We don’t know exactly when farmers began to include salt in their diet, but we can guess why. Salt performed a great service, in the centuries before refrigeration, in preserving meats and other foods. It helped make foods like olives edible; it added flavor to bland cereals and other foods. At least 5,600 years ago, archaeological evidence shows us, salt was mined and traded in Europe. It remains a staple today; in fact, the average American consumes about twice as much sodium as potassium. And that’s not healthy.
6. An Acid-Base Imbalance
Very few people—including nutritionists and dietitians—are aware that the acid-base content of your food can affect your health. Basically, this is what happens: everything you digest eventually reports to the kidneys as either an acid or an alkaline base. Acid-producing foods are meats, fish, grains, legumes, dairy products, and salt. Alkaline-producing foods are fruits and vegetables. You need both kinds—acid and alkaline. Fats are generally neutral.
The average American diet is slightly acidic—which means that our kidneys must handle a net acid load. For example: Suppose you have a typical “light” lunch, probably available at a dozen places near your home or office, of pepperoni pizza and a small salad with Caesar dressing. This meal is a disaster for the body’s acid-base balance: the pizza’s white-flour crust, melted cheeses, and salty pepperoni are all highly acidic. Add salt, and you make it even more acidic. Any alkaline remnant available in the tiny salad is neutralized by the salt and cheese in the Caesar salad dressing.
In the long run, eating too many acid foods and not enough alkaline foods can contribute to bone and muscle loss with aging. There are more immediate dangers, too: excessive dietary acid can raise blood pressure and increase your risk of developing kidney stones. It can also aggravate asthma and exercise-induced asthma.
7. Not Enough Plant Phytochemicals, Vitamins, Minerals, and Antioxidants
The Paleo Diet is rich in vitamins and minerals. One of the best ways to prove how healthy our diet used to be is to show what happened when our ancestors fiddled with it.
Vitamin C deficiency, a disease unknown to Paleolithic people, causes scurvy. Paleolithic people didn’t have this problem; their diets were extremely high in vitamin C (around 500 milligrams per day) because they ate so many fresh fruits and vegetables. But even Eskimo groups—who for thousands of years have eaten virtually no plant foods for most of the year—didn’t get scurvy. How can this be? They got their vitamin C from other natural sources—raw fish, seal, and caribou meat.
But as our ancestors began eating more cereal grains and fewer lean meats, fresh fruits, and vegetables, they lost much of the vitamin C in their diets. Cereal grains have no vitamin C, which is one of the body’s most powerful antioxidants. Vitamin C helps lower cholesterol, reduces the risk of heart disease and cancer, boosts the immune system, and helps ward off infections and colds.
Vitamin A deficiency, like scurvy, could only have emerged after the coming of agriculture. Paleo diets were always rich in fruits and vegetables—excellent sources of beta-carotene, a nutrient that can be converted to vitamin A by the liver. (Our ancient ancestors also ate the entire carcasses of the animals they hunted and killed, including the vitamin A-rich liver.) Again, trouble happened when cereals took over and fresh fruits, vegetables, and organ meats were pushed aside. Vitamin A is essential for all of the body’s mucous membranes. Vitamin A deficiency results in a condition called “xerophthalmia” (dry eyes), which can lead to blindness; in fact, this is the leading cause of blindness in children worldwide. Vitamin A deficiency also impairs the body’s ability to fight infection and disease.
Vitamin B deficiency is another problem. Many people believe that whole-grain cereals are rich sources of B vitamins. They’re mistaken. Compared to lean meats, fruits, and vegetables, calorie for calorie, cereals are vitamin B lightweights. Even worse, as I mentioned earlier, whole grains and legumes contain antinutrients that block the absorption of B vitamins in the intestines. For instance, antinutrients called “pyridoxine glucosides” can prevent your body from getting as much as two-thirds of the vitamin B6 you eat. In a study of vegetarian women from Nepal, Dr. Robert Reynolds, of the USDA Human Nutrition Research Center, linked the low vitamin B6 levels in these women to the high levels of pyridoxine glucosides in their grain- and legume-heavy diets. In contrast, the availability of vitamin B6 in lean meats is nearly 100 percent.
