PALEO AND YOUR HEALTH |
YOU’VE NO DOUBT HEARD A LOT ABOUT THE PALEOLITHIC DIET. Maybe you know it as the Caveman Diet or Stone Age Diet—or just Paleo. Friends may have tried it. You might have read about its aversion to grains and cut back on gluten with the idea that it might help you shed a few pounds. Maybe you’ve tried to avoid processed foods or decided to eat more raw stuff.
The diet may sound simple at first, but it’s actually based on a relatively complex idea. The concept was first proposed at length in a self-published book called The Stone Age Diet, by Walter L. Voegtlin, M.D. A gastroenterologist, Voegtlin based his theory of the ideal diet on the way the human body was built and anthropological research. He came to the conclusion that we evolved primarily to eat a protein-based diet, one that focused on meat and other foods readily at hand that were eaten raw or with basic preparation.
Voegtlin gained some notoriety for his revolutionary ideas, but the diet didn’t really start to gain attention until 1985, when two doctors, Boyd Eaton and Melvin Konner, expanded on Voegtlin’s theories in a New England Journal of Medicine paper called “Paleolithic Nutrition.” The basic concept was that we have spent around 200,000 years in a hunter-gatherer state, and as a result, we’ve evolved to eat a certain way. Our bodies thrive and in fact depend on basic nutritional principles that we’ve lost touch with over the millennia. Since we haven’t evolved much in the last 10,000 years—about when we began farming—our bodies and digestive systems are still best suited to the diet our Paleolithic ancestors consumed.
One of the more interesting findings over the past several decades is that our ancient forebears actually lived longer and healthier lives than anthropologists once thought. Paleolithic men and women were about as tall as we are now, they lived about as long, and the remains that anthropologists have analyzed suggest our ancestors had little experience with the health concerns so common in the modern world, such as heart disease, diabetes, and cancer.
The diet our Paleolithic forebears ate would be one we’re uniquely suited to consume. So what exactly is it? After poring over the findings of anthropologists, Eaton, Konner, and others have concluded that we ate what we could capture—and this was the biggest caloric reward we could hope for. When we couldn’t capture and kill our meals, we picked the edible nonprotein food sources around us: nuts, berries, fruit, and some roots. Because of food scarcity, survival depended on gleaning the highest caloric rewards from our food—and that’s how we became efficient digesters. Our digestive tract is relatively short and simple compared to animals that are vegetarian.
Now, of course, we’ve lived a long time as harvesters of grains and agricultural growers, so it seems like our bodies would have adapted to these relatively new foodstuffs. Not so fast: Evolutionary scientists say that in fact our bodies have changed remarkably little in the last 10,000 years. And it’s during that time that our problems with chronic diseases began to emerge.
TIP
Recruit a partner. Getting your spouse, friend, or other family member to join you will help you get off to a good start. The two of you can share ideas, recipes, and keep each other on track through the tough times.
Why Paleo Is The Perfect Plan
When you set out to shed just a few pounds—which is a great way to approach weight loss, whether you want to lose 10 or 100 pounds—the best thing to do is to keep your diet simple. A huge Paleo advantage is that you don’t have to weigh food, elaborately plan meals, or count calories.
That may seem liberating—or maybe a little frightening, if you’re used to diets with rigid rules. With Paleo, you don’t have to count calories because eating the foods you’re meant to consume will help you naturally feel full before you’re at risk of overeating. You’ll stay satisfied for much longer than when you eat the cheap, nutritionally unfulfilling foods so common in our modern diet. The other advantage is that eliminating foods the body struggles to digest and process will help reduce inflammation. Considering that being overweight and obese are primarily diseases of inflammation, taming the fire within the body will help you shed pounds even more quickly. You may find your initial weight loss far surpasses your 10-pound goal. Although dieting experts set the pace of safe weight loss at 2 pounds per week, soothing inflammation may mean that you lose even twice that much in the first several weeks.
TIP
Start slowly. If you love bread or pasta and can’t imagine life without it, don’t try going cold turkey or you’ll be setting yourself up for failure. Instead, try limiting your grains to one meal a day, and then reduce the size of your grain serving before you eliminate it entirely.
