The Paleo Diet Cookbook: More than 150 recipes for Paleo Breakfasts, Lunches, Dinners, Snacks, and Beverages (5 page)
Authors: Loren Cordain
BOOK: The Paleo Diet Cookbook: More than 150 recipes for Paleo Breakfasts, Lunches, Dinners, Snacks, and Beverages
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Fruits are Mother Nature’s natural sweets, and the only fruits you should completely avoid are canned fruits packed in syrup. Dried fruits should be consumed in limited quantities, as they can contain as much concentrated sugar as a candy bar (see the table below). If you are obese or have one or more diseases of metabolic syndrome (hypertension, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, or abnormal blood lipids), you should avoid dried fruit altogether and eat sparingly the very high and high sugar fresh fruits that are listed below. Once your weight normalizes and your disease symptoms wane, feel free to eat as much fresh fruit as you like.
SUGAR CONTENT IN DRIED AND FRESH FRUITSDRIED FRUITS
Extremely High in Total Sugars Total Sugars per 100 Grams Dried mango 73.0 Raisins, golden 70.6 Zante currants 70.6 Raisins 65.0 Dates 64.2 Dried figs 62.3 Dried papaya 53.5 Dried pears 49.0 Dried peaches 44.6 Dried prunes 44.0 Dried apricots 38.9 FRESH FRUITS
Very High in Total Sugars Total Sugars per 100 Grams Grapes 18.1 Banana 15.6 Mango 14.8 Cherries, sweet 14.6 High in Total Sugars Apple 13.3 Pineapple 11.9 Purple passion fruit 11.2 Moderate in Total Sugars Kiwi 10.5 Pear 10.5 Pear, Bosc 10.5 Pear, Anjou 10.5 Pomegranate 10.1 Raspberries 9.5 Apricot 9.3 Orange 9.2 Watermelon 9.0 Cantaloupe 8.7 Peach 8.7 Nectarine 8.5 Jackfruit 8.4 Honeydew melon 8.2 Blackberries 8.1 Cherries, sour 8.1 Tangerine 7.7 Plum 7.5 Low in Total Sugars Blueberries 7.3 Starfruit 7.1 Elderberries 7.0 Figs (fresh) 6.9 Mamey apple 6.5 Grapefruit, pink 6.2 Grapefruit, white 6.2 Guava 6.0 Guava, strawberry 6.0 Papaya 5.9 Strawberries 5.8 Casaba melon 4.7 Very Low in Total Sugars Tomato 2.8 Lemon 2.5 Avocado, California 0.9 Avocado, Florida 0.9 Lime 0.4
Except for potatoes and corn, you can’t go wrong with fresh veggies. Try to eat them at every meal, including breakfast. Why not fold some chopped scallions, avocado slices, and diced tomatoes into your next omelet, made with omega 3-enriched eggs? If you are obese or have signs and symptoms of metabolic syndrome, limit your servings of yams and sweet potatoes to one a day. Remember that peas and green beans are legumes, and these foods were rarely on Stone Age menus. Otherwise, enjoy these incredibly healthy foods.
• Artichoke
• Asparagus
• Beet greens
• Beets
• Bell peppers
• Broccoli
• Brussels sprouts
• Cabbage
• Carrots
• Cauliflower
• Celery
• Collards
• Cucumber
• Dandelion
• Eggplant
• Endive
• Green onions
• Kale
• Kohlrabi
• Lettuce
• Mushrooms
• Mustard greens
• Onions
• Parsley
• Parsnip
• Peppers
• Pumpkin
• Purslane
• Radish
• Rutabaga
• Seaweed
• Spinach
• Squash
• Sweet potatoes
• Swiss chard
• Tomatillos
• Tomato
• Turnip greens
• Turnips
• Watercress
• Yams
Nuts are rich sources of monounsaturated fats, which lower your blood cholesterol, thereby reducing your risk of heart disease and certain cancers, including breast cancer. However, because nuts and seeds are such concentrated sources of fat, they have the potential to slow down weight loss, particularly if you’re overweight or obese. If you are, you should limit your consumption of nuts and seeds to less than 4 ounces per day. Once your metabolism has increased and you’ve reached your desired weight, you can eat more nuts, particularly walnuts, which have a more favorable omega 6 to omega 3 ratio than any other nut. Almost all nuts contain high concentrations of omega 6 fatty acids, and if eaten excessively can create an imbalance of fatty acids in your diet.
Peanuts are legumes, not nuts, and are absolutely not on the Paleo Diet menu. Peanuts contain substances that rapidly enter our bloodstreams and can promote allergies, autoimmune diseases, and heart disease. Nut allergies, particularly peanut and pine nut allergies, are common and can disrupt your health.
