The Paleo Diet for Athletes (2 page)

The Yanomamo Indians of South America, to whom salt was unknown in the late 1960s and early 1970s, were completely free of high blood pressure.
Table I.2
shows the remarkable results of their salt-free diet in conjunction with their non-Westernized lifestyle on blood pressure. Not only is their average population blood pressure (102/64) lower than values considered to be normal (120/80) in the United States, but also there is no age-associated rise in blood pressure. In the United States, by the ages of 65 to 74, 65 percent of all Americans have high blood pressure (140/90 or greater).

FIGURE I-1

FIGURE I-2

The superb health and fitness levels of hunter-gatherers were recorded not only in the medical literature but also in historical accounts by early explorers, adventurers, and frontiersmen. Cabeza de Vaca, the Spanish explorer, saw Native Americans in Florida in 1527 and described them as “wonderfully well built, spare, very strong, and very swift.” Similar observations of these Indians were made in 1564 by the French explorer Rene de Laudonniere, who noted, “The agility of the women is so great that they can swim over great rivers, bearing their children upon one of their arms. They climb up, also, very nimbly upon the highest trees in the country … even the most ancient women of the country dance with the others.”

TABLE I.1

Blood Cholesterol Levels in Non-Westernized Populations

TABLE I.2

Blood Pressures (Systolic/Diastolic) in 506 Yanomamo Indians Throughout Life

In his 1773 account of California Native Americans, Jacob Baegert noted that “the Californians are seldom sick. They are in general strong, hardy, and much healthier than the many thousands who live daily in abundance and on the choicest fare that the skill of Parisian cooks can prepare.” In his book
Across Unknown South America,
Henry Savage Landor describes the Borono Indians of the Amazon in 1913.

They displayed powerful chests, with ribs well covered with flesh and muscle. With their dark yellow skins they were not unlike beautiful bronze torsi. The abdominal region was never unduly enlarged, perhaps owing to the fact that their digestion was good, and also because they took a considerable amount of daily exercise…. The anatomical detail of the body was perfectly balanced. The arms were powerful, but with fine, well-formed wrists—exquisitely chiseled, as were all attachments of their limbs. Great refinement of the race was also to be noticed in the shape of their legs—marvelously modeled, without an ounce of extra flesh, and with small ankles.

Captain Cook, who visited New Zealand in 1772, was particularly impressed by the good health of the native Maori.

It cannot be thought strange that these people enjoy perfect and uninterrupted health. In all our visits to their towns, where young and old, men and women, crowd about us, prompted by the same curiosity that carried us to look at them, we never saw a single person who appeared to have any bodily complaint, nor among the numbers that we have seen naked did we perceive the slightest eruption upon the skin, or any marks that an eruption had been left behind…. A further proof that human nature is here untainted with disease is the great number of old men that we saw … appeared to be very ancient, yet none of them were decrepit; and though not equal to the young in muscular strength, were not a whit behind them in cheerfulness and vivacity.

Another common counterargument proposed by doubting Thomases is this: “We don’t really know what they, our Stone Age ancestors, ate.” In
Chapter 8
, we will delve into all the archaeological, anthropological, physiological, and fossil evidence showing us exactly what Stone Age hunter-gatherers ate. But for now, let us challenge you with a simple question that most of you could intuitively work out with little or zero knowledge of the fossil record or archaeology.

What foods could not have been consumed by Stone Age people?

This is no trick question; just do a little bit of reasoning with what you know about how some of the foods on your daily platter got there. Let’s tackle some of the easy ones first. How about the cup of milk you had with your breakfast cereal—where did it come from? Well, of course, a farmer milked a cow, and the milk was processed, pasteurized, homogenized, and bottled at a dairy, then eventually made its way to your local supermarket. Bingo—as simple as that, right?

Now stop and think a moment about where that docile, milkable cow came from. Were these peaceful, domesticated beasts always with us? Of course not! Modern-day milk cows were domesticated from wild, unruly beasts bearing enormous horns, called aurochs. Julius Caesar, who encountered these fierce brutes in Europe before they became extinct, remarked, “They are a little below the elephant in size, and of the appearance, color, and shape of a bull. Their strength and speed are extraordinary; they spare neither man nor wild beast which they have espied.” Prior to domestication, aurochs, like all wild mammals, would not let humans approach them, much less milk them. So, you can see that all of the milk and dairy products we consume today simply would not have been on the menu of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. In the average US diet, milk and dairy represent 10.6 percent of total daily energy intake.

