by Frank Tufano
The Ancestral Indigenous Diet:
Achieving Native Health in a Modern World
by Frank Tufano
The Ancestral Indigenous Diet:
Achieving Native Health in a Modern World
Copyright © 2019 by Frank Tufano
All rights reserved. This book or parts thereof may not be reproduced in any form, stored in any retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means — electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise — without prior written permission of the publisher.
ISBN: 978-1-7344306-0-8
Editorial services by Jared Wade, 86 Sixty
Published by Frank Tufano, United States of America
First printing edition, 2019
Frank Tufano
www.frank-tufano.com
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
An Old Secret:
Rediscovering Our Ancestral Indigenous Diet
Chapter 2
Creating My Diet:
Frankie Boy’s Journey to Optimal Health
Chapter 3
The Fundamental Four:
The Nutritional Foundation of the Ancestral Indigenous Diet
Chapter 4
The Other Nutrients:
Understanding and Getting Everything Else You Need
Chapter 5
Chronic Inflammation:
How to Avoid the Silent Killer
Chapter 6
Plant Food Myths:
Why Fruits, Vegetables, and Grains Aren’t Necessary
Chapter 7
Food Quality:
The Biggest Factor in Nutrition and Health
Chapter 8
Food Sourcing:
What to Eat and How to Get It
Chapter 9
Food Preparation:
Cooking and Eating to Maximize Nutrition
Chapter 10
Understanding Natural Hunger:
The Three Types of Satiety
Chapter 11
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ):
Addressing Common Ancestral Indigenous Diet Concerns
Chapter 12
Beyond Nutrition:
Water, Sleep, Sun, Exercise, and Modern Problems
Chapter 13
Eating As Nature Intended:
Your Journey to Optimal Health
Chapter 1
An Old Secret:
Rediscovering Our Ancestral Indigenous Diet
Have you ever seen a wolf wear glasses? Are gorillas making kale shakes in the jungle? Are sharks wearing braces?
Humans are animals. We evolved into our current physical form tens of thousands of years ago before spreading out across the globe. We look, live, and eat differently depending on the specific location where we settled. Every aspect of human physical development has been guided by these factors over hundreds — even thousands — of generations. Not only was our development dictated by these factors, but many of the problems of modern civilization are a result of us having abandoned this environment.
The largest change in recent generations has been to our diet, although other critical elements of health — water, exercise, sun exposure, and sleep — also undergoing major shifts.
The human diet, all across the planet, has always been composed of high-quality animal and plant foods that vary by region. According to some historical accounts, indigenous people didn’t suffer from the modern degenerative diseases that are so common today, let alone dietary conditions like type 2 diabetes.
My belief is that this was primarily due to what they ate. Their water was also free of modern contaminants, both physical and chemical, and they used to get much more sun exposure while staying active throughout the entire day. Now, after spending most of our waking hours inside, we try to make up for hours and hours of sedentary activity with a small window of exercise then we sleep poorly, surrounded by blue light from electronic screens, before waking up to an alarm clock in the middle of our sleep cycle.
There is no going back to the past. Few would want to. But with a little bit of effort and a change to our mindset, we can take some steps to rediscover our ancestral health. There is direct action that you can take right now — primarily by adding high-quality animal foods to your diet — to begin repairing the damage caused by modern eating and lifestyle choices.
Only one thing is stopping us: What we’ve been told all our lives.
The Ancestral Indigenous Diet vs. the Paleo Diet
Some people familiar with diet trends may think they have heard this before. Isn’t this the Paleo Diet? Certain elements of my approach to nutrition do line up with the Paleo Diet, and some of the ancestral-based concepts are similar. But, no, my philosophy is quite different.
At its core, the Paleo Diet focuses more on what foods you can’t eat as opposed to foods you should eat. Many civilizations have consumed grains that didn’t exist in the days of cavemen, for example, and lived in excellent health nevertheless. Dismissing this knowledge — just to devoutly follow the idea that we must eat exactly like our ancestors before the Agricultural Revolution — can begin to border on religious.
Instead, we need to dig digger and begin to understand which foods are bad for us and which are absolutely critical. Recognizing which foods are most important from a nutrient, vitamin, and mineral standpoint is largely absent in most Paleo Diet descriptions.
Paleo, in many ways, is about restriction. My Ancestral Indigenous Diet, above all else, is about prioritizing the foods that you must consume.
For me, nutrient density is the basis of everything. We start by understanding which nutrients are the most essential to health and focus all of our attention on consuming them. Then, at the same time, we cut out everything that doesn’t serve a clear purpose.
Yes, it does turn out that most of the best foods to consume are similar to what cavemen survived off of. But the argument for why we should eat them now in the 21st century is based much more in nutritional science — not dogma and modern marketing spin. Even more importantly, the Paleo Diet has been largely corrupted by people who started making brownies with 30 different "paleo" ingredients, not to mention the corporate and special interest groups working to make sure people don't understand the importance of food quality.
