The Paleo Diet (30 page)

In this book, I’ve traced agricultural “progress,” and we’ve seen that the key to restoring our health and losing weight is to replace our modern processed foods with fresh fruits, vegetables, lean meats, and seafood. In the United States and other Western countries, this is very easy to do. We can grow our own vegetables and fruits or buy them year round at the supermarket. Thanks to global air transportation and greenhouses, we can get fresh peaches in February and strawberries in December. We can get shrimp from Tahiti in Minnesota, buy Colorado-raised buffalo meat in Hawaii, and find Alaskan salmon in Nebraska.

The only limiting factor is cost. Fresh fruits and vegetables cost more than beans and white rice. Lean pork tenderloin and turkey breasts are more expensive than potatoes and bread. The starchy foods of the Agricultural Revolution are the world’s cheap foods. Grains, legumes, and tubers are the starchy foods that have let our planet’s population balloon to more than 6 billion. They’re also the foods that have enabled us to grotesquely fatten our livestock in feedlots to satisfy our craving for fatty meats. They’ve allowed us to pollute our food supply with billions of tons of sugar and high-fructose corn syrup. They’re also the foods responsible for destroying the balance of omega 6 and omega 3 fats in our diet. Without them, the world could probably support one-tenth or less of our present population; without agriculture’s cheap starchy staples, it is no exaggeration to say that billions of people worldwide would starve.

It is unfortunate that for most of the world’s people the diet to which they are genetically adapted now lies beyond their financial reach. The foods decreed by our genetic heritage and the foods we all ate before the Agricultural Revolution have now become the elite foods of wealthy, privileged countries.

However, there are many immediate practical steps that could be taken to improve the nutritional quality of the world’s food supply and make everyday diets more like those of our Paleolithic ancestors.

Cereal grains are an inferior food for livestock as well as for humans. Many of our health problems related to overconsumption of saturated fats and omega 6 fats are directly attributable to the practice of feeding grain to livestock. Today, 70 percent of the U.S. grain harvest is fed to cattle, but there is no pressing need to do this. In modern beef production, cattle generally spend the first half of their lives grazing on pastureland or rangeland. They typically receive commercial cereal feeds during the second half of their lives. If we didn’t confine cattle to feedlots and essentially force-feed them cereal grains, we could produce a healthier meat product by simply allowing these animals the freedom to graze outdoors all their lives.

Feeding grain to cattle dilutes the healthful omega 3 fats and increases the omega 6 fats. It also produces an obese animal that may have as much as 25 to 30 percent of its body weight as fat. Three- to 4-inch layers of pure fat lie just below the skin. Fat dominates the abdominal cavity and even infiltrates the muscle tissue. This infiltration of fat between the muscles, called “marbling,” is one of the major reasons why grain is fed to cattle: cattle producers believe the consumer likes a nicely marbled steak. But a nicely marbled T-bone steak may contain more than 60 percent of its total calories as fat. Even lean, grain-fed beef, trimmed of all of its fat, contains more than twice the fat that is found in pasture-fed cattle or wild game meat. The predominant type of fat in grain-fattened cows is saturated fat. A 100-gram serving of a fatty T-bone steak gives you 9 grams of saturated fat. The same serving of a lean steak from a pasture-fed cow gives you only 1.3 grams of saturated fat.

Feeding grain to cattle has a harmful effect on nutrients as well: cattle fed on pasture alone produce meat that contains five times more conjugated linoleic acid (CLA) than grain-fed cattle do. Conjugated linoleic acid is a good type of fat that may be one of our most powerful allies in the war against cancer; in studies of laboratory animals, tiny amounts of CLA have effectively reduced tumor growth. Grass-fed livestock also produce meat that contains four times more vitamin E and selenium than grain-fed animals have. Both vitamin E and selenium are powerful antioxidants that protect us from cancer and heart disease.

Basically, feeding grain to cattle takes a good, healthful food—lean meat—and turns it into a less nutritious, fatty food that has a high potential for impairing our health. It’s also very wasteful. Most of the excess fat from cows that produce marbled meat is ultimately trimmed away and discarded during the butchering process. Why are we feeding grain to our livestock to make them fat and then throwing away much of the fat just to get an end product—fatty meat—that is less healthful than the original lean meat we started with? It makes little sense. A better approach to raising our cattle, from both health and ecological viewpoints, would be simply to eliminate grain feeding altogether. Many of the beef producers in Australia and Argentina have taken this approach, with a resounding note of approval from the consumer.

Loren Cordain’s Paleo Diet Web site
www.thepaleodiet.com

 

Loren Cordain’s Dietary Cure for Acne Web site
http://www.dietaryacnecure.com/

 

Robb Wolf’s Web site
http://robbwolf.com/

 

Don Wiss’s comprehensive Paleo Web site
http://paleodiet.com/

Cordain, Loren.
The Dietary Cure for Acne
. Fort Collins, CO: Paleo Diet Enterprises LLC, 2006.

Cordain, Loren, and Joe Friel.
The Paleo Diet for Athletes: A Nutritional Formula for Peak Athletic Performance.
Emmaus, PA: Rodale Press, 2005.

Cordain, Loren, Nell Stephenson, and Lorrie Cordain.
The Paleo Diet Cookbook: More Than 150 Recipes for Paleo Breakfasts, Lunches, Dinners, Snacks, and Beverages
. Hoboken, NJ:John Wiley & Sons, 2011.

Paleo Brands
http://www.paleobrands.com/

Broken Arrow Ranch
3296 Junction Highway
Ingram, TX 78025
(800) 962-4263
www.brokenarrowranch.com

 

Exotic Meat Market
130 Walnut Avenue, Unit A-18
Perris, CA 92571
951-345-4623
http://exoticmeatmarket.com/

 

Exotic Meats USA
1330 Capita Blvd.
Reno, NV 89502
(800) 444-5687
http://www.exoticmeatsandmore.com/

 

Game Sales International
P.O. Box 7719
Loveland, CO 80537
(800) 729-2090
www.gamesalesintl.com

 

Grande Natural Meat
P.O. Box 10
Del Norte, Colorado 81132
(888) 338-4581
www.elkusa.com

 

Hills Foods Ltd.
Unit 130 Glacier Street
Coquitlam, British Columbia
Canada V3K 5Z6
(604) 472-1500
www.hillsfoods.com

 

Mount Royal Game Meat
3902 N. Main
Houston, TX 77009
(800) 730-3337
www.mountroyal.com

 

Polarica
105 Quint Street
San Francisco, CA 94124
(800) 426-3872
www.polarica.com

Jo Robinson’s comprehensive listing of pasture and grass-fed meats, eggs, and dairy in the U.S. and Canada

 

George Bass’s free-range eggs:
The Country Hen
P.O. Box 333
Hubbardston, MA 01452
Phone: (978) 928-5333
countryhen.com

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