Table of Contents
Praise for THE PALEO DIET
“The Paleo Diet helps you lose fat, improve your health, and feel great. Why? Because the Paleo Diet works with your genetics to help you realize your natural birthright of vibrant health and wellness. My book’s success is due in large part to the revolutionary solutions provided by Professor Loren Cordain and his Paleo Diet message.”
—Robb Wolf, author of the bestselling The Paleo Solution
“Loren Cordain’s extensive research demonstrates how modern westernized diets drastically depart from the original diet humans consumed for millions of years. In The Paleo Diet and The Paleo Diet Cookbook , Dr. Cordain shows how diets high in grains, dairy, vegetable oils, salt, and refined sugars are at odds with our genetic legacy and then shares his uncomplicated strategy for losing weight and getting healthy.”
—Arthur De Vany, Ph.D., author of The New Evolution Diet
“We found Dr. Loren Cordain’s scientific research indispensable when we wrote The 30-Day Low-Carb Diet Solution. Cordain provides the most compelling arguments we’ve seen for why a protein-rich diet is the diet we were born to eat. His weight-loss plan simply works and his recipes are simply terrific.”
—Michael R. Eades, M.D., and Mary Dan Eades, M.D., authors of Protein Power, The 6-Week Cure for the Middle-Aged Middle, and The Low-Carb Comfort Food Cookbook
“The Paleo Diet is at once revolutionary and intuitive. Its prescription provides without a doubt the most nutritious diet on the planet. Beautifully written, The Paleo Diet takes us from the theory to the day-to-day practice of the native human diet.”
—Jennie Brand-Miller, Ph.D., coauthor of the bestselling The Glucose Revolution series
“Dr. Loren Cordain’s approach to nutrition is logically compelling, readily understood, and at the cutting edge of health science. Not all scientists can translate their concepts into a straightforward, accessible format, but Cordain has accomplished this feat brilliantly.”
—S. Boyd Eaton, M.D., lead author of The Paleolithic Prescription
“Finally someone has figured out the best diet—a modern version of the diet the human race grew up eating. Dr. Loren Cordain’s easy-to-follow diet plan reminds us that the healthiest foods are the simplest ones.”
—Jack Challem, author of The Inflammation Syndrome, Stop Prediabetes Now, andSyndrome X
“In a world where we’re surrounded with information overload on dieting, this is a commonsense and effective weight-control approach that’s easy to follow.”
—Fred Pescatore, M.D., author of The Hamptons Diet and The Allergy and Asthma Cure
“The Paleo Diet lays out the basic nutrition plan not only for weight loss and good health but also for peak performance in athletic competition. It works.”
—Joe Friel, author of The Triathlete’s Training Bible
Preface to the Revised Edition
The original version of The Paleo Diet first came into print in January 2002. After its initial release, my book gained popularity and sales were good for the next few years, but it did not achieve chart-topping levels and the national exposure for which I had hoped. Fast-forward eight years to 2010: The Paleo Diet has become one of America’s best-selling diet and health books.
This kind of sales history is almost unheard of in the publishing industry for successful diet books, which typically act like dwarf stars—they burn brightly at first and then fade away. Not so for The Paleo Diet, which started as a gentle glow and over the years has become hotter and hotter until now it is red hot. A diet book that once began as a ripple is now approaching tidal wave proportions.
Why? What is different about The Paleo Diet in 2010 compared to 2002? The material in the book has not radically changed, but the world has radically changed since 2002, particularly how we now communicate and inform one another about our lives, our daily experiences, and our reality. And herein is a clue to my book’s sustained and increasing popularity.
When I first started to write The Paleo Diet in 2000, the Internet was in its youthful throes (Google had been founded only two years earlier, in 1998), and most people still used telephones (not cell phones) to talk. The U.S. Postal Service remained healthy because Bill Gates’s foundational maxim “a personal computer in every household” had not yet taken firm hold, and snail mail reigned supreme. Then, “spam” simply meant canned meat. In the era of my book’s baptism, texting, blogs, Facebook, YouTube, and most of the other Internet and electronic wizardry we now routinely take for granted still lay in the future. Then, people found out about the world through newspapers, radio, TV, and weekly news magazines. Now, except for the New York Times and a few other mainstays, daily newspapers have dried up to a trickle. Who wants to hear about outdated weekly news in paid-for magazines when you can get it for free and instantly from the Internet anytime you want? Like newspapers and magazines, radio and TV are not nearly as convenient or as timely as the Web—you can get Web versions of these media, anyway—so why bother with the real things?
When I wrote The Paleo Diet a decade ago, electronic interconnectedness was primitive, slow, and noninclusive. Local U.S. news was unavailable, obscure, or unknown in places like Uzbekistan or Botswana and vice versa. In those days, scientists reported new discoveries in their specialized journals, but this information was rarely picked up by newspapers or the popular press. It took years or decades for many discoveries to have an impact on people’s lives. A decade ago, most people didn’t argue with their physicians’ diagnoses and prescriptions because “the doctor always knew best”—presumably because, then, the doctor was better informed than the patient was.
The Internet, Web sites, blogs, cell phones, and other various types of electronic wizardry have transformed our world within a mere decade or less. The electronic transmission of news and information and practical data to improve our lives, our financial situations, and our health has become humankind’s universal language. Anyone in the world who has access to either a computer or a cell phone can immediately connect with anyone else who has the same technology. We now can and do talk to one another in unprecedented numbers—by the billions. A local event can instantaneously become a worldwide happening. Today what your next-door neighbor knows is available not only to you and your close friends, but literally to the world.
With such vast and nearly total information connectiveness, a subtle but crucial upshot of this brave new electronic world has arisen. When someone comes up with an answer to a complex or even a simple problem that is correct and that works, it gains followers like a snowball rolling downhill. Such has been the case for The Paleo Diet. It simply works. In an earlier era, prior to the Web, when human networks were small and noninclusive, information flowed slowly or not at all. Accordingly, correct answers sometimes smoldered for years, decades, or longer before they became widely recognized and accepted. Fortunately, The Paleo Diet came of age at the same time that the Internet was being adopted globally.
Had I originally written about a diet—a lifetime way of eating—that didn’t work, The Paleo Diet would have simply faded into oblivion in the ensuing eight years since its publication. Yet it didn’t. My book continues to gain more and more supporters as people like you relate their personal health experiences with The Paleo Diet to one another via the largest and most comprehensive human network ever created: the Internet. If The Paleo Diet had caused you to gain weight, made you feel lethargic, raised your blood cholesterol, promoted ill health, and been impossible to follow, it would have fallen by the wayside like most other dietary schemes dreamed up by human beings. Yet it didn’t. In fact, The Paleo Diet movement continues to spread worldwide, thanks in part to the Web.
When people find correct answers to complex diet/health questions, they let their friends know, and thanks to the Internet, the momentum has accelerated. In the United States, the word “Paleo” has become part of mass culture, due in part to its popularity with the national CrossFit movement that is sweeping the country and recent coverage in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other global media. The Paleo Diet has found wide acceptance not only with CrossFitters and athletes, but also with the medical and health professions, who have embraced it because of its wide-reaching therapeutic effects on metabolic syndrome diseases, autoimmune diseases, mental disorders, and beyond. In fact, there are very few chronic illnesses or diseases that do not respond favorably to our ancestral diet.
The novelty of The Paleo Diet is that a mortal human being like me didn’t create it. Rather, I—along with many other scientists, physicians, and anthropologists worldwide—simply uncovered what was already there: the diet to which our species is genetically adapted. This is the diet of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, the foods consumed by every human being on the planet until a mere 333 human generations ago, or about ten thousand years ago. Our ancestors’ diets were uncomplicated by agriculture, animal husbandry, technology, and processed foods. Then, as today, our health is optimized when we eat lean meats, seafood, and fresh fruits and veggies at the expense of grains, dairy, refined sugars, refined oils, and processed foods.
Nutritional science is not static. What we once believed to be true ten years ago is invariably replaced by fresh knowledge based on better experiments, more comprehensive data, and a newer understanding of how our bodies work. When I first wrote The Paleo Diet, a great deal of the dietary advice I offered was cutting edge—so much so, that it was looked on with skepticism by scientists and the public at large. Here’s a perfect example. One 2002 online review of The Paleo Diet read, “Claims of improving diseases from diabetes to acne to polycystic ovary disease may be a little overstated.” I feel vindicated knowing that the original dietary recommendations I made for type 2 diabetes, acne, and polycystic ovary syndrome have been confirmed by hundreds of scientific experiments.
Especially gratifying are a series of epidemiological experiments from Dr. Walter Willett and colleagues at the Harvard School of Public Health that linked milk consumption and the occurrence of acne. Even more convincing evidence for the diet-acne link comes from Dr. Neil Mann’s research group at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, where acne patients were actually fed high-protein, low-glycemic-load diets and reported significant improvement in their symptoms.
Anytime a diet/health book survives eight years, the hindsight rule (hindsight is 20/20) surely has to come into play. Indeed it did with this book, as reflected by my current updates and edits to the original volume. The elegance of The Paleo Diet concept is that the essential idea (the evolutionary basis for optimal human nutrition) is fundamentally sound and will never change; as Boyd Eaton, the godfather of Paleolithic nutrition commented, “The science behind Paleolithic Nutrition is indisputable; however, we will continually hone the concept as newer information accumulates.”
So, what’s new in this edition, and what are the noteworthy changes?
The first revision involves recommended oils. We are now down to only four: olive oil, flaxseed oil, walnut oil, and avocado oil. I no longer can recommend canola oil at all, and the only oil I believe should be used for cooking is olive oil. My friend and noted nutritionist Robert Crayhon always said to “let the data speak for itself,” and I believe his words ring true. The rationale for these new recommendations is solely based on new facts that have emerged. You can find this updated information in this revised edition.
Another shift is that I have softened my stance on the saturated fat issue as more and more data become available, including information from my recent evolutionary paper on the topic.
Finally, as scientists begin to unravel the mystery of autoimmune diseases, it is becoming apparent that multiple nutritional elements of the Paleo Diet may protect us from these one hundred or more illnesses that afflict nearly 10 percent of the U.S. population.
All of this information, along with the tweaks needed to bring The Paleo Diet up to date in 2010, is to be found within this edition. I’ve also just published a new book, The Paleo Diet Cookbook, which contains more than 150 Paleo recipes. I owe a debt of gratitude to each and every Paleo Diet supporter for making this concept known to the world.
PART ONE
Understanding the Paleo Diet
Introduction
This book represents the culmination of my lifelong interest in the link between diet and health, and of my fascination with anthropology and human origins. Although these scientific disciplines may at first appear to be unrelated, they are intimately connected. Our origins—the very beginnings of the human species—can be traced to pivotal changes in the diet of our early ancestors that made possible the evolution of our large, metabolically active brains. The Agricultural Revolution and the adoption of cereal grains as staple foods allowed us to abandon forever our previous hunter-gatherer lifestyle and caused the Earth’s population to balloon and develop into the vast industrial-technological society in which we live today.
The problem, as you will see in this book, is that we are genetically adapted to eat what the hunter-gatherers ate. Many of our health problems today are the direct result of what we do—and do not—eat. This book will show you where we went wrong—how the standard American diet and even today’s so-called healthy diets wreak havoc with our Paleolithic (Old Stone Age) constitutions. It will also show you how you can lose weight and regain health and well-being by eating the way our hunter-gatherer ancestors ate—the diet that nature intended.
The reason for this book is very simple: the Paleo Diet is the one and only diet that ideally fits our genetic makeup. Just 333 generations ago—and for 2.5 million years before that—every human being on Earth ate this way. It is the diet to which all of us are ideally suited and the lifetime nutritional plan that will normalize your weight and improve your health. I didn’t design this diet—nature did. This diet has been built into our genes.
More than twenty years ago, I read a book that endorsed vegetarian dieting titled Are You Confused? I suspect that this title pretty much sums up how many of us feel about the conflicting breakthroughs and mixed messages we hear every day from scientific and medical authorities on what we should and shouldn’t eat to lose weight and be healthy.
But here’s the good news. Over the last twenty-five years, scientists and physicians worldwide have begun to agree on the fundamental principle underlying optimal nutrition—thanks in part to my colleague Dr. S. Boyd Eaton of Emory University in Atlanta. In 1985, Dr. Eaton published a revolutionary scientific paper called “Paleolithic Nutrition” in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine suggesting that the ideal diet was to be found in the nutritional practices of our Stone Age ancestors. Although a few physicians, scientists, and anthropologists had been aware of this concept, it was Dr. Eaton’s writings that brought this idea to center stage.
Dr. Eaton applied the most fundamental and pervasive idea of all biology and medicine—the theory of evolution by natural selection—to diet and health. His premise was simple: our genes determine our nutritional needs. And our genes were shaped by the selective pressures of our Paleolithic environment, including the foods our ancient ancestors ate.
Many modern foods are at odds with our genetic makeup—which, as we’ll discuss in the book, is basically the same as that of our Paleolithic ancestors—and this is the cause of many of our modern diseases. By restoring the food types that we are genetically programmed to eat, we can not only lose weight, but also restore our health and well-being.
I have studied diet and health for the past three decades and have devoted the last twenty years to studying the Paleo Diet concept. I have been fortunate enough to work with Dr. Eaton to refine this groundbreaking idea and explore a wealth of new evidence. Together with many of the world’s top nutritional scientists and anthropologists, I have been able to determine the dietary practices of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Understanding what they ate is essential for understanding what we should eat today to improve our health and promote weight loss. Our research has been published in the top nutritional journals in the world.
It’s all here for you in this book—all the dietary knowledge and wisdom that my research team and I have gleaned from our distant ancestors who lived in the days before agriculture. Part One explains what our Paleolithic ancestors ate, the basics of the Paleo Diet, and how civilization has made us stray from our original diet, bringing us ill health and obesity. Part Two shows how you can lose weight and how much you can lose, and also how the Paleo Diet can prevent and heal disease. Part Three spells out everything you need to know to follow the Paleo Diet—including meal plans for the three levels of the diet and more than 100 delicious Paleo recipes. That’s the best part of the Paleo Diet—you’ll eat well, feel great, and lose weight! The book ends with a complete list of scientific references that back up all of this information.
How Our Healthy Way of Life Went Wrong
The Agricultural Revolution began 10,000 years ago—just a drop in the bucket compared to the 2.5 million years that human beings have lived on Earth. Until that time—just 333 generations ago—everyone on the planet ate lean meats, fresh fruits, and vegetables. For most of us, it’s been fewer than 200 generations since our ancestors abandoned the old lifestyle and turned to agriculture. If you happen to be an Eskimo or a Native American, it’s been barely four to six generations. Except for perhaps a half-dozen tiny tribes in South America and a few on the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal, pure hunter-gatherers have vanished from the face of the Earth. When these few remaining tribes become Westernized during the next decade or so, this ancient way of life—which allowed our species to thrive, grow, and mature—will come to an end.
This loss of humanity’s original way of life matters a great deal. Why? Look at us. We’re a mess. We eat too much, we eat the wrong foods, and we’re fat. Incredibly, more Americans are overweight than aren’t: 68 percent of all American men over age twenty-five, and 64 percent of women over age twenty-five are either overweight or obese. And it’s killing us. The leading cause of death in the United States—responsible for 35 percent of all deaths or 1 of every 2.8 deaths—is heart and blood vessel disease. Seventy-three million Americans have high blood pressure; 34 million have high cholesterol levels, and 17 million have type 2 diabetes. It’s not a pretty picture.
Most people don’t realize just how healthy our Paleolithic ancestors were. They were lean, fit, and generally free from heart disease and the other ailments that plague Western countries. Yet many people assume that Stone Age people had it rough, that their lives were “poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” as Thomas Hobbes wrote in The Leviathan.
But the historical and anthropological record simply does not support this line of reasoning. Almost without exception, descriptions of hunter-gatherers by early European explorers and adventurers showed these people to be healthy, fit, strong, and vivacious. These same characteristics can be yours when you follow the dietary and exercise principles I have laid out in the Paleo Diet.
I have examined thousands of early-nineteenth and twentieth-century photographs of hunter-gatherers. They invariably show indigenous people to be lean, muscular, and fit. The few medical studies of hunter-gatherers who managed to survive into the twentieth century also confirm earlier written accounts by explorers and frontiersmen. No matter where they lived—in the polar regions of Canada, the deserts of Australia, or the rain forests of Brazil—the medical records were identical. These people were free from signs and symptoms of the chronic diseases that currently plague us. And they were lean and physically fit. The medical evidence shows that their body fat, aerobic fitness, blood cholesterol, blood pressure, and insulin metabolism were always superior to those of the average modern couch potato. In most cases, these values were equivalent to those of modern-day, healthy, trained athletes.
High blood pressure (hypertension) is the most prevalent risk factor for heart disease in the United States. It’s almost unheard of in indigenous populations. The Yanomamo Indians of northern Brazil and southern Venezuela, to whom salt was unknown in the late 1960s and early 1970s, were absolutely free from hypertension. Their blood pressure didn’t increase with age and remained remarkably low by today’s standards. Amazingly, scientific studies of Greenland Eskimos by Drs. Hans Bang and Jørn Dyerberg from Aalborg Hospital in Aalborg, Denmark, showed that despite a diet containing more than 60 percent animal food, not one death from heart disease—or even a single heart attack—occurred in 2,600 Eskimos from 1968 to 1978. This death rate from heart disease is one of the lowest ever reported in the medical literature. For a similar group of 2,600 people in the United States during a ten-year period, the expected number of deaths from heart disease would be about twenty-five.
When you put into practice the nutritional guidelines of the Paleo Diet, you will be getting the same protection from heart disease that the Eskimos had. You will also become lean and fit, like your ancient ancestors. This is your birthright. By going backward in time with your diet, you will actually be moving forward. You’ll be combining the ancient dietary wisdom with all of the health advantages that modern medicine has to offer. You will reap the best of both worlds.
1
Not Just Another Low-Carb Diet
What’s the diet craze this week? You name it, there’s a book selling it—and people buying it, hoping for a “magic bullet” to help them shed excess pounds. But how can everybody be right? More to the point, is anybody right? What are we supposed to eat? How can we lose weight, keep it off—and not feel hungry all the time? What’s the best diet for our health and well-being?
For more than thirty years, as an avid researcher of health, nutrition, and fitness, I have been working to answer these questions. I started this quest because I wanted to get past all the hype, confusion, and political posturing swirling around dietary opinion. I was looking for facts: the simple, unadulterated truth. The answer, I found, was hidden back in time—way back, with ancient humans who survived by hunting wild animals and fish and gathering wild fruits and vegetables. These people were known as “hunter-gatherers,” and my research team and I published our analysis of what many of them (more than 200 separate societies) ate in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.We were astonished at the diversity of their diet. We were also amazed at what they didnot eat—which we’ll get to in a minute and which may surprise you.
Health Secrets of Our Ancestors
What do Paleolithic people have to do with us? Actually, quite a lot: DNA evidence shows that basic human physiology has changed little in 40,000 years. Literally, we are Stone Agers living in the Space Age; our dietary needs are the same as theirs. Our genes are well adapted to a world in which all the food eaten daily had to be hunted, fished, or gathered from the natural environment—a world that no longer exists. Nature determined what our bodies needed thousands of years before civilization developed, before people started farming and raising domesticated livestock.
In other words, built into our genes is a blueprint for optimal nutrition—a plan that spells out the foods that make us healthy, lean, and fit. Whether you believe the architect of that blueprint is God, or God acting through evolution by natural selection, or by evolution alone, the end result is still the same: We need to give our bodies the foods we were originally designed to eat.
Your car is designed to run on gasoline. When you put diesel fuel into its tank, the results are disastrous for the engine. The same principle is true for us: We are designed to run best on the wild plant and animal foods that all human beings gathered and hunted just 333 generations ago. The staples of today’s diet—cereals, dairy products, refined sugars, fatty meats, and salted, processed foods—are like diesel fuel to our bodies’ metabolic machinery. These foods clog our engines, make us fat, and cause disease and ill health.
Sadly, with all of our progress, we have strayed from the path designed for us by nature. For instance:
• Paleolithic people ate no dairy food. Imagine how difficult it would be to milk a wild animal, even if you could somehow manage to catch one.
• Paleolithic people hardly ever ate cereal grains. This sounds shocking to us today, but for most ancient people, grains were considered starvation food at best.
• Paleolithic people didn’t salt their food.
• The only refined sugar Paleolithic people ate was honey, when they were lucky enough to find it.
• Wild, lean animal foods dominated Paleolithic diets, so their protein intake was quite high by modern standards, while their carbohydrate consumption was much lower.
• Virtually all of the carbohydrates Paleolithic people ate came from nonstarchy wild fruits and vegetables. Consequently, their carbohydrate intake was much lower and their fiber intake much higher than those obtained by eating the typical modern diet.
• The main fats in the Paleolithic diets were healthful, monounsaturated, polyunsaturated, and omega 3 fats—not the trans fats and certain saturated fats that dominate modern diets.
With this book, we are returning to the diet we were genetically programmed to follow. The Paleo Diet is more than a blast from the past. It’s the key to speedy weight loss, effective weight control, and, above all, lifelong health. The Paleo Diet enlists the body’s own mechanisms, evolved over millions of years, to put the brakes on weight gain and the development of the chronic diseases of civilization. It is the closest approximation we can make, given the current scientific knowledge, to humanity’s original, universal diet—the easy-to-follow, cravings-checking, satisfying program that nature itself has devised.
The Problems with Most Low-Carb Diets
The Paleo Diet is a low-carbohydrate diet—but that’s where any resemblance to the glut of low-carbohydrate fad diets ends. Remember, the Paleo Diet is the only diet based on millions of years of nutritional facts—the one ideally suited to our biological needs and makeup and the one that most closely resembles hunter-gatherer diets. How does the Paleo Diet compare with the low-carb fad diets and the average U.S. diet?
Modern low-carbohydrate weight-loss diets are really high-fat diets that contain moderate levels of protein. They don’t have the high levels of protein that our ancestors ate—the levels found in the Paleo Diet. Actually, compared with what our ancestors ate, the carbohydrate content of these modern weight-loss diets is far too low. Even worse, almost all of these low-carbohydrate diets permit unlimited consumption of fatty, salty processed meats (such as bacon, sausage, hot dogs, and lunch meats) and dairy products (cheeses, cream, and butter) while restricting the consumption of fruits and vegetables. Cancer-fighting fruits and vegetables! This dietary pattern is drastically different from that of our ancestors.
And although low-carbohydrate diets may be successful in promoting weight loss, many dieters are achieving short-term weight loss at the expense of long-term health and well-being. Here’s what the sellers of these diet plans don’t want you to know: when low-carbohydrate diets cause weight loss in the short term, it’s because they deplete the body’s reserves of muscle and liver glycogen (carbohydrate), and the weight you’re losing rapidly is mostly water weight.
When low-carbohydrate diets cause weight loss in the long run (weeks or months), it’s because more calories are being burned than consumed, plain and simple. Low-carbohydrate diets tend to normalize insulin metabolism in many people, particularly in those who are seriously overweight. This normalization prevents swings in blood sugar that, in turn, may cause some people to eat less and lose weight. It is the cutback in total calories that lowers total cholesterol and low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol (the bad cholesterol) levels. Also, reductions in dietary carbohydrates (whether calories are cut or not) almost always cause a decline in blood triglycerides and an increase in blood high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol (the good cholesterol).
So, if low-carbohydrate diets cause someone to consume fewer calories, they may help produce weight loss and improvements in blood chemistry, at least over the short haul. However, dieters beware: when low-carbohydrate, high-fat diets are followedwithout a decrease in the daily consumption of calories, they are, according to the American Dietetic Association, “a nightmare.” Let’s see why.
Low Carb Doesn’t Mean Low Cholesterol
Despite what anybody tells you—despite the outrageous claims of the low-carbohydrate, high-fat diet doctors—if you eat a lot of the saturated fats found in cheeses, butter, and bacon and don’t cut your overall calorie intake, your cholesterol will go up. The medical community has known this for more than fifty years. It’s been demonstrated in metabolic ward studies, in which people are locked into a hospital wing and only allowed to eat foods that have been carefully weighed and analyzed. Many of the low-carbohydrate diet doctors claim that these clinical trials are invalid because none of them reduced the carbohydrate content sufficiently. These doctors should know better; low carbohydrates don’t guarantee low cholesterol.
Dr. Stephen Phinney and colleagues from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology conducted a normal caloric intake metabolic ward trial involving nine healthy, lean men. These men consumed nothing but meat, fish, eggs, cheese, and cream for thirty-five days. They had a low carbohydrate intake—less than 20 grams a day—but it didn’t matter. Their blood cholesterol levels still went up, from 159 to 208 on average in just thirty-five days. This study indicates that diets high in a specific saturated fat called palmitic acid tends to raise blood cholesterol levels when caloric intake levels are normal.
So, at best, low-carbohydrate, high-fat diets are a temporary fix. At worst, they can cause big trouble in the long run by elevating LDL cholesterol levels, which increases the risk for heart and cardiovascular disease.
Healthy Fats, Not Lethal Fats
One major difference between the Paleo Diet and the low-carbohydrate, high-fat diets we just talked about is the fats. In most modern low-carbohydrate weight-loss diets, no distinction is made between good fats and bad fats. All fats are generally lumped together; the goal is simply to reduce carbohydrates and not worry about fats.
But you should worry about fats. Not all fats are created equal, and the impact of fat on blood cholesterol—and the odds of developing heart disease—can’t be ignored. The problem is, fats are confusing for many people trying to make good dietary decisions. For one thing, many of them sound alike. How are saturated fats different from monounsaturated—or even polyunsaturated—fats? How are omega 6 fats different from the omega 3 variety?
• Monounsaturated fats are good. They’re found in olive oil, nuts, and avocados; are known to lower blood cholesterol; and help prevent artery clogging or atherosclerosis.
• Saturated fats are mostly bad. They’re found in processed meats, whole dairy products, and many bakery items; most of them are known to raise cholesterol. A key exception is a saturated fat called stearic acid, which, like monounsaturated fats, lowers blood cholesterol levels.
• Polyunsaturated fats are a mixed bag—some are more beneficial than others. For example, omega 3 polyunsaturated fats (the kind found in fish oils) are healthy fats, which can improve blood chemistry and reduce your risk of many chronic diseases. But omega 6 polyunsaturated fats (found in vegetable oils, many baked goods, and snack foods) are not good when you eat too much of them at the expense of omega 3 fats.
People in the Paleolithic Age ate a lot of monounsaturated fats; they had saturated and polyunsaturated fats in moderation—but when they did have polyunsaturated fats, they had a proper balance of the omega 3 and omega 6 fats. They consumed far fewer omega 6 polyunsaturated fats than we do today. In addition, the main saturated fat in wild animals was healthful stearic acid, not the cholesterol-raising palmitic acid, which dominates the fat of feedlot cattle.
How important are fats in the diet? Here’s a modern example: People who live in Mediterranean countries, who consume lots of olive oil, are much less likely to die of heart disease than Americans or northern Europeans, who don’t consume as much olive oil. Instead, our Western diet is burdened by high levels of certain saturated fats, omega 6 fats, and trans fats and sadly lacking in heart-healthy, artery-protecting omega 3 fats.
Our studies of hunter-gatherers suggest that they had low blood cholesterol and relatively little heart disease. Our research team believes that dietary fats were a major reason for their freedom from heart disease.
Saturated Fats, Reconsidered
In the first edition of The Paleo Diet, I was adamant that you should avoid fatty processed meats such as bacon, hot dogs, lunch meats, salami, bologna, and sausages because they contain excessive saturated fats, which raise your blood cholesterol levels. That message still holds true today, but new information subtly alters this fundamental point of Paleo Dieting, and, as always, the devil lies in the details. Should you now go out and eat bacon and processed meats to your heart’s desire? Absolutely not! Processed meats are synthetic mixtures of meat (muscle) and fat combined artificially at the meatpacker’s or butcher’s whim, with no regard for the true fatty acid profile of wild animal carcasses that our hunter-gatherer ancestors ate. In addition to their unnatural fatty acid profiles (high in omega 6 fatty acids, low in omega 3 fatty acids, and high in saturated fatty acids), processed fatty meats are full of preservatives such as nitrites, which are converted into potent cancer-causing nitrosamines in our guts. To make a bad situation worse, these unnatural meats are typically full of salt, high-fructose corn syrup, wheat, grains, and other additives that have multiple adverse health effects.
So, artificially produced, synthetic, factory meats have little or nothing to do with the wild animal foods our hunter-gatherer ancestors ate, and they should be avoided. But how about the unprocessed fatty meats that we routinely eat, day in and day out, that are produced in feedlots and butchered without adding fats or preservatives? These are meats such as T-bone steaks, spareribs, lamb chops, and chicken legs and thighs, as well as fatty cuts of pork and other fatty domestic meats. Are they a problem?
I realize that many, perhaps most, readers are not hunters and have never seen carcasses of wild animals, such as deer, elk, or antelope. Nor have you had the opportunity to visually contrast the carcasses of feedlot-produced animals to wild animals. I can tell you that there is no comparison. My research group and I have taken the time to do the chemical analyses between wild and feedlot-produced animals, and we have published our results in some of the top nutritional journals in the world.
Wild animal carcasses are lean, have little external fat, and exhibit virtually no fat between the muscles (marbling). In contrast, feedlot-produced cattle maintain a four- to six-inch layer of white fat covering the animal’s entire body. These artificial products of modern agriculture are overweight, obese, and sick. Their muscles are infiltrated with that fat that we call marbling, a trait that improves flavor but makes the cattle insulin resistant and in poor health, just like us. Wild animals rarely or never exhibit marbling.
Because feedlot-raised animals are exclusively fed grains (corn and sorghum) in the last half of their lives, their meat has high concentrations of omega 6 fatty acids at the expense of health-promoting omega 3 fatty acids. The meat of grain-fed livestock is vastly at odds with that of wild animals. Check out Appendix B in this book. A 100 gram (~ ¼4 lb.) serving of T-bone beefsteak gives you a walloping 9.1 grams of saturated fat, whereas a comparable piece of bison roast yields only 0.9 grams of saturated fat. You would have to eat ten times more bison meat to get a similar amount of saturated fat than the amount in a single serving of T-bone steak.
It would be difficult for our hunter-gatherer ancestors to eat anywhere near the amount of saturated fat that we get on a yearly basis in the typical Western diet. So, does dietary saturated fat promote heart disease? Should Paleo Dieters try to limit the fatty domesticated meats in their diet in order to reduce saturated fat? This question is not as clear-cut as it seemed twenty-five years ago, when Drs. Michael Brown and Joseph Goldstein of the University of Texas Southwest Medical Center were awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine for discovering that saturated fats down-regulated the LDL receptor. Their discovery and subsequent randomized, controlled human trials have unequivocally shown that certain saturated fats (lauric acid [12:0], myristic acid [14:0], and palmitic acid, [16:0]) but not all (stearic acid [18:0]), elevate blood cholesterol levels in humans, all other factors being equal. These facts are undeniable. Yet the next question is contentious and has divided the nutritional and medical community in recent years: do increased blood cholesterol levels necessarily predispose all people to an increased risk for cardiovascular disease?
As the scientific community has struggled with this question during the last few years, we should remember that the evolutionary template will almost always guide us to the correct answer. The clogging of arteries that eventually results in fatal heart attacks comes about through a process called atherosclerosis, in which plaque (cholesterol and calcium) builds up in the arteries that supply the heart itself with blood. It was originally thought that this buildup gradually narrowed and finally closed the arteries supplying the heart, thereby causing a heart attack. We now know that this model is inaccurate and too simple.
In the last ten to fifteen years, it has become apparent that inflammation is involved at every step of the way when arteries become clogged with plaque. In fact, the fatal event causing a heart attack is not the gradual narrowing of arteries supplying the heart but rather the rupturing of the fibrous cap that surrounds and walls off plaque that forms in the heart’s arteries. Chronic low-level inflammation triggers the fibrous cap to rupture, which in turn causes a clot to form in the arteries that supply the heart, resulting in a heart attack. Without chronic low-level inflammation, heart attacks probably would rarely or never occur.
So, do dietary saturated fats from fatty meats cause the artery-clogging process known as atherosclerosis? If we look at the evolutionary evidence, the answer is a resounding yes. Dr. Michael Zimmerman, a pathologist at Hahnemann University in Pennsylvania, had the rare opportunity to perform autopsies on a number of Eskimo mummies that had been frozen in Alaska’s permafrost for hundreds of years. The first mummy was that of a fifty-three-year-old woman whose body washed out of the frozen banks of Saint Lawrence Island in October 1972. Radiocarbon dating indicated that she had died in 400 A.D. from a landslide that had completely buried her. Dr. Zimmerman’s autopsy revealed moderate atherosclerosis in the arteries supplying her heart but no evidence of a heart attack. The second frozen mummy was also a female, forty to forty-five years of age, who had also been engulfed in an ice-and-mud-slide in 1520 A.D. near Barrow, Alaska. Similarly, the autopsy showed atherosclerotic plaques lining the arteries of her heart.
From my prior studies of worldwide hunter-gatherers, we know that these Eskimo women had a diet that consisted almost entirely (97 percent) of wild animal foods, including whales, walruses, seals, salmon, muskoxen, and caribou. Because they lived so far north (63 to 71 degrees north latitude), plant foods simply were unavailable; consequently, their carbohydrate intake was virtually zero. Yet they still developed atherosclerosis. Perhaps Drs. Brown and Goldstein were right, after all: high dietary intakes of saturated fats do promote atherosclerosis. Despite these facts, the best archaeological and medical evidence shows that Eskimos living and eating in their traditional ways rarely or never died from heart attacks or strokes.
