Chapter 11
Paleo Supplements and Sunshine
I promote the Paleo Diet every second I get. In my private practice, it has cured more patients than any other supplement or medication I have prescribed.
—Brooks Rice, M.D.
Paleo Miracles: George’s Story
I have been on a strict Paleo diet for six weeks, and I now believe in miracles. Five years ago, at the age of sixty-four, I stopped playing golf because I had too many aches and pains in my muscles, joints, and bones, and my energy level was very low. At that time, I thought it was old age! Now, within six weeks I play golf, and I work and/or exercise ten hours a day.
As a lifelong skeptic, this is hard for me to believe. And now I’m telling my flabbergasted friends that I’m going for one hundred. The only supplements I take are omega 3 and vitamin D.
When you start eating Paleo, you simply won’t require most vitamins and supplements. In fact, except for fish oil and vitamin D, if you take antioxidants and/or B vitamins, you will increase your risk of cancer, heart disease and dying from all causes.
One of my first jobs after high school was with the U.S. Forest Service on a wildfire crew in Markleville, California. During the summer of 1969, I bunked with eight other firefighters in a rustic shack where we shared a communal kitchen and bathroom. As an eighteen-year-old barely out of my parents’ house, I had to buy groceries to last a week before my days off. I managed to purchase a box of Total cereal, thinking this was a sensible food to help me obtain 100 percent of my daily vitamins and minerals.
Forty years later, I realize that my naïve food choice reflected a global perspective on diet that has emerged since World War II. Instead of focusing on natural, healthy foods in my diet, I was suckered into focusing on micronutrients. Until only recently this perspective has dominated scientific, as well as lay, thought on nutritious diets. I quote a recent study by Drs. Lichtenstein and Russell from Tufts University that appeared in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association:
The most promising data in the area of nutrition and positive health outcomes relate to dietary patterns, not nutrient supplements. These data suggest that other factors in food or the relative presence of some foods and the absence of other foods are more important than the level of individual nutrients consumed.
No amount of vitamins, minerals, or supplements added to breakfast cereals will ever make them a healthful food. Similarly, athletic drinks boasting vitamins, amino acids, and additives are nothing more than liquid candy. The food-processing industry “fortifies” highly processed foods such as breakfast cereals, soft drinks, designer yogurts, granola, mayonnaise, and orange juice with various nutrients and then recharacterizes them as “nutritious” or “heart healthy.” These marketing ploys not only cause widespread adverse health effects, they also propagate the misleading idea that micronutrients (vitamins and minerals) are more important than foods.
We need to get back to healthy eating patterns characterized by a diet of traditional foods such as fresh fruits, vegetables, seafood, and grass-produced meats that have nourished and sustained our species from the very beginning. When we eat real, living foods, there is little or no need to supplement our diet with any single nutrient that is thought to be protective against disease.
The mentality that has dominated nutritional thought in the post–World War II era, since vitamins and supplements became widely available, was that if a little bit is good, more must be better. Let’s take a look at the Dietary Reference Intake (DRI), which used to be called the Recommended Dietary Allowance (RDA), for the B vitamins in the table below.
Notice that we actually need only tiny amounts of these essential nutrients. For instance, the daily DRI for vitamin B1 is 1.2 milligrams. A milligram is just one-thousandth (1/1,000) of a gram, and a microgram (mcg) is just one-millionth of a gram (1/1,000,000). When I first started buying multivitamins back in the late 1960s and the early 1970s, about the only brand available was One-A-Days. Back then, these vitamins contained precisely the DRI—no more and no less.
These days, if you go down to your local pharmacy or health food store and decide to buy a mixed B-vitamin formula or a multivitamin, you are immediately met with a staggering number of choices. Do you want the 10-milligram version, the 50 mg form, or the 100 mg variety? You go with the 100 mg version because you’re getting more vitamins for your buck. We all know that B vitamins are water soluble, so what you don’t use will simply be excreted in your urine. Once again, let’s allow the evolutionary template to give us guidance. Foraging human beings have always consumed vitamins, minerals, and phytochemicals in a range of concentration that was available through diet alone. Processed foods were not on the menu, nor were vitamin supplements or fortified foods. Our ancestral vitamin, mineral, and nutrient intake always fell within a narrow range—not too low and not too high.
