Nutrition scientists use the term “calcium balance” to describe this process. It’s the difference between how much calcium you take in and how much you excrete. Most of us have gotten the message about consuming calcium. But the other part of the equation—how much calcium you excrete—is just as important. It is quite possible for you to be in calcium balance on a low calcium intake if your calcium excretion is also low. On the other hand, it’s easy for you to fall out of calcium balance—even if you load up on cheese at every meal—if you lose more calcium than you take in.
The main factor that determines calcium loss is yet another kind of balance—the acid-base balance. If your diet has high levels of acid, you’ll lose more calcium in your urine; if you eat more alkaline foods, you’ll retain more calcium. A study in the New England Journal of Medicine by my colleague Dr. Anthony Sebastian and his research group at the University of California at San Francisco showed that simply taking potassium bicarbonate (an alkaline base) neutralized the body’s internal acid production, reduced urinary calcium losses, and increased the rate of bone formation. In a follow-up report in the New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Lawrence Appel at Johns Hopkins University reported that diets rich in fruits and vegetables (these are alkaline foods) significantly reduced urinary calcium loss in 459 men and women.
See Appendix A for a list of common foods and their acid-base values.
Cereals, most dairy products, legumes, meat, fish, salty processed foods, and eggs produce net acid loads in the body. By far the worst offenders on this list are the hard cheeses, which are rich sources of calcium. Again, unless you get enough fruits and vegetables, eating these acid-rich foods will actually promote bone loss and osteoporosis.
Virtually all fruits and vegetables produce alkaline loads in the body. When you adopt the Paleo Diet, you won’t have to worry about excessive dietary acid causing bone loss—because you’ll be getting 35 percent or more of your daily calories as healthful alkaline fruits and vegetables that will neutralize the dietary acid you get when you eat meat and seafood.
Toxic Salt
Most low-carbohydrate, high-fat diets don’t address the dangers of salt; some even encourage its use. And yet there is a ton of medical evidence linking salt to high blood pressure, stroke, osteoporosis, kidney stones, asthma, and even certain forms of cancer. Salt is also implicated as a factor in insomnia, air and motion sickness, Ménière’s syndrome (an agonizing ear ringing), and the preeclampsia of pregnancy.
Salt is made up of sodium and chloride. Although most people think that the sodium portion of salt is entirely responsible for most of its unhealthful effects, chloride is just as guilty, if not more so. The average American eats about 10 grams of salt a day (this turns out to be about 4 grams of sodium and 6 grams of chloride). Chloride, like cereals, dairy products, legumes, and meats, yields a net acid load to the kidneys after it is digested. Because of its high chloride content, salt is one of the worst offenders in making your diet more acid.
Paleolithic people hardly ever used salt and never ate anything like today’s salty cheeses, processed meats, and canned fish advocated by most of the low-carbohydrate weight-loss diets. Do your body a favor and throw out your saltshaker along with all the highly salted, processed, packaged, and canned foods in your pantry.
Lean Meat Helps You Lose Weight
It’s taken half a century, but scientists have finally realized that when they stigmatized red meat, they threw out the proverbial baby with the bathwater. Meat is a mixture of fat and protein. Lean meat—such as that found in wild game and seafood—is about 80 percent protein and about 20 percent fat. But fatty processed meats like bacon and hot dogs can pack a whopping 75 percent of their calories as fat and only 25 percent or less as protein. What should have been obvious—that it was the high level of a certain saturated fat, palmitic acid, not the protein, that caused health problems—was essentially ignored. Meat protein had unfairly become a villain.
Here again, there’s a major lesson to be learned from looking at the distant past: for more than 2 million years, our ancestors had a diet rich in lean protein and healthful fats. It gave them energy and, combined with fruits and vegetables, helped them stay healthy.
Protein Increases Your Metabolism and Slows Your Appetite
When scientists actually studied how lean protein influences health, well-being, and body-weight regulation—and this has occurred only in the last two decades—they found that our ancestors were right all along. It turns out that lean protein is perhaps our most powerful ally in the battle of the bulge. It has twice the “thermic effect” of either fats or carbohydrates, which means it revs up your metabolism. In other words, protein’s thermic effect increases our metabolism and causes us to burn more calories than if we ate an equal caloric serving of either fat or carbohydrate. Also, more than fats, more than carbohydrates, protein has the highest “satiating value”—that is, it does the best job of making us feel full.
