Hi! I originally started eating paleo because of stomach problems and I've stuck with it because it makes me feel great. I am also a co-organizer for NYC's Eating Paleo in NYC Meetup Group. I was recently featured in the New York Times in an article about caveman-style life in NYC.
Melissa McEwen
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05/11/2010 - 10:38
I had a great time at Jackson Lander's deer hunting workshop, but I will write a post on it later since I'm still...ruminating...haha! But John Durant already beat me to it and has some great picture, so you should check them out.
I've been getting some questions about the paleo foods section...actually a lot of questions. I created that section with the idea of showing my own diet and showing the costs and benefits of each food.
But it's really not as simple as non-paleo and paleo. Really, most foods aren't "paleolithic." If a museum curator put a domestic chicken in the prehistoric human diorama in the Museum of Natural History they would be fired. But paleolithic eating isn't about reenactment, it's about emulating the nutritional intake of our ancestors- no African baboon meat required.
That's why I include butter/ghee in my diet. Paleolithic hunters ate the brain, which is very rich in fat. I don't eat that because it's hard to buy and when hunting there are concerns about prion diseases (which I think are largely exaggerated and I plan to do some of Fergus Henderson's brain recipes whenever I finally get ahold of brain). But hunter-gatherer cultures like the Hazda seem to love the brain.
Onwas then reaches into the fire and pulls out the skull. He hacks it open, like a coconut, exposing the brains, which have been boiling for a good hour inside the skull. They look like ramen noodles, yellowish white, lightly steaming. He holds the skull out, and the men, including myself, surge forward and stick our fingers inside the skull and scoop up a handful of brains and slurp them down. With this, the night, at last, comes to an end.
But why are sesame seeds not-paleo on my list and cumin is? Well, it's actually not as simple as that. As an astute reader pointed out, there is evidence that prehistoric hominids ate small amounts of seeds, grains, and even legumes. Note the small amounts- it's pretty hard to gather enough wild grains to make a rice pilaf or tahini. Personally I DO eat sesame seeds. They are a tasty garnish on raw tuna sashimi. I put maybe 10 on. In small quantities they are like cumin, which is also a flavoring/garnish. Both of these used as garnish are tasty, but probably inconsequential either way for someone with a healthy digestive system.
Contrast that with hummus, which contains large amounts of chickpeas and ground sesame seeds in the form of tahini. It's used as a food, but as a food it provides inappropriate nutrition, particularly in the form of excess omega-6 fatty acids. Something people don't think about is that seeds and grains used as foods displace better foods. If I eat a cup of white rice at a Korean place I'm not going to get sick, but it's going to fill me up and I'll eat less blood stew or squid, which are much more nutritious.
When I'm at a nice restaurant sometimes pork will come with a teeny tiny side of beans. I'll eat those. Since my digestive flora has been rebalanced by eating paleo, they honestly don't bother me and beans cooked in pork fat are mighty tasty. I'm ultimately a foodie and taste means a lot to me.
I stick with my guns that your staples should be grass fed meat from ruminants, fish, coconut, and other sources of saturated fat. Go ahead, season with cumin or sesame seeds, but if you eat them by the bag-full, it's just not evolutionarily appropriate.
Sticking with my guns
What about taste? Is our sense of taste a useless piece of baggage that leads us to fruit rollup and fried chicken perdition? No way! Our tastebuds are shaped by evolution to help us survive. It's our environment that messes them up and allows them to be used for choosing crap instead of choosing tasty nutritious fat. Do them a favor and strip your eating environment of junk. The best use for them in a paleo diet is that they tell you when to eat more fat, which particularly if you are doing a meat-only fast, is very very useful.
One thing optimal foraging theory misses out on is that humans have a sense of taste that often trumps "efficiency," which is why you will find cultures all over the world going after things like berries and nuts that provide little in the way of calories but much in the way of flavor. Perhaps they provide something else? Honestly, cutting nuts out of my diet has been easy because I no longer crave them. Perhaps there is something in my offal, seafood, and fat-rich paleo diet that I wasn't getting when I was a nut-crazed (hehe) faileo.