Vitamin | DRI |
Thiamine (vitamin B1) | 1.2 mg |
Riboflavin (vitamin B2) | 1.3 mg |
Niacin (vitamin B3) | 16 mg |
Pantothenic acid (vitamin B5) | 5 mg |
Pyrodoxine (vitamin B6) | 1.3 mg |
Cyanocobalamin (vitamin B12) | 2.4 mcg |
Folate | 400 mcg |
Biotin | 30 mcg |
The relative levels of one B vitamin to another or any single nutrient to another fell within a range determined by the types of unprocessed plant and animal foods that were consumed. It would have been impossible for any hunter-gatherer ever to obtain ten times the DRI for any B vitamin, much less one hundred times this value. In addition, the natural ratio of one B vitamin to the next or any nutrient to another would never have been exactly one to one, as it is in most modern vitamin formulations.
Paracelsus, one of the greatest Renaissance physicians of sixteenth-century Europe, is credited with the quote “Dose makes the poison.” Indeed, this ancient wisdom is now coming back to haunt us in the twenty-first century as we indiscriminately lace our food supply with artificially produced vitamins and minerals that we perceive to enhance our health and prevent disease. On page 199 is a graph that shows how dosages of vitamin and mineral supplements can relate to your health and well-being. Notice that when a nutrient intake is low, it increases our risk for disease—this really isn’t news to most of us. What may surprise you is that an excessive intake of many so-called safe vitamins and minerals has increasingly been shown to be harmful and to actually cause illness.
Our hunter-gatherer ancestors rarely or never would have ingested too few or too many nutrients that caused disease by landing on either the left- or the right-hand extremes of the curve. Prior to the agricultural revolution, it would have been difficult or nearly impossible for any forager to develop a vitamin or nutrient deficiency by falling on the left-hand side of the curve. Wild plant and animal foods are rich sources of all known nutrients required for optimal human health. When these foods or their modern counterparts are regularly consumed, nutrient deficiencies never develop. Only in the postagricultural period could people have wound up on the left side of the curve.
Nutrient or supplement dose
![image](../images/f199-01.jpg)
Vitamin and mineral deficiencies became commonplace in early farmers as nutrient-poor cereal grains replaced wild meats, fish, fruits, and vegetables. With the Industrial Revolution and the introduction of refined grains, sugars, vegetable oils, canned foods, and eventually processed and junk food, the consumption of nutrient-depleted foods became the norm. It’s high time that we return to the foods to which our species is genetically adapted. By doing so, you will never have to worry about landing on the left side of the curve.
Probably more alarming to you is not the left side of the curve but rather the right. I realize that you may be taking high doses of B and antioxidant vitamins because you think they provide protection from cancer and heart disease. Nothing could be further from the truth, and in fact this practice will increase your risk of dying from cancer, heart disease, and all causes combined. Except for fish oil and vitamin D, supplementation is a total waste of your time and money. It’s high time to dismantle the myth of nutrient supplementation as our guiding light to health and well-being and replace it with the truth of nutrient-dense real foods.
Folic Acid Supplementation and Fortification
In 1947, scientists at Lederle Labs synthesized a compound called folic acid that had never previously existed on our planet. No human prior to 1947 had ever ingested this artificial substance. Fifty-one years later, in 1998, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) legislated that the entire U.S. population would now be required to ingest this artificial substance. We were never allowed to vote on this decision; it simply happened overnight. One day folic acid was not part of our food supply, and the next day every man, woman, and child in the United States was forced to ingest folic acid, whether they wanted to or not. This unilateral decision has turned into one of the worst health fiascos in the history of our country. In the thirteen years since its inception, this mandatory legislation has resulted in untold deaths, diseases, and disabilities.