I’m not bashing the Paleo Diet from afar. I have tried it and understand why Paleo has appealed to so many people. The version I followed involved me eating five pounds of sweet potatoes per day in an attempt to fix my lack of energy. My skin turned orange from all of the beta-carotene, and I looked green in certain lighting.
It was actually pretty fitting. I looked like an alien — because I was eating a diet that isn’t realistic on this planet.
Eating Like a Carnivore
If I am speaking against sweet potatoes, does this mean I think meat is the only path to health? Is this the Carnivore Diet, another recent “fad diet” in the world of nutrition?
Yes — but also no. Very much no. Some of you may be familiar with me identifying as a carnivore through my YouTube channel. And although my dietary regime does fall under carnivore , there are far more pieces to this puzzle. This is mainly because the Carnivore Diet, at least as it has been popularized over the past few years, is incomplete and lacks nutrition.
Many medical professionals are skeptical of the Carnivore Diet and have warned people not to jump on this trend. While some of their worries — about missing grains and veggies — are unfounded, they are correct to wonder how someone eating only steak can be healthy.
For those who are not familiar
, let me offer some quick background. The Carnivore Diet hit the mainstream in 2018 and has been growing steadily in popularity ever since. A lot of this is thanks largely to its association with Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson and his daughter Mikhaila Peterson, who touts her meat-only lifestyle for curing a range of health problems she had been dealing with for years.
For Mikhaila, and as it is usually described, the Carnivore Diet’s primary benefit is reducing inflammation and working as an “elimination diet” that cuts out any problems you might have with food allergies or intolerances. (Almost nobody struggles to digest meat.) It also cuts out sugar and most carbs, which fits in with the Keto Diet push that has gone even more mainstream and generally makes people feel better than the energy spikes and crashes of the Standard American Diet (SAD). Compared to the aptly named SAD way of eating, it is no surprise that people usually feel better after going Carnivore.
And unlike another trendy movement, the Vegan Diet, the Carnivore Diet is not entirely void of key vitamins and nutrients. But the people who preach eating grain-fed steak all day, every day, are missing many essential things as well. Throw in all the hormones, antibiotics, agrochemicals, and other negative substances rampant in conventional meat, and I understand why doctors are against it.
My diet is much different. The food prescribed by the Ancestral Indigenous Diet does come almost entirely from animal sources. So it does overlap with the carnivore way of eating (as well as the Keto Diet). You can call it carnivore. But it will not match up — at all — with the popular version of the Carnivore Diet you will find online or at the bookstore.
Besides, there actually are some plant foods that are fine to eat and a few that offer legitimate nutritional benefits. If you decide to consume them, options like wild blueberries, macadamia nuts, and avocados are the lesser of the evils. Seaweed contains iodine and electrolytes.
These plant foods, however, are not necessary to achieve optimal human health. Still, some people like to eat them — whether for culinary or other reasons — and I will help explain why some plant foods must be avoided while others can provide some supplemental benefits without many drawbacks.
So, in short, no, this is not the Carnivore Diet that you may have heard about. It is very, very different, even if it shares the concept of exclusively sticking to animal products.
The Ancestral Indigenous Diet is more about teaching you the principles, handed down by those who survived and thrived throughout history, that will help you achieve true natural health.
Some of this is non-negotiable. You must consume certain vitamin-rich foods. But there is also a lot of flexibility. I will not be forcing you to follow some 30-day meal plan. I won’t dictate exactly what you need to eat.
Instead, this book will show you how to eat in a way that you can follow forever.
The Power of Meat
Paleo, Carnivore, Vegan, Vegetarian, Keto, Mediterranean, Atkins, South Beach, Raw, Primal, Local, FODMAP. Today, these diet terms are all discussed constantly throughout traditional media, social media, and the YouTube community.
There is simply far too much contradicting information about diets. Doctors push statins to lower cholesterol. Well-meaning wellness advocates adopt a plant-based diet to avoid heart disease. Keto dieters push electrolyte consumption and high fat consumption from junk food.
Most people agree that fruits and veggies are good for you. But has anyone actually questioned why? Or even argued for the opposite? There is so much to analyze and interpret — with so many conflicting studies — but one thing is for certain: the presence of high-quality animal food and high-quality plant food in every native diet. Remember that term: high-quality. It is what I advocate above all else.
There once lived communities in modern-day Switzerland, for example, that consumed mostly rye bread and raw grass-fed cheese, supplementing with meat and milk. Some Australian Aborigines ate hundreds— even thousands — of wild plant and animal food. Certain groups of Native Americans in North America got more than 80% of their calories from buffalo. Even in modern times, there are so-called “blue zones” (the term for places with unusually high life expectancy) that incorporate both high-quality animal and plant foods as the basis of their diet.
