

Paleo for Beginners

A Practical Guide to Getting Started with Paleo

By

Jamie Wright

Paleo for Beginners

By Jamie Wright

Copyright © 2014 Jamie Wright

Smashwords Edition
Table of Contents

Medical Disclaimer

Introduction

The Basic Premise

What is the Paleo Diet?

What's Wrong With Modern Diets?

What foods did we evolve to eat?

Paleo Foods - Overview

Non-Paleo Foods - The Biggest Culprits

Grains

Refined Sugars and Sweeteners

Artificial Sweeteners

Alcohol

Common Questions and Concerns

Paleo Food List and Reference Guide

Quick Reference List

Explanations of Specific Food Groups

Paleo Foods

Meat

Eggs

Vegetables

Fruit

Tubers (starchy root vegetables)

Nuts and Seeds

Herbs and Spices

Healthy Oils

Non-Paleo Foods

Grains

Potatoes

Beans and Legumes

Dairy

Refined Sugars

Alcohol

Conventional Artificial Sweeteners

Industrial Vegetable Oils

Semi-Paleo Foods

Butter

Fruit Juice

Nightshade Vegetables

Natural Sweeteners

Honey

Maple Syrup

Paleo-Friendly Artificial Sweeteners

Stevia

Xylitol

Coffee and tea

Basic Paleo Eating Guidelines

Optional Supplement Guidelines

The (Optional) Role of Supplements

General Supplement Purchasing Guidelines

A Note on Multivitamins and Other General Supplements

The Supplements

Fish Oil (i.e. Omega-3 Fatty Acids)

Vitamin D

Probiotics

Paleo Weight Loss Strategies

The Benefits of Cutting Carbs for Weight Loss

Determining Your Ideal Carb Intake

Carb Intake Guidelines

Optimizing and Troubleshooting

Qualitative Guidelines for Cutting Carbs (Without Counting)

Organic Food and the Paleo Diet

What's the difference between organic and conventional food?

Should you buy your food organic?

Meat Guidelines

Produce Guidelines

Guidelines for Buying Animal Products

Factory-farmed vs. pasture-raised

Guidelines for purchasing

Paleo Lifestyle Habits

Low Intensity Exercise

Higher Intensity Exercise

Sleep

Sunlight

Sitting and Standing Habits

Eating Paleo at Restaurants

Saving Money on Paleo

Saving Time on Paleo

Beginner-Friendly Paleo Recipes

Introduction to the Recipes

Ingredient Discussion

Cooking Oils

Butter

Alcohol

Salt

Coconut Milk

Cocoa Powder (and Chocolate)

Coconut Aminos and Tamari (Soy Sauce Alternatives)

A Note on Animal Products

Equipment Guidelines

The Recipes

Super Simple Kabobs

Beef Lettuce Burritos

Turkey Omelet

Flavorful Trail Mix

Strawberry Banana Green Smoothie

Lemon Garlic Chicken

Steamed Salmon Saute

Baked Fish with Creamy Mustard Sauce

Herbed Shrimp Scramble

Paleo Spicy Tuna Sushi Rolls

Paleo Meatloaf

Paleo Deviled Eggs

Bacon-Wrapped Dates

Grape and Walnut Chicken Salad

Moroccan Chicken

Spicy Chicken Wings

Lemon Rosemary Salmon

Chicken Liver Pâté

Grilled Chicken Salad

Apple Walnut Tuna Salad

Mixed Herb Salad

Strawberry-Spinach Salad

Cabbage Salad with Orange Tahini Dressing

Spinach Salad with Beets and Oranges

Paleo Mayonnaise

Basic Salsa

Classic Marinara Sauce

Paleo Pasta (aka Roasted Spaghetti Squash Noodles)

Paleo Rice (aka Cauliflower Rice)

Simple Kale Chips

Oven-Baked Sweet Potato Fries

Paleo Candy Bars

Dairy-Free Chocolate Mousse

Oven-Baked Stuffed Apples

Paleo Banana Almond Donuts with Cinnamon Frosting

Coconut Pumpkin Pudding

More Books in the Practical Paleo Series

A Final Word

# Medical Disclaimer

If you have any serious health conditions, any food sensitivities, or are taking medication for pretty much anything, you are strongly encouraged to check with a doctor before making any big changes in the way you eat (or even the way you exercise, take supplements, etc).

Your doctor may have general objections to the paleo diet based on general health concerns: for example, many doctors are still under the mistaken impression that eating red meat, eggs, or other healthy paleo foods will increase your risk of heart disease, cancer, and other serious diseases. These general concerns are dealt with in this book, and if you don't have any serious health problems, there's no harm in trying the paleo diet for a month and seeing how it makes you look, feel, and perform. We would even encourage you to get before-and-after blood tests with your doctor, so that you'll have an objective record of how the paleo diet is affecting your health (we predict it will be for the better!).

However, if your doctor can give you a specific reason why the paleo diet won't interact well with some health condition you have, or some medication you're taking, you should take this advice very seriously. The paleo diet is very healthy and not even the slightest bit risky for the average person - however, you may not be the average person! If you have a serious health condition, it's always best to be careful and cautious.

So if you have any health concerns, please consult with your doctor before adopting a paleo diet.

# Introduction

People choose to adopt a paleo diet for many different reasons: losing weight, improving your energy, living longer, or just feeling great every day. But whatever your reasons for picking up this book, our goal is to help you use the paleo diet to achieve all those goals (and more!) in a way that is simple, practical, and easy to incorporate into your current lifestyle.

In this book, we'll cover everything you need to know to get started with the paleo diet, step by step, with nothing left out. This book includes:

  * A detailed overview of the basic principles of the paleo diet.
  * An in-depth discussion of which foods are part of the paleo diet, which foods are excluded from the paleo diet, and which foods are borderline, "semi-paleo", or optional.
  * A practical breakdown of how to incorporate the paleo diet into your life, including a basic template for how to eat paleo, how to specifically modify the paleo diet for weight loss, how to save time and money when you eat paleo, and more.
  * A hand-picked selection of delicious, healthy, beginner-friendly paleo recipes, including recipes for entrees, side dishes, desserts, meat, vegetables, smoothies, baked goods, finger foods, and more, to help get you started on your paleo journey right away.

We've done our best to cover absolutely everything a newcomer to the paleo diet needs to know, without any unnecessary filler or fluff, and with everything carefully organized and arrange so that you're never overwhelmed!

We're confident that by the time you're done with this book, you'll find it easy, fun, and natural to incorporate the paleo diet into your everyday lifestyle, and start immediately seeing the incredible weight loss, energy, and vibrant health that goes along with it.

So let's get started on your journey into the paleo diet!

# The Basic Premise

### What is the Paleo Diet?

The paleo diet, simply put, is the only diet in existence that is designed to work with your body's natural genetic evolution to make you lean, healthy, strong, energetic, and happy! It's based on giving your body the foods that it evolved to eat over the course of tens of thousands of years.

A Simple Analogy to Explain the Basics

The best way to explain the basic logic behind the paleo diet is with a simple analogy:

Imagine that you work at a zoo, and it's your job to keep all the animals in the zoo as healthy as possible. What do you feed each animal to make sure that it stays lean, healthy, active, and happy?

The answer is pretty obvious: you feed the animals whatever diet they evolved to eat in the wild! The bison are herbivores, who evolved to graze on wild grasses, so you feed the bison a steady diet of grass and they thrive. The lions are carnivores, who evolved to hunt and eat wild game, so you feed them a steady diet of meat and they thrive.

Furthermore, you know that if you were to switch the diets of these two animals, the results would be disastrous. The bison wouldn't know what to do with the meat, and the lion wouldn't know what to do with the grass. Even if you forced this food down their throats, they wouldn't be able to digest it, and both animals would literally starve to death!

It's not because one type of food is inherently superior: the difference that makes one way of eating healthy, and another way of eating lethal, is one simple factor: did the animal in question evolve to eat this way?

Here's where it gets interesting: the exact same logic applies to humans. Although humans are far more technologically advanced than animals, and have progressed to the point where we no longer live in nature, we still evolved in the natural world. Much like a caged zoo animal on a diet of processed food pellets, our modern diets and lifestyles have taken us away from the natural foods we were designed to live on, and have been exchanged with modern artificial replacements.

### What's Wrong With Modern Diets?

Basically, the problem with modern diets is that they're based around a very new invention: agriculture. A few thousand years ago humans discovered how to farm, and this new ability to grow large amounts of food rapidly spread across the entire globe. This is because agriculture has many advantages: it allowed the human race to settle down, form societies, and progress to the modern, technologically advanced species we are today.

There's one problem though: our bodies never adjusted properly to eating all the modern foods we've created with our advanced agricultural technology. Even though we're now modern people, living in skyscrapers and flying around in planes, on a purely biological level, our bodies are still mostly the same as when we were hunter-gatherers in the wild, because all of our modern technological developments have only happened over the last few thousand years. In fact, if you imagine the span of human evolution as a 100 yard football field, we were hunter-gatherers for approximately the first 99 yards, and it was only during the very last yard that the entire agricultural revolution took place.

This means that, unfortunately, our bodies haven't evolved to eat a lot of the modern foods we invented after the agricultural revolution. We've moved away from eating foods like wild-caught meat and seafood, vegetables, seasonal fruit, etc, and adapted a diet high in foods based on agriculture, like grain, refined sweeteners, and industrial vegetable oils. These foods have certain advantages, like being cheap and easy to mass produce, but the trade off is that they aren't as healthy for us as the naturally-occurring foods we evolved to eat.

### What Foods Did We Evolve to Eat?

Very simply, the paleo diet consists of any food that was naturally available to our hunter-gatherer ancestors in the wild. This includes a wide range of delicious foods, like grass fed beef, wild-caught seafood, colorful fruits and vegetables, starchy tubers like sweet potatoes, healthy oils like olive oil and coconut oil, delicious herbs and spices, and natural sweeteners like honey.

The paleo diet excludes foods that we can only eat as a result of modern farming techniques (many of which aren't even edible without modern technology to refine and process them). This includes grains like wheat, corn, and rice, refined sweeteners like sugar and high fructose corn syrup, industrial oils like corn and canola oil, and other modern foods (many of which you already know are bad for you!).

In order to give you a more complete picture of how the paleo diet works, we'll need to examine all of these food groups in detail, so let's take a detailed look at which foods you should be eating on the paleo diet, and which ones you should be avoiding.

# Paleo Foods - Overview

The basic food groups that make up the paleo diet are based on the foods that were widely available and commonly consumed by paleolithic hunter-gatherers, in all parts of the world and throughout human evolutionary history. Consuming the modern equivalents of these foods gives us the type of optimal nutrition that our bodies were literally designed for at the genetic level.

The core of the paleo diet are the foods that were staples of our ancestors' diets all over the world: meat, seafood, fruit, vegetables, roots, and nuts and seeds.

Meat: Needless to say, hunter-gatherers hunted! Animal foods were eaten as often as possible, and in most parts of the world hunting and fishing formed the backbone of the tribe's diet. Meat and seafood are a rich source of high-quality protein, healthy fats, minerals, B-vitamins, and other nutrients. No tribal culture in the world has ever survived without animal foods one kind or another.

Seafood: Seafood was consumed universally by all paleolithic humans who lived anywhere near the sea. Fish offer a rich source of omega-3 fatty acids, complete protein, B complex vitamins, selenium, vitamin D, vitamin E, zinc, iron, magnesium, phosphorous, antioxidants, and other nutrients.

Fruit: Consumed wild wherever it could be gathered, fruit is a rich source of vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants. Paleolithic humans consumed it unpredictably (based on seasonal availability), and modern fruit species have been bred to be particularly high in sugar and carbs, so moderation is usually recommended when consuming modern fruit. However, fruit was still a nutrient-rich, natural, and healthy part of the diets of any tribal group that had access to it, and serves the same role in most versions of the modern paleo diet.

Vegetables: Plant vegetation has been one of the richest sources of nutrients in the human diet throughout history, and vegetables are one of the primary source of vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, and other healthy plant compounds on the paleo diet.

Nuts and Seeds: Gathered whenever possible by every tribal group that had access to them, nuts and seeds contain healthy fats and protein and are rich in minerals. Nuts and seeds are another food group that is consumed in moderation in the paleo diet, due to high levels of polyunsaturated fats and other compounds that humans only ate periodically throughout their evolution, nuts and seeds are nevertheless a regular part of our ancestral history.

Roots: Every hunter-gatherer culture in the world whose geographical location contained starchy tubers and root vegetables has made it a staple part of their diet to dig those roots up! Consumed in moderation in the modern paleo diet, due to their high carb content, root vegetables are still a rich source of slow-digesting carbs and healthy nutrients (particularly minerals) that can be used to supplement the other hunted-and-gathered plants and animals in your diet.

The modern paleo diet also includes some foods that our paleolithic ancestors would only have eaten occasionally, like eggs (which would only rarely be found in a wild bird's nest, not harvested from domesticated chickens) or honey (only consumed when a wild bee hive was found, and the honey was stolen from angry, stinging bees!). These foods don't generally need to be eaten as rarely as a paleolithic hunter-gatherer would eat them, since they're composed of healthy, natural ingredients and usually contain helpful micronutrients and other beneficial compounds.

The paleo diet allows and encourages plentiful intake of natural herbs and spices. These delicious plants can rarely be over-consumed, and ancient human cultures all have a long history of using edible herbs for both culinary and medicinal purposes; not only do they make your food taste better, but modern science has shown that many of them even have health benefits.

And finally, some modern foods are generally allowed in moderate but fairly liberal amounts on the paleo diet, like coffee, tea, chocolate, and healthy oils. Even though these foods are modern and require agriculture and some processing to produce, they generally require minimal processing, contain many of the same beneficial compounds as "more natural" foods, and don't contain the harmful compounds found in other modern foods like grain, refined sugars, and industrial vegetable oils.

Remember: eating a paleo diet isn't about historical re-enactment! When we eat paleo, we're not trying to put on a little play about what it was like to live as a caveperson. We're simply trying to choose the modern foods that are the best fit for what our bodies are biologically adapted to, using a loose framework of what a hunter-gatherer lifestyle was traditionally like around the world, and backed up with lots of modern science.

Each of the above food groups will be discussed in a bit more detail in a future chapter. So for now, let's turn to the other side of the paleo eating philosophy: the foods that aren't considered paleo.

# Non-Paleo Foods - The Biggest Culprits

The paleo diet excludes several broad categories of modern food as being unhealthy. Although some of these foods have been around for thousands of years, they were all invented after the agricultural revolution - remember, agriculture only goes back about 10,000 years in human history, but species is over 200,000 years old! This means that for the most part, our bodies haven't had enough time to adapt to consuming these foods (especially in comparison to the hundreds of thousands of years that we've been eating natural foods).

Furthermore, modern scientific research has found that all of the foods excluded from the paleo diet contain harmful compounds (which we'll discuss in a moment), or have been linked to a range of health problems. This is in contrast to the small number of modern foods which are included in the paleo diet (like coffee, tea chocolate, etc), which extensive modern scientific research has shown to be healthy.