If you are currently a Paleo Dieter, you probably don’t have to worry about ingesting folic acid, provided that you are not taking any vitamin supplements that contain this compound. In 1998, the FDA mandated that all enriched wheat flour was to be fortified with folic acid. Because most commercial wheat products—breakfast cereals, bread, cookies, cakes, crackers, doughnuts, pizza crust, hamburger and hot dog buns, wheat tortillas, and so on—are made with enriched wheat flour, essentially the entire U.S. population began to consume folic acid in 1998. At the time, this national mandate seemed like a pretty good idea because convincing data existed to show that low folate status caused neural tube birth defects such as spina bifida. Folate is an entirely different compound than folic acid. In our bodies, folate and folic acid are metabolized in completely different ways. Folate is a natural vitamin found in leafy green vegetables, organ meats, and some nuts. Folic acid is a manmade substance that can be converted to folate in the liver. The problem is that folic acid is not efficiently converted to folate, thereby causing an excess pool of both folic acid and folate to build up in our bodies. It creates this pool even at doses as low as 200 mcg, half the RDA. And that’s the problem.
I would be the first person to congratulate the FDA for mandating a national policy that could reduce or eliminate birth defects. Unfortunately, its shotgun approach to curing neural tube birth defects put the entire U.S population at risk for death and disability from other more serious diseases. In a six-year period (1990–1996) before mandatory folic acid fortification, the average number of neural tube defects per year in the United States was 1,582. In the first year (1998–1999) following fortification, neural tube defects dropped to 1,337, so 245 cases of these diseases were prevented.
A much better strategy would be to selectively supplement pregnant women with folate—not with folic acid. Only fetuses, not the entire U.S. population, are at risk for neural tube defects.
Folic Acid and Breast, Prostate, and Colorectal Cancers
In the last decade, an accumulating body of scientific evidence now makes it clear that the FDA’s mandatory folic acid fortification program represents one of the worst blunders in the history of U.S. public health. An alarming number of human clinical trials, animal experiments, and epidemiological studies convincingly show that excess folate via folic acid fortification has resulted in population-wide increases in the risk for breast, prostate, and colorectal cancers.
A 2010 meta analysis at Bristol University demonstrated that high levels of blood folate were associated with an increased prostate cancer risk. Even more convincing evidence comes from a clinical trial by Dr. Figueiredo at the University of Southern California. In this experiment, 643 men were randomly assigned to either a folic acid supplementation group or a placebo group. After nearly eleven years, the percentage of men who developed prostate cancer in the folic acid treatment group was 9.7 percent, whereas only 3.3 percent of the men in the placebo group were diagnosed with prostate cancer.
Higher blood concentrations of folate from folic acid supplementation also cause a faster progression of this often fatal disease. Although scientists aren’t completely sure how excess folate and folic acid promote cancer, animal experiments indicate that these compounds induce a cancer-causing reaction called hypermethylation in the DNA of cancer cells.
An alarming number of recent population studies have also suggested that high folate intake, largely from folic acid in supplements and fortified foods, may increase breast cancer risk. In a study of 70,656 postmenopausal women who were followed from 1992 until 2005, dietary folate intake from both folic acid and folate was positively associated with breast cancer risk.
I’d like to make it clear that folate and folic acid are not one and the same compound. Folate is the natural, healthful B vitamin that is found in leafy green veggies, organ meats, and some nuts. Folic acid is an artificial chemical that can be converted to folate in the liver. Because folic acid builds up and forms pools of this manmade chemical in our bodies at doses as low as 200 mcg (half the DRI), it is known to disrupt normal folate metabolism. Dietary folate from natural food sources does not produce harmful health effects, whereas folic acid does. A recent animal experiment by Dr. Ly at the University of Toronto demonstrated that folic acid supplementation led to an increased risk of mammary cancer in rats. It is notable that the equivalent (around 800 mcg) dietary levels of folic acid necessary to produce breast cancer in the rats could easily be achieved in humans by eating fortified foods and taking folic acid supplements.
The situation with colorectal cancers and folic acid supplementation/fortification is nearly identical to those for breast and prostate cancers. Animal, tissue, epidemiological, and human dietary trials all reveal that folic acid increases the risk for colorectal cancers. The most powerful type of research design in human supplementation experiments is called a double-blind, placebo-controlled, randomized trial. With these types of experiments, scientists can be relatively sure that a certain treatment causes a specific outcome. Such a study of 1,021 men and women was carried out during a ten-year period. I quote the authors of this study, “Folic acid was associated with higher risks of having 3 or more adenomas [cancers] and of noncolorectal cancers.” A similar double-blind, placebo-controlled, randomized trial from Norway came up with similar conclusions: “Treatment with folic acid plus vitamin B12 was associated with increased cancer outcomes, and all-cause mortality in patients with ischemic heart disease in Norway, where there is no folic acid fortification of foods.” Indeed, many European nations, including the United Kingdom, have taken a more cautious approach and have decided not to fortify their food supplies with folic acid.