So, now we have the facts we need to come to closure with the saturated fat-heart disease issue. Dietary saturated fats from excessive consumption of processed fatty meats and feedlot-produced meats increase our blood cholesterol concentrations, but unless our immune systems are chronically inflamed, atherosclerosis likely will not kill us from either heart attacks or strokes.
The new advice I can give you is this: If you are faithful to the basic principles of the Paleo Diet, consumption of fatty meats will probably have a minimal outcome on your health and wellbeing—as it did for our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Consumption of fatty meats and organs had survival value in an earlier time when humans didn’t eat grains, legumes, dairy products, refined sugars, and salty processed foods, the foods that produce chronic low-level inflammation in our bodies through a variety of physiological mechanisms. I will explain this in more depth in my next book, Living the Paleo Diet.
Disease-Fighting Fruits and Vegetables
A big problem with low-carbohydrate weight-loss diets is what they do to health-promoting fruits and vegetables—they nearly eliminate them. Because of a technicality—a blanket restriction on all types of carbohydrates, even beneficial ones, to between 30 and 100 grams per day—fruits and veggies are largely off-limits. This is a mistake. Fruits and vegetables—with their antioxidants, phytochemicals, and fiber—are some of our most powerful allies in the war against heart disease, cancer, and osteoporosis. Yet just one papaya (59 grams of carbohydrate) would blow the daily limit for two of the most popular low-carbohydrate diets. Eating an orange, an apple, and a cup of broccoli and carrots (73 grams of carbohydrate) —just a drop in the bucket to hunter-gatherers, whose diets were rich in fruits and vegetables—would wreck all but the most liberal low-carbohydrate diets.
Humanity’s original carbohydrate sources—the foods we survived on for millions of years—didn’t come from starchy grains and potatoes, which have high glycemic indices that can rapidly cause blood sugar to spike. Instead, they came from wild fruits and vegetables with low glycemic indices that produced minimal, gradual rises in blood sugar. These are the carbohydrates that you’ll be eating on the Paleo Diet. These nonstarchy carbohydrates normalize your blood glucose and insulin levels, promote weight loss, and make you feel energized all day long.
The Osteoporosis Connection
One of the greatest—and least recognized—benefits of fruits and vegetables is their ability to slow or prevent the loss of bone density, called “osteoporosis,” that so often comes with aging. As far back as 1999, Dr. Katherine Tucker and colleagues at Tufts University examined the bone mineral status of a large group of elderly men and women. These scientists found that the people who ate the most fruits and vegetables had the greatest bone mineral densities and the strongest bones. In the ensuing ten years, more than 100 scientific studies have confirmed this concept.
But what about calcium? Surely, eating a lot of cheese can help prevent osteoporosis? The answer is a bit more complicated. One of the great ironies of the low-carbohydrate, high-fat diets is that even though they allow unlimited consumption of high-calcium cheeses, they almost certainly will be found to promote bone loss and osteoporosis in the long run. How can this be? Because getting a lot of dietary calcium from cheese, by itself, isn’t enough to offset the lack of fruits and vegetables.
Nutrition scientists use the term “calcium balance” to describe this process. It’s the difference between how much calcium you take in and how much you excrete. Most of us have gotten the message about consuming calcium. But the other part of the equation—how much calcium you excrete—is just as important. It is quite possible for you to be in calcium balance on a low calcium intake if your calcium excretion is also low. On the other hand, it’s easy for you to fall out of calcium balance—even if you load up on cheese at every meal—if you lose more calcium than you take in.
The main factor that determines calcium loss is yet another kind of balance—the acid-base balance. If your diet has high levels of acid, you’ll lose more calcium in your urine; if you eat more alkaline foods, you’ll retain more calcium. A study in the New England Journal of Medicine by my colleague Dr. Anthony Sebastian and his research group at the University of California at San Francisco showed that simply taking potassium bicarbonate (an alkaline base) neutralized the body’s internal acid production, reduced urinary calcium losses, and increased the rate of bone formation. In a follow-up report in the New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Lawrence Appel at Johns Hopkins University reported that diets rich in fruits and vegetables (these are alkaline foods) significantly reduced urinary calcium loss in 459 men and women.
See Appendix A for a list of common foods and their acid-base values.
Cereals, most dairy products, legumes, meat, fish, salty processed foods, and eggs produce net acid loads in the body. By far the worst offenders on this list are the hard cheeses, which are rich sources of calcium. Again, unless you get enough fruits and vegetables, eating these acid-rich foods will actually promote bone loss and osteoporosis.
Virtually all fruits and vegetables produce alkaline loads in the body. When you adopt the Paleo Diet, you won’t have to worry about excessive dietary acid causing bone loss—because you’ll be getting 35 percent or more of your daily calories as healthful alkaline fruits and vegetables that will neutralize the dietary acid you get when you eat meat and seafood.
Toxic Salt
Most low-carbohydrate, high-fat diets don’t address the dangers of salt; some even encourage its use. And yet there is a ton of medical evidence linking salt to high blood pressure, stroke, osteoporosis, kidney stones, asthma, and even certain forms of cancer. Salt is also implicated as a factor in insomnia, air and motion sickness, Ménière’s syndrome (an agonizing ear ringing), and the preeclampsia of pregnancy.
Salt is made up of sodium and chloride. Although most people think that the sodium portion of salt is entirely responsible for most of its unhealthful effects, chloride is just as guilty, if not more so. The average American eats about 10 grams of salt a day (this turns out to be about 4 grams of sodium and 6 grams of chloride). Chloride, like cereals, dairy products, legumes, and meats, yields a net acid load to the kidneys after it is digested. Because of its high chloride content, salt is one of the worst offenders in making your diet more acid.
Paleolithic people hardly ever used salt and never ate anything like today’s salty cheeses, processed meats, and canned fish advocated by most of the low-carbohydrate weight-loss diets. Do your body a favor and throw out your saltshaker along with all the highly salted, processed, packaged, and canned foods in your pantry.
Lean Meat Helps You Lose Weight
It’s taken half a century, but scientists have finally realized that when they stigmatized red meat, they threw out the proverbial baby with the bathwater. Meat is a mixture of fat and protein. Lean meat—such as that found in wild game and seafood—is about 80 percent protein and about 20 percent fat. But fatty processed meats like bacon and hot dogs can pack a whopping 75 percent of their calories as fat and only 25 percent or less as protein. What should have been obvious—that it was the high level of a certain saturated fat, palmitic acid, not the protein, that caused health problems—was essentially ignored. Meat protein had unfairly become a villain.
Here again, there’s a major lesson to be learned from looking at the distant past: for more than 2 million years, our ancestors had a diet rich in lean protein and healthful fats. It gave them energy and, combined with fruits and vegetables, helped them stay healthy.
Protein Increases Your Metabolism and Slows Your Appetite
When scientists actually studied how lean protein influences health, well-being, and body-weight regulation—and this has occurred only in the last two decades—they found that our ancestors were right all along. It turns out that lean protein is perhaps our most powerful ally in the battle of the bulge. It has twice the “thermic effect” of either fats or carbohydrates, which means it revs up your metabolism. In other words, protein’s thermic effect increases our metabolism and causes us to burn more calories than if we ate an equal caloric serving of either fat or carbohydrate. Also, more than fats, more than carbohydrates, protein has the highest “satiating value”—that is, it does the best job of making us feel full.
The principles I have laid out in the Paleo Diet—all based on decades of scientific research and proved over millions of years by our ancestors—will make your metabolism soar, your appetite shrink, and extra pounds begin to melt away as you include more and more lean protein in your meals.
Lean Protein and Heart Disease
But this diet gives you much more than a slimmer figure. Unlike other low-carbohydrate diets, it’s good for your heart. High-protein diets have been shown by Dr. Bernard Wolfe at the University of Western Ontario in Canada to be more effective than low-fat, high-carbohydrate diets in lowering total and bad LDL cholesterol and triglycerides while simultaneously increasing the good HDL cholesterol. My colleague Neil Mann at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Melbourne, Australia, has demonstrated that people who eat a lot of lean meat have lower blood levels of homocysteine (a toxic substance in the blood that damages the arteries and predisposes them to atherosclerosis) than do vegan vegetarians. The net result is that high-protein diets produce beneficial changes in your blood chemistry that, in turn, reduce your overall risk of heart disease.
High-protein diets have been shown to improve insulin metabolism, help lower blood pressure, and reduce the risk of stroke. They have even prolonged survival in women with breast cancer.
Some people have been told that high-protein diets damage the kidneys. They don’t. Scientists at the Royal Veterinary and Agricultural University in Copenhagen effectively put this myth to rest. Dr. Arne Astrup and colleagues put sixty-five overweight people on a high-protein diet for six months and found that their kidneys easily adapted to increased protein levels. Furthermore, kidney function remained perfect at the end of the experiment.
Isn’t it time you got protein on your side? Eating lean meat and fish at every meal, just as your Paleolithic ancestors did, could be the healthiest decision you ever made.
Compared to the faddish low-carbohydrate weight-loss diets, the Paleo Diet includes all the nutritional elements needed to encourage weight loss while promoting health and well-being. The Paleo Diet is designed to imitate the healthful diets of our preagricultural ancestors. It contains the proper balance of plant and animal foods—and the correct ratios of protein, fat, and carbohydrate required for weight loss and excellent health.
So, don’t be fooled by the low-carbohydrate fad diets. The Paleo Diet gives you the same weight-loss benefits, but it’s also a delicious, healthy diet you can maintain for a lifetime.
2
The Ground Rules for the Paleo Diet
With the Paleo Diet, you’ll be restoring the diet you are genetically programmed to eat. You’ll be following the diet that every single person on the planet ate only 333 generations ago. It is the diet the modern world has completely forgotten.
The Paleo Diet is simplicity itself. Here are the ground rules:
1. All the lean meats, fish, and seafood you can eat
2. All the fruits and nonstarchy vegetables you can eat
3. No cereals
4. No legumes
5. No dairy products
6. No processed foods
The Paleo Diet is not a fat-free diet, it’s a “bad fat”-free diet. It has few of the artery-clogging fats found in the typical Western diet, but there is plenty of low-fat protein and good fats—such as those found in salmon and other cold-water fish, as well as in nuts and olive oil. It is not a fanatically strict diet, either.
There are three levels of adherence that make it easy to follow the diet’s principles. Each level contains a limited number of Open Meals—in which you can still eat your favorite foods. If you enjoy an occasional glass of wine or beer, that’s fine—it’s allowed here. Because the Paleo Diet is a lifetime program of eating—and not a quick-fix weight-loss diet—it has built-in flexibility to accommodate a little cheating and your own individuality.
Try it, and from the beginning your appetite will be reduced and your metabolism will be increased. This means you’ll lose weight without the hunger pangs that accompany so many diets—and ultimately doom these diets to fail. There’s no need to count carbohydrate grams in this diet. You can eat as much carbohydrate as you want, as long as it’s the good kind—the kind that comes from low-glycemic fruits and vegetables. There is no need to count calories. This is how our diet was meant to be: Eat until you’re full. Enjoy nature’s bounty. Lose weight, and be healthy while you’re doing it.
Here’s how the Paleo Diet compares to the faddish low-carbohydrate diets we discussed in the previous chapter.
| Item | The Paleo Diet | Fad Low-Carb Diets | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Protein | High (19-35%) | Moderate (18-23%) | |
| Carbohydrate | Moderate (22-40%) | Low (4 -26%) | |
| Total fat | Moderate (28-47%) | High (51-78%) | |
| Saturated fat | Moderate | High | |
| Monounsaturated fat | High | Moderate | |
| Polyunsaturated fat | Moderate | Moderate | |
| Omega 3 fat | High | Low | |
| Total fiber | High | Low | |
| Fruits and vegetables | High | Low | |
| Nuts and seeds | Moderate | Low | |
| Salt | Low | High | |
| Refined sugars | Low | Low | |
| Dairy foods | None | High | |
The Fundamentals of the Paleo Diet
The Paleo Diet is based on the bedrock of Stone Age diets:
Eat lots of lean meats, fresh fruits,
and vegetables
and vegetables
From the work my research team and I have done in analyzing the daily food intake of hunter-gatherer societies, we have found the ideal dietary ratio. Although you don’t need to count calories with the Paleo Diet, if you did you’d find that a little more than half—55 percent—of your calories comes from lean meats, organ meats, fish, and seafood. The balance comes from fresh fruits and vegetables, some nuts, and healthful oils.
My research team and I have spent years analyzing what Paleolithic humans ate—running hundreds of computerized analyses exploring every conceivable dietary component, varying the amounts and types of plant and animal foods that were available to our ancient ancestors. No matter how we mixed up the ingredients, seven dietary characteristics consistently emerged. They are the Seven Keys of the Paleo Diet—your guidelines to weight loss and good health.
The Seven Keys of the Paleo Diet
1. Eat a relatively high amount of animal protein compared to that in the typical American diet.
2. Eat fewer carbohydrates than most modern diets recommend, but eat lots of good carbohydrates—from fruits and vegetables, not from grains, starchy tubers, and refined sugars.
3. Eat a large amount of fiber from nonstarchy fruits and vegetables.
4. Eat a moderate amount of fat, with more good (monounsaturated and polyunsaturated) fats than bad (trans and certain saturated) fats, and nearly equal amounts of omega 3 and omega 6 fats.
5. Eat foods with a high potassium content and a low sodium content.
6. Eat a diet with a net alkaline load.
7. Eat foods rich in plant phytochemicals, vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants.
The Seven Keys optimize health, minimize the risk of chronic disease, and cause excess weight to melt away. This is the way we’re genetically programmed to eat.
Just the Foods You Can Hunt and Gather at Your Supermarket
You don’t have to eat wild game meat (unless you want to) to achieve the same health benefits that kept the world’s hunter-gatherers free from the chronic diseases of civilization. The mainstays of the Paleo Diet are the lean meats, organ meats, and fish and seafood that are available at your local supermarket.
Here are some high-protein foods that are part of the Paleo Diet:
• Skinless turkey breast (94 percent protein)
• Shrimp (90 percent protein)
• Red snapper (87 percent protein)
• Crab (86 percent protein)
• Halibut (80 percent protein)
• Beef sweetbreads (77 percent protein)
• Steamed clams (73 percent protein)
• Lean pork tenderloin (72 percent protein)
• Beef heart (69 percent protein)
• Broiled tuna (68 percent protein)
• Veal steak (68 percent protein)
• Sirloin beef steak (65 percent protein)
• Chicken livers (65 percent protein)
• Skinless chicken breasts (63 percent protein)
• Beef liver (63 percent protein)
• Lean beef flank steak (62 percent protein)
• Lean pork chops (62 percent protein)
• Mussels (58 percent protein)
Although you may think of hamburger, eggs, cheese, milk, and legumes as high-protein foods, think again. None of these foods can hold a candle to lean meat and fish when it comes to protein content.
• Eggs (34 percent protein)
• Cheeses (28 percent protein)
• Legumes (27 percent protein)
• Lamb chops (25 percent protein)
• Fatty hamburger (24 percent protein)
• Dry salami (23 percent protein)
• Link pork sausage (22 percent protein)
• Bacon (21 percent protein)
• Whole milk (21 percent protein)
• Liverwurst sausage (18 percent protein)
• Bologna (15 percent protein)
• Hot dogs (14 percent protein)
• Cereal grains (12 percent protein)
• Nuts (10 percent protein)
You don’t have to eat bone marrow (a favorite food of hunter-gatherers) on the Paleo Diet, either, but here’s why it was good for our Paleolithic ancestors: marrow is a major source of monounsaturated fat—another good fat. Monounsaturated fats lower your cholesterol level and reduce your risk of breast cancer and heart disease. You can find monounsaturated fats in nuts, avocados, and olive oil.
Nor do you have to eat brains (another delicacy for hunter-gatherers) to get omega 3 fats—one of the good fats we talked about in chapter 1 and quite important in preventing many chronic diseases. You can get plenty of health-sustaining omega 3 fats from many foods found in the supermarket, such as:
• Fish and seafood, particularly cold-water fish such as salmon, mackerel, herring, and halibut
• Flaxseed oil, which can be used in several ways—as an ingredient in salad dressings, poured over steamed vegetables, or taken as a supplement
• Liver
• Game meat
• Free-range chickens
• Pasture-fed beef
• Eggs enriched with omega 3
• Salt-free walnuts and macadamia nuts (which are also tasty in salads)
• Leafy green vegetables
• Fish oil capsules, available at health food stores
Meal Preparation and Typical Meals
Eating unadulterated, healthful lean meats, seafood, fruits, and veggies at every meal requires a little bit of planning and foresight, but once you get into the swing of things, it will become second nature. Even working people who must eat away from home can easily incorporate real foods into their busy schedules; so can people who travel often or who must frequently dine out.
One of the keys to becoming a successful Paleo Dieter is to prepare some of your food at home and bring it with you to work either as a snack or as a meal. For lunch, nothing could be simpler than to brown-bag a few slices of last night’s lean roast beef or skinless chicken breasts along with some fresh tomato wedges, a few carrot sticks, and an apple or a fresh peach.
Eating Paleo style while dining out is also quite easy if you follow a few simple guidelines. Order a tossed green salad with shrimp, but hold the croutons and dress it with olive oil and lemon juice. For breakfast out, try two poached eggs and half a cantaloupe, skip the toast and bacon, and treat yourself to a cup of decaffeinated coffee or herbal tea. In chapter 8, I fully outline how to pull off a Paleo Diet in our fast-food world.
Although you will be eliminating grains, dairy products, refined sugars, and processed foods from your daily fare, you will soon discover the incredible bounty and diversity of delicious and healthful foods that the Paleo Diet has to offer. How about a breakfast omelet made with omega 3-enriched eggs and stuffed with crab and avocado and covered with peach salsa? A filet of sole simmered in wine sauce accompanied by spinach salad and gazpacho soup for lunch? For dinner, does roast pork loin, a tossed green salad dressed with flaxseed oil, steamed broccoli, a glass of Merlot, and a bowl of fresh blackberries sprinkled with almond slices sound tempting? These are just a few of the six weeks’ worth of meal plans and more than 100 Paleo recipes I provide you with in chapters 9 and 10.
The Paleo Diet: A Nutritional Bonanza
Many registered dietitians and knowledgeable nutritionists would predict that any diet that excludes all cereal grains, dairy products, and legumes would lack many important nutrients and would require extremely careful planning to make it work. Just the opposite is true with the Paleo Diet—which confirms yet again that this is exactly the type of diet human beings were meant to thrive on, as they have for all but the last 10,000 years.
The Paleo Diet provides 100 percent of our nutrient requirements. My research team has analyzed the nutrient composition of hundreds of varying combinations of the Paleo Diet, in which we’ve altered the percentage as well as the types of plant and animal foods it contains. In virtually every dietary permutation, the levels of vitamins and minerals exceed governmental recommended daily allowances (RDAs). The Paleo Diet even surpasses modern cereal- and dairy-based diets in many nutritional elements that protect against heart disease and cancer, including:
• Vitamin C
• Vitamin B12
• Vitamin B6
• Folic acid
• Magnesium
• Chromium
• Potassium
• Selenium
• Soluble fiber
• Omega 3 and monounsaturated fats
• Beta-carotene and other plant phytochemicals
In fact, the Paleo Diet is packed with much higher levels of many nutrients that are deficient in both vegetarian and average American diets, such as iron, zinc, vitamin B12, vitamin B6, and omega 3 fats.
Let’s take a quick look at the daily nutrient intake of a twenty-five-year-old woman on the Paleo Diet. Out of a typical 2,200 calories, half come from animal foods and half from plant foods—all available at the supermarket.
For breakfast, she eats half a cantaloupe and a 12-ounce portion of broiled Atlantic salmon. Lunch is a shrimp, spinach/vegetable salad (seven large boiled shrimp, three cups of raw spinach leaves, one shredded carrot, one sliced cucumber, two diced tomatoes, lemon juice/olive oil/spice dressing). For dinner, she has two lean pork chops, two cups of steamed broccoli, and a tossed green salad (two cups of romaine lettuce, a half-cup of diced tomatoes, a quarter-cup of sliced purple onions, half an avocado, lemon juice dressing) . She tops it all off with a half-cup of fresh or frozen blueberries and a quarter-cup of slivered almonds. For a snack, she has a quarter-cup of slivered almonds and a cold pork chop.
| Nutrient | Daily Intake | RDA | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Calories | 2,200.0 | 100% | |
| Protein | 190.0 (g) | 379% | |
| Carbohydrate | 142.0 (g) | — | |
| Fat | 108.0 (g) | — | |
| Saturated fat | 21.0 (g) | — | |
| Monounsaturated fat | 54.0 (g) | — | |
| Polyunsaturated fat | 21.0 (g) 21.0 (g) | — | |
| Omega 3 fats | 6.7 (g) | — | |
| Water-soluble vitamins | |||
| Thiamin (B1) | 4.6 (mg) | 417% | |
| Riboflavin (B2) | 3.6 (mg) | 281% | |
| Niacin (B3) | 56.2 (mg) | 374% | |
| Pyridoxine (B6) | 5.9 (mg) | 369% | |
| Cobalamin (B12) | 10.3 (µg) | 513% | |
| Biotin | 113.0 (µg) | 174% | |
| Folate | 911.0 (µg) | 506% | |
| Pantothenic acid | 11.5 (mg) | 209% | |
| Vitamin C | 559.0 (mg) | 932% | |
| Fat-soluble vitamins | |||
| Vitamin A | 6,861.0 (RE) | 858% | |
| Vitamin D | 0.0 (µg) | 0% | |
| Vitamin E | 26.5 (mg) | 331 % | |
| Vitamin K | 945.0 (µg) | 1,454% | |
| Macro minerals | |||
| Sodium | 813.0 (mg) | — | |
| Potassium | 8,555.0 (mg) | — | |
| Calcium | 890.0 (mg) | 111 % | |
| Phosphorus | 2,308.0 (mg) | 289% | |
| Magnesium | 685.0 (mg) | 245% | |
| Trace minerals | |||
| Iron | 21.5 (mg) | 143% | |
| Zinc | 19.8 (mg) | 165% | |
| Copper | 3.5 (mg) | 155% | |
| Manganese | 6.4 (mg) | 181 % | |
| Selenium | 0.147 (mg) | 267% | |
| Dietary fiber | 47.0 (g) | — | |
| Beta-carotene | 3,583.0 (µg) | — | |
As you can see, the Paleo Diet is extremely nutritious. The macronutrient breakdown for this sample 2,200-calorie diet is 33 percent protein, 25 percent carbohydrate, and 42 percent fat. Note that for every nutrient except vitamin D, the daily nutrient intake ranges from 1.5 to more than 10 times the governmentally suggested RDA. Even “healthful” vegetarian diets don’t reach these nutrient levels. The Paleo Diet is rich in antioxidant vitamins (A, C, and E), minerals (selenium), and plant phytochemicals, such as beta-carotene, which can help prevent the development of heart disease and cancer. In addition, the high levels of B vitamins (B6, B12, and folate) prevent elevated levels of blood homocysteine, a potent risk factor for atherosclerosis, and also have been associated with a reduced risk of colon cancer and spina bifida, a neural tube birth defect.
Even though the fat content (42 percent of total calories) is slightly higher than that in the average American diet (31 percent of total calories), these are good fats—healthful, cholesterol-lowering monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats. Actually, the monounsaturated fat intake is twice that of saturated fat. As I discussed earlier, the high levels of omega 3 fats also help protect against heart disease by their ability to thin the blood, prevent fatal heartbeat irregularities, and lower blood triglycerides.
Not only does the Paleo Diet provide you with an abundance of nutrients, it’s also extremely high in fiber. This, too, can lower blood cholesterol. It promotes normal bowel function and prevents constipation as well.
Finally, because extra salt and processed salty foods are not part of the Paleo Diet, the sodium (and chloride) content here is very low, while the potassium content is quite high. As we’ve discussed, this high-potassium/low-sodium balance helps prevent high blood pressure, kidney stones, asthma, osteoporosis, certain types of cancer, and other chronic diseases known to be associated with high-salt diets.
The amount of vitamin D you’ll get on the Paleo Diet is negligible, because vitamin D is found only in trace quantities in all naturally occurring foods, except for fish liver oils. But we don’t need to eat that much vitamin D—we can get all we need from the sun. (When we’re exposed to ultraviolet radiation from sunlight, our bodies synthesize vitamin D from the cholesterol in our skin.) Our Paleolithic ancestors spent much of their time outdoors, and they manufactured all the vitamin D they needed from the sun’s natural rays. Today, many of us get insufficient sunlight exposure to synthesize optimal levels of vitamin D. This is why milk, margarine, and other processed foods are fortified with vitamin D. We would all do well to incorporate some of the Stone Age lifestyle and make sure to get some daily sunshine. However, if your busy lifestyle doesn’t allow it, particularly during short winter days, I recommend that you take a vitamin D supplement (at least 2,000 I.U./day).
Perhaps the most important element of the Paleo Diet is its high protein intake—nearly four times higher than the RDA. As I’ve discussed, this high level of protein helps you lose weight by increasing your metabolism and reducing your appetite. A 1999 clinical report in the International Journal of Obesity by my friend Dr. Soren Toubro and colleagues from the Royal Veterinary and Agricultural University in Copenhagen, Denmark, has shown that when it comes to weight loss, high-protein, low-calorie diets are much more effective than low-calorie, high-carbohydrate diets. In the ensuing eleven years, hundreds of scientific papers have confirmed these seminal results. Also, high levels of low-fat protein lower your cholesterol, reduce triglycerides and increase good HDL cholesterol, and reduce your risk of high blood pressure, stroke, and certain forms of cancer. When accompanied by sufficient amounts of alkaline fruit and vegetables, high-protein diets do not promote osteoporosis. Instead, they protect you from it.
The Typical American Diet: A Nutritional Nightmare
Now let’s take a look at this same 2,200 calorie diet for our sample twenty-five-year-old woman—but let’s replace most of the real foods (lean meats and fruits and vegetables) with processed foods, cereal grains, and dairy products. Remember, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Food Pyramid encourages you to eat six to eleven servings of grains every day. The nutrient breakdown depicted below closely resembles that of the average American diet. This is the same diet that has produced a nation in which 68 percent of all American men over age twenty-five and 64 percent of women over age twenty-five are either overweight or obese.
For breakfast, our twenty-five-year-old woman eats a Danish pastry and two cups of cornflakes with 8 ounces of whole milk, topped off with a teaspoon of sugar, and drinks a cup of coffee with a tablespoon of cream and a teaspoon of sugar. Because of the large amounts of refined carbohydrates consumed for breakfast, her blood sugar level soon plummets and she is hungry again by midmorning, so she eats a glazed doughnut and drinks another cup of coffee with cream and sugar. By noon, she’s hungry again. She goes to the McDonald’s near her office and orders a Quarter Pounder, a small portion of French fries, and a 12-ounce cola drink. For dinner, she eats two slices of cheese pizza and a small iceberg lettuce salad with half a tomato, covered with two tablespoons of Thousand Island dressing. She washes it all down with 12 ounces of lemon-lime soda. Let’s examine the nutrient breakdown of this dietary disaster:
| Nutrient | Daily Intake | RDA | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Calories | 2,200.0 | 100% | |
| Protein | 62.0 (g) | 57% | |
| Carbohydrate | 309.0 (g) | — | |
| Fat | 83.0 (g) | — | |
| Saturated fat | 29.0 (g) | — | |
| Monounsaturated fat | 19.0 (g) | — | |
| Polyunsaturated fat | 10.0 (g) | — | |
| Omega 3 fats | 1.0 (g) | — | |
| Water-soluble vitamins | |||
| Thiamin (B1) | 1.0 (mg) | 95% | |
| Riboflavin (B2) | 1.1 (mg) | 87% | |
| Niacin (B3) | 11.0 (mg) | 73% | |
| Pyridoxine (B6) | 0.3 (mg) | 20% | |
| Cobalamin (B12) | 1.8 (µg) | 88% | |
| Biotin | 11.8 (µg) | 18% | |
| Folate | 148.0 (µg) | 82% | |
| Pantothenic acid | 1.8 (mg) | 32% | |
| Vitamin C | 30.0 (mg) | 51% | |
| Fat-soluble vitamins | |||
| Vitamin A | 425.0 (RE) | 53% | |
| Vitamin D | 3.1 (µg) | 63% | |
| Vitamin E | 2.7 (mg) | 34% | |
| Vitamin K | 52.0 (µg) | 80% | |
| Macro minerals | |||
| Sodium | 2,943.0 (mg) | — | |
| Potassium | 2,121.0 (mg) | — | |
| Calcium | 887.0 (mg) | 111 % | |
| Phosphorus | 918.0 (mg) | 115% | |
| Magnesium | 128.0 (mg) | 46% | |
| Trace minerals | |||
| Iron | 10.2 (mg) | 68% | |
| Zinc | 3.9 (mg) | 33% | |
| Copper | 0.4 (mg) | 19% | |
| Manganese | 0.9 (mg) | 28% | |
| Selenium | 0.040 (mg) | 73% | |
| Dietary fiber | 8.0 (g) | — | |
| Beta-carotene | 87.0 (µg) | — | |
This diet typifies everything that’s wrong with the way most of us eat today—the modern, processed food-based diet. It violates all of the Seven Keys of the Paleo Diet—the ones we’re genetically programmed to follow. Except for calcium and phosphorus, every nutrient falls below the RDA. The protein intake on the standard American diet is a paltry 62 grams (57 percent of the RDA) compared to that of the Paleo Diet (a mighty 190 grams, or 379 percent of the RDA). Remember, protein is your ally in weight loss and good health. It lowers your cholesterol, improves your insulin sensitivity, speeds up your metabolism, satisfies your appetite, and helps you lose weight.
Even though there is very little meat in the typical American diet of this woman, the saturated fat content (29 grams) is 38 percent higher than that of the Paleo Diet. Worse still is the mix of fats. Healthful, cholesterol-lowering polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fats total a meager 29 grams. (In contrast, they add up to 75 grams on the Paleo Diet.) There is only 1 gram of heart-healthy omega 3 fats for the whole day in the typical American diet compared to a bountiful 6.7 grams in the sample Paleo Diet meal. Is it any wonder that the cereal-based, processed food-laden American diet promotes heart disease?
Now take a look at vitamin B6 (20 percent of the RDA), vitamin B12 (88 percent of the RDA), and folate (82 percent of the RDA). This woman’s diet is deficient in all three of the vitamins that prevent toxic buildup of homocysteine, the substance that damages the arteries and further predisposes you to heart disease. Inadequate amounts of folate also increase the risk of colon cancer and the birth defect spina bifida.
It’s also worth noting that this sample American diet has three times more sodium—but four times less potassium—than the Paleo Diet. This mineral imbalance promotes or aggravates conditions and diseases due to acid-base imbalance, including high blood pressure, osteoporosis, kidney stones, asthma, stroke, and certain forms of cancer. The daily intake of magnesium is also quite low here (46 percent of the RDA). Numerous scientific studies have shown that having a low magnesium level puts you at risk for heart disease by elevating your blood pressure, increasing your cholesterol level, and predisposing your heart to irregular beats. A low intake of magnesium also promotes the formation of kidney stones.
A high intake of antioxidant vitamins and phytochemicals from fresh fruits and vegetables is one of the best dietary strategies you can adopt to reduce the risk of cancer and heart disease. Unfortunately, when cereals, dairy products, processed foods, and fatty meats displace fruits and vegetables, they automatically lower your intake of health-giving antioxidants and phytochemicals from fruits and veggies. There is no comparison between the RDA percentages of vitamin A (53 percent), vitamin C (51 percent), vitamin E (34 percent), and selenium (73 percent) in the example above and those in the Paleo Diet: vitamin A (858 percent), vitamin C (932 percent), vitamin E (331 percent), and selenium (267 percent). The Paleo Diet contains forty-one times more beta-carotene (a natural plant antioxidant) than the average American diet.
The average American diet is also deficient in zinc (33 percent of the RDA) and iron (68 percent of the RDA)—which, along with a low intake of vitamins A and C, can impair your immune system and open the door to colds and infections.
Because the average American diet is loaded with refined cereal grains (six servings in our example) and sugars (123 grams or about a quarter-pound in our example), it increases the blood sugar and insulin levels in many people. If insulin remains constantly elevated, it causes a condition known as hyperinsulinemia, which increases the risk of a collection of diseases called metabolic syndrome—type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, obesity, and harmful changes in blood chemistry. But refined cereals and sugars are not part of the Paleo Diet—which means that your dietary insulin level will be naturally low and you will automatically reduce your risk of metabolic syndrome diseases. Last but not least is fiber. The average American diet contains a measly 8 grams compared to 47 grams on the Paleo Diet.
Many nutritionists would say that the example diet is healthful because it contains large amounts of carbohydrate (55 percent of total calories) and a low total fat intake (34 percent of total calories). This is also the message that most Americans have heard loud and clear—that healthful diets should be high in carbohydrate and low in fat. Unfortunately, when it comes to actual practice, most high-carbohydrate, low-fat diets look pretty much like our example of the typical American diet—a nutritional nightmare that promotes obesity, heart disease, cancer, and a host of other chronic illnesses.
Why You Can’t Overeat on the Paleo Diet
Most of the foods we crave—and that make us fat if we eat enough of them—contain some combination of sugar, starch, fat, and salt in a highly concentrated form. (If you think about it, sugar, starch, fat, and salt are pretty much the recipe for all the foods people tend to overeat.)
In nature, a sweet taste is almost always associated with fruit. This is what drew our ancestors to strawberries, for instance—the desire for a “sweet.” However, as a bonus, they got much more than the sweet taste—fiber, vitamins, minerals, phytochemicals, and other healthful substances that improved their chances of survival. Similarly, our Paleolithic ancestors sought foods with a salty taste. Salt is absolutely essential for your health—but you don’t need much of it. The trace amounts of salt found in fresh fruits, vegetables, and lean meats were just right for our ancient ancestors—who also got a hefty dose of potassium along with the sodium. Today, almost all processed foods are grossly overloaded with salt.
