Friday, February 28, 2014

Briefly on Dietary Experimentation


So, I've got kind of a weird confluence of ideas in my life that has led me to messing with my diet a bit. 
After hearing about some bad stuff that gluten can do to people in general, I heard about the paleo diet, which is naturally free of gluten.  I have no plans to go full paleo, but it is an intriguing diet, partly in that much of what it contains is, or at least can be, tasty. 
I probably already consume plenty of meat, so I'm not changing that quantity, but I will be increasing my fruit & veggie intake, which is something that's often recommended, anyway. 
I don't expect to go gluten-free any time soon, but it's interesting to see how much gluten is in so much of what we eat, anyway.  For reference, the grains that naturally contain gluten are wheat, rye, triticale, and barley; all remaining grains are naturally gluten-free.  The caveat there is that, apparently, oats are frequently contaminated by wheat, but, since I'm not allergic or anything, I won't be picky about that. 
I'm working on what will probably be my easiest and broadest substitution that I'll end up making:  substituting peanut butter with an actual nut butter.  I suspect that I'll find cashew butter quite delicious, but also quite expensive.  For hard-to-find nut butters, I may resort to grinding the nuts myself, just to try them. 

It's also interesting to see what's so hard to find because of the way that the economy self-reinforces:  Nobody sells something because not enough people want it, but most people don't want it because they see it as niche (i.e., only for "health nuts" or whatever), but it's only that way because it's not already on every store shelf, anyway!  

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