Rupestre paintings. In the times of the paleo diet

In 2002 Professor Loren Cordain published a book called The Paleo Diet: “Lose Weight and Get Healthy by Eating the Food You Were Designed to Eat“. In it, he promotes a diet very similar to that our ancestors followed thousands of years ago, when hunting and gathering were the only way to get food.

The Paleolithic or Paleo Diet, proposes a model of nutrition that mimics our ancestors, those hunter gatherers who did not have sophisticated cooking techniques but food in its most natural state possible, without any processing.

This type of diet has been proposed as a healthy diet. It is promoted as a valid alternative to lose weight.  Is it a another miracle diet ?

This diet is based in wild meats, fish, vegetables and fruits, none of them raised or cultivated, as agriculture and pastoralism had not yet evolved at that time. It bans any cultivated carbohydrates as those coming from corn, wheat, potatoes, rice or any cultivated seed or root. It also bans any type of meat or fat except those coming from wild animal, seafood or nuts.

The paleo diet basically consists of a nutrition pattern rich in red and white meats. No cold meats or sausages are allowed, and above all, fresh fruits and vegetables as well as nuts and seeds.

Without entering to discuss the benefits of this diet, not supported by sound scientific studies, its main problem are the difficulties to find the right products for the daily intake.

On top of that many healthy products are not included in this diet, as it could be the olive oil.

Acai is a small round fruit, similar to grapes but with less juice and pulp. Its color is black purple and it is produced by the Acai palm, in bunches or, better, panicles of six hundred up to one thousand elements.

It is very popular in Brazil since long time ago. Recently, with the boom of the antioxidants, the product has become very popular all over the world. As it is difficult to be found fresh in many countries, it is commercialized in bottles, as a juice, or in pills.

Many virtues are claimed for the fruit, but apart from its antioxidants properties, about three times of the grapes or blueberries content, nothing else has been proved. There is no evidence of its “slimming powers” or its “male enhancement virility”.

My advice is to enjoy acai berries, as long as you can get fresh fruit at a reasonable price. You cannot be sure that the dietary complements you may acquire in form of pills or some other manufactured product, can be better that a generous daily amount of fresh blueberries, blackberries or grapes.

You should be cautious with manufactured juices, as many of them have water, colorant and added sugar. Even more, The antioxidant power of the Acai  Berry juice is lower than pomegranate and blueberry juice, and red wine.

100 grams of dried pulp acai has 600 calories. (48 grams of lipids, 13 grams of proteins, 34 grams of fiber, 3 grams of sugar). The non desecated fruit is also very high caloric due to its high content in fat (oleic acid 56%; palmitic acid , 24%, and linoleic acid 12% of total fat). Theefore, the only side effect of eating too many acai berries can be increasing weight.

Before ordering acai supplements, be careful to choose the right place. You can be a victim a acai trial offer scam. There a lot of victims of scammers.

The “miracle banana diet” is a very popular diet in Japan. It spread after Kumiko Mori, a famous singer said in a TV show that had lost 15 pound following it.

This diet was invented in 2008 by Sumiko Watanabe, pharmacist in Osaka (Japan), to help her husband, Hitoshi Watanabe, over weighted. It seems to be that Mr Watanabe lost 36 pounds and divulgated the diet on one of most important Japan’s social networking services called Mixi. Almost one million copies of books related to the banana diet has been sold since last 2008 March and bananas sales has been increased by a 75% .

There are many versions of the diet. One of them is the “morning banana diet”. You eat a banana for breakfast with a glass of water at room temperature. In lunch and dinner, you can have whatever you like…except dessert. You have to go to bed before midnight. Others “prescriptions” say that you can have as many bananas as you want.

Another version is to eat a couple of bananas before breakfast, lunch and dinner.



This diet may help some people… but it may be disastrous for many others. You have to consider that a diet should be always balanced and if it allows you to eat whatever you like, it may derive in many situations, from malnutrition to excess of calories.

The effect of the banana is supposed to be stuff people before meals. After that, you may eat from nothing to excessively. In both cases it dangerous.

100 grams (3,53 ounces) of peeled banana have from 90 to 100 Kcal, 23 grams of carbs, 0,3 grams of fat, 5 mg of calcium and 360 mgs of potassium.

It is reported that Tila Tequila, the Facebook product girl, also has followed this diet. By the way, she is not dead!. It’s marketing.

Chinese grapefruit for grapefruit diet

The Grapefruit Diet

The Grapefruit diet exists from about seventy years. It is based on some pretended virtues of the grapefruit, the most important of which would be its supposed power for burning fat, due to some never found enzymes.  These facts never have been proof and there are different versions of the diet.

a) The grapefruit cleansing diet.

After a period of overeating, especially on feast, holidays, Christmas, etc., the body may be overburden. A couple of days eating grapefruits, and only grapefruits, may be a detoxification way for people without health problems. For longer periods than that, a doctor should supervise the process. Anyway, we are talking about a healthy person.  Depending on the amount of fruit consumed, some water has to be added to allow a normal hydration. A drastic reduction of food intake with a important reduction in sodium and other minerals leads to an expected dehydration.

b) The grapefruit diet as a way of losing weight .

There are many different combinations. The most known is the one which mix the Atkins Diet with the grapefruit intake. This diet is low carb, low calories and high protein. It should not be followed without medical guidance.

Nevertheless, we highly recommend the grapefruit. It is full of vitamin C and is low in calories.

Don’t forget that a piece of fruit is always welcome!

Normal grapefruit