Many of the foods considered unhealthy on the paleo diet are extremely common in modern society, and have become staples of the modern diet. The primary culprits are grains, refined sugars, and industrial vegetable oils; these foods are omnipresent in most modern diets, and are responsible for a huge range of serious health problems, including all of the "diseases of civilization" which plague modern society. Unsurprisingly, the paleo diet also discourages several artificial, non-food substances which many people commonly consume, like alcohol, and most artificial sweeteners, as well as some foods which are technically natural but which still possess some unhealthy properties, such as dairy, potatoes, and beans and legumes.

Because of how potentially harmful these foods are to your health when consumed in large quantities or on a regular basis, as well as the fact that they've become so deeply ingrained in our modern diets that they're hard to get away from, we'd like to discuss the health problems associated with each of these food groups in detail, so that we can show you how important it is to remove these foods from your diet.

### Grains

One of the biggest dietary shifts that took place when human civilization transitioned from a hunter-gatherer diet to an agricultural diet was that the human species stopped eating wild plants and animals, and instead started eating agriculture's number one product: grain. Unfortunately, since grains had never been a part of the human diet up to that point, the human body hadn't evolved to properly digest grains as well as other, more natural foods.

This is the most basic reason why grain isn't considered healthy on the paleo diet. However, unlike sugar, alcohol, trans fats, and other unhealthy foods, grain is actually widely considered to be a healthy food, and is often recommended by doctors and health authorities as the foundation of a healthy diet. This creates a lot of confusion among people when they first become interested in paleo, as it's one of the paleo principles that runs most strongly against conventional health advice.

So let's cut through the confusion, and talk about the specific, scientific reasons the paleo diet advises against making grain a regular part of your diet.

For starters, it's important to acknowledge a basic fact: there are no actual health benefits to eating grains that you can't also get from eating other foods. For example, if you're concerned about getting enough fiber, you can get plenty of fiber from fruits and vegetables. Likewise, if you're interested in the micronutrients found in grains, all the vitamins and minerals found in grains are also found in fruit, vegetables, meat/animal products, and pretty much every other food that's part of the paleo diet. Many of these foods, on a calorie for calorie basis, are actually much more nutrient-dense than grains!

So we certainly don't need to eat grain in order to be healthy. But what are the actual reasons to avoid eating grains altogether?

One word: antinutrients.

Antinutrients are naturally occurring compounds found in plants that cause negative effects when consumed. Animals who evolved to eat grain, like birds and rodents, have also evolved specialized digestive systems which can handle these antinutrients without negative effects. Humans, on the other hand, have only been eating grain-based diets for the last 10,000 years or so, which means that we haven't evolved adequate defenses against these antinutrients, leading to negative consequences when we consume them.

Most forms of grain contain two types of unhealthy antinutrients: lectins and phytates.

Lectins are actually plant defensive compounds, which some species of plants (including grain) have evolved in order to deal with predators. Different species of plants have different ways of protecting their seeds (i.e. the reproductive part of the plant) from being eaten. Most nuts, for example, have evolved hard shells to protects them, while fruit plants evolved hard, indigestible seeds that pass through the digestive tract unharmed to germinate on the ground. Some plants, however, protect themselves by developing natural toxins designed to ward off predators, and unfortunately, grains fall into this category. Grains contain a mild, natural class of toxins called "lectins", which irritate the gastrointestinal tract and prevent it from functioning properly. The continuous, low-level damage caused by lectins causes inflammation and provokes a mild autoimmune response (in other words, causing the body's immune system to attack its own tissue), and many chronic diseases and health conditions have been linked to this type of chronic, low-level autoimmune/inflammatory condition.

Phytates are compounds found in grain that are normally responsible for regulating the germination of the grain seeds. Unfortunately, the way phytates regulate this process is by binding to minerals in the plant. Unfortunately, this creates an unintended side effect when the grain is consumed: the phytates in the grain bind themselves to the minerals in your digestive tract and prevent them from being absorbed. There's also some evidence that these phytates interfere with the digestion of other important nutrient like vitamins A, D, and B12. This means that even if you're consuming a lot of nutrient-rich foods in your diet, eating any significant amount of grain will prevent those nutrients from being absorbed! In fact, many developing countries that depend on grain as a staple food tend to have widespread mineral deficiencies in important minerals like calcium, iron, zinc, etc.

As a final nail in the coffin, all grains are extremely high in carbohydrates. The paleo diet is generally a low to moderate carb diet, because consuming high-carb foods on a regular basis chronically elevates insulin and blood sugar, displaces healthy proteins and fats from your diet, increases appetite, and interferes with weight loss.

All of this adds up to make grains one of the worst foods to include as a regular part of your diet, even the supposedly "healthy" whole grains that many of us were raised to revere. Grains are high in carbs, are often highly processed (in the case of baked goods like bread), contain mildly toxic antinutrients that prevent your body and digestive systems from working properly, and don't even contain any unique nutrients that can't easily be obtained from other sources. In short, grains are one of the most important foods to avoid on your journey toward a healthy, natural paleo diet.

### Refined Sugars and Sweeteners

The fact that the paleo diet considers refined sugar unhealthy is certainly one of its least controversial aspects, and most people don't need much convincing that consuming any significant amount of sugar is bad for their health.

That being said, many people are of the opinion that sugar (and related substances like high fructose corn syrup) is simply "empty calories" - in other words, that the only reason it's unhealthy is that it doesn't contain any nutrients, and therefore "takes up space" in your diet that could be occupied by more nutrient-dense foods. While this is certainly true, it's only one of several reasons why sugar consumption is bad for your health.

Evolutionarily speaking, the reason why sugar is bad for you is because our hunter-gatherers ancestors almost never had access to concentrated sources of sugar. The most sugar the average paleolithic human ever ate came in the form of wild fruits, which were nutrient dense, fibrous, often only available seasonally, and actually lower in sugar content than modern fruit. Some parts of the world had occasional access to honey (a natural sweetener that we'll discuss in a later section), but even in this case, the access was very occasional.

The result of all this is humans didn't evolve to eat the highly refined sugars modern humans have access to, and they certainly didn't evolve to consume it in the huge quantities most people do today. The modern scientific literature bears this out, showing a substantial body of research indicating that regularly consuming refined sweeteners (like table sugar, high fructose corn syrup, etc), has the potential to:

  * Induce significant oxidative stress on the body.
  * Decrease your body's production of leptin, a hormone responsible for regulating appetite.
  * Impair the functioning of white blood cells, which in turn impairs the functioning of the immune system.
  * In significant quantities over time, can lead to insulin resistance, which promotes fat storage and weight gain in the short term, and in the long term can eventually lead to serious health problems like type 2 diabetes and heart disease.

Finally, sugar even has a mildly addictive effect on the body, with some research indicating that consuming sugar stimulates the same part of your brain that is affected by opiate drugs!

For these reasons, consuming refined sweeteners is strictly frowned on in the paleo diet. The good news is that there are a range of natural sweeteners still available to you, which are not only healthier than sugar, they're also just as delicious! The most common of these are raw honey and maple syrup (although there are some less popular options as well, like molasses, palm sugar, and coconut sugar). Honey and maple syrup will be discussed in the Paleo Food List and Reference Guide chapter.

We think you'll find that when you adopt a healthy, nutrient-rich paleo diet, free from artificial ingredients and processed junk, you'll be pleasantly surprised to find that your craving for sweet things naturally goes down, as your body learns to eat real food and be satisfied with the wealth of nutrients you're providing it. This is good, because even with healthy paleo sweeteners, you should be keeping your overall intake of carbohydrates and sugar relatively low (at least compared to the amount consumed in the modern diet). You can find a discussion of weight loss and carbohydrate intake in the Paleo for Weight Loss chapter, and if you find yourself having trouble staying within these carb limits, we also have a discussion of paleo-friendly artificial sweeteners in the Paleo Food List and Reference Guide chapter.

### Artificial Sweeteners

When attempting to lose weight, many people switch to artificial sweeteners as a way to reduce the amount of sugar and calories in their diet. These artificial sweeteners are often touted by mainstream health experts as a healthier alternative to sugar and a valid method for weight loss, but are they really as healthy as claimed?

For starters, artificial sweeteners are, of course artificial. Nothing like them is found in nature, so right off the bat these chemical compounds are already suspect, because our bodies definitely didn't evolve to consume these chemicals. That being said, not all modern foods are bad, which means that we need to turn to the available scientific evidence in order to evaluate whether artificial sweeteners are healthy or unhealthy.

The good news is that there is relatively little scientific evidence that artificial sweeteners are actively harmful. Much of the concern about artificial sweeteners causing cancer, or contributing to diseases like diabetes and heart disease, is based on feeding huge quantities of these sweeteners to lab rats - the artificially high quantities used in these studies are more than any actual human being would ever consume, even if you were literally drinking diet soda all day. And for every scientific study that shows a link between artificial sweeteners and some health problem, there's another study that shows no relation.

So does this mean that you can start gulping down all the diet soda you want? Not exactly.

First of all, the fact that the research on artificial sweeteners isn't conclusive yet doesn't mean they're healthy. Consuming these chemicals on a regular basis still may cause some adverse health effects that we just don't know about yet, and some of these potential downsides haven't been ruled out yet. For example, there's currently some evidence that consuming sucralose (commonly sold under the brand name Splenda) kills significant amounts of the probiotic bacteria in your digestive system. So far this effect has only been shown in rats, but it hasn't been entirely ruled out in humans yet, which begs the question: are you willing to risk the health of your digestive system for the convenience of putting some Splenda in your coffee, or would you rather play it safe and find an alternative?

Since the jury is still out on whether the most common artificial sweeteners are safe to include as a regular part of your diet, we tend to advocate the cautious approach and advise that people steer away from these artificial chemicals, just to be on the safe side.

Instead of using common artificial sweeteners like aspartame, saccharine, and sucralose, there area few strategies you can use for satisfying your sugar cravings.

The first is to just use moderate amounts of natural sweeteners in your food, like honey and maple syrup (which are discussed in a previous section). Depending on how physically active you are, you probably shouldn't be consuming any significant amounts of these paleo-friendly sweeteners, but since we know for a fact that moderate consumption of these foods doesn't have any negative effects, they're a superior alternative to both regular and artificial sweeteners (as long as you consume them in moderation, and are careful about fitting them into your lifestyle).

The other approach is to use paleo-friendly artificial sweeteners. The two sweeteners that fall into this paleo-friendly category are stevia and xylitol, and although they are artificial, and therefore not technically 100% paleo, all of the available research on these sweeteners indicates that not only do they have no negative effects on health, they actually have some beneficial health properties. In comparison to more common artificial sweeteners, whose health effects aren't fully understood (and which haven't been linked to any health benefits at all), these paleo-friendly artificial sweeteners are a safer and healthier alternative. Stevia and xylitol are both discussed in more detail in the following section on Paleo-Friendly Artificial Sweeteners.

### Alcohol

As you may have guessed, booze is not particularly paleo. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors certainly weren't downing sugary mixed drinks out of hollowed-out coconuts (although this certainly would have made the Paleolithic era more fun!).

Even from the standpoint of modern health research, alcohol is problematic for a number of reasons. For starters, it's essentially a toxin, which your body can only deal with in limited quantities (basically whatever your liver can de-toxify and filter from your blood stream). Excess alcohol intake on a regular basis can lead to fatty liver disease, and has also been linked with several types of cancer. Even in fairly mild quantities, it negatively affects judgment and perception, and disrupts normal sleep cycles.

That being said, we understand that many people will want to have an occasional sip of alcohol when socializing with friends or celebrating a special occasion. This is one of the cultural/social factors that separates alcohol from foods like industrial vegetable oils and refined sugars and flours, which are less "special occasion" foods and more everyday staples.

If you decide to indulge in some alcohol for a special occasion, choose drinks such as red wine (which contains 5-10 times as many antioxidants as white wine) or wood-aged spirits like scotch, brandy, or bourbon (served neat, with no mixers). Although alcohol isn't particularly healthy, these options the benefit of high antioxidant content, as well as no additional unhealthy ingredients, like a high sugar content.  
Overall though, the best approach to alcohol is to have no more than a glass or two on special occasions, and otherwise avoid consuming it altogether.

# Common Questions and Concerns

How is the paleo diet different from other diets?

First of all, the paleo diet has one big advantage over most other diets: it's a lifestyle diet. This means that it isn't just designed to be eaten short-term to lose weight (although it certainly will help you lose weight!) - the paleo way of eating is designed to be healthy and sustainable over the long-term. You can enjoy delicious, nourishing paleo food for the rest of your life, and all the great benefits that go with it, like maintaining a lean, healthy body, increased physical energy and mental focus, preventing serious chronic diseases, and staying healthy and active well into your golden years. We think these benefits are a lot more tantalizing than just losing weight for a few months and then going back to eating junk food.

The other thing that differentiates that paleo diet from any other diet in existence is that it's the only way of eating that takes into account what your body was naturally designed to eat! Evolutionary biology is the bedrock of all biological science, and the paleo diet is the only diet based on the foods that our species evolved to eat over hundreds of thousands of years.  No TV diet guru can compete with that!

I thought the average caveman only lived to be 30! Aren't modern people healthier than cave people?

Actually, in many ways, the answer is no!

Modern humans do have lots of advantages that ancients humans didn't have. For starters, modern medicine has given us a huge number of advances. Our infant mortality rate is lower than it's ever been in history, we have cheap, plentiful vaccines for diseases that used to be deadly, we can use drugs and surgery to fix ourselves if we're injured in a traumatic event, and the list goes on. We're also no longer at risk of being eaten by predators, or having entire tribes wiped out from a drought or famine.

All of these factors contribute to the average lifespan of a modern person living longer. However, none of these benefits are a result of diet; they're a result of improved technology, sanitation, and safety.

When it comes to the effects of our modern diet, the result is clear. In developed countries like the United States, two out of every three people are overweight, one out of three are obese, and the numbers are getting worse every year. We're also seeing record levels of heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer's, and other chronic illnesses.

By contrast, if we look at modern hunter-gatherer tribes, which exist in isolated areas and still follow their traditional ways of eating and living, we see that any of these tribesmen who don't die from accidents, droughts, plagues, and similar problems commonly live into their sixties and seventies. That's as long as most people in industrially-developed countries live, and they don't even have the benefit of modern medicine to help them. We also find that they remain fit, healthy, and active right up until the very end of their lives, rather than slowly wasting away from chronic illnesses like the majority of people in developed countries.

Wait, you're saying that I should be eating foods like bacon, eggs, and steak? All that saturated fat and cholesterol will give me a heart attack!

As you may have heard, in recent years science has been discovering a fact that many traditional cultures have known for centuries: meat isn't bad for you!

The reason why doctors and scientists have told us meat, eggs, and similar foods are unhealthy for the last few decades is because a large number of observational studies in the U.S. have shown a correlation between consuming foods high in saturated fat and cholesterol (like red meat) and chronic diseases like heart disease and cancer. So this correlation means that fat is bad for you, right?

Actually, there's a problem with this theory: as scientists say, "correlation does not equal causation". This means that just because two things tend to happen at the same time, it doesn't necessarily mean they're related.

