Guest Post: Tortured By The Food Pyramid

Written by Mark Grigoleit

“I am 54, male, born in northern Alberta with Norwegian/German heritage. I had numerous and serious health issues since I was in my early 20’s, most of which cleared up almost completely about 5 years ago with a dietary change, which I’ll discuss.

I grew up with access to anything I would want to eat, as my parents had a restaurant at the time. I later went to university without scholarships and had to live cheaply. This meant lots of carbs, a little meat, and all low fat, as that was the official guideline since the 1970s. In my early 20s I developed hypoglycaemia, would walk into walls in the afternoon from low blood glucose. In my late 20s I started to get migraines. Waking up in the morning with a rusty screwdriver in the side of my head, slowly turning. In my 30s I had what I can only describe as a multitude of food allergies, along with a suspected candida condition. Leaky gut came up. And to top it off, mood swings (cyclothymia) since for as long as I can remember. In my 40’s I developed reflux, which means I sometimes woke up vomiting. Then one day I came across Gary Taubes’ book ‘Good Calories, Bad Calories’. The week after finishing that book, I went on a meatball diet. That’s right, meatballs for lunch and dinner, for a week. After the initial aggression (!) subsided, I noticed that after I switched to a low-carb diet with healthy fats (butter, olive oil, coconut oil), several things quickly changed: the migraines went from 2-3 per week to one or two per year; no more food sensitivities; I can eat some milder cheeses now, which previously were migraine triggers; I can eat CHOCOLATE again!; I am no longer hungry all the time; and my moods are stable, mostly. The food pyramid isn’t wrong, it’s just upside down, and I lost about 25 years of my life because of that little mistake.”