Carrying extra pounds around the midsection may be the most troubling aspect of being overweight. Research has found that too much belly fat is harder on organs, arteries, and the heart than fat you carry elsewhere, such as on your hips or thighs. According to new research, you may be able to target that spare tire if you fill your plate with the right foods.
At McMaster University in Ontario, researchers recruited 90 overweight and obese women and put them on a regular exercise schedule of walking and strength training. They also assigned them to one of three diets, featuring high, medium, and low amounts of protein. The researchers measured the volunteers’ fat and muscle both at the beginning of the study and four months later, at the end. While all the women lost the same amount of weight on average, the big difference was in their levels of fat and muscle: 100 percent of the weight loss in the high-protein group was fat, especially around the midsection. They also added about a pound and a half of muscle, while the low-protein group actually lost 1.5 pounds of muscle. “The preservation or even gain of muscle is very important for maintaining metabolic rate and preventing weight regain, which can be a major problem for many seeking to lose weight,” says Andrea Josse, lead author of the study and a graduate student in the Department of Kinesiology at McMaster.
How much protein did the women who had the most weight loss consume? The amounts weren’t too daunting: They got about 30 percent of their calories from protein—about what you get on a Paleo plan; most Americans typically get in the neighborhood of 15 to 20 percent.
Shed Pounds
Everyone knows that eating fewer calories than you burn through exercise and daily activity can lead to weight loss. But one thing researchers have learned in the last decade is how the calories you eat influence appetite. The biggest surprise was that low-fiber carbohydrates—think of rice cakes, white-flour bread and crackers, low-fat high-sugar treats—could actually increase hunger. These easily digested carbohydrates are similar in structure to the blood sugar—glucose—that powers your body. The sudden surge of glucose provokes a rise in insulin, the hormone your body relies on to process sugar. All that glucose either gets burned up for energy or shuttled off to places like your thighs and belly to be converted to long-term storage—in other words, fat.
The rapid peak and then plunge in blood sugar is a source of weight-gain troubles. As levels fall, your gut signals your brain that energy supplies are running low, and then you’re hungry again. The calories you consumed make you want to eat more, and suddenly the calories-in vs. calories-out equation doesn’t add up the way we always thought it did.
The solution is to add more protein to your diet—fish, lean cuts of meat, and nuts are good choices. All these foods take longer to digest, resulting in a more gradual rise of blood sugar. You’ll feel full longer and give yourself a chance to tip the scale in your favor.
You’ve probably heard about the all-meat Atkins plan. That’s not the answer. You may be able to lose some weight by eating bacon, lamb, and steak morning, noon, and night, but you won’t feel very good, and you’ll be as likely to have long-term success on Atkins as you would a wheatgrass-and-kale diet. But when researchers scrutinized the high-protein approach of Atkins, they discovered something they didn’t expect: People who ate higher-protein diets lost more weight than people on high-carbohydrate plans, but they were also far more likely to stay on the diet than the high-carb dieters. Even better, the protein eaters tended to preserve muscle and lose more fat compared to the high-carb group.
People who eat protein at breakfast—a poached egg, for example—eat 100 to 200 fewer calories the rest of the day than people who have toast and jam, low-fiber cereal, or other simple carbohydrate breakfasts. As you’ll find, a lunch of sliced turkey or chicken over a salad of greens allows you to make it to dinner with minimal snacking.
You may discover that as you start this diet you’ll actually shed pounds much more quickly than the recommended average of 2 pounds a week. Don’t worry about that—beginning a new plan will fill you with energy, and that may lead you to be more active, burn more calories, and shed weight faster. Plus, as inflammation levels fall, the pounds (and your water weight) will disappear. Within a week or two your face and shape will look noticeably different in the mirror!
TIP
Just because you’re eating more protein doesn’t mean you can forget about produce. Make sure your house is stocked with plenty of healthy produce. Keep in-season fruit nearby, and store greens, mushrooms, squash, onions, and other Paleo-friendly produce in the crisper drawer of your fridge.
TIP
Don’t feel like you have to eliminate all dairy and all whole grains—you may want to start by reducing the amount you normally eat by half.
The Health Benefits of Going Paleo
Health is one of the biggest concerns dieters have when adopting this plan. And in fact some researchers and diet experts still debate whether an approach that favors protein and eliminates whole grains can really claim to be safe. You’ll be happy to hear that the trend in research is supporting the idea that an approach like Paleo may actually be healthier for you.