The principles I have laid out in the Paleo Diet—all based on decades of scientific research and proved over millions of years by our ancestors—will make your metabolism soar, your appetite shrink, and extra pounds begin to melt away as you include more and more lean protein in your meals.
Lean Protein and Heart Disease
But this diet gives you much more than a slimmer figure. Unlike other low-carbohydrate diets, it’s good for your heart. High-protein diets have been shown by Dr. Bernard Wolfe at the University of Western Ontario in Canada to be more effective than low-fat, high-carbohydrate diets in lowering total and bad LDL cholesterol and triglycerides while simultaneously increasing the good HDL cholesterol. My colleague Neil Mann at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Melbourne, Australia, has demonstrated that people who eat a lot of lean meat have lower blood levels of homocysteine (a toxic substance in the blood that damages the arteries and predisposes them to atherosclerosis) than do vegan vegetarians. The net result is that high-protein diets produce beneficial changes in your blood chemistry that, in turn, reduce your overall risk of heart disease.
High-protein diets have been shown to improve insulin metabolism, help lower blood pressure, and reduce the risk of stroke. They have even prolonged survival in women with breast cancer.
Some people have been told that high-protein diets damage the kidneys. They don’t. Scientists at the Royal Veterinary and Agricultural University in Copenhagen effectively put this myth to rest. Dr. Arne Astrup and colleagues put sixty-five overweight people on a high-protein diet for six months and found that their kidneys easily adapted to increased protein levels. Furthermore, kidney function remained perfect at the end of the experiment.
Isn’t it time you got protein on your side? Eating lean meat and fish at every meal, just as your Paleolithic ancestors did, could be the healthiest decision you ever made.
Compared to the faddish low-carbohydrate weight-loss diets, the Paleo Diet includes all the nutritional elements needed to encourage weight loss while promoting health and well-being. The Paleo Diet is designed to imitate the healthful diets of our preagricultural ancestors. It contains the proper balance of plant and animal foods—and the correct ratios of protein, fat, and carbohydrate required for weight loss and excellent health.
So, don’t be fooled by the low-carbohydrate fad diets. The Paleo Diet gives you the same weight-loss benefits, but it’s also a delicious, healthy diet you can maintain for a lifetime.
2
The Ground Rules for the Paleo Diet
With the Paleo Diet, you’ll be restoring the diet you are genetically programmed to eat. You’ll be following the diet that every single person on the planet ate only 333 generations ago. It is the diet the modern world has completely forgotten.
The Paleo Diet is simplicity itself. Here are the ground rules:1. All the lean meats, fish, and seafood you can eat
2. All the fruits and nonstarchy vegetables you can eat
3. No cereals
4. No legumes
&
nbsp; 5. No dairy products
6. No processed foods
The Paleo Diet is not a fat-free diet, it’s a “bad fat”-free diet. It has few of the artery-clogging fats found in the typical Western diet, but there is plenty of low-fat protein and good fats—such as those found in salmon and other cold-water fish, as well as in nuts and olive oil. It is not a fanatically strict diet, either.
There are three levels of adherence that make it easy to follow the diet’s principles. Each level contains a limited number of Open Meals—in which you can still eat your favorite foods. If you enjoy an occasional glass of wine or beer, that’s fine—it’s allowed here. Because the Paleo Diet is a lifetime program of eating—and not a quick-fix weight-loss diet—it has built-in flexibility to accommodate a little cheating and your own individuality.
Try it, and from the beginning your appetite will be reduced and your metabolism will be increased. This means you’ll lose weight without the hunger pangs that accompany so many diets—and ultimately doom these diets to fail. There’s no need to count carbohydrate grams in this diet. You can eat as much carbohydrate as you want, as long as it’s the good kind—the kind that comes from low-glycemic fruits and vegetables. There is no need to count calories. This is how our diet was meant to be: Eat until you’re full. Enjoy nature’s bounty. Lose weight, and be healthy while you’re doing it.
