The Paleo Diet (7 page)

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:

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 B
₆
(20 percent of the RDA), vitamin B
₁₂
(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.

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.

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’t
also 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.