Paleo Diet, The: Lose Weight and Get Healthy by Eating the Food You Were Designed to Eat

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Paleo Diet, The: Lose Weight and Get Healthy by Eating the Food You Were Designed to Eat

by: Loren Cordain

Topics include: your insulin metabolism, your insulin sensitivity, cold chicken breasts, dietary acid, enriched eggs, healthful oils, tsp black pepper, lean pork chops, protein toxicity, all processed foods, diet nature, tsp cayenne pepper, wild game meat, nonstarchy vegetables, original diet, flaxseed oil, tsp basil, alkaline base, simmer for five minutes, tsp turmeric, oxidized cholesterol, glycemic load

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According to author Loren Cordain, modern health and diet problems didn't start with the advent of packaged snack food, but much earlier--back at the dawn of the agricultural age many thousands of years ago. As humans became less nomadic and more dependent on high-carbohydrate diets, we left behind the diet we had evolved with, which is based on low-fat proteins and plenty of fruits and vegetables. Sugars, fats, and carbs were rare, if they were present at all, and survival required a steady, if low-key, level of activity. Cordain's book The Paleo Diet blends medical research with a healthy sprinkle of individual anecdotes, practical tips, and recipes designed to make his suggestions into a sustainable lifestyle, rather than a simple month-long diet; he even includes cooking recommendations and nationwide sources for wild game. Claims of improving diseases from diabetes to acne to polycystic ovary disease may be a little overstated, but in general the advice seems sound. Can any of us really go wrong by adding lots more vegetables and fruits to our daily regimen? One recommendation on safe tanning with a gradual reduction in sunscreen is surprising and not much detail is provided for safety issues that can accompany increased sun exposure. Still, Cordain's assertions have helped many people, and could provide exactly the changes you've been looking for to improve your health. --Jill Lightner From Library Journal Like Ray Audette's Neanderthin (St. Martin's, 1999), this is another "if you can't find it in the wild, don't eat it" diet that takes the germ of a useful idea and runs with it. According to Cordain (health and exercise science, Colorado State Univ.), Paleolithic humans were fit and lean because, as hunter-gatherers, they ate what was available: meats low in saturated fats, fresh fruits, and nonstarchy vegetables. Nor did they suffer from heart disease, cancer, and diabetes, the byproducts of our poor eating habits and lack of exercise. Then again, the average Paleolithic life span was about 30 years, not long enough to develop most chronic illnesses. Still, the author asserts that by eliminating grains, dairy, refined sugars, and processed foods from our diets, we, too, can thrive as our ancestors did. Three levels of diet and six weeks of sample menus, with recipes, are included. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. Book Info
Colorado State Univ., Fort Collins. Consumer text illustrates a diet consisting of lean meats, fish, fresh fruits, and nonstarchy vegetables for weight loss. Includes more than 100 recipes and a six-week meal plan utilizing the diet. Softcover. From the Publisher
"Dr. Loren Cordain, a highly respected, innovative investigator, has clearly articulated an approach to nutrition that is logically compelling, readily understood, and at the cutting edge of health science. Dr. Loren Cordain's original insights, encyclopedic knowledge, and painstaking research have made critical contributions.... Not all scientists can translate their concepts into a straightforward, accessible format, but Cordain has accomplished this feat brilliantly." --S. Boyd Eaton, M.D., Clinical Assistant Professor, Emory University; former Medical Director, Olympic Village Polyclinic, 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games (considered the godfather of the Paleolithic nutrition movement) "The Paleo Diet is a landmark book, written by one of the most brilliant and respected nutritionists in America today. It could save your life. Read it, live it, and buy a copy for everyone you love." --Robert Crayhon, M.S., Author of The Carnitine Miracle "The Paleo Diet is at once revolutionary and intuitive.... Its prescription provides without a doubt the most nutritious diet on the planet. Beautifully written, The Paleo Diet takes us from the theory to the day-to-day practice of the native human diet." --Jennie Brand-Miller, Ph.D. co-author of the bestselling The Glucose Revolution and The Glucose Revolution Life Plan; Professor of Human Nutrition, University of Sydney "Finally, someone has figured out the best diet for people -- a modern version of the diet the human race grew up eating. Dr. Loren Cordain's easy-to-follow diet plan cuts right to the chase and reminds us that the healthiest foods are the simplest ones." --Jack Challem, coauthor of Syndrome X: The Complete Nutritional Program to Prevent and Reverse Insulin Resistance "The Paleo Diet not only lays out the basic nutrition plan for weight loss and good health, but also for peak performance in athletic competition. It works." --Joe Friel, author of The Triathlete's Training Bible and endurance coach "In a world where we're surrounded with an information overload of dieting, this is a commonsense and effective weight-control approach that's easy to follow." --Fred Pescatore, M.D., author of Thin For Good and Feed Your Kids Well "Dr. Cordain offers a recipe for improved health based on his assessment of a range of information from modern medicine, anthropology, archaeology, and nutrition science. The Paleo Diet is a compelling read for anyone interested in diet and its linkage to health." --Clark Spencer Larsen, Ph.D.; Distinguished Professor of Social and Behavioral Sciences and Chair, Department of Anthropology, Ohio State University About the Author
LOREN CORDAIN, Ph.D., is one of the worlds most renowned scientists doing groundbreaking research into the original human diet. Generally acknowledged as the worlds leading expert on the Paleolithic diet, he is a professor in the Health and Exercise Science Department at Colorado State University and is a member of the American Institute of Nutrition, the American Society for Clinical Nutrition, and the American Heart Association. He regularly lectures and travels around North America and the world.