Real Food versus Fake Food
Today, much of our food is also fake. What does this mean? It’s created, not natural, food. See for yourself. How about a snack of dry white flour? Of course not; by itself, flour is bland and tasteless—you’d choke on it. However, if you add water, yeast, salt, vegetable oil, and sugar and then bake the result, suddenly you’ve got white bread. If you take this same mixture, deep-fry it in hydrogenated fats, and then glaze it with sugar, it becomes tastier still—a glazed doughnut. Or you could add bananas and walnuts to the original dough, bake it, and coat it with sugar and margarine, and you’ve got banana nut bread with frosting.
If you want to feel more virtuous about the whole thing, you can substitute whole-wheat flour and honey and call it “health food.” But the bottom line is that none of these highly palatable food mixtures even remotely resemble the foods that nourished all human beings until very recently. In Paleolithic times, starchy foods weren’talso salty; now we have potato chips and corn chips. Sweet foods were never also fat. Now we have ice cream and chocolates. Fatty foods were almost never also starchy. Now we have doughnuts that are not only fatty and starchy, but sugary as well.
It is extremely easy to overeat processed foods made with starch, fats, sugars, and salt. There is always room after dinner for pie, ice cream, or chocolates. But how about another stalk of celery or another broiled chicken breast? Many overweight people can easily polish off a quart of ice cream after a full dinner. How many could—or would—eat an additional quart of steamed broccoli? The point here is that it’s very difficult to overeat real foods—fruits, vegetables, and lean meats. Fruits and vegetables provide us with natural bulk and fiber to fill up our stomachs. Because they are low-glycemic, they also normalize our blood sugar and reduce our appetites. The protein in lean meats satisfies our hunger pangs rapidly and lets us know when we are full. Two skinless chicken breasts for dinner may be filling—and two more might be impossible. Can we say the same for pizza slices?
Fake foods distort our appetites, allowing us to eat more than we really need. The most insidious—doughnuts, corn chips, vanilla wafers, croissants, wheat crackers—have a terrible one-two punch: high fats plus high-glycemic carbohydrates.
Normally, purely high-fat foods allow our appetites to self-regulate. For example, you can only eat a certain amount of pure butter before your body says “Ugh” and you become full and stop eating. However, when a high-glycemic carbohydrate sneaks in along with fat, you can continue eating the fat long after you would normally be full. The carbohydrate makes the fat taste better than it would alone (particularly if some salt and sugar are added), so you eat more. But the high-glycemic carbohydrate also may fool your body into thinking that it’s still hungry.
When you eat a doughnut, for example, the high-glycemic carbohydrates cause your blood insulin level to shoot up. At the same time, your blood level of a hormone called “glucagon” tends to fall. These chemical changes cause a cascade of events that may result in impaired metabolism by limiting the body’s access to its two major metabolic fuels—fat and glucose. The other important result of these chemical changes is hypoglycemia—low blood sugar, which paradoxically stimulates your appetite, making you feel hungry even though you’ve just eaten. These high-fat, high-glycemic carbohydrate foods perpetuate a vicious cycle of being hungry and eating and never being satisfied. They cause excessive rises in your blood sugar and insulin levels and promote rapid weight gain.
High-fructose corn syrup can make this bad situation even worse. Fructose powerfully promotes insulin resistance. It’s added to almost every processed food imaginable; we get most of it from soft drinks, sweets, and baked items. But it’s also an ingredient in most low-fat or nonfat salad dressings—foods many of us buy in an attempt to be more responsible, to count calories, and to limit as many unwholesome ingredients as possible. The best approach is to stay away from these foods. Stick with humanity’s original fare: fruits, vegetables, and lean meats.
What to Expect on the Paleo Diet
The key to the Paleo Diet is to stay with this wonderful way of eating. I can guarantee that you will immediately feel better. Your energy level will increase; you won’t have to endure that late-afternoon tiredness or “blah” feeling. In the morning, you’ll wake up charged and ready to greet the new day. You’ll feel better with each passing day, and as the weeks go by, you’ll notice that your clothes feel a bit loose. Your weight will gradually drop—week by week—until your normal, healthy body weight is restored. For some people, this may only take one or two months; for others, six months to a year; and for those with severe weight and health problems, a year or more. But the bottom line is that it will happen.
Many people also experience clearing of their sinuses, less stiffness of their joints in the morning, and normalization of bowel function. Indigestion, heartburn, and acid stomach are reduced and may even vanish completely within a few weeks of adopting this diet.
People with high cholesterol and abnormal blood chemistry can expect to see improvements within two weeks of starting the diet. Blood triglyceride levels will drop within days, and the good HDL cholesterol will rise rapidly as well. In addition, for most people on the Paleo Diet, total blood cholesterol and LDL cholesterol drop within the first two weeks.
The Paleo Diet is particularly helpful for people with type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure, kidney stones, asthma, acne, and osteoporosis. There is also a significant body of evidence suggesting that the Paleo Diet may be helpful in certain autoimmune diseases such as celiac disease, dermatitis herpetiformis, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, and Sjögren’s syndrome. It even reduces your risk of many types of cancer.
So eat well, lose weight, and be healthy with the Paleo Diet.
3
How Our Diet Went Wrong and What You Can Do about It
The blink of an eye. That’s how long, in the grand scheme of human history, we have grown food and domesticated livestock. It’s been only 333 generations since this change—known as the “Agricultural Revolution”—happened, and yet we have almost completely lost track of the foods our ancient ancestors ate. The so-called new foods that agriculture gave us so completely displaced the old foods that most of us are unaware that these foods were ever new. Many people assume that cereals, dairy products, salted foods, legumes, domesticated meats, and refined sugars have always been part of our diet. Not true! We need to rediscover the foods that brought our Paleolithic ancestors vibrant health, lean bodies, and freedom from chronic disease. The foods that agreed nicely with their genetic blueprints are the same foods that agree nicely with our genetic blueprints.
But what are these foods? How can we possibly know what our Paleolithic ancestors ate? My research team and I have been asking these same questions for the past decade. I am happy to tell you that we have found answers to these questions by carefully piecing together information from four sources:
• The fossil record
• Contemporary hunter-gatherer diets
• Chimpanzee diets
• Nutrients in wild animals and plants
The Paleolithic (Old Stone Age) era began some 2.5 million years ago in Africa when the first crude stone tools were developed. It ended about 10,000 years ago in the Middle East, with the first ancient farms. (Perhaps twenty different species of ancient humans lived in the Paleolithic era. However, for the purposes of this book, we’ll cover only the diets of our direct ancestors.) We can trace the evidence showing the dominance of lean meat in human diets from our origins 2.5 million years ago until the beginnings of agriculture 10,000 years ago.
Lean Meat Is Brain Food
The notion that human beings were meant to be vegetarians runs contrary to every shred of evolutionary evidence from the fossil and anthropological record. We owe a huge debt to lean meat. In fact, scientific evidence overwhelmingly suggests that if our ancient ancestors had eaten a meatless diet, we wouldn’t be where we are today. I wouldn’t have become a scientist, you wouldn’t be reading this book, and we would all look a lot more like our nearest animal relative—the chimpanzee.
How can this be? Chimps are hairy, and they have a big gut. They swing from trees. Well, yes, but about 5 to 7 million years ago, so did our prehuman ancestors. The evidence is that the family tree forks—and humans moved into a category all their own. But genetically speaking, we are only about 1.7 percent different from the chimp.
Chimps are mostly vegetarians (although they do eat a few insects, bird eggs, and the occasional small animal), and they have the big, protruding belly characteristic of vegetarian animals (horses and cows, for example, have big bellies, too). Apes need large, active guts to extract the nutrients from their fiber-filled, plant-based diet.
About 2.5 million years ago, our ancestors began trading in their big guts for bigger brains—to the point where today our bellies are about 40 percent smaller than those of chimps and our brains are about three times larger. The turning point came when our ancestors figured out that eating animal food (meat and organs) gave them much more energy. Over the years, their bellies began to shrink—because they didn’t need the extra room to process all that roughage. All the energy formerly needed by the gut was diverted to the brain, which doubled and then tripled in size. Without nutrient-dense animal foods in the diet, the large brains that make us human never would have had the chance to develop. Meat and animal foods literally shaped our genome.
Interestingly, just before the same period when human brains began to expand, something new came on the scene: tools—crude stone weapons, and knives that our ancestors used to butcher animal carcasses and later to hunt. We know this because of telltale cut marks that have been found on the bones of fossilized animals and from evidence (a classic example is the 125,000-year-old spear crafted from a yew tree found embedded between the ribs of an extinct straight-tusked elephant in Germany) compiled at thousands of archaeological sites worldwide.
At first, humans were not terribly good hunters. They started out as scavengers who trailed behind predators such as lions and ate the leftovers remaining on abandoned carcasses. The pickings were slim; ravenous lions don’t leave much behind, except for bones. But with their handy tools (stone anvils and hammers), our early ancestors could crack the skulls and bones and still find something to eat—brains and fatty marrow.
Marrow fat was the main concentrated energy source that enabled the early human gut to shrink, while the scavenged brains contained a specific type of omega 3 fat called “docosahexaenoic acid” (DHA), which allowed the brain to expand. Docosahexaenoic acid is the building block of our brain tissue.
Without a dietary source of DHA, the huge expansion of our brain capacity could never have happened. Without meat, marrow, and brains, our human ancestors never would have been able to walk out of tropical Africa and colonize the colder areas of the world. If these people had depended on finding plant foods in cold Europe, they would have starved. In a landmark series of studies, my colleague Mike Richards, at Oxford University, studied the bones of Paleolithic people who lived in England some 12,000 years ago. Their diet, Richards confirmed, was almost identical to that of top-level carnivores, such as wolves and bears.
Hunting Big Game
Why would any sane person get close enough to poke a spear into a sharp-hoofed, kicking, and snorting 600-pound horse—much less a raging 5-ton mammoth? Why didn’t Paleolithic people play it safe, gathering berries and nuts and snaring rabbits, rodents, and small birds? Again, the wisdom of the old ways becomes clear.
The basic idea of foraging for food—whether you’re a human, a wolf, or even a house cat chasing a mouse—is simple. You’ve got to receive more energy from the food you capture than you use in trying to capture it. If you run around all day and use up 1,000 calories, but come home with only ten apples worth a grand total of 800 calories, you’re going to be very hungry. So when Paleolithic people went looking for food, they tried to get the most bang for the buck. The best way to do this, they found, was with a large animal. It takes a lot more energy to run down and capture 1,600 one-ounce mice than it does to kill a single deer weighing 100 pounds (1,600 ounces). But there’s a much more important reason why larger animals were preferred. It’s called “protein toxicity.”
We can only tolerate a certain amount of protein at a time- about 200 to 300 grams a day. Too much protein makes us nauseated, causes diarrhea, and eventually can kill us. This is why our Paleolithic ancestors couldn’t just eat lean muscle meat. They needed to eat fat along with the lean meat, or they needed to supplement the lean meat with carbohydrates from plant foods. Early explorers and frontiersmen in North America knew this, too. They were painfully aware of the toxic effect of too much lean protein; they called the illness “rabbit starvation.”
On average, large animals like deer and cows (or, for Paleolithic people, mammoths and wild horses) contain more fat and less protein than smaller animals like rabbits and squirrels. The squirrel’s body is 83 percent protein and 17 percent fat; the mule deer’s body is 40 percent protein and 60 percent fat. If you ate nothing but squirrel, you would rapidly exceed the body’s protein ceiling, and like those early pioneers, you’d end up with rabbit starvation. On the other hand, if you only had deer to eat, you’d be doing fine. You would not develop protein toxicity because you’d be protected by the deer’s higher fat content. This is why Paleolithic hunters risked their lives hunting larger animals.
In the Paleo Diet, you’re protected from protein toxicity, too—by unlimited access to fresh fruits and vegetables. You’re also protected by the good cholesterol-lowering monounsaturated fats and by our most powerful deterrent to heart disease—omega 3 fatty acids. With these safeguards in place, protein is your friend. High levels of protein speed up your metabolism, reduce your appetite, and lower your cholesterol. You will benefit from eating lean protein at every meal. I can assure you that as long as you eat plenty of fresh fruits and vegetables, there is no such thing as too much protein.
Restoring the Balance in Your Diet
My research team and I have found that, ideally, a little more than half—55 percent—of your calories should come from lean meats, organ meats, fish, and seafood. The balance should come from fresh fruits and vegetables, some nuts, and healthful oils.
In the average American diet, not only is the balance of plant to animal food off-kilter, it’s almost exactly the opposite of what we are genetically programmed to eat. In the typical American diet, 24 percent of the calories come from cereals, 11 percent from dairy products, 18 percent from refined sugars, and 18 percent from refined oils. These foods represent 71 percent of the energy consumed in the typical American diet—yet virtually none of them are to be found on the Paleo menu of lean meats, fresh fruits, and vegetables. In the American diet, about 38 percent of the calories come from animal foods, most of them high-fat and unhealthy meats (hot dogs, fatty ground beef, bacon, lunch meats, etc.)—a far cry from the Paleo Diet.
How “Progress” Has Hurt Us
The Agricultural Revolution changed the world and allowed civilization—cities, culture, technological and medical achievements, and scientific knowledge—to develop. These were all good things. And yet, there was a huge downside. The Agricultural Revolution is also responsible for much of today’s obesity and chronic disease. The foods that agriculture brought us—cereals, dairy products, fatty meats, salted foods, and refined sugars and oils—proved disastrous for our Paleolithic bodies.
Nobody could have anticipated this revolution or its consequences. The early farmers didn’t have some great plan to overthrow the old system. They were just looking for better ways to feed their families in the face of a rising population and dwindling food resources. It all started in the Middle East about 10,000 years ago, when some enterprising people started to sow and harvest wild wheat seeds. Later, they domesticated barley and a few legumes and then livestock—sheep, goats, and pigs. They still picked wild fruits and vegetables and still hunted wild game, but the die was cast; the diet had changed dramatically.
Hello Grains, Hello Health Problems
The archaeological record clearly shows that whenever and wherever ancient humans sowed seeds (and replaced the old animal-dominated diets), part of the harvest included health problems. One physical ramification of the new diet was immediately obvious: early farmers were markedly shorter than their ancestors. In Turkey and Greece, for example, preagricultural men stood 5 feet 9 inches tall and women 5 feet 5 inches. By 3000 B.C., the average man had shrunk to 5 feet 3 inches and the average woman to 5 feet. But getting shorter—not in itself a health problem—was the least of the changes in these early farmers. Studies of their bones and teeth have revealed that these people were basically a mess: they had more infectious diseases than their ancestors, more childhood mortality, and shorter life spans in general. They also had more osteoporosis, rickets, and other bone mineral disorders, thanks to the cereal-based diets. For the first time, humans were plagued with vitamin- and mineral-deficiency diseases—scurvy, beriberi, pellagra, vitamin A and zinc deficiencies, and iron-deficiency anemia. Instead of the well-formed, strong teeth their ancestors had, there were now cavities. Their jaws, which were formerly square and roomy, were suddenly too small for their teeth, which overlapped each other.
What had gone wrong? How could the benign practice of agriculture—harnessing nature’s bounty—have caused so many health problems? We now know that although the population was soaring, the quality of life—as well as the average life span—was in a nosedive. The new staples, cereals and starches, provided calories but not the vital nutrients of the old diet—lean meats, fruits, and vegetables. The result—ill health and disease.
The health picture got worse over the years with the arrival of salt, fatty cheeses, and butter. Our ancestors learned to ferment grains, make beer, and eventually distill spirits. Selective breeding—and the innovation of feeding grain to livestock—steadily produced fatter pigs, cows, and sheep. Most meat wasn’t eaten fresh—fewer people hunted—but instead was pickled, salted, or smoked. Fruits and vegetables became luxuries—rare seasonal additions to the monotony of cereal and starch.
More recently—just 200 years ago—the Industrial Revolution brought refined sugar, canned foods, and refined white flour to the average family’s table. Food was processed in earnest by the mid-twentieth century with the invention of trans-fatty acids, margarine, shortening, and combinations of these fats mixed with sugar, salt, other starches, high omega 6 vegetable oils, high-fructose corn syrup, and countless additives, preservatives, coloring agents, and emulsifiers.
Imagine a Paleolithic human confronted with a Twinkie or even a pizza. He or she wouldn’t even recognize these modern-day treats as food.
Big Mistakes in the 1950s
In many ways, the 1950s were a simpler time. Part of the mind-set then seemed to be to find simple solutions for complicated problems. In the early 1950s, when scientists were unraveling the links between diet and heart disease, they found that saturated fat (the kind found in butter, cheese, and fatty meats) raised total blood cholesterol; it also raised the LDL (the bad kind) cholesterol level and increased the risk of heart disease. More recent research has shown that not all saturated fats raise total and LDL cholesterol. Stearic acid actually lowers blood cholesterol similar to the way that monounsaturated fats do. Unfortunately, red meat became the scapegoat; all of a sudden, it was the chief artery clogger and cause of heart attacks. Even many nutritionists and physicians jumped to the conclusion that red meat was an unhealthy food that promoted heart disease and bowel cancer.
The food industry responded to the message that saturated fats were bad by creating all sorts of “healthy alternatives”—highly polyunsaturated vegetable oils (corn, safflower, sunflower, and cottonseed, to name a few). They also gave us all kinds of products made from these oils, such as margarines, shortening, spreads, and dressings. And almost overnight, these vegetable oils and their spin-offs were incorporated into virtually all processed foods and baked goods.
Unfortunately, as we now know, this was a very bad move. The indiscriminate infusion of vegetable oils into the American diet gave us far too many omega 6 polyunsaturated fats at the expense of the good omega 3 polyunsaturated fats. And the increased use of margarine and spreads caused the widespread introduction of still another kind of fat, called “trans-fatty acids,” into our meals and snacks.
The next plan the nutritional masterminds came up with—like the anti-red meat campaign, it was not well thought out and was inadequately tested before being put into practice—was to replace saturated fats with carbohydrates, primarily starchy carbohydrates, like those found in bread, potatoes, and cereals. By the early 1990s, this recommendation had become so entrenched that it was the official policy of the USDA. The bedrock of our national Food Pyramid is its base—six to eleven servings of cereal grains. We now know, from scientific studies examining something called the “glycemic index” of certain foods, that this is six to eleven servings too many.
Part of the confusion here is that all carbohydrates are not created equal. Some of them are good for us. But others promote ill health and disease, and this brings us to the glycemic index. Good carbohydrates have a low glycemic index. This means they cause a minimal or slow rise in our blood glucose (sugar) level. The “glycemic load” is the glycemic index of a food times its carbohydrate content. It is this high-glycemic load that elevates blood insulin levels in many people. High-glycemic carbohydrates cause large and rapid rises in blood glucose and have been implicated in a wide variety of chronic diseases—adult-onset diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, obesity, elevated blood uric acid levels, elevated blood triglycerides (the building blocks of fat, which float around in the bloodstream), elevated small-dense LDL cholesterol, and reduced HDL cholesterol. This cluster of diseases is known to cardiologists as metabolic syndrome. Regrettably, the architects of the Food Pyramid did not distinguish between high- and low-glycemic carbohydrates when they started this carbomania.
Let’s see how our modern way of eating has deviated from the Seven Keys to nutrition I laid out in chapter 2, and how this has affected our health.
The Seven Major Problems in the Typical American Diet
1. Not Enough Protein
Protein makes up 15 percent of the calories that most Americans (and people in other Western countries) eat every day. But it should be much higher—between 19 and 35 percent—to give us more energy and help us burn off extra calories. Look at the numbers: For every 100 calories, cereals average only about 12 percent protein—compared to 83 percent protein for game meats. Legumes like lentils, peas, and beans average 27 percent protein.
As for dairy products, the phenomenon of the “milk cow” (or goat or sheep) happened roughly 9,000 years ago. Milk contains 21 percent protein, cheese averages 28 percent protein, and butter has absolutely no protein—but a lot of fat.
The bottom line: Most of us are getting only half of the protein we need. Why is this bad? As I’ll discuss in the next three chapters, a low protein intake contributes to weight gain and a high blood cholesterol level and increases your risk of many chronic diseases.
2. Too Much of the Wrong Carbohydrates
The USDA Food Pyramid is based on carbohydrates; we’re a nation of starch and sugar eaters. Carbohydrates make up about half of the typical Western diet—a considerable difference from the Paleo Diet. For our ancient ancestors, carbohydrates accounted for 22 to 40 percent of the daily calories—but these were good carbohydrates, from wild fruits and vegetables. These low-glycemic foods—which don’t cause blood sugar to spike—are digested and absorbed slowly.
With nonstarchy fruits and vegetables, it’s very hard to get more than about 35 percent of your calories as carbohydrates. For example: There are 26 calories in the average tomato. To get 35 percent of your daily calories as carbohydrates from tomatoes only, you’d have to eat thirty tomatoes. And this is why, with the Paleo Diet, you can indulge yourself by eating all the nonstarchy fruits and vegetables you want. When you eat the right foods, getting too many carbohydrates—or eating too many high-glycemic carbohydrates, which can cause a dangerous rise in your blood sugar and insulin levels—is simply not something you have to worry about. The average carbohydrate content of fruits is only about 13 percent per 100 grams, about 4 percent for nonstarchy vegetables—and zero for lean meats, fish, and seafood. In stark contrast, the average carbohydrate content of cereal grains is 72 percent per 100 grams.
Why are many carbohydrates bad? Many whole grains and legumes don’t have a lot of vitamins and minerals. They’re poor dietary sources of these important nutrients. So a diet that’s tilted too heavily toward grains and legumes—at the expense of lean meats, fruits, and vegetables—can lead to vitamin and mineral deficiencies. This is why so many of our breads and cereals are fortified with extra nutrients. Food shouldn’t need to be supplemented with vitamins, and if you’re getting the right balance of lean meats, fruits, and vegetables, neither should you.
Worse, cereal grains and legumes even contain “antinutrients”—chemicals that actually prevent your body from absorbing the proper nutrients and can damage the gastrointestinal and immune systems. Too many grains and legumes can disrupt the acid balance in the kidneys as well, and can contribute to the loss of muscle mass and bone mineral content with aging.
Finally, if you eat more carbohydrates, you’re eating less protein. Protein is the dieter’s friend: it reduces your appetite and increases your metabolism—and this translates rapidly into weight loss.
One of the great dietary myths in the Western world is that whole grains and legumes are healthful. The truth is that these foods are marginal at best. But what about the “health-food” breads? At best, they’re less bad than the overprocessed, super-refined white breads you could be buying. But they’re still not part of the Paleo Diet. Formerly (before “progress” brought refined milling technology to bread making), almost all cereal grains either were eaten whole or were so crudely milled that nearly the entire grain—bran, germ, and fiber—remained intact, and flour was much less refined than the kind we buy today. Our great-greatgrandparents ate cracked wheat breads and baked goods with a moderate glycemic index—which meant a more moderate rise in blood sugar level.
Does this mean that whole grains are good for you? Not necessarily. It just means that an extra bad characteristic—a high glycemic index—wasn’t incorporated into them yet. That unfortunate addition happened about 130 years ago, when steel roller mills came on the flour-making scene. They smashed all the fiber out of the grains and left the wimpy white, high-glycemic powder most of us think of as flour. Today, almost all baked goods made with this stuff frequently cause the blood sugar level to rise excessively.
Even “whole wheat” bread made from flour ground by these steel roller mills does the same thing to your blood sugar, because the flour particle size is uniformly small—so it’s virtually no different from white flour. About 80 percent of all the cereal products Americans eat—as they follow the directions of the USDA Food Pyramid—come from refined white flour with a high glycemic index.
Cereal grains are literally best left for the birds
Compounding the Problem: Sugar and Sweeteners
Our Paleolithic ancestors loved honey. But it was a rare treat, because it was only available seasonally and in limited quantities (and they had to outmaneuver bees to get it). So for the most part, refined sugars—another source of carbohydrates—simply were not part of humanity’s diet for 2.5 million years. In fact, until about the last 200 years or so, they weren’t part of anybody’s diet.
Sugar is another of those side effects of technological “progress,” and its rise to prominence in our daily life has been rapid. In England in 1815, the average person used about 15 pounds of table sugar a year; in 1970, the average person used 120 pounds. How much sugar do you buy a year? Do you buy another 5-pound bag every time you go to the grocery store? You’re not alone.
Yet sugar, like refined cereal grains, is not good for us. Sure, it causes cavities—most of us hear that message every time we go to the dentist. But it’s also becoming evident that sugar poses more serious health problems. It promotes insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome diseases almost as much as high-glycemic breads and starchy potatoes do.
The chemical name for table sugar is “sucrose.” Although sucrose has nearly the same high glycemic index (65) as white bread (70), it has two additional characteristics that make it particularly harmful for insulin metabolism. First, it is 100 percent carbohydrate, meaning that its glycemic load is very high.
Second, when your body digests sucrose, it is broken down into two simple sugars—high-glycemic glucose (with a glycemic index of 97) and low-glycemic fructose (with a glycemic index of 23). Scientists used to think that fructose was not harmful because of its low glycemic index. But recent laboratory studies by Dr. Mike Pagliassotti and colleagues at Arizona State University have revealed that fructose is actually the main culprit in table sugar that causes insulin resistance. Dr. Pagliassotti’s findings were bolstered by research at the University of Lausanne Medical School in Switzerland, by Dr. Luc Tappy and colleagues, showing that fructose can cause insulin resistance in humans. Insulin resistance, in turn, often promotes obesity and chronic metabolic syndrome diseases, including hypertension, heart disease, and diabetes.
To calculate the glycemic load, multiply the glycemic index by the carbohydrate content
High-Fructose Corn Syrup: A Really Bad Idea
The steady increase in table sugar use was an unfortunate development in the carbohydrate content of our diet. But in the 1970s, the food-processing industry made a discovery: high-fructose corn syrup could save them a lot of money. Because fructose is so much sweeter than sucrose, less of it is needed to sweeten any processed food. Today corn syrup is the food-processing industry’s sweetener of choice. Imagine the financial incentive here: with fructose, millions of tons of sugar are saved each year.
What does this mean to average Americans? It means we are getting grossly disproportionate amounts of sweetener in our diets. There are about 10 teaspoons of high-fructose corn syrup in a single 12-ounce can of soda. The average American now eats 66 pounds of corn syrup a year, plus 64 pounds of sucrose, and an appalling total of 131 pounds of refined sugars. When you begin the Paleo Diet and gradually wean yourself off processed foods, your daily sugar intake will drastically shrink—and, better still, the sugar you get will come from healthful fruits and vegetables.
3. Not Enough Fiber
Fiber intake began to go down the day our ancient ancestors started harvesting cereal grains. How can this be? Don’t whole grains equal fiber? When our doctors tell us to add more fiber to our diet, don’t they mean for us to eat more oatmeal? The truth is that calorie for calorie, whole grains can’t hold a candle to fruits and vegetables. Fruits on average contain almost twice as much fiber as whole grains. Compared to whole grains, nonstarchy vegetables have eight times more fiber.Sugars have absolutely no fiber.
And yet we know that dietary fiber is absolutely essential for good health. Not having enough fiber raises our risk of developing scores of diseases and health problems. A comprehensive medical text edited by Drs. Hugh Trowell, Denis Burkitt, and Kenneth Heaton has implicated low dietary fiber in the following diseases and health problems: constipation, diverticulitis, colon cancer, appendicitis, Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis, irritable bowel syndrome, duodenal ulcer, hiatal hernia, gastroesophageal reflux, obesity, type 2 diabetes, gallstones, high blood cholesterol, varicose veins, hemorrhoids, deep vein thrombosis, and kidney stones.
4. Too Much Fat and Too Many Bad Fats
Cut the fat! If the nutritional experts have had an overriding message over the last decades, this is it.
The thing is, this dictum is flat-out wrong. We now know that it’s not how much fat you eat that raises your blood cholesterol levels and increases your risk of heart disease, cancer, and diabetes—it’s the kind of fat you eat. We consume too many omega 6 polyunsaturated fats at the expense of the healthful omega 3 kind. And we get plenty of those cholesterol-raising, artery-clogging trans-fatty acids found in margarine, shortening, and many processed foods. Finally, we eat excessive amounts of palmitic acid, a blood cholesterol-raising saturated fat found in cheeses, baked goods, and fatty processed meats, such as hot dogs, bacon, bologna, and salami.
All of those kinds of fat are bad and need to go. But in removing all fats from our diet, we are doing more harm than good. This problem is easy to solve: With the Paleo Diet—which contains healthful fats—you will automatically reestablish the proper balance of fats in your diet. You’ll also lower your blood cholesterol and reduce your risk of heart disease, cancer, and other chronic illnesses.
From our analyses of the fats in wild animals, my research team and I have found that even though ancient humans ate meat at nearly every meal, they consumed about half of the palmitic acid found in the average Western diet. (Wild game meat is low in total fat and palmitic acid and high in healthful, cholesterol-lowering monounsaturated fat and stearic acid.) They also ate lots of omega 3 polyunsaturated fats.
See Appendix 2 for a table contrasting the fats in domestic and wild meats.
The ratio of omega 6 to omega 3 fats in Paleo diets was about 2 to 1; for the average American, the ratio is much too high—about 10 to 1. Eating too many omega 6 fats instead of omega 3 fats increases your risk of heart disease and certain forms of cancer; it also aggravates inflammatory and autoimmune diseases. The lean meats, fish, fruits, vegetables, and oils found in the Paleo Diet guarantee that you will have the proper ratio of omega 6 and omega 3 fats—and of all other fats.
Cereal Doesn’t Help
Cereal grains are low in fat. But the little fat they do have is unbalanced—tilted heavily toward omega 6. For example, in game and organ meat, the average ratio of omega 6 to omega 3 is 2 or 3 to one. In eight of the world’s most commonly consumed cereals, this ratio is a staggering 22 to 1.
Cereal grains also have contributed to generations of blubbery cows that bear little resemblance to the lean wild animals our ancestors ate. Grain-fed cows have become loaded down with palmitic acid; worse, the fats in their meat have taken on the same high omega 6 to omega 3 ratio that’s in their grain.
Milk Doesn’t Help, Either
Dairy foods have taken a further toll on humanity’s health over the last 9,000 years or so. Milk, cream, cheese, butter, and fermented milk products (including yogurt), ice cream, and the many processed dairy products of the twentieth century are some of the richest sources of certain saturated fats in the typical Western diet. In particular, fatty dairy foods contain palmitic and myristic fatty acids—two substances that elevate blood cholesterol. When you evaluate dairy products for fat percentage by calories, butter is the worst at 100 percent fat. Cream is 89 percent fat, cheeses average about 74 percent fat, and whole milk is about 49 percent fat. And most of the fats in these dairy products—about 40 percent—are the bad saturated fatty acids. Despite their wholesome image, whole milk and fatty dairy products are some of the least healthful foods in our diets. Their fatty acids (palmitic acid and myristic acid) raise your blood cholesterol; they also raise your risk of developing heart disease and other chronic illnesses.
The Trouble with Unbalanced Vegetable Oils
The next major misstep in food innovation happened just a few decades ago, when vegetable oils became part of our diet.
In the 1940s and 1950s, when most of these vegetable oils were introduced, nobody realized that the ratio of omega 6 to omega 3 fats was terribly important to health. What food scientists knew at that point was pretty simple—that polyunsaturated fats lowered blood cholesterol. And it was with this limited piece of the total picture that they happily created a great variety of cooking and salad oils that were highly polyunsaturated—but regrettably also extremely high in omega 6 fats. The worst offenders are safflower oil and peanut oil (with extremely high omega 6 to omega 3 ratios), cottonseed oil, sunflower oil, sesame oil, and corn oil. Walnut oil is more balanced. And flaxseed oil is better still—low in omega 6 fats and high in omega 3.
Trans Fats Are Terrible
Cooking and salad oils are just part of the high omega 6 problem. Nearly all processed foods—breads, cookies, cakes, crackers, chips, doughnuts, muffins, cereals, and candies—and all fast foods are cooked with some form of high omega 6 vegetable oil. Worse, many of these foods are still made with hydrogenated vegetable oils that contain harmful trans-fatty acids. Trans fats raise blood cholesterol and increase your risk of developing heart disease. A study published in the American Journal of Public Health concluded that consumption of trans fats by Americans was responsible for more than 30,000 deaths annually from heart disease. Trans fats are found in margarine, shortening, and some peanut butters—foods that definitely were not part of humanity’s original diet.
5. Too Much Salt, Not Enough Potassium
Paleo diets were exceptionally rich in potassium and low in sodium. Just about everything Paleolithic people ate—meats, fish, fruits, vegetables, nuts, and seeds—contained about five to ten times more potassium than sodium. This means that when you eat only fresh, unprocessed food, it’s impossible to consume more sodium than potassium.
We don’t know exactly when farmers began to include salt in their diet, but we can guess why. Salt performed a great service, in the centuries before refrigeration, in preserving meats and other foods. It helped make foods like olives edible; it added flavor to bland cereals and other foods. At least 5,600 years ago, archaeological evidence shows us, salt was mined and traded in Europe. It remains a staple today; in fact, the average American consumes about twice as much sodium as potassium. And that’s not healthy.
6. An Acid-Base Imbalance
Very few people—including nutritionists and dietitians—are aware that the acid-base content of your food can affect your health. Basically, this is what happens: everything you digest eventually reports to the kidneys as either an acid or an alkaline base. Acid-producing foods are meats, fish, grains, legumes, dairy products, and salt. Alkaline-producing foods are fruits and vegetables. You need both kinds—acid and alkaline. Fats are generally neutral.