Here’s how the Paleo Diet compares to the faddish low-carbohydrate diets we discussed in the previous chapter.
Item The Paleo Diet Fad Low-Carb Diets
Protein High (19-35%) Moderate (18-23%)
Carbohydrate Moderate (22-40%) Low (4 -26%)
Total fat Moderate (28-47%) High (51-78%)
Saturated fat Moderate High
Monounsaturated fat High Moderate
Polyunsaturated fat Moderate Moderate
Omega 3 fat High Low
Total fiber High Low
Fruits and vegetables High Low
Nuts and seeds Moderate Low
Salt Low High
Refined sugars Low Low
Dairy foods None High
The Fundamentals of the Paleo Diet
The Paleo Diet is based on the bedrock of Stone Age diets:Eat lots of lean meats, fresh fruits,
and vegetables
From the work my research team and I have done in analyzing the daily food intake of hunter-gatherer societies, we have found the ideal dietary ratio. Although you don’t need to count calories with the Paleo Diet, if you did you’d find that a little more than half—55 percent—of your calories comes from lean meats, organ meats, fish, and seafood. The balance comes from fresh fruits and vegetables, some nuts, and healthful oils.
My research team and I have spent years analyzing what Paleolithic humans ate—running hundreds of computerized analyses exploring every conceivable dietary component, varying the amounts and types of plant and animal foods that were available to our ancient ancestors. No matter how we mixed up the ingredients, seven dietary characteristics consistently emerged. They are the Seven Keys of the Paleo Diet—your guidelines to weight loss and good health.
The Seven Keys of the Paleo Diet
1. Eat a relatively high amount of animal protein compared to that in the typical American diet.
2. Eat fewer carbohydrates than most modern diets recommend, but eat lots of good carbohydrates—from fruits and vegetables, not from grains, starchy tubers, and refined sugars.
3. Eat a large amount of fiber from nonstarchy fruits and vegetables.
4. Eat a moderate amount of fat, with more good (monounsaturated and polyunsaturated) fats than bad (trans and certain saturated) fats, and nearly equal amounts of omega 3 and omega 6 fats.
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.
Just the Foods You Can Hunt and Gather at Your Supermarket
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:• Skinless turkey breast (94 percent protein)
• Shrimp (90 percent protein)
• Red snapper (87 percent protein)
• Crab (86 percent protein)
• Halibut (80 percent protein)
• Beef sweetbreads (77 percent protein)
• Steamed clams (73 percent protein)
• Lean pork tenderloin (72 percent protein)
• Beef heart (69 percent protein)
• Broiled tuna (68 percent protein)
• Veal steak (68 percent protein)
• Sirloin beef steak (65 percent protein)
• Chicken livers (65 percent protein)
• Skinless chicken breasts (63 percent protein)
• Beef liver (63 percent protein)
• Lean beef flank steak (62 percent protein)
• Lean pork chops (62 percent protein)
• Mussels (58 percent protein)
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.
• Eggs (34 percent protein)
• Cheeses (28 percent protein)
• Legumes (27 percent protein)
• Lamb chops (25 percent protein)
• Fatty hamburger (24 percent protein)
• Dry salami (23 percent protein)
• Link pork sausage (22 percent protein)
• Bacon (21 percent protein)
• Whole milk (21 percent protein)
• Liverwurst sausage (18 percent protein)
• Bologna (15 percent protein)
• Hot dogs (14 percent protein)
• Cereal grains (12 percent protein)
• Nuts (10 percent protein)
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:• Fish and seafood, particularly cold-water fish such as salmon, mackerel, herring, and halibut
• Flaxseed oil, which can be used in several ways—as an ingredient in salad dressings, poured over steamed vegetables, or taken as a supplement
• Liver
• Game meat
• Free-range chickens
• Pasture-fed beef
• Eggs enriched with omega 3
• Salt-free walnuts and macadamia nuts (which are also tasty in salads)
• Leafy green vegetables
• Fish oil capsules, available at health food stores
Meal Preparation and Typical Meals
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.
The Paleo Diet: A Nutritional Bonanza
The Paleo Diet Page 4