The Paleo Diet is defined as a set of nutrition principles based on evolutionary biology and supported by the most current research on optimal health and well-being. What it means, in practice, is very simple – The Paleo Diet is about consuming only whole, unprocessed foods, vegetables, fruits, meats, seafood, high quality dietary fats, nuts, seeds while avoiding grains, dairy products, legumes ( all beans, lentils and peanuts), sugar, trans fats, industrial seed oils (ie. vegetable oil, canola oil, peanut oil etc. ) and all processed foods.
For those looking for a quick, convincing argument – The Paleo Diet will let you become a better version of yourself for the rest of your life.
TOP 10 REASONS TO CONSIDER PALEO DIET
- Helps eliminate foods that cause inflammation
- Promotes self-healing
- Restores healthy digestion and gut flora
- Reduces risk of autoimmune disease, allergies, and cancers
- Corrects Omega-6 to Omega-3 imbalance for optimum heart health
- Restores proper hormone functioning and signaling
- Reverses diabetes by restoring insulin sensitivity, improving glucose tolerance and stabilizing blood sugar
- Improves mental health, mood swings and cognitive functioning
- Repairs metabolism and helps control weight naturally
- Restores sleep and promotes vital rest
The undeniable truth about the Paleo Diet is that for the overwhelming majority of people, strict following of the guiding principles, discipline and a little patience will result in improved metabolism, halting of persistent low-grade inflammation caused by certain foods, stabilized hormonal functions and inevitable weight loss. In other words, your body will be on its way to self-healing from woes caused by overconsumption of sub-optimal and not fully compatible with human metabolism foods, while building the foundation for good health and well-being for years to come.
Contrary to existing misconceptions claiming that the Paleo Diet is all about eating like a caveman, consuming excessive amounts of red meat, restricting carbohydrates, consuming too much fat and others, the Paleo Diet is neither of those claims. Although the thought of looking back at human evolution to begin searching for clues leading to optimal health lies at the origins of the Paleo movement, the Paleo Diet is not all about eating what cavemen ate, nor does the Paleo Diet restrict consumption of vegetables and healthy carbs relative to red meat. Arguably, the Paleo community consumes a lot more whole fruits and vegetables than vegans, many of whom are unaware of the toxic ingredients and are mindlessly consuming highly processed, nutrient void vegan junk food.
Unlike the popular Ketogenic Diet ( KETO), with which Paleo frequently confused, the Paleo Diet doesn’t promote the consumption of dietary fat in large amounts. The Paleo Diet is not dogmatic and is continually evolving and embracing the most recent scientific findings. Finding balance in life and being mindful of what we choose to eat daily strongly resonates with Paleo Lifestyle.
Skeptics may argue that the foods available today are not the same as they were a million years ago, prehistoric humans evolved independently and followed diverse diets. However, what is difficult to dispute is the scientific evidence on what certain foods available today do to our bodies. It becomes clear that it’s irrelevant whether caveman ate cereal for breakfast or not. What does matter is the effect that cereal has on our health and well-being. This is precisely what makes the Paleo Diet so convincing – its endless pursuit of optimal health and well-being.
Although it may sound like another apocryphal, “miracle cure” diet that is making promises it can’t deliver, the Paleo Diet is firmly implanted into the fabric of nutritional science in the US and around the world. This is because Paleo is not merely another diet, but rather a biological necessity for the optimal functioning of human beings and the result of a painstaking natural selection process that took over 2 million years to perfect, creating the most dominant species on Earth – humans. If you consider your health and well-being to be your most precious asset and wish to make your own conclusion based on factual information, the following may help you to decide whether the Paleo Diet is worth the effort.
The ability to consume many things that fuel our body today became possible due to our unique adaptation as species to safely digest and metabolize certain foods, while extracting all necessary nutrients needed to support our bodily needs. This is not only completely logical but also a scientific fact that the longer it took us to adapt to digesting certain foods, the better we got at extracting their nutritional value with the slightest potential for any harm to our digestive, immune and endocrine systems. That means that the food we were eating for two million years, before the agricultural expansion 10,000 years ago, when our ancestors provided for themselves by fishing, hunting, and gathering, should be a better fit for consumption than grains, beans, sugar and dairy products that entered our ancestors’ lives in the Neolithic age.
Not surprisingly, the science completely supports this hypothesis. Like any organism on the planet, plants only care about their survival and propagation. Similar adaptation and survival principles that made us smarter made some of those plants quite formidable at defending themselves. It may seem obvious that eating toxic water hemlock or a belladonna plant is not a good idea and, for that reason, there are only a very few fatalities on record, which happened mainly from accidental ingestion.
In comparison, consumption of everyday staples like wheat and soybeans may seem like the right thing to do, yet last year chronic diseases linked to diets high in processed wheat and soy amounted to a 2.5 trillion dollar price tag, caused millions of untimely deaths, not to mention pain and suffering, loss of productivity, etc. If that is a fact, why aren’t there any congressional hearings to investigate the subject of the matter further? The answer is complex and, needless to say, of a very political nature. Since political issues are outside of the scope of this discussion, let’s focus on what makes wheat, soy and many other ingredients that we’ve grown up eating every day so suddenly “dangerous.”