How about refined sugars? The annual per capita consumption of all sugars in the United States is a staggering 152 pounds, or 18.6 percent of our total daily calories from all foods combined! Do you think it would have been possible for your Stone Age ancestors to have consumed that much refined sugar? Absolutely not! Table sugar (sucrose) comes from either the sugarcane plant or sugar beets. Hunter-gatherers simply did not possess either the tools or knowledge to make refined sugars. In fact, sugar from sugarcane was first manufactured in northern India about 500 BC, whereas sugar extracted from sugar beets dates back to only 1747, in Germany. The ubiquitous high-fructose corn syrup, the preferred sweetener in soft drinks and many processed foods, was introduced into the US food supply as recently as the late 1970s. We now consume almost as much high-fructose corn syrup (63.6 pounds per capita) as we do sucrose (65.6 pounds per capita). There is no doubt that hunter-gatherers would have relished refined sugars, just as we do. However, except for honey, which was rare and only seasonally available, they simply had no readily available source of refined sugar.

Now that you are getting the drift of which foods could and could not have been on hunter-gatherers’ menus, it becomes apparent that no highly processed foods were ever eaten. This isn’t rocket science by any means—just simple, deductive logic that almost anyone can work out with a few basic facts.

However, here’s a fact that may surprise you. Although bread, grains, and cereals symbolize “the staff of life” in virtually all Westernized societies and now represent almost 25 percent of the calories in the typical US diet, they were rarely or never consumed by our Stone Age ancestors. How do we know this? Have you ever tried to pop down a handful of uncooked whole wheat berries? How about some uncooked corn kernels or brown rice grains? If you perform these little experiments, you will see that the hard morsels come out of your body just like they went in—fully intact and undigested! Whole grains are tough as old boots unless their cell walls are first broken down by milling and their starch made digestible by cooking. Although our Stone Age ancestors had controlled fire by about 250,000 years ago, we know that grains did not become staple foods until the very recent appearance of crude stone grinding tools 13,000 years ago in the Middle East, according to fossil records. The bottom line is that grains, like dairy products and refined sugars, were not part of the native human diet.

While a cheese puff may look quite a bit different from a tortilla chip or a frozen waffle or even a bagel, all of these processed foods are almost indistinguishable from one another when you look at their individual food components. Think about it. They are really nothing more than mixtures of the same old three to six major ingredients—refined grains, refined sugars, some kind of processed vegetable oil, salt, artificial flavoring, and, perhaps, some kind of processed dairy product. Processed vegetable oils and salt, just like dairy food, refined sugars, and grains, are Johnny-come-latelies into the human diet. These ubiquitous foods and processed food mixtures made with them now compose 70 percent of all the food consumed in the US diet. By default, their inclusion into our diets displaces more healthful fruits, veggies, lean meats, and seafood—the staples of our Stone Age ancestors. As the next 12 chapters unfold, we will show you how you can improve your diet and thereby maximize your potential to improve your performance by increasing your intake of lean meats, seafood, fruits, and vegetables, along with careful and judicious consumption of certain “non-Paleo” modern foods.

CHAPTER 1

T
HE
D
IET
R
EVOLUTION

When Joe and I began writing
The Paleo Diet for Athletes
in 2004, books on low-carbohydrate diets such as Dr. Atkins’s New Diet Revolution, Protein Power, the Zone, and the South Beach Diet had ruled the bestselling book lists for at least a decade. At the time, millions of Americans lost weight with diets that flew directly in the face of conventional medical and nutritional wisdom, which advocated low-fat, high-carbohydrate diets. If we fast-forward to 2012, most (but not all) things have remained the same. The USDA replaced its “Food Pyramid” with the “MyPlate” in June 2011; however, the change was only cosmetic in nature, as the same old low-fat, high-carbohydrate recommendations remained firmly in place.
The Zone
and
Protein Power
have disappeared from the bestseller lists, only to be replaced by the latest reincarnation of
Atkins
and
The South Beach Diet.
In the ensuing 7 years since our book was first published, a new concept has arrived on the dietary scene that threatens to displace not only the low-carb diets but also government-and institution-recommended low-fat, high-carbohydrate diets.