For example, there is a genuine statistical correlation between the number of people who eat ice cream and the number of people who drown every year: the more ice cream people are eating, the more deaths from drowning increase. So eating ice cream causes drowning, right? The answer, of course, is no. What's far more likely is that when the weather is warm, people eat more ice cream, and they also go swimming more often. Both of these behaviors (swimming and eating ice cream) result from the same root cause (the weather being warm). And if you have a higher number of people swimming, you'll also see a higher number of people drowning; this is just because there are more people in the water, not because of anything to do with ice cream.

The same phenomenon occurs in the relationship between saturated fat, cholesterol, and chronic disease. Studies on Americans (and other countries which have adopted an Americanized diet) show a correlation between saturated fat intake and chronic disease, because Americans get their saturated fat from processed, low-quality meat and cheese, and consume it in combination with terrible foods like high fructose corn syrup and industrial vegetable oils.

However, there are other countries and cultures, like the French, Swiss, and Spanish, who have traditionally eaten lots of saturated fat as part of their normal diets (which don't contain much sugar, trans fat, etc), and these cultures have much lower rates of cancer and heart disease than Americans do.

In short, for every study that apparently shows foods like eggs, red meat, and bacon cause chronic diseases, there's usually another study which shows the opposite effect.

If you'd like to investigate this for yourself, you can look up the large, well-funded studies that have been done on the subject, like (for example) the Framingham Study, the Honolulu Heart Program Study, and the Japanese Lipid Intervention Trial, and which all contradict the idea that eating saturated fat and cholesterol from animal products is bad for you.

Or you can just try eating a paleo diet for the next month, and see for yourself how much weight you lose, how much your blood tests improve, and how much better you feel!

Everybody knows that whole grains are super healthy: won't I be missing out on fiber and nutrients if I cut grains out of my diet?

As mentioned in our discussion of grains, whole grains are lousy sources of fiber, minerals, B vitamins, and all the other nutrients they're touted for when you compare them to pasture-raised meat, wild seafood, and fresh fruits and veggies. For example, a 1,000-calorie serving of fresh fruits and vegetables has 2-7 times as much fiber as does a comparable serving of whole grains. The same goes for micronutrients, with the fruits and veggies (depending on the exact composition) containing 10-15 times more calcium, 2-3 times more magnesium, 10-12 times more potassium, 5-6 times more iron... and the list goes on.

Furthermore, all grains (including whole grains) contain lectins and phytates, two kinds of harmful compounds that in large doses can irritate your digestive system, increase inflammation, and interfere with nutrient absorption.

For more info on why the paleo diet goes counter to conventional wisdom and basically considers grains to be junk food, see the section on grain in the Non-Paleo Foods chapter. But for now, just know that not only are grains bad news, but you can easily get just as many (if not more) nutrients from eating healthy fruits and veggies.

How can the paleo diet help me lose weight?

One of the many great benefits of the paleo diet is that, in addition to it's main goal of making you as healthy as possible, it's also an excellent way to lose weight. The reason is because the paleo diet is high in healthy whole-food protein, moderate to high in healthy, natural fats, high in nutrients, and low-glycemic. Each of these natural aspects of the paleo diet also have weight loss benefits:

  * Protein has 2-3 times the thermic effect of either fat or carbs, meaning that it ramps up your metabolism for increased fat burning. It has also been scientifically shown to be more satiating on a calorie-for-calorie basis compared to fat or carbs, which means that it naturally reduces your appetite, allowing you to eat less food and still feel completely full.
  * Healthy, natural fat, while a bit less satiating than protein, is more satiating than the processed carbs (like grain products) that most people base their diet around. It's also great for maintaining healthy hormone levels, keeping your mood, appetite, blood sugar, and other factors in check.
  * A diet that is high in micronutrients signals your body that it's getting all the nutrition it needs, and therefore doesn't need to constantly send you hunger signals in order to get you to take in more nutrients (like it does when you consume empty calories).
  * Finally, a diet that is low-glycemic and low in processed carbohydrates keeps your blood sugar, appetite, and energy levels steady throughout the day, and prevents the sugar cravings that lead to over-consumption of empty calories.

These factors all work synergistically together to make the paleo diet absolutely amazing for weight loss. And as a final bonus, since the paleo diet naturally brings your appetite down to healthy levels, most people eating paleo can lose weight without needing to keep a food journal, weigh and measure their food, or count so much as a single calorie! This is in stark contrast to low-fat, high-carb diets, which leave most people feeling hungry, tired, and irritable, and usually require calorie-counting and other annoying artificial habits to prevent over-eating.

In short, not only is the paleo diet the best way to eat for maximizing your health, energy, and longevity, it's arguably the best approach for long-term, sustainable weight loss too!

How can I afford to eat this way?

First of all, we have a whole chapter later in the book devoted entirely to helping you save money while eating paleo (see the chapter Saving Money on Paleo). There are tons of ways to make healthy eating more affordable, and chances are that the advice in that chapter will save you hundreds of dollars a year (way more than the cost of this book)!

Second, the average person eating an unhealthy diet isn't living off of cheap ramen noodles and tap water. They're spending all kinds of extra money on their food, in the form of chips, soda, candy, etc. And when you spend money on junk food like soda, for example, you aren't giving your body any nutrients at all, and you aren't even consuming something that will fill you up and satiate your hunger. It certainly tastes good, but from the standpoint of cost-effectiveness, a ton of money is being wasted.

As a general rule of thumb, junk food does tend to be cheaper on a cost-per-calorie basis. However, you'll be surprised how much money you can save by giving up things like soda and sugary snacks; money you can then invest in delicious, nourishing, real food.

And finally, even if you end up spending more money on food than you used to, we would encourage you to look at this extra spending for what it is: an amazingly good deal! For what amounts to a few extra dollars a day, you can look better, feel better, and keep yourself healthy and strong. That sounds like an amazing deal to us.

The cold hard truth is that even if you don't eat paleo, you're going to be spending money on your health one way or the other: you can either spend it now, building a healthy, strong, beautiful body that you love living in, or you can spend it later when your health falls apart on things like hospital bills and medications. Not only is it absolutely miserable to live with a chronic health condition, the cost of treating and managing these conditions is way more than the cost of eating paleo!

Is paleo good for ______ health condition?

Although the paleo diet isn't a medical treatment, it has a number of great health benefits which can potentially be massively helpful when combined with proper treatment from a doctor, and many people even find that it can be used to manage and improve a whole host of medical and health issues.

For starters, the fact that the paleo diet is inherently anti-inflammatory, high in micronutrients and antioxidants, high in protein and healthy fats, and low to non-existent in refined sugars and flours, hydrogenated vegetable oils, and processed foods, means that it's one of the best diets around for reducing your risk of the many serious "diseases of civilization", and will almost certainly reduce your risk of heart disease, many cancers, type 2 diabetes, and degenerative diseases like Alzheimer's.

In addition, if you already have a chronic health condition, many people who adopt the paleo diet report that it helps them manage and sometimes even eliminate their symptoms, for such wide-ranging health conditions, such as arthritis, gout, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, osteoporosis, kidney stones, hypertension, stroke, asthma, insomnia, and many, many others (too many to list here!). Adopting a healthy paleo lifestyle isn't always enough to completely eliminate these conditions, but even if the condition can't be eliminated entirely, many people report that eating paleo drastically reduces their symptoms.

Many people also report that paleo helps them with chronic low-level health problems like acne, acid reflux, indigestion, etc. Plus, as previously discussed, it's a great method for healthy, sustainable weight loss, and preventing all the obesity-related health problems that go along with it.

If you have a serious health problem, you should NOT assume that all you need to do is adopt a paleo diet and you'll be magically cured. Work with your doctor, keep taking any medication or other treatments you need to, and play it safe! The good news is that as long as you're careful and continue to be supervised by a medical professional, the paleo diet can potentially be a great tool for managing, preventing, and sometimes even healing people with chronic health problems.

Is the paleo diet environmentally friendly?

In many ways yes! Although the basic food groups of the paleo diet (meat, fruit, vegetables, nuts and seeds, etc) can be sourced from anywhere, the paleo diet encourages practitioners to get their food from local, sustainable sources, their meat and eggs from pasture-raised animals, their produce from organic farming operations, etc.

In the short-term, the world certainly couldn't handle it if every person on Earth suddenly switched to a paleo diet. This is a natural side effect of the fact that there are currently 7 billion people on the planet: the only way to feed all these people in the short-term is with a bunch of cheap, efficient, unhealthy food, like grains, refined sugars, and industrial vegetable oils.

However, the paleo diet is still way better for the environment than the way most people eat! The factory-farmed meat that most people consume wastes tons of food and land, since the animals in these operations need to be fed grain and other agricultural products. It takes about 13 pounds of grain to produce a single pound of meat, which creates a massive amount of wasted food. These operations also burn tons of fossil fuels, since the grain needs to be shipped in from all over the country to get to the factory farm.

By contrast, the pasture-based animal products that are encouraged on the paleo diet use grass, rainwater, and other natural resources that humans can't consume to produce healthy, wholesome meat. They also make efficient use of land that is great for grazing animals, but very poor for farming (like rough terrain, where there's plenty of grass but also rocks, poor farming soil, etc). These operations also consume drastically less fossil fuel than factory-farms, and the animals don't need to be constantly pumped full of antibiotics to keep them alive. The type of produce encouraged on the paleo diet, depending on how you choose to interpret it, can also be organic, locally-grown, and sustainably-produced produce.

It really is the whole package - not only is paleo healthier for you, it's healthier for the planet too!

# Paleo Food List and Reference Guide

Ultimately, the paleo diet is pretty simple: eating foods that were available (in some form) to your paleolithic ancestors is healthy, and eating foods that your ancestors wouldn't recognize is generally a bad idea.

However, this general guideline is a little simplistic; we're modern humans, who get our food from modern supermarkets, and navigating the aisles of the local grocery store can be a little tricky even if you have some rough guidelines in mind. So in this chapter, we're going to give you both a simple, easy to follow reference list to start with (listing all of the paleo, non-paleo, and borderline-paleo food groups you need to know about), as well as a more detailed explanation of why each food group is categorized the way it is.

If you're ever confused about whether or not a particular type of food is paleo (and if so, how it fits into the overall picture of the paleo diet), this chapter will serve as your go-to reference guide whenever you have any questions.

If you're just getting started, don't be overwhelmed by all this information! If all you want is to get started with the paleo diet right away, and don't want to get bogged down in all of these detailed explanations, you don't have to know all of this info in order to get started. For now, just use the quick reference list below to identify which foods are paleo and which aren't, skip the detailed explanations, and read the next chapter ("Basic Paleo Eating Guidelines") to get started. Then you can come back and read through the rest of this information at your own pace.

## Quick Reference List

Paleo Foods

  * Meat, including poultry, seafood, etc.
  * Eggs.
  * Non-starchy vegetables, including leafy greens, cruciferous veggies, etc.
  * Fruit.
  * Most starchy tubers / root vegetables, including sweet potatoes, yams, and squash.
  * Nuts and seeds.
  * Healthy oils, like olive and coconut oil.
  * Paleo-friendly sweeteners, including honey and maple syrup.
  * Herbs and spices.

Non-Paleo Foods

  * Grains, including corn, rice, and soy.
  * Beans and legumes.
  * Dairy.
  * Refined sugars, including high fructose corn syrup and all forms of cane sugar.
  * Potatoes.
  * Industrial seed and vegetable oils, including corn, canola, and soybean oil.
  * Most common artificial sweeteners, including aspartame and sucralose.
  * Alcohol.

Semi-Paleo Foods

  * Grass-fed butter.
  * Paleo-friendly natural sweeteners, including honey and maple syrup.
  * Paleo-friendly artificial sweeteners, including stevia and xylitol.
  * Coffee and tea.
  * Fruit juice.
  * Nightshade vegetables.

## Explanations of Specific Food Groups

## Paleo Foods

### Meat

Meat was a primary food source for most paleolithic hunter-gatherer groups, and forms one of the main pillars of the paleo diet. This includes red meat, which is commonly dismissed as unhealthy by conventional wisdom, and can extend from common beef to more rare items such as lamb and bison. Seafood, including fish, shellfish, and mollusks, is also in this category. Preference should be given to meats which come from animals that have been pasture-raised, and seafood that has been wild-caught. For more details, see the Guidelines for Buying Animal Products chapter.

### Eggs

Paleolithic humans almost never would have eaten eggs, unless they happened to stumble across an unprotected bird nest on rare occasions. However, eggs contain lots of healthy fat, complete protein, and rich micronutrients, which makes them nutritionally comparable to meat. Although chicken eggs are of course the most common, quail, duck, pheasant, and other eggs are equally healthy. Just like meat, it should ideally be sourced from pasture-raised animals.

### Vegetables

Vegetables are a key part of the paleo diet; since other plant foods like fruit, nuts, and starchy root vegetables are only consumed in moderation, veggies provide much of the plant-based nutrition

found in the paleo diet. The vast majority of vegetables are perfectly paleo, including:

  * Leafy greens: one of the most nutrient-rich types of vegetables, containing a wealth of vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, and phytonutrients. Common examples include, spinach, kale, chard, arugula, mustard greens, collard greens, and parsley.
  * Brassicas / cruciferous vegetables: the other type of vegetable which is extremely nutrient-dense and high in antioxidants. Common examples include broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, and bok choy.
  * Alliums: less nutrient-rich than many of the above vegetables, but extremely flavorful, and high in healthy organo-sulfur compounds and other unique nutrients. Common examples include garlic, onions, shallots, and leeks.
  * Sea vegetables: often referred to unflatteringly as "seaweed", sea vegetables are not commonly consumed in most of the modern world. However, sea veggies actually used to be a very common and important staple of almost every traditional culture in the world that lived anywhere near the ocean, and can still be found in the diets of some coastal countries (the most well-known being Japan). Sea veggies are rich in iodine, a hard-to-find nutrient that plays important roles in the body, as well as all kinds of important minerals. Common examples include nori, kelp, kombu, arame, dulse, and Irish moss.
  * Non-starchy root vegetables. These veggies are flavorful, richly textured, and the more brightly-colored members of this family (like carrots and beets) contain valuable antioxidants (carotenoids in carrots and betalains in beets, for example). Common examples include carrots, beets, jicama, parsnips, turnips, and rhubarb.

There are also some vegetables and veggie-like foods require special explanation:

  * Non-sweet fruits like tomatoes and avocados can be safely treated like "honorary veggies" for the sake of determining your intake, since they contain no sugar and almost no carbohydrate.
  * Many people who eat a standard modern diet treat corn like a vegetable – it isn't! Corn is a grain, and should be treated as such.
  * Starchy vegetables like sweet potatoes, yams, and squash aren't considered to be in the same category as "normal" vegetables, because they contain a significant amount of calories and carbohydrates. This doesn't mean their unhealthy, they're just different. These starchy root vegetables are discussed in their own section below.
  * Potatoes are a vegetable, but aren't considered paleo, for reasons discussed below.
  * Lettuce is paleo and perfectly healthy to eat, but unfortunately all types of lettuce are extremely low in nutrients. This means that lettuce is fine to use if you just want a nice crunchy texture for a dish you're making, but if you're looking for healthy micronutrients, you should choose another vegetable; the ones from the "leafy green" category (like spinach) work very well in most situations where you'd use lettuce.
  * Some nightshade vegetables, like tomatoes and bell peppers, are considered a bit "borderline" by some paleo experts. Although the majority of paleo eaters are perfectly comfortable including these veggies in their diet, some people with food sensitivities prefer to exclude them. Nightshade vegetables are discussed in their own section below.