Folic Acid Fortification/Supplementation and Autism
A disturbing development involving folic acid fortification/supplementation has recently arisen. A number of scientists now believe that excessive folic acid may play an important role in the autism spectrum disorder (ASD), which includes autism, Asperger’s syndrome, and other developmental problems. The most recent epidemiological studies of autism show that the increasing prevalence of ASD in the United States coincides with the same time period that mandatory folic acid fortification began. It is known that excessive folic acid during the embryonic period may adversely affect normal brain development.
Unlike the folic acid/cancer story, the data for ASD is still preliminary. Large population studies will be required to determine whether the mandatory folic acid fortification program is responsible for the disturbing recent increase in ASD.
Antioxidant Supplements Do More Harm than Good
Of all of the supplements people take, antioxidants are one of the most popular, particularly with seniors and cancer patients. The most commonly supplemented antioxidants are beta carotene, vitamin A, vitamin C, vitamin E, and selenium. About 11 percent of the U.S. population supplement their diets with antioxidants on a daily basis; this number rises to almost 20 percent in adults fifty-five years of age and older. The perception with most antioxidant consumers is that these nutrients increase longevity and may prevent cancer, heart disease, and whatever else ails them. More is almost always thought to be better.
Let’s examine the U-shaped curve once again. If people are deficient in these nutrients, there is little doubt that health will suffer. On the other hand, more is definitely not better. Our bodies operate optimally when nutrients are supplied to them in the ranges for which they were designed. If you underinflate a tire, your car performs poorly—if you overinflate it, the tire ruptures. Just like tires, our bodies’ natural defenses against disease, as well as the rate at which we age, is dependent on just the right amount of antioxidants from our diets—not too little, but also not too much.
The idea behind antioxidant supplements is that they capture and inactivate free radicals. These are highly reactive particles formed within our tissues as by-products of metabolism. Excessive free radicals may damage cells and tissues in many ways. In animal experiments, high free radical production can promote cancer, heart disease, and premature aging. Our bodies use dietary antioxidants to disarm free radicals and prevent damage to cells. We also manufacture antioxidants within our bodies that work together with dietary antioxidants to keep free radicals at bay.
An often overlooked fact when it comes to free radicals is that they are necessary components of normal body function and a healthy immune system. Free radicals are used by the immune system to destroy cancer cells, kill invading microorganisms, and detoxify cells. If we overload our bodies with massive doses of antioxidants, these essential functions are impaired as normal free radical activity is suppressed. Alternatively, supranormal doses of antioxidant vitamins upset other delicate aspects of cellular machinery, which can actually turn antioxidants into pro-oxidants and ultimately increase free radical activity.
In 1994, one of the first realizations that high doses of antioxidants may be harmful arose with the ATBC study, a randomized, placebo-controlled experiment of 29,133 male smokers. The experiment wanted to determine whether beta carotene or vitamin E supplementation could reduce lung cancer incidence in this group of heavy smokers. Following five to eight years of supplementation, the researchers were shocked—treatment with beta carotene actually increased lung cancer rates by 16 to 18 percent and overall death rates by 8 percent. Furthermore, the men who took vitamin E suffered more hemorrhagic strokes than did those taking placebo pills. A similar trial known as the CARET study had been ongoing concurrently with the ATBC study. In the CARET trial, smokers and former smokers received beta carotene (20 mg) in combination with high doses of vitamin A (25,000 I.U.) for an average of five years. The men who received the antioxidants experienced a 28 percent greater incidence in lung cancer and a 17 percent higher death rate than those taking an inert placebo pill. The CARET trial was immediately stopped when the results of the ATBC trial were reported.