The answer is much easier to find – plants’ natural defense mechanisms. Of course, grains and beans are not nearly as toxic and potent as water hemlock or belladonna. However, given their consumption on a regular basis over a lifetime, they will significantly lessen your chances of a happy retirement by causing a constant low-grade inflammation, hormonal imbalance, metabolic disorders, heart disease, diabetes, weight gain from empty calories, and many other undesirable events. All of this happens because 10,000 years just isn’t enough time for humans to fully adapt to digestion of grains and legumes, more specifically, not enough time to avoid or mitigate the effects these food staples have on our gut, immunity, hormones and many other vital systems.
Plants possess a formidable arsenal of natural defense mechanisms. The most concerning ones are linked to anti-nutrients that plants produce to discourage being consumed by any living organism. Anti-nutrients belong to different classes based on their function.
The most well understood by the scientific community anti-nutrients are:
Prolamins-plant storage proteins, such as Gluten (Gliadin) in wheat, that directly affect intestinal cell structure and functions, by modulating gene expressions, cause inflammation and oxidative stress;
Lectins – proteins that damage the cells of our gut barrier and cause intestinal permeability, which leads to chronic diseases like rheumatoid, lupus, IBS, Crohn’s and others;
Phytate – phytic acid that binds to iron, calcium, magnesium and zinc and prevents their absorption in the human body;
Saponins– toxic compounds that destroy the intestinal barrier cells by punching holes in their membranes and, once in the bloodstream, cause further damage to red blood cells and promote inflammation;
Protease Inhibitors – agents that prevent our gut enzymes from breaking down proteins into amino acids, causing elevated levels of the enzyme trypsin, which triggers the loosening of tight cell junctions;
Isoflavones – compounds known for their role in the development of the goiter thyroid and for causing hormonal imbalance by mimicking the female hormone estrogen;
Tannins that reduce protein digestibility, bind to iron and other minerals, causing their malabsorption.
One of the leading researchers on the subject of plant defense mechanisms and their impact on our health, Dr Gundry, raised concerns that many of the above-listed anti-nutrients are present in abundance in all grains (wheat, rye, corn, etc. ) and legumes ( beans, soy, peanuts, etc.). While abundant in anti-nutrients, grains and members of the legume family are also high calorie, high glycemic load foods with low nutritional content. Given other alternatives, it makes no sense to consume these foods unless survival is genuinely at stake. I hope you agree that for most of us, well being and good health are far more critical than merely satisfying our cravings.
SURVIVAL IS NOT ENOUGH! To gain a clear perspective on grains and beans read my articles, “Top ten reasons to completely avoid all grains and grain products” and, “Top five reasons why beans and lentils are not good for consumption.”
Grains and beans are not the only foods to avoid. While just about everyone is aware of the harmful effects of sugar, artificial sweeteners, high fructose corn syrup, modified starches and trans-fats, there are many other anti-nutrients and ultra-processed foods that are laden with gut destroying and cancer-causing compounds. The irony is that not only are some of them perceived as necessary, such as gums, emulsifiers, artificial flavors, and preservatives, but also believed to be highly beneficial, such as milk and milk products, industrial seed oils (canola, safflower, etc.), vegetable oils (soybean, peanut, etc.), and others.
I will intentionally skip the discussion about sugar, trans fat, and processed additives since the subject has been very well covered by mainstream media in recent years and leaves no doubt how detrimental they are to human health. Instead, you may familiarize yourself or refresh your memory about these anti-nutrients in my articles, “Top ten reasons to stay away from sugar” and, “Top ten reasons to avoid trans fat.”
However, I’d like to mention a few words about milk and industrial seed/vegetable oils. For those of you who follow the subject of nutrition, it must have been a shock to learn that a recently published 50-year study concluded that consumption of milk has no effect on improving bone integrity in children and offers no protection from osteoporosis or bone fracture in women.
Although this may have been a surprise for the general public, for seasoned nutritionists this was merely a confirmation of what they suspected all along – frequent consumption of milk is a path to poor health and is incompatible with long-term well-being. In fact, there are so many ways to get in trouble when consuming dairy products (from a common lactose intolerance, leading to inflammation and severe discomfort, to developing cancers or diabetes resulting from excessive growth hormones and sugar) that it should make any reasonable person cringe at the thought of willfully ingesting this sub-optimal substance reserved for baby cows only.
Get detailed info in my summary about milk, “Top ten reasons to give up milk and dairy products.”