### Fruit

Fruit is a delicious, nutrient-dense, and perfectly healthy part of the paleo diet. However, since fruit contains moderate amounts of naturally occurring sugars, most versions of the paleo diet recommend that fruit is only eaten in moderation to avoid consuming too much sugar and carbohydrate. This is especially an issue with the types of fruit available to modern humans, since modern fruits have been selectively bred over the course of thousands of years to be larger, softer, sweeter, and overall more sugary than the species of ancient fruits available to our paleolithic ancestors.

To get around this minor hitch, it's recommended that you limit your fruit intake to a few servings per day. You can also cut the amount of sugar you're consuming even further by selecting low-sugar fruits like berries, which are lower in calories and carbs than many other types of fruit while still being very nutrient-rich, particularly in the potent antioxidants found in colorful berries like blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, etc.

Keeping your fruit intake to 2-3 servings per day is good for someone just getting started with the paleo diet, as well as experienced dieters who are comfortable maintaining their current weight. But if you're trying to lose weight by cutting your carb intake, you may want reduce your fruit intake a bit further; see the Paleo for Weight Loss chapter for guidelines.

### Tubers (starchy root vegetables)

Most tubers (starchy root vegetables like sweet potatoes, yams, and squash) are perfectly healthy and can be included easily in the average paleo diet. There are countless examples of both modern and ancient hunter-gatherer tribes who subsisted largely off of starchy root vegetables of various descriptions, from more recognizable varieties like yams to more exotic examples like cassava, giving them a solid history as part of our human dietary evolution.

Starchy tubers provide healthy slow-digesting carbs, and a respectable load of vitamins and minerals. Many of these richly colored root vegetables are also high in antioxidants; the traditional bright orange sweet potato is high in carotenoids like Vitamin A, while the exotic Okinawan purple sweet potato is abundant in anthocyanins (the same type of antioxidants found in blueberries).

However, one aspect of these otherwise very healthy vegetables is that they're essentially pure starch; very high in carbs, with very little protein and zero fat. This means that in the context of the average paleo diet, which is moderate- to low-carb, intake of starchy tubers should be kept fairly low, depending on activity levels and weight loss goals.

The upside of this is that if you're fairly athletic or physically active, paleo starches like sweet potatoes make a great post-workout recovery food, since the starch in these foods is pure glucose that your body can use to replenish the muscle glycogen you burned during your workout. This is particularly effective for the more intense types of exercise that primarily use muscle glycogen as fuel, like weight lifting, sprinting, and long-distance running, as well as many sports.

Keeping your intake of starchy tubers to 1-2 servings per day is a good guideline for someone just getting started with the paleo diet, as well as experienced dieters who are comfortable maintaining their current weight. But if you're trying to lose weight by cutting your carb intake, you may want reduce your starch intake a bit further; see the Paleo for Weight Loss chapter for guidelines.

Note that traditional brown and white potatoes are an exception that is not considered paleo; see the section on potatoes below for details.

### Nuts and Seeds

Nuts and seeds are another food group that is perfectly healthy and paleo overall, but which should still be enjoyed in moderation for an optimal diet.

The main downside of nuts and seeds is that most of them are somewhat high in phytates and omega-6 fatty acids, which you may remember from other sections as being unhealthy substances. This downside is mediated by the fact that nuts generally aren't consumed in large quantities the way that foods like grains and hydrogenated vegetable oils often are in the modern diet, which minimizes any potential harm that could be caused by these substances.

As far as the positive aspects of nuts and seeds, the good news outweighs the bad: they sport a pretty complete nutritional profile, containing balanced amounts of protein, carbohydrate, and natural fats, plus natural antioxidants like Vitamin E and plenty of minerals.

So overall, nuts and seeds are a pretty healthy supplemental food to include in your diet, as long as you keep your intake moderate. It can sometimes be easy to overindulge, particularly if you use paleo-friendly products like nut butters and nut flours. Keep your intake to no more than a few servings per day, and you'll be able to gain all the nutritional benefits of nuts and seeds while avoiding any of the potential drawbacks.

A finale note: as you may know the most popular nut in the world, the peanut, is not actually a nut, but rather a legume. Peanuts have a few potentially unhealthy qualities which make them a non-paleo food; these issues are discussed below in the section on legumes.

### Herbs and Spices

Herbs, spices, and other natural seasonings (including the much-maligned salt), are perfectly paleo and encouraged. Throughout history they've been used by every culture in the world; not only to make food taste better, but also as medicinal plants used by many traditional cultures to treat common ailments. The human species has been using these plants in one form or another without ill effect, which makes it safe to declare them entirely paleo.

Not only will using herbs and spices make your food taste more delicious and flavorful, but many common household herbs and spices we use every day actually have health benefits. For example, ginger and turmeric are both anti-inflammatory, cinnamon helps improve insulin sensitivity, and mint can help alleviate indigestion, to name a few examples.

Salt deserves a special note here, because it's often considered unhealthy due to conventional wisdom. This myth got started by a few observational studies linking salt to higher blood pressure. It probably didn't help that many unhealthy processed snack foods are high in salt, which means that people who eat lots of junk food also tend to eat lots of salt. However, a lot more research has been done on salt over the years, and the total body of research indicates that salt intake is perfectly safe in any normal quantities that you could naturally use it.

This means that you pretty much have free reign to use whatever spices, herbs, and other natural seasonings you want, in whatever quantities you want – in fact, the more the better!

### Healthy Oils

Healthy oils are a food group that may seem a bit confusing at first glance. Most of us have been told, for example, that olive oil is extremely healthy, but now that we're looking at things from a paleo perspective, we may initially protest by pointing out that paleolithic hunter-gatherers didn't consume anything that had been purified down to an oil! So is there any such thing as a "healthy oil" from a paleo perspective?

The answer, happily, is yes. As a general rule of thumb, oils that are considered healthy on the paleo diet simply come from foods which are themselves considered paleo. For example, since we can eat foods like olives, coconuts, and avocados, we can also safely consume olive oil, coconut oil, and avocado oil. By the same token, foods like corn and soybeans aren't paleo, so corn and soybean oil aren't considered paleo. Overall, it's pretty simple.

Another helpful guideline is based on the fact that oil is essentially pure, refined fat; this means that if a particular food naturally contains a significant amount of healthy fat (like the aforementioned olives, coconuts, and avocados), the oil that comes from these foods is natural and healthy. But if an oil is made from a food that doesn't naturally contain fat (like corn), it requires extremely artificial processing methods to turn that food into an oil despite the absence of healthy fats. This is another helpful guideline that would help you distinguish between healthy oils like coconut and olive oil, and unhealthy oils like corn oil

Finally, note that any oil which has been hydrogenated is particularly unhealthy. These oils are almost universally high in unhealthy trans fats, which extensive scientific research has associated (to various degrees) with almost every chronic disease known to man, including weight gain, heart disease, cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer, infertility, and even clinical depression.

If you'd like a list of oils that are considered unhealthy, see the section on Industrial Vegetable Oils below.

Here's a list of the many oils considered healthy by paleo standards:

  * Olive oil.
  * Coconut oil.
  * Avocado oil.
  * Fish oil.
  * Palm oil.
  * Flax seed oil.
  * Sesame oil.
  * Various nut oils, including macadamia, almond, walnut, hazelnut, etc.

All of these oils are made from natural fats which occur in the source food itself, as opposed to the various unhealthy oils (discussed below in the section "Hydrogenated Oils") which require large-scale industrial operations to produce, like corn and soybean oil, since they don't contain any natural fats.

For cooking, it's best to use certain oils that have high smoke-points, since cooking won't oxidize (i.e. damage) the healthy fats in these oils These are primarily the oils composed of saturated fats, including almost all animal fats (butter, ghee, lard, bacon fat, duck fat, etc), as well as coconut oil, palm oil, and olive oil (at lower cooking temperatures only). The rest of the oils on the above list should be used for non-cooking purposes like, salad dressings, to avoid damaging them.

And regardless of which oils you're using and how you're using them, you can generally feel free to use as much of these oils as you want; as long as you aren't completely going overboard on extra calories, you can never get too many healthy fats!

## Non-Paleo Foods

### Grains

As discussed in more detail in a previous chapter, grains are pretty much bad news across the board, and eliminating them from your diet is one of the most important parts of adopting a healthy paleo lifestyle.

Although the details of exactly why grains are unhealthy are discussed in the previously-mentioned chapter, many newcomers to the paleo diet are confused about exactly what foods do and don't "count" as grains, particularly with grains like corn (often mislabeled a vegetable), grain-like foods like quinoa, etc. We'll aim to give you some quick and dirty guidelines in this section; if you've read our previous discussion of grains, you already know why grains in general are unhealthy. So let's get to specifics:

Corn, wheat, barley, rye: These are the most common forms of grain that we eat, and they suffer from all the drawbacks we've already discussed. Enough said.

Soy: Not technically a grain at all, soy falls into the grain category primarily because it's grown and eaten like a grain, and contains a number of grain-like properties. Like grain, it requires extensive processing in order to be edible (in most cases), and also contain very high levels of phytates, the compounds found in grain that inhibit nutrient absorption. There are also some concerns about the phytoestrogens in soy potentially interfering with normal hormone production, particularly in men. There are some traditional soy preparations that seem to make soy relatively healthy, like edamame (commonly served at sushi restaurants), which are simply whole soybean pods you can suck the seed out of, as well as fermented soybean dishes (like tempeh, natto, and miso) which lower the soybean's phytate levels and contains healthy probiotics. But the most commonly eaten forms of soy (tofu, soy milk, etc), are highly processed, high in phytates, and overall not optimal as part of a healthy paleo diet.

Oats: Oats are often recommended by health and fitness experts because they're high in a particular form of healthy, soluble, prebiotic fiber, and because they're relatively high in minerals. However, they still aren't as nutrient-dense as other plants foods (particularly leafy greens), and they contain high amounts of phytates that prevent mineral absorption.

Rice: Rice, although not recommended as part of a paleo diet, is probably the "safest" grain you can eat. The antinutrients commonly found in grains are also found in rice; however, they're primarily contained in the hull, husk, and bran of the rice plant. What we commonly refer to as "white rice" is the seed of the rice plant, with the hull, husk, and bran removed, so this means that boiled white rice is free from these antinutrients. That's the good news – the bad news is that white rice is also free from regular nutrients, and is simply composed of pure starch. Needless to say, starchy, nutrient-free, and essentially empty calories are not encouraged as part of the paleo diet.

Quinoa: Quinoa has enjoyed a fair amount of popularity in the health food world due to the fact that it is gluten-free, contains complete protein, and has the long shelf life and relatively low cost of grain. It's not technically a grain, which means it might technically be included in the paleo diet, however it does contain some worrisome grain-like properties that prevent it from being a good paleo option. It contains relatively high levels of phytates, just like grains, and also contains compounds called saponins, which damage the digestive system similarly to lectins. It's also relatively high in carbs and on the glycemic index. This all adds up to mean that quinoa, while not technically a grain, has almost exactly the same drawbacks as grain, and is even consumed the same way as many grains; this overall picture means it's not encouraged as part of a healthy paleo diet.

We hope these specific discussions of grains and grain-like foods is helpful in clarifying the overall principle of grain-avoidance on the paleo diet. For more information on why grains in general are omitted from the paleo way of eating, see the section on grains in the Non-Paleo Foods chapters.

### Potatoes

Potatoes (i.e. traditional brown and white potatoes) are one of the most "borderline" foods that aren't considered paleo. This is because in many ways they're actually pretty similar to sweet potatoes, which are considered a paleo food; both types of potato contain similar levels of vitamins, minerals, and macronutrients. So why are sweet potatoes considered paleo but "regular" potatoes aren't?

The first reason is that potatoes contain a form of mild plant toxin called glycoalkaloids. Glycoalkaloids are similar to the lectins found in grains, in the sense that they are naturally-occurring plant defensive compounds which can irritate/interfere with digestion. Glycoalkaloids are only harmful to most people in very high doses (more than you would normally ever eat), but people who have digestion issues can often experience some negative issues with them even at very low levels of intake. Anecdotally, many people with a history of joint issues often report minor joint pain if they eat potatoes on a regular basis, which may be another side effect of the glycoalkaloids.

The second thing that sets regular potatoes apart from sweet potatoes is that regular potatoes have a higher glycemic index than sweet potatoes. On average, boiled white potatoes have a GI of 82, while sweet potatoes have a GI of 70. This difference isn't large, but it isn't small either, and it means that the glucose in brown and white potatoes will be more quickly digested and spike blood sugar more sharply. This is considered problematic according to paleo diet philosophy, because keeping your blood sugar and insulin levels moderate and steady is typically good for weight management and energy levels. This GI difference is relatively minor, but it's worth bearing in mind as part of the overall picture.

The third and final problem is that since potatoes are technically nightshade vegetables, they contain small amounts of lectins, just like grains. Sweet potatoes don't have this problem (they only contain the tiny trace amounts of lectins found in all plants). So consuming sweet potatoes will help you keep your overall intake of lectins lower than consuming brown/white potatoes will.

None of these factors would be a big deal individually, but taken together, they all add up to make sweet potatoes a healthier, "more paleo" choice than regular potatoes. Potatoes are still one of the least offensive items on the list of non-paleo foods, so if you're look for a semi-healthy "cheat meal", a baked potato with grass-fed butter would be a delicious compromise option. However, if you're sensitive to nightshade vegetables, struggling to lose weight, or simply interested in fine-tuning and optimizing your diet, you'll probably want to avoid conventional potatoes.

### Beans and Legumes

Legumes (including beans, lentils, chickpeas, peanuts, etc) are similar to potatoes in the sense that they're excluded from the paleo diet simply for being mediocre, rather than for being outright unhealthy (like grain, refined sugar, and industrial oils). At first glance they appear fine, containing a moderate amount of protein and good amounts of several minerals, like potassium and magnesium. However, there are a few problems with legumes that keep them off the list of healthy paleo foods.

For starters, legumes are immediately under suspicion based on the fact that our paleolithic ancestors didn't eat them! Beans and legumes weren't eaten on a consistent basis by the vast majority of hunter-gatherers before the rise of agriculture allowed them to be cultivated; although not enough to condemn legumes by itself (since the paleo diet does include some modern foods), this fact casts suspicion on whether our bodies are evolutionarily well-adapted to consuming them.

Additionally, compared to higher-quality paleo foods like pasture-raised animal products and nutrient-rich vegetables, legumes simply aren't very nutrient dense in comparison to how many calories and carbohydrates they contain. For example, a half cup of legumes (depending on which variety you're eating) typically contains 5-10 grams of protein and 20-30 grams of carbohydrate, meaning that the protein comes with 3-4 times as much carbohydrate. To make matters worse, this protein is typically incomplete protein. And the micronutrients found in legumes, while perfectly respectable in their own right, aren't nearly as impressive as what you'd get from the same number of calories in the form of (for example) grass-fed beef with a side of leafy green vegetables.

