The Ancestral Indigenous Diet: A Whole Foods Meat-Based Carnivore Diet

by Frank Tufano

  When you take all of this out of the equation, however, the child is getting no significant nutrition — for years on end — and then also compounding that problem with a constant assault of anti-nutrients. This sad reality is what stands out. This is what is destroying our society’s health more than the presence of some unfriendly oxalates and lectins.

  A quick aside: Consuming too many plant foods, even leafy greens, can disrupt natural ratios of minerals. For example, the ratio of copper and zinc — two antagonistic metals in our body that fight for real estate, so to speak — is much closer to ideal in meat. Daily intake of spinach, which is much higher in copper, can throw this out of whack. Most people actually have a zinc deficiency from prior plant food consumption. The same can happen with potassium and sodium ratios or magnesium and calcium ratios, both of which rely on balance as much as volume to keep our bodies functioning optimally.

  Again, we are resilient beings and these ratios being off won't kill us. And, in fairness, eating way too many oysters or way too much liver can throw off ratios too. The thing to remember is that more is not always better. It's much easier to keep everything in harmony with the closer-to-ideal ratios in animal foods rather than by adding in a random assortment of modern, engineered crops that often have strange combinations of minerals and elements.

  Because real-world comparisons are sometimes easier to understand than science, Frankie Boy will leave you with one metaphor that may help you put this all together: Think of your body like a car.

  Plant foods can do a great job of functioning like gas. While I personally live on a ketogenic metabolism and prefer to use fat as my fuel — which we can call diesel — carbs can work just fine as gasoline to get the automobile from point A to point B. But if gasoline is the only thing you ever put into the car, it will stop functioning properly over time. You’re not changing the oil, you’re not replacing the brake pads, and you’re not putting in new air filters. You are not keeping up on essential maintenance in the form of essential nutrients.

  In this state of disrepair, the vehicle may only last a month. Or it may keep on trucking for another three years. But eventually, you can be sure that this car is going to break down.

  It may have been working great by just adding gasoline, and gasoline only, for a long time because it’s a well-built, highly resilient machine. It will depend upon what type of car it is (much like your genetics) and how long you’ve been driving it this way (how long ago you stopped consuming high-quality animal nutrition). But, if you keep trying to run it this way without considering the essentials, that car simply cannot last forever.

  The Reality About Eating Plants

  I don’t want to be all doom and gloom about plants. There are plant foods that can have benefits to your health. Studies continue to look at antioxidants and other compounds that may potentially be helpful.

  The primary reason that I don’t consume any plant foods at all is due to my past Accutane usage and the damage done to my gut. I now have trouble tolerating many foods high in carbohydrates that I consumed frequently in the past. But, admittedly, for a healthy person with a diverse gut microbiome, there may in fact be some aspects that could be positive, especially in terms of feeding certain gut bacteria (although things like milk and honey can also do this).

  Ultimately, however, even the best plant foods are really not providing much of anything that someone can’t get from animal foods. And there is just so much knowledge required to eat most plant foods the right way. The proper preparation to make even sourdough bread from heirloom grains, not to mention undertaking wild rice fermentation or sowans, is a tall task. And it’s often very expensive! So much so that I can afford the highest-quality animal foods but would struggle to ever validate splurging for most rare grains.

  Sure, you probably won’t see any negative effects from eating a few ounces of macadamia nuts, a handful of wild blueberries, the occasional avocado, or some raw coconut. If you do enjoy these foods and want to consume them once in awhile to add some variety it isn’t the end of the world. Maybe it helps you stick to the diet better and stave off feelings of meat-only boredom.

  In fact, for someone who struggles to find fatty cuts of grass-fed beef, either financially or because of where they live, eating something like a mashed sweet potato with a half a stick of raw butter could be beneficial on balance. If you’re stuck inside all winter with roommates who are sick of you smoking up the apartment by pan-searing steaks, being nice to them and having an avocado and a half-dozen scrambled eggs for dinner won’t put you in the hospital.

  To be absolutely clear, I am in no way recommending any of this. No plant foods are included as part of the Ancestral Indigenous Diet. But these are just examples to stress the importance of ensuring you consume nutrient-dense animal foods. That, first and foremost, is the goal of this diet much more than preaching philosophically purity or devoutly adhering to some carnivore religion.

  One other reason we can’t say strict carnivore-eating is the only way to achieve optimal health is the existence of "blue zones.” People living in blue zones, a term coined for a few select places where residents tend to live to extraordinarily old ages, definitely consume a wide variety of foods, including many vegetables, fruits, grains, and beans. In this way, they resemble the indigenous groups all throughout history.

  Critically, however, the diets of the people living in these special regions — whether in Italy, Japan, Costa Rica, or Greece — have almost always included certain meats, cheeses, seafood, or other locally sourced, high-quality animal foods. Italians in Sardinia eat an average of around 15 pounds of sheep's cheese per year, according to NPR. In Okinawa, Japan, where the most centenarians have been born, they eat fish three times a week plus squid and octopus. And people in Ikaria, Greece, consume a lot of goat’s milk and feta cheese.