As an aside, I'm more likely to respond to your comments nicely if you use the contact form rather than posting comments unrelated to the post you are commenting on.
Comment?: 9
04/22/2010 - 18:27
Really easy to find at your local garden shop or next to your sofa!
I don't understand why so many paleo dieters neglect to consume cycads. They have been a part of our diet since the stone age and numerous hunter-gatherer tribes enjoy them. I hear that their starch goes really well in a puree of herbs with salmon. Making them is REALLY simple too! First you take the pith from the trunk, roots, and seeds and grind them into a coarse flour in your Vitamix. Then you soak it for five days and wash it out carefully several times to remove toxic chemicals. Finally, bake it on some hot rocks or ferment for several days. If tribal people in the jungle can do it, you can too.
Scientists don't recommend eating this, as some nerve toxin and other assorted natural chemicals could remain, but we paleo dieters know that it's a perfectly good food that people have eaten for hundreds of thousands of years! In fact, it's so valuable to hunter-gatherers that women will spend hours and hours preparing it.
Unlike potatoes, which they did not eat and therefore they are really bad. I can't find any studies that show that potatoes cause arthiritis or anything, but if Grok didn't eat it, then it doesn't belong. Who knows what it could do it you?
Next time you are craving potatos, reach for your nearest house plants and start processing! Stone age foods are always good and neolithic foods are always bad!
*just kidding. There is nothing wrong with modeling your diet on evolutionary principles that posit that the stone age was when we were eating food we evolved to eat, but it's fairly shallow to think that everything that is neolithic is bad. Almost ALL our food is technically neolithic. We should evaluate each food scientifically in light of our evolution.
Comment?: 6
02/24/2010 - 20:50
A while back I read an article mentioning a book called Prehistoric Cookery. It had some interesting ideas, so I bought the book.
Unfortunately the book is really a tiny little coffee table book. I was hoping for something more substantial, but it did get me thinking about ancient mesolithic and iron age diets of the Celts.
Scotland and Ireland are disproportionately affected by alcoholism, obesity, metabolic syndrome, and celiac disease. For some time there was a theory that this was because Celts are descended from a "Celtic Fringe" of more recent hunter-gatherers similar to the Finnish and Sami fringe further north. Recently, that theory was seriously questioned by genetic research that showed that Celts are most likely descendants of Middle Eastern neolithic farmers, mixed with perhaps some local hunter-gatherer stock.
It's really quite amazing how ignorant even scientific professionals are about the history of food, such as Colin T. Campbell or the professor in the article about Prehistoric Cookery, Brian Radcliffe, who claims
“The main lesson is that as humans we need a huge variety of food from a range of different sources and food groups, ” he says. “We can see from early man’s experience that it is not good enough to rely upon single sources and single groups of foods because they did not give them the nutrients they needed.
Ugh. First of all, he obviously hasn't read the book he is commenting on, which clearly shows the wide variety of foods consumed by the Celts ranging from fish roe to nettles to berries. Also, he doesn't seem to know about the many groups of indigenous peoples who rely on flesh and are healthy.
The author of Prehistoric Cookery makes some of the same mistakes, saying that "like studied hunter-gatherers" the diet of ancient Celts would have been 80% plants, which is NOT true. Hunter-gathers studied get most of their calories from meat. Isotope studies indicate that the Celtic diet in the Iron Age was very high in meat.
Mesolithic Celts seem to have eaten deer and wild boar. Their remains are typically on the shoreline, where they left shell middens and probably ate seaweed, roe, and whole fish. Early grains cultivated were mainly oats. Barley and early forms of wheat swept in later, but oats remained very important. Perhaps that is why their teeth in the Medieval period were better than the more wheat-centric English.
Weston A. Price visited the Isle of Lewis in Scotland and found that the natives were remarkably healthy and had beautiful teeth despite their "limited" diet. A diet of fish and oats might seem limited to us, but they ate parts of the fish that we typically don't:
An important and highly relished article of diet has been baked cod's head stuffed with chopped cod's liver and oatmeal.