The average American diet is slightly acidic—which means that our kidneys must handle a net acid load. For example: Suppose you have a typical “light” lunch, probably available at a dozen places near your home or office, of pepperoni pizza and a small salad with Caesar dressing. This meal is a disaster for the body’s acid-base balance: the pizza’s white-flour crust, melted cheeses, and salty pepperoni are all highly acidic. Add salt, and you make it even more acidic. Any alkaline remnant available in the tiny salad is neutralized by the salt and cheese in the Caesar salad dressing.
In the long run, eating too many acid foods and not enough alkaline foods can contribute to bone and muscle loss with aging. There are more immediate dangers, too: excessive dietary acid can raise blood pressure and increase your risk of developing kidney stones. It can also aggravate asthma and exercise-induced asthma.
7. Not Enough Plant Phytochemicals, Vitamins, Minerals, and Antioxidants
The Paleo Diet is rich in vitamins and minerals. One of the best ways to prove how healthy our diet used to be is to show what happened when our ancestors fiddled with it.
Vitamin C deficiency, a disease unknown to Paleolithic people, causes scurvy. Paleolithic people didn’t have this problem; their diets were extremely high in vitamin C (around 500 milligrams per day) because they ate so many fresh fruits and vegetables. But even Eskimo groups—who for thousands of years have eaten virtually no plant foods for most of the year—didn’t get scurvy. How can this be? They got their vitamin C from other natural sources—raw fish, seal, and caribou meat.
But as our ancestors began eating more cereal grains and fewer lean meats, fresh fruits, and vegetables, they lost much of the vitamin C in their diets. Cereal grains have no vitamin C, which is one of the body’s most powerful antioxidants. Vitamin C helps lower cholesterol, reduces the risk of heart disease and cancer, boosts the immune system, and helps ward off infections and colds.
Vitamin A deficiency, like scurvy, could only have emerged after the coming of agriculture. Paleo diets were always rich in fruits and vegetables—excellent sources of beta-carotene, a nutrient that can be converted to vitamin A by the liver. (Our ancient ancestors also ate the entire carcasses of the animals they hunted and killed, including the vitamin A-rich liver.) Again, trouble happened when cereals took over and fresh fruits, vegetables, and organ meats were pushed aside. Vitamin A is essential for all of the body’s mucous membranes. Vitamin A deficiency results in a condition called “xerophthalmia” (dry eyes), which can lead to blindness; in fact, this is the leading cause of blindness in children worldwide. Vitamin A deficiency also impairs the body’s ability to fight infection and disease.
Vitamin B deficiency is another problem. Many people believe that whole-grain cereals are rich sources of B vitamins. They’re mistaken. Compared to lean meats, fruits, and vegetables, calorie for calorie, cereals are vitamin B lightweights. Even worse, as I mentioned earlier, whole grains and legumes contain antinutrients that block the absorption of B vitamins in the intestines. For instance, antinutrients called “pyridoxine glucosides” can prevent your body from getting as much as two-thirds of the vitamin B6 you eat. In a study of vegetarian women from Nepal, Dr. Robert Reynolds, of the USDA Human Nutrition Research Center, linked the low vitamin B6 levels in these women to the high levels of pyridoxine glucosides in their grain- and legume-heavy diets. In contrast, the availability of vitamin B6 in lean meats is nearly 100 percent.
Another B vitamin that’s poorly absorbed when you eat whole grains is biotin. Experiments by my colleague Dr. Bruce Watkins from Purdue University have shown that wheat and other whole grains impair the body’s ability to get enough biotin. Biotin deficiencies result in dry, brittle fingernails and hair. Research by Dr. Richard K. Scher and colleagues at Columbia University has shown that biotin supplements reduce fingernail brittleness and vertical “ridging” in nails. But you won’t need to supplement your diet if you get enough biotin (or any other vitamin or mineral) the old-fashioned way—by eating the right foods. The availability of biotin from animal foods is almost 100 percent.
Pellagra and beriberi are two of the most devastating and widespread B vitamin deficiency diseases that have ever plagued human-kind. They are caused exclusively by excessive consumption of cereals. Pellagra is a serious, often fatal, disease caused by a lack of the B vitamin niacin and the essential amino acid tryptophan. In a sad chapter of U.S. history, between 1906 and 1940 there was an epidemic of pellagra in the South. An estimated 3 million people developed it, and at least 100,000 of them died. Similar outbreaks have occurred in Europe and India, and pellagra is still common in parts of Africa.
Underlying every worldwide pellagra epidemic was excessive consumption of corn. Corn has low levels of both niacin and tryptophan, and the tiny amounts of niacin that are present are poorly absorbed. Pellagra could never have happened in the Paleolithic era, because lean meats are excellent sources of both niacin and tryptophan. Invariably, whenever we stray from the lean meats, fruits, and vegetables that we are genetically adapted to eat, ill health is the result.
Beriberi, caused by a deficiency of vitamin B1 (thiamin), ultiately causes paralysis of the leg muscles. This disease was virtually unknown until the introduction of polished rice in the late 1800s. In parts of Japan and Southeast Asia, where rice was the staple food, beriberi became epidemic as people replaced their traditional brown rice with white rice. Eventually, scientists discovered that removing the thiamin-containing bran during the polishing process was largely responsible for this disease. Beriberi has been mostly eliminated with the introduction of “enriched” rice, to which vitamin B1 is added. However, the message should be clear: If we have to add 1 a vitamin to a food to prevent it from causing ill health and disease, we shouldn’t be eating it in the first place.
Vitamin B Deficiency and Heart Disease
In North America, we enrich our refined cereal grains with vitamin B1 and niacin—which means you will never have to worry about pellagra or beriberi. But it doesn’t mean that these foods are good for you. Far from it. Within the past twenty years, a major risk factor for heart disease has surfaced. It has been found that low dietary intakes of three B vitamins—B , B12, and folate—increase your blood level of an amino acid called homocysteine. A high blood level of homocysteine, in turn, increases your risk of heart disease. Whole-grain cereals have no vitamin B12, their vitamin B is poorly absorbed, and they are at best a meager source of folate. So excessive consumption of whole-grain cereals instead of lean meats, fruits, and vegetables is a formula for disaster for your heart. Again, lean meats are rich sources of vitamins B and B , and fresh fruits and vegetables are our best food sources of folate. By eating the foods nature intended, you will never have to worry about your B vitamin status, homocysteine level, and heart disease.
Folate Deficiency
Since most Americans don’t eat enough fresh fruits and vegetables, our dietary intake of folate is often marginal or low. Folate not only protects us from heart disease, it reduces our risk of colon cancer. Taken by pregnant women, it prevents spina bifida. Because of these healthful effects, the U.S. government now enriches our refined cereal grains with folic acid (a form of folate). So, somewhat paradoxically, you can now eat white bread, doughnuts, and cookies to increase your folic acid intake—but when you eat whole grains, you won’t get this benefit.
The bottom line is that grains are an inferior food. No matter how you slice your bread (whole or refined), grains are not good for you. Even when they’re artificially pumped full of vitamins and minerals, they cannot measure up to lean meats, fruits, and vegetables.
Minerals
On paper, whole grains appear to be a fairly good source of many important minerals, such as iron, zinc, copper, and calcium. Actually, cereals are lousy sources of these nutritionally important minerals.
Iron
Remember the antinutrients that block our absorption of B vitamins? Other antinutrients, called “phytates,” chemically bind iron, zinc, copper, and calcium within grains and block their absorption during digestion. Phytates do their job so well that the worldwide epidemic of iron-deficiency anemia—which affects 1.2 billion people—is universally attributed to the poor availability of iron in cereal- and legume-based diets. Iron-deficiency anemia weakens you and hinders your ability to work; it also makes you more susceptible to infection and more likely to develop a severe infection. It increases a mother’s risk of dying during childbirth. It can permanently impair a child’s learning ability. Iron-deficiency anemia—like the other deficiency diseases caused by agriculture’s new foods—would not have been possible with Paleo diets. Lean meats and animal foods are rich sources of iron. More important, the type of iron found in lean meats and animal foods is easily assimilated by the body.
Zinc
Zinc deficiency is another disaster caused by whole-grain cereals. In much of the Middle East, a whole-wheat flatbread called tanok contributes more than half of the total daily calories. Studies done by Dr. John Reinhold and colleagues have shown that tanok causes a zinc deficiency that stunts growth and delays puberty in children. We need zinc to help us fight infection and colds, to sustain our strength, and to enable us to work. Once again, lean meats are excellent sources of zinc. In fact, the “bioavailability” (the amount you receive of a particular nutrient) of zinc from meat is four times greater than from grains.
Calcium
Most American women, and many men, have gotten the message about calcium: insufficient dietary calcium can eventually lead to bone loss and osteoporosis. Few realize that cereal grains and legumes are a catastrophe for your bone health. As with iron and zinc, the little calcium that’s present in whole grains is bound to phytates—which means that most of it never gets absorbed by the body. Cereals also contain high levels of phosphorus. We know that an unfavorable calcium-to-phosphorus ratio can speed up bone loss. Also, cereals produce a net acid load to the kidneys—and this, too, increases calcium loss in the urine.
Whole grains are even known to disrupt vitamin D metabolism in the body. Vitamin D increases calcium absorption and prevents rickets, a disease that causes bone deformities. In fact, scientists who want to study rickets in laboratory animals know exactly how to produce it—by feeding the animals whole grains. In many of the world’s undeveloped countries, where whole grains and legumes are the main sources of calories, rickets, osteoporosis, and other bone-mineral diseases are common.
From the fossil record, we know that these same bone-mineral problems were also common among the first farmers. Not surprisingly, the hunter-gatherers who came before them didn’t have these diseases. Hunter-gatherers never drank milk. They did not have bone-mineral problems because they ate lots of fruits and vegetables—which gave them enough calcium to build strong bones. Fruits and veggies also gave them an abundant source of alkaline base that prevented excessive losses of calcium in the urine. When you adopt the Paleo Diet, you won’t have to worry about your calcium intake. You’ll get all you need from the fruits and vegetables. But more important, you’ll be in calcium balance. You will be taking in more calcium than you lose, and this is essential for bone health.
By restoring lean meats, fruits, and veggies to your diet and eliminating agriculture’s new foods, you will lose weight, feel better, and reduce your risk of developing the diseases of civilization that plague us all.
PART TWO
Losing Weight and Preventing and Healing Diseases
4
Losing Weight the Paleo Diet Way
Here are four reasons why you should make lean protein a major part of your diet:
• It can’t be overeaten.
• It raises your metabolism, causing you to burn more calories.
• It satisfies your appetite, causing you to feel less hungry between meals.
• It improves insulin sensitivity.
Determining Whether You Need to Lose Weight
How do you know if you’re overweight? Scientists have devised a simple measure based on your height and weight that allows you to know exactly how much extra weight you may be toting. This measure system is called the “body mass index” (BMI), and here are the categories:
| BMI | Classification |
|---|---|
| Below 18.5 | Underweight |
| 18.5-24.9 | Normal |
| 25.0-29.9 | Overweight |
| Above 30.0 | Obesity |
The BMI is easy to calculate. It is simply your weight in kilograms (kg) divided by your height in meters (m) squared. You can calculate your weight in kilograms by dividing your weight in pounds by 2.2. You can change your height to meters by multiplying your height in inches by 0.0254. So a 5-foot, 4-inch (64 inches) tall woman who weighs 154 pounds would weigh 70 kilograms (154 / 2.2 = 70 kg), and her height in meters would be 1.63 meters (64 × 0.0254 = 1.63 m). Her height in square meters would be 2.66 (1.63 × 1.63 = 2.66). Her BMI would be 26.3 (70 / 2.66 = 26.3). This would put her in the overweight category. If your BMI is greater than 27, this may be a sign that you are insulin resistant and have (or are at high risk of developing) one or more of the diseases of metabolic syndrome.
A Doctor Loses 30 Pounds: Ben’s Story
Here is what Dr. Ben Balzer, a general family physician from Sydney, Australia, has to say about the Paleo Diet:
In April this year, I reached the end of my tether with my weight. I’d tipped the scales at 222 lbs. My weight for my height should be under 172 pounds. In fact, I’d been too frightened to get on the scales for some weeks, as I knew what they would tell me. I’m sure I hit 225 pounds during this time. I’d been following the standard dietary advice of low-fat dieting reasonably well for seven years. Although it worked well at first, it stopped, and my weight had gradually increased.
As a doctor, I knew exactly what I was in for. I have a strong family history of diabetes, hypertension, stroke. I was 37 years old. Medically, I knew it was inevitable that I would be affected if I didn’t act. I was feeling tired, bloated, and sluggish. It seemed harder to get through each day. I tried to exercise but had trouble finding the time and could swim only 500 meters with difficulty. My feet were also hurting badly. I had had heel pain syndrome (heel spur) for two and a half years, despite cortisone shots and physical therapy. I had headaches at least five days a week.
Fortunately, 10 years earlier I’d heard a noted Australian professor of medicine mention the Paleolithic diet. That sounds like a logical idea, I thought, and filed it away for future reference; there was no Internet then. In my time of need, I searched the Internet for Paleolithic diet and immediately found Don Wiss’s www.Paleofood.com site. Also, a local dietitian recommended a scientific paper by Eaton, Eaton, and Konner, and I was off.
The first thing that I noticed on the diet was a feeling of a surge in my vitality. Within two weeks, my heel pain syndrome disappeared—a totally unexpected effect. My headaches soon reduced to once each two weeks and after eight months are down to once each 6 weeks or so and very mild at that—another unexpected effect.
The weight fell off very quickly—15 pounds in the first month, and now 29 pounds altogether. If that wasn’t enough, I’ve had an increase in my muscle bulk, despite having little chance to exercise. The end result was that my trousers were almost falling off me, but my shirts were getting tight across the shoulders. The effect on my fitness was immediate. The first time I went swimming on the diet, I clocked up 1,000 meters and was hardly puffing afterward. I can run around better than I can ever remember.
My mental clarity has improved and is sharper than it has ever been before in my life. Everyone who knows me tells me how well I look. Interestingly, when I socialize, I’ll often break the diet to be sociable. If I eat bread twice on the one weekend, I’ll always get up on the Monday morning with sore heels again.
Since then, I’ve studied the diet intensively. I am totally convinced [that] far more illnesses than [were] previously suspected are related to factors in the modern diet. In addition to the usual illnesses listed as dietary (hypertension, diabetes, hypercholesterolemia, cardiovascular disease, stroke), we can add many forms of arthritis, throat infection, peptic ulcer, acne, and many others.
I plan to stay on the Paleolithic diet (as well as one can in this modern age) for the rest of my life. I think it’s obvious from the above that I would be silly if I didn’t!
A lean and healthy body is your birthright. The Paleo Diet is not a quick-fix solution. It is not a temporary, gimmicky diet. It’s a way of eating that will gradually normalize your body weight to its ideal level and keep the pounds off permanently.
There’s one very simple concept that you must understand when it comes to losing weight—the First Law of Thermodynamics, which states that energy is neither created nor destroyed. This means that the energy—calories—you put into your body must equal the energy you expend. Otherwise, you’ll either gain or lose weight. If you eat more calories than you burn off, you’ll gain weight. If you burn more than you take in, you’ll lose weight.
Why Protein Helps Burn Calories
When it comes to human metabolism, this basic law of physics is a bit more complicated: All calories are not created equal. Protein is different from carbohydrates and fats.
How do you burn calories? Some you burn at a very low level all the time as part of your “resting metabolism”—for basic, unconscious functions such as beating of the heart, breathing, and digestion. You burn more calories when you move and still more when you exercise.
The common wisdom is that there are only two ways to burn more calories than you eat: Eat less or move around—exercise—more.
But there’s another way to burn calories—a subtle process that can work wonders over weeks and months to create a substantial, long-term caloric deficit. Best of all, you don’t even have to get out of bed to reap the benefits. This amazing phenomenon is called the “thermic effect,” and the key to making it work is protein.
This is how it works: During the digestive process, your body breaks down food into its basic components—carbohydrates, fats, and proteins—and turns them into energy it can use. There’s a trade-off: To get the energy from the food, the body must spend some of its own energy. There’s a scientific name for this use of energy to digest and metabolize food—“dietary-induced thermogenesis” (DIT). Carbohydrates and fats generate about the same low DIT. Protein’s DIT is huge in comparison—more than two and a half to three times greater. So, in order for the body to obtain energy from dietary protein, it must give up almost three times more energy than it needs for either fat or carbohydrates.
What this means is that protein boosts your metabolism and causes you to lose weight more rapidly than the same caloric amounts of fat or carbohydrates. A study carried out at the Dunn Clinical Nutrition Center in Cambridge, England, by Dr. M. J. Dauncey and colleagues showed that during a twenty-four-hour period, a high-protein diet increased total energy expenditures by 12 percent (220 calories) compared to a calorically matched high-carbohydrate diet.
Over six months—with absolutely no increase in exercise or decrease in caloric intake—a high-protein diet could cause you to lose 10 to 15 pounds. Over those same six months—with increased exercise and a somewhat decreased caloric intake—a high-protein diet could cause you to lose 30 to 75 pounds!
Think about it. You don’t have to cut calories one bit. You can lose 20 to 30 pounds in a year with utterly no change in the quantity of food you eat or even any change in your exercise habits. Or a lot more than that if you exercise more or eat less. That’s just what happened with Dean.
Losing 75 Pounds in Six Months: Dean’s Story
In April 1999, Dateline NBC ran a feature story of my research into Paleo diets and interviewed Dean Stankovic, age thirty-two. Dean’s weight had fluctuated wildly on his 6-foot, 3-inch frame since his graduation from high school, at one point reaching a high of 280 pounds. Before he adopted the Paleo Diet, Dean had tried dozens of diets. Although Dean was very determined to lose weight, he just couldn’t seem to stick to traditional low-calorie diets like the one created by Weight Watchers. They made him feel hungry all the time. Worse, on all of these diets, his weight dropped at first—but the longer he stayed with them, the slower the weight loss became. This is because the body’s metabolic rate slows down to conserve body stores during periods of starvation—which is exactly what low-calorie diets are. Eventually, after a few months of starvation with these low-calorie diets, no matter how strong his willpower and resolve, Dean always went back to his normal way of eating—basically, the standard American diet.
Dean had tried the high-fat, low-carbohydrate diets advocated by Dr. Atkins and others. He lost weight with these diets but complained of a low energy level, lethargy, and constant fatigue. He also believed that all of those fatty, salty, bacon-and-egg breakfasts, greasy sausages and salami, and fatty cheeses just couldn’t be good for his body. And these diets became boring. It was fun at first to trade in one evil (sweets and starches) for another (fats). But after a while he craved apples, peaches, and strawberries—any fresh fruit. Dean just couldn’t imagine going through the rest of his life eating only tiny amounts of fruits and veggies. This was not a lifelong way of eating! Life was not worth living when all he had to look forward to was fatty meats and cheeses, cream, and butter. Dean’s mind and body rebelled, and he found himself once again down in the dumps—back to his old diet and back to his old weight.
In the fall of 1998, Dean met a young woman who had been eating in the Paleo manner for a number of years. She gave Dean some of my writings and dietary recommendations. After a few false starts, Dean began the Paleo Diet in earnest and started to lose weight steadily. By the spring of 1999, after six months on the Paleo Diet, he had lost 70 pounds and was down to a svelte 185 pounds. Dean’s opening remark on Dateline NBC—“It is a very satisfying diet; I don’t feel hungry”—is a characteristic comment, echoed by almost everyone who gives this way of eating a try. Two years later, Dean has kept the weight off and sums up his feelings this way: “I consider it more than just a diet; it’s more of a lifestyle. I think it is one of the greatest diets ever created. I have no plans to go back to my old ways.”
Protein Satisfies Your Appetite
Protein’s high DIT is not the only reason you lose weight when you start eating more lean animal protein. Protein also affects your appetite. Protein satisfies hunger far more effectively than either carbohydrate or fat. Dr. Marisa Porrini’s research group at the University of Milan in Italy has found that high-protein meals are much more effective than high-fat meals in satisfying the appetite.
High-protein meats also do a much better job of reducing hunger between meals than do high-carbohydrate vegetarian meals. Dr. Britta Barkeling and colleagues at the Karolinska Hospital in Stockholm served twenty healthy women lunches of identical caloric value; the women ate either a high-protein meat casserole or a high-carbohydrate vegetarian casserole. The researchers then measured how much food the women ate at dinner. The women who had eaten the meat casserole ate 12 percent fewer calories during their evening meal. As this study illustrates, protein’s powerful capacity to satisfy hunger not only influences how much you eat at the very next meal but also how much you’ll eat all day long.
At the Rowett Research Institute in Great Britain, Dr. R. James Stubbs and colleagues fed six men a high-protein, high-fat, or high-carbohydrate meal at breakfast and then monitored their feeling of hunger for the next twenty-four hours. The high-protein breakfast suppressed hunger much more effectively than the other two breakfast meals did—even more than the high-fat breakfast. These experiments and many others have convincingly shown that if you want to feel less hungry and stay less hungry, lean animal protein is your best line of attack.
Theoretically, any leftover calories—whether they’re from protein, carbohydrates, or fats—would count as a calorie “surplus” and result in weight gain. In reality, the body doesn’t work that way. It is very difficult and inefficient for the body’s metabolic machinery to store excess protein calories as fat. The surplus almost always comes from extra fats or carbohydrates—and these are the foods that most frequently make you fat.
It is impossible to overeat pure protein. In fact, you couldn’t gain weight just on lean, low-fat protein if your life depended on it. The body has clear limits, determined by the liver’s inability to handle excess dietary nitrogen (released when the body breaks down protein). For most people, this limit is about 35 percent of your normal daily caloric intake. If you exceed this limit for a prolonged stretch of time, your body will protest—with nausea, diarrhea, abrupt weight loss, and other symptoms of protein toxicity.
But remember, protein is your best ally in waging the battle of the bulge—and when it is accompanied by plenty of fruits and veggies and good fats and oils, you will never have to worry about getting too much protein. Now let’s take a look at the next major reason why the Paleo Diet causes you to lose weight without nagging hunger.
Promoting Weight Loss by Improving Your Insulin Sensitivity
The Paleo Diet promotes weight loss not only because of its high protein level that simultaneously revs up your metabolism and reduces appetite, but also because it improves your insulin metabolism.
Insulin resistance is a serious problem, and most people who are overweight have it. In insulin resistance, the pancreas (the gland that makes insulin) must make extra insulin to clear blood sugar—glucose—from the bloodstream. There’s a bit of a “chicken and egg” argument as to which event happens first. Does being overweight cause insulin resistance or vice versa? Scientists aren’t entirely sure. However, once insulin resistance starts, it prompts a domino effect of metabolic changes that encourage weight gain. The body frequently stores more fat, for one thing. For another, excessive insulin in the bloodstream can cause low blood sugar (a condition called “hypoglycemia”). The body’s response to low blood sugar is: “Hey—we’re in trouble. We’d better eat something fast!” Low blood sugar stimulates the appetite, and this can be deceptive: it causes you to feel hungry even if you’ve just eaten.
The good news is that what you choose to eat—protein, fats, or carbohydrates—can influence the progression of insulin resistance. Dr. Gerald Reaven’s research at Stanford University has shown that low-fat, high-carbohydrate foods hinder insulin metabolism. But high-protein diets are known to improve insulin metabolism. Dr. P. M. Piatti and colleagues at the University of Milan put twenty-five overweight women on one of two diets. The first contained 45 percent protein, 35 percent carbohydrates, and 20 percent fat. The second contained 60 percent carbohydrates, 20 percent protein, and 20 percent fat. After twenty-one days the women on the high-protein diet had significantly improved insulin metabolism, but those on the high-carbohydrate diet actually got worse.
With all these benefits, it seems obvious that lean protein should be the starting point for all weight-loss diets. Prior to 2002, only three clinical trials of high-protein diets had been conducted. All three investigations found high-protein diets to be excellent—far better than low-fat, high-carbohydrate diets—at promoting weight loss.
Dr. Arne Astrup’s nutritional research group at the Royal Veterinary and Agricultural University in Copenhagen, Denmark, studied weight loss in sixty-five people placed on either high-protein or high-carbohydrate, reduced-calorie diets. After six months, those in the high-protein group had lost an average of 19.6 pounds—and 35 percent of the participants in this group had lost more than 22 pounds. The people in the high-carbohydrate group, however, lost only an average of 11.2 pounds; only 9 percent of the people in this group lost 22 pounds.
Dr. Hwalla Baba and colleagues at the American University of Beirut demonstrated almost identical results when they put thirteen overweight men on high- and low-protein, reduced-calorie diets. After only a month the average weight loss for men on the high-protein diet was 18.3 pounds compared to only 13.2 pounds for the high-carbohydrate group.
Dr. Donald Layman, a professor of nutrition at the University of Illinois, studied twenty-four overweight women who for ten weeks were on 1,700-calorie-a-day diets. Half of the women followed the current USDA Food Pyramid guidelines recommending a diet of 55 percent carbohydrate, 15 percent protein (68 grams per day), and 30 percent fat. The other half had a diet of 40 percent carbohydrate, 30 percent protein (125 grams a day), and 30 percent fat. The average weight loss for both groups was about 16 pounds, but the high-protein group lost 12.3 pounds of body fat and just 1.7 pounds of muscle compared to 10.4 pounds of body fat and 3 pounds of muscle for the Food Pyramid group. Interestingly, the study also found that women on the higher-protein diet had higher levels of thyroid hormone, which indicates that they had a faster metabolic rate. The higher-protein diet also resulted in a noticeable drop in triglyceride levels and a slight increase in the good HDL cholesterol.
In the eight years since I wrote the first edition of this book, numerous human clinical trials have conclusively demonstrated the superiority of high-protein diets in producing weight loss and benefiting overall health.
What You Can Expect to Lose on the Paleo Diet
When you start the Paleo Diet, you’ll probably realize—perhaps with a shock—just how much of your diet has been built around cereal grains, legumes, dairy products, and processed foods. Even most vegetarians must eat large amounts of grains and legumes to make their plant-based diets work, because it’s very difficult to get enough calories just from eating fruits and vegetables. Except for the 2,000 or fewer hunter-gatherers still remaining on the planet, none of the world’s people obtain their daily sustenance just from fruits, vegetables, lean meats, and seafood. When you start the Paleo Diet, you may choose to count yourself among the dietary elite—knowing that about 6 billion people on the planet aren’t eating this way. And yet just 10,000 years ago—a mere drop in the bucket of geological time—there wasn’t a single person who did not follow the Paleo Diet.
Everything I’m telling you about how the Paleo Diet will affect your body weight, health, and well-being is based on scientifically validated information that has been published in high-quality, peer-reviewed scientific and medical journals.
If you’re overweight, the Paleo Diet will normalize your weight. This means that you will steadily lose pounds, as long as you continue to follow the diet, until your weight approaches its ideal. Most people experience rapid weight loss within the first three to five days. This is mainly water loss, and it stabilizes fairly quickly. After that, how much weight you lose will depend on two things—how overweight you are to begin with and how many total “deficit” calories you accumulate. After the initial water loss, it takes a deficit of 3,500 calories to lose a pound of fat. It is not unusual for people who are obese (medically, this means people who have a body mass index (BMI) of greater than 30) to lose between 10 and 15 pounds each month.
Sharing Success Stories
Many people, in many countries, have adopted Paleo Diets to improve their health and to lose weight. You can read about their stories and triumphs at my Web address:www.thepaleodiet.com/success_stories/. You may also want to visit my blog (http://thepaleodiet.blogspot.com/), where Paleo dieters share experiences, offer support, and talk to one another about daily challenges, dietary issues, and health issues concerning the Paleo Diet lifestyle.
Losing 45 Pounds and Healing Crohn’s Disease: Sally’s Story
Sally is a manager for a large telecommunications company in Illinois. Her reasons for adopting the diet were primarily health-related. However, she also benefited from the diet’s remarkable ability to normalize excess body weight.
In the fall of 1986, I became severely ill. It started with several months of unshakable diarrhea, followed by gut-wrenching pain. It became so bad that I could not keep any food down. I lost 70 pounds in three months, and I was only thirteen years old. I barely made it through my classes at school, and then I’d go home and sleep. My best friends no longer came over, my mother was sick with worry, and my father thought I was anorexic. When my symptoms began, doctors could not find anything wrong except for “perhaps some allergies.” And when my symptoms grew worse, I was shuffled back and forth between doctors and specialists, each speculating on tumors, liver disease, and other life-threatening conditions. I was subjected to every conceivable test: MRI [magnetic resonance imaging], ultrasounds, upper/lower GIs [gastrointestinal studies], blood tests, stool samples, urine tests, X-rays, throat scopes, and others. It took almost nine months to reach the diagnosis of Crohn’s disease.
I was given large doses of prednisone [a steroid drug] and scheduled to have a portion of my bowels surgically removed if I didn’t respond to the medication. Within days of [taking] the steroids, I felt much better. Within weeks I was outside mowing the lawn and eating more in a day than I had eaten previously in a month. At the time, my medications were a miracle.
For most of my life I have been cycling between steroids, anti-inflammatory drugs, and immune suppressors. All of these medications alleviated the symptoms, but none treated the underlying disease. My overall health slowly deteriorated. I was severely depressed and powerless to stop my life from slowly wasting away. When questioning doctors, I was given unhelpful speculations: “Crohn’s disease is genetic; it runs in families. It may be caused by a virus or bacterium, it is not contagious, and we do not know what causes this disease.” Every specialist I saw agreed that Crohn’s is not diet-related.
By the time I graduated from college, I became determined to do something. I enrolled in graduate school to learn more about scientific research so that one day I might help find a cure. While in graduate school, I discovered literature about diet-related treatments for a whole range of degenerative illnesses, including Crohn’s disease. All of the diets used to treat Crohn’s disease are very similar to a Paleolithic diet. It became my turn to become responsible for my own health, and I started eating a strict Paleolithic diet. The results were amazing. Within a month I was 90 percent symptom-free. I felt like I had been reborn.
I have been on the diet for almost two years now. I’ve lost 45 pounds and am near my optimal weight. I am 100 percent symptom-free of Crohn’s disease and haven’t seen a doctor in over a year. I’ve started running 4 miles a day, something that I could never have achieved before. This diet is anything but a quick fix. It takes time to heal the wounds of disease and medication. However, to anyone looking for control over their disease or their weight, I urge them to give it a try. It might just save your life as it saved mine.
Vegetarian Isn’t Better: Ann’s Story
After high school graduation, Ann Woods left her home for a summer waitressing job in Alaska. She had a great time living away from her parents and partying with her friends, but the continual stream of on-the-job glazed doughnuts, burgers, and fries, along with evening treats of M&Ms and Baskin-Robbins ice cream, eventually caused her waistline to balloon. When she came back home to start college in the fall, her weight had jumped from 110 to 135 pounds. She was still not fat but was much heavier than she had ever been. After a bit of friendly razzing from her boyfriend, she managed to lose all the weight by adopting a near-vegetarian diet that emphasized grains, potatoes, lots of starch, and very little fat or meat. At the time, this seemed a prudent thing to do. After all, this type of diet was supposed to be the healthiest.
Ann also began to jog, an activity that soon blossomed into a lifetime interest in running and fitness. Her weight stabilized, and she became lean and fit. Her blood pressure and cholesterol levels were low, but after almost seven years of running, she noticed that her energy began to wane. She was continually tired and wanted nothing more than to sleep after long runs. Ann recovered from one running-related injury only to find herself injured again within weeks. Dark circles formed underneath her eyes, and she caught colds more frequently than ever. She finally discovered that she had iron-deficiency anemia caused by her “healthful” staples of oatmeal, brown rice, beans, pasta, and low-fat yogurt.
Ann discovered the Paleo dietary principles in The Complete Book of Alternative Nutrition, which featured my research. It made a lot of sense to her, and she gave it a try. She replaced her former vegetarian staples with lean meat, chicken, and seafood at almost every meal. Fruits and veggies were no problem—she had eaten a lot of these before her switch. Within a week, Ann noticed that her energy level was stable throughout the day. She no longer had late-afternoon slumps. Her stamina increased, and she was less tired after her runs. After three months on the diet she dropped 5 additional pounds to her present weight of 106, her stomach was now totally flat, and her muscle tone and strength were better than ever. On top of this, her iron-deficiency anemia disappeared, and the dark circles underneath her eyes vanished.
A Nutritionist Loses 30 Pounds: Melissa’s Story
Melissa Diane Smith, a nutritionist and a health journalist based in Tucson, Arizona, is the coauthor of Syndrome X: The Complete Nutritional Program to Prevent and Reverse Insulin Resistance and is the author of Going Against the Grain: How Reducing and Avoiding Grains Can Revitalize Your Health. This is her story:
In 1986, I began a job at a health spa and naturally emphasized foods in my diet that I thought were healthy—bagels, muffins, chicken-pasta dishes, chicken-rice dishes, and turkey sandwiches. This type of diet was disastrous for me. During the next year and a half, I gained 30 pounds and developed a whole host of health problems, including a very severe flulike illness that I could not shake, which was much later diagnosed as chronic fatigue syndrome.
In an effort to regain my health, I tried several popular and recommended vegetarian, macrobiotic, and high-carbohydrate diets but grew weaker and sicker on each one. I continued to experiment and eventually stumbled upon the diet that turned my health around. It was based on lean animal protein and lots of nonstarchy vegetables and was entirely free of wheat or other gluten grains, dairy, legumes, processed fats, and sugar.
When I ate this way, the difference in my health was dramatic. I quickly felt more energetic, mentally focused, and less sick. I also began to effortlessly lose the excess weight I had put on. Within about six months, I lost all the weight I had gained and was back to 115 pounds—size 6 for me. It was hard to turn against established nutritional wisdom, but I kept eating this way and totally recovered from chronic fatigue syndrome. The diet was the answer to regaining my health, and it’s kept me trim and healthy ever since.
