Paleo Diet Basics

Why Paleo? A couple of reasons the paleo diet is so effective for so many health conditions- Nutrient Density and Toxin Avoidance. I know some people see the paleo diet as “eating as our ancestors ate”, but I don’t necessarily see it that way. We have access to many things that hunter gatherers wouldn’t, like fruits and vegetables grown all over the world, in and out of season, and amounts of foods that they would have never had. For example, how much almond butter would you be able to eat if you had to individually crack each almond, roast them, then grind them?

Avoiding anti-nutrients present in grains and legumes allows you to absorb more of the nutrients in the other foods you eat. Inflammation in the gut is able to heal and balance is restored to the gut flora, enabling you to get the most out of everything you eat. I see it more as a modern toxic avoidance and anti inflammatory protocol. In the US, grains are one of the most heavily sprayed crops with the most harmful pesticides and herbicides, so by avoiding them you’re also reducing your exposure to toxins. In my opinion, one of the best uses of the paleo parameters is to use it to get your inflammation down and get your gut back to a place where you can truly evaluate how different foods affect you. When you eliminate empty calories from bread and sugar, you are naturally going to be eating more nutrient dense foods in their place like meat, healthy fats, and vegetables.

Acceptable Foods on the Basic Paleo Diet:

• Meat (preferably raised in a natural manner for that particular animal)
• Wild Caught Seafood
• Pastured Soy-free Eggs
• Vegetables (except grains)
• Fruits (preferably low sugar like berries & in moderation)
• Nuts and Seeds (in moderation, except peanuts which are actually legumes)
• Healthy Oils (grass fed ghee, beef tallow, pastured lard, coconut oil, extra virgn olive oil)
• Bone Broth
• Tea and Coffee
• Rarely:
• Raw Unfiltered Honey and Organic Maple Syrup
• Organic Wine and 100% Agave Tequila (special occasions, most other liquor is made of grains)

I think one of the main reasons that the paleo diet has been more successful long term for a lot of people is that you don’t need to count calories and treat it like a “diet”. Most people will see a huge improvement in health just by picking and choosing from the foods above. There are nuances, especially if your gut is compromised, but this is a huge improvement over the standard american diet.

Mark Sissons “Primal Diet” also includes grass fed butter, yogurt, cream, and some cheese. For most people, it is a good idea to eliminate dairy for at least 30 days then reintroduce it to see how your body reacts. This is where the “toxin avoidance” comes in for me. It is very hard to find farmers that are actually producing grass fed, grass finished, raw dairy. When dairy is pasteurized (aka cooked), it degrades the nutrients and kills the enzymes in the milk that help our bodies digest it, making it even more likely that it will cause an inflammatory response in the body. Grains are one of the most heavily sprayed crops with the most harmful pesticides and herbicides (glyphosate and atrazine) in the US. Dairy that is marked “Grass Fed” in the store is often not 100% grass fed, meaning it got a dose of grains and possibly soy. Studies have shown that the phytoestrogen effects of soy and the harmful effects of herbicides do in fact pass through to the milk. I have also seen people that are allergic to herbicides have reactions to milk products that were fed these items. These grain feeds usually contain corn as well. GMO corn often cross pollinates Organic NonGMO corn, so even if the animals were fed “Organic NonGMO Grains”, there is still a chance that they are eating GMO corn.

I’m not even going to get into the hormones, antibiotics, vaccines, and other toxins that end up in store bought dairy, even “organic”. If you are going to eat dairy, be vigilant and observe your body’s reactions. Goat milk, yogurt/kefir, and cheese tends to be much better tolerated by most people. Unlike cows, goats actually do eat grains naturally and can digest them properly. If you can find someone that is feeding them local grains that aren’t sprayed with anything, that is a good option.

Foods That Are Not Included in the Paleo Diet:

• Processed Foods
• Sugar and Artificial Sweeteners
• Grains (corn, wheat/gluten, rice, oatmeal, farro, amaranth, barley, quinoa, rye, etc)
• Legumes (beans, peanuts, soy)
• Seed Oils
• Dairy
• Beer and Most Other Alcohol

Why not?

Processed Foods

Avoid anything with ingredients that you don’t recognize as food, also flavors and flavorings, natural flavors, spices, yeast extract. Here’s an article breaking down tons of food chemicals including ones that are sprayed on the inside of cans. The word “Natural” is a trick in labeling in the United States. There are no regulations, so basically just always cross it off in your mind. “Flavorings” are also totally unregulated and can be pretty much anything. A lot of times this is how MSG (Monosodium Glutamate) is snuck into foods. The problem with MSG, especially from a weight loss perspective, is that it turns off the satiation signal in your brain, so you never feel full. Of course this is very convenient for companies that want you to consume as much of their product as possible. It is also a neurotoxin (along with aspartame) and is hidden under many names in products. I will add a more detailed post about that later and link it here. Remember that a company will make their product sound as good as possible on the label, so if it says “Organic” but not “Grass fed” for example, it is not grass fed. If it says “Spices” but doesn’t list the spices out, that is because MSG is allowed under the umbrella term “spices”.