  Consider this: People living in blue zones usually consume around 70% of their calories from plant foods and 30% from animal foods. This is the exact same ratio as the Standard American Diet. What is the difference — in the makeup of the diet and their health? Food quality.

  It’s also important to note that anybody who has ever lived to be 100 years old grew up in a time before the widespread consumption of modern processed foods. This means that both the animal products and the plant foods they ate in their formative years were coming from much-higher-quality sources than can readily be found today. And toxic herbicides, like glyphosate, had not even been invented. So, unlike most of your options in this century, each piece of lettuce they consumed wasn’t laced with industrial poison.

  Eating for Modern Times

  If you could take a time machine to a Greek island in 1935, eating for health would be a lot easier. You probably couldn’t mess it up if you tried. That, unfortunately, is no longer the world we live in. Especially in the United States, you need to understand that access and availability to high-quality foods has grown incredibly scarce.

  It’s a sad commentary on our society honestly. We have more and more affluence and abundance than ever. But it is harder now for even someone living very comfortably on $100,000 per year to find a good piece of chicken than it was for a poor farmer in the days before World War II.

  Just remember: Today, the main purpose of eating any plant food is culinary or psychological enjoyment. You don’t need the relatively low amount of nutrients they offer. And in this modern world of abundance, you don’t have the excuse of needing extra calories like our ancestors.

  But before you even start to talk about including veggies, grains, and nuts, you need to begin learning a lot about avoiding the downsides of inflammation, removing anti-nutrients, understanding which “nuts” and “good fats” to always avoid (like cashews), and where to find heirloom varieties.

  The problem with plants is that both the nutrient and anti-nutrient profile of every single food varies so much. What's the anti-nutrient content of white potatoes vs sweet potatoes? White potatoes are nightshades so they are high in solan
ines. Whereas sweet potatoes are high in oxalates. Learning it all is essentially homework! Good luck trying to live a normal life and keep it all straight.

  Gauging the bodies response to individual plant foods, and trying to see which antinutrients cause you issues, is a good first step. But, for most people, this is just too time consuming and confusing. And especially if you’re coming from a Standard American Diet, you already have enough work to do in terms of understanding why the nutrients from animal foods are so vital and how to source quality products.

  That’s why my advice is to focus on that. If anything, use your limited time to learn more about the importance of Vitamin A and find a local farm that has high-quality eggs.

  If you actually want to get healthy, try to just keep everything as simple as possible while you change your life for the better. You have years of damage to fix. You need to overcome vitamin and nutrient deficiencies and get your Omega ratios back in check. This will take months, if not years, of focused effort toward eating the right animal foods and cutting out the junk.

  Don’t spend hours each week making sourdough bread with natural cultures and fermenting stone-cut Scottish oats. In general, these can be seen as more-approachable foods to use if introducing your family or friends to better eating habits. Make them einkorn flour cookies, fermented sourdough, or a raw cream cheesecake if you want to spend some effort.

  But, personally, you will probably be a lot better off just sticking to the animal foods that we know are the foundation of nutrition. Use the precious time you save to get a little exercise or sit outside in the sunshine.

  Eventually, you may want to reintroduce some of these plant foods. With the right information, enough care, and better understanding of how your digestive system reacts to different substances, that should be no problem. Beyond all the science and chemistry, what matters most is how you individually tolerate them.

  But, for now, trust me: You don’t need any of this and you will do much, much better by simply sticking to high-quality animal foods 99% of the time. Embracing high-quality animal foods — and consuming only the best of the best — will be the fastest and easiest way to make real progress on the journey to optimal health.

  Chapter 7

  Food Quality:

  The Biggest Factor in Nutrition and Health

  Every day, countless new articles, TV reports, YouTube videos, and research studies talk about one food or another being “healthy” for you. No doubt, some foods are generally better. And others are always bad. But labeling any specific thing as unquestionably “healthy” misses the biggest factor in nutrition and human health.

  Food quality is KING! What the animal was raised on determines its vitamin, mineral, and overall nutritional content. This means that you always want to consume animals that themselves ate their natural diet.

  Cows should be eating grass. Pigs should be foraging for leaves, roots, and bugs. If they instead spend their lives eating low-quality and unnatural industrial feed, they will have fewer nutrients in their muscles, fat, and organs.

  A steak is not just a steak. An egg is not just an egg. Salmon is not just salmon. Milk is not just milk. Bacon, from the right animal that lived the right way, can be very healthy and nutritious. Or, as most varieties are, it can be highly processed crap full of Omega-6 fatty acids, preservatives, and commercial poison. Garbage in, garbage out. Pretty simple.

  The Vital Importance of Food Quality

  How much difference can there really be between grass-fed and grain-fed beef? It’s a reasonable question that many people don’t fully grasp. It doesn’t help that the marketing around grass-fed beef generally promotes it as an organic product that is free from “contaminants” (including steroids, hormones, and antibiotics) and more humane.

  Make no mistake: There is a definite benefit to not ingesting those industrial compounds. But there has unfortunately been little done to raise awareness about the nutritional differences, and this is what is really fundamental to the Ancestral Indigenous Diet.