Losing Weight the Right Way
With the Paleo Diet, weight loss is a continuous, deliberate decline that occurs gradually, over a period of a few to many months. There are no quick fixes here—but then again, quick fixes don’t work. Most people who try such diets are unable to stick with them over the long haul.
You won’t feel hungry on this diet. Protein is a great satisfier. The low-carbohydrate content of the diet combined with its low glycemic load will normalize your insulin and blood sugar levels and will also help keep you from overeating. The weight that you will lose will stay off if you just stick to the diet—all the lean meats, fish, seafood, fresh fruits, and vegetables (except starchy vegetables) you can eat.
Isn’t it time to get started and give your body what it is genetically programmed to eat?
The Paleo Diet is a lifelong way of eating that will normalize weight in everyone
5
Metabolic Syndrome: Diseases of Civilization
It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Metabolic syndrome diseases—the diseases of insulin resistance—are the main health problems of Western countries, affecting as many as half of all adults and children. There are four major metabolic syndrome diseases:
• Type 2 diabetes
• High blood pressure
• Heart disease
• Dyslipidemia (low HDL cholesterol, elevated triglycerides, and high small-dense LDL cholesterol)
Gout and blood-clotting abnormalities are usually grouped with metabolic syndrome diseases, too, and so is obesity.
When people become insulin-resistant, the pancreas must secrete more insulin than normal to clear sugar (glucose) from the bloodstream. This creates a state in which the blood insulin level is elevated all the time.
Insulin is a major hormone that affects nearly every cell in the body. A chronically high blood-insulin level is thought to be the underlying culprit in all diseases of metabolic syndrome. But these are all complicated diseases, with many contributory factors.
Some scientists believe that high-saturated-fat diets make insulin metabolism less efficient. Others, including Dr. Gerald Reaven at Stanford University, believe that high-carbohydrate diets—both low- and high-glycemic foods—are to blame. Still others single out high-glycemic carbohydrates. However, the obvious has been ignored: Most people who develop obesity and diseases of insulin resistance do it with mixtures of high-fat and high-glycemic carbohydrates. Some examples of these bad food combinations: Baked potato and sour cream. Bread with butter. Eggs with toast and hash browns. Pizza with cheese. Ice cream, candies, cookies, chips. These and all of the other processed foods we eat contain both a high-fat component and high-glycemic carbohydrates.
With the Paleo Diet, it doesn’t matter which of these kinds of foods ultimately cause insulin resistance—because these unnatural food combinations aren’t part of the picture (except as Open Meal treats). Your meals won’t suffer—in fact, they’ll be richer, more varied, and more delicious than ever. Instead of fatty gourmet ice cream, treat yourself to a bowl of fresh blueberries or half a cantaloupe filled with diced strawberries and walnuts. Instead of fish sticks, how about peel-and-eat shrimp or a lean grilled steak? We’ll get to specific recipes and meal plans later in the book.
Healing Metabolic Syndrome: Jack’s Story
Jack Challem, known worldwide as the “Nutrition Reporter,” is a leading health journalist with more than twenty-five years of experience reporting on nutrition research. He is a contributing editor for Let’s Live and Natural Health magazines and the coauthor of a number of popular nutrition books.
When I started writing my book Syndrome X: The Complete Nutritional Program to Prevent and Reverse Insulin Resistance, I was in denial about having the early stages of Syndrome X. I was 48 years old, weighed 170 pounds, had a 38-inch waist, and a fasting glucose of 111 mg/dL. I should have known better. I made a point of getting back to the very diet I advocate in my book,Syndrome X. I also stopped eating all pasta and virtually all bread. Basically, I was following a Paleo Diet with lean meats and a lot of veggies.
In three months I lost 20 pounds and 4 inches from my waist. My fasting blood sugar was 85 mg/dL. My blood cholesterol and triglyceride values also improved. It has been extremely easy to maintain these improvements. Eating the Paleo Diet is simple and tasty.
How Insulin Resistance Increases Your Risk of Heart Disease
High-glycemic carbohydrates cause an increase in your blood triglycerides and a decrease in your good HDL cholesterol. They also cause an increase in a special type of cholesterol in your bloodstream called “small-dense LDL cholesterol.” All of these changes in blood chemistry severely increase your risk of death from heart disease.
Small-Dense LDL Cholesterol
In recent years, small-dense LDL cholesterol has emerged as one of the most potent risks for atherosclerosis, the artery-clogging process. The study of atherosclerosis has become increasingly specific. First, we had cholesterol, then HDL and LDL (good and bad) cholesterol, and now a particularly bad kind of LDL cholesterol whose small, dense particles are ideal for artery blockage.
Even if you have normal total and LDL blood cholesterol levels, you still may be at risk for developing heart disease if your small-dense LDL cholesterol level is elevated.
Although low-fat, high-carbohydrate diets may reduce total and LDL cholesterol, they are useless in lowering small-dense LDL cholesterol. In fact, they make it worse. Dr. Darlene Dreon and colleagues at the University of California-Berkeley have shown repeatedly that high-carbohydrate diets increase small-dense LDL cholesterol particles in men, women, and children. High-glycemic foods increase our blood triglycerides, which make small-dense LDL cholesterol. When we lower triglycerides—by cutting out the starch and the high-glycemic carbohydrates—we automatically lower our small-dense LDL cholesterol.
The Keys to Greater Insulin Sensitivity
The Paleo Diet improves insulin sensitivity in many ways. First, because it’s humanity’s original low-glycemic-carbohydrate, low-sugar diet, you won’t have to worry about triglycerides, HDL cholesterol, or small-dense LDL cholesterol. All of these blood values will rapidly normalize as your insulin level becomes reduced and stabilized.
The Paleo Diet’s high fiber, high protein, and omega 3 fat content all improve insulin sensitivity as well. Unlike starchy carbohydrates, protein causes only small changes in your blood levels of glucose and insulin. By itself, a single meal of pure fat doesn’t change these blood levels, either. The omega 3 fats that are integral to the Paleo Diet actually improve insulin metabolism and cause a rapid drop in blood triglycerides. The high fiber from nonstarchy vegetables and fruits found in the Paleo Diet slows the passage of carbohydrates through your intestines; this slows blood sugar rises and ultimately also improves insulin sensitivity.
Other Diseases Related to Insulin Resistance
It’s only recently that scientists have begun expanding the scope of insulin resistance. In research worldwide, this condition is being linked to many other chronic diseases and health problems. Scientists are exploring the role of insulin resistance in certain types of cancer, nearsightedness, polycystic ovary syndrome, and even acne—although in all of these, as in heart disease, many causative factors are believed to be involved. It is premature to establish a direct cause-and-effect relationship. But if these diseases ultimately do turn out to have insulin resistance as their underlying cause, you’ll be protected—because the Paleo Diet contains all of the dietary elements known to stop insulin resistance.
Breast, Prostate, and Colon Cancers and Insulin Resistance
Over the last five years, scientists have discovered through a chain reaction of metabolic events that elevated levels of insulin in the bloodstream increase blood levels of a hormone called “insulinlike growth factor one” (IGF-1) and decrease another hormone called “insulinlike growth factor binding protein three” (IGFBP-3). The decrease in IGFBP-3 causes tissues to be less sensitive to one of the body’s natural chemical signals (retinoic acid) that normally limits tissue growth. In addition, IGF-1, a potent hormone in all tissues, is a major regulator of growth: Increased levels of IGF-1 encourage growth, and reduced levels slow growth. Children who are below normal height have low levels of IGF-1. When IGF-1 is injected into these children, they immediately start to grow taller. As you might expect, tall children have higher levels of IGF-1. Studies of growing children by Dr. William Wong and colleagues at the Children’s Nutrition Research Center in Houston found that girls who were taller and heavier and who matured earlier had higher blood levels of both insulin and IGF-1 and lower levels of IGFBP-3. Diets that cause insulin resistance—particularly, high-glycemic-carbohydrate diets—increase IGF-1 levels, lower IGFBP-3 levels, and decrease tissue sensitivity to retinoic acid. These hormonal changes, in turn, accelerate growth in developing children.
What does this have to do with adult health? It’s been found that IGF-1 is a powerful stimulator of cell division—growth—in all cells during all phases of life. In fact, scientists suspect that IGF-1 may be one of the primary promoters of all unregulated and tissue growth in the body. But IGFBP-3 prevents unregulated cell growth by causing cancer cells to die naturally through a process called “apoptosis.” Over the last decade, numerous scientific papers have shown a strong association between elevated levels of IGF-1, lowered levels of IGFBP-3, and breast cancer in premenopausal women, prostate cancer in men, and colorectal cancer in all adults. In animal models of many types of cancer, scientists can promote cancer by adding a key ingredient—IGF-1; conversely, adding IGFBP-3 slows cancer. Synthetic derivatives of the body’s natural retinoic acid powerfully inhibit the cancer process in cell cultures. So, the whole chain of hormonal events initiated by elevated blood levels of insulin tends to promote the cancer process.
Two risk factors for breast cancer are early onset of puberty and above-average height. It is entirely possible that the same high insulin levels that elevate IGF-1 and lower IGFBP-3 (in other words, the levels that make children taller and make puberty happen sooner during childhood) also increase susceptibility to cancer during adulthood.
Many women, worried about breast cancer, have adopted vegetarian diets in an attempt to reduce their risk. Unfortunately, it may be that these grain- and starch-based diets actually increase the risk of breast cancer, because they elevate insulin—which, in turn, increases IGF-1 and lowers IGFBP-3. A large epidemiological study of Italian women, led by Dr. Silvia Franceschi, has shown that eating large amounts of pasta and refined bread raises the risk of developing both breast and colorectal cancer.
Most vegetarian diets are based on starchy grains and legumes. Sadly—despite continuing perceptions of these as healthy foods—vegetarian diets don’t reduce the risk of cancer. In the largest-ever study comparing the causes of death in more than 76,000 people, it was decisively shown that there were no differences in death rates from breast, prostate, colorectal, stomach, or lung cancer between vegetarians and meat eaters.
Cancer is a complex process involving many genetic and environmental factors. It is almost certain that no single dietary element is responsible for all cancers. However, with the low-glycemic Paleo Diet, which is also high in lean protein and health-promoting fruits and vegetables, your risk of developing many types of cancer may be very much reduced.
Myopia and Insulin Resistance
Because insulin resistance changes the hormonal profile of the blood to one that facilitates tissue growth, scientists have good reason to suspect that insulin resistance lies at the root of any disease in which abnormal tissue growth occurs. One extremely common such disease is myopia—nearsightedness—which affects an estimated one-third of all Americans. Myopia results from excessive growth of the eyeball. Although the eye looks normal from the outside, inside it’s too long for the eye to focus properly. Myopia typically develops during the childhood growth years and usually stabilizes by the time people reach their early twenties. New evidence that implicates insulin resistance in the childhood development of myopia may be useful in preventing nearsightedness in young children.
Eye doctors generally agree that nearsightedness results from an interaction between excessive reading and your genes. If you spent your youth with your nose in a book and if nearsightedness runs in your family, chances are good that you’re now wearing glasses or contact lenses. Myopia is thought to stem from a slightly blurred image on the back of your eye (the retina) that’s produced as you focus on the written page. This blurred image causes the retina to send out a hormonal signal telling the eyeball to grow longer. Experiments in laboratory animals suggest that the hormonal signal is produced by retinoic acid. Excessive reading slows the retina’s production of retinoic acid, a substance that normally checks or prevents the eyeball from growing too long. Additionally, recent research shows that elevated insulin also directly contributes to the excessive growth of the eyeball. This may mean that if your children’s diet prevents insulin resistance during growth and development, their risk of developing myopia may be lower.
Polycystic Ovary Syndrome
Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) affects 5 to 10 percent of all North American women. Women with PCOS ovulate irregularly or not at all, and their ovaries produce high levels of male hormones such as testosterone. Women with PCOS are prone to obesity, excessive body hair, acne, high blood pressure, and type 2 diabetes. They also have a seven times greater risk of heart disease and heart attack than other women do. Almost 60 percent of all women with PCOS are insulin resistant, and most of these women have elevated levels of IGF-1. Numerous clinical studies have shown that simply changing the diet—eating foods that improve insulin metabolism—can reduce many of the symptoms of PCOS. The Paleo Diet, which normalizes insulin metabolism, can greatly help women with this problem.
Acne
For years, many dermatologists believed that diet had absolutely nothing to do with acne. But very new scientific evidence has linked insulin resistance to acne. Diets loaded with sugar, fructose, and high-glycemic carbohydrates may contribute to this problem, which can be devastating. Between 40 and 50 million American teens and adults have acne.
Some striking information to support the link between acne and diet comes from Dr. Otto Schaefer, who spent his entire professional career in the wilderness of the Canadian Far North, working with Inuit natives who literally were transferred from the Stone Age to the Space Age in a single generation during the 1950s and 1960s. Dr. Schaefer reported that in those Eskimos who ate their traditional foods, acne was absent. Only when they adopted Western foods laced with refined sugars and starches and dairy products did acne appear.
Four things happen when acne develops: First, there’s accelerated growth of the skin surrounding the hair follicle (called “follicular hyperkeratosis”). Second, oil (sebum) production speeds up within the follicle. Third, the cells in the follicle abnormally stick together as they are being shed, thus plugging the follicle. And, finally, the plugged-up follicle gets infected. Until recently, dermatologists didn’t know why the accelerated growth occurred, why these cells became excessively cohesive, or what caused the boost in oil production. But growing evidence suggests that elevated insulin and IGF-1 are directly responsible for the increased follicular skin growth, along with reductions in circulating blood levels of IGFBP-3. Remember that high-glycemic foods raise your blood level of IGF-1 while lowering IGFBP-3. This is why low-glycemic-load, high-protein diets are so effective in eliminating acne. They put the brakes on excessive follicular skin growth.
Besides causing increases in IGF-1 and reductions in IGFBP-3, elevated insulin levels from eating high-glycemic carbohydrates cause a rise in the male hormone testosterone. It is these increases in IGF-1 and testosterone that promote the discharge of oil. This means that insulin resistance caused by high-glycemic diets may be directly responsible for the first three steps in acne development. In the last five years, dietary intervention studies and a series of epidemiological studies from the Harvard School of Public Health have conclusively demonstrated that high-protein, low-glycemic diets like the Paleo Diet improve insulin metabolism and can help prevent acne. It is now safe to say that the Paleo Diet will improve your insulin metabolism—and if you have acne, this lifetime program of healthy eating will help it disappear.
As you can see, the Paleo Diet can be a very effective tool in fighting virtually all the diseases of metabolic syndrome.
6
Food as Medicine: How Paleo Diets Improve Health and Well-Being
We never used to be so sick. The white man’s food is not good for us.
—Malaya Kulujuk, a Baffin Island Eskimo
The Diet-Disease Connection
Many of the chronic illnesses that plague the Western world—the “diseases of civilization”—can be attributed to dietary missteps. Diet and disease are obviously linked. And when we stray from the Seven Keys of the Paleo Diet, which stood firm for 2.5 million years, we not only develop metabolic syndrome diseases, but also increase our susceptibility to a host of other diseases.
How can we know whether a particular food, or the lack of it, in our diet is actually the factor responsible for a particular disease—or the absence of it? If you have a milk allergy or lactose intolerance, the cause and effect of your symptoms are probably painfully clear. But it’s much harder—if not impossible—to foresee whether the pat of margarine (containing trans-fatty acids) you put on your toast yesterday morning will have anything to do with causing a heart attack forty years later.
Scientists and physicians use a variety of research procedures to determine whether diet and disease are linked, including dietary interventions, epidemiological studies, animal experiments, and cultured tissue studies. When the results of all four procedures are in agreement, it is quite likely that a certain food may cause a certain disease. However, in most cases the link between diet and disease is usually not this clear-cut; often, genetic susceptibility to disease further clouds the issue. In many of the diseases that we will be examining, the diet-disease connection has only been partially unraveled. Nonetheless, by adhering to the dietary guidelines of your Paleolithic ancestors, you will reduce your risk of developing these illnesses, and if you are currently suffering from one of these illnesses, your symptoms may improve with the Paleo Diet.
Metabolic Syndrome Diseases
I’ve already talked about the metabolic syndrome diseases (type 2 diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, dyslipidemia, obesity, PCOS, myopia, acne, and breast, prostate, and colon cancers) and how they are linked to elevated levels of insulin in the bloodstream. But all of these diseases also have other known contributing dietary factors. For example, salt is connected to high blood pressure—but so is a lack of fresh fruits and vegetables. Too much omega 6 fat in your diet at the expense of omega 3 fat can also cause your blood pressure to rise. Even a low protein intake has been linked to rising blood pressure.
Breast, prostate, and colon cancers are known to develop more often in people who don’t eat enough fresh fruits and vegetables. Fruits and veggies hit cancer with a one-two punch: they’re excellent sources of antioxidant vitamins and minerals that may impede the cancer process, and they also contain a variety of special substances called “phytochemicals,” nutrients found in foods that are lethal to cancer cells. The study of most phytochemicals is fairly new; scientists are only beginning to understand how they work. But here are a few examples:
• Broccoli contains sulforaphanes, which chase cancer-causing elements out of cells.
• Broccoli is also loaded with cancer-fighting folic acid, vitamin C, beta-carotene, and a substance called “indole-3-carbinol,” which helps improve the body’s estrogens.
• Strawberries, tomatoes, pineapples, and green peppers contain p-coumaric acid and chlorogenic acid, compounds known to be powerful anticancer agents.
• Garlic and onions not only contain substances that will lower your cholesterol but are also rich sources of allylic sulfides, which seem to protect against stomach cancer.
As is the case with high blood pressure, eating too many omega 6 and too few omega 3 fats further increases your risk of developing breast, prostate, and colon cancers.
We may not know precisely how dietary factors cause each and every metabolic syndrome disease, but one thing’s certain: when you adopt the Paleo Diet, you will be putting all known dietary factors on your side to prevent these illnesses.
Cardiovascular Diseases
The number one killer in the United States is cardiovascular disease. A staggering 35 percent of all deaths in this country result from heart attacks, stroke, high blood pressure, and other illnesses of the heart and blood vessels. Cardiovascular disease, like cancer, is a complex illness, and no single dietary element is solely responsible. However, once again, by following the nutritional principles of humanity’s original diet, you will put the odds in your favor of not developing this deadly disease.
Good Fats Help Prevent Cardiovascular Disease
Good fats are what doctors call “cardioprotective.” They protect the heart and the blood vessels from disease. With the Paleo Diet—unlike the average American diet—at least half of your fats are healthful monounsaturated fats. The other half is evenly split between saturated and polyunsaturated fats. There are no synthetic trans fats. And the crucial omega 6 to omega 3 fat ratio is about 2 to 1—which greatly reduces your risk of dying from heart disease.
Monounsaturated Fats
Monounsaturated fats reduce your overall risk of heart disease by lowering your level of total cholesterol—but not your beneficial HDL cholesterol—in the blood. These healthful fats—found in abundance in the Paleo Diet—also help prevent LDL cholesterol from oxidizing (breaking down) and contributing to the artery-clogging process. Monounsaturated fats also may reduce your risk of breast cancer.
Omega 3 Fats
I’ve already talked about the beneficial effects of omega 3 fats on insulin metabolism and how they lower blood triglycerides. Omega 3 fats are also exceptionally potent agents in preventing the irregular heartbeats that can make a heart attack fatal. They help prevent blood clotting and ease tension in clogged arteries as well.
In a landmark dietary intervention study, French physicians Serg Renaud and Michel de Lorgeril evaluated the effect of a diet rich in omega 3 fats in 600 patients who had previously survived a heart attack. In this investigation, known as the Lyon Diet Heart Study, half of the patients were assigned to the American Heart Association reduced-fat diet, in which 30 percent of calories come from fat. The rest followed a 35 percent fat traditional Mediterranean diet that was rich in omega 3 and monounsaturated fats and fruits and vegetables.
The results were striking: compared to the patients who followed the American Heart Association Diet, those who were on the Mediterranean diet had a 76 percent lower risk of dying from another heart attack, a stroke, or another cardiovascular disease. This remarkable protection from heart disease can be yours, too. Like the Mediterranean diet, humankind’s original diet is also high in cardioprotective omega 3 fats, fiber, monounsaturated fats, and the beneficial phytochemicals and antioxidant vitamins that are found in fruits and vegetables.
Diseases of Acid-Base Balance and Excessive Sodium
The average cereal-based, salt-laden, cheese-filled American diet—which is nearly devoid of fresh fruits and vegetables—tilts your body’s acid-base balance in favor of acid. As we discussed earlier, grains, cheeses, meats, and salty foods yield a net acid load to the kidneys, while fruits and vegetables always generate an alkaline load. An overload of acid foods—at the expense of alkaline foods—can cause numerous health problems, particularly as you age and your kidneys become less adept at handling dietary acid.
Of the four major acid-producing foods, three—grains, cheeses, and salt—were eaten rarely or never by our Paleolithic ancestors. Instead, they ate huge amounts (by modern standards) of alkaline fruits and vegetables, which buffered the acid from their meat-rich diets.
Many chronic diseases prevalent in Western countries develop because of a dietary acid-base imbalance. These include:
• Osteoporosis
• High blood pressure
• Stroke
• Kidney stones
• Asthma
• Exercise-induced asthma
• Ménière’s syndrome
• Stomach cancer
• Insomnia
• Air and motion sickness
The realization that such diverse problems could be linked to acid-base imbalance is fairly recent. Not so long ago, scientists connected many of these illnesses to too much sodium, or salt. But the chemical recipe for salt has two ingredients—sodium and chloride. And as I discussed earlier, it’s the chloride part of salt that makes it acidic—not the sodium. Chloride may also be more to blame than sodium as a dietary cause of high blood pressure.
Osteoporosis
Earlier, I talked about salt’s interplay with calcium in the body: people who eat a lot of salt excrete more calcium in their urine than do people who avoid salt. In turn, this calcium loss contributes to bone loss and osteoporosis, because the acidic chloride in salt must be buffered in the kidneys by alkaline base—and the body’s largest reservoir of alkaline base is the calcium in our bones. When we eat salty potato chips or a pepperoni pizza, we are leaching calcium from our bones. When we do it over the course of a lifetime, we may well develop osteoporosis.
Asthma and Exercise-Induced Asthma
But salt is not just bad for the bones. Although it has not been shown to cause asthma or exercise-induced asthma, it can aggravate both conditions. Studies in humans and animals have shown that salt can constrict the muscles surrounding the small airways in the lung. My research team demonstrated that salt (both the sodium and the chloride components) increases the severity of exercise-induced asthma. We also showed that low-salt diets can reduce many symptoms of exercise-induced asthma.
Other Problems Caused by Salt
Maybe you don’t salt your food. Good for you—but you should be aware that despite your good intentions, there’s probably more salt in your diet than you think. The average American eats 10 to 12 grams of salt every day. Almost 80 percent of this comes from processed foods—even those considered healthful. Two slices of whole-wheat bread, for instance, give you 1.5 grams of salt. So automatically there’s salt in any sandwich you make—even before you add salty meats like ham, salami, or bologna.
A high-salt diet increases your risk of kidney stones, stroke, and stomach cancer.
It also impairs sleep—this is one of the least-recognized benefits of low-salt diets. When you cut the salt out of your diet, you will sleep better almost immediately. Low-salt diets also have been shown to reduce motion and air sickness.
Many other foods are acidic and able to disrupt the body’s acid-base balance. Every time you eat cereals, peanuts, peanut butter, bread, muffins, cheese, sandwiches, pizza, doughnuts, cookies—basically, any processed food—you are overloading your body with dietary acid. Unless you balance these foods with healthful alkaline fruits and vegetables, you will be out of acid-base balance—and at increased risk for many chronic diseases.
Potassium
Another crucial chemical balance in the body is that of potassium and sodium. Paleo diets contained about ten times as much potassium as sodium. The average American eats about five times as much sodium as potassium every day. The beauty of the Paleo Diet is that it swiftly returns your body to humanity’s original high intake of potassium and low intake of sodium.
Digestive Diseases
Fiber is absolutely essential to your health—and at least thirteen illnesses can result when you don’t get enough fiber in your diet. Some of the most common digestive diseases that develop when you eat the standard American diet with its overload of refined grains, sugars, dairy, and processed foods are:
• Constipation
• Varicose veins
• Hemorrhoids
• Heartburn
• Indigestion
• Appendicitis
• Diverticular disease of the colon
• Crohn’s disease
• Ulcerative colitis
• Irritable bowel syndrome
• Duodenal ulcer
• Hiatal hernia
• Gallstones
The Paleo Diet is naturally high in fiber because of its abundance of fruits and vegetables—about three to five times as much fiber each day as there is in the average American diet.
Some people worry that lean meat-based diets are constipating. This is not true. Meat, fish, and seafood are not constipating at all. The famous Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson spent years mapping and exploring the Far North at the turn of the twentieth century. During his expeditions on dogsleds, he frequently lived off the land for more than a year at a time. He and his men were entirely dependent on the all-animal food diet that could be obtained from hunting and fishing. Amazingly, he reported in his journal that men who had suffered from constipation on their former rations of flour, corn biscuits, rice, and breads were almost completely cured of their problem within a week of adopting the all-meat (high in protein, but with enough fat to avoid the risk of protein toxicity) menu of the Eskimos.
Years later, when Stefansson returned to civilization, he and another explorer were put on an all-meat diet for an entire year, under controlled hospital conditions, by the most respected scientists and physicians of the day. The clinical evaluations at the end of the year showed bowel function to be normal. Just like Stefansson and the Eskimos, you will not suffer from constipation when lean meat, fish, and seafood dominate your diet. In fact, you will find that most of your digestive problems will disappear.
Crohn’s Disease and Ulcerative Colitis
As with every other disease of civilization, it is not the soluble fiber from fruits and vegetables that will reduce your digestive problems, but rather the entire diet. Dairy products, cereals, and yeast have been implicated time and again in the development of Crohn’s disease, an inflammatory disease of the gastrointestinal tract. Elemental diets (special liquid formulas without dairy, cereal, or yeast proteins) are the first line of defense physicians use in treating these patients. Amazingly, almost 80 percent of patients achieve complete remission while on elemental diets with absolutely no drug therapy. But there is a big problem here: hardly anyone can stay on a liquid diet forever. What would you rather do, drink a liquid diet or eat humanity’s real foods—fruits, veggies, and lean meats?
One of our most powerful therapies to calm down the inflammation of both Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis (an inflammatory disease of the colon) is to prescribe fish oil capsules—an excellent source of omega 3 fats. Once again, we find that multiple elements in humanity’s original diet complement one another to eliminate or prevent chronic illness. And it is our deviation from the three simple foods (fruits, vegetables, and lean meats) we are genetically adapted to eat that invariably causes us trouble and ill health.
Inflammatory Diseases
Omega 3 fats are powerful weapons in other wars as well. Perhaps because of their anti-inflammatory properties, they may prevent cancer from developing. They are also extremely effective in calming down virtually all inflammatory diseases—illnesses that end in “itis,” such as rheumatoid arthritis, ulcerative colitis, and gingivitis. These amazingly healthful fats can even reduce symptoms of certain autoimmune diseases: the combination of supplementing your diet with omega 3 fats and eliminating grains, dairy foods, legumes, potatoes, and yeast may substantially reduce the severity of symptoms of these diseases.
Autoimmune Diseases
Autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, and type 1 (juvenile) diabetes develop when the body’s immune system can’t tell the difference between its own tissues and those of foreign invaders. The result: the body attacks itself. The type of disease depends on the nature of the body’s assault: When the immune system invades and destroys nerve tissue, multiple sclerosis and other neurological diseases develop. When the pancreas is the target, type 1 diabetes occurs. When joint tissues are attacked and destroyed, the result is rheumatoid arthritis.
All autoimmune diseases develop because of interactions between the genes and one or more environmental factors, such as a viral or bacterial infection or exposure to a certain food. No one knows exactly how viruses, bacteria, and foods can spark the disease in genetically susceptible people, but research from our laboratory increasingly implicates recently introduced Neolithic foods such as grains, legumes, dairy foods, potatoes, and other members of the nightshade family.
Many environmental agents have been suspected in the development of autoimmune diseases. But only one of these types has proved capable of causing a disease. Cereal grains—such as wheat, rye, barley, and oats—are responsible for celiac disease and dermatitis herpetiformis. In celiac disease, the immune system attacks and destroys cells in the intestine, leading to diarrhea and many nutritional problems. In dermatitis herpetiformis, the skin is attacked.
Withdrawal of all gluten-containing cereals causes complete remission of both diseases. Cereal grains, dairy products, and legumes are suspected in other autoimmune diseases, such as type 1 diabetes, multiple sclerosis, and rheumatoid arthritis. To date, no dietary intervention studies have been conducted to see whether Paleo diets—free of grains, dairy products, and legumes—can reduce the symptoms of these diseases. However, anecdotal reports from Canada show improvement in symptoms of multiple sclerosis patients following the Paleo Diet.
Lectins and Autoimmune Disease
My research group and I have published a paper in the British Journal of Nutrition describing our theory that dairy foods, grains, legumes, and yeast may be partly to blame for rheumatoid arthritis and other autoimmune diseases in genetically susceptible people. Legumes and grains contain substances called lectins. These substances are proteins that plants have evolved to ward off insect predators. Lectins can bind with almost any tissue in our bodies and wreak havoc—if they can enter the body, that is.
Normally, when we eat food, all proteins are broken down into basic amino acid building blocks and then absorbed in the small intestine. Lectins are different. They are not digested and broken down; instead, they attach themselves to cells in our intestines, where nutrient absorption takes place. The lectins in wheat (WGA), kidney beans (PHA), soybeans (SBA), and peanuts (PNA) are known to increase intestinal permeability and allow partially digested food proteins and remnants of resident gut bacteria to spill into the bloodstream. (Alcohol and hot chili peppers also increase intestinal permeability.) Usually, special immune cells immediately gobble up these wayward bacteria and food proteins. But lectins are cellular Trojan horses. They make the intestines easier to penetrate, and they impair the immune system’s ability to fight off food and bacterial fragments that leak into the bloodstream.
Surprisingly, we have found that many common gut bacteria fragments are made up of the same molecular building blocks as those found in certain immune system proteins and in the tissues under attack by the immune system. This matchup—of gut bacteria or food protein, immune system protein, and body tissue protein—may confuse the immune system, causing it to attack the body’s own tissues. A number of research groups worldwide have found that milk, grain, legume, and nightshade proteins can also trick the immune system into attacking the body’s own tissues by this process of molecular mimicry.
If you have an autoimmune disease, there is no guarantee that diet will cure it or even reduce your symptoms, but there is virtually no risk, and there are many other great benefits from the Paleo Diet that will improve your health.
Psychological Disorders
One of the least known benefits of grain-free diets is their ability to improve mental well-being. My colleague Dr. Klaus Lorenz of Colorado State University has extensively studied how cereals may influence the development and progression of schizophrenia. In a wide-ranging review study, Dr. Lorenz concluded that in “populations eating little or no wheat, rye and barley, the prevalence of schizophrenia is quite low.” Dr. Lorenz’s analysis included the clinical studies by Dr. F. Curtis Dohan of the Eastern Pennsylvania Psychiatric Institute. In studies spanning almost twenty-five years, Dr. Dohan reported time and again that the symptoms of schizophrenia were reduced in patients on grain-and dairy-free diets but worsened when these foods were returned to the diet. Exactly why cereals may alter mood and mental well-being is not entirely clear. But several studies have shown that when wheat is digested, it contains a narcoticlike substance that may affect certain areas in the brain that influence behavior. Similar substances called “casomorphins” have been isolated from cow’s milk; however, no one knows whether they can alter mood or behavior.
My colleague Joe Hibbeln at the National Institutes of Health has demonstrated that omega 3 fats may be effective in reducing depression, hostility, schizophrenia, and other mental disorders. His finding was confirmed in a four-month study of thirty manic-depressive patients by Dr. Andrew Stoll of the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. Dr. Stoll used medicine’s most powerful study tool, a double-blind, placebo-controlled trial, to compare the efficacy of omega 3 fats versus olive oil for treatment of manic-depressive illness. According to Dr. Stoll and his colleagues, “for nearly every outcome measure, the omega 3 fatty acid group performed better than the placebo group.” This work lends credence to a number of recent studies demonstrating that the symptoms of depression are much lower in people who eat a lot of fish (an excellent source of omega 3 fats).
The Paleo Diet will also improve your mental outlook because it normalizes your insulin level. Almost everyone knows that a low blood sugar level can make you feel tired, irritable, and tense. When you normalize your insulin level with low-glycemic carbohydrates and plenty of lean protein, your blood sugar level will be more even throughout the day and so will your mood.
Vitamin-Deficiency Diseases
In the United States the common vitamin deficiency diseases (beriberi, pellagra, and rickets) were wiped out after World War II with the wide-scale fortification of our white flour and white rice with B vitamins and our milk and margarine with vitamin D. However, people living in less developed nations are not so lucky; these diseases still run rampant wherever diets are heavily based on cereals and legumes. It goes without saying that the world’s primary vitamin deficiency diseases, including scurvy from a lack of vitamin C, are completely a result of agriculture’s new foods. When you eat the way nature intended, you will protect yourself from all illnesses that develop from vitamin deficiencies.
Dental Cavities
Nearly all archaeological studies of Paleolithic people’s teeth show them to be almost completely free of cavities. How can this be when they never brushed, gargled with mouthwash, or flossed? The answer is simple: with their diet of lean meats, fruits, and veggies, cavities simply couldn’t get a foothold. Historically speaking, cavities and tooth decay didn’t start until the coming of agriculture and its starchy, sugary foods. Cavities are caused when acid produced by certain bacteria eats away part of the enamel of your tooth. These bacteria can’t set up shop in your teeth unless there is a constant source of sugar or starch that fuels their acid production.
