The Ancestral Table: Traditional Recipes for a Paleo Lifestyle (3 page)

Playing the Modern Medical Game

I spent a year on heavy drug therapy—a combination of steroids and other immunosuppressants. While they allowed me to function, I wasn’t happy with the idea of spending the rest of my life tethered to drug therapy that could potentially cause health issues for me later in life. So in 2007 I elected to have a pulmonary resectioning surgery performed at a major pulmonary institute in California. During the ten-hour procedure, I was put into full cardiac arrest using deep hypothermia and a full cardiopulmonary bypass. In other words, the doctors cooled my body to stop blood circulation and kept me in a state of hibernation, with a machine taking over my heart and lung functions; I was clinically dead for eight hours. The surgeons removed inflamed tissue from my pulmonary arteries and reconstructed the arteries using cow parts.

As you might imagine, this procedure is tricky, and only a few places in the world do it. It carries a high mortality rate due to its inherent complications. I’m happy to say that I made it out okay. It was definitely one of the hardest and most painful moments of my life, but even more painful was the fact that the surgery didn’t ease my symptoms. After gambling with my life and hoping it would fix my ailments, I was on the same amount of medication and felt no significant improvement in my pulmonary performance.

Bear in mind that through all this, life still went on—I got married a few months before the surgery and even went on a deployment between health crises. Without the support of my wife, family, friends, and military family, I’m not sure I could have made it through this crazy time.

Taking Matters into My Own Hands

Years went by. Janey and I moved to the Baltimore area in 2008 and welcomed our son, Oliver, into the world in 2009. I continued to work as a translator in the Navy. The heavy medication was taking its toll, especially the steroids. I was nearly 40 pounds over my normal weight, my bones were becoming progressively more brittle, and I couldn’t build muscle to save my life. I was becoming increasingly tired all the time and was experiencing health events that were simply not normal for my age—I had a painful bout of shingles due to my compromised immune system, and I was having trouble remembering simple things, which is often associated with steroid therapy.

And then in 2010 I came across a blog post that mentioned the Paleo diet. It was shown to reverse instances of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and autoimmune symptoms. Within a week I had thrown out all the garbage in our pantry and started eating whole foods and meals based on ancestral principles. I immediately felt better. My inflammation markers improved so dramatically in that first month that I convinced my doctors to decrease my immunosuppressant medication, and I was off steroid therapy quickly thereafter.

I dropped those extra 40 pounds nearly overnight, and everything went back to normal, or at least closer to normal than I had been in many years. I simply started feeling like I did before getting sick. Over the course of the next few years, I was able to wean myself off every medication but one, when at my worst I had been taking more than a dozen pills a day and self-injecting medications into my stomach.

I’ll be the first person to say that changing my diet didn’t completely cure me—there’s no mistaking the fact that I still have a serious and debilitating autoimmune condition—but I can say with confidence that changing my diet improved my health by leaps and bounds.

Sharing My Story

I started my blog,
The Domestic Man,
several months before switching my diet. I opened the website with the idea that we humans have become domesticated, that we have lost touch with our lineage. Many cultures have stopped passing down traditions from one generation to the next, one of the most important traditions being how we gather and prepare our meals. Today, an alarming number of Americans don’t know where our food comes from or how to prepare food beyond taking it out of a box and heating it up.

So I decided to reconnect with nature by chronicling my cooking adventures. Once I started trying to write recipes that were in line with my new way of eating, I discovered a trend: there are a ton of delicious, healthy dishes to be found nestled in the pages of history. So I adjusted my website to focus on fundamental, traditional dishes that are historically relevant. Along the way I also realized that gourmet cuisine rests on the foundation of traditional foods and is quite possibly the ideal culmination of history and science. And the main idea of this cookbook was born.

This book is the result of several years’ worth of research and experimentation, my attempt to compile a collection of dishes that are based on traditional recipes (both relatively new and ancient) found all over the world. If human beings have been eating this way since antiquity, why switch things up now?

The Paleo Template

I’d like to take a second to go over the basis of the Paleo diet for anyone who’s new to the concept.

The Paleo (short for Paleolithic) diet is based on the ancestral human diet. It focuses on whole foods like meats, vegetables, and fruits while avoiding foods that are problematic to many people’s digestive systems. The Paleo diet is not a reenactment of prehistoric diets; it uses scientific study and evolutionary evidence to figure out the optimal diet for our modern age.

The Paleo diet is not the first attempt at restoring an ancestrally minded lifestyle. In the late 19th century, a movement known as the Physical Culture Movement sprang up as a reaction to increasingly sedentary lifestyles of post–Industrial Revolution society. Followers of the movement avoided what they considered “diseases of affluence” by eating natural foods, increasing exposure to air, bathing in rivers, and getting plenty of sunshine.

Weston A. Price was a dentist who found a relationship between dental health and nutrition; in researching for his 1939 book,
Nutrition and Physical Degeneration: A Comparison of Primitive and Modern Diets and Their Effects,
Price studied many pre-industrial populations around the world and found that those eating indigenous diets were free of diseases that had become typical in the West. His work is the basis of the Western A. Price Foundation, one of the largest whole-foods and traditional movements today.

In 1975, gastroenterologist Walter L. Voetlin published a book called
The Stone Age Diet,
which concludes that humans are primarily carnivores by nature, with some allowance for carbohydrates. Since the 1980s, several doctors, nutritionists, and scholars have published works asserting that a diet based on ancestral principles is ideal for modern societies. Loren Cordain, a professor at Colorado State University, first published
The Paleo Diet
in 2001, and it became the basis for our modern interpretation of the diet, focusing on meats and vegetables. Robb Wolf published
The Paleo Solution
in 2010, which refined Cordain’s principles and attracted mainstream attention and popularity.

Today, several versions of the Paleo diet exist. Dallas and Melissa Hartwig’s Whole30 program (outlined in their book
It Starts with Food
) provides a tough-love plan to transform your diet through their 30-day reset, which follows strict Paleo guidelines. Mark Sisson’s
The Primal Blueprint
is consistent with most Paleo principles but is more lenient with dairy and alcohol. In the Foreword to this book, Paul Jaminet describes his Perfect Health Diet, which advocates moderate consumption of safe starches in ratios that are aligned with those found in indigenous diets worldwide. The Perfect Health Diet is the diet that I follow and demonstrate in this book; indeed, you could call this the first Perfect Health Diet cookbook.

My Dietary and Culinary Tenets

As you’ll see in later sections, I support a historically minded way of eating that is delicious, sustainable, and based on Paleo diet principles. The concept of dieting is both foreign and unnatural to how humans have lived for all of history. Instead, I believe that the way we eat should be a healthy combination of traditional practices and informed research to find what works for us as individuals.