Dr. Wolf Funfack is a specialist in internal medicine and a nutritional physician. His personal experiences and the daily problems of overweight presented by many patients in his practice led him to seek effective solutions in the area of diet and healthy nutrition. In 2001, together with Silvia Bürkle, Diplomate in Food Engineering, he developed the metabolic balance® metabolic program based on his 20-year experience as a nutritional specialist.
Our ancestors who were still living as hunters and gatherers covered 15 to 20 miles every day on foot. We aren’t speaking here about casual strolls, for they sped along quite briskly. Either they were running after something to eat, or they were running from something that wanted to eat them. In both cases, they were physically very active and remained so throughout their lives.
After dinner, rest a while; after dinner, walk a mile! Our ancestors had already walked that mile before their dinner, and they had used up in advance every calorie they ate as they ran through the forests. The ratio between calories used and calories ingested was reasonably balanced. If it was out of kilter, it was more likely because they used more calories than they were able to take in. The average person in the Western world these days covers about 550 to 660 yards daily and of course hardly needs to consume additional calories in order to secure daily meals. Typically, a person sits at a computer and orders the next freezer-full of food from the “table-set-yourself. com” company, which brings supplies right to the house and, if the buyer is especially fortunate, even sorts them neatly in the buyer’s freezer. Long ago, the foods consumed by our hunter-gatherer ancestors were purely natural products—100% organic even without the USDA Organic seal, and a certification of a kind we can only dream about. In today’s supermarket, we typically find only industrially processed foods and meals prepared in advance. Whether there are truly natural products behind all the different organic certificates is not easy for consumers to determine, and in addition, they must pay quite a bit extra for these allegedly special organic foods.
From prehistoric bone artifacts we can now be certain that the diet back then consisted of 60 to 70% animal protein. This is also confirmed by studies of native peoples nowadays who still nourish themselves by being hunters and gatherers. They too live on 60 to 70% animal protein. This distribution of basic nutrients is similar in all regions regardless of their distance from the equator. Likewise, the difference in the proportion of carbohydrates consumed by peoples living in the Northern Hemisphere compared with their southern neighbors living near the equator is much smaller than one might imagine!
Protein-rich foods include eggs, milk, yogurt, and cheese.