I do think it's important to note that the oat eaters of the mesolithic were just not as healthy as their hunter-gatherer ancestors. Their bones were smaller and less sturdy. Traditional agrarian diets aren't bad, but I still don't believe they are optimal.
Here are some foods that I would definitely like to eat more of from Prehistoric Cookery include:
- Laver, a type of seaweed prized by the Welsh. We might think of Seaweed as an exotic Asian food, but people from all over the world have been harvesting it for a long time.
- Fish stomachs and roe. At least roe is fairly tasty...can't say the same for fish stomachs, though they are much cheaper :)
- Marsh plants. Sea beans(Salicornia) are fairly tasty and can actually be found at some NYC Greenmarkets and Fairway when they are in season.
- Ox tails and marrow bones. I already eat marrow bones and they are wonderful and cheap fatty treat.
- Nettles and other wild herbs. I already gather these often and will post more about them in the Spring.
The traditional bread was nearly flat and rather tough. It's interesting because since breads persist in Scandinavia. A local NYC bakery does the real thing. The Celts also fermented their oats.
On the subject of Ireland, it's also good to note that of course the potato was introduced very late. It spurred population increases that ended up being disastrous when the potato famine hit. Before potatoes were introduced, the diet of the Irish probably resembled that of the Masai, as they also relied on their cattle herds for both dairy and meat.
Cattle blood, not potatoes for Cuchulainn
Comment?: 3
02/04/2010 - 21:57
Image from MARTHA STEWART, she is badass
My fridge is full of jars of creepy goo. At least my roommates thing that. But the truth is that those jars hold liquid gold! I love jars, as they are easy to clean fat off of and don't leech plastic byproducts. But I love what's in those jars more:
- Stock! Just save your bones and put them in your crockpot with water on low for 24 hours and you get a brew rich in minerals like calcium and delicious savory flavor. Use it to make soups or just drink it! Don't ever throw away bones, even weird ones like pork and buffalo, make decent stock. The fat that floats to the top is good because it forms a cap that keeps the stock fresh for months. Once you break the fat cap, use within a week. If the stock is relatively new, I use it as a fat to saute vegetables for soup in.
- Pig juice! I make pork belly all the time. I just throw the belly in the crock pot on low overnight with a salt brine. The end result is pork belly, which I brown and eat, and a rich brown liquid. I put it in a jar and the fat floats to the top. The fat can be used to cook anything with, but often I just dump the whole jar in a crock pot with a lean cut of meat like wild boar or pork tenderloin to transform it into something delicious. I used to love lean meat, but since going paleo I realize it is inferior...fortunately pig juice saves it.
- Pig jelly! I don't have it anymore, but it was a crock full of rilettes from a farmer friend. Rilettes are delicious lard and delicious meat combined into an unholy medley of wonder and happiness. Spread on some lettuce, seaweed, or some less fortunate cut of meat.
- Some buffalo marrow bones from the farmer's market. Put them in a cooking pan with sides and pop them in the oven..or even the toaster oven until the fat melts. Spread it on anything or eat it plan.
- Sardines I didn't like. The box said they were delicious, but really they were just fishy. Unfortunately they are healthy and cheap, so I am planning on forcing myself to like them. When people tell me they dislike X healthy food, I often recount how I have gradually forced myself to like various slimy sea creatures because they are so good for me.
Stefansson also forced himself to like fish, you can read about it in his interesting book online:
Until I was twenty seven I had the belief about myself that I could not eat fish and felt certain that its taste was obnoxious to me. I thought it an interesting peculiarity and assumed that everyone else would think so and there were few things I told about so often as the fact that I was peculiar in that I could not eat fish. I think I might have lost the notion sooner if it had not formed such an excellent topic of conversation
Comment?: 6
01/28/2010 - 23:16
I would hate for people to think that the paleo diet is about recovering some "paradise lost." Just because peasant agriculture was miserable for most people doesn't mean foraging was a walk in the part. Almost every foraging culture studied has a wide range of remedies for illness and medicine men are revered. Hunter-gatherers suffered from malaria, tuberculosis, parasites, wounds from wild animal bites, and all sorts of horrendous infections.
