About Us

About Us

 

Welcome to Paleo Britain! My name is Chloe Archard and together with my sisters Sophie, Polly, Lucy and Rosie we have set up Paleo Britain to bring together all the great British companies producing real, high-quality, good-for-us, ethical and sustainable food. We want to promote that we should all be eating real food, not processed fake and junk foods, and to let people know what’s going on with the paleo/primal diet and lifestyle movement here in the UK.

 

About Us

 

We initially didn’t want to call this website Paleo Britain – we wanted to call it Real Food for Health. The word ‘paleo’ makes people think ‘caveman’ fad-diet, where you eat nothing but lean meats and veggies, and we would never promote fad-diets here. But truthfully, that is not what the paleo diet is about at all. The paleo diet is about eating real food, maximizing nutrient-density, and minimizing toxic components in our diets and lifestyles.

 

 

There are a few simple things we believe in and these are the things we’ll be promoting and talking about on this site

 

  1. Eat real food!
  2. Eat nutrient-dense, fresh, whole foods and foods that are good for us.
  3. Avoid foods that have harmful and detrimental effects on the body.
  4. Don’t be afraid of fat. Saturated fat is not bad for us!
  5. Support British food producers and other UK companies producing natural, organic and ethical products.
  6. We also believe in movement, healthy sleep habits and stress-reduction in our busy lives.

 

I studied at Oxford University from 1999-2003 and have an MSc in Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry. During my degree I became fascinated in the workings of the human body at a cellular level – how what we eat effects the genes and proteins in our body, how the immune system works and how cancer develops. I’m interested in the science of nutrition. I apply my scientific training when I read information about nutrition and I never believe something I read unless I can see evidence to back it up. I also LOVE food and cooking and want to eat delicious food that’s also good for me, so we want to show through this site that healthy eating doesn’t have to be boring.

 

Eating paleo will not make you feel like you’re on a diet. You will look, feel and perform better, and you’ll eat better too.

 

In the UK, obesity has increased ten fold since the 1970’s. In 2012 24% of men in the UK and 25% of women were classified as obese. 40% of men and 30% of women are overweight. Everyone has heard these statistics in the news over the last ten years, so why are the figures still going up and up?

 

I believed the ‘saturated fat is bad’ dogma for years and tried to eat a low fat diet based on starchy foods. However, in 2010 I read The Diet Delusion (Good Calories, Bad Calories) by Gary Taubes which totally transformed the way I thought about fat and sugar. It has absolutely NOT been proven that eating saturated fat causes heart disease. So why are we still being told to cut saturated fat from our diets?

 

I then read Zoe Harcombe’s The Obesity Epidemic and Nutrition & Physical Degeneration by Weston A Price (two brilliant books) which led me down the route of eating real, nutrient-dense foods.

 

The paleo diet in a nut-shell involves eating (mainly but not exclusively) foods available to our paleolithic ancestors, and the most nutritionally dense foods available, foods that will make us healthy and strong. It advocates avoiding foods that will harm our health, these foods happen to be ones that were not available throughout most of human history (processed food, refined sugar, grains and vegetable/seed oils). The most up to date and high-quality scientific research suggests that this also happens to be the best way to eat for optimum health.

 

Our current dietary advice is not working, and worse still, is causing an obesity epidemic in the UK. The Foresight report (a Government report) predicts that 90% of today’s children will be overweight or obese by 2050. In 1983, Britain did a U-turn in our dietary advice and since then there has been an explosion in obesity, diabetes and other modern illnesses. We used to be told that starchy foods were fattening, and sugary ones particularly so. Suddenly we were being told ‘base your meals on starchy foods’. Obesity has increased up to ten-fold since.

 

We must return to eating real food, not processed food, and that is what the paleo diet advocates. To quote one of my favourite researchers Zoe Harcombe ‘I believe that nature knows how to feed humans better than food manufacturers do’.

 

We hope you enjoy the site and find some useful information on here to help improve your health!