We can learn a lot from our teeth because any food that does so much damage to our teeth can’t be very good for the rest of our bodies, either. Refined sugars and starches are foreign substances to our Paleolithic bodies. We simply haven’t had time to adapt to agriculture’s new foods. We are best designed to run on the foods nature provided: lean meats, fruits, and veggies.
Alcoholism
Alcohol—and its enormous potential for abuse—was not part of the preagricultural equation. No alcoholic beverage has ever been linked to Paleolithic people, although it would have been possible to make alcoholic drinks from gathered honey (mead) or berries (wine) by natural fermentation. It wasn’t until the Agricultural Revolution, with its abundance of starchy grains, that the first beers were brewed on a regular basis. Quite a bit later came wine, made from fermented grapes. (Because beer and wine are yeast fermentation by-products, they do not contain more than about 6 to 13 percent alcohol; the alcohol-producing yeast organisms die when the alcohol concentration rises above this level.) Hard liquor didn’t come on the scene until about 800 A.D., with the invention of distillation.
In most Western countries, moderate consumption (five to ten drinks per week) of alcohol is not considered detrimental to health; in fact, it has been associated with a reduced risk of dying from all combined causes of death. Moderate alcohol consumption also may improve your insulin sensitivity and is associated with a reduced risk of other chronic diseases.
Does this mean you should take up drinking to improve your health? Absolutely not. You don’t need alcohol to obtain the health and weight-loss benefits of the Paleo Diet. However, if you currently enjoy an occasional glass of wine, there is no need to forgo this pleasure. Consumption of alcoholic beverages a few times a week won’t hurt your health, nor will it slow your weight loss. However, if you suffer from an autoimmune disease or another serious health problem, alcoholic beverages should not be part of your dietary equation.
Skin Cancers
Skin cancers come in three basic varieties:
• Squamous cell cancers, which form on the top layers of the skin
• Basal cell cancers, which form on the bottom layers of the skin
• Melanomas, which form within the skin’s pigment-producing cells, the melanocytes
The American Cancer Society estimated that 2 million Americans would develop the first two types of skin cancer in the year 2010. These cancers grow slowly, rarely spread to other areas of the body, and are easily curable by early removal. An estimated 69,000 Americans were expected to develop melanoma in 2009. If detected early and surgically removed before they spread to other parts of the body, melanomas are highly curable, with 95 out of 100 people alive five years after diagnosis. But if melanomas spread to the rest of the body, they can be deadly; the five-year survival rate drops drastically, to 16 out of 100.
Scientists know that excessive sunlight exposure is linked to all three cancers. But this does not mean you should avoid sunlight in any amount. Here again, the experience of our hunter-gatherer ancestors proves helpful. Ironically, many studies have shown that people with high lifetime sunlight exposure (similar to that of hunter-gatherers) have lower rates of melanoma than those with low sunlight exposure. Also, indoor workers have a greater risk of developing melanoma than outdoor workers do. Even more puzzling, melanomas often arise in body areas that are infrequently or intermittently exposed to the sun. These unexpected findings have led researchers to believe that severe sunburn during childhood, or intense burns in body areas that are infrequently or intermittently exposed to the sun, may be more important in the development of melanoma than cumulative exposure during adulthood.
When your exposure to sunlight is gradual, moderate, and continuous—if you don’t get excessive sunburn—your body responds in a manner guided by evolutionary wisdom. The skin begins to tan from increased production of melanin, and the darkened skin provides protection from the sunlight’s damaging ultraviolet rays. Also, vitamin D levels in the blood begin to rise as ultraviolet light strikes the skin, causing it to convert cholesterol into vitamin D.
Vitamin D is a potent inhibitor of the cancer-causing process. In fact, vitamin D has been shown to prevent the growth of melanomas in experimental animals and cultured tissue lines.
An unexpected bonus of vitamin D is that it may also be one of our most important allies in the war against prostate, breast, and colon cancers. Evidence from population studies confirms that people with the greatest lifetime sun exposures have the lowest rates of these cancers.
Skin cancer is a complex disease, with several factors influencing its ultimate course. In laboratory animals, scientists have found that excessive omega 6 fats promote the development of skin cancer—but omega 3 fats slow it down. Furthermore, antioxidants like beta-carotene, vitamin C, and vitamin E tend to prevent the sun’s ultraviolet damage to the skin. You can get these same dietary advantages when you adopt the dietary principles I have laid out in the Paleo Diet. (Note: As with many of the diseases we have discussed, proper diet reduces your risk of developing some types of skin cancer, but it cannot completely prevent it.)
Exposure to sunlight is natural for human beings. It is part of our evolutionary heritage. Without sunlight, it is virtually impossible to achieve an adequate intake of vitamin D from the natural foods that were available to our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Our food supply has been a significant source of vitamin D for a very short time—less than a century, when dairy producers began adding it to milk and, later, margarine. Sunlight exposure is healthy as long as it occurs in a slow, gradual, and limited dose over the course of a lifetime.
As you have seen, the Paleo Diet will not only help you get thin; it will also help prevent and treat a broad range of diseases. The Paleo Diet is good medicine!
PART THREE
The Paleo Diet Program
7
Eating Great: What to Eat, What to Avoid
Now that I’ve talked about why the Paleo Diet is the diet nature intended, let’s get down to specifics: how do you get started?
This is the best part—it’s so easy. You don’t have to balance food blocks, weigh portions, keep a food log, or count calories. As I’ve shown, the basic guidelines of the Paleo Diet are very simple : all the lean meats, poultry, fish, seafood, fruits (except dried fruits), and vegetables (except starchy tubers—primarily, potatoes) you can eat. Because the mainstay of the Paleo Diet is high-quality, low-fat protein, you won’t need to feel guilty about eating lean meat, fish, or seafood at every meal. This is exactly what you should be doing, along with as many low-glycemic fruits and veggies as you want.
You’re about to embark on a diet of enormous and bountiful diversity, fully backed by thousands of clinical nutrition trials and—most important—by 2.5 million years of evolutionary experience. What do you get in return? If you follow the simple nutritional guidelines laid out in this chapter and spelled out in the next two chapters with tempting meal plans and delicious, easy recipes, you will lose weight; reduce your risk of heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and other chronic diseases; and feel energized all day long. And unlike with almost every other diet you can think of, you won’t feel hungry all the time.You will feel good on this diet, because this is the only diet that is consistent with your genetic makeup.
By imitating the diets of our Paleolithic ancestors with foods you can buy at the supermarket or grow in your own garden, you’ll be able to reap the health benefits that are your genetic heritage—freedom from obesity, a high energy level, and excellent health.
It is not possible for us to duplicate precisely all the foods that our ancient ancestors ate. Many of these foods no longer exist—such as the mammoth—or they’re unavailable commercially, or they just aren’t palatable, given our modern tastes and cultural traditions. However, most of the advantages and benefits of the Paleo Diet can easily be obtained from common foods following the general nutritional guidelines observed by our Paleolithic ancestors.
Making the Diet Work for You
It isn’t easy to change the habits of a lifetime, and you don’t have to do it overnight. You can ease the transition by adopting the three levels of the Paleo Diet. The levels are based on the concept that what you do occasionally won’t harm the overall good of what you do most of the time. Does this mean you can cheat? Yes—sometimes. Occasional cheating and digressions may be just what you need to help you stick to the diet the rest of the time, and they won’t sidetrack the weight loss and health effects of this diet.
Getting Enough of the Right Foods
As I discussed earlier, there was no single Paleo diet. Our ancient ancestors made the most of their environment wherever they happened to be. For example, the Inuit people were able to live healthy lives, free of chronic diseases, on a diet that derived at least 97 percent of its energy from animal foods. At the other end of the spectrum were groups like the !Kung in Africa, who obtained 65 percent of their daily calories from plant foods (chiefly the mongongo nut). However, most Paleolithic groups fell somewhere in between, with animal foods generally making up around 55-60 percent of the daily caloric intake. On the Paleo Diet, you should attempt to get a little more than half of your calories from lean meat, organ meats, fish, shellfish, and poultry and the rest from plant foods.
Let’s take a look at the wonderful, diverse foods that you can eat in unlimited quantities.
Meats
The key word here is “lean.” Of course, this includes chicken and fish. But many people are surprised to find that red meat—beef and pork—organ meats, and game meats are also on the list. How can this be? Because, as I discussed earlier, the Paleo Diet is not a fat-free diet, it’s a bad fat-free diet. As long as the meat is lean, you can eat your fill. Another noteworthy aspect of the meats available on this diet is their great variety. This is a common response as people begin this diet: “I was in a rut before—hamburgers, hot dogs, and pizza. Now I’m planning my meals around all kinds of meats—some I had never tried before, some I’d never even heard of.”
In order to get enough protein and calories, you should eat animal food at almost every meal. You can’t just eat animal food, however. You must eat fruits and vegetables, too. Here’s why: if protein-dense, extremely lean meats and seafood are your main sources of calories, you will get sick—with nausea, diarrhea, and weakness—because your body can’t handle this much undiluted protein without something else, either fat or carbohydrates. As we discussed earlier, early Arctic explorers, trappers, and frontiersmen who had no choice but to eat the fat-depleted meat of game animals in the dregs of winter rapidly developed these same symptoms, frequently referred to as “rabbit starvation” or protein toxicity.
The problem, as shown in Dr. Daniel Rudman’s laboratory at Emory University in Atlanta, is that the liver can’t effectively eliminate the nitrogen caused by the protein overload. For most people, the dietary protein ceiling is 200 to 300 grams a day, or about 30 to 40 percent of the normal daily caloric intake.
On the other hand, eating too many fatty meats can wipe out any health benefits that eating high levels of protein will help you achieve. Paleolithic people couldn’t eat fatty meats if they tried—they had nothing like the tubby grain-fed animals that produce our steaks today. Wild game meat contains about 15 to 20 percent of its calories as fat. A lean cut of beef trimmed of all visible fat contains more than double this amount (35 to 40 percent fat). And certain fatty cuts of meats may contain 65 to 80 percent fat.
FAT AND PROTEIN CONTENT (PERCENTAGE OF TOTAL CALORIES OF MEAT AND FISH)
Not only is the total amount of fat higher in commonly consumed fatty meats—such as hamburger, T-bone steak, hot dogs, and lamb chops—than that found in fish and game meat, but the types of fat are also quite different. Because most commercially available beef has been feedlot-fattened (mainly with corn and sorghum), it contains low levels of omega 3 fats and high levels of omega 6 fats. This is the wrong mix. When eaten in excess, omega 6 fats are harmful, while omega 3 fats are greatly beneficial. The average Western diet is burdened by high levels of omega 6 fats—which can promote the development of heart disease in many ways. The meats, fish, and seafood you’ll be eating on the Paleo Diet are low in fat and high in protein, and they contain the correct balance of omega 3 and omega 6 fats.
What about eggs? Eggs are a relatively high-fat food (62 percent fat, 34 percent protein). Eating too many eggs can promote weight gain and increase blood cholesterol levels. There is no doubt that Paleolithic people would have eaten wild bird eggs whenever they found them. But this wasn’t that often. Wild eggs always would have been a seasonal food and would not have been eaten every day. Also, wild bird eggs are nutritionally different from domesticated chicken eggs; they have higher levels of beneficial omega 3 fat and lower levels of certain saturated fats. You should also buy eggs enriched with omega 3 fats.
The high protein of the Paleo Diet is the key to many of its weight-loss benefits. Protein helps you lose weight faster by boosting your metabolism while simultaneously blunting your hunger. And while this is happening, low-fat protein is improving your blood lipid and cholesterol levels, as studies from Dr. Bernard Wolfe’s laboratory at the University of Western Ontario have confirmed. Low-fat protein also prevents blood sugar swings and reduces the risk of hypertension, stroke, heart disease, and certain cancers.
Salmon for breakfast? Breakfast is one part of the Paleo Diet that may seem a bit strange at first. In Western countries, breakfast is usually a high-carbohydrate affair, featuring a cereal product (bagel, sweet roll, buttered bread, packaged cereal with milk, oatmeal), coffee or fruit juice, and a piece of fruit. The other common option is the high-fat, “stick to your ribs” breakfast—bacon, sausage, ham, eggs, omelets, hash-brown potatoes, and occasionally steak or pork chops.
Salmon steak and chicken breast aren’t on very many breakfast menus. And yet studies indicate that for Paleolithic people, the morning meal was high in protein, was low in carbohydrates and fat, and probably contained “leftovers” from the animal that was killed the day before. A common breakfast on the Paleo Diet, then, might be a cold salmon steak or cold crab (left over from last night’s supper) and half a cantaloupe. So go ahead—try fish or meat first thing in the morning. You’ll soon find yourself looking trimmer and feeling fitter right at the start of the day.
What to Eat?
Here are the specifics of the Paleo Diet. We’ll start with domestic meats. Eat as much as you want for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Cook the meats simply, without too much added fat—broiling, baking, roasting, sautéing, or browning, then pouring off excess liquid fat, or stir-frying over high heat with a little olive oil (but never deep-fat frying).
Lean Meats
Lean beef (trimmed of visible fat)
• Flank steak
• Top sirloin steak
• Extra-lean hamburger (no more than 7 percent fat, extra fat drained off)
• London broil
• Chuck steak
• Lean veal
• Any other lean cut
Lean pork (trimmed of visible fat)
• Pork loin
• Pork chops
• Any other lean cut
Lean poultry (white meat, skin removed)
• Chicken breast
• Turkey breast
• Game hen breast
Eggs (limit to six to twelve a week)
• Chicken (go for the enriched omega 3 variety)
• Duck
• Goose
Other meats
• Rabbit meat (any cut)
• Goat meat (any cut)
Organ meats
• Beef, lamb, pork, and chicken livers
• Beef, pork, and lamb tongues
• Beef, lamb, and pork marrow
• Beef, lamb, and pork “sweetbreads”
Next, more exotic fare. You may hunt your own or buy locally or via mail order. For a list of exotic-meat suppliers, see chapter 8.
Game meat
• Alligator
• Bear
• Bison (buffalo)
• Caribou
• Elk
• Emu
• Goose
• Kangaroo
• Muscovy duck
• New Zealand cervena deer
• Ostrich
• Pheasant
• Quail
• Rattlesnake
• Reindeer
• Squab
• Turtle
• Venison
• Wild boar
• Wild turkey
Fish
• Bass
• Bluefish
• Cod
• Drum
• Eel
• Flatfish
• Grouper
• Haddock
• Halibut
• Herring
• Mackerel
• Monkfish
• Mullet
• Northern pike
• Orange roughy
• Perch
• Red snapper
• Rockfish
• Salmon
• Scrod
• Shark
• Striped bass
• Sunfish
• Tilapia
• Trout
• Tuna
• Turbot
• Walleye
• Any other commercially available fish
Shellfish
• Abalone
• Clams
• Crab
• Crayfish
• Lobster
• Mussels
• Oysters
• Scallops
• Shrimp
Fruits and Vegetables
It’s not easy to get 50 percent of your daily calories from fruits and vegetables because of the high bulk and low caloric density of fruits and salad vegetables. On an average 2,200-calorie diet, you’d have to eat more than 5 pounds of fruits and vegetables a day. Most people are simply unwilling or physiologically unable to consume this much plant food; there is a limit to how much fiber the human gut can hold. However, some plant foods, such as avocados, nuts, seeds, and olive oil, are rich in healthful fats. Eating these in moderate amounts will help you get the calories you need for a balanced diet.
Unless you are severely overweight or obese, you should not worry about how many fresh fruits you eat on the Paleo Diet. Only people with signs and symptoms of metabolic syndrome need to limit consumption of fresh fruits. High-sugar fruits like grapes, bananas, cherries, and mangos should be limited for obese patients or those with signs and symptoms of metabolic syndrome. Low-sugar fruits like berries and melons represent no problems. Check out my Web site: www.thepaleodiet.com/nutritional_tools/fruits_table.html to see a list of fruits that are low in sugars.
Nuts are rich in calories. If you are trying to lose weight, you should eat only about 4 ounces of them a day. Also, except for walnuts, almost all nuts have high levels of omega 6 fats, and if eaten excessively, they can unbalance the ratio of omega 6 to omega 3 fats in your diet.
For ideal health, then, you should eat fruits and vegetables with every meal, along with moderate amounts of nuts, avocados, seeds, and healthful oils (flaxseed and olive). However, just because it’s a vegetable doesn’t mean it’s good—or that it’s on the list below. High-carbohydrate, starchy tubers like potatoes are restricted on the Paleo Diet. Also, dried fruit should be eaten only in small amounts because it, too, can produce a high glycemic load (causing a rapid increase in the blood glucose level), particularly when you eat too much of it. When you’re hungry or in doubt, start with a high-protein, low-fat food. Remember, lean protein is the most effective nutrient in reducing your appetite and boosting your metabolism to help you burn stored fat.
Fruits
• Apple
• Apricot
• Avocado
• Banana
• Blackberries
• Blueberries
• Boysenberries
• Cantaloupe
• Carambola
• Cassava melon
• Cherimoya
• Cherries
• Cranberries
• Figs
• Gooseberries
• Grapefruit
• Guava
• Grapes
• Honeydew melon
• Kiwi
• Lemon
• Lime
• Lychee
• Mango
• Nectarine
• Orange
• Papaya
• Passion fruit
• Peaches
• Pears
• Persimmon
• Pineapple
• Plums
• Pomegranate
• Raspberries
• Rhubarb
• Star fruit
• Strawberries
• Tangerine
• Watermelon
• All other fruits
Vegetables 1
• Artichoke
• Asparagus
• Beet greens
• Beets
• Bell peppers
• Broccoli
• Brussels sprouts
• Cabbage
• Carrots
• Cauliflower
• Celery
• Collards
• Cucumber
• Dandelion
• Eggplant
• Endive
• Green onions
• Kale
• Kohlrabi
• Lettuce
• Mushrooms
• Mustard greens
• Onions
• Parsley
• Parsnip
• Peppers (all kinds)
• Pumpkin
• Purslane
• Radish
• Rutabaga
• Seaweed
• Spinach
• Squash (all kinds)
• Swiss chard
• Tomatillos
• Tomato (actually a fruit, but most people think of it as a vegetable)
• Turnip greens
• Turnips
• Watercress
Nuts and Seeds
Nuts are rich sources of monounsaturated fats. Monounsaturated fats tend to lower cholesterol and reduce the risk of heart disease and may also reduce the risk of certain cancers, including breast cancer. However, because nuts and seeds are such concentrated sources of fat, they have the potential to slow down weight loss, particularly if you’re overweight. Again, if you are actively losing weight, you should eat no more than 4 ounces of nuts and seeds a day. Once your metabolism has increased and you’ve reached your desired weight, you can eat more nuts, particularly walnuts, which have a favorable omega 6 to omega 3 ratio. Note: Peanuts are legumes, not nuts, and are not on the list.
• Almonds
• Brazil nuts
• Cashews
• Chestnuts
• Hazelnuts (filberts)
• Macadamia nuts
• Pecans
• Pine nuts
• Pistachios (unsalted)
• Pumpkin seeds
• Sesame seeds
• Sunflower seeds
• Walnuts
Foods You Can Eat in Moderation
Some people are surprised to find alcohol in this next category. There is no evidence to suggest that our Paleolithic ancestors drank any form of alcoholic beverage. And it’s abundantly clear, in our own day, that abuse of alcohol—in addition to causing a host of serious behavioral and social problems—can impair your health, damage your liver, and increase your risk of developing many cancers. However, if you currently drink in moderation—if you enjoy an occasional beer or glass of wine—there’s no need to give up this pleasure on the Paleo Diet. In fact, numerous scientific studies suggest that moderate alcohol consumption significantly reduces the risk of dying from heart disease and other illnesses. Wine in particular, when consumed in moderation, has been shown to have many beneficial health effects. A glass of wine before or during dinner may help improve your insulin sensitivity and reduce your appetite. Wine is also an appetizing, salt-free ingredient that adds flavor to many meat and vegetable dishes. Note: If you have an autoimmune disease, you should avoid alcoholic beverages and other yeast-containing foods. (For more information, see chapter 6.)
Oils
• Olive, avocado, walnut, and flaxseed oils (use in moderation—4 tablespoons or less a day when weight loss is of primary importance)
Beverages
• Diet sodas (These often contain artificial sweeteners such as aspartame and saccharine, which may be harmful; you’re better off drinking bottled and mineral waters.)
• Coffee
• Tea
• Wine (two 4-ounce glasses. Note: Don’t buy “cooking wine,” which is loaded with salt.)
• Beer (one 12-ounce serving)
• Spirits (4 ounces)
Paleo Sweets
• Dried fruits (no more than 2 ounces a day, particularly if you are trying to lose weight)
• Nuts mixed with dried and fresh fruits (no more than 4 ounces of nuts and 2 ounces of dried fruit a day, particularly if you are trying to lose weight)
Foods You Should Avoid
I’ve spent a lot of time talking about why the foods in this next category should not be part of your diet. (You don’t have to stop cold turkey, though; you can gradually wean them from your diet, as I’ll discuss below.) Except for honey, refined sugars were nonexistent in Paleo diets; so were dairy products and excess salt. Almost all processed food is a mix of three or four of the following: sugar, some form of starch (wheat, potatoes, corn, rice), fat or oil, dairy products, salt, and flavorings. Because most processed foods are made with refined grains, starches, and sugars, they are high-glycemic items and can cause large swings in blood sugar levels. Most modern cereal- and sugar-based processed foods adversely affect insulin metabolism and are associated with a greater risk of obesity, heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, and other chronic health problems.
Just because these foods are not part of the diet, you don’t have to banish them from your life forever. But you should try to avoid them most of the time.
Dairy Foods
• All processed foods made with any dairy products
• Butter
• Cheese
• Cream
• Dairy spreads
• Frozen yogurt
• Ice cream
• Ice milk
• Low-fat milk
• Nonfat dairy creamer
• Powdered milk
• Skim milk
• Whole milk
• Yogurt
Cereal Grains
• Barley (barley soup, barley bread, and all processed foods made with barley)
• Corn (corn on the cob, corn tortillas, corn chips, cornstarch, corn syrup)
• Millet
• Oats (steel-cut oats, rolled oats, and all processed foods made with oats)
• Rice (brown rice, white rice, ramen, rice noodles, basmati rice, rice cakes, rice flour, and all processed foods made with rice)
• Rye (rye bread, rye crackers, and all processed foods made with rye)
• Sorghum
• Wheat (bread, rolls, muffins, noodles, crackers, cookies, cake, doughnuts, pancakes, waffles, pasta, spaghetti, lasagna, wheat tortillas, pizza, pita bread, flat bread, and all processed foods made with wheat or wheat flour)
• Wild rice
Cereal-Grainlike Seeds
• Amaranth
• Buckwheat
• Quinoa
Legumes
• All beans (adzuki beans, black beans, broad beans, fava beans, field beans, garbanzo beans, horse beans, kidney beans, lima beans, mung beans, navy beans, pinto beans, red beans, string beans, white beans)
• Black-eyed peas
• Chickpeas
• Lentils
• Peas
• Peanut butter
• Peanuts
• Snow peas
• Sugar snap peas
• Soybeans and all soybean products, including tofu
Starchy Vegetables
• Starchy tubers
• Cassava root
• Manioc
• Potatoes and all potato products (French fries, potato chips, etc.)
• Sweet potatoes
• Tapioca pudding
• Yams
Salt-Containing Foods
• Almost all commercial salad dressings and condiments
• Bacon
• Cheese
• Deli meats
• Frankfurters
• Ham
• Hot dogs
• Ketchup
• Olives
• Pickled foods
• Pork rinds
• Processed meats
• Salami
• Salted nuts
• Salted spices
• Sausages
• Smoked, dried, and salted fish and meat
• Virtually all canned meats and fish (unless they are unsalted or unless you soak and drain them)
Fatty Meats
• Bacon
• Bacon bits
• Bologna
• Breakfast sausage
• Chicken and turkey skin
• Chicken wings
• Deli meats
• Fatty lamb chops
• Fatty pork chops
• Pepperoni
• Pork sausage
• Salami
• Spam
Soft Drinks and Fruit Juices
• All sugary soft drinks
• Canned, bottled, and freshly squeezed fruit drinks (which lack the fiber of fresh fruit and have a much higher glycemic index)
Sweets
• Candy
• Honey
• Sugars
As you can see, there’s a bounty of wonderful foods you can eat on the Paleo Diet, so you’ll never get bored. Use your imagination and have fun with these delicious foods.
8
The Paleo Diet User’s Manual
Stocking Your Refrigerator and Pantry
You know those diets where you have to buy their food, in their packaging, at their stores? This is different. You don’t need to buy any special foods to follow the Paleo Diet. Just about everything you need is right in your local supermarket—particularly if it has a health food section. Even if you live in a rural area, the basics of the diet—lean meats, fish, fresh fruits, and vegetables—can be found in small grocery stores. If you choose, you can order specialty oils and game meats through the mail (some suppliers are listed below). But you don’t need anything out of the ordinary to get started.
Look for Lean Meats
The mainstay of the Paleo Diet is lean animal foods. Always choose the leanest cut of meat you can find.
Beef
If you can get it—it might be at the butcher’s counter, not out in the main meat aisle—“range-fed” is better than grain-fed beef because it’s leaner, and it has a better ratio of omega 6 to omega 3 fatty acids. Note: The words “natural beef” are no guarantee that the animal hasn’t been fattened with grains (or pumped full of antibiotics, for that matter); check with your butcher. A simple visual inspection of the fat on any cut of meat lets you know if the animal was raised on pasture or on grains. Pasture-produced meat has fat that is orange to dark yellow in color, whereas grain-produced meat has fat that appears white.
Poultry
“Free-range” chickens are almost always better than broiler chickens, because—like range-fed beef—they’re not as fat. Here, too, the natural foraging diet (of insects, worms, and wild plants) guarantees a healthful ratio of omega 6 to omega 3 fatty acids. Free-range chickens can be found in many upscale or health-oriented supermarkets.
Turkey
Turkey breast is one of the best and cheapest sources of very lean meat—it’s even leaner than most game meat—and fortunately, it’s available almost everywhere. Tip: Before you cook very lean domestic meats, rub them with olive oil. This will add flavor and help keep them moist during cooking.
Pork
Some pork is even leaner than chicken. Lean pork tenderloin, for instance, has 28 percent fat compared to skinless chicken breasts at 37 percent. Naturally grown pork—similar to free-range chickens—is leaner, too.
Other Choices
What about organ meats? Many people mistakenly think organ meats are fatty. Organ meats are low in fat and are rich sources of vitamins, minerals, and omega 3 fat. Bone marrow is another overlooked food that’s seldom eaten in the United States but is considered a delicacy in Europe. Even though it contains about 80 percent fat by weight, almost 75 percent of the fat is monounsaturated—which means that marrow is a good fat that won’t raise your cholesterol.
As for lamb, if you can find grass-fed, free-range meat, go for it. The type of lamb produced in Australia and New Zealand is leaner than American grain-fed lamb and contains more healthful omega 3 fats. Remember, leaner, grass-produced meat is the key to making this lifelong nutrition plan work for you.
One of the best online resources for locating healthy, naturally produced, grass-fed meats is my friend and colleague Jo Robinson’s Eatwild Web site: www.eatwild.com. Jo’s Web site is an incredible cornucopia of information that will help you locate a reliable producer of grass-fed, natural meat in your local region. Eatwild’s Directory of Farms lists more than 1,300 pasture-based farms, with more farms being added regularly. It is the most comprehensive source for grass-fed meat in the United States and Canada. For your convenience, Jo provides customers with contact information of suppliers who will ship their products to you.
Wild Game Meat—at a Gourmet Store Near You
In the United States, it’s illegal to harvest wild game meat for commercial use. This means that the game meat you can buy from specialty suppliers (some are listed below) didn’t come from the wild, but from a ranch or a farm—where these animals graze freely in large fenced or open areas. Most game animals are raised in free-range conditions. Like its wild counterpart, this game meat is quite low in fat and maintains a healthful balance of omega 6 and omega 3 fatty acids.
You can find buffalo and sometimes rabbit meat in many supermarkets—especially the upscale or health-oriented ones—and more exotic fare in specialty meat and butcher shops. Your local butcher may be able to order game meat as well, but be prepared—it isn’t cheap. If you are a hunter (or if you know someone who is, who would be willing to help out), you can save a lot of money by acquiring wild meat yourself.
Like all very lean meat, game meat is a bit tricky to cook. It’s also easy to ruin so that it loses its texture and appeal.
It also helps to rub the meat thoroughly with olive oil before cooking and keep basting it as it cooks. If you grill game meat, keep it on the rare side, baste it often with olive oil or marinades, and it will be tender.
The secret to making game tender—and not rubbery or leathery—is to cook it very slowly over low heat in a covered dish with a bit of water
If you’ve never tasted game meat, you may be in for a big surprise. Some game meats, like buffalo and elk, taste a lot like lean beef, but with a sweeter, richer flavor. Others, like antelope or sage hen, can have a distinctively pungent flavor—the telltale “gamey” taste. This gamey flavor is actually a good sign; it results from the increased levels of omega 3 fats in the meat, plus various wild plants in the animal’s diet. It also indicates that the game meat you’re eating is healthy, with a good balance of omega 6 and omega 3 fats. If you’re not used to game meat’s distinctive flavors—or if you never want to get used to it—overnight marinating can do wonders.
Here are some mail-order suppliers that specialize in the sale of game meat:
Game Sales International
P.O. Box 7719
Loveland, CO 80537
Phone: (800) 729-2090
Fax: (970) 669-9041
www.gamesalesintl.com
P.O. Box 7719
Loveland, CO 80537
Phone: (800) 729-2090
Fax: (970) 669-9041
www.gamesalesintl.com
Exotic Meat Market
130 Walnut Avenue, Unit A-18
Perris, CA 92571
Phone: (951) 345-4623
http://exoticmeatmarket.com
130 Walnut Avenue, Unit A-18
Perris, CA 92571
Phone: (951) 345-4623
http://exoticmeatmarket.com
Hills Foods Ltd.
Unit 130 Glacier Street
Coquitlam, British Columbia
Canada V3K 5Z6
Phone: (604) 472-1500
www.hillsfoods.com
Unit 130 Glacier Street
Coquitlam, British Columbia
Canada V3K 5Z6
Phone: (604) 472-1500
www.hillsfoods.com
Polarica (West Coast)
105 Quint Street
San Francisco, CA 94124
Phone: (800) 426-3872
www.polarica.com
105 Quint Street
San Francisco, CA 94124
Phone: (800) 426-3872
www.polarica.com
Broken Arrow Ranch
3296 Junction Highway
Ingram, TX 78025
Phone: (800) 962-4263
www.brokenarrowranch.com
3296 Junction Highway
Ingram, TX 78025
Phone: (800) 962-4263
www.brokenarrowranch.com
Southern Game Meat (Kangaroo)
Unit 1/5 Stanton Road
Seven Hills
NSW 2147 Australia
Phone: 61-2-8825-8350
www.sgm.com.au
Unit 1/5 Stanton Road
Seven Hills
NSW 2147 Australia
Phone: 61-2-8825-8350
www.sgm.com.au
Fish and Seafood
Nutritionally speaking, fish and seafood are a lot like humanity’s original staple food—lean game meat. They’re high in protein, low in total fat, and typically high in omega 3 fats. Many scientific studies have shown that regular fish consumption reduces bad LDL cholesterol and triglycerides while simultaneously increasing the good HDL cholesterol. The omega 3 fats in fish also prevent the heart from going into irregular, uncontrolled beating patterns called “arrhythmias,” which can be fatal. Fish is just plain good for you. It lowers your risk of heart attack, stroke, and type 2 diabetes. By eating fish and seafood regularly, you can significantly reduce your risk of dying from the number one killer of all Americans—heart disease.
Unfortunately, there’s a downside, and it has nothing to do with fish and seafood, but with our own environment. Fish and seafood are often contaminated with heavy metals, particularly mercury; by polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs); and by pesticides such as DDT and dieldrin. The places where fish live—oceans, rivers, lakes, and streams—are also the dumping grounds for many of these potentially harmful chemicals. Once in the water, these toxins seep into the sediments and then into the plants. They’re ingested by the tiny animals that form the base of the food chain. Little fish eat plants and tiny animals, and bigger fish eat little fish. Heavy metals and fat-soluble pesticides can become concentrated in older fish, in predatory fish, and in fatty species of fish.
Mercury finds its way into our waterways as a by-product of fuel-burning and through household and industrial wastes. Bacteria in the water convert mercury into the toxic compound methylmercury. When we eat mercury-contaminated fish, we can develop mercury poisoning, which can damage the brain and the nervous system. The good news is that most of the time, the amount of mercury we get from fish is quite small. And the amount of mercury that you can potentially accumulate by eating fish three or four times a week is tiny compared to how much you could get by industrial or occupational exposure.
For healthy people, regular fish consumption poses virtually no risk to brain or nervous system function. It’s safe even for pregnant women and very young children, concludes a comprehensive study conducted by Dr. Philip Davidson and colleagues at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry in New York. Their findings, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, come from a nine-year study conducted in the Republic of the Seychelles, an island nation in the Indian Ocean, where most people eat fish nearly a dozen times a week and have mercury levelsabout ten times higher than those of most Americans. In fact, no harmful effects were seen in the nervous systems and behavior of children at mercury levels up to twenty times the average American level.
It is a worrisome fact that we live in a polluted world, and most of us are exposed to a host of toxic compounds. However, the greatest risk to your health is not from environmental pollutants, but from heart disease, diabetes, obesity, stroke, and the associated health disorders of metabolic syndrome. Eating fish protects you not only from these diseases but from all causes of death, including cancer.Because fish is one of our greatest sources of omega 3 fats, it can also help prevent depression and improve your mood, as my friend and colleague Dr. Joseph Hibbeln of the National Institutes of Health has shown. In short, fish should be part of your diet.
