The Paleo Diet (18 page)

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.

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.

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.

The mainstay of the Paleo Diet is lean animal foods. Always choose the leanest cut of meat you can find.

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.

“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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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 levels
about 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.