Another B vitamin that’s poorly absorbed when you eat whole grains is biotin. Experiments by my colleague Dr. Bruce Watkins from Purdue University have shown that wheat and other whole grains impair the body’s ability to get enough biotin. Biotin deficiencies result in dry, brittle fingernails and hair. Research by Dr. Richard K. Scher and colleagues at Columbia University has shown that biotin supplements reduce fingernail brittleness and vertical “ridging” in nails. But you won’t need to supplement your diet if you get enough biotin (or any other vitamin or mineral) the old-fashioned way—by eating the right foods. The availability of biotin from animal foods is almost 100 percent.
Pellagra and beriberi are two of the most devastating and widespread B vitamin deficiency diseases that have ever plagued human-kind. They are caused exclusively by excessive consumption of cereals. Pellagra is a serious, often fatal, disease caused by a lack of the B vitamin niacin and the essential amino acid tryptophan. In a sad chapter of U.S. history, between 1906 and 1940 there was an epidemic of pellagra in the South. An estimated 3 million people developed it, and at least 100,000 of them died. Similar outbreaks have occurred in Europe and India, and pellagra is still common in parts of Africa.
Underlying every worldwide pellagra epidemic was excessive consumption of corn. Corn has low levels of both niacin and tryptophan, and the tiny amounts of niacin that are present are poorly absorbed. Pellagra could never have happened in the Paleolithic era, because lean meats are excellent sources of both niacin and tryptophan. Invariably, whenever we stray from the lean meats, fruits, and vegetables that we are genetically adapted to eat, ill health is the result.
Beriberi, caused by a deficiency of vitamin B1 (thiamin), ultiately causes paralysis of the leg muscles. This disease was virtually unknown until the introduction of polished rice in the late 1800s. In parts of Japan and Southeast Asia, where rice was the staple food, beriberi became epidemic as people replaced their traditional brown rice with white rice. Eventually, scientists discovered that removing the thiamin-containing bran during the polishing process was largely responsible for this disease. Beriberi has been mostly eliminated with the introduction of “enriched” rice, to which vitamin B1 is added. However, the message should be clear: If we have to add 1 a vitamin to a food to prevent it from causing ill health and disease, we shouldn’t be eating it in the first place.
Vitamin B Deficiency and Heart Disease
In North America, we enrich our refined cereal grains with vitamin B1 and niacin—which means you will never have to worry about pellagra or beriberi. But it doesn’t mean that these foods are good for you. Far from it. Within the past twenty years, a major risk factor for heart disease has surfaced. It has been found that low dietary intakes of three B vitamins—B , B12, and folate—increase your blood level of an amino acid called homocysteine. A high blood level of homocysteine, in turn, increases your risk of heart disease. Whole-grain cereals have no vitamin B12, their vitamin B is poorly absorbed, and they are at best a meager source of folate. So excessive consumption of whole-grain cereals instead of lean meats, fruits, and vegetables is a formula for disaster for your heart. Again, lean meats are rich sources of vitamins B and B , and fresh fruits and vegetables are our best food sources of folate. By eating the foods nature intended, you will never have to worry about your B vitamin status, homocysteine level, and heart disease.
Folate Deficiency
Since most Americans don’t eat enough fresh fruits and vegetables, our dietary intake of folate is often marginal or low. Folate not only protects us from heart disease, it reduces our risk of colon can
cer. Taken by pregnant women, it prevents spina bifida. Because of these healthful effects, the U.S. government now enriches our refined cereal grains with folic acid (a form of folate). So, somewhat paradoxically, you can now eat white bread, doughnuts, and cookies to increase your folic acid intake—but when you eat whole grains, you won’t get this benefit.
The bottom line is that grains are an inferior food. No matter how you slice your bread (whole or refined), grains are not good for you. Even when they’re artificially pumped full of vitamins and minerals, they cannot measure up to lean meats, fruits, and vegetables.
