The Paleo Diet (6 page)

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.

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:

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.

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:

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.

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:

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 B
₁₂
, vitamin B
₆
, 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.

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 (B
₆
, B
₁₂
, 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.