  The nutrient difference can be drastic. A conventionally raised grain-fed ribeye or New York strip, honestly, gives you almost no fat-soluble vitamins. You will get a few of the commonly obtained B Vitamins and some minerals. But, by comparison, some grass-fed bone marrow will effectively give you all the nutrition you need for the entire day.

  You should also know that different foods are affected by feedlot production in different ways. Pork and chicken are impacted by industrial feed more than beef because of how the digestive systems of ruminant animals work. In particular, it alters the Omega ratio in the animal’s fat, among other factors. Many people report feeling great on grain-fed steak but become more lethargic, or just feel “off” if they eat too much conventionally raised pork. The differences in how the different animals react to grain feeding is a big reason why.

  This isn’t an invitation to eat feedlot beef. It’s not good for you! But it means that, in a pinch, eating a steak at Applebees once in awhile may not affect you as negatively as eating conventional pork chops every day.

  Beyond the barnyard, we see differences in the ocean as well. Wild-caught fish, especially salmon, has an excellent nutrient profile that is much better than farmed varieties. No matter what the fish ate or where it was raised, there will still be a pollution consideration that can be worrisome to some degree. Fish is something of a double-edged sword.

  Then again, especially for those of us eating in North America, wild-caught fish typically have the benefit of maintaining some year-round consistency. Sure, you may be worried about the potential pollution factor even with wild-caught fish. But a piece of Pacific sockeye salmon, by and large, will usually have a good nutrient profile regardless of when it was caught. And a fish pulled aboard a ship during high season then flash frozen will store its nutrients well until it reaches your plate.

  We don’t always see this with grass-fed beef. When the cow is coming off summer pasture, it is always packed with nutrients. But these same cows often eat hay during the winter. Even though hay is close to their natural, preferred food source — and way better than industrial soy or corn feed covered in the herbicide atrazine — it doesn’t allow the cows to store as many vitamins. Then there is Vitamin D to think about. The winter season means the cows won’t see enough sun to convert high levels of Vitamin D3. This is one reason why we see indigenous groups fermenting or preserving foods from the late summer and fall.

  In short, even grass-fed beef isn’t always grass-fed beef. There will be nutrient differences depending upon the time of year, where it’s from, and the grass it ate.

  Major Differences in Food Quality

  In animal foods, we are primarily concerned with vitamins. For plants, because they don't contain bioavailable vitamins in considerable amounts, it’s minerals. As noted, the ultimate vitamin content in the beef products we consume depends not just on the cow’s feed but on the season it was slaughtered and even the actual quality of the pasture and soil.

  Such factors are very difficult to know. It’s one thing to buy a plastic-wrapped package that says “grass-fed” at Whole Foods and another to find a trustworthy specialty supplier that guarantees “grass-fed” and “grass-finished” beef. Then it is another thing altogether to actually know your local farmer personally and have visited the farm and pasture to see where the cows are raised, fed, and slaughtered.

  I get it: This is asking a lot. Do we really have to go through all this just to eat dinner? Besides, can I really even tell the difference? Could I actually pick out the more nutritious steak if two very different options were placed in front of me — let alone have an idea what type of pasture is optimal for a cow?

  In some sense, you probably can’t as an untrained consumer. It would be great if we had a better nutritional facts to rely on. This would help everybody learn the difference between grass-fed and grain-fed beef generally. (Side note: Doing this type of testing is a personal goal of mine. It is expensive and so far hasn’t gener
ated that much demand from the marketplace. But I hope to help provide more clarity on this information in the future.)

  All that said, there are ways for a trained eye to spot food quality. And you will get better at it in time if you learn the signs.

  How do you tell? For one, the meat from grass-fed and older animals is generally darker. The fat should also be beige, or even bordering on yellow, not stark white.

  Even better than training your eye, you should educate your tongue. It is far easier to identify properly raised animals by taste. Because if they are not raised right, the fat will have a hard texture and something of an off, acrid taste.

  Assessing fish is generally less of an issue since it is usually labeled “wild-caught” or “farm-raised” at the fishmonger. Although wild-caught fish, especially shellfish, is a very reliable source of certain nutrients, as a rule, farmed fish can be problematic due to pollution concerns. In general, it still is usually better — in most cases — than feedlot-raised beef, pork, and chicken. But some people react very badly to the toxins and other negative substances they contain

  I personally feel like death if I eat more than a small amount of farmed salmon. So if that is the only thing available, I just avoid it altogether and rely on brains, shellfish, eggs, cod liver fish oil pills, cod liver, or another good source for Omega-3s.

  Eating Local: Not Just for Hipsters

  My standards for food quality are ridiculously high. In both my personal life and my business as a food distributor, I go to stupid lengths to find the very best. This means I have spent countless hours searching around my local area for the top options — and it certainly helps in some ways that I live in New York City. There are just a ton of options in the nation’s largest metro area and I try to take advantage of them all.

  Then again, some people living in a small town in Montana may have even better luck by just driving 10 miles down the road. You may be able to ask a rancher for 20 pounds of grass-fed veal liver and be set for the whole season — though good luck finding salmon roe or fresh crab consistently in a landlocked town of 5,000 people.