The bottom line in creating Paleo Diet for Athletes recipes with modern foods is to keep it simple. Our Stone Age ancestors ate virtually all of their foods fresh and minimally processed. If you do likewise, your health and performance will soar. Whenever possible, choose your foods in this order: (1) fresh, (2) frozen, (3) canned. When you prepare Stone Age recipes with contemporary foods, bear in mind that you want to make sure the ingredients are free of grains, dairy products, salt, refined sugars, legumes (including peanuts), and yeast-containing foods such as baked goods, pickled foods, vinegar, and fermented foods and beverages. Be sure your food choices contain only permitted oils, and remember to select fresh meat, preferably grass fed. Keep in mind the foundation of the Paleo Diet for Athletes: fresh meats, seafood, and fruits and veggies!
Our modern palettes have become jaded with the never-ending onslaught of salt, starch, sugar, and fat laced everywhere into processed foods. After a few weeks of Paleo dieting, you will notice a wonderful change emerging in your taste buds.
Subtle flavors that you never knew existed will materialize. You won’t need to add sugar to your fresh strawberries—they will taste delightfully sweet all by themselves. Avocados will have a luscious, creamy flavor that needs no added salt or anything else. Once you have given up sweet, sticky doughnuts, a fresh nectarine will never have tasted so good. Spices you never knew existed will enliven your steaks and roasts, and you will be able to discern these subtle yet incredible flavors because you will no longer be drowning your taste buds in salt and refined sugars.
Vinegar: Vinegar contains acetic acid in a 5 percent solution and consequently contributes to the net metabolic acidosis that plagues the typical American diet. Additionally, unless the vinegar is distilled, it will contain small quantities of yeast—another non-Paleo food substance that should be avoided. We recommend you replace vinegar in your recipes with either lemon or lime juice.
Salt: One of the toughest modern dietary routines to kick is the salt habit. Salt is added to almost everything. In fact, most of us take in an appalling 10 grams per day! These salt substitutes will not only help you get the salt out but will also enliven your recipes: lemon crystals, lemon pepper devoid of salt, powdered garlic, powdered onion, ground red pepper, chili powder, black pepper, cumin, turmeric, celery seeds, coriander seeds, and any commercially available salt-free spice mixtures.
Sugars: There is absolutely no doubt that our Stone Age ancestors had a sweet tooth. Field studies of hunter-gatherers show that they would endure enormous numbers of bee stings to get hold of honey. During certain times of the year, they would gorge themselves with a pound or more of honey a day. However, they couldn’t eat it day in and day out, all year long, because it simply wasn’t available. Similarly, other naturally occurring sweets such as dates, figs, or maple sugar would have been available seasonally for only a few short weeks during the entire year. We should follow the hunter-gatherer example and get refined sugars out of our diets. That doesn’t mean you have to ban sweets entirely—you can eat all of the fresh fruit that you like (unless you are overweight or have one or more symptoms of metabolic syndrome (type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, obesity, and gout)), and you can add certain spices such as vanilla, ginger, mint leaves, cinnamon, and nutmeg to recipes. Also, it is entirely permissible to add fruit purees sweetened with lemon or lime juice to your recipes.
Fat: Replace the “bad” fats (trans fats, margarine, and shortening) with these oils: olive, flaxseed, walnut, macadamia, coconut, and avocado. Remember that flaxseed and walnut oils are delicate and susceptible to breakdown by heat and therefore should be used after, not during, cooking.
Alcohol: Perhaps the most important component of any dietary plan is getting people to stick with it. The best way to make you instantly give up on the Paleo Diet for Athletes—or any diet, for that matter—is to make “Thou Shalt Nots.” You will notice from Chapter 9 that there are no—repeat, no—absolute requirements in The Paleo Diet for Athletes. We have deliberately incorporated this strategy into our nutritional plan to help you with compliance. If you enjoy an occasional glass of wine with your dinner, have it! Realize that you have a certain number of open meals during the week (as fully outlined in Chapter 11), which allow you to enjoy any food you like. However, bear in mind that the further you deviate from the basic plan, the less likely you are to achieve your health and performance goals. Obviously, alcohol was not part of any hunter-gatherer diet, and we do not recommend regular consumption of alcohol for athletes, either. However, it’s perfectly acceptable to use certain alcoholic beverages such as wine to add flavor to marinades and sauces. Much of the alcohol is vaporized during cooking.