Sugar

Sugar is high on the glycemic index causing huge bumps in blood sugar when it is consumed. This sets off a chain reaction in the body that leads to inflammation, depleted mineral stores, and dysregulates the bacteria in the gut leading to candida overgrowth (Responsible for yeast infections, athletes foot, jock itch, dandruff, and nail fungi among other things). Traditional medicine recognizes that gut health is the key to nutrient absorption and mainstream science is finally starting to catch up. We don’t necessarily get vitamins and minerals from what we eat. We get them from the bacteria in our gut breaking down what we eat and producing these vital nutrients. When you eat sugar and simple carbohydrates, it causes candida, a yeast present in every person and harmful bacteria to overtake the “healthy” bacteria that you need to turn your food into absorbable nutrients. Inflammation is also responsible for the majority of major diseases (autoimmune diseases, PCOS and other reproductive issues, arthritis, chronic pain, Alzheimer’s, leaky gut, food and environmental allergies, some mood/mental disorders). In labs, cancer cells cannot be grown without a sugar solution. Sugar also has a link to skin aging. I found this article about the hardening of collagen to be really interesting.

Artificial sweeteners fall under processed foods and many have been found to contribute to cancer and other diseases. They also reinforce the habit of eating unnaturally sweet foods instead of giving your taste buds time to readjust to a more natural diet.

Check out the documentary Fat Fiction if you want to see how the sugar industry manipulated data and blamed fat for diseases that were caused by sugar all along. It also touches on the unethical government lobbying they used to affect the food pyramid and dietary recommendations over the years.

Grains

Grains are carbohydrates and break down into sugar in the body, so a lot of the above also applies to them. On top of that, they also contain a host of anti-nutrients. Many plants contain compounds that serve to discourage predators from consuming them, especially grains. A lot of them are not digestible by humans and actually carry other essential nutrients out of your body with them.

Lectins are carbohydrate-binding proteins that bind to nutrients contributing to deficiencies and can cause compromises to the gut barrier which ultimately leads to leaky gut syndrome. “Grains contain lectins which can damage the gut lining, which increases inflammation and is a newly discovered feature of not only autoimmune disease but also insulin resistance and liver pathology,” – Robb Wolf in The Paleo Solution. Lectins are also similar to proteins in the body which can cause a situation where your immune system can’t tell the difference between the foreign lectins and the body’s own natural proteins and consequently attacks its own proteins. This is how autoimmune conditions are created.

Phytates(phytic acid) bind to minerals (magnesium, copper, calcium, zinc and iron) in the body. By binding to these minerals, phytates make those minerals unavailable and take them out of the body. Even if the grains you’re consuming “contain” a ton of minerals, your body is unable to process and absorb them. Weston A Price’s studies of different cultures and their eating habits found that untreated grains and white flour quickly led to tooth decay, bone loss, and other diseases of civilization in these communities. Soaking and fermenting whole grains can lessen the effects of antinutrients, but that would still preclude the majority of grains in our society. Phytic acid is also found in nuts and seeds which is why I recommend only eating them in moderation and keeping an eye on any adverse reactions you may have to them.

Gluten is known to be one of the most difficult to digest plant proteins. It’s an enzyme inhibitor which effects your bodies ability to break down and absorb the nutrients in your food. The reason I typically recommend eliminating all grains, not just gluten containing grains, is eliminating gluten alone usually leads to an uptake in other grains that are high in lectins and phytic acid, reaking havoc on an already compromised digestive system.

Legumes

Legumes include beans, soybeans, peas, and peanuts. They contain high amounts of phytic acid, lectins, and another plant compound that can be antagonistic to the digestive system, oxalates.

Oxalates bind to calcium and other minerals as they leave the body which can lead to kidney stones in some people and also cause digestive distress in others. It is also found in high amounts in certain leafy greens like kale and spinach. Personally, I have noticed a reaction to eating high amounts of wilted spinach or cooked kale, so if you are experiencing digestive issues after eliminating grains and beans, I’d also pay attention to your reaction to greens and nuts.

Soy contains high amounts of phyic acid, oxalates, lectins, and also isoflavones which is an antinutrient that is capable of exerting estrogen-like effects and considered an endocrine disruptor. I’ve read that fermenting can rid soy of some of these effects. Traditionally soy sauce is fermented and unpasteurized, but I haven’t been able to find any of that quality in the US.