In the years since those studies, more convincing data has verified the harmful effects of antioxidant supplementation. A 2007 meta analysis of sixty-seven randomized, controlled trials studies involving 232,606 participants showed that supplementation with vitamin E, beta carotene, or vitamin A increased overall death rates. In 2008, a large randomized controlled trial, the SELECT study of vitamin E and selenium supplementation in 35,533 men, was prematurely halted when it was discovered that these two antioxidants increased the risk for prostate cancer and type 2 diabetes. In addition, a large meta analysis involving twenty randomized controlled trials and 211,818 subjects revealed that antioxidant supplementation (beta carotene, vitamin A, vitamin C, vitamin E, and selenium) did not protect against gastrointestinal cancer and increased overall death rates.
A series of recent meta analyses show that high vitamin E intake may be particularly dangerous. Dr. Miller at Johns Hopkins analyzed nineteen randomized trials that included more than 136,000 subjects and stated, “High-dosage (more than or equal to 400 IU a day) vitamin E supplements may increase all-cause mortality and should be avoided.” In a meta analysis of 118,765 people and nine randomized, controlled trials evaluating the effects of vitamin E on stroke, Dr. Schürks and coworkers at Harvard Medical School concluded, “In this meta analysis, vitamin E increased the risk for haemorrhagic stroke by 22 percent . . . indiscriminate widespread use of vitamin E should be cautioned against.”
Even the once-acclaimed vitamin C may have little therapeutic value for cancer or heart disease. In the Physicians’ Health Study, a randomized, placebo-controlled trial of vitamins E and C in 14,641 male doctors, the authors summarized, “Neither vitamin E nor C supplementation reduced the risk of prostate or total cancer. These data provide no support for the use of these supplements for the prevention of cancer in middle-aged and older men.”
The situation for cardiovascular disease and vitamin C and other antioxidants appears to be the same as for cancer—they are a waste of your money. Dr. Bleys demonstrated in a meta analysis of eleven randomized, controlled trials: “Our meta-analysis showed no evidence of a protective effect of antioxidant vitamin-mineral or B vitamin supplementation on the progression of atherosclerosis. Our findings add to recent skepticism about the presumed beneficial effects of vitamin-mineral supplementation on clinical cardiovascular endpoints.”
If you are an athlete, a series of recent human and animal experiments suggest that mega doses of vitamin C may have detrimental effects on your performance. Surprisingly, supplementation with vitamin C may decrease training efficiency, cancel the beneficial effects of exercise on insulin sensitivity, and delay healing after exercise. In addition, vitamin C supplementation did not decrease free radical damage to DNA that may occur following exercise.
These kinds of studies further cement the notion that fitness, vitality, and well-being can never be achieved by single isolated nutrients, supplements, or fortified foods. The available evidence conclusively shows that these compounds are harmful by causing nutritional imbalances within our bodies. The Paleo Diet has never been about supplements but rather about real, wholesome living foods.
I’m thirty-six years old, and 5 feet, 8.5 inches tall. I started the Paleo Diet about four months ago. Since then, I’ve lost almost 25 pounds, bringing me down to my ideal weight of 150. My blood pressure went from 115/70 to 92/56. I decided to try the Paleo Diet because I read (on About.com) that it may help alleviate depression and anxiety. To my delight, it worked—my depression and anxiety have disappeared. My energy levels are much higher than before. I’m no longer tired throughout the day. My mind is clearer—I can focus much more easily, and my short-term memory has improved greatly. My skin is much smoother and less dry. Another improvement that I’ve found, which is kind of strange to me because I never expected it, is that my shinbones are no longer really sensitive. It used to be that if I barely bumped my shinbones against something, the pain was quite bad. Now they’re hardly sensitive at all. Thanks much!
—Scott
Starting in the summer of 1974, I worked as a lifeguard at Sand Harbor Beach on Lake Tahoe’s pristine North Shore for the next twenty consecutive summers. Besides experiencing some of the greatest times of my life, I took in a lot of sunshine—to say the least! Back in the 1970s, there were only two brands of “sun tan lotions” (Coppertone and Sea & Ski) because “sunscreens” had yet to be invented. There were no sun-blocking agents in either lotion, and we used them mainly to moisturize our skin. No one on our lifeguarding crew worried about skin cancer, and if anybody got too much sun, he or she simply sat beneath an umbrella on the lifeguard tower. We wore short shorts and Vuarnet sunglasses. In the day, our goal was not to avoid the sun but rather to get the deepest, darkest tan possible.