So this explains why legumes aren't an ideal choice. But even though they aren't necessarily ideal, why aren't beans and legumes just in the "eat in moderation" category of the paleo diet? The reason is that, similar to potatoes, legumes contain moderate amounts of lectins, the same harmful compounds that make grains so unhealthy. The amounts of these lectins can be reduced through certain preparation techniques (like soaking), but the lectins aren't eliminated entirely. And given the other factors mentioned above, plus the fact that our paleolithic ancestors definitely didn't eat them, legumes can't be considered an optimal food choice.

If you really like legumes (peanuts, of course, being the most popular by far), then some occasional indulgence is relatively healthy, at least compared to other non-paleo foods like refined sugar. But if your main goal is to optimize your health (or just optimize your weight loss), beans and legumes should be minimized or avoided.

### Dairy

Dairy is another borderline food that doesn't make the cut on the paleo diet. On the one hand, dairy (particularly from grass-fed cows) contains nutrients, complete protein, and the same type of natural animal fat found in muscle meat. However, paleolithic humans most certainly didn't consume dairy of any kind; there were no domesticated animals, and the only natural way that cow's milk was being consumed was by baby cows! So given these discrepancies, where does dairy fall on the paleo spectrum?

For starters, it's important to acknowledge that huge amounts of the world's population suffer from some degree of lactose intolerance. In most people, this may not be the full-blown, run-to-the-bathroom style of lactose intolerance; most people simply don't digest lactose well, and may experience some minor gas, bloating, or other digestive discomfort if they drink significant amounts of milk. These symptoms should be noted carefully, because they're a result of the lactose in milk not being properly digested by your body.

Some ethnic and cultural groups have been consuming milk for the last several thousand years, and modern people descended from these cultures are more likely to be able to have the lactase enzyme that allows them to digest milk. People with a Northern European background, for example, where dairy consumption was common throughout modern history, are much less likely to be lactose intolerant than people of African descent, where dairy consumption was fairly rare. The takeaway here is that if you experience any signs at all of digestive discomfort from drinking a glass or two of milk, it means that your body isn't well adapted to it and you should avoid dairy consumption.

But what if you don't have these problems? Does that mean dairy is good for you? Generally speaking, the answer is that it still isn't ideal. Milk tends to be very insulinogenic (i.e. it sharply raises your insulin levels), which doesn't square well with the paleo diets overall goal of keeping insulin relatively low, especially for purposes of weight loss. There's also a fair amount of evidence that milk is pro-inflammatory, and since inflammation plays a role in a huge range of chronic diseases, from heart disease to arthritis, reducing inflammation is one of the most important things you can do for your health. So overall, consuming most dairy products is discouraged.

There are some potential exceptions to this rule. For example, many people find that once they've been on the paleo diet for a while and their digestion has improved, they can consume high-quality dairy from pasture-raised cows without any problem. Many healthy paleo eaters also find that they can consume fermented dairy, like kefir or yogurt, because the fermentation process breaks down some or most of the lactose in the dairy. These approaches still aren't particularly viable for people who are seriously lactose intolerant, but some paleo eaters find success eating these forms of high-quality dairy, so you're encouraged to self-experiment a bit with these foods once you're comfortable with a non-dairy version of the paleo diet.

Finally, one particular form of dairy deserves a special note: grass-fed butter, which many paleo eaters include in their diet despite the fact that it is technically dairy. Grass-fed butter is discussed in its own section of "Semi-Paleo Foods" below.

### Refined Sugars

Refined sugars have been covered in more detail in a previous chapter, and as mentioned in that section, avoiding refined sugars is one of the least controversial aspects of the paleo diet. There are only a few points that need to be made here in order to give you a complete understanding of what refined sweeteners you're avoiding and why:

  * For the most part, refined sugar is refined sugar; there is little (if any) difference between different types. It doesn't matter if it's normal table sugar, white or brown sugar, organic sugar, or "raw" sugar; these sugars are all essentially identical, and are all equally unhealthy.

  * In contrast to the above point, natural sweeteners actually do have different effects on the body than refined sweeteners; for example, natural raw honey actually has a measurably different effect on your blood sugar than common table sugar does, as well as containing trace nutrients and antioxidants (see the section on honey for more info). Natural sweeteners like honey are still composed largely of sugar, and can certainly be over-indulged; but they are different from (and healthier than) refined sugars.

  * "Added sugar" is an increasingly large problem; food manufacturers are adding sugar to all kinds of food products, even products which aren't particularly sweet-tasting, like pasta sauce, non-sweet salad dressings, etc. They also frequently sneak it into supposedly healthy products which contain some natural sweetness, like fruit juice, in order to bump up the sweetness and make it even more appealing. The takeaway is that even if you eliminate refined sugar from your diet by avoiding the obvious culprits (candy, soda, pastries, etc), you can still be consuming a fair amount without even realizing it. To avoid this, try cutting down on the amount of pre-made products you purchase, and also read the labels of the ones you do buy more carefully.

Our paleolithic ancestors didn't consume many sweeteners of any kind, and the ones they did consume came from wild fruit and an occasional lucky discovery of wild honey. They would never recognize the highly-refined sugars we consume in the modern era, much less consume these sweeteners in the amounts we do. This is why the paleo diet tends to advocate not only lowering your overall carb intake, but to particularly lower your consumption of refined sugars, and instead relying on moderate amounts of naturally sweet foods like fruit and honey to satisfy your sweet tooth.

### Alcohol

Alcohol is discussed in a previous section, and omitting it from your die is pretty self-explanatory. Modern scientific research indicates that anything more than a drink or two per day tends to have clear negative health consequences, and even small amounts can cause problems, like interfering with sleep, adding empty calories to the diet, etc. On top of this, it's very clear that our paleolithic ancestors didn't drink: alcohol is an agricultural food, and the closest a healthy hunter-gatherer ever came to the stuff was eating some accidentally-fermented fruit. This paints a very clear picture: alcohol isn't paleo.

In some ways, alcohol can be a trickier habit for some people to give up than things like grain and sugar, simply because many people have a social life that revolves heavily around drinking. It's one thing to change your eating habits in your own home, and when you go to a restaurant it's relatively easy to order something at least semi-paleo off the menu. But when your friends invite you out to the bar for a drink, there isn't really a convenient work-around other than just turning down the invitation altogether, which isn't a viable option for people who want to maintain their social life with their current group of non-paleo friends.

Although zero alcohol is probably the ideal amount to have in your diet, you can allow yourself an occasional drink for social reasons as long as you're strategic about it.

First, eliminate any habit you currently have of drinking at home, and save your weekly indulgences for times when you'd like to socialize with your friends.

Second, when you're at a bar or party, choose semi-healthy drinks that don't come mixed with a bunch of sugar water, and which contain some healthy compounds like antioxidants. Ideal choices for these "cheat" drinks are red wine and whiskey served neat (including scotch, bourbon, etc); these drinks both contain high levels of beneficial antioxidants, are low in sugar and carbohydrates, and are easy to slowly sip on for long periods of time (which helps keep your overall consumption of alcohol for the night low). They also have rich, complex flavors which are interesting to explore once you've acquired taste for them.

Remember, alcohol is technically a mild toxin, and even small amounts aren't ideal. You can indulge occasionally for social reasons if you do it intelligently, but your overall consumption should be kept very low.

### Conventional Artificial Sweeteners

Paleolithic humans didn't have access to anything even resembling artificial sweeteners – the foods they ate either contained some natural sugars that made them sweet, like wild fruit and honey, or were free from sugars and therefore free from any sweetness as well. This makes modern artificial sweeteners immediately suspicious in the paleo view of health.

But if you look at the composition of these sweeteners, they seem like they would complemant a paleo way of eating, most notably because they're carb-free and therefore arguably useful for a lower-carb diet like the paleo diet.

So what's the verdict on artificial sweeteners?

If you've read the previous chapter devoted to this topic, you know that modern paleo eaters take a bit of a compromise approach: the majority of artificial sweeteners are discouraged, with the exception of a few that have been conclusively shown to be relatively healthy. This is more of a "better safe than sorry" approach: unlike refined sugars and trans fats, most artificial sweeteners haven't been conclusively linked to any serious health problems – they just haven't conclusively been proven to be entirely harmless either. This fact, combined with the fact that our paleolithic ancestors certainly didn't evolve consuming these substances, puts most conventional artificial sweeteners firmly in the "not paleo" category.

These conventional artificial sweeteners include more popular and well-known options like aspartame and sucralose, as well as less popular ones like saccharine. Aspartame is the sweetener almost universally used in diet sodas, and sucralose is commonly used in many athletic products like protein powders and bars. Both of these are also available in packet form at most restaurants, coffee shops, and similar places under various brand names The specific scientific reasons why these sweeteners are generally discouraged on the paleo diet is discussed in more detail in the chapter dedicated to artificial sweeteners.

If you'd like to experiment with some paleo-friendly artificial sweeteners, your two best options are stevia and xylitol, which are discussed in the previous chapter on artificial sweeteners and briefly in their own section below. Otherwise, if you'd like to refrain from artificial sweeteners altogether, you definitely aren't at risk for missing out on any real benefits (other than a little extra fake-tasting sweetness) from omitting them from your diet.

### Industrial Vegetable Oils

All of the paleo-approved plant-based oils listed in the "healthy oils" section above (olive oil, flaxseed oil, palm oil, coconut oil, etc) can all be derived from their source-foods using very basic equipment, without the need for advanced industrial processes like solvents, hydraulic pressure, or ultra-high heating. These oils are still processed, but only minimally so, because these foods contain natural healthy fats which can easily be extracted into oils; this makes consuming these oils very similar to consuming the natural, healthy fats found in the source food itself.

The oils which are considered unhealthy on the paleo diet are the exact opposite: industrial vegetable oils, which get their name from the fact that highly-involved artificial industrial processes are required in order to extract any oil from the seeds and grains these oils are made from. Most of the plants these foods are made from, like canola and cottonseed, aren't even edible in their natural forms without extensive processing.

These oils include:

  * Corn oil
  * Soybean oil
  * Canola oil
  * Cottonseed oil
  * Safflower oil
  * Partially hydrogenated oils
  * Margarine

The high level of processing that industrial vegetable oils undergo leaves them with a number of unhealthy characteristics. Of most concern is the fact that some of the natural fats found in these oils have been hydrogenated, meaning that some of the healthy fat has been converted to trans fats. Even relatively small amounts of these trans fats have been shown to significantly increase your risk of heart disease, and may also be linked to diseases like obesity, diabetes, Alzheimer's, infertility, and even depression. These oils are also extremely high in Omega-6 fats, large amounts of which are extremely pro-inflammatory, and linked to all inflammatory diseases, including cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, obesity, irritable bowel syndrome, macular degeneration , rheumatoid arthritis, autoimmune diseases, and many others.

Needless to say, industrial vegetable oils are bad news!

Industrial oils are very frequently used for cooking, which means that besides avoiding them in your own cooking, you'll also have to watch out for them at restaurants, since almost all restaurants use these oils liberally, especially with fried foods. You'll also find them frequently used in many processed and packaged foods, as well as some miscellaneous foods like commercially-produced baked goods. This is another reason why the paleo diet discourages consuming these foods!

The good news is that when it comes to your own diet and cooking, industrial vegetable oils are relatively easy to avoid. All you have to do is steer clear of the oils on the above list, and instead use the many tasty, nutritious oils listed in the "Healthy Oils" section above, like coconut oil, olive oil, etc. This step, plus a little caution and label-reading when eating out or buying pre-packaged foods, will make it relatively easy for you to avoid these noxious industrial oils.

## Semi-Paleo Foods

### Butter

Although butter is technically a dairy product, it's mostly composed almost entirely of natural animal fat, whose composition is very similar to the actual fat tissue of ruminant animals (cows, goats, etc). It's also mostly devoid of lactose and casein, the substances found in other dairy products that is primarily responsible for the issues that dairy.

At the same time, it still contains many of the beneficial compounds found in pasture-raised animal products, like CLA (a healthy fat that has been linked to benefits to cardiovascular health, reducing the risk of certain cancers, and fat loss), butyrate (a short-chain fatty acid shown to be anti-inflammatory), vitamins A, D, E, and K2, and a perfect 1:1 ratio of Omega 6 to Omega 3 fatty acids.

For these reasons, many paleo eaters who avoid dairy in general are happy to make an exception for high-quality grass-fed butter being included in their diet as a healthy, mostly-paleo ingredient.

### Fruit Juice

Although fruit juice comes from fruit (a healthy paleo food), on a calorie-for-calorie basis fruit juice is higher in sugar and lower in nutrients than the whole fruits it's made from. This is because (depending on what kind of fruit is being eaten/juiced) the juicing process generally removes a significant amount of the nutrient-containing parts of the fruit, like the skin, pulp, etc. This also removes the fiber, which helps slow down the digestion of the sugars in whole fruit (and therefore prevents large blood sugar spikes).

Commercially bottled juices also have a few potential downsides, depending on what brand you get. Many are heated for reasons of food safety and shelf stability, which also reduces the nutrient load a bit. And many brands contain refined sugar, preservatives, and other additives that you might not want in your diet.

All that being said, juice in general, and commercially bottled juices, are an option if used in moderation. In particular, if you're using juice as just one ingredient in a complex, nutrient-rich paleo recipe (like a good paleo smoothie, for example) that contains healthy fats, protein, phytonutrients, fiber, antioxidants, and a bunch of other micronutrients, it's much different than just drinking a glass of juice by itself. So while you probably shouldn't be drinking commercial fruit juices as a regular beverage, using it as a recipe ingredient (in moderation) is usually fine.

If you squeeze the juice yourself, this will not only make the juice as nutrient-rich as possible, it will also taste amazingly fresh and delicious, and have no harmful additives. And if you buy a brand of commercially bottled juice that is free from preservatives and refined sugars, you should be able to avoid the primary negative affects that would come from drinking most commercial brands of fruit juice.

Basically, if you're trying to minimize the amount of sugar and carbs you consume, you might want to consider dropping juice. That being said, juice isn't anything to be afraid of, and (depending on your health and weight loss goals, personal tolerances, etc) can be a nutritious and semi-paleo cooking ingredient and occasional beverage when consumed in moderation.

### Nightshade Vegetables

Nightshades are a specific family of flowering plants which, besides including a number of vines, flowers, and other miscellaneous plants, also includes a number of edible vegetables commonly consumed by humans, most notably:

  * Tomatoes
  * Peppers (including bell peppers, chili peppers, paprika, tamales, tomatillos, pimentos, cayenne, etc.)
  * Eggplant
  * Tomatilloes
  * Potatoes
  * ...and a number of others

For some people who are particularly strict about the paleo diet, nightshades are frowned on, because they technically contain small amounts of harmful compounds like lectins (one of the harmful compounds in grain) and alkaloids (a potentially harmful compound discussed in the section on potatoes above). Additionally, some people have food sensitivities to these plants (most notably people with IBS and other digestive disorders, paricularly those who have been prescribed a "low FODMAP" diet by a nutritionist).