Seed Oils

Refined oils (grape seed oil, canola oil, corn oil, safflower oil, almond oil, sunflower oil, soybean oil, vegetable oil, palm fruit oil) are extracted using chemicals or high temperatures which end up oxidizing the fats in the oils. Oxidized oils produce free radicals in the body, increase inflammation, and are being found to be a big contributor to disease. Some of these plants (canola/rapeseed, corn, soy) are also typically genetically modified which hasn’t been truly studied for adverse effects in humans. In addition to that, these oils are high in omega 6 fats instead of omega 3s like free range animal fat. The reason omega 3 supplements are recommended by most nutritionists is that the american diet is heavily unbalanced towards omega 6 fats from the seed oils and grain fed animal products. Another consideration is that when cooking, these oils oxidize and break down at much lower temperatures than animal fat which creates free radicals in the body. Even olive oil will smoke at a pretty low temperature, which means it is breaking down.

My recommendation is to use high quality single source extra virgin olive oil raw in salads or on top of food versus cooking with it. For cooking I use grass fed ghee (butter with the milk solids removed, so no lactose), cold pressed coconut oil, beef tallow from grass fed cows, rendered fat from pastured pork and bacon, and duck fat. We haven’t had the ability to turn seeds into oil for that long, so animal fat is not only delicous, but easily digestible and full of vital nutrients.

Dairy

When dairy is grass fed and raw or fermented, it is very high in nutrients (especially A, D, and K, as well as K2 if you’re eating aged cheese or fermented dairy). The problem is that most of the dairy that we have access to in stores is fed feed that contains grains that have been sprayed with herbicides, and contains soy and gmo corn. This is not a natural diet for cows, so that combined with the close quarters that industrial dairy cows are kept in causes them to get various infections. They are then treated with antibiotics. All of this goes through to the milk, so when you are drinking that milk or eating that cheese, you are also getting a dose of herbicides, antibiotics that put your gut bacteria out of balance, omega 6 fats instead of omega 3, and the estrogenic effects of soy.

Another factor is that some people are sensitive to lactose or casein (milk sugar and protein). This causes inflammation and digestive distress and is usually pretty obvious if you have cut dairy out of your diet for at least 30 days, then reintroduced it to observe the effects. Other effects can be sinus congestion (I’ve had people tell me they get a stuffy nose literally as soon as they eat it or the next morning for some), acne, joint pain, and arthritis. This is less common with raw milk, because the enzymes and bacteria that help break the milk down in your body are still present in the milk.

My view of dairy leans towards the Weston A Price ancestral diet view, which is raw milk can be very nutritious if it is from healthy cows fed a natural diet. Weston Price was a dentist that traveled around the world studying cultures and tribes that had not had contact with the industrialized food chain. He observed that they had perfect teeth and didn’t suffer from the diseases that we accept as normal in modern civilizations until white flour, grains, sugar, and pasteurized dairy were introduced. I’ll go into more detail about him later, but you can read more here. Basically his research suggests that dairy is not inherently inflammatory and a lot of the ill effects are because of the treatment of the cows and pasteurization of the milk.

Goat milk is a great option for people that react to cows milk. Kefir is cultured goat milk (like drinkable yogurt) that contains tons of vital bioavailable vitamins and nutrients and helps rebalance gut bacteria. You can find people that sell various raw dairy in your area here.

Beer and Alcohol

I’m not going to spend a ton of time on this particular topic, because I think we all know alcohol isn’t a health food. Beer is mostly made from wheat, barley, and hops. A lot of people react to the gluten and some to the pesticides from the grains in non organic beer. As far as wine goes, Organic wine (not wine “Made with Organic Grapes”) is a good option for a special occasion. I have written about this labeling trick, so you can read more about it here.

Alcohol also affects your blood sugar, even if you are not drinking it mixed with sugary sodas. When you drink, your liver prioritizes processing and eliminating that alcohol over other toxins which stalls out fat loss. It can also affect your moods for up to two weeks. I never thought alcohol had an effect on my moods days or weeks later until I eliminated it entirely and reintroduced it. In a society where alcohol is pushed on us at every turn, I think everyone should try eliminating it for a period of time and seeing how you feel about it physically and mentally.

100% agave tequila is a good option if you want an occasional margarita, because it does not contain any grains or gluten. A popular paleo choice is the NorCal Margarita which is 100% agave tequila, sparkling water, and fresh squeezed lime juice. You can add a little squeeze of orange if it is too sour. This guide covers alcohol in more detail if you are interested.

Everything in life is a balance. Maybe you’re not going to never eat a tortilla chip or have a margarita again, but can use this to guide yourself towards choices that you won’t regret the next day. Even if you can’t afford all grass fed meat and organic vegetables right now, taking the step to at least avoid grains and sugar could still do a lot for your health. If you do splurge on grains, I would suggest making those organic if possible to avoid the pesticides. One of the worst things we can do for our bodies is to eat something while telling ourselves that it is wrong or unhealthy. I think food should be approached with joy and gratitude. Sometimes sharing with others or having something we miss from our childhood is worth it and can be balanced out by the informed choices we have been making. Whatever you eat, enjoy it!