Lastly, a few words dedicated to another surprisingly common class of ingredients that silently kills millions of unsuspecting consumers – industrial vegetable and seed oils. Unfortunately, the most common SEED OILS used for frying foods are either canola, peanut, corn or soybean oils. Although originating from different sources, they have one thing in common – excessive amounts of Polyunsaturated Fatty Acids (PUFA – Omega 6) and almost always some form of toxic trans fats. The Polyunsaturated Fatty Acids are not inherently bad. In fact, in limited quantities, they are essential for our body. However, they are so omnipresent in the Standard American Diet (SAD) and so consistently overconsumed that they have become the leading cause of heart disease, fatty liver, and many others.
I’d like to share with you a few words about why the Paleo Diet became my passion. When I was diagnosed with chronic gastritis and gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD), the best my GI doctor could do for me was to send me home with a bag of pills. I couldn’t even get a clear explanation of why my digestive system was out of order although I ate only freshly prepared food. For the first time in my life, I had no choice but to take an honest look at how I nourish my best asset – my body.
The results were particularly disheartening in light of the fact that I was a French restaurant owner. My daily breakfast consisted of a typical bagel with cream cheese, alternating with oatmeal, cereal, French toast with milk or yogurt. My typical lunch was a variation of sandwiches, pizza or burgers with fries. Dinner was the usual pasta, rice, beans or corn dish with some lean meats and occasional vegetables.
You don’t have to be a genius to spot the obvious problem – overconsumption of processed grains, practically no fresh vegetables, and very little good quality, dietary fat. It became apparent to me that some of those foods were contributing to my disease.
On a quest to fix my problem, I’ve spent six months tirelessly analyzing any information I could find, attending nutritional conferences and absorbing words of wisdom from people who spent their entire professional lives on the forefront of nutritional science. The conclusion that stemmed from the research confirmed my hypothesis – it wasn’t the quality of foods that I ate or their relative freshness that made me sick, the real reason was that the foods that I ate were sub-optimal, at best, while many were entirely unsuitable for consumption.
These foods can be classified as inflammation-inducing with insignificant nutritional value. Surprisingly, the items that fit the description are among some of the most frequently consumed in the US. The most prominent are: sugar, grains and grain products, beans and legumes, milk, industrial seed and vegetable oils, all processed foods, gums, natural, and artificial additives.
The Paleo Diet was a wonderful discovery for me. As a natural skeptic and a nonbeliever in diets, I was cautious to give it an unbiased analysis. After sorting through the hype about the Paleo Diet being a cure-all, reading about the caveman lifestyle and listening to exaggerated testimonials, I came to realize that Paleo wasn’t about blindly imitating cavemen’s eating habits. In fact, it didn’t even matter what they ate. What was far more important was the scientific data and years of research that clearly demonstrated that biologically justified nutrition, lifestyle choices, and exercise lead to well-being.
There are many diets to choose from, and each diet carries a promise of optimal health. At the end what matters is whether they can fulfill that promise consistently over time. The Paleo Diet, with its focus on a mindful approach to nutrition, even when observed sporadically, delivers that promise more consistently than any other diet.
After successfully overcoming my personal health challenges caused by incorrect nutrition, I convinced my wife Aurore, who is my business partner and an accomplished French Chef, to sell our successful French restaurant and join me on a mission to promote and improve the Paleo Diet nutrition principles. That also meant giving up grain flour, cream, beans, sugar and many other ingredients, so common in French cooking, and replacing them with substitutes that are nutrient dense, non-inflammatory and free of dangerous synthetic chemicals. She agreed to give the Paleo Diet a try, and a year later we’ve never felt better physically and emotionally. Our desire to share the experience with the rest of the world culminated in the creation of Sapiens Paleo Kitchen – a gourmet 100% Paleo French restaurant.
Sapiens Paleo Kitchen is the first Paleo specialty restaurant in Phoenix/Scottsdale metro area and the only one in the nation combining French cuisine with Paleo nutrition principles for optimal health. Under the umbrella of Sapiens Paleo Kitchen we offer organic MEAL PREP, ready-to-eat meals delivered to your door, catering, and a bakery dedicated entirely to Paleo/Gluten-Free, Seed Oil-Free, Keto, AIP and Vegan nutrition principles. Committed to using only high-quality ingredients and always keen on presentation and superb taste, Chef Aurore makes Paleo complement French cooking in a perfect fusion.
At Sapiens Paleo Kitchen you will not find any grain (wheat, corn, etc.), grain derivatives (modified starches, sweeteners, etc.), seed oils, sugar, legumes (beans, peanuts, etc.), milk, processed foods, gums or additives of any kind on our menu. Instead, what you will find is an abundance of whole, fresh, seasonal, locally grown vegetables sourced from local farms like Rhiba Farm in San Tan Valley. You will discover grass-fed meats, humanely raised cage-free poultry, wild caught fish, and quality dietary fats ( grass-fed ghee, avocado, coconut, olive oils, etc.) Most importantly, you will find care, honesty and our strong desire to make a difference in people’s lives.
Roman Yasinsky
Owner
Sapiens Paleo Kitchen