The preferred medicine against diarrhea was clay, kaolin-like powders or pulverized bone ash while bee larva, certain tree barks and the fruits of two trees were eaten to relieve constipation.
But many detractors of the paleo diet point to studies of more modern hunter-gatherer cultures to draw out evidence they were ill. We have to remember that what is left on that lifestyle is people who were able to survive on the worst lands not coveted by farmers. The Inuit or the San diet might be healthier than most American diets, but neither is really similar to the diet of paleolithic people.
In Innu mythology, Matshishkapeu (literally the "Fart Man") is the most powerful spirit—even more powerful than the Caribou Master, Kanipinikassikueu. He proved himself when the Kanipinikassikueu refused to give the Innu any caribou to eat. Matshishkapeu was so angry that he cursed the Caribou Master with a painful case of constipation.
It's even possible we could do better. For example, both the high and low fiber diets of hunter-gatherers are touted as solutions to digestive problems, but digestive ailments clearly still plagued cultures eating both diets. Personally, I try to eat the vegetables that work for me and I don't worry about counting fiber. I'm pretty such that if I ate the bazillion grams of fiber the San eat, I would feel pretty sick. Maybe that's what anecdotes like this convey: there is lots of learn from hunter-gatherer and ancestral diets, but imitating their fiber consumption with BRAN4LIFE bread is on the same level as imitating snake bite wounds by keeping your own pet PALEOvipers.
Despite all that hunter-gatherers suffered, the paleo diet is about avoiding diseases of civilization, and it seems they did that well. We should eat like them, but still with an eye to the fact that they ate what they could to survive.
Postscript: I think many of the stomach problems attributed to hunter-gatherers were probably post-infectious or in the case of the Inuit, because of a lean time...literally...Vilhjalmur Stefansson found that without ample amount of fat, stomach issues ensued.
Comment?: 0
01/26/2010 - 14:15
Gene Expression has a facinating post on the transition from foraging to agriculture and how it affected human welfare. The graph Razib drew is interesting:
Thinking about it in a dietary context, I added a green line. Of course it is a rough approxamation. It would certainly be interesting to do a really well-researched version of this graph taking into account the archeological evidence, but this graph does show some important things. We in the modern era (well, some of us in 1st world countries at least) are lucky in many ways, as mortality is pretty much lower than its ever been. We don't have to worry very much about ourselves and our children getting felled by a random infection or being eaten by wild animals. But the so-called diseases of civilization really keep us from living up to our full genetic potential.
Where on this timeline do you want to eat? There are actually several good choices that seem to allow one to avoid diseases of civilization.
- The paleolithic diet, emulating hunter-gatherers.
- The mesolithic diet, emulating peoples who would have eaten small amounts of agricultural products, but also would have supplemented with wild foods. I think some diets that are similar to this would be the acorn-based diets of some Native west coast cultures or the reindeer-herding Sami. Many foraging cultures that survived beyond the paleolithic, don't really eat a diet that would be considered paleolithic. Reliance on nuts as a major food source, for example, seems to start after the paleolithic period.
- and traditional nutrition, which emulates the diet of healthy peasant societies. The modern Weston A. Price society aims for this diet.
I suppose it all depends on that dotted line from this graph on Demeter's Legacy. Certainly, there are both cultural (soaking and fermenting grains) and genetic adaptations that make agricultural food less harmful to humans. Eliminating the basic poisons of the Industrial Revolution like refined sugars and grains is often enough to restore health. I suppose it is up to you as an individual to decide if you are experiencing maladaptation from an agricultural diet. The cause of maladaption could be genetic, but it also could be that the illnesses developed on an inappropriate diet require going back to the basics. I feel that is certainly the case for me.
Comment?: 0
01/07/2010 - 18:44
Almost like an extension of Jared Diamond's The Worst Mistake. Manning challenges the notion that agriculture represented progress for the human race by telling us about what we lost by adopting it- our health, for example.
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