Times and styles have changed considerably since then (thank God), but one big difference today that may produce adverse health effects is the universal application of sunscreen lotions.
I still spend my summers at Sand Harbor but no longer as a lifeguard. Very few beachgoers have deep tans the way they did back in the 1970s, and sunscreens are to be found in every beach bag because “everyone knows that sunscreens prevent skin cancer.”
Just as the milk industry campaigned to convince us that milk drinking prevents osteoporosis, sunscreen manufacturers have promoted the myth that sunscreens prevent cancer. In a recent paper, Dr. Berwick from the University of New Mexico Cancer Center, summarized the most recent scientific findings on sunscreens: “Sunscreens protect against sunburn. . . . Thus far, no rigorous human evidence has shown that sunscreens prevent the major types of skin cancer: cutaneous melanoma and basal cell carcinoma.” If the truth be known, melanoma risk is actually increased with the use of sunscreens because they allow you longer exposure to the sun without burning.
The part of sunlight that causes damage to our skin is ultraviolet (UV) radiation, a spectrum that is divided into two categories: UVA and UVB. Most of the sunlight that reddens our skin, causing sunburn, is UVB. Consequently, almost all sunscreens employ one or more ingredients in their formula to block UVB to various degrees. Until recently, few sunscreens blocked UVA. Although it hasn’t been completely settled, a consensus in the scientific community now indicates that UVA sunlight is the chief cause of melanoma. If your sunscreen blocks only UVB and not UVA, it most likely increases the risk for melanoma.
You might think that the best sunscreen would be one that blocks both UVB and UVA equally, but this conclusion is erroneous and would actually end up increasing your risk of dying from numerous cancers. Sunlight exposure has a paradoxical effect that is both good and bad. Chronic, long-term exposure to the sun, such as what lifeguards and other outdoor workers experience, is protective from melanomas and many other cancers, whereas intermittent, infrequent intense burning, followed by little sun exposure, may promote this deadly form of skin cancer and many other cancers.
Blocking UVB sunlight turns out to be very poor idea because this spectrum of light stimulates vitamin D production in our skin. Sunscreens that block UVB suppress the synthesis of vitamin D, one of the most powerful anticancer substances our bodies produce. In the last twenty years, compelling evidence reveals that low vitamin D blood status increases the risk for sixteen cancers, many autoimmune diseases, cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, mental illness, osteoporosis, and susceptibility to infectious diseases. So what is the solution? How can you and your children enjoy a nice sunny summer day outdoors and not get sunburned but still benefit from the sun’s healthy vitamin D–boosting effects?
If we look to the evolutionary template and use a little common sense and some modern technology, we can easily overcome this problem. The first thing you’ve got to do is change your mind-set—sunlight is not harmful but rather is incredibly healthy, providing that we get it in the same U-shaped dose that we get of other nutrients.
Lorrie and I have been taking our boys to the beach every summer of their lives. None has ever had a severe sunburn, and each of them gets very dark tan by summer’s end. Here’s our strategy. At the beginning of summer, we apply lotion liberally for the first few days, preferably with sunscreens containing both UVA and UVB blockers and a moderate SPF value—8 to 15. As the boys gradually tan, we simultaneously reduce the sunscreen quantity and the SPF value.
After a week to ten days, when they are tan, we pay little attention to sunscreens anymore, although we encourage them to sit under beach umbrellas or put on their shirts if they are hot or have had too much sun. A similar strategy will work for adults, depending on your skin color and initial tan. The key here is moderation and to gradually increase your exposure. The best protection from excessive sunlight is not a sunscreen, but rather shade, hats, and light clothing.
Regular sunlight exposure is one of the most healthy habits we can get into because it increases our blood levels of vitamin D, which in turn reduces our risk for developing most diseases and illnesses in the Western world. But how much sun do we need? This depends on your skin color. Very-dark-skinned people need almost twice the time in the sun as light-skinned people do to achieve similar blood concentrations of vitamin D. The following table shows blood levels of vitamin D and their classification.