You should still be prudent when you shop for fish and seafood. Here are a few ways you can minimize your risk of eating contaminated fish:
• Avoid freshwater fish taken from lakes and rivers—particularly the Great Lakes and other polluted, industrialized areas.
• Choose fish that come from cleaner waters, such as the Pacific Ocean and in Alaska.
• Eat mainly smaller, nonpredatory species such as flounder, herring, sardines, sole, pollock, catfish, halibut, and clams.
• Eat big fish—swordfish, shark, and tuna—sparingly. These long-lived predatory fish tend to accumulate more mercury.
Fortunately, over the long run, the Paleo Diet’s many fruits and vegetables—and their disease-fighting antioxidants—can help prevent cancers and health problems that are a direct result of our environmentally polluted world.
How to Be a Savvy Shopper for Fish
Yet the possibility of environmental contamination isn’t the only thing you have to worry about when you eat fresh fish and seafood. Another, much bigger concern is simply whether the fish has gone bad. Improper handling and warm temperatures offer great potential for bacterial contamination and spoilage as fish makes its way from wherever it was caught to its eventual place of sale. The freshness clock begins to tick immediately: most fish have a shelf life of seven to twelve days once they’re out of the water. But fish often remain on a boat for five to six days after they’re caught. They may spend another day or two in transit from the processor / wholesaler to the marketplace—and then may sit on a retailer’s display counter for several days more before they are sold. If the fish get too warm during any stage of transport, they’ll spoil even faster. Bacteria are the main culprits in the spoilage process, but enzymes in the fish tissue and even atmospheric oxygen can contribute. Fortunately, spoiled fish release a pungent warning—a compound called “trimethylamine,” which causes the telltale fishy odor associated with bad fish.
Fresh fish is practically odorless. If a fish smells, spoilage is most likely well under way—so stay away from smelly fish. Here are some other tips:
• If you’re buying whole fish—and it passes the odor test—check the gills. If they’re bright red and moist, the fish is probably fine. If the gills are brown or clumped together, the fish has been on the shelf too long.
• Buy fish last. If you’re making a prolonged excursion to the grocery store, don’t get the fish first and then let it sit in the cart for an hour while you get everything else on the list. Select it, pay for it, go home—and immediately refrigerate the fish in its original package in the coldest part of your refrigerator. Try to eat the fish no more than a day after you buy it.
• To protect yourself from bacterial contamination, wash the fish in cold water and then cook it thoroughly, until it’s opaque and flakes easily with a fork. This is important: bacteria and parasites sometimes live in raw fish. But if you cook the fish completely, you’ll minimize your chances of getting sick—even if you inadvertently eat fish that has partially spoiled.
• Avoid eating raw fish of any kind for the reasons above.
• If you can’t eat fresh fish within a day or two of buying it, freeze it. Freezing completely stops bacterial growth. However, once the fish thaws, the same deterioration process starts again.
• Be careful when you buy fish labeled “previously frozen.” This may be once-fresh fish that wasn’t bought, went past its expiration date, was frozen by the retailer, and was thawed again for quick sale.
• Look for light-colored, cottony spots on the fish—they’re freezer burns. Sometimes frozen fish is allowed to thaw and then is refrozen, sometimes several times. Also look for ice crystal coatings—and walk away if you find them. These are fish you don’t want to buy. The highest-quality frozen fish are caught at sea and then quick-frozen individually on board the ship. (Often, there’s a label to this effect, saying that the fish was “frozen at sea.”)
What about Farm-Raised Fish?
It’s called “aquaculture.” Many species of fish and shellfish—including salmon, trout, catfish, tilapia, carp, eels, shrimp, and crayfish—are produced in closed waters and ponds and fed soy-and cereal-based chows. This is similar to the situation of feedlot-fed cattle. What they eat causes their own meat to be low or deficient in the beneficial omega 3 fatty acids that help make fish so good for us. Numerous scientific studies have demonstrated the omega 3 fatty acid inferiority of farmed fish compared to wild fish.
Farmed fish are usually cheaper to bring to market than wild fish. In the United States, trout—unless you have caught it yourself in the wild—is almost always farmed. Fresh, wild salmon has a marvelous flavor; most farmed salmon is bland-tasting. Decide for yourself. Note: Some farmed fish is labeled as such; most is not. If you don’t know, ask your grocer.
Should You Eat Canned Fish?
Canned tuna is America’s favorite fish by far. But the canning process causes a number of problems, the least of which is a loss of fresh flavor. This is what happens: the tuna is cooked at high temperatures and then sealed in a can containing salt, vegetable oil, water, or a combination of these three ingredients. The canning process removes 99 percent of the vitamin A found in fresh tuna, 97 percent of the vitamin B1, 86 percent of the vitamin B2, 45 percent of the niacin, and 59 percent of the vitamin B . It also increases the level of oxidized cholesterol in the fish, specifically a molecule called “25-hydroxycholesterol” that is extremely destructive to the linings of arterial blood vessels—so destructive that oxidized cholesterol is routinely fed to laboratory animals to accelerate artery clogging in order to test theories of heart disease. In animal models of atherosclerosis and heart disease, only 0.3 percent of the dietary cholesterol needs to be in the form of oxidized cholesterol to cause premature damage to the arterial linings.
To complete the degradation of this formerly healthy food, the tuna is packed with salt water or vegetable oils, which usually are high in omega 6 fatty acids. If you have the choice, always choose fresh or frozen fish over canned fish. If you do eat canned tuna, try to find brands that are packed in water only (no salt) or in more healthful oils, such as olive. (Most water-packed tuna contains added salt, but this can be removed by soaking the tuna in a shallow pan filled with tap water and then rinsing the fish in a colander under a running tap.)
Eggs: Good or Bad?
Eggs are healthful foods; our Paleolithic ancestors ate them seasonally, because they just weren’t available all the time. Several recent studies have shown that eating one egg a day has no discernible effect on your blood cholesterol level and does not increase your risk of heart disease. So go ahead—enjoy a couple of eggs for breakfast every few days.
There’s more good news on the egg front: you can buy chicken eggs that, like the wild bird eggs our ancestors ate, have high levels of omega 3 fatty acids. These enriched eggs—produced when chicken are fed omega 3-enriched feeds—are nutritionally superior and are available at many supermarkets and health food stores.
Because eggs are one of our richest dietary sources of cholesterol, the way they’re cooked influences the level of oxidized cholesterol—which can damage the cells lining your arteries and increase your risk of developing atherosclerosis and heart disease. High heat—like that of a griddle—produces more oxidized cholesterol than slow cooking: poaching, hard-boiling, or baking. When you have the choice, avoid fried eggs.
A recent study demonstrated that eggs from free-range hens had up to 1/3 less cholesterol, ¼ less saturated fat, 2/3 more vitamin A, 2 times more omega 3 fatty acids, 3 times more vitamin E, and 7 times more beta-carotene, than battery-cage eggs.
Similar to the situation with grass-fed, free-range meats, eggs produced from chickens allowed to live and forage freely are more nutritious and healthful than are their factory-produced counterparts. One of the first poultry farmers to recognize the superiority of free-range eggs was my friend George Bass. You can sample George’s eggs at his Web site for the Country Hen below. I also recommend that you visit Jo Robinson’s Web site, www.eatwild.com, to find a local producer of free-range eggs near your home.
How to Make the Most of Fruits and Vegetables
One of the first changes you’ll notice when you start the Paleo Diet is the large amounts of fresh fruits and veggies that you will need to keep on hand. Note: To help produce stay fresh longer, keep fruits and vegetables covered in plastic bags in your refrigerator.
The constant need to replenish your fresh produce supply gives you a good excuse to explore new venues. Try going to local farmers’ markets in your area. They’re wonderful sources of wholesome, fresh, and delicious fruits and vegetables. They may even inspire you to try growing your own vegetables at home. Also, take this opportunity to try out-of-the-ordinary fruits and vegetables (many are included in the recipes and meal plans in this book). You may want to look for exotic produce in Asian, Far Eastern, and ethnic markets if there are any in your community. As you gradually wean yourself from salty, sugary, and starchy foods, your taste buds will become attuned to the subtle flavors and textures of wonderful real foods.
To be on the safe side, be sure to wash all produce before you eat it (even if it comes in a bag that says it’s been washed). Like fish, fresh produce can contain trace residues of pesticides, heavy metals, or other pollutants. The Food and Drug Administration has monitored the levels of contaminants in the U.S. food supply for almost forty years in a program called the Total Diet Study (you can read about it on the Web at: vm.cfsan.fda.gov/~comm/tdstoc.html). The study, which began in 1961, periodically examines more than 230 foods from eight regional metropolitan areas to determine which hidden ingredients—and how much of them—we’re getting in our food. Since its inception, the study has found that our average daily intake of all toxic contaminants—including pesticides, industrial chemicals, heavy metals, and radioactive materials—is well below acceptable limits. Of course, it would be even better if our average daily intake of contaminants were zero, and we could rest assured that our food was completely free of any pollution—but it’s pretty safe to say that this will not happen any time soon.
The bottom line is that fruits and vegetables have much to offer—antioxidants, vitamins, minerals, and all the healing benefits we’ve discussed in this book. We can’t do without them; more than that, they need to play a starring role in our diet.
If you are concerned about pesticide exposure, artificial fertilizer, and other food safety issues, you may want to seek organically grown produce whenever possible, although it’s a bit more expensive
Nuts and Seeds
Nuts and seeds are a good adjunct to the Paleo Diet, but they’ve got a lot of fat, so you need to eat them in moderation. Too many fatty foods—even beneficial nuts and seeds—can rapidly upset your balance of essential dietary fats and derail your weight-loss progress. Throughout the book, we’ve talked about the omegas—omega 6 and omega 3. One kind—omega 6 fats—is not good for you when eaten in excess. The other kind—omega 3 fats—can make you healthier in many ways. The ideal ratio of omega 6 to omega 3 fats should be between 2 and 3 to 1. For most Americans, unfortunately, it’s between 10 and 15 to 1. All nuts and seeds—except for walnuts and possibly macadamia nuts—have unacceptably high omega 6 to omega 3 ratios. This is why you must eat them in small amounts.
Omega 6 to Omega 3 Fat Ratio in Nuts and Seeds
| Nut or Seed | Omega 6 to Omega 3 Ratio |
|---|---|
| Walnuts | 4.2 |
| Macadamia nuts | 6.3 |
| Pecans | 20.9 |
| Pine nuts | 31.6 |
| Cashews | 47.6 |
| Pistachio nuts | 51.9 |
| Hazelnuts (filberts) | 90.0 |
| Pumpkin seeds | 114.4 |
| Brazil nuts | 377.9 |
| Sunflower seeds | 472.9 |
| Almonds | extremely high (no detectable omega 3 fats) |
| Peanuts (not a nut but a legume) | extremely high (no detectable omega 3 fats) |
But nuts are part of the Paleo Diet. They’re high in monounsaturated fats and have been shown in numerous clinical trials to lower cholesterol. This is why they’re on the diet in moderate amounts, so that you can benefit from the good things nuts have to offer. But the high quantities of omega 6 fats in these nuts can also predispose you to heart disease—because they displace the omega 3 fats, which are known to prevent fatal heartbeat irregularities, decrease blood clotting, lower blood triglyceride levels, and reduce the inflammatory profile of prostaglandins and leukotrienes (hormonelike substances that control the inflammation process). Omega 3 fats have also been shown to lessen the symptoms of many inflammatory and autoimmune diseases, including arthritis and inflammatory bowel disease.
Peanuts are forbidden. As mentioned, they are not nuts at all; they’re legumes—and legumes contain lectins and other antinutrients that can adversely affect your health, particularly if you are suffering from an autoimmune disorder.
Important note: Many people are allergic to nuts, and pine nuts can be particularly troublesome for some people. Listen to your body carefully as you begin the Paleo Diet and fine-tune the diet to your specific health needs. Although nuts and seeds are true Paleo foods—and were certainly part of the diets of our ancient ancestors—they were not the staples.
When you shop for nuts:
• Try to buy raw, unsalted nuts. You can find them in their natural state at most supermarkets in the late summer and early fall when they come into season.
• If you don’t like cracking nuts, you can find packaged, hulled nuts at some supermarkets and most health food stores. However, read the package label. Hulled nuts are sometimes coated with trans fat-containing oils to increase their shelf life.
• When in doubt, go for walnuts. They have the best omega 6 to omega 3 ratio and are your healthiest choice for a snack food or to use in other dishes. Other nuts should be considered garnishes in salads and other dishes, rather than eaten in quantity.
Purchasing Oils
Vegetable oils were obviously not a component of any pre-agricultural or hunter-gatherer diet, simply because the technology to produce them did not exist. Oils made from walnuts, almonds, olives, sesame seeds, and flaxseeds were first produced using crude presses between 5,000 and 6,000 years ago. However, except for olive oil, most early oil use was for nonfood purposes, such as illumination, lubrication, and medicine. It wasn’t until the beginning of the twentieth century, with the advent of mechanically driven steel expellers and hexane extraction processes, that vegetable oils started to contribute significantly to the caloric content of the Western diet. Today vegetable oils used in cooking, salad oils, margarine, shortening, and processed foods supply 17.6 percent of the total daily energy intake in the U.S. diet. The enormous infusion of vegetable oils into the Western diet, starting in the early 1900s, represents the greatest single factor responsible for elevating the dietary omega 6 to omega 3 ratio to its current and unhealthful value of 10 to 1. In hunter-gatherer diets, the omega 6 to omega 3 ratio was closer to 2 to 1. If we use the evolutionary template exclusively, vegetable oils should probably constitute a minimal part of modern-day Paleo diets.
So, if this is the case, why should we not eliminate all vegetable oils from our diet?
I still believe that certain oils can be used to cook with and add flavor when making condiments, dressings, and marinades. Simply stated, there are four oils (flaxseed, walnut, olive, and avocado) that can promote health and facilitate your getting the correct balance of good fats into your diet. Because hunter-gatherers ate the entire carcasses of wild animals (tongue, eyes, brains, marrow, liver, gonads, intestines, kidneys, and so on) and relished fatty plant foods (nuts and seeds), they did not have to worry about the correct balance of fatty acids in their diet. It came out correctly in the wash.
For most of us, the thought of eating organs is not only repulsive, but is also not practical as we simply do not have access to wild game. Consequently, by eating lean meats, fish, and seafood, along with healthful oils, nuts, and seeds, you can get the correct balance of fatty acids in your diet.
As you can see from the table on page 134, only three vegetable oils have omega 6 to omega 3 ratios of less than 3. These are flaxseed (0.24), canola (2.0), and mustard seed (2.6). Although I originally recommended mustard seed oil in the first edition of The Paleo Diet, I can no longer make this recommendation because of its high erucic acid (a long-chain monounsaturated fatty acid) concentration of 41.2 percent. Consumption of large quantities of erucic acid in laboratory animals causes adverse changes in their heart structure and function and other organs.
This leaves only two vegetable oils (canola and flaxseed) that do not contribute to an elevated intake of omega 6 fatty acids. A number of epidemiological (population) studies have shown a higher risk of developing prostate cancer with an increased consumption of alpha linolenic acid (ALA), a major fatty acid found in both canola and flaxseed oil. However, epidemiological studies are notorious for their conflicting results. For every six studies that support one nutritional concept, you can often find half a dozen more that conclude precisely the opposite. Such is the case linking ALA and flaxseed oil to an increased prostate cancer risk. A series of the most recent epidemiological studies was unable to statistically show that ALA consumption increased prostate cancer risk. More important, in experiments in which animals were fed flaxseed oil, the flaxseed actually inhibited the growth and development of prostate cancer. The case supporting flaxseed oil as a promoter of prostate cancer is currently based solely on epidemiological evidence and therefore remains inconclusive because of the total lack of confirming experimental evidence. Because the majority of epidemiological studies support the notion that ALA is protective against cardiovascular disease, flaxseed oil should still be viewed as healthful.
Since the original publication of The Paleo Diet in 2002, I have reversed my view of canola oil and can no longer support its consumption or use. Let me explain why. Canola oil comes from the seeds of the rape plant (Brassica rapa or Brassica campestris), which is a close relative of broccoli, cabbage, Brussels sprouts, and kale. Clearly, humans have eaten cabbage and its relatives since prior to historical times, and I still strongly support the consumption of these health-promoting vegetables. The concentrated oil from the seeds of Brassica plants is another story.
In its original form, rape plants produced a seed oil that contained high concentrations (20 to 50 percent) of erucic acid (a monounsaturated fatty acid labeled 22:1n9), which I have previously explained is toxic and which causes a wide variety of pathological changes in laboratory animals. In the early 1970s, plant breeders from Canada developed a strain of rape plant that produced a seed with less than 2 percent erucic acid (hence the name canola oil). The erucic acid content of commercially available canola oil averages 0.6 percent. Despite its low erucic acid content, however, a number of experiments in the 1970s showed that even at low concentrations (2.0 percent and 0.88 percent), canola oil fed to rats could still produce minor heart scarring that was considered “pathological.”
A series of recent rat studies of low-erucic canola oil conducted by Dr. Ohara and colleagues at the Hatano Research Institute in Japan reported kidney injuries, as well as increases in blood sodium levels and abnormal changes to a hormone, aldosterone, that regulates blood pressure. Other negative effects of canola oil consumption in animals at 10 percent of calories include decreased litter sizes, behavioral changes, and liver injury. A number of recent human studies of canola/rapeseed oil by Dr. Poiikonen and colleagues at the University of Tempere in Finland have shown it to be a potent allergen in adults and children and indicate that it may cause allergic cross-reactions from other environmental allergens in children with atopic dermatitis (skin rashes).
Based on these up-to-date studies in both humans and animals, I prefer to be on the safe side and can no longer recommend canola oil.
Both olive oil and avocado oil are high (73.9 and 70.6 percent, respectively) in cholesterol-lowering monounsaturated fatty acids but have less than favorable omega 6 to omega 3 ratios of 11.7 and 13.5. Consequently, excessive consumption of both of these oils without adequate intake of long-chain omega 3 fatty acids (EPA plus DHA) will derail an otherwise healthy diet. I recommend that you get 1.0 to 2.0 grams of EPA and DHA per day in your diet from either fish or fish oil capsules. Because avocado oil is difficult to find and expensive, that pretty much leaves olive oil as the staple for cooking, salad dressings, and marinades.
If you can afford it, I recommend that you always choose extra-virgin olive oil, because this grade of oil is produced by physical means only, without chemical treatment, and it contains the highest concentrations of polyphenolic compounds, which protect against cancer, heart disease, and inflammation.
Although peanut oil has been promoted as a healthy, cholesterol-lowering oil because of its high monounsaturated fat content (46 percent of total fat), it has turned out to be one of the most atherogenic (artery-clogging) of all oils. In fact, it is routinely used to induce coronary artery atherosclerosis in monkeys and other laboratory animals. It’s not clear exactly why this happens. Some scientific evidence suggests that peanut lectins (proteins that bind to carbohydrates) may be responsible for this effect.
Because soybean oil also contains residual lectin activity (SBA) and maintains a marginal (7.5) omega 6 to omega 3 ratio, it can’t be recommended as a staple oil, either. A similar argument can be made for wheat germ oil, which has a marginal omega 6 to omega 3 ratio of 7.9 but also contains large quantities of the lectin WGA, one of the most widely studied and potentially most damaging of all the dietary lectins.
Coconut meat, oil, and milk are traditional foods of indigenous people who live in the tropics. These foods have high amounts of a saturated fat called lauric acid, which is known to elevate blood cholesterol concentrations—a risk factor for cardiovascular disease in modern Westernized populations. Paradoxically, traditional cultures that consume coconut foods have a minimal or nonexistent incidence of heart disease, stroke, or cardiovascular complications normally associated with eating high levels of saturated fats, such as the lauric acid found in coconut food products.
Lauric acid apparently exerts a protective effect in our bodies by eliminating gut bacteria that increase intestinal permeability, a risk factor for cardiovascular disease via heightened chronic low-level inflammation. Based on the evidence of traditional Pacific Islanders who consume coconut, it appears that this food does not present a risk for cardiovascular disease when included as a component of modern Paleo Diets. Let your palate go back to the islands and enjoy the delicious health benefits of this traditional plant food.
SALAD AND COOKING OILS
Spices
One of the key elements of the Paleo Diet is to cut way down on your use of salt—or, better yet, cut it out entirely. This doesn’t mean you need to eat bland, tasteless food—far from it. If you haven’t already plunged into the wonderful world of spices, now’s your chance.
Lemon crystals and lemon pepper are good replacements for salt, and they give food a mouthwatering zing. There are also several good salt substitutes, commercially available spice mixes designed to take the place of salt. Note: Check the labels; sometimes spice mixes contain cornstarch, hydrolyzed wheat proteins, or other grain and legume products.
Some people—particularly if they are suffering from an autoimmune disease—should stay away from spices made from chili peppers (cayenne pepper and paprika). This botanical family of spices contains a substance called “capsaicin.” Studies by Dr. Erika Jensen-Jarolim and colleagues at University Hospital in Vienna, Austria, have shown that capsaicin increases intestinal permeability and may play a role in the development and progression of certain autoimmune diseases. Again, let your body serve as your guide: if a spice seems to be irritating your system or causing problems, don’t use it.
The good news is that most spices are easily digestible and well tolerated and add subtle flavors and overtones to almost all dishes. They’ll make your food come alive.
Individualizing Your Diet
The starting point for the optimal Paleo Diet lies in our genes. In some respects, we’re all the same. We’ve all got the basic human genome, shaped by more than 2 million years of evolution and adapted to eat lean, wild animal meats and uncultivated fruits and vegetables. But we’re all different, too. Our own genetic differences ultimately influence how we react to certain foods or food types, or how much of a particular nutrient, vitamin, or mineral we need to maintain good health. Even though seafood should be a central part of the Paleo Diet, for example, it’s clearly out of the question for people who are allergic to it. If you have a nut, shellfish, or other food allergy, then obviously these foods cannot be part of your individualized program.
The National Academy of Sciences has provided DRIs (Dietary Reference Intakes) for vitamins and minerals. However, these one-size-fits-all guidelines aren’t necessarily perfect for everyone. For example, people who are exposed to extra environmental pollutants (say, cigarette smoke) have been shown to require extra antioxidant vitamins. Certain diseases and disorders are known to impair the body’s ability to absorb nutrients; pregnant women and breast-feeding mothers need more nutrients than other women do.
No universal dietary recommendations apply to everybody, even though we all have the same starting point—our evolutionary past.
Many people don’t even know that some foods—particularly, grains, dairy products, legumes, and yeast—are to blame for some of their health problems. They may not make the diet/health connection until they eliminate these foods and then reintroduce them. Listen to your body as you gradually return to the diet nature intended for us all. Find out what works for you and be sensible ; alter your diet so that you can live with it—but remember, the further you stray from the basic principles of the diet (lean animal protein, fresh fruits, and vegetables), the less likely you’ll be able to reap its health benefits.
Vitamins, Minerals, and Supplements
When we eat the foods that we’re genetically programmed to eat, we won’t develop nutritional deficiency diseases. As I discussed earlier, pellagra (niacin deficiency) and beriberi (vitamin B1 deficiency) have never been found in hunter-gatherers—modern or Paleolithic. In chapter 2 I showed how the vitamins and the minerals eaten every day on the Paleo Diet—a modern Paleo diet—far exceed the RDAs in almost every category. This diet is nutrient-rich by any standard, and it provides us with everything we need to be healthy.
This does not mean that people on the Paleo Diet don’t need supplements. You may choose to bolster your diet with certain supplements, including those discussed next.
Vitamin D
Except for fatty ocean fish, there is very little vitamin D in any commonly consumed natural (that is, not artificially fortified) foods. This wasn’t a major problem for our Paleolithic ancestors, who spent much of their time outdoors and got all the vitamin D they needed from sunlight. Today, for most of us, sunlight exposure is a hit-or-miss proposition. This is why, to prevent rickets and other vitamin D-deficiency diseases, processed foods such as milk and margarine are fortified with vitamin D.
Do you get enough sun? (“Enough” means about fifteen minutes a day.) If you don’t, and you’ve stopped eating margarine and milk, you should supplement your diet with this nutrient. The DRI for vitamin D is 200-600 IU (for “international units”). Because many studies have suggested a link between low vitamin D levels in the blood and a number of cancers—including breast, prostate, and colon cancers—you may want to boost your daily supplementation to 2,000 IU. However, this is not one of those “more is better” nutrients. Vitamin D is fat-soluble, which means it can accumulate in your tissues and eventually become toxic if you take too much of it. The tolerable upper limit for vitamin D in adults is 2,000 IU daily, although recent studies have challenged this value and suggest that a more accurate limit is 10,000 IU.
Here are the keys to healthy sun exposure:
• Build up sun time gradually (fifteen minutes or less at first, depending on your skin color and ability to tan).
• Never let your skin burn.
• Where it is possible, take the sun year round.
• Use sunscreens at first to prevent burning; look for sunscreens that block both ultraviolet A and ultraviolet B sunlight.
• However, because sunscreens also impair vitamin D and melanin production, as your tan develops, you can gradually reduce the level of sunscreen protection.
Antioxidants
Although our bodies are basically the same as those of our ancient ancestors, we live in a vastly different world. The pristine, unpolluted Paleolithic environment no longer exists; we are regularly exposed to numerous toxic substances that didn’t exist 100 years ago. The food we eat, the air we breathe, and the water we drink contain minuscule residues of pesticides and chemical and industrial contaminants. These pollutants are inescapable; they’re even found in remote parts of Antarctica and Greenland.
Nobody knows the effects of a lifetime exposure to these noxious agents. However, it’s clear that a well-functioning immune system—bolstered by antioxidant vitamins and minerals—may help protect you from a variety of environmentally dependent cancers and diseases. The medical literature is overflowing with studies showing the potential of supplemental antioxidants to reduce the risk of heart disease and many cancers.
The Paleo Diet is exceptionally rich in antioxidants—even with no supplementation. It contains, on average, more than 500 milligrams of vitamin C (more than nine times the RDA), more than 25 IU of vitamin E (more than three times the RDA), and more than 140 micrograms of selenium (more than 2.5 times the RDA). Also, because this diet is loaded with fresh fruits and vegetables, it’s high in beta-carotene and many other plant substances (phytochemicals) that protect against many types of cancer. But for some antioxidants, it may be beneficial to supplement your diet. These include:
• Vitamin E: Many of the beneficial effects of vitamin E have been shown to occur with pharmacological doses that cannot be achieved by diet alone. Because vitamin E is completely safe and has virtually no side effects, daily doses between 200 and 400 IU may provide additional disease protection.
• Vitamin C: Here, too, you may want to bring your daily level higher than you could reach with diet alone. Daily supplementation of 500 to 1,000 milligrams has been shown to improve immune function, lower cholesterol, and reduce the risk of some types of cancer.
• Selenium: Selenium may be one of our most important allies in preventing or waylaying the cancer process. In a randomized, double-blind study (the “gold standard” in medical research) of 1,312 older people, selenium doses of 200 micrograms reduced the overall incidence of cancer by 42 percent and cut cancer death rates in half. The selenium content of fruits and vegetables varies greatly, depending on how much selenium was in the soil where the produce was grown. To make sure you get ample amounts of selenium, you would do well to supplement your diet with 200 to 400 micrograms a day.
Fish Oil Capsules
Some people just don’t like fish or shellfish, no matter how it’s prepared. If you’re one of them, I recommend that you take daily fish oil capsules. There are two active ingredients, both fatty acids, in fish oil that produce its many beneficial effects—eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA). You should try to take 1 to 2 grams of EPA and DHA daily. Depending on the brand and the size of the capsules, you will need to take about four to eight capsules per day to get sufficient EPA and DHA. Regular fish oil supplementation will decrease your risk of cancer and heart disease and may reduce certain symptoms of autoimmune diseases and inflammatory disorders.
Food Availability and Preparation Issues
One of the keys to making this diet work is ensuring that your modern Paleo food is always available. Many of us have schedules away from home or at our jobs, where it is impossible to prepare or buy fresh, unadulterated fruits, veggies, and lean meats. This means you will need to prepare some of your food at home and bring it with you. But this isn’t a problem. For most people, lunch is the most common meal away from home, and “brown-bagging” lunch is the norm for many working people.
You don’t have to prepare three separate Paleo meals from scratch every single day. What works best for most people is to simply double or triple the size of the evening meal and then bring the leftovers for lunch. Put parts of your salad and main dish in a sealed container that night and take them with you the next morning. Toss in a piece of fresh fruit, and you’ve got a terrific lunch! You can also cook two or more main dishes in the evening, use one, and immediately refrigerate the other for use later in the week.
This same principle works for your condiments (salad dressings, salsas, marinades, dips, etc.). Mix up a big batch on the weekend or in the evening, put it in a container, and store it in the refrigerator until you need it. Nothing could be simpler.
Most supermarkets now stock precut, washed salad vegetables and mixes of lettuces. Completely mixed salads (spinach, Caesar, etc.) in sealed plastic bags without added dressing are also commonly available. These packaged veggies are great for people on the go who want to eat fresh foods but don’t have time to prepare them. So if time is of the essence, you can make a wonderful, healthful salad by simply opening a bag of cut, washed, and mixed salad greens. Try tossing in some cold shrimp, shredded crabmeat, and olive oil or dressing that you have made beforehand, and you’ve got another instant Paleo lunch.
Dining Out, Travel, and Peer Pressure
You’re invited over to a close friend’s house for dinner, and it’s spaghetti and meatballs. That’s okay, just this once. Your daughter baked you a triple-chocolate birthday cake and would be devastated if you didn’t eat at least a piece. That’s okay, just this once. Things happen—and a few occasional and minor dietary indiscretions won’t make much difference to your overall health if you follow the diet the rest of the time. However, if these indiscretions become the rule and not the exception, you will increasingly lose the healthful benefits and weight-loss effects of the Paleo Diet.
Dining Out
How can you make the Paleo Diet work in the real world? Do the best you can. When you dine out, it can be a challenge—or downright impossible—to follow the Paleo Diet to a T. In the real world, many restaurants build their menu around most of the foods you’re trying not to eat. Even though many restaurants now offer low-fat or vegetarian meals, few restaurants sponsor Paleo cuisine. In the best situations, you’ll be able to stick pretty close to the Paleo Diet; in the worst cases, you may have to throw in the towel.
However, most of the time, you should be able to pull it off with just a few transgressions. The key is “triage.” Assign your priorities based on urgency:
1. Your number one concern is to get a main dish that is not a starch-based food. Avoid pancakes for breakfast, for example, sandwiches for lunch, and pasta for dinner.
2. Try to choose lean meat or seafood, cooked in a simple manner—by baking, broiling, sautéing, roasting, poaching, or steaming—without added starches and fats.
3. Always try to get some fresh fruit or a nonstarchy vegetable at every meal.
4. Keep the meal as simple as you can; the fewer ingredients, the better.
Breakfast
Most breakfast restaurants serve fresh fruit and some form of eggs. Because fried and scrambled eggs are usually cooked with trans fat-containing margarine or shortening, order your eggs poached or hard-boiled. Or have an omelet filled with veggies—hold the cheese and skip the toast. A cup of coffee is okay. Sometimes you can find smoked salmon or fish for breakfast or shrimp-stuffed omelets; try to include healthful omega 3 fats whenever possible. A lean ham slice or pork chop or a lean breakfast steak is another option—but make sure that you also get a big bowl of fruit to balance the acid-producing protein load. Try to keep salt to a minimum (this is probably the most difficult aspect of dining out).
Lunch
Lunches are usually pretty easy, now that most restaurants offer salads, lean meats, and fish as entrées. If your salad comes with croutons, ignore them, and try to get an olive oil-based dressing. For dessert, order fresh fruit.
Dinner
Dinners out are usually fairly easy, too. Even pasta-heavy Italian restaurants usually have seafood or meat entrées. You can ask to have these dishes prepared without added flour or breading, skip the potatoes, and get a side order of steamed vegetables. Treat yourself to an occasional glass of wine with dinner. Japanese restaurants are a breeze. They almost always have fish, shellfish, or lean beef and plenty of steamed veggies; just skip the rice and the soy sauce (it’s far too salty, and most soy sauces are made with wheat). Chinese restaurants can also be dealt with deftly by avoiding dishes that are rich in sugary, salty sauces, such as sweet and sour pork and deep-fried “crispy” dishes. Go with stir-fried chicken dishes or, better yet, steamed crab or fish. Use the same strategy in ordering Chinese vegetable side dishes; ask your waiter or waitress to omit any sauces and just bring fresh steamed veggies. Mexican restaurants are a bit of a challenge, but again, with careful selections you can stick pretty closely to the Paleo Diet. Once in a while, there will be no choice; you’ll have to accept whatever food is available. In those cases, limit your portions.
When You Travel
You may choose to dine out, buy food and take it with you in a cooler, or buy it in supermarkets, grocery stores, and even roadside markets along the way. Fresh fruit and veggies are universally available, and they travel well in an ice-filled cooler. Try making your own beef jerky (see chapter 10); it’s delicious and filling, and it tastes great with fresh fruit. Hard-boiled eggs, cooked beforehand and stored in the cooler, can be indispensable for breakfasts on the road.
Instead of stopping where most traveling Americans do—at the first exit with a fast-food restaurant that looks fairly clean—drive a mile or two from the highway and find a supermarket. Most food stores have deli sections with premade salads, and many offer a salad bar. Apply the triage principle and do the best you can. For example, precooked chicken (roasted or rotisserie-cooked) is available at most supermarket deli counters and is an option in a pinch. Make sure to take the skin off before you eat it. If you didn’t bring any paper plates and plastic utensils, pick some up while you’re at the store. Water-packed tuna isn’t ideal, either, but it will do while you’re on the road.
