This beautiful image of the Omega nebula, a stellar nursery located in the constellation Sagittarius, was taken using the Very Large Telescope located in the Atacama Desert of Chile. Light from these newborn stars will take 6,500 light-years to reach Earth. (image via Wired)
Hold on, we are now jumping back to....Paleo bling!? Hang this 9 cm stone pendant around your neck with a leather strap and you would be stylish 25,000 years ago. It would probably go well with your pelt. The pendant, found in the Basque province of Spain, was used for sharpening stone tools. Form, function and fashion.
Our Paleolithic ancestors' survival depended on stone tools and what we know of their diet points to an overall robust health. Today, even though we have wonderful tools that allow us to peer into deep space, we have lost sight of our original health and our original diet. Although the Paleo diet varied in different parts of the world, it did not include processed foods, sugar, bread, pasta, pastries, cookies, candy….. (That sentence may be a hard to read for some.) If you want to know what the Paleo diet is not, go to your local Starbucks and look at the top shelf. Also, be wary of much of what exists on the second and third shelves.
Fortunately, a growing number of people are rediscovering the original human diet. The State Journal of West Virginia has a story on Kimberly Huneycutt:
“A former California girl, Huneycutt found herself at the age of 40, unhealthy, aged beyond her years and tired after a life spent in the sun and eating a traditional "American" diet that included processed foods.”
"It's been really amazing," says Honeycutt about the transformation she experienced on the Paleo diet.
Nutritionist Stella Metsovas has developed the Paleo Mediterranean diet. Although the “Mediterranean principles” she uses are not clear from this brief article, the description of Paleo diet is solid:
“The Paleolithic diet consists of grass-fed meat, free-range fowl or wild-caught fish, seasonal fruits and vegetables, and generous portions of healthy fats – including nuts, seeds, avocados, olive oil and coconut oil. Grains, legumes, dairy products, sugar, vegetable oils and processed foods are absent from this diet.”
You might not start at grass-fed, free-range, or wild-caught stage, but switching to fish, meat, vegetables, fruit, nuts and berries will put you leagues away for all that stuff on the top shelf.
Maybe you are concerned about starting the Paleo diet because of harm to animals. Unfortunately, as a look at the numbers in Australia shows, no one gets off the hook on this one. However, the Paleo diet appears to be the better choice. When you compare the use of rangelands versus croplands on animal life, the numbers don’t look good for agriculture.
Relying on grains and pulses brings destruction of native ecosystems, significant threats to native species and at least 25 times more deaths of sentient animals per kilogram of food.
Finally, in the category “if we trash the planet, we trash ourselves”, the good news is that global investment in cleantech companies increased by 13% to $8.99 billion in 2011. Better yet, the Cleantech Group believes “2012 will be an all-time record year for global cleantech investments."