That being said, the majority of people who follow the paleo lifestyle are comfortable using them, and experience no negative effects from doing so. This is because for most people, the levels of problematic compounds found in common nightshade vegetables like tomatoes are very low, and there is currently no available research linking these common foods to bad health. So for most people, enjoying a dish that includes some diced tomatoes or bell peppers isn't a big deal.

However, if you want to follow a more strict version of the paleo diet, or if you find that you are particularly sensitive to nightshades (experiencing symptoms related to increased joint pain, arthritis, etc), you may want to steer clear of any dishes that contain tomatoes, bell peppers, hot sauce, or similar ingredients, even if those dishes are technically perfectly paleo. Remember: personal experimentation will be the best way to determine what feels best for you.

### Natural Sweeteners

Honey and maple syrup are the go-to natural sweeteners used in the paleo diet. Although the two can be used almost interchangeably in culinary terms for the purpose of adding sweetness to a dish, their origins and nutritional contexts are fairly different, so we'll look at each one individually:

#### Honey

Honey is a somewhat controversial food in the paleo world. On the one hand, it's a 100% natural food, and has been commonly consumed by many hunter-gatherer cultures throughout history. On the other hand, it's macronutrient composition is almost pure sugar, which means that it doesn't always fit comfortably into many people's idea of what a (usually low-carb) paleo diet should be.

If you're like most people who adopt a paleo diet, we're assuming that you're okay with occasionally indulging in some higher-carb foods like honey, as long as those foods comes from a healthy, natural source. But, if you're going to indulge in some carbs, is honey really a healthy choice? And if so, what sets it apart from more conventional refined sweeteners?

To start with, honey isn't just sugar. It contains over a hundred different compounds, including trace amounts of minerals, amino acids, vitamins, and antioxidants, as well as miscellaneous substances like bee pollen. This means that honey has more to offer than just sugar (which is all that you'll find in table sugar and high-fructose corn syrup, for example).

More to the point, studies have shown that honey doesn't have the same effect on the body as refined sweeteners do. In comparison to table sugar and high fructose corn syrup, blood tests show that consuming honey causes less of an increase in triglycerides and blood glucose levels, less inflammation, less oxidative stress, and has a more favorable effect on HDL and LDL cholesterol levels.

What this all means is that, if you're going to indulge your sweet tooth a bit, honey is definitely a healthier choice than conventional sugars.

When buying honey, be sure to choose a brand of honey labeled as "raw". Raw honey is unpasteurized, unprocessed, and free from additives, while conventional honey is often of questionable quality. For example, a lot of conventional honey is actually mixed with corn syrup, even if corn syrup doesn't appear on the label! To be on the safe side, choose a brand of raw honey (available at any health food store).

Finally, note that the taste of honey can vary greatly between different brands and categories of honey. There are many types of honey (clover, buckwheat, wildflower, etc), and the region a particular brand of honey originates from can also affect the taste. Be sure to experiment with many different brands and types of honey to find one that fits your personal tastes.

#### Maple Syrup

Maple syrup is in a similar category as honey: it's almost entirely composed of sugar, but it has qualities that make it a healthier choice than conventional refined sweeteners.

For starters, just like honey, maple syrup has a long history of being consumed as a traditional food by groups as such as Native Americans. This means there is some precedent for maple syrup being used as part of a hunter-gatherer diet, albeit probably in smaller amounts than modern humans would normally use it.

Scientifically speaking, maple syrup contains trace minerals, dozens of phenolic compounds, and decent levels of antioxidants. This means that, like much like honey, maple syrup isn't "just sugar", and deserves consideration as a healthy sweetener (as long as it's used in moderation).

Note that the above only refers to real maple syrup, not the artificially flavored corn syrup sold under generic names like "pancake syrup" or even just "syrup". Be sure you're buying the real stuff (just check the label, and make sure the only ingredient listed is "maple syrup"). When selecting between different brands and "grades", try to buy the darkest-colored maple syrup you can get, as this dark color indicates higher levels of trace minerals and antioxidants.

### Paleo-Friendly Artificial Sweeteners

Although conventional artificial sweeteners are discouraged on the paleo diet, as discussed above, there are some artificial sweeteners which are considered to be relatively paleo-friendly.

Technically, nothing artificial is truly paleo, since nothing artificial was available during our evolutionary history as a species; the only sweet foods available to our paleolithic ancestors would have been naturally sweet foods like wild fruit and honey.

However, there are two modern artificial sweeteners which have been studied extensively and shown to have scientifically-proven advantages over conventional artificial sweeteners: stevia and xylitol. These slightly less common artificial sweeteners aren't technically paleo, but the average low-carb paleo diet can really benefit from having some artificial sweeteners to prevent carb and sugar cravings. Since stevia and xylitol have both been proven to be safe and healthy, many low-carb paleo dieters are happy to include one or both of them in their diets as an alternative to higher-carb natural sweeteners like honey.

Since stevia and xylitol are fairly different, we'll discuss each of them individually:

#### Stevia

Stevia is a popular non-caloric sweetener among many health-conscious people even outside the paleo community, and often used as an alternative to conventional artificial sweeteners like sucralose and aspartame. Stevia is derived from a South American herb, and can be purchased in either powder or liquid form.

Studies on stevia have linked it to a number of health benefits, including increasing insulin sensitivity and decreasing post-meal blood sugar levels. In fact, the Japanese have been using stevia to treat type 2 diabetics for decades for exactly this reason. This also makes stevia particularly appealing for low-carb dieters, who are usually trying to reduce blood sugar and increase insulin sensitivity as much as possible.

Stevia is very sweet, and perfectly healthy for anyone to use. The one drawback is that many people complain that it has a very distinct, unpleasant underlying flavor. Some people claim that this is simply an acquired taste, that you'll get used to after a while, while some say they simply can't get used to it.

If you're interested in experimenting with Stevia, be sure to try multiple brands, as well as both the powdered and liquid forms, to find what works best for you.

#### Xylitol

Xylitol is the most popular member of a family of artificial sweeteners derived from sugar alcohols, and boasts a number of benefits over other artificial sweeteners that make it popular with the health crowd.

First, it has very little effect on blood glucose levels, and no effect on insulin levels, making it another excellent choice for diabetics, low-carb dieters, and anyone else concerned with managing their blood sugar and insulin.

Second, unlike almost any other sweetener, xylitol actually protects your teeth, with a number of studies showing that it has a protective effect against dental plaque and cavities. It's even included as an active ingredient in many natural/organic toothpastes.

The only potential downside to using xylitol is that if you eat too much, too soon, it might give you mild diarrhea. This is because your body needs to adapt its digestive enzymes to consuming it; if you're going to use it regularly, consume it sparingly for the first few weeks to give your body time to adjust.

### Coffee and Tea

Coffee and tea aren't technically paleo, in the sense that our paleolithic ancestors didn't start their morning by brewing a pot of coffee or end their day with a nice soothing cup of herbal tea. That being said, there is precedent in both our evolutionary history, and our modern scientific literature, for coffee and tea consumption being perfectly healthy.

Historically speaking, humans have been brewing batches of medicinal herbs since before recorded history began. At first, these uses were purely medicinal, and probably only used haphazardly by various tribal groups around the world. But eventually, this behavior evolved into the more recreational form of tea drinking that we're familiar with today.

However, modern tea (and certainly modern coffee) are relatively recent inventions that wouldn't exist without modern agricultural technology. This makes them not technically paleo; so why do we consider them to be paleo-friendly? In short, it's a result of the fact that (unlike other modern foods like grains and sugar) the vast majority of scientific research indicates that coffee and tea are perfectly healthy. We'll deal with each separately for clarity:

As one of the most popular beverages in the Western world, lots of research has been done on coffee, and a combination of observational studies and controlled trials have linked coffee to reduced risk for all kinds of serious diseases, including colon and prostate cancers, Parkinson's, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, and type 2 diabetes. It's also been shown to be associated with lower average bodyweights, and can even boost athletic performance when consumed before physical activity.

Tea is a much broader category of drinks than coffee. "Real" tea includes a number of fairly different teas which originate from different varieties of the tea plant (Camellia sinensis), the most popular varieties being black, white, and green tea, but also including less common varieties like oolong and pu-erh. "Herbal tea" technically isn't tea, since it isn't made from the tea plant, but involves a tea-like infusion of hot water and herbs (often combined with "real tea", and sometimes other plants like fruit, flowers, etc).

Regardless of this complexity, the good news is that pretty much all varieties of tea have large amounts of scientific research backing them up as being healthy. Almost all varieties contain a potent blend of anti-oxidant and anti-inflammatory compounds, which is probably why the majority of research indicates that tea consumption protects against many of the major chronic diseases, including cardiovascular disease, osteoporosis, high blood pressure, arthritis, and possibly even several cancers. "Real tea" and some herbal teas contain caffeine (typically one-quarter to one-half the amount of the average cup of coffee). And since many herbs have medicinal properties, many herbal teas also have medicinal benefits, depending on which of the many dozens of herb species are used.

At least some (if not most) of the positive effects associated with drinking coffee and tea are probably the result of the caffeine contained in these drinks (a fair amount of research shows that even isolated caffeine taken in pill form has benefits). However, many of the health benefits are probably a result of other compounds found in the drinks, including small amounts of vitamins and minerals (depending on the beverage) and an impressive array of antioxidants. Even better, these beneficial compounds are also found in decaf coffee and non-caffeinated herbal teas.

Coffee and most teas all contain different types of antioxidants, but regardless of which drink you prefer, you're getting a solid load of antioxidants along with the caffeine. In fact, since many people in modern industrialized countries eat a diet that is low in fruits and vegetables, it's not uncommon for their daily 2-3 cups of coffee or tea to be the highest source of antioxidants in their diet! This is what separates these healthy caffeinated beverages from processed alternatives like energy drinks.

There are two potential pitfalls that come with consuming these beverages, however:

First, with coffee in particular and certain tea drinks as well, it's very common for people to consume their coffee in conjunction with a lot of milk, sugar, and other unhealthy additives. This is particularly true with the fancy blended and/or espresso-based drinks available at coffee shops, where a few shots of espresso are mixed with an amount of milk, whipped cream, and flavor syrup that is essentially a large milkshake! It's also a concern for people who simply mix a few teaspoons of cream and sugar into their coffee or tea; especially if you're having a few cups of the stuff a day, these small amounts of non-paleo foods can add up surprisingly fast.

If you're going to partake in coffee or tea, you have two options to avoid this problem. The first is to use paleo substitutes; for example, if you like a cup of coffee or Earl Grey tea with cream and sugar, you can instead use coconut cream and a little honey (or use a paleo-friendly artificial sweetener like stevia in place of the honey). You can even take this approach to making your own paleo lattes, mochas, and blended drinks at home: simply add some espresso or strongly brewed coffee to a blender with coconut or almond milk, good-quality cocoa powder, your paleo sweetener of choice, and some paleo friendly spices or flavorings like cinnamon or vanilla extract, and you've got a fancy blended drink worthy of any over-priced coffee shop. Just keep your use of sweeteners moderate and in-line with your personal health and weight loss goals. Alternately, you may just want to learn to appreciate the subtle, complex flavors of coffee and tea without any additives. This is probably the most healthy and natural way to consume these beverages, and most in line with how they're traditionally consumed in cultures all over the world. Regardless of which approach you take, make sure that you're drinking your coffee or tea in healthy context, and that they aren't serving as vehicles for unhealthy foods to work their way into your diet.

The second potential pitfall that comes with any caffeinated beverage is an over-reliance on the caffeine. This doesn't apply to non-caffeinated herbal teas and similar drinks, of course, but since most of us consume coffee or tea at least partially for the caffeine, the boost of artificial energy these drinks provide can be seductive. There are many ways this can manifest itself: you may be cutting down on your sleep or compromising your healthy diet, and then trying to make up for it by using caffeine as a crutch to prop up your energy levels. You may be extra sensitive to caffeine, so that even a relatively small amount makes you jittery and over-stimulated. Or you may simply have developed a mild caffeine addiction over the years, where your body comes to rely on it a bit too much and punish you with headaches and other withdrawal symptoms if you don't constantly feed your habit.

Regardless, your caffeine intake is something you should keep an eye on. Even if you tolerate caffeine very well, without any apparent jitters or other side effects, you should probably keep your intake fairly moderate just to be on the safe side, and avoid using it as a crutch. Eating a clean paleo diet and getting lots of high-quality sleep should provide you with more than enough energy! On the other hand, if you're not regularly allowing yourself good sleep, you're experiencing lots of stress in your life, you've noticed any signs of withdrawal if you don't get your fix, or you're just experiencing some jitteriness or other side effects, drinking any significant amount of caffeine may overtax your adrenal system in a way that hurts more than it helps. Try cutting down on your intake, or even temporarily stopping it altogether, and see how you feel after your body adjusts to a lower level of intake. You may find that it clears up some problems, and may even find that you can enjoy steadier, more consistent energy levels without artificial spikes of caffeine.

Regardless of how you choose to consume these beverages, and whether you're consuming them for a little extra boost of energy, or for health benefits like reducing inflammation or increasing antioxidant intake, just keep in mind that coffee and tea are no replacement for a healthy paleo diet combined with great sleep and plenty of exercise. Keep your intake moderate, and savor your coffee or tea as a soothing, energizing, and enjoyable supplement to the rest of your paleo lifestyle.

# Basic Paleo Eating Guidelines

As a metaphor for how a paleo diet should generally look in practice, if you were eating a paleo meal off of one big plate, here's how the average paleo plate should look:

  1. About a third of the plate should be taken up be a piece of protein roughly the size of your palm. The protein will probably end up being meat (pretty much anything; beef, chicken, pork, lamb, seafood, etc), but eggs also work well. The "about the size of your palm" guideline helps ensure that you're getting about the right amount of food for your body size: large people have large palms, and small people have small palms (regardless of how much bodyfat they currently have). Meat can be baked, steamed, boiled, pan-fried, or grilled on an open flame, and dressed up with paleo-friendly sauces, toppings, or condiments you like.

  2. Another third of the plate should be a generous helping of colorful veggies. These will ideally be leafy green vegetables (spinach, kale, chard), or cruciferous vegetables (broccoli, cabbage, brussels sprouts), since these veggies have almost no calories or carbs while still being extremely rich in nutrients. This will probably end up being about a cup of vegetables, give or take. These veggies can be raw, boiled, steamed, or sauteed, and cooked/dressed with healthy fats like olive oil, coconut butter or oil, ghee, grass-fed butter, etc (if using a dressing, make sure the sugar/carb content is minimal).

  3. The final third of the plate can be almost any paleo food you want, restricted only be how much you're cutting your carbs. For fat loss purposes, this usually means a healthy fat-based food, like avocado slices, mixed nuts, etc. However, if you're not cutting carbs too strictly, anywhere from 1-3 times a day this final third can be composed of fruit (fresh, frozen, even dried in moderation), or healthy starches like sweet potatoes (cooked in healthy fats and flavored with whatever natural oils, herbs, and spices you want).