In a huge 2014 study from Boston University Medical Center that was published in the American Journal of Hypertension, researchers analyzed the diets and health of more than 5,000 individuals and then followed them for 11 years to see who would go on to develop high blood pressure. Their findings revealed that the more protein the study subjects regularly ate, the lower their blood pressure. The results held true even for people who were overweight—and being overweight by itself is a risk factor for high blood pressure. Remarkably, eating more protein reduced blood pressure by 40 to 60 percent in the study subjects. “These results provide no evidence to suggest that individuals concerned about the development of high blood pressure should avoid dietary protein,” explains study author Lynn Moore, M.D., an associate professor of medicine at Boston University. “Rather, protein intake may play a role in the long-term prevention of high blood pressure.” Moore believes dietary guidelines need to be rewritten to emphasize the importance of protein in protecting the heart.
Weight-loss studies in general have been supporting the ideas behind Paleo. A 2014 study from Harvard Medical School found that over a year and a half, people who followed a high-protein plan had lower inflammation, cholesterol, and triglycerides—all of which are linked to a higher risk of heart disease. People who followed a more traditional low-fat diet actually got worse. Again, the take-home for the Paleo dieter is that not only is this diet more likely to help him/her lose weight, it seems to be healthier as well.
Researchers at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine kept a close watch on the arteries of 23 overweight and obese people as they followed a typical high-protein plan. Participants limited their carbohydrates to no more than 30 percent of their total calories, while they allowed fats from lean meat, dairy, and nuts to make up as much as 40 percent of their calories. Despite their diet’s high-fat content (traditional diet advice is to limit fat to less than 30 percent of calories), it didn’t alter key measurements of artery health, such as flexibility, the researchers found. What’s more, compared to volunteers following a more traditional low-fat diet, the high-fat dieters lost weight much more quickly: They dropped 10 pounds in 45 days, while the low-fat group required a total of 70 days to lose the same.
“Our study should help allay the concerns that many people who need to lose weight have about choosing a low-carb diet instead of a low-fat one, and provide reassurance that both types of diet are effective at weight loss and that a low-carb approach does not seem to pose any immediate risk to vascular health,” says the study’s lead researcher, exercise physiologist Kerry Stewart, Ed.D. “More people should be considering a low-carb diet as a good option.” If you’re concerned about harming your heart with this plan, worry no more.
TIP
Before starting any diet, get a physical and check with your doctor about your health. Not only will you be radically changing your diet, but you’ll also be exercising more, and you’ll be more active in general thanks to your increased energy. For these reasons, you’ll want to talk to your doctor about your plans.
Other Health Benefits to Paleo
Diabetes has reached epidemic numbers in the United States. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), between 1980 and 2011 the number of people with diabetes increased 133 percent. The source of this dramatic increase is weight related, no question. Diabetes incidence has marched in lockstep with the increase in people who are overweight and obese. But there’s another culprit at work: inflammation.
You’ve already read about inflammation here and elsewhere, no doubt. It can result from low-grade chronic infections, pain, or stress. But perhaps simple carbs are the easiest source of inflammation to spot—and to control—in our diet. Eating so much sugar and other forms of carbohydrates day in and day out dramatically raises the level of inflammation in the body. Researchers call this phenomenon silent inflammation.
Gökhan Hotamisligil, M.D., Ph.D., professor of genetics and metabolism at the Harvard School of Public Health, is one of the leading researchers in the area of silent inflammation and how it relates to obesity. This silent inflammation spurs the steady release of pro-inflammatory chemicals into the blood, which can raise the risk of diabetes by interfering with insulin’s ability to remove glucose from the bloodstream while increasing blood pressure by swelling arteries, which drives up heart-disease risk. Chronic inflammation has even been tied to dementia and cancer.
As Hotamisligil and others—including Barry Sears, Ph.D., founder of the Inflammation Research Foundation and author of The Zone—looked more closely at this inflammation, they discovered it can promote weight gain by suppressing hormones that help control appetite and blood sugar. The result: You lose a sense of how full you are, and your blood sugar soars and plunges, triggering the impulse to eat more.