Ask Your Friends and Family for Support
The support of your spouse, immediate family, and friends can make a world of difference in any big life change. Tell them what you’re doing and why—whether it’s to lose weight or to improve your health. Explain the logic and rationale of the Paleo Diet and share your successes with them. You don’t necessarily have to put the entire family on the diet, and many of the meals that you’ll be eating on this lifetime program of nutrition are not very different from the types of food you ate before. You can always include bread, rolls, or potatoes with your family meals and give family members the option of eating them. In nearly all public settings, unless you call it to their attention, most people won’t even realize that your diet has changed—until they notice your weight loss, increase in energy level, and improvement in health. Who knows? They may see the healthful changes you’re experiencing and want to join you.
The Paleo Diet is humanity’s normal diet. The abnormal diet, the odd diet, the out-of-the-ordinary diet is actually the grain-, dairy-, and processed food-based diet that currently pervades the Western world. It’s time for a change.
9
The Meal Plans for the Three Levels of the Paleo Diet
The Paleo Diet is a lifelong way of eating that will gradually restore your normal body weight, health, and well-being. If you follow the dietary guidelines and principles I have laid out, you will reap all the benefits that humanity’s original diet has to offer. Your health will immediately improve, and you will definitely begin to lose weight.
In this chapter, you’ll find three two-week meal plans. Any of them will work for you; the only difference is in the number of Open Meals. Level I allows you three Open Meals per week, Level II allows two per week, and Level III allows one. Just use the appropriate number of Open Meals for your level of the diet, and you’re set. Use these guidelines and the recipes in chapter 10 to help you embrace the diet that nature designed for us all.
If you are a beginner, you may want to adhere to Level I for two to four weeks before you move to Levels II and III—or, if you’re happy there, you may want to stay at this level of the diet. Note: You should try to include no more than one Open Meal on any given day, and do not try to make up for lost time with your meal choices. Use them as a safety net as you get used to humanity’s real foods: fresh, lean meats, seafood, and fruits and vegetables.
Should you definitely plan to move up to Levels II and III? Not necessarily. Depending on your nutritional and weight-loss goals, you may be happy with the results you achieve at Level I, particularly if you limit your consumption of the non-Paleo foods while consuming your Open Meals.
If you decide to jump into the Paleo Diet more rapidly by advancing to Level II, then you may substitute two Open Meals a week for any of the meals in the meal plans.
If you are one of those people who can make long-term behavioral changes abruptly and want to go cold turkey to the Stone Age, or if it is absolutely essential that you maximize the weight-loss and health benefits of this program, then you should adopt Level III. On Level III you should substitute one Open Meal a week for any of the meal plans.
However, most people do quite well at Level II, and this is the level I recommend for maintenance, except for dieters with chronic diseases, who may do better with long-term adherence to Level III.
Snacks
When our ancient ancestors were out foraging for food, they often snacked on some of the food they gathered, or they took portions of a previous meal along their journey. The snacks on the Paleo Diet—like those of our Paleo ancestors—are healthy, wholesome, and made of real food. Most of them are easily portable, so you may want to bring some of them along on your own daily journeys. You may eat snacks between meals whenever you become hungry.
• Fresh fruit of any kind
• Homemade beef jerky (without salt)
• Homemade dried salmon strips (without salt)
• Raw vegetables: carrots, celery sticks, cherry tomatoes, mushrooms, broccoli, cucumbers, cauliflower (with homemade guacamole or salsa dip)
• Cold skinless, broiled chicken breast
• Avocado or tomato slices
• Nuts: almonds, pecans, walnuts, filberts (limit to 4 ounces a day if you’re trying to lose weight)
• Dried fruit (limit to 2 ounces a day)
• Hard-boiled egg
• Cold slices of lean beef
• Peel-and-eat shrimp
• Unsalted sunflower seeds (limit to 4 ounces a day if you’re trying to lose weight)
Level I: Entry Level
The key to Level I is the 85-15 rule, and here’s how it works: Most people eat about twenty meals a week, plus snacks. On this beginning level, three of your meals—15 percent of the meals you eat all week—can be “open.” This way, you don’t have to give up your favorite foods. Again, the flexibility of the Paleo Diet allows you to cheat occasionally without losing the overall benefits of the diet. The three Open Meals provide a good opportunity to taste some of the foods you may miss the most.
There is great potential for abuse here, and you should do your best to avoid it. Do not consider these Open Meals as your chance to pig out on forbidden foods. For example, having two pints of Ben & Jerry’s Chunky Monkey ice cream for lunch would be a bad move and self-defeating. But if you’re invited to a party or go out to eat with friends, the Open Meal is your chance to indulge a bit. A single scoop of Chunky Monkey won’t hurt, particularly if you’ve been on the diet all week. Or eat a slice of toast with your breakfast or have some potatoes with your dinner entrée. But again, don’t eat six slices of toast or a pound of mashed potatoes. The basic idea is to ease the feeling of deprivation that generally accompanies the start of any change in diet. If you handle these Open Meals wisely—treating yourself, but not to excess—you’ll soon find that you don’t need to cheat at all.
At first, many people find it difficult to give up bread, cereals, and dairy products. But when you cut down on these foods gradually, you’ll eventually be able to replace them with more healthful fruits and vegetables. With Level I, you may want to use some “transitional” condiments. These contain sugar and salt but are low in fat. As you become accustomed to your new eating plan, you’ll want to reduce or eliminate them. Transitional condiments include:
• Low-fat salad dressings. Use these in moderation and read the labels. Stay away from brands that contain large amounts of corn syrup or salt.
• Commercial sauces. Mustard, hot sauces, prepared salsa. Note: No catsup (except for the Paleo version, the recipe for which is included in chapter 10); regular catsup is too high in salt and fructose.
If you are a coffee, beer, or wine drinker, you may continue to enjoy these non-Paleo beverages in moderation, working toward cutting back on them as you become accustomed to the Paleo Diet. Transitional beverages include:
• Sugar-free soft drinks. Use these in moderation. All of them contain artificial sweeteners, which are best left out of your diet.
• Alcoholic beverages. Use these in moderation.
• Coffee. Use it in moderation. Excessive caffeine is associated with a number of illnesses and health problems.
Sample Two-Week Meal Plan for Level I
| SUNDAY | Breakfast: | |
| Open | ||
| Lunch: | ||
| Almond Chicken Salad* | ||
| Herbal tea | ||
| Dinner: | ||
| Tomato and avocado slices | ||
| Grilled skinless turkey breast | ||
| Steamed broccoli, carrots, and artichoke | ||
| Bowl of fresh blueberries, raisins, and almonds | ||
| Water with lemon slice | ||
| Snack: | ||
| Basic Beef Jerky,* celery sticks | ||
| MONDAY | Breakfast: | |
| Bowl of diced apples, shredded carrots, and raisins | ||
| Poached eggs | ||
| Cup of decaffeinated coffee | ||
| Lunch: | ||
| Brockway Tuna Salad* | ||
| Handful of almonds | ||
| Mineral water | ||
| Dinner: | ||
| Escargots (prepared without butter) | ||
| Tossed green salad | ||
| Broiled halibut steak with lemon juice and dill | ||
| Steamed asparagus | ||
| Sliced. kiwi fruit and tangerine wedges | ||
| Glass of dry white wine | ||
| Snack: | ||
| cold lean beef slices, carrot sticks | ||
| TUESDAY | Breakfast: | |
| Cantaloupe, strawberries | ||
| Broiled lean pork chops | ||
| Herbal tea | ||
| Lunch: | ||
| Spinach salad with choice of Paleo dressing* | ||
| Broiled orange roughy with fresh orange juice and oregano | ||
| Steamed cauliflower | ||
| Apple | ||
| Mineral water | ||
| Dinner: | ||
| Paleo Zucchini Soup* | ||
| Slow-Cooked Veal with Salsa* | ||
| Figs | ||
| Iced tea | ||
| Snack : | ||
| hard-boiled eggs, walnuts, raisins | ||
| WEDNESDAY | Breakfast: | |
| Grapefruit | ||
| Strawberries with blackberries | ||
| Cold leftover Veal with Salsa* | ||
| Cup of decaffeinated coffee | ||
| Lunch: | ||
| Open | ||
| Dinner: | ||
| Avocado and tomato slices | ||
| Oysters on the half shell | ||
| Altamira Stuffed Chicken* | ||
| Ratatouille* | ||
| Fresh boysenberries, raisins, and almonds | ||
| Cup of decaffeinated coffee | ||
| Snack: | ||
| mango, unsalted macadamia nuts, Dried Salmon* | ||
| THURSDAY | Breakfast: | |
| Raspberries with walnuts | ||
| Scrambled eggs with a small beefsteak | ||
| Herbal tea | ||
| Lunch: | ||
| Lime and Dill Crab* | ||
| Figs and fresh nectarines | ||
| Iced tea | ||
| Dinner: | ||
| Spicy Tomato Soup* | ||
| Green salad with black olives (rinsed of salt) | ||
| Burgundy Walnut Beef Roast* | ||
| Steamed cauliflower with lemon juice and paprika | ||
| Fresh peaches | ||
| Glass of red wine | ||
| Snack: | ||
| cold chicken breast, cherry tomatoes, celery sticks | ||
| FRIDAY | Breakfast: | |
| Blueberries and cantaloupe | ||
| Cold crab legs | ||
| Water with lemon | ||
| Lunch: | ||
| Gingery Chicken and Veggies* | ||
| Tomato/black olive (rinsed of salt), green salad, and Anaheim Cilantro Salsa* dressing | ||
| Iced tea | ||
| Dinner: | ||
| Open | ||
| Snack: | ||
| hard-boiled eggs, cold broiled salmon steak | ||
| SATURDAY | Breakfast: | |
| Casaba melon | ||
| Cold chicken breasts | ||
| Herbal tea | ||
| Lunch: | ||
| Tahoe Shrimp Salad* | ||
| Melon slices and strawberries | ||
| Sugar-free soda | ||
| Dinner: | ||
| Cold mackerel | ||
| Tomato and cucumber wedges with olive oil and lemon juice | ||
| Auroch Beef Cabbage Rolls* | ||
| Chopped pecans, raspberries, and Medjool dates | ||
| Water with lemon wedge | ||
| Snack: | ||
| Basic Beef Jerky,* apple slices | ||
| SUNDAY | Breakfast: | |
| Bowl of sliced bananas, strawberries, and walnuts | ||
| Cup of decaffeinated coffee | ||
| Lunch: | ||
| Waldorf Salad* | ||
| Apple | ||
| Water and lemon juice | ||
| Dinner: | ||
| Open | ||
| Snack: | ||
| Guava, dried apricots, kiwi fruit, Dried Salmon* | ||
| MONDAY | Breakfast: | |
| Cantaloupe Stuffed with Blackberries and Pecans* | ||
| Herbal tea | ||
| Lunch: | ||
| Spinach Salad à la Cordani* | ||
| Orange sections | ||
| Mineral water | ||
| Dinner: | ||
| Chicken Vegetable Soup* | ||
| Marinated Mushrooms* | ||
| Omega Meatballs* | ||
| Baked Walnut-Cinnamon Apples* | ||
| Iced tea | ||
| Snack: | ||
| Spicy Beef Jerky,* dried apricots without sulfur | ||
| TUESDAY | Breakfast: | |
| Fresh or frozen blackberries and raspberries | ||
| Trout sautéed in olive oil and lemon juice | ||
| Water with lemon wedge | ||
| Lunch: | ||
| Turkey burgers | ||
| Tossed green salad with olive oil and lemon juice | ||
| Apple slices with lemon juice and mint leaves | ||
| Iced tea | ||
| Dinner: | ||
| Tossed green salad with flaxseed oil and lemon juice | ||
| Paleo Zucchini Soup* | ||
| Baked Tomatoes* | ||
| Savory Steamed Mussels* | ||
| Fresh melon | ||
| Mineral water | ||
| Snack: | ||
| fresh peaches, peel-and-eat shrimp, walnuts | ||
| WEDNESDAY | Breakfast: | |
| Fresh or frozen strawberries and/or blueberries | ||
| Grilled lean venison sausage | ||
| Herbal tea | ||
| Lunch: | ||
| Open | ||
| Dinner: | ||
| Celery and carrot sticks dipped in Guacamole Fiesta* | ||
| Spicy Tomato Soup* | ||
| Steamed asparagus | ||
| Sautéed Rocky Mountain Chicken Livers* | ||
| Pomegranate | ||
| Cup of decaffeinated coffee | ||
| Snack: | ||
| hard-boiled egg, unsalted macadamia nuts | ||
| THURSDAY | Breakfast: | |
| Fresh plums | ||
| Small lean beefsteak covered with Peach Salsa* | ||
| Cup of decaffeinated coffee | ||
| Lunch: | ||
| Gazpacho* | ||
| Shrimp-Stuffed Avocado* | ||
| Apple | ||
| Iced tea | ||
| Dinner: | ||
| Tomato, cucumber, and red onion salad with olive oil | ||
| Red Snapper in Snappy Sauce* | ||
| Carrot-Mushroom Stir-Fry* | ||
| Peach-Almond Delight* | ||
| Glass of dry white wine or mineral water | ||
| Snack: | ||
| cold crab legs, tomato quarters | ||
| FRIDAY | Breakfast: | |
| Grapefruit | ||
| Scrambled Basil Eggs Topped with Salsa* | ||
| Herbal tea | ||
| Lunch: | ||
| Tossed green salad with olive oil and lemon juice | ||
| Paleo-Correct Meat Loaf* | ||
| Glass of lemon water | ||
| Dinner: | ||
| Marinated Mushrooms* | ||
| Altamira Stuffed Chicken* | ||
| Spicy Stuffed Squash* | ||
| Baked Walnut-Cinnamon Apples* | ||
| Mineral water | ||
| Snack: | ||
| sliced cold turkey breasts, sunflower seeds, hard-boiled eggs | ||
| SATURDAY | Breakfast: | |
| Open | ||
| Lunch: | ||
| Broiled Tenderloin of Pork with Spicy Rub* | ||
| Honeydew melon | ||
| Herbal tea | ||
| Dinner: | ||
| Waldorf Salad* | ||
| Chicken Cacciatore* | ||
| Steamed broccoli with lemon juice | ||
| 2 or 3 Medjool dates | ||
| Diet soda | ||
| Snack: | ||
| carrot and celery sticks, dried pears, walnuts | ||
| * See recipes in chapter 10. | ||
Level II: Maintenance Level
Level II of the Paleo Diet is structured around the 90-10 split. Two Open Meals are permitted each week; the rest of your meals are made up of modern Paleo foods. At this level, you should restrict or eliminate all of the transitional foods, except during your two Open Meals. As in Level I, all snacks should be chosen from the list of Paleo snacks (see “snacks” near the beginning of this chapter). Many people do quite well at this level and find that there’s no need to move to the next level unless weight loss or health considerations are paramount.
Sample Two-Week Meal Plan for Level II
| SUNDAY | Breakfast: | Open |
| Lunch: | ||
| Beef and Spinach Scramble* | ||
| Herbal tea | ||
| Dinner: | ||
| Tomato wedges and cucumber slices dipped in flaxseed oil | ||
| Salmon Steaks in Curry Sauce* | ||
| Steamed brussels sprouts | ||
| Tangerines | ||
| Mineral water | ||
| Snack: | apple with Spicy Beef Jerky* | |
| MONDAY | Breakfast: | |
| Half a cantaloupe, strawberries | ||
| Cold halibut steak | ||
| Herbal tea | ||
| Lunch: | ||
| Brockway Tuna Salad* | ||
| Tangerine | ||
| Water with lemon | ||
| Dinner: | ||
| Tomato and cucumber slices with Veggie Dip* | ||
| Omega Meatballs* | ||
| Steamed carrots and cauliflower with dill and paprika | ||
| Kiwi fruit and strawberries with walnut pieces | ||
| Iced herbal tea | ||
| Snack: | Spicy Beef Jerky,* celery sticks | |
| TUESDAY | Breakfast: | |
| Grapefruit | ||
| Two-egg (omega 3-enriched) omelet with avocado, scallion, and tomato filling cooked in olive oil | ||
| Herbal tea | ||
| Lunch: | ||
| Gingery Chicken and Veggies* | ||
| Apple and walnuts | ||
| Diet soda | ||
| Dinner: | ||
| Tomato wedges | ||
| Artichoke leaves dipped in Omega 3 Mayonnaise* | ||
| Tossed green salad with flaxseed oil and lemon juice | ||
| Salmon Steaks in Curry Sauce* | ||
| Fresh or frozen berries | ||
| Glass of nonalcoholic wine | ||
| Snack: | carrot sticks, sliced zucchini, cold boiled shrimp | |
| WEDNESDAY | Breakfast: | Open |
| Lunch: | ||
| Gazpacho* | ||
| Cajun Catfish Bake* | ||
| Fresh peaches | ||
| Herbal tea | ||
| Dinner: | ||
| Chicken Vegetable Soup* | ||
| Ambrosia Salad* | ||
| Barbecued Alaskan Shrimp* | ||
| Fresh blackberries | ||
| Glass of ice water and lemon wedge | ||
| Snack: | walnuts and raisins, hard-boiled egg | |
| THURSDAY | Breakfast: | |
| Fresh pineapple slices | ||
| Broiled small breakfast steak covered with Anaheim Cilantro Salsa* | ||
| Herbal tea | ||
| Lunch: | ||
| Spinach Salad with Crabmeat* | ||
| Fresh oranges | ||
| Mineral water | ||
| Dinner: | ||
| Butter Leaf Avocado Salad* | ||
| Baked Haddock Italiano* | ||
| Steamed summer squash with lemon pepper and paprika | ||
| Fresh Cinnamon Applesauce* | ||
| Water with lemon slice | ||
| Snack: | cold chicken breasts, celery and carrot sticks | |
| FRIDAY | Breakfast: | |
| Pink grapefruit | ||
| Chilled steamed prawns | ||
| Cup of decaffeinated coffee | ||
| Lunch: | ||
| Tossed green salad with Omega 3 Russian Dressing* | ||
| Grilled lean pork chops covered with Raspberry Barbecue Sauce* | ||
| Mineral water | ||
| Dinner: | Open | |
| Snack: | cucumber slices, cold lean beef slices | |
| SATURDAY | Breakfast: | |
| Fresh or frozen strawberries | ||
| Two-egg (omega 3-enriched) omelet stuffed with spinach, mushrooms, and onions sautéed in olive oil | ||
| Water with fresh lemon wedge | ||
| Lunch: | ||
| Kenny’s Barbecued Spicy Chicken* | ||
| Steamed vegetables | ||
| Fresh fruit | ||
| Diet soda | ||
| Dinner: | ||
| Marinated Mushrooms* | ||
| Red Snapper in Snappy Sauce* | ||
| Spicy Stuffed Squash* | ||
| Baked Walnut-Cinnamon Apples* | ||
| Glass of Sancerre wine | ||
| Snack: | Basic Beef Jerky,* dried apple slices | |
| SUNDAY | Breakfast: | |
| Honeydew melon and fresh blueberries covered with walnuts | ||
| Chilled steamed crab legs | ||
| Cup of decaffeinated coffee | ||
| Lunch: | ||
| Tossed green salad with Omega 3 Russian Salad Dressing* | ||
| Broiled flounder with lemon juice and dill | ||
| Glass of nonalcoholic cabernet sauvignon wine | ||
| Dinner: | ||
| Tomato and avocado wedges with garlic and cayenne powders | ||
| Sicilian Skillet Veal Chops* | ||
| Steamed cauliflower served with lemon juice | ||
| Carrot sticks | ||
| Strawberry-Blueberry Horizon* | ||
| Iced herbal tea | ||
| Snack: | celery and carrot sticks dipped in Veggie Dip,* unsalted macadamia nuts | |
| MONDAY | Breakfast: | |
| Kyle’s Apple Breakfast* | ||
| Cold sliced turkey breast | ||
| Herbal tea | ||
| Lunch: | ||
| Auroch Beef Cabbage Rolls* | ||
| Fresh fruit | ||
| Iced herbal tea | ||
| Dinner: | ||
| Gazpacho* | ||
| Mackerel steaks with dill and lemon juice | ||
| Steamed asparagus with lemon juice | ||
| Fresh fruit | ||
| Glass of nonalcoholic wine | ||
| Snack: | Spicy Beef Jerky,* dried apricots without sulfur | |
| TUESDAY | Breakfast: | |
| Fresh orange slices | ||
| Scrambled Basil Eggs Topped with Salsa* | ||
| Cup of decaffeinated coffee | ||
| Lunch: | ||
| Carrot Salad* | ||
| Salmon Steaks in Curry Sauce* | ||
| Mineral water | ||
| Dinner: | ||
| Baked Tomatoes* | ||
| Rocky Mountain Elk Steaks* | ||
| Walnut Broccoli with Carrots* | ||
| Almost Frozen Mashed Bananas* | ||
| Ice water | ||
| Snack: | Dried Salmon,* kiwi fruit, celery sticks | |
| WEDNESDAY | Breakfast: | |
| Fresh papaya | ||
| Pork Chops Stuffed with Chicken Livers* | ||
| Ice water with lime wedge | ||
| Lunch: | Open | |
| Dinner: | ||
| Tossed green salad with olive oil and lemon juice | ||
| Burgundy Walnut Beef Roast* | ||
| Steamed orange peppers and onions | ||
| Peach-Almond Delight* | ||
| Iced tea | ||
| Snack: | cold trout, slices of Vidalia or Maui sweet onions, oranges | |
| THURSDAY | Breakfast: | |
| Grapefruit | ||
| Cold beef slices | ||
| Cup of decaffeinated coffee | ||
| Lunch: | ||
| Spinach salad with shrimp | ||
| Apple slices with lemon juice | ||
| Herbal tea | ||
| Dinner: | ||
| Tossed green salad dressed with flaxseed oil and lemon juice | ||
| Paleo Zucchini Soup* | ||
| Broiled chicken breasts covered with Peach Salsa* | ||
| Fresh Cinnamon Applesauce* | ||
| Iced tea | ||
| Snack: | walnuts, grapes, cherry tomatoes | |
| FRIDAY | Breakfast: | |
| Cantaloupe | ||
| Poached Eggs with Peach Salsa* | ||
| Herbal tea | ||
| Lunch: Steamed | ||
| Tossed green salad with Omega 3 Russian Dressing* | ||
| Lime and Dill Crab* | ||
| carrots | ||
| Water with lemon wedge | ||
| Dinner: | ||
| Chicken Vegetable Soup* | ||
| Paleo-Correct Meat Loaf* | ||
| Avocado and tomato slices | ||
| Steamed broccoli | ||
| Fresh peaches | ||
| Glass of Pinot Noir wine | ||
| Snack: | Peel-and-eat shrimp, celery sticks, pecans | |
| SATURDAY | Breakfast: | |
| Citrus bowl (grapefruit, orange, and tangerine sections) | ||
| Cold Paleo-Correct Meat Loaf* (left over from dinner) | ||
| Herbal tea | ||
| Lunch: | ||
| Tomato, cucumber, purple onion salad with olive oil | ||
| Beef and Spinach Scramble* | ||
| Mineral water | ||
| Dinner: | ||
| Sliced cucumber and radish tray | ||
| Chez Lorraine’s Baked Salmon* | ||
| Steamed asparagus | ||
| Cup Pecans, raisins, and blueberries | ||
| of decaffeinated coffee | ||
| Snack: | cold chicken breasts, sunflower seeds, dried pear slices | |
Level III: Maximal Weight Loss Level
At Level III, it’s the 95-5 rule—with one Open Meal a week, and the balance of meals made up of all the delicious modern Paleo meals I’ve discussed in this chapter. At this level, you should restrict or eliminate all the transitional foods, except during your Open Meals. As in Levels I and II, all snacks should be chosen from the list of Paleo Snacks. This is the highest level, designed for the true Paleo Diet aficionado who wants to maximize health and well-being, or for individuals suffering from actual obesity or high levels of chronic disease who need to maximize the therapeutic effects of the diet.
Sample Two-Week Meal Plan for Level III
| SUNDAY | Breakfast: | Open |
| Lunch: | ||
| Tossed green salad with lemon juice and olive oil dressing | ||
| Savory Steamed Mussels* | ||
| Mineral water | ||
| Dinner: | ||
| Tomato and avocado slices | ||
| Altamira Stuffed Chicken* | ||
| Steamed Swiss chard and carrots | ||
| Steamed artichoke | ||
| Bowl of fresh blueberries, raisins, and almonds | ||
| Mineral water | ||
| Snack: | Basic Beef Jerky,* carrot sticks | |
| MONDAY | Breakfast: | |
| Bowl of diced apples, shredded carrots, and raisins with cinnamon | ||
| Poached eggs | ||
| Cup of decaffeinated coffee | ||
| Lunch: | ||
| Brockway Tuna Salad* | ||
| Handful of walnuts | ||
| Mineral water | ||
| Dinner: | ||
| Peel-and-eat shrimp | ||
| Tossed green salad | ||
| Chez Lorraine’s Baked Salmon* | ||
| Steamed asparagus with fresh-squeezed lemon | ||
| Sliced kiwi fruit and strawberries | ||
| Diet soda | ||
| Snack: | cold lean beef slices, celery sticks | |
| TUESDAY | Breakfast: | |
| Honeydew melon, blackberries | ||
| Broiled lean pork chops | ||
| Herbal tea | ||
| Lunch: | ||
| Waldorf Salad* | ||
| Broiled halibut steak with lime juice | ||
| Steamed cauliflower | ||
| Apple | ||
| Mineral water | ||
| Dinner: | ||
| Tossed green salad with scallions and Figs cucumbers | ||
| Chicken Vegetable Soup* | ||
| Stir-Fried Beef with Vegetables* | ||
| Figs and walnuts | ||
| Iced tea | ||
| Snack: | hard-boiled eggs, pecans, raisins | |
| WEDNESDAY | Breakfast: | |
| Strawberries and apricots | ||
| Zesty Shrimp-Avocado Omelet* | ||
| Cup of decaffeinated coffee | ||
| Lunch: | ||
| Cucumber and tomato slices with Veggie Dip* | ||
| Steamed crab | ||
| Dried apricots | ||
| Mineral water | ||
| Dinner: | ||
| Oysters on the half shell | ||
| Cucumber slices dipped in Guacamole Fiesta* | ||
| Altamira Stuffed Chicken* | ||
| Ratatouille* | ||
| Bowl of fresh boysenberries, raisins, and almonds | ||
| Glass of nonalcoholic dry white wine | ||
| Snack: | papaya, walnuts, Spicy Beef Jerky* | |
| THURSDAY | Breakfast: | |
| Strawberries | ||
| Small beefsteak with Peach Salsa* | ||
| Herbal tea | ||
| Lunch: | ||
| Tossed green salad with flaxseed oil and lemon juice | ||
| Sand Harbor Baked Cod* | ||
| Medjool dates and fresh nectarines | ||
| Iced tea | ||
| Dinner: | ||
| Marinated Mushrooms* | ||
| Green salad with olive oil and lemon juice | ||
| Broiled Tenderloin of Pork with Spicy Rub* | ||
| Steamed cabbage with lemon juice and paprika | ||
| Baked Walnut-Cinnamon Apples* | ||
| Glass of ice water | ||
| Snack: | cold chicken breast, cantaloupe | |
| FRIDAY | Breakfast: | |
| Fresh or frozen blueberries and cantaloupe | ||
| Cold steamed king crab legs | ||
| Water with lemon | ||
| Lunch: | ||
| Green salad with avocado, quartered tomatoes, and black olives (rinsed of salt) dressed with Anaheim Cilantro Salsa* | ||
| Gingery Chicken and Veggies* | ||
| Apple | ||
| Mineral water | ||
| Dinner: | ||
| Spinach salad with walnuts and flaxseed oil dressing | ||
| Cold trout | ||
| Baked Tomatoes* | ||
| Chopped pecans, raspberries, and Medjool dates | ||
| Mineral water | ||
| Snack: | hard-boiled egg, cold prawns | |
| SATURDAY | Breakfast: | |
| Cold chicken breasts covered with Anaheim Cilantro Salsa* | ||
| Watermelon | ||
| Herbal tea | ||
| Lunch: | ||
| Tahoe Shrimp Salad* | ||
| Melon slices and strawberries | ||
| Sugar-free Diet 7-Up | ||
| Dinner: | ||
| Carrot, radish, cherry tomato, sliced cucumber tray | ||
| Baked Haddock Italiano* | ||
| Steamed asparagus | ||
| Almonds, raisins, and peaches | ||
| Mineral water | ||
| Snack: | Basic Beef Jerky,* oranges | |
| SUNDAY | Breakfast: | |
| Bowl of sliced banana, pears, walnuts | ||
| Soft-boiled eggs | ||
| Cup of decaffeinated coffee | ||
| Lunch: | ||
| Tossed green salad dressed with olive oil and lemon juice | ||
| Red Snapper in Snappy Sauce* | ||
| Apple slices with lemon juice | ||
| Mineral water | ||
| Dinner: | ||
| Ambrosia Salad* | ||
| Broiled lobster tails with olive oil and fresh pepper | ||
| Steamed artichoke with lemon juice | ||
| Strawberry-Blueberry Horizon* | ||
| Cup of decaffeinated coffee | ||
| Snack: | mango, kiwi fruit, Dried Salmon* | |
| MONDAY | Breakfast: | |
| Cantaloupe Stuffed with Blackberries and Pecans* | ||
| Cold leftover lobster | ||
| Herbal tea | ||
| Lunch: | ||
| Tossed green salad with olive oil and lemon juice | ||
| Kenny’s Barbecued Spicy Chicken* | ||
| Tangerine sections | ||
| Glass of nonalcoholic chardonnay | ||
| Dinner: | ||
| Marinated Mushrooms* | ||
| Chicken Vegetable Soup* | ||
| London broil sprinkled with fresh ground pepper and garlic powder | ||
| Spicy Stuffed Squash* | ||
| Peach-Almond Delight* | ||
| Iced tea | ||
| Snack: | Kyle’s Apple Breakfast,* Spicy Beef Jerky* | |
| TUESDAY | Breakfast: | |
| Grapefruit | ||
| Cold leftover London broil | ||
| Herbal tea | ||
| Lunch: | ||
| Gazpacho* | ||
| Broiled turkey burgers | ||
| Sliced star fruit | ||
| Mineral water | ||
| Dinner: | ||
| Butter Leaf Avocado Salad* | ||
| Cajun Catfish Bake* | ||
| Steamed collard greens | ||
| Cantaloupe Stuffed with Blackberries and Pecans* | ||
| Glass of mineral water | ||
| Snack: | peel-and-eat shrimp, cauliflower florets, pecans | |
| WEDNESDAY | Breakfast: | |
| Fresh mangos and papayas | ||
| Lean breakfast beefsteak smothered with Peach Salsa* | ||
| Herbal tea | ||
| Lunch: | ||
| Celery and carrot sticks dipped in Guacamole Fiesta* | ||
| Paleo Zucchini Soup* | ||
| Sautéed Rocky Mountain Chicken Livers* | ||
| Fresh blueberries | ||
| Water with lemon slice | ||
| Dinner: | ||
| Spinach Salad à la Cordani* | ||
| Tender Buffalo Roast* | ||
| Steamed asparagus and carrots with lemon juice and garlic powder | ||
| Fresh Cinnamon Applesauce* | ||
| Cup of decaffeinated coffee | ||
| Snack: | hard-boiled egg, walnuts, raisins | |
| THURSDAY | Breakfast: | |
| Fresh plums | ||
| Cold leftover Tender Buffalo Roast* slices covered with fresh Anaheim Cilantro Salsa* | ||
| Lemon water | ||
| Lunch: | ||
| Spicy Tomato Soup* | ||
| Shrimp-Stuffed Avocado* | ||
| Watermelon | ||
| Diet soda | ||
| Dinner: | ||
| Tomato, cucumber, and purple onion salad with olive oil | ||
| Roast Pheasant with Fruit and Nut Stuffing* | ||
| Carrot-Mushroom Stir-Fry* | ||
| Waldorf Salad* | ||
| Glass of red wine or mineral water | ||
| Snack: | cold, lean steak slices; tomato quarters | |
| FRIDAY | Breakfast: | |
| Cantaloupe | ||
| Eggs scrambled in olive oil and basil | ||
| Herbal tea | ||
| Lunch: | ||
| Almond Chicken Salad* | ||
| Glass of lemon water | ||
| Dinner: | ||
| Marinated Mushrooms* | ||
| Isola Baked Pork Chops* | ||
| Ratatouille* | ||
| Baked Walnut-Cinnamon Apples* | ||
| Diet soda | ||
| Snack: | cold chicken breasts, sunflower seeds | |
| SATURDAY | Breakfast: | |
| Fresh or frozen strawberries | ||
| Poached eggs, cold prawns | ||
| Tea | ||
| Lunch: | Open | |
| Dinner: | ||
| Tossed green salad with flaxseed oil and lemon juice | ||
| Barbecued Venison Steaks with Herbs* | ||
| Steamed summer squash with lemon juice | ||
| Walnut Broccoli with Carrots* | ||
| 2 or 3 Medjool dates | ||
| Ice water | ||
| Snack: | carrot and celery sticks, raisins, walnuts |
So there you have it—three delicious and healthful meal plans (Level I: three Open Meals per week; Level II: two Open Meals per week; and Level III: one Open Meal per week). Use these meal plans to familiarize yourself with Paleo Diet principles. Once you have become a seasoned Paleo Dieter, use your own creativity and ingenuity to develop your own scrumptious Paleo feasts!
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