Would you try the new 'primitive' diet that rewrites the calorie rules?
Bad news for people who like milky coffees and ham sarnies – a new study has uncovered one of the healthiest diets in the world and there’s no dairy, wheat or beef in sight. The diet – known as the NiMe (non-industrialised microbiome restore) diet – has been developed by researchers who looked at the eating patterns of people living in Papua New Guinea and other non-industrialised societies.
The NiMe diet is packed with vegetables, legumes and fruit and contains one small serving of animal protein per day (salmon, chicken or pork). It also avoids highly processed foods. When researchers put their findings to the test in a human intervention study, participants saw improved health in just three weeks, with a drop in LDL (“bad”) cholesterol by 17%, reduced blood sugar by 6%, and reduced C-reactive Protein – a marker of inflammation and heart disease – by 14%. Participants also lost weight while still eating the same number of calories as before.
“We saw remarkable results including weight loss,” says study leader Professor Jens Walter, Professor at the School of Microbiology at University College Cork. “These benefits were directly linked to improvements in the participants’ gut microbiome, specifically, microbiome features damaged by industrialisation.”
Dairy, beef and wheat were excluded from the human trial because they are not part of the traditional diet in rural Papua New Guinea, he added. The diet also included 45g of fibre a day, which exceeds the recommendations in dietary guidelines.
Prof Walter said he was “actively searching for new ways” to prevent chronic illness linked to the food we eat. “Western diets – high in processed foods and low in fibre – are associated with obesity, diabetes and heart disease. These diets don’t only harm our bodies, they also harm our gut microbiomes, the complex community of bacteria, fungi and viruses found in our intestinal tract that are important for our health.”
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