Hi Lorraine,

Thank you for your thoughtful note. Conscious Eating was not written to prescribe a diet, but to create awareness of how our food consumption effects not only our health, but the health of society and the planet. Many people in this world are constrained in their food choices by economics and geographic availability. In some regions, grains and starches may be the only choices available. In others, it may be animal proteins. In most of the developed world, we have many food choices, so the article was written to help create awareness of how we can eat more consciously, no matter what are dietary preferences and constraints are. For example, the article didn’t say don’t eat meat. It said if you eat meat, eat pasture-raised, grass, fed, grass finished meat. I agree that whole grains and starches, even though they are generally complex carbohydrates, often act like sugars in our body. However, many complex carbohydrates, including such things as whole grains and whole starches, don’t create the sugar spike that would generally be typical of simple carbohydrates. The gut biome is of critical importance to our health, and writing an article specifically about the gut biome is a really good idea.