Diet Systems

Everyone has a dietary limitation of one kind or another. Some dietary limitations are permanent, others are seasonal. The time to find this out is before you set out on a long distance hike. Thru-hike failure rate due to improper diet is not known but obviously exists. Probably the most common failure is due to lactose intolerant people who decide to use dairy products (including whey). Maybe your body can adapt to them and maybe it can't. Find out before the hike! The following diet systems are posted to help you explore the idea of what works for you and what does not.

Traditional Hiking Diet Systems
As a nutritionist and avid long distance hiker, Brenda L. Braaten, Ph.D., R.D, has spent many nights along the trail answering questions related to nutrition and endurance. Based on her sabbatical research and personal experience she has compiled Pack Light, Eat Right in an FAQ format.

Primitive Diet Systems

Blood Type Diet/ Nutrient Value Encyclopedia The Type O diet recommendations easily fall into the class of a primitive diet.

Weston A. Price Foundation Diet is dedicated to restoring nutrient-dense foods to the human diet through education, research and activism.

What is The Primal Blueprint? The essence of the Primal Blueprint is this: Most of life is really much simpler than modern medicine and science would like to have you believe. You can have a tremendous impact on how your genes express themselves, simply by providing your cells the right environments. All you need is a basic understanding of how your body works and a simple philosophical roadmap you can use to find answers to just about any questions of health and fitness – whether it involves personal choices or lifestyle adjustments or whether medical intervention might be appropriate. With this simple strategy, you will forever be able to examine or evaluate any food choice, any form of exercise or any other behavior in the context of how it impacts your genes! Even if you decide to opt for a “bad choice”, at least you’ll know why it’s bad…

Evolution, Diet and Health With regard to diet what students of human evolution and advocates of evolutionary medicine need most from paleoprimatologists is an estimate of the nutritional pattern likely to have characterized the last common ancestor of apes and humans, a hypothetical species thought to have existed in Africa between seven and five million years ago.

Vegetarian Diet Systems

Vegetarian Hiking I've spent the past ten years of my life as a vegetarian, and during the last four of those years I traveled the full lengths of the Appalachian, Pacific Crest, and Continental Divide National Scenic Trails while maintaining a vegetarian diet - David Patterson

Mediterranean Diet System

[The traditional Mediterranean Diet refers to the dietary patterns typical in the early 1960's of some Mediterranean regions, including Crete and other parts of Greece and Southern Italy. The reason these dietary patterns are singled out are because the adult life expectancy of these areas were among the highest in the world; with rates of coronary heart disease among the lowest in the world during that time.
The Mediterranean Diet Food Pyramid