Paleo Cookbooks

Paleo Cookbooks Are Essential for the Paleo Lifestyle

All of a sudden, there’s been an increase in interest in Paleo Cookbooks.   Why has this happened and what does it mean to us?  To answer this, I’ll first address what a Paleo Diet (otherwise called Primal Diet) is, then I’ll cover the significance of Paleo Cookbooks.  The best online, by the way, is The Paleo Recipe Book..  There are a number of other names for these diets, such as the Primitive Diet and David’s Diet.

Nora Gedgaudus wrote a fascinating book on this subject, Primal Body Primal Mind.  The following video is a trailer for the book.

 

The Way We Were

10,000 Years Ago

A Paleo or Primal Diet goes back to the basics – to a diet patterned after what our ancestral paleolithic forebears would have eaten 10,000 years ago.  In other words it is as close as one can get to eating what Stone Age man ate, such as meat, whatever parts of animals could be eaten, including especially fat, and whatever small quantities of edible fruits or vegetables could be gathered (in season).    Food then was mostly animals we killed – and we ate just about every part of the animal, including the bones and organs.

Our digestive systems back then (10,000 years ago) were the result of refinement generation by generation since human evolution began 2.6 million years ago – in other words, people just died off if their digestive systems weren’t suited to the environment  and over the course of over 100,000 or so generations, they ended up as they were in the paleolithic era (10,000 years ago).   Furthermore, the presence of vegetables, grains, or fruits in the diet then was almost nonexistent.  Ice ages occurred roughly every 100,00 years since the dawn of man, during which humanoids lived entirely off animals they could hunt – no vegetation whatsoever.

So the bodies we had during the paleolithic era could, if we needed to, subsist entirely on animal products.  The interesting part in this, is that in the last 10,000 years since the paleolithic era, which is actually a relatively small span of time relative to evolutionary changes, we’ve changed very little.  According to S. Boyd Eaton, MD, a Medical Anthropologist, “99.99% of our genes were formed before the development of agriculture” (10,000 years ago).

The Way We Are Now

So, fast forward to present day.  We have bodies suited to eating almost all animal products.  The agricultural era started about 10,000 years ago and over that time we’ve seen agricultural products become a larger and larger portion of our diet.  The problem is that our systems have still not adapted to it.  According to most sources, it will take roughly 40,000 to 100,000 years for our human genetic makeup to adapt to a major change in the environment or the food we eat.  Since we only just barely started eating agricultural products 10,000 years, we have not yet adapted to agricultural products.

The common wisdom is “So What – agricultural crops, vegetables, and fruit are good for you!”.   The reality, as we are learning now, is that agricultural products are not as healthy as we’d thought.  As Nora Gedgaudus says in her excellent book, Primal Body Primal Mind, nature doesn’t particularly deliver to us safe foods to eat.  The early stages of the agricultural era, for example, were made possible only because we had learned how to control fire well enough to boil agricultural products before we ate them to remove toxins.  The first potatoes discovered were toxic, as an example, and had to be boiled before they were safe to eat.  Over time we selectively cultivated and genetically modified potatoes to remove the toxins.  With many, many other agricultural products, over the past 10,000 years, we modified and fiddled with our agricultural products to render them edible and more pleasing to eat.  We also made them sweeter.  Fruits 10,000 years ago were not sweet and often bitter.  Even in more recent times, for instance, in the 1700s, apples were too sour to be eaten raw and were used almost exclusively for making apple cider.  Our modern day delicious apples are the result of years and years of genetic modification.

Since the agricultural era began 10,000 years ago, we have refined our choices of what we grow and eat as agricultural products to ensure they are edible, tasty, and safe.  We are discovering now, however, secondary effects of these supposedly safe agricultural products that are devastating.  The following are just some of the examples of what we consider to be perfectly safe foods, that are in fact, not safe for many people:

1. Sugar (along with refined carbohydrates such as wheat flour and white rice) are at the top of the list.  These carbohydrates are perfectly safe to eat in the short term but lend themselves too easily to over-consumption leading to obesity, Type 2 Diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and even Alzheimer’s Disease.
2. Carbohydrates of any type, if consumed in quantities large enough to raise blood sugar levels in the blood enough to raise insulin levels lead to the same health risks attributed to sugar (obesity, Type 2 Diabetes, etc.).
3. Gluten (from wheat) is a long term toxin to many people leading to hard-to-diagnose problems of many kinds, as well as Celiac Disease.
4. Peanuts (and some of the other legumes) can be toxic to many people and are a common allergen.
5. Insecticides and herbicides are in many foods leading to complications when consumed that we can’t even measure.

Nora Gedguadus comments on this issue in the following video, based on her book, Primal Body, Primal Mind.

Paleo Cookbooks Are Here to Stay

The emergence of the Paleo Diet and the Primal Diet came about over the concerns outlined above.  Enthusiasts in this movement are actively getting back to the paleolithic diet with foodstuffs they can obtain today.  This turns out to be an interesting path, since one of the things that wasn’t available in paleolithic times was processed, packaged food!   Paleo Dieters have to do it themselves: select, buy, and cook their own food, hence the necessity of Paleo Cookbooks to show the way.

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Joe Lindley