Minerals
On paper, whole grains appear to be a fairly good source of many important minerals, such as iron, zinc, copper, and calcium. Actually, cereals are lousy sources of these nutritionally important minerals.
Iron
Remember the antinutrients that block our absorption of B vitamins? Other antinutrients, called “phytates,” chemically bind iron, zinc, copper, and calcium within grains and block their absorption during digestion. Phytates do their job so well that the worldwide epidemic of iron-deficiency anemia—which affects 1.2 billion people—is universally attributed to the poor availability of iron in cereal- and legume-based diets. Iron-deficiency anemia weakens you and hinders your ability to work; it also makes you more susceptible to infection and more likely to develop a severe infection. It increases a mother’s risk of dying during childbirth. It can permanently impair a child’s learning ability. Iron-deficiency anemia—like the other deficiency diseases caused by agriculture’s new foods—would not have been possible with Paleo diets. Lean meats and animal foods are rich sources of iron. More important, the type of iron found in lean meats and animal foods is easily assimilated by the body.
Zinc
Zinc deficiency is another disaster caused by whole-grain cereals. In much of the Middle East, a whole-wheat flatbread called tanok contributes more than half of the total daily calories. Studies done by Dr. John Reinhold and colleagues have shown that tanok causes a zinc deficiency that stunts growth and delays puberty in children. We need zinc to help us fight infection and colds, to sustain our strength, and to enable us to work. Once again, lean meats are excellent sources of zinc. In fact, the “bioavailability” (the amount you receive of a particular nutrient) of zinc from meat is four times greater than from grains.
Calcium
Most American women, and many men, have gotten the message about calcium: insufficient dietary calcium can eventually lead to bone loss and osteoporosis. Few realize that cereal grains and legumes are a catastrophe for your bone health. As with iron and zinc, the little calcium that’s present in whole grains is bound to phytates—which means that most of it never gets absorbed by the body. Cereals also contain high levels of phosphorus. We know that an unfavorable calcium-to-phosphorus ratio can speed up bone loss. Also, cereals produce a net acid load to the kidneys—and this, too, increases calcium loss in the urine.
Whole grains are even known to disrupt vitamin D metabolism in the body. Vitamin D increases calcium absorption and prevents rickets, a disease that causes bone deformities. In fact, scientists who want to study rickets in laboratory animals know exactly how to produce it—by feeding the animals whole grains. In many of the world’s undeveloped countries, where whole grains and legumes are the main sources of calories, rickets, osteoporosis, and other bone-mineral diseases are common.
From the fossil record, we know that these same bone-mineral problems were also common among the first farmers. Not surprisingly, the hunter-gatherers who came before them didn’t have these diseases. Hunter-gatherers never drank milk. They did not have bone-mineral problems because they ate lots of fruits and vegetables—which gave them enough calcium to build strong bones. Fruits and veggies also gave them an abundant source of alkaline base that prevented excessive losses of calcium in the urine. When you adopt the Paleo Diet, you won’t have to worry about your calcium intake. You’ll get all you need from the fruits and vegetables. But more important, you’ll be in calcium balance. You will be taking in more calcium than you lose, and this is essential for bone health.
By restoring lean meats, fruits, and veggies to your diet and eliminating agriculture’s new foods, you will lose weight, feel better, and reduce your risk of developing the diseases of civilization that plague us all.
PART TWO
Losing Weight and Preventing and Healing Diseases
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Losing Weight the Paleo Diet Way
Here are four reasons why you should make lean protein a major part of your diet:• It can’t be overeaten.
• It raises your metabolism, causing you to burn more calories.
• It satisfies your appetite, causing you to feel less hungry between meals.
• It improves insulin sensitivity.
