Your body: A primal eating machine

Last week, I touched on primal eating and the differences between primal and paleo. This week, let's take a deeper dive on a few key points to eating primal.

There are a number of factors that determine how healthy you are. The big one is your nutrition and research has shown 70 percent of your overall health footprint can be set by your nutrition. The other interesting thing about your health and your body is 80 percent of your body composition is set by your diet.

Understanding that nutrition is one of the biggest components for healthy living, it is almost scary that we do not work harder at doing a better job keeping natural organic whole foods in our body. The human body is an amazing machine designed to convert proteins, fats and sugars into life supporting nutrients and energy. We have been eating whole natural foods over the last few thousand years. It has only been in the last few hundred years that our diets have seen a drastic change in what we consume.

Imagine your body as if it is a high performance engine. When you put dirty gas or diesel in a high performance gas engine, is does not take long for the inner workings of that engine to fail, it is the same with poor nutrition and our bodies. Poor food choices change the inner workings or our digestion, carbohydrate conversion and our ability to burn and process proteins and fats.

Eating primal is how we evolved and our biological systems are designed to get the maximal benefit from natural food source nutrition while converting it to energy and burning it efficiently. This natural foundation of eating primal is inherently a low-carb footprint. Carbohydrates are sugar, driving insulin production when carbs are converted into energy, this gives us the ability to work hard, play hard and - a thousand years ago - survive, hunt and live in tough environments.

Modern nutritional values drive the same insulin response, but with very different and often negative results such as diabetes, obesity and autoimmune issues.

In the world of primal eating, your body's lean muscle mass is one of the most important aspects to keep properly fed. Primal foods support a lean body and as we know, lean muscle is a big factor in our body's health and well-being. The more lean muscle you have, the better you burn fat and sugar. With primal eating supporting muscle, your body becomes a fat burner. Most of us eating high carbohydrates and sugary diets are sugar burners and this leads to many of the weight and health problems we see today.

With primal nutrition, fat consumption is a good thing. Fat free is misguided and when we eat natural whole foods like nuts, avocados, coconut and olive oils, we get needed nutrients and fuel from the right types of fat. The best way to manage fat intake is to find the balance with your carb and protein intake, then add the rest of your daily calorie intake with good fats.

Eating a primal diet of natural whole foods is much more simple then you may believe. Many of you may be thinking "Why bother? It's just another diet program." What I find very interesting about the idea to eat like our ancestors is the fact that it's not just another program. Yes, a smart guy wrote a book and started a great blog on going primal, but eating primal is totally natural to humans.

Our human ancestors, like many of our primate cousins, started their evolutionary journey as omnivores. The reason for this was simple survival. During hard times, carnivores died off quickly and herbivores fared better, but under tough conditions they too found it tough to find food. Our ability to eat just about anything has been key to our evolution and survival. So eating primal means getting your nutrition from a wide range of natural food sources and that is a fairly easy thing to do. Stick to green leafy vegetables, nuts, meats and fruits. Move away from grains, dairy, legumes and processed foods.

Now for those of us that have mastered the art of veganism or become dutiful vegetarians, you are already working part of the primal diet. For the rest of us that love our beef, chicken or fish, primal becomes that transitional nutrition guide that can be simple to follow and cuts out all the marginal dietary processed foods that are readily available and cause so much damage to our health and well-being.

Judd Jones is a director for the Hagadone Corporation.