The Paleo Diet (11 page)

Since most Americans don’t eat enough fresh fruits and vegetables, our dietary intake of folate is often marginal or low. Folate not only protects us from heart disease, it reduces our risk of colon cancer. Taken by pregnant women, it prevents spina bifida. Because of these healthful effects, the U.S. government now enriches our refined cereal grains with folic acid (a form of folate). So, somewhat paradoxically, you can now eat white bread, doughnuts, and cookies to increase your folic acid intake—but when you eat whole grains, you won’t get this benefit.

The bottom line is that grains are an inferior food. No matter how you slice your bread (whole or refined), grains are not good for you. Even when they’re artificially pumped full of vitamins and minerals, they cannot measure up to lean meats, fruits, and vegetables.

On paper, whole grains appear to be a fairly good source of many important minerals, such as iron, zinc, copper, and calcium. Actually, cereals are lousy sources of these nutritionally important minerals.

Remember the antinutrients that block our absorption of B vitamins? Other antinutrients, called “phytates,” chemically bind iron, zinc, copper, and calcium within grains and block their absorption during digestion. Phytates do their job so well that the worldwide epidemic of iron-deficiency anemia—which affects 1.2 billion people—is universally attributed to the poor availability of iron in cereal- and legume-based diets. Iron-deficiency anemia weakens you and hinders your ability to work; it also makes you more susceptible to infection and more likely to develop a severe infection. It increases a mother’s risk of dying during childbirth. It can permanently impair a child’s learning ability. Iron-deficiency anemia—like the other deficiency diseases caused by agriculture’s new foods—would not have been possible with Paleo diets. Lean meats and animal foods are rich sources of iron. More important, the type of iron found in lean meats and animal foods is easily assimilated by the body.

Zinc deficiency is another disaster caused by whole-grain cereals. In much of the Middle East, a whole-wheat flatbread called tanok contributes more than half of the total daily calories. Studies done by Dr. John Reinhold and colleagues have shown that tanok causes a zinc deficiency that stunts growth and delays puberty in children. We need zinc to help us fight infection and colds, to sustain our strength, and to enable us to work. Once again, lean meats are excellent sources of zinc. In fact, the “bioavailability” (the amount you receive of a particular nutrient) of zinc from meat is four times greater than from grains.

Most American women, and many men, have gotten the message about calcium: insufficient dietary calcium can eventually lead to bone loss and osteoporosis. Few realize that cereal grains and legumes are a catastrophe for your bone health. As with iron and zinc, the little calcium that’s present in whole grains is bound to phytates—which means that most of it never gets absorbed by the body. Cereals also contain high levels of phosphorus. We know that an unfavorable calcium-to-phosphorus ratio can speed up bone loss. Also, cereals produce a net acid load to the kidneys—and this, too, increases calcium loss in the urine.

Whole grains are even known to disrupt vitamin D metabolism in the body. Vitamin D increases calcium absorption and prevents rickets, a disease that causes bone deformities. In fact, scientists who want to study rickets in laboratory animals know exactly how to produce it—by feeding the animals whole grains. In many of the world’s undeveloped countries, where whole grains and legumes are the main sources of calories, rickets, osteoporosis, and other bone-mineral diseases are common.

From the fossil record, we know that these same bone-mineral problems were also common among the first farmers. Not surprisingly, the hunter-gatherers who came before them didn’t have these diseases. Hunter-gatherers never drank milk. They did not have bone-mineral problems because they ate lots of fruits and vegetables—which gave them enough calcium to build strong bones. Fruits and veggies also gave them an abundant source of alkaline base that prevented excessive losses of calcium in the urine. When you adopt the Paleo Diet, you won’t have to worry about your calcium intake. You’ll get all you need from the fruits and vegetables. But more important, you’ll be in calcium balance. You will be taking in more calcium than you lose, and this is essential for bone health.

By restoring lean meats, fruits, and veggies to your diet and eliminating agriculture’s new foods, you will lose weight, feel better, and reduce your risk of developing the diseases of civilization that plague us all.

