Members of the PaleoDiet group will know pemmican as a mixture of
fat and dried meat, with fruit sometimes added, long used by North
American indians and frontier people. So important a source of food
was pemmican that Pemmican wars were fought to control its
distribution.
I broke a long standing tradition of staying out of "health food"
stores and buying any packaged or processed food yesterday to buy
some pemmican to use as an afternoon snack. I bought it without
reading the label and now find that what is sold as "pemmican" is
not pemmican.
Here are the ingredients: malted corn and barley, nonfat milk,
honey, wheat germ, raisins, soy flour, walnuts, soy oil, wheat bran,
pecans, grape juice.
Aside from walnuts and pecans, there is nothing in this list that a
PaleoEater like myself (and, I gather, most of you) ever eats. Its
macronutrient profile is fat 20%, protein 34% and carbohydrate 20%.
But, more than half the CHO is sugars.
The taste was repulsive to someone who has eaten Paleo for so long
(15 years or so).
I also glanced over most of the "balance" or 30-30-40 or "power"
bars and found them to be about like this "pemmican". I wasn't
surprised to see that hundreds of new "miracle" diet and
fat-burning, muscle growing "explosive energy" products had been
invented in years since I had last been in a health food store. The
people in there don't look any better or seem any more energetic
though, in spite of these new innovations.
What did strike me, in my more informed perspective about
macronutrients gained from this group, is that the products on the
shelves of health food stores are as far out on the CHO abuse scale
as what you find in any store. This health food store seemed to be
a candy store in disguise where you can feel good about carbohydrate
abuse.
Its back to the Stone Age for me at the produce and meat counter.
Arthur De Vany
Professor
<[log in to unmask]>
http://www.socsci.uci.edu/mbs/personnel/devany/devany.html
University of California
Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences
3151 Social Science Plaza
Irvine, CA 92697-5100
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