Determining Whether You Need to Lose Weight
How do you know if you’re overweight? Scientists have devised a simple measure based on your height and weight that allows you to know exactly how much extra weight you may be toting. This measure system is called the “body mass index” (BMI), and here are the categories:
BMI Classification
Below 18.5 Underweight
18.5-24.9 Normal
25.0-29.9 Overweight
Above 30.0 Obesity
The BMI is easy to calculate. It is simply your weight in kilograms (kg) divided by your height in meters (m) squared. You can calculate your weight in kilograms by dividing your weight in pounds by 2.2. You can change your height to meters by multiplying your height in inches by 0.0254. So a 5-foot, 4-inch (64 inches) tall woman who weighs 154 pounds would weigh 70 kilograms (154 / 2.2 = 70 kg), and her height in meters would be 1.63 meters (64 × 0.0254 = 1.63 m). Her height in square meters would be 2.66 (1.63 × 1.63 = 2.66). Her BMI would be 26.3 (70 / 2.66 = 26.3). This would put her in the overweight category. If your BMI is greater than 27, this may be a sign that you are insulin resistant and have (or are at high risk of developing) one or more of the diseases of metabolic syndrome.
A Doctor Loses 30 Pounds: Ben’s Story
Here is what Dr. Ben Balzer, a general family physician from Sydney, Australia, has to say about the Paleo Diet:In April this year, I reached the end of my tether with my weight. I’d tipped the scales at 222 lbs. My weight for my height should be under 172 pounds. In fact, I’d been too frightened to get on the scales for some weeks, as I knew what they would tell me. I’m sure I hit 225 pounds during this time. I’d been following the standard dietary advice of low-fat dieting reasonably well for seven years. Although it worked well at first, it stopped, and my weight had gradually increased.
As a doctor, I knew exactly what I was in for. I have a strong family history of diabetes, hypertension, stroke. I was 37 years old. Medically, I knew it was inevitable that I would be affected if I didn’t act. I was feeling tired, bloated, and sluggish. It seemed harder to get through each day. I tried to exercise but had trouble finding the time and could swim only 500 meters with difficulty. My feet were also hurting badly. I had had heel pain syndrome (heel spur) for two and a half years, despite cortisone shots and physical therapy. I had headaches at least five days a week.
Fortunately, 10 years earlier I’d heard a noted Australian professor of medicine mention the Paleolithic diet. That sounds like a logical idea, I thought, and filed it away for future reference; there was no Internet then. In my time of need, I searched the Internet for Paleolithic diet and immediately found Don Wiss’s www.Paleofood.com site. Also, a local dietitian recommended a scientific paper by Eaton, Eaton, and Konner, and I was off.
The first thing that I noticed on the diet was a feeling of a surge in my vitality. Within two weeks, my heel pain syndrome disappeared—a totally unexpected effect. My headaches soon reduced to once each two weeks and after eight months are down to once each 6 weeks or so and very mild at that—another unexpected effect.
The weight fell off very quickly—15 pounds in the first month, and now 29 pounds a
ltogether. If that wasn’t enough, I’ve had an increase in my muscle bulk, despite having little chance to exercise. The end result was that my trousers were almost falling off me, but my shirts were getting tight across the shoulders. The effect on my fitness was immediate. The first time I went swimming on the diet, I clocked up 1,000 meters and was hardly puffing afterward. I can run around better than I can ever remember.
My mental clarity has improved and is sharper than it has ever been before in my life. Everyone who knows me tells me how well I look. Interestingly, when I socialize, I’ll often break the diet to be sociable. If I eat bread twice on the one weekend, I’ll always get up on the Monday morning with sore heels again.
Since then, I’ve studied the diet intensively. I am totally convinced [that] far more illnesses than [were] previously suspected are related to factors in the modern diet. In addition to the usual illnesses listed as dietary (hypertension, diabetes, hypercholesterolemia, cardiovascular disease, stroke), we can add many forms of arthritis, throat infection, peptic ulcer, acne, and many others.
I plan to stay on the Paleolithic diet (as well as one can in this modern age) for the rest of my life. I think it’s obvious from the above that I would be silly if I didn’t!
The Paleo Diet Page 8