Although I have made paleo banana bread a few times, including recently for my mother, who is trying to reduce the amount of sugar she’s consuming, I think the overall concept of paleo eating is pretty stupid, that we should return back to the time of cave men to really be eating as healthily as we can. So… cave men had access to eggs? Really? And they used sugar as a sweetener for… baking banana bread?

The biggest gripe I have with the paleo diet is that it demonizes beans and all legumes and puts them on the “unhealthy” food list. As soon as I heard that, I knew this diet was total garbage. The rationale they have is that beans contain lectins, which are supposedly bad for you. The lectins are pretty much destroyed by cooking; that’s why we cook legumes in the first place and to soften them. As long as you are cooking the beans long enough, you will be fine. Beans are high in fiber and likely the most nutrient-dense food on earth. If I were vegetarian or vegan and didn’t have access to beans, I’d probably be massively malnourished.

I thought about this as as I made my Kerala black-eyed pea coconut curry tonight. Over the last year, I’ve been cooking more black-eyed peas, and I’m so impressed by how buttery and creamy they can become. It actually makes you miss meat less when you eat these beans. Just think of what all these crazy paleo followers are missing.