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