Welcome to the New Nordic Diet!

Image: Stefano Valle / FreeDigital-Photos.net

Hi, this is the completely unofficial site for the New Nordic Diet as it is emerging in these years from the universities and eateries of Denmark, the Southernmost Nordic Country and home to The World's Best Restaurant 2010, Noma. Right now, a 100 million Danish Kroner (curtesy of the Nordea Fund) are being spent toward the creation of a whole new way of approaching everyday family eating in the Nordic Countries. A way that should ideally lead to a lowered incidence of the various so-called diseases of civilizations or life style diseases such as diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular disease, stroke, and, to a large extent, cancer.

The New Nordic Diet will arguably be a healthier one than the standardized Western diet, which is promoted by the various official nutritional guidelines as they appear in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland, the USA, Canada, the UK, the Netherlands, Germany, Russia, the Baltic nations and other countries sharing our latitude or way of thinking about diet. And with this in mind, is there any reason that this diet should not be shared with the rest of the world? We think not, which is why this site has been created.

The main contributor to this blog will be budzinski, author of the popular Tanker om Kost (Thoughts on Diet), a blog in Danish which advocates a return to ancestral health via a Paleolithic diet low in--or, preferably, devoid of--neolithic food items such as grains, pasteurized dairy, processed sugar and modern vegetable oils, as well as a Paleolithic look at sleep, exercise and stress-management. The plan is however that users, i.e. you, are encouraged to generate content such as New Nordic Diet compliant recipes, which in turn will be presented on the Recipes for a New Nordic Diet blog.

The scientific basis for the diet is formulated in the Grundlag for Ny Nordisk Hverdagsmad, which you may download from HERE. It was published in August 2010 by the Institute for Human Nutrition at the University of Copenhagen (and is regrettably still only available in Danish).

As a raison d'etre for the diet it says:

In the Nordic countries a small population shares a vast natural environment. Therefore, we have a natural access to large quantities of plants, funghi, meat, fish, berries and fruit which may be harvested from the wild. (p. 27)

With the emphasis on 'wild' it is clear that a New Nordic Diet will have a lot of common ground with a Paleolithic diet that famously makes use of foods that can be 'hunted, fished, collected, gathered or plucked'. Befittingly, then, there will be a bias toward the Paleolithic approach in these blog posts. We do, however, welcome all recipes. If people are opposed to say, whole barley or oats, they are welcome to substitute sweet potatoes or yams or what ever source of starch they prefer in their diet.

Contribute, share, enjoy
If you have a New Nordic Diet compliant recipe, please post it as a comment to any post on this blog. The recipe will then appear on the Recipe blog and thus become part of an online New Nordic Diet cookbook. Pictures that would accompany recipes must be sent to:

Kostbloggeren
)at(
yahoo
)dot(
com

Please use name of recipe as subject for message.

Let's do the New Nordic Diet together and become strong, lean and fit like the invincible Vikings!