GS, this appears far different than your previous statements that you eat fruit and consume fruit juices for "hydration" in place of water. It is also counter to your previous post where you put some poor person on a "natural" fruit juice and vegetable juice diet to cure liver cancer.
Please understand that I'm not criticizing your personal choices or your right to make them. Only that the choices and recommendations you've made are not consistent with the topic of this forum.
I'm also in a similar situation as you've described where I follow an admittedly narrow interpretation of a raw paleo diet, but my family does not. As an example, my wife is 5 feet tall and weighs about 220 lbs - border line on being grossly obese. She suffers from high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes, and gall stones to the extent that even though she's had her gall bladder removed, her bile ducts get clogged and she must be hospitalized every couple of years to have them manually swept out. All of these things cause her great discomfort, headaches, severe indigestion, constant heart burn, sleep apnea, etc, yet she refuses to change her diet. Her doctor says that her diet is so bad, (gallons of vegetable oils, cookies and cakes drenched in honey, and mostly pasta, rice, and white bread), that even eating hamburgers and french fries would be and improvement. She insists that the foods she eats are what her culture has eaten for centuries and refuses to change. Her sisters and brother also suffer similar problems as they eat the same foods.
My wife also insists that the food I eat is totally wrong and she wouldn't eat raw meat or animal fat if it was the last food on earth, she'd rather die of starvation. She sticks with this even though she's seen that the way I eat has solved my health issues, many of which were the same as hers. The choices my wife makes are hers and she must endure the consequences just as I must face the consequences of the choices I make. When she complains of her morning headache, her heartburn and stomach pain after eating, the fact that she can't sleep and is always tired, and the intense pain when her bile ducts become blocked, I never say a word. She just takes her daily fist full of pills and we head for the emergency room every few months because this is the way she wants to live her life.
Our choices are our own and we have every right to make them, but must endure the resulting consequences, good or bad. My problem is when we are recommending "medication" to solve health problems. Like it or not, herbal remedies are nothing more than "medication in the wild" as it were. As Tyler pointed out, plants contain the same substances as the pills - it just looks different and you may have to consume a bit more of the plant or extract the chemicals as a tea etc. To pretend that this is somehow better or different than taking a modern medicine containing the same substances seem a bit disingenuous to me. What I'm trying to do is work through my health issues such that my lifestyle itself will make the need for medications in any form unnecessary. So far my narrow definition of what constitutes a good paleo diet has served me will in this respect.
Lex