Reviews:

The Paleo Diet by Loren Cordain, Ph.D. is a monumental work that brilliantly explains and popularizes what may well be one of the biggest breakthroughs in scientific understanding in human history: the evolutionary hypothesis of human nutrition and lifestyle. This hypothesis does what no other diet and exercise regime does: it builds a scientific model that can be used to make predictions that can be tested and it does so upon the very foundation of biology--evolution. This book does an excellent job of explaining this model and how to put it to use. Dr. Cordain's style is eminently readable, so it is understandable to the layperson while maintaining a scientific and evidence-based approach. Endnotes would make the book even better. Those scientists who are using this evolutionary model of nutrition predict that the healthiest foods for humans will be the natural foods that humans have been eating for the last 2.5 million years--not the agrarian and processed foods of the last ten thousand years--and that an optimal diet will approximate as much as possible the types of diets that Paleolithic peoples consumed. Most other diets take a hit-or-miss, after-the-fact approach, focusing on the micro level of what certain scientific studies and anecdotal evidence suggest about the healthiness of certain foods and diets, and from the aggregation of some of this data, try to determine the optimal dietary approach. As new data comes in that contradicts the old, upheavals in dietary fads occur and many people become confused and discouraged by the conflicting signals they receive over the years. As others have noted, Paleolithic-based diets are the only non-fad diets, since they span hundreds of thousands and millions of years, not decades. The most common criticism of the evolutionary hypothesis of diet and lifestyle involves comparative life expectancy. Assumptions are made that people live much longer and healthier lives today than Stone Agers did, and that Stone Agers did not live long enough to acquire the chronic degenerative diseases of modern civilization. The idea that hunter gatherers' lives were "nasty, brutish, and short" is actually an exaggeration that was popularized by Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan. Dr. Cordain explains (as have others) the scientific findings that human life expectancies DECLINED when Stone Age hunter-gatherers adopted an agrarian lifestyle at the start of the Neolithic era. The later increases in life expectancy were mainly due to public health advances in sanitation, food safety, quarantine systems, immunizations and childbirth survival rates. Thirty three years was the estimated AVERAGE life expectancy of a Paleolithic hunter-gatherer male, not the maximal lifespan of all hunter gatherers. A hunter gatherer who survived childbirth, infectious disease, accidents, battles, and wild animals could be expected to live as long as we do today. Moreover, archaeological and anthropological studies of Paleolithic records and contemporary hunter-gatherer cultures show much lower prevalence of heart disease, sudden cardiac death, cancer, stroke and even acne than in modern societies. Professor Jared Diamond, the famous evolutionary biologist and author, went so far as to state that "recent discoveries suggest that the adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered. With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism, that curse our existence." He further declared that "Hunter-gatherers practiced the most successful and longest-lasting life style in human history. In contrast, we're still struggling with the mess into which agriculture has tumbled us, and it's unclear whether we can solve it." Those questions that Cordain didn't handle thoroughly in his book are addressed on his website (http://thepaleodiet.com/faqs/). Perhaps future editions of the book will include the additional details and defenses that Cordain has posted on his site. For example, Cordain responds to another common objection to The Paleo Diet--that hunter gatherers favored fatty cuts of meat and that Cordain is therefore wrong to suggest that we restrict our intake of saturated fat. Cordain agrees that "There is absolutely no doubt that hunter-gatherers favored the fattiest part of the animals they hunted and killed" (such as the tongue and brains). But this does not mean that we should eat unlimited quantities of fatty domestic meats, as Cordain explains: "Not surprisingly, these organs are all relatively high in fat, but more importantly analyses from our laboratories showed the types of fats in tongue, brain, and marrow are healthful, unlike the high concentrations of saturated fats found in fatty domestic meats. Brain is extremely high in polyunsaturated fats including the health-promoting omega-3 fatty acids, whereas the dominant fat in tongue and marrow are the cholesterol lowering monounsaturated fats." Cordain points out that modern feedlot cattle typically have 30% body fat or greater, versus the 10% body fat that wild Paleolithic animals averaged on a year round basis. Cordain also explains on his site that the question of saturated fat is more complicated than a simple good-or-bad debate would indicate. Some saturated fat is good (stearic acid) and some is bad (palmitic acid, lauric acid, and myristic acid). Wild animals have more of the good saturated fat than domestic animals. As scientific understanding of the new field of evolutionary nutrition advances, some of Cordain's recommendations may well be revised. Cordain has already modified one of his recommendations: he no longer recommends using flaxseed oil in cooking (he still recommends consuming it cold, adding it to meats after cooking them and to salads) and acknowledges that was an error. This is a new field in science and there is still much to learn. Cordain was first "enlightened" about diet by S. Boyd Eaton's 1985 article in the New England Journal of Medicine entitled "Paleolithic Nutrition." Accumulating evidence and growing scientific opinion suggests that S. Boyd Eaton, Loren Cordain and others have indeed started a scientific revolution. I believe that this book will be seen in retrospect as an early classic in this revolution's development. One doesn't even need to accept the evolutionary model in order to recognize the wisdom of this dietary approach. Cordain says that a blueprint for optimal nutrition is built into our genes and "Whether you believe the architect of that blueprint is God, or God acting through evolution by natural selection, or by evolution alone, the end result is still the same: We need to give our bodies the foods we were originally designed to eat."