Depending on how much you want to cut sugar and carbs, you can often add in a healthy paleo-friendly dessert, sweetened with honey or maple syrup, in addition to your normal meals, although you generally shouldn't do this more than once a day.

Beverages can include coffee and caffeinated teas in moderation (ideally unsweetened), occasional fruit juice in moderation, non-caffeinated herbal tea, coconut water, almond milk (ideally unsweetened), and as much pure, healthy, refreshing water as you can drink. In fact, since many people don't drink enough water, it's recommended that you make water your go-to beverage.

Shooting for three meals a day is a good target, but if you prefer smaller meals and find that your portion sizes aren't filling you up, you can feel free to have healthy paleo snacks between meals. These snacks can actually be small "dishes" if you want, or they can be simple foods like a handful of nuts, some sliced fruit, veggies with a paleo-friendly dip, avocado slices, beef jerky, deli meat, etc. If you stick to healthy paleo foods, while keeping your carb intake relatively low, your appetite will be naturally healthy and balanced, allowing you to snack as much as you want without worry.

The amount of "cheating" you can allow yourself on the paleo diet will depend on your overall health and weight loss goals. If you have a serious health condition you're trying to manage, or if losing weight is a big priority for you, then we recommend being fairly strict about eating only healthy, nutrient-rich paleo foods to support your goals. But if you're lean, active, have good energy, sleep well, and are overall free from any health problems or body issues, you can feel free to occasionally indulge in a few drinks with friends, a slice of birthday cake at the office party, etc. Just make sure that at least 90% of the meals you eat in a given week are paleo, and you can afford an occasional "cheat" while still maintaining an amazing level of health. Remember, this diet is supposed to make you feel good, not neurotic, guilty, and stressed!

Many people tinker with the above template for paleo eating in order to customize it to their personal tastes. For example, many people who don't like eating veggies in the form of salads and similar side dishes find that they prefer to get their daily veggie intake from a green smoothie or two. Some people prefer more or less meat, some favor getting their carbs from fruit while others prefer a daily sweet potato, etc. The above "plate" example doesn't mean you literally need to divvy up your food into thirds on a plate; as long as your diet ends up following the general guidelines above, you can let your personal eating preferences determine how your average meal actually looks.

And that's about it! There are certainly many variations on this "basic" version of the paleo diet, to the point where almost every person will end up finding their own personalized version of the above eating plan that works for them. But overall, it's a very simple, intuitive, and easy to maintain way of eating, and we think that once you get used to it, these eating habits will become second nature to you - in fact, when you notice how good the paleo diet makes you feel, you'll wonder how you ever ate any other way!

# Optional Supplement Guidelines

### The (Optional) Role of Supplements

Needless to say, our hunter-gatherer ancestors didn't use supplements: they got all the nutrients they needed from the wild, natural foods they ate. In the modern world, however, it's often difficult, expensive, or just inconvenient to get certain nutrients in your diet, and this is where supplementation can potentially help a modern person maximize their health.

It should be noted that, on a purely technical level, the ideal amount of supplements for you to be consuming is zero! This is because getting nutrients from food (and occasionally other lifestyle factors, like sunlight) is almost always more biologically effective than getting them from supplements.

This isn't just superstition: your body has simply evolved to get its nutrients from food, which means that it's most well adapted to this delivery mechanism. Whole foods typically contain a wide range of vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, phytochemicals, and macronutrients, not just the isolated nutrients found in supplements. This means that not only are you getting more nutritional "bang for your buck" with whole foods, but the many nutrients in whole foods often work together synergistically to be more effective.

For example, although calcium on its own is somewhat good for your bones, it's been shown to be much more effective when combined with vitamin D, magnesium, and vitamin K2. Another example is vitamin E, which is a fat soluble vitamin, and therefore better digested when consumed with fat. And the list goes on!

There are tons of these types of interactions among nutrients. And since most natural foods contain dozens of different substances, most scientists agree that we haven't even discovered all the potentially beneficial compounds found in whole foods.

This is why it's always beneficial to obtain nutrients from their natural sources if possible, and why the supplements listed below contain detailed discussions on how to determine if you need more of these nutrients in your diet, as well as how to obtain these nutrients naturally, before resorting to supplementation.

Our modern lifestyles often make it difficult or inconvenient to obtain certain nutrients naturally, since our modern lifestyles are so far removed from the lifestyles of our ancestors in the wild. This means that, in many cases, supplementation a valid option for modern people to find the most convenient and effective way to maximize their health.

The following small list of supplements is chosen based on two criteria: first, that these nutrients are difficult to obtain as part of a normal modern lifestyle (even a healthy paleo lifestyle!), and second, that these nutrients play an absolutely key role in the body, and can't be ignored by anyone interested in good health. These supplements are all backed up with stacks of scientific research, to the point where even very conservative, mainstream health experts are happy to recommend them. And to make things even better, they're also inexpensive and widely available anywhere supplements are sold.

So if your lifestyle doesn't allow you to get all the nutrients you need, the supplements below are great, paleo-friendly alternatives.

### General Supplement Purchasing Guidelines

As a general rule of thumb, as long as the supplement you're buying meets the criteria laid out in the description for that supplement, you should be buying the least expensive brand you can. Most of the scientific studies done on these supplements aren't using a "special" type of that nutrient, they're just using the most common type, so don't feel like you need to pay twice as much for a brand that claims to be extra potent / extra pure / extra whatever. A lot of the most expensive brands of supplements are just charging you extra money to pay for their pretty packaging and high marketing budget!

Also note that there will be no specific recommendations of brands, to avoid any concerns about conflicts of interest. The criteria listed below for each supplement should be more than enough for you to make your own choices about which brand of supplement you'd like to buy, based on what is affordable, conveniently available, and how it meets your personal goals.

### A Note on Multivitamins and Other General Supplements

As a rule of thumb, we typically don't recommend  general-purpose supplements like multivitamins, as well as products like supplemental antioxidants, or supplements advertised for specific purposes like boosting testosterone, helping joints, etc. This isn't necessarily because these supplements are useless, it's just because the nutrients, antioxidants, and other compounds found in these supplements can easily be obtained from real food. And getting your nutrition from real food is generally more effective, since the nutrients in food come naturally "packaged" with all the necessary complementary nutrients and cofactors that help them work (as discussed above).

If you're worried about being deficient in a particular nutrient, it's generally pretty easy to get that nutrient from food. Between fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, roots, and animal products, it's generally not hard to find a source of whatever vitamin or mineral you think you're missing. Additionally, eating a wide range of these foods and keeping some variety in your diet will help you cover all your nutritional bases without the need for a multivitamin.

If you really are concerned about a serious nutrient deficiency, you may want to consider getting blood testing done through your doctor to verify your actual blood levels of various nutrients. From that point, if getting a particular nutrient from food is inconvenient, you can decide if you need to supplement with that specific vitamin or mineral.

The supplements listed below are listed here precisely because they're special cases: it's hard to get these nutrients from food, so supplementing is often easier for most people. But when it comes to all the run-of-the-mill vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, and other compounds found abundantly in real food, go with real food first!

## The Supplements

### Fish Oil (i.e. Omega-3 Fatty Acids)

Practically every health expert in the world - regardless of whether they're paleo or not - agrees that it's extremely important for everyone to get enough Omega-3 fatty acids in their diet. This Omega-3 can come from a multitude of sources, including both supplements and real food, and just like every other nutrient, it's almost always best to get it from food, like grass-fed beef and wild-caught fish.

However, if it's too difficult or inconvenient for you to get enough Omega-3's from whole foods (whether because you can't afford pasture-raised animal products, don't like the taste of fish, or whatever), supplementing with fish oil is the way to go. Cold-water fish store Omega-3 in their fat tissue, and since fish oil is simply the purified oil from these fatty fish (like olive oil from olives), it's the most convenient, highly-concentrated, and bioavailable form of Omega-3 you can get.

Tons of research has been done on the health benefits of Omega-3 supplementation in general, and fish oil supplementation specifically. Various studies have found that taking fish oil supplements can potentially have such wide ranging effects as reducing inflammation, lowering your risk of heart disease, lowering your risk of many types of cancer (including prostate, breast, and colorectal cancer), improving vision, improving insulin sensitivity, and even improving brain function. For example, one study conducted at New York University (Protzko J. et al 2013), even found that the simple act of giving fish oil pills to pregnant women was enough to increase the IQ of their children later in life!

How do you know if you need it?

First of all, you should keep in mind that practically all the research done on fish oil has been conducted on people eating a fairly "normal" (i.e. non-paleo) diet, which means that for someone eating a nutrient-rich, whole foods paleo diet, the effects might not be as strong (since you're already eating so healthy!). This is especially likely if you're consuming pasture-raised animal products, since (for example) grass-fed beef contains much higher amounts of Omega-3's than grain-fed beef.

You are especially unlikely to need fish oil supplements if you're eating seafood on a regular basis; as a general rule of thumb, it usually doesn't matter what kind of fish you're eating (tuna, salmon, cod, etc), or even if it's factory-farmed fish (although wild-caught fish is certainly healthier); many studies have shown that eating fish on a regular basis is not only as healthy as fish oil supplementation, it's actually significantly healthier!

The final factor depends on how much vegetable oil you're eating. Without getting too much into the nitty-gritty technical details, there's some evidence that consuming industrial vegetable and seed oils (such as corn, soy, peanut, safflower, and similar oils) increases your body's need for Omega-3 fatty acids. The good news is that if you're following a healthy paleo diet, you should be eating little or no industrial vegetable oil, so this particular factor probably isn't a concern for you. Just be aware that if you let your eating habits slip, and start eating more unhealthy vegetable oils, you'll need to consume more fish oil (or even better, whole fish) to balance it out.

So the overall recommendations for supplementing with fish oil are as follows:

If you're eating wild-caught fish 3-4 times a week, plus consistently following a paleo diet, you definitely don't need fish oil supplements.

If you don't eat fish on a regular basis, but the animal products you eat are exclusively (or almost exclusively) pasture-raised, grass fed, etc, and if you're eating a very clean paleo diet with no consumption of industrial vegetable oils, you probably don't need a fish oil supplement in this case either.

However, you should probably be taking a fish oil supplement if you don't consume fish regularly and if your adherence to the paleo diet isn't particularly strict. This is particularly relevant for paleo followers who eat animal products that are factory farmed, since these animal products have very low levels of Omega-3 fatty acids and high in unhealthy fats from their grain-based diet.

Guidelines for Use

Fish oil is readily available anywhere that supplements are sold, and ranges from very cheap to very expensive, depending mostly on the brand. You'll probably want to take it in capsule form, but it's also available in a liquid form which some people mix with smoothies, salad dressings, etc.

To start with, you should choose a brand of fish oil that contains some Vitamin E. Vitamin E is a natural antioxidant, which helps prevent the fish oil from oxidizing (i.e. spoiling) during storage.

When reading the label on the back of the container, just look for high amounts of EPA and DHA (the healthy Omega-3 fats fish oil is made of). This indicates that the supplement you're taking is mostly made of actual fish oil, rather than fish oil mixed with other substances.

Depending on how tall you are and how much you weigh, as well as the above-mentioned factors (how much vegetable oil you're consuming, whether you eat pasture-raised or factory-farmed animal products, etc), you should be taking anywhere 1-4 grams of fish oil per day. For most people, assuming you're taking 1-gram capsules of fish oil, taking 2-4 capsules a day is a good guideline. Fish oil is very safe, but don't take more than 3-4 grams per day for any extended period of time, otherwise you might put yourself at risk for reduced blood clotting and increased chance of bleeding.

Note that vegetarian Omega-3 supplements, like flax oil, are relatively healthy overall, but not ideal for getting more Omega-3's in your diet. The vegetable-based Omega-3 fats found in flax oil need to be converted by your body into the animal-based Omega-3 fats your body can actually use (after all, you're an animal, not a vegetable). This conversion process is inefficient, which means that you're losing a lot of the plant-based Omega-3 fats during digestion. Since fish oil comes from an animal, it doesn't need to be converted, which makes it much more potent and bioavailable than plant-based sources of Omega-3. So if you're bothering to supplement with Omega-3's at all, you should either be eating fish, or taking fish oil!

### Vitamin D

Vitamin D is a critically important nutrient, with such wide-ranging health effects as:

  * Working in conjunction with calcium and other minerals to build strong bones.
  * Aiding in the production of healthy levels of sex hormones.
  * Playing a huge role in the immune system, activating the T-cells that fight infections and bacteria.
  * Reducing inflammation.
  * Reducing the risk of many cancers.

Not only is Vitamin D extremely important for good health, it's also extremely unique in how the body obtains it. Unlike almost every other vitamin and mineral, Vitamin D isn't found in almost any naturally occurring foods, except in trace mounts; instead, the human body produces its own Vitamin D when its skin is exposed to sunlight.

This is problematic for many modern people. The human species evolved living outdoors, usually with little or no clothing, and this abundant sun exposure led to an abundant supply of Vitamin D. In almost all modern cultures, however, people spend their entire day indoors, away from the sun, with many people rarely getting more than a few minutes of sunlight per day as they walk between their car and their home/job. Even when we do go outside, our bodies are largely covered in clothing, which blocks the sun's rays.

The fact that most modern people don't get much natural sunlight exposure, combined with the fact that Vitamin D doesn't occur naturally in almost any foods, means that most people would benefit from taking a Vitamin D supplement.

How do you know if you need it?

There's really only one factor for determining whether or not you need to supplement with Vitamin D: just ask yourself, "How much sun exposure am I getting?" The more sunlight exposure you're getting, the less likely you are to need Vitamin D (and the lower dose you'll take if you decide to supplement).

That being said, there are a surprising number of factors that can influence "how much sun exposure" you're technically getting. The color of your skin, the strength of the sunlight in your geographical area, the amount of clothing you're wearing - they can all affect how much Vitamin D you're body produces.

For example, a Caucasian person in Miami at noon would only need about 10-15 minutes to fulfill their daily dose of Vitamin D, whereas the same person in Boston (with all other factors the same) may need as much as an hour to produce the same amount. This is because Miami is closer to the equator, and the sun shines brighter and stronger there.

Meanwhile, a person with brown or black skin would probably need twice as much sunlight exposure (20-30 minutes in Miami, or 2 hours in Boston) to produce the same amount of Vitamin D, because dark skin blocks sunlight more than light skin does.

These are just a few examples, but don't be overwhelmed by all these factors! The silver lining that makes this complicated situation more simple for most people is that, as a modern human who wears clothing and lives indoors, chances are that you need supplementation, regardless of your skin color, geographical location, etc.

If you don't spend any time outdoors (or go outdoors a lot, but with lots of clothes on) you can skip straight to the next section for dosing guidelines.

Otherwise, if you do regularly spend time outdoors, live in a sunny part of the country, and your outdoor activity is spend with lots of skin exposed, you can get a more specific idea of how much Vitamin D you're getting by visiting the website for the Vitamin D council, a nonprofit group that works to educate people on the health impact of Vitamin D and sun exposure. They have an extensive discussion on the subject, which can be found on their website at www.vitamindcouncil.org.

