the Andes would have collected some portion of these in their diet although not nearly in the same proportions that we have consumed them since becoming agrarian.
Those of European descent were likely completely unprepared to eat these, however.
Wellescent - definately not all tubers - just ones that can't be eaten raw. Potatoes are a bit of a grey area it seems - whilst sweet potatoes are considered acceptable, nevertheless eating a lot of them is considered to be not ideal. Personally I don't like potatoes because they offer little nutritionally and are rapidly converted to blood sugar. So my own personal rationale is not necessarily entirely borne of paleo/primal principles.
I think this video is wonderful. I'm a student of natural medicine at SCNM, and Dr. Don Matesz showed this in our class on the history of nutrition. May I put a link to your video on my Facebook page?
Leia - good to know it's being put to good use - you are welcome to put a link to the video on your Facebook page.
I've seen paleo described in numerous ways and this is, by far, the simplest explaination. Thanks alot.
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