Here’s our list of recommended nuts and seeds, but remember to listen to your body and let it be the final judge of what you should and shouldn’t eat, particularly when it comes to nuts and seeds.
• Almonds
• Brazil nuts
• Cashews
• Chestnuts
• Hazelnuts (filberts)
• Macadamia nuts
• Pecans
• Pistachios (unsalted)
• Pumpkin seeds
• Sesame seeds
• Sunflower seeds
• Walnuts
For ideal health you should eat lots of lean meat, seafood, fish, and fresh fruits and vegetables with every meal along with moderate amounts of nuts, avocados, seeds, and healthful oils (olive, flaxseed, walnut, and avocado). Dried fruit should be consumed in small quantities because it causes rapid increases in blood glucose and insulin levels. When you’re hungry or in doubt, start with a high-protein, low-fat food. Remember, lean protein is the most effective nutrient to reduce your appetite and boost your metabolism to help you burn stored fat and lose weight.
Vegetable oils were clearly not a component of Stone Age diets, simply because our hunter-gatherer ancestors did not have the technology to produce them. Oils made from walnuts, almonds, olives, sesame seeds, and flax seeds were initially manufactured using primitive presses about five to six thousand years ago. Nevertheless, except for olive oil, most early utilization of plant oils was for non-food purposes, such as lubrication, lighting, and medication. It wasn’t until the start of the twentieth century, with the arrival of mechanically driven steel expellers and hexane extraction methods, that vegetable oils contributed noticeable calories to the Western diet.
Today the vegetable oils used in cooking, salad oils, margarine, shortening, and processed foods supply 17.6 percent of the total daily energy in the U.S. diet. This massive infusion of vegetable oils into our food supply starting in the early 1900s is to blame for elevating the dietary omega 6 to omega 3 ratio to its current and damaging value of ten to one. In hunter-gatherer diets, the omega 6 to omega 3 ratio was closer to two to one. Numerous diseases associated with this imbalance of fatty acids include heart disease, cancer, autoimmune diseases, metabolic syndrome, and almost all inflammatory diseases that end with “-itis”. If we use the evolutionary model exclusively, then vegetable oils should constitute only a minimal part of contemporary Paleo diets.
If this is the case, then why not completely do away with all vegetable oils? I still believe that certain oils may be used in cooking and to add flavor to condiments, dressings, and marinades. Simply stated, there are at least four oils—flaxseed, walnut, olive, and avocado—that promote health and assist in getting the correct balance of good fats back into your diet.
Since the publication of the first edition of
The Paleo Diet
in 2002, I have reversed my position on canola oil and can no longer endorse its consumption. Canola oil comes from the seeds of the rape plant (
Brassica rapa
or
Brassica campestris
), which is a relative of the broccoli, cabbage, Brussels sprouts, and kale family. Undoubtedly, humans have eaten cabbage and its relatives since before historical times, and I still strongly support the consumption of these health-promoting vegetables. Nevertheless, the concentrated oil from
Brassica
seeds is another story.
The Paleo Diet
in 2002, I have reversed my position on canola oil and can no longer endorse its consumption. Canola oil comes from the seeds of the rape plant (
Brassica rapa
or
Brassica campestris
), which is a relative of the broccoli, cabbage, Brussels sprouts, and kale family. Undoubtedly, humans have eaten cabbage and its relatives since before historical times, and I still strongly support the consumption of these health-promoting vegetables. Nevertheless, the concentrated oil from
Brassica
seeds is another story.
In its original form, rape plants produced a seed oil that contained elevated levels (20 to 50 percent) of erucic acid (a monounsaturated fatty acid labeled 22:1n9). Erucic acid is toxic and causes tissue damage in many organs of laboratory animals. In the early 1970s, Canadian plant breeders developed a strain of rape plant that yielded a seed with less than 2 percent erucic acid (thus the name canola oil).
The erucic acid content of commercially available canola oil averages 0.6 percent. Despite its low erucic acid content, a number of experiments in the 1970s showed that even at low concentrations (2.0 and 0.88 percent), canola oil fed to rats could still elicit minor heart scarring that was considered pathological. A series of recent rat studies of low-erucic canola oil conducted by Dr. Ohara and colleagues at the Hatano Research Institute in Japan reported kidney injuries, increases in blood sodium levels, and abnormal changes in the hormone aldosterone, which regulates blood pressure.
Other harmful effects of canola oil consumption in animals (at 10 percent of their total calories) included decreased litter sizes, behavioral changes, and liver damage. A number of recent human studies of canola and rapeseed oil by Dr. Poiikonen and colleagues at the University of Tempere in Finland showed it to be a potent allergen in adults and children that causes allergic cross-reactions from other environmental allergens. Based on these brand-new findings in both humans and animals, I prefer to err on the safe side and can no longer recommend canola oil in the modern-day Paleo Diet.
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