How long did the cavemen live ?
I think this is a good book on diet and nutrition and culture. The author is correct, I think, to criticize the typical U.S. diet, which is literally killing millions of people, because it is heavily based on sugar, carbohydrates, fat, and sodium (salt). Processed foods are full of bad things like hydrogenated fats, and fast food has all kinds of bad things in it. I also think that the idea of eating lean protein, fruits and vegetables is a very good idea. For example, you can literally eat as much fruit as you want. By the time your stomache is full, you will stop eating, but the energy density to volume of food is very low, so you won't gain weight. I think one big factor in the U.S. obesity epidemic is lack of exercise and movement (driving everywhere) and also the fact that portions keep increasing in size. Going to a lean protein and fruit and veggies diet is a good idea, because protein make you feel full far longer than carbs do. So in essence, I like this book and will do this diet. However, I mean, let's get real, the average paleolithic man or woman lived probably to be about 22 on average, whereas we today live to be 74. Paleo man died probably mostly of infections and parasites. He did not live long enough to develop heart disease or the types of diseases the author associates with our "high carb diet". So it is a bit of an unfair comparison. I would take our modern lifestyle over that of paleo man any day of the week, and I think it is a bit odd to hold up as a model a people that died so young. Another issue I have is, if our genetic code designs us for eating lean protein and veggies, why do the things we crave tend to be other things (donuts, pizza, etc.). If my genes are specifically built for eating veggies and lean protein, why do I like pizza and donuts more ? It can't all be "cultural factors". I once read an interview of a top European nutrition expert, and he said, they did research on what is in uncooked vegetables, and he reported that many of the things are very harmful. Brocholi has some really nasty substances in it ! He also said that we should tune more into what our body tells us, because it doesn't lie. For example, you body self-regulates, and will give you signals for what to eat and when, if you know how to listen to it. So the idea in the Paleo diet that uncooked veggies are all good and that we are genetically designed to eat them and lean protein makes me wonder a bit, because moms all over the world have to force their kids to eat stuff like brocholi. Maybe nature knows a lot more than we do, and those kids are right, if they listen to what their body is telling them. I think the truth is, our paleo genetics doesn't know we live in an environment of extremely easy access to food (especially in the U.S.), and we tend to love fats and sugars and salt because in a resource-scare environment, we HAD to love them, because they were so rare. On the other hand, veggies were everywhere. So I think there are some very good concepts in this book, and everyone should think this through. It is fascinating and I appreciate that the author wrote this book, because it puts us on the right track.