evoBodybuilding

Bob Fritz has been a big name behind the scenes of modern bodybuilding supplementation’and health foods for pets and competitive animals’for many years. He’s taken his own discoveries, along with the ideas of other key contributors to modern-day sports nutrition, and combined them to develop a model for performance athletes. That information all comes together in a new book, evoBodybuilding.

As the name implies, the book is based on our evolution, but not in the way you might expect. Its thesis is that we haven’t evolved as much as we think. We are, Fritz says, ‘essentially unchanged since the Stone Age.’ In other words, we need to look at the idea of reverting to our hunter-gatherer origins in choosing how we eat and train. Obviously, that doesn’t mean you should go make yourself a bow and arrow and start hunting your meat, but it does mean you should consider eating as if you were.

Fritz’s ideas are compelling, to say the least. He explains the problems with today’s modern grain-based diets, and he describes the ways in which we can bypass what he calls our ‘stay-small’ genes. That can be done both nutritionally and physically, based on your choices in food and exercise.

The training Fritz describes is about what you’d expect’basic and recovery oriented. It’s the nutrition information that has me truly interested in his approach. According to Fritz, our digestive systems were designed to use very few, if any, grains’ironically, probably our most abundant food source today.

His Factory-Spec Caveman Diet recommends about 65 percent plant sources and 35 percent wild-meat sources’that’s right, wild meat. That means our meat sources should be grass-fed, rather than grain-fed, animals. Even the eggs we eat should come from free-range chickens.

Fritz investigates many other intriguing ideas, and I recommend that you read the book yourself. I’m very interested in putting many of his ideas to the test. There is one problem, though. Except for the omega-enriched eggs he recommends, the stuff is not readily available at your typical grocery store. The only local source I’ve found for grass-fed meat is Trader Joe’s, which sometimes carries Australian grass-fed beef. At the moment I’m waiting for an order of grass-fed meat from Northstar Bison (www.northstarbison.com or 1-888-295-6332). Yum!

I’m going to give evoBodybuilding’s Caveman Diet a serious try. Watch for my results and impressions in upcoming issues of the magazine or IRONMAN’s e-zine.

Editor’s note: EvoBodybuilding is available from Home Gym Warehouse. Call 1-800-447-0008 or visit www.home-gym.com.