Vitamin D Levels in the Blood
Blood Levels of Vitamin D | Category |
Less than 20 ng/ml | Deficiency |
21 to 29 ng/ml | Insufficiency |
Greater than 30 ng/ml | Sufficiency |
60 ng/ml | Maximal with sunlight exposure |
Lifeguards and other outdoor workers can achieve blood concentrations that top out at about 60 ng/ml, but you don’t need values this high. Most experts agree that values higher than 30 ng/ml will significantly reduce your risk for developing cancer and all of the other diseases associated with low vitamin D status. The good news is that daily sunlight exposure in the summertime for short periods of fifteen to thirty minutes will rapidly boost your blood levels of vitamin D above 30 ng/ml. The bad news is that it is virtually impossible to do this with diet alone because almost all real foods that we commonly eat contain little or no vitamin D.
For most of us, regular sunlight exposure is a luxury that is difficult or impossible to come by on a year-round basis. Obviously, our hunter-gatherer ancestors did not have this problem. Consequently, you will need to supplement your diet with vitamin D3 capsules. If we look at the official governmental recommendation for vitamin D intake—between 400 and 600 IU—it is woefully inadequate. This DRI, like the folic acid supplementation fiasco, represents a failure in public health policy. The most recent human experiments show that blood levels of 30 ng/ml could never be achieved with vitamin intakes between 400 and 600 IU. In fact, 400 IU does not raise insufficient blood concentrations of vitamin D at all.
The majority of Americans maintain blood levels of vitamin D that are either deficient or insufficient. One of the best strategies you can take with adopting the Paleo Diet is to supplement daily with vitamin D3 if you are unable to get sunshine on a regular basis. Most vitamin D experts agree that daily supplementation of at least 2,000 IU of vitamin D3 is necessary to achieve blood levels of 30 ng/ml or greater. People who have never supplemented with vitamin D and/or who have had little sunlight exposure for years may need 5,000 IU per day.
One of the absolutely essential elements of the Paleo Diet is to increase your consumption of foods containing the long-chain omega 3 fatty acids known as EPA and DHA. Your best sources of these vital nutrients come from fatty fish such as salmon, mackerel, sardines, and herring. A 4-ounce serving of salmon contains around 1,200 milligrams of EPA + DHA. If you’re like most Americans, your normal daily diet provides only from 100 to 200 milligrams of these healthy fatty acids.
Try to consume at least 500 to 1,800 milligrams of EPA + DHA per day, either by eating fish or taking fish oil supplements. If you have cardiovascular disease, you should include at least 1.0 gram of EPA + DHA in your diet. Patients with high blood triglycerides can lower their blood values by as much as 40 percent by taking 2 to 4 grams of EPA + DHA daily.
The problem with the typical American diet is that it contains insufficient EPA and DHA and excessive omega 6 fatty acids from vegetable oils. Today vegetable oils used in cooking, salad oils, margarine, shortening, and processed foods supply 17.6 percent of the total daily calories in the U.S. diet. This massive infusion of vegetable oils into our food supply, starting in the early 1900s, is to blame for elevating the ratio of dietary omega 6 to omega 3 to its current and damaging value of 10 to 1. In hunter-gatherer diets, the ratio of omega 6 to omega 3 was closer to 2 to 1.
Numerous diseases associated with this imbalance of omega 3 and omega 6 fatty acids include heart disease, cancer, autoimmune diseases, the metabolic syndrome, and almost all inflammatory diseases that end with “-itis.” If we use the evolutionary model exclusively, vegetable oils should make up a minimal part of contemporary Paleo diets. By using this strategy and regularly eating fatty fish or supplementing with fish oil, you will reduce your risk of developing almost all of the diseases of Western civilization.
To increase your intake of the long-chain omega 3 fatty acids,
- Eat fatty fish such as salmon, mackerel, sardines, or herring two to three times per week.
- Consume grass-fed fed meats, rather than feedlot-produced meats.
- Eat omega 3–enriched eggs.
- Enjoy shellfish, such as crab, lobster, oysters, and clams.
- Eat almost any fish, as even lean fish are moderate sources of EPA and DHA.
- Eat organ meats.
- Supplement with fish oil or fish oil capsules.
Paleo Bottom Line
Get more sun in your life and more fish in your diet. If you can’t or don’t get enough, take vitamin D and fish oil supplements. You don’t need or want any other supplements.