The exact animal and plant foods eaten by different native groups varied widely. There were, however, two consistent factors in all of these communities: the presence of animal foods and a level of food quality that is rare today in the United States.
And it is the vitamins specific to these animal foods — the essential fat-soluble vitamins — that are the key to human health. There is no other source of these nutrients that is present in all regions of the world at all times of the year.
Upon inspecting the nutritional profile of plant foods, we see that they actually lack certain nutrients found in animal foods. Many have a high “paper value” of vitamins and minerals. But the “bioavailability” of these nutrients is very low in reality, primarily because we cannot utilize the nutrients in these plant foods as effectively as those from animal sources.
This is compounded by the presence of “anti-nutrients” that serve as a defense mechanism for fruits in vegetables. Not only that, but some people are genetically unable to convert the vitamins found in plant foods into the form that is needed in the body. (One key example is the conversion of the beta-carotene found in vegetables to retinol, the animal form of Vitamin A.)
Even people whose bodies can make the conversions require fat for the vitamins to be metabolized correctly. And where is the only place you can acquire fat as all times of the year in all places on earth? Animal foods. Fat access from plants is very limited to specific parts of the world that naturally produce the few sources that do exist (like avocado, coconut, and other nuts).
The fat phobia pushed over the past half-century by the Western medical community — and with the full support of the agricultural industry — has made people forget about this. Maybe more than protein (and the lean chicken people now devour), fat has always been the foundation of the human diet. Nothing else offers the same combination of nutrition and caloric energy.
Even the media and mainstream medical community are starting to acknowledge that fat and cholesterol are not bogeymen, although certain entrenched groups continue to resist. This is a nice baby step, but they continue to miss the message on the essential nutrients unique to high-quality animal foods.
In our modern world of abundance, people have grown disconnected from the natural world. But the caloric density of plant foods is very low. This alone makes it clear why animal foods provided the only viable source of energy for tens of thousands of years throughout human evolution — not to mention all the labor required to gather low-calorie wild plants. It’s no wonder people opted for grains once the Neolithic Revolution hit and agriculture became viable.
In the big picture, widespread access to fruits and vegetables is a relatively modern concept. And we should recognize that many indigenous groups were in perfect health while effectively only eating animal products and wild grains. So, when creating our modern diet, the safest assumption is that we need to focus on obtaining our nutrition from animal foods. Plants, including grains, should be afterthoughts. We aren't surviving in nature any more. We get to pick and choose what we eat. And if our ancestors had a choice, those tribesman would have always picked the hunt over the farmer’s plow.
Unlearning Assumptions: Going Against Conventional Wisdom
Many people find these ideas difficult to consider. Assumptions based on conventional wisdom may never be overcome. Cultural norms are such a strong tool, and food pyramid pseudoscience has become ingrained into our society. Combined with fear-mongering, propaganda, closed-mindedness, and pride, these preconceived notions may forever continue to prevent people from rediscovering their true, ancestral, natural health.
Meat is bad for you. Fruit and whole grains promote health.
This is what public health officials and medical authorities have be
en telling Americans for the past century. But even as we are learning more and more that this isn’t true — through both scientific research and individual experience — people continue to, quite literally, take this message to their grave.
If something isn’t working, it is time for something new.
But in the case of the Ancestral Indigenous Diet, “new” is not actually new at all. It isn’t even old. It’s ancient.
Chapter 2
Creating My Diet:
Frankie Boy’s Journey to Optimal Health
My journey to pursue optimal human health started on Google. I searched “what is the healthiest diet?” Literally. That was about seven years ago at a time when I was dealing with physical problems and living an unhealthy lifestyle.
But I only realized it was unhealthy in hindsight.
At the time, I thought I was doing everything right. I was following the classic nutritional playbook for weightlifting, something I had been practicing seriously for more than a half-decade. My focus was bodybuilding and gaining muscle. So, yeah, it turns out that I was the stereotypical New York Italian meathead way before I ever became a carnivore “meathead.” Gym. Tan. Laundry. Chicken. Rice. Broccoli.
It took me a long time — and taking a step back to gain an outside perspective — to really understand that almost every aspect of bodybuilding culture is negative. From unrealistic expectations to rampant steroid use to gymrats killing their joints with marathon lifting sessions, none of it is actually healthy.
Despite building an enviable body and eating a diet approved by fitness influencers, nutritionists and doctors, I felt like shit. Things deteriorated further after I took Accutane, a prescription pharmaceutical, to fix my cystic acne. I was in my early 20s with a range of health problems. The worst was an inability to properly digest carbohydrates. All of a sudden, I had no energy despite eating pounds and pounds of grilled chicken, sweet potatoes, and brown rice every day.
Enough was enough. What I was doing wasn’t working. Something had to change. This is what prompted my initial exploration into nutrition with that simple Google search.