Here are four reasons why you should make lean protein a major part of your diet:

How do you know if you’re overweight? Scientists have devised a simple measure based on your height and weight that allows you to know exactly how much extra weight you may be toting. This measure system is called the “body mass index” (BMI), and here are the categories:

The BMI is easy to calculate. It is simply your weight in kilograms (kg) divided by your height in meters (m) squared. You can calculate your weight in kilograms by dividing your weight in pounds by 2.2. You can change your height to meters by multiplying your height in inches by 0.0254. So a 5-foot, 4-inch (64 inches) tall woman who weighs 154 pounds would weigh 70 kilograms (154 / 2.2 = 70 kg), and her height in meters would be 1.63 meters (64 × 0.0254 = 1.63 m). Her height in square meters would be 2.66 (1.63 × 1.63 = 2.66). Her BMI would be 26.3 (70 / 2.66 = 26.3). This would put her in the overweight category. If your BMI is greater than 27, this may be a sign that you are insulin resistant and have (or are at high risk of developing) one or more of the diseases of metabolic syndrome.

Here is what Dr. Ben Balzer, a general family physician from Sydney, Australia, has to say about the Paleo Diet:

A lean and healthy body is your birthright. The Paleo Diet is not a quick-fix solution. It is not a temporary, gimmicky diet. It’s a way of eating that will gradually normalize your body weight to its ideal level and keep the pounds off permanently.

There’s one very simple concept that you must understand when it comes to losing weight—the First Law of Thermodynamics, which states that energy is neither created nor destroyed. This means that the energy—calories—you put into your body must equal the energy you expend. Otherwise, you’ll either gain or lose weight. If you eat more calories than you burn off, you’ll gain weight. If you burn more than you take in, you’ll lose weight.

When it comes to human metabolism, this basic law of physics is a bit more complicated:
All calories are not created equal.
Protein is different from carbohydrates and fats.

How do you burn calories? Some you burn at a very low level all the time as part of your “resting metabolism”—for basic, unconscious functions such as beating of the heart, breathing, and digestion. You burn more calories when you move and still more when you exercise.

The common wisdom is that there are only two ways to burn more calories than you eat: Eat less or move around—exercise—more.

But there’s another way to burn calories—a subtle process that can work wonders over weeks and months to create a substantial, long-term caloric deficit. Best of all, you don’t even have to get out of bed to reap the benefits. This amazing phenomenon is called the “thermic effect,” and the key to making it work is protein.

This is how it works: During the digestive process, your body breaks down food into its basic components—carbohydrates, fats, and proteins—and turns them into energy it can use. There’s a trade-off: To get the energy from the food, the body must spend some of its own energy. There’s a scientific name for this use of energy to digest and metabolize food—“dietary-induced thermogenesis” (DIT). Carbohydrates and fats generate about the same low DIT. Protein’s DIT is huge in comparison—more than two and a half to three times greater. So, in order for the body to obtain energy from dietary protein, it must give up almost three times more energy than it needs for either fat or carbohydrates.

What this means is that
protein boosts your metabolism and causes you to lose weight
more rapidly than the same caloric amounts of fat or carbohydrates. A study carried out at the Dunn Clinical Nutrition Center in Cambridge, England, by Dr. M. J. Dauncey and colleagues showed that during a twenty-four-hour period, a high-protein diet increased total energy expenditures by 12 percent (220 calories) compared to a calorically matched high-carbohydrate diet.

Think about it. You don’t have to cut calories one bit. You can lose 20 to 30 pounds in a year with utterly no change in the quantity of food you eat or even any change in your exercise habits. Or a lot more than that if you exercise more or eat less. That’s just what happened with Dean.

In April 1999,
Dateline NBC
ran a feature story of my research into Paleo diets and interviewed Dean Stankovic, age thirty-two. Dean’s weight had fluctuated wildly on his 6-foot, 3-inch frame since his graduation from high school, at one point reaching a high of 280 pounds. Before he adopted the Paleo Diet, Dean had tried dozens of diets. Although Dean was very determined to lose weight, he just couldn’t seem to stick to traditional low-calorie diets like the one created by Weight Watchers. They made him feel hungry all the time. Worse, on all of these diets, his weight dropped at first—but the longer he stayed with them, the slower the weight loss became. This is because the body’s metabolic rate slows down to conserve body stores during periods of starvation—which is exactly what low-calorie diets are. Eventually, after a few months of starvation with these low-calorie diets, no matter how strong his willpower and resolve, Dean always went back to his normal way of eating—basically, the standard American diet.