Paleo Diet

I started Paleo on February 1, 2011 in an attempt to cure my IBS. It worked!

I’ve set up this page for my own reference, to help me keep information I’ve found in one place. I made it publicly available in case anyone else might find it useful.

These are some questions others have asked me, or that I’ve wondered about myself enough to track down some information:

What foods do you avoid on paleo?

Paleo eliminates grains, legumes, and dairy. No wheat, corn, or rice. No quinoa—it’s not technically a grain, but it fills the same ecological niche and has similar biological defenses. No beans or peanuts (which are not actually nuts). No milk or cheese.

Paleo is gluten-free, but gluten-free is not always paleo. Paleo means avoiding the whole grain, not just the gluten. As Dr. Harris said, if your food needs a prefix, it isn’t paleo.

So what do you eat?

Anything our caveman ancestors ate! Beef, pork (bacon!), chicken, duck, lamb… eggs, fruits, vegetables, nuts, fish.

Where do you get your calcium?

A better question might be, “Where did our paleolithic ancestors get calcium?” They didn’t have cheese and yogurt, and only drank milk as infants—milk that was tailor-made for human babies.

Do we really need a lot of dietary calcium? Americans get a huge amount of calcium in their diet, and yet we also have one of the highest rates of osteoporosis in the world. There’s even some evidence that high amounts of dietary calcium cause osteoporosis.

If our diet causes our bodies to become too acidic, we compensate using calcium:

Bone health is substantially dependent on dietary acid/base balance. All foods upon digestion ultimately must report to the kidney as either acid or base. When the diet yields a net acid load (such as low-carb fad dietsthat restrict consumption of fruits and vegetables), the acid must be buffered by the alkaline stores of base in the body. Calcium salts in the bones represent the largest store of alkaline base in the body and are depleted and eliminated in the urine when the diet produces a net acid load. The highest acid-producing foods are hard cheeses, cereal grains, salted foods, meats, and legumes, whereas the only alkaline, base-producing foods are fruits and vegetables. Because the average American diet is overloaded with grains, cheeses, salted processed foods, and fatty meats at the expense of fruits and vegetables, it produces a net acid load and promotes bone demineralization. By replacing hard cheeses, cereal grains, and processed foods with plenty of green vegetables and fruits, the body comes back into acid/base balance which brings us also back into calcium balance. The goal is to avoid a net acid load on your kidneys.