What Sears and other researchers have found is that many of the most popular types of food we eat support and enhance this inflammatory state in the body. Carbohydrates are the main source, but there are other culprits. You may have heard of omega-3 fatty acids, the healthy fats found in fish and nuts. One of the reasons omega-3s bestow health benefits is that they’re anti-inflammatory. However, this healthy fat has a brother called omega-6, and it’s far more common in our food supply. We get it from vegetable oils such as corn, soy, and safflower—oils that have been promoted as healthy, but new research demonstrates they are in fact inflammatory. Our bodies also convert refined carbohydrate-rich foods—pastries, white bread, and fructose sweeteners in soda—into omega-6. The fat isn’t really that bad, says Sears, but it needs to be in balance with omega-3s in our diet or it will spur inflammation. The problem is that omega-6 foods are the cheapest form of calories in our diet and are widely used in the manufacture of most processed foods—a practice that began in the 1970s around the time Americans began to develop a weight problem.
Another inflammation-related disease is polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), a hormonal imbalance that can lead to distressing symptoms, including weight gain and obesity—as many as one in five women battle this condition. New research from the University of Copenhagen in Denmark has found that a diet that favors healthy sources of protein over carbohydrates can help women with PCOS manage symptoms and lose weight. Scientists recruited 57 women with PCOS to take part in the study. Half the women followed a traditional diet that got about 15 percent of its calories from protein, 55 percent from carbs, and 30 percent from fat. The rest followed a high-protein plan—more than 40 percent of calories from protein and less than 30 percent of calories from carbs, with the last 30 percent coming from fat. After six months, the researchers discovered that women on the high-protein plan lost more than twice the weight of those on the high-carb plan—17 pounds versus 7 pounds. And a much higher percentage of the loss was in the form of fatty tissue: The protein eaters shed 14 pounds of fat compared to the 5 pounds lost by the carb group.
Weight loss alone can help lessen the symptoms of PCOS, say the researchers. The protein group also experienced healthy improvements in hormones and blood sugar control compared to the carb group. Researchers say that it’s clear eating more healthy protein—red meat, turkey, chicken, and dairy—can help women with this condition.
Again and again, research demonstrates that the best way to balance your diet and reduce inflammation is to add healthy protein to your diet and shed pounds. Sears and Hotamisligil have found that losing even a few pounds can dramatically lower markers of inflammation in the blood. (Reducing stress will also help, and exercise is a great way to manage life’s stressors. You can get more bang for your buck by ensuring your exercise is relaxing—yoga can fit the bill—but you’ll learn more about that later.)
The step that everyone should take is to avoid pro-inflammatory foods and seek out anti-inflammatory meals, and the best way to do that is to adopt a Paleo approach to eating!
We’ve Come a Long Way
Just 10 years ago, government health experts and most major health organizations recommended a low-fat diet with no more than 30 percent of your calories from fat. Then studies at Harvard and elsewhere revealed that people following low-fat diets were more likely to abandon their diets compared to people who followed regimens that contained as much as 40 percent of calories from fat.
What’s more, there’s no evidence that low-fat vegetarian or vegan diets produce more weight loss than a plan that features plenty of healthy fats like those in olive oil, fatty fish, and coconuts. Animal and plant proteins contain anti-inflammatory substances; in the following chapters you’ll read more about how pastured, traditionally raised meats such as free-range chickens (and eggs) and grass-fed red meat will deliver the omega-3 fats your diet is missing. And you don’t have to worry about the saturated fat content from eggs, beef, and coconut oil: Once considered damaging to your heart, saturated fat got a reprieve when investigators found some types of saturated fatty acids may not have a negative effect on cholesterol. But the biggest reason to go Paleo and add these healthy fat-containing foods to your diet is that it simply tastes better. The possible health benefits are just a bonus.
Success Story:
Sarah
Within one year of trying a Paleo diet, Sarah lost nearly 80 pounds. “At a whopping 273 pounds, my body was shutting down. Everything hurt, I couldn’t breathe properly, and I was emotionally wrecked,” she explains. “After I went Paleo, I found my immune system started working much better. Today, I rarely get sick.”
BEFORE
Now, four years later, she’s kept the weight off and she’s passionate about helping others learn that it is possible to find weight loss success. Sarah encourages and educates others by working for a professional Paleo blogger.
AFTER
