New Consciousness Review Winter 2016 | Page 27

HEALTH INTERVIEW Primal Fat Burner Nora Gedgaudas, author of the groundbreaking book, Primal Body Primal Mind, talks with Miriam Knight about her new book that shakes the myths surrounding dietary fat explains how using a fat-based ketogenic diet in alignment with your evolutionary and genetic design can give you the tools you need to rebuild your own health. Miriam: Nora, tell us about this primal fat burning book. You are the preeminent authority I would say on the paleo diet and on converting to a fatbased diet. Can you tell us, what is the difference between a fat-based diet and the “normal” diet in human physiology? Nora: What we can define as “normal” as you say, is this: The vast majority of people in the world are pretty well-adapted, or I should say maladapted to more of a sugar-based metabolism, a sugar burning metabolism if you will. What I try to make the case for is restoring a more natural and healthy fatbased metabolism that utilizes both free fatty acids and ketones as a primary source of fuel. I have talked about these two ways of looking at our metabolism metaphorically using my old wood stove analogy. You can look upon carbohydrates as essentially being a form of “metabolic kindling” if you will. It burns very fast and hot, but it doesn’t burn in a particularly long, stable or sustained manner. The carbohydrates I am talking about here are sugar and starch-rich foods, and we need to distinguish these from fibrous vegetables and greens that really don’t have a whole lot of caloric value or utilizable carbohydrate value in the form of sugar and starch. The so-called “complex carbohydrates” that we’re all supposed to be basing our diet on according to the US Department of Agricul- 27 | New Consciousness Review