Note that sunlight exposure through glass windows doesn't produce Vitamin D, since glass screens out some of the natural radiation found in sunlight that triggers the release of Vitamin D when it hits your skin. Also, many tanning beds don't produce the necessary type of radiation either. And if you wear sunscreen when you go out, be aware that sunscreen also prevents your skin from producing Vitamin D.

Finally, the ultimate way to know for sure whether or not you need to supplement Vitamin D (and if so, how much) is to get your blood levels of Vitamin D tested by your doctor with a simple blood test. Your blood levels of Vitamin D should be anywhere from 40-100 ng/ml, ideally in the 50-70 ng/ml range.

Guidelines for Use

Assuming that you need to supplement Vitamin D, and are getting little or no sunlight exposure, the Vitamin D council recommends that the average adult take about 5,000 iu of Vitamin D per day. This is a general rule of thumb, which doesn't take your body size into account, so if you'd like a more specific recommendation based on your weight, you can take 1,000 iu of supplemental Vitamin D per 25 pounds of body weight.

This dosage recommendation is much higher than the recommended minimum amounts that are often put forth by government health agencies and other health organizations, simply because those recommendations are based only on avoiding deficiencies, rather than maximizing the health benefits you get from Vitamin D.

Remember that if you get more sunlight exposure than the average person, you should probably be adjusting this amount downwards, and the most precise way of getting an idea for this is to get your blood levels of Vitamin D tested by your doctor. Guidelines for how to proceed from there can be found on the Vitamin D Council's website at www.vitamindcouncil.org.

You can't overdose on Vitamin D from natural sunlight exposure, since your body naturally regulates its own production of this nutrient. You can, however, take too much supplemental Vitamin D. If you keep your supplemental doses conservative (less than 10,000 iu per day for adults), you shouldn't be at much risk unless you're also getting a ton of natural sunlight exposure. If you have any doubt, get your blood levels tested: anything over 100 ng/ml calls for a reduction in your supplementation.

Vitamin D comes in the form of capsules and drops, and in various doses, and is sometimes combined with other complementary nutrients like calcium. You can take whichever form of the supplement you find most convenient, and you don't even need to take it with food. Just be sure to take a supplement that specifically provides you with the "D3" form of Vitamin D, as this is the form that is thought to be best absorbed by your body.

### Probiotics

You may be familiar with the growing interest in probiotics, most commonly in the form of doctors, nutritionists, and other health experts recommending yogurt to improve digestion. Although probiotics do aid digestion, and are found in yogurt, probiotics are a much larger topic than this.

The simple definition of a "probiotic" is a strain of healthy bacteria. Unlike the harmful bacteria that make us sick, probiotic bacteria work synergistically with our bodies to provide a wide range of useful functions. These bacteria essentially live symbiotically inside our digestive systems, like little workers performing useful functions in exchange for their room and board.

This symbiotic relationship between humans and beneficial bacteria evolved because life in the paleolithic era was pretty dirty. There were no bottles of hand sanitizer, no refrigeration, no shrink-wrapped food, no pasteurization, not even any soap: for the majority of human existence, people weren't even aware that microorganisms existed. This meant that people were constantly consuming bacteria, whether through dirt, unpreserved food, etc.

Over time, our bodies evolved to make use of this constant exposure to bacteria, allowing many types of beneficial bacteria to populate our guts and help us with a variety of helpful tasks like aiding our immune system, helping us digest our food, and many other symbiotic benefits (which we'll discuss in a moment).

The discovery that germs caused disease, and that we could kill these germs with soap, cooking, freezing, and other technologies, was a huge benefit to the human race. It allowed us to rid ourselves of many formerly deadly diseases, drastically reduce the infant mortality rate, and extend the average human lifespan. However, these incredible benefits have come with an unforeseen side effect: in addition to killing off the harmful bacteria that cause disease, we also are no longer exposed to the beneficial bacteria that our bodies evolved to depend on.

Modern science is increasingly discovering more and more health benefits associated with probiotic bacteria, with different strains of bacteria showing benefits such as:

  * Aiding weight loss and helping to maintain low bodyfat levels.
  * Helping produce the critical neurotransmitter serotonin (research suggests that 95% of serotonin is produced by gut bacteria, and a deficiency in serotonin has been linked to depression).
  * Lower rates of asthma in children.
  * Lower rates of cavities in children.
  * Decreased anxiety in patients with chronic fatigue syndrome.
  * Reducing inflammation and oxidative stress.
  * Reducing the risk of colon cancer.
  * Relieving diarrhea, flatulence, indigestion, and other symptoms in people with digestive conditions like irritable bowl syndrome, SIBO, inflammatory bowel disease, Crohn's disease, etc.
  * Aiding in the digestion and absorption of nutrients.
  * Fighting the overgrowth of harmful bacteria and aiding the immune system against infection.

And that's just for starters! This impressive and diverse hosts of benefits is just what our current scientific research on probiotics has uncovered so far.

How do you know if you need it?

In theory, everyone should be able to benefit from including probiotics in their diet, for all of the benefits mentioned above. However, since probiotic bacteria are mostly involved in the functioning of the digestive system, you don't necessarily need to worry about consuming any probiotics in your diet if you feel that your digestion is good.

If you're experiencing even mild symptoms of indigestion (gas, bloating, etc) you should certainly experiment with increasing the amount of probiotics in your diet. Even if you aren't having any problems with your digestion, you may want to consider probiotic foods or supplements anyway; the list of possible benefits is compelling enough that you might want to "play it safe" and make sure you're not missing out on any of these (potential) benefits that science has uncovered.

So how do you get probiotic bacteria? The way that paleolithic people acquired these bacteria was pretty much through eating dirt; never washing your hands or your food would cause a person to consume a steady amount of soil on a regular basis, and this soil carried billions of soil-based organisms which populated our guts. Needless to say, this isn't recommended for modern people; not only is our soil potentially contaminated with modern chemicals and other toxins, eating dirt potentially exposes you to bad bacteria as well as the good stuff.

Another historical way that humans have acquired beneficial bacteria is through fermented foods. A fermented food is simply a food in which bacteria has been allowed to grow under controlled circumstances. Most people are familiar with fermentation through its use in making certain alcoholic drinks (like wine and beer), but it's also used to make many traditional foods.

Fermented foods are almost completely absent from the modern diet, but interestingly, almost every traditional culture in the world includes them as a regular dietary staple. The ancient Babylonions fermented milk, the Romans fermented bread (the ancient equivalent of modern sourdough), and the Inuit ferment fish and fish oil.

These traditional foods have often survived into relatively recent times. Asians and Southeast Asians consumed kimchi (fermented cabbage), natto (fermented soy), and various fermented sauces (like fish sauce and soy sauce). The Middle East consumed various types of yogurt (fermented dairy), including a liquid form called kefir. Europeans also consumed kefir, as well as sauerkraut, pickles, and various types of fermented fish. And the list goes on: truly, every part of the world has recognized the importance of fermented foods.

All fermented foods contain healthy probiotics: this is why most mainstream doctors and health experts recommend that people eat yogurt! However, there are a few potential problems with getting your probiotics from fermented foods.

First, the most common fermented foods aren't particularly healthy. Most store-bought yogurt, for example, is sugary, processed, pasteurized, and loaded with chemical additives (not to mention the fact that dairy is generally frowned on in the paleo diet).

Second, many people simply don't like the taste of "real" fermented food. Regardless of which specific type of fermented food you're eating, the fermentation process universally produces a "sour" taste that many people find unpleasant. This probably the reason why fermented foods have fallen out of favor in the modern diet: when was the last time you were at a restaurant and heard someone request sauerkraut?

If you'd like to get your probiotics from fermented foods, there are a number of healthy, paleo-friendly options that you can try to see if you enjoy the taste.

  * Sauerkraut: The traditional German dish, made from cabbage, which most people are familiar with. Usually sold in jars, and available in most grocery stores.
  * Kimchi: A Korean traditional food that is somewhat similar to sauerkraut, but contains more flavor and more ingredients. Made from a combination of cabbage and other vegetables (like carrots, scallions, cucumber, etc), it's traditionally made spicy (usually using red chilli pepper), which nicely complements the natural sourness of the fermentation, making kimchi more palatable for many people than non-spicy fermented foods. Sold in jars, and found in many grocery stores, usually in the Asian food aisle.
  * Kombucha: A type of fermented tea, sold in bottles in many health food stores, kombucha has become popular with the health crowd because chugging down a bottle of the stuff is easier, more convenient, and more portable than a plate of fermented vegetables. Kombucha can be found as a plain, mildly sour tea, or flavored with a wide range of other ingredients, like ginger, honey, lavender, berries, etc. Store-bought kombucha tends to be a bit expensive (usually two or three dollars per bottle), but is pretty palatable and very convenient.

If you decide to include fermented foods in your diet, you'll want to consume them anywhere from 2-3 times per week (for people with normal digestion) all the way up to every day (for people with a history of digestion issues). The amounts will matter, of course: eating a few forkfuls of kimchi per day vs. one large bowl of kimchi per week probably works out to be about the same total amount either way.

Think of a small bowl (or in the case of liquid, like kombucha or kefir, one cup) as being one serving, and start having a few servings a week to begin with, then adjust the amount you consume from there based on how it affects your digestion and how you feel.

Finally, if you don't want to consume any fermented foods in your diet (and especially if you're experiencing any symptoms of bad digestion, as mentioned above), you might want to consider taking a probiotic supplement.

Probiotic supplements are simply composed of live bacterial cultures in capsule form, which you can take just like any other pill. The probiotic bacteria delivered by these pills is designed to mimic the way that these bacteria are delivered by fermented foods, dirt, etc, and most scientific research indicates that these pills are about as effective as probiotics obtained from fermented foods (in fact, much of the research on the benefits of probiotic bacteria is done with supplemental probiotics).

For guidelines on choosing a good supplement, see the following section.

Guidelines for Use

Different brands of probiotic supplements contain different amounts of bacteria, as well as different bacterial species. This can make choosing a probiotic supplement somewhat tricky, especially since probiotics still aren't completely understood! Even many health experts who specialize in treating digestive issues with probiotics prefer to use an experimental approach, changing the type and amount of probiotics being used with their patient until a desired result is reached. For this reason, you'll need to experiment somewhat with probiotics to find out what works best for you: pay particular attention to how it affects any aspects of your digestion, as well as mood, energy levels, etc.

The good news is that there are some fairly firm guidelines you can use as a starting point in your experimentation. The following guidelines will help you choose a supplement that will work for you.

Species of probiotic bacteria

Every probiotic supplement contains living bacteria, and just like any living organism, bacteria come in different species. Many different species of probiotic bacteria have been studied for their effects on health, so paying attention to the specific type and number of species you find in a given supplement is important.

To start with, you'll probably want a supplement with at least a few different species of probiotic bacteria. So far, scientific research has only measured the effectiveness of individual strains of probiotics, so it's currently unclear whether there's any extra benefit to consuming multiple strains in one pill. However, since your digestive system is populated by literally hundreds of different strains of bacteria, it's probably a good bet that having a diverse array of probiotics in your diet is a good thing.

Avoid brands that only provide one strain (since this may not be an ideal level of bacterial diversity), and you may want to also avoid brands that contain any more than 8-10 strains (since these products may be trying too hard to "pad" the number of bacteria they list, or might not have enough of each type). As a rule of thumb, a brand with 4-6 strains of bacteria is a nice, safe middle ground.

There are many strains of bacteria used in probiotic supplements, and these will all be listed on the label of the supplement in question (if a given brand doesn't list what species of bacteria are in the supplement, and in what amounts, don't buy it!).

At this point, the most commonly used (and also most scientifically tested) bacteria are strains of Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium. These will be listed on the label of your supplement as specific species, such as Lactobacillus Acidopholus,  Lactobacillus Rhamnosus, etc. Sometimes the first word is abbreviated, so the examples just mentioned would read L. Acidopholus and L. Rhamnosus, respectively.

Don't stress out too much about the specific species of bacteria found in a given supplement. Just make sure you're getting a few strains of Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium, since this is a sign that the brand is using well-tested, reputable strains. Other than that, don't sweat the details too much.

Frequency of Use

You may not need to take a probiotic supplement (or eat fermented food) every day. It's important to occasionally replenish the bacteria in your gut, because bacteria can die as a result of stress, compromised diet, or simply just being passed through your digestive system over time. But if you aren't experiencing significant digestive issues, you're probably fine taking probiotics as little as once or twice a week. You can consume more if you want, just keep your overall consumption moderate (no more than one dose per day) just to be on the safe side.

If you do have digestive issues, taking probiotics every day might help alleviate your symptoms: the only way to test this is with personal experimentation. Start taking probiotics (or eating fermented foods) every day, and see how it affects your symptoms, then try scaling back the amount you're consuming and notice if there's a difference. Eventually, you'll find a good schedule that allows you to take probiotics as little as possible while still keeping your digestive system in tip-top shape.

Quantity

Each strain of bacteria on the label will have its amount listed in terms of "cfu", or "colony forming units". This measurement simply represents the number of bacteria in the supplement; for any supplement that contains more than one species of bacteria, the number of cfu's will be listed for each individual strain, as well as the total cfu count.

Probiotic supplements can range anywhere from 1 billion cfu on the low end all the way up to 50 billion cfu's on the high end. Higher doses tend to be designed specifically for people with severe digestive issues like Crohn's disease, and are generally overkill for people with normal digestion. If your digestion is normal, you should probably shoot for a pill that contains at least 4 billion cfu, with an upper limit of 10-15 billion. For people with digestive issues, taking 20-30 billion cfu per day is often the amount it takes to relieve their symptoms; the only way to find the specific amount is to start small, and work your way up until you start seeing noticeable improvement in your digestion.

# Paleo Weight Loss Strategies

One of the great things about the paleo diet is that even though it's primarily designed to improve your health (and all the related benefits like increased longevity, energy, disease resistance, and mental focus), it's also great for losing weight. In fact, many people who adopt the paleo diet for health reasons find that they lose weight without even trying! This is a natural side effect of eating a diet that is A) extremely nutrient-rich, B) low in carbs and high in protein and healthy fats, and C) based around nourishing, satisfying whole foods.

This is why, if one of your goals is to lose weight, we recommend that you start by just following a basic, healthy paleo diet, without focusing on weight loss at first. This allows you to get comfortable with the basics of the paleo diet (which can often be tricky at first, because it's a big lifestyle shift for many people), and make your transition to paleo as easy as possible without worrying about weight loss. Not only will this make the transition to paleo easier and more enjoyable, but as a bonus, most people will find that consistently eating paleo causes them to naturally shed unwanted bodyfat without even trying.

Once you're comfortable with the basics of the paleo diet, however, you may find that you aren't losing weight as fast as you want, or even at all! This is totally normal; just because you're eating healthy food doesn't mean you'll lose weight. Healthy eating habits will tend to reduce your appetite, as well as creating an ideal environment for fat loss in your body by optimizing your hormones, metabolism, calorie partitioning, and a host of other factors. However, you're still perfectly capable of eating surplus calories, and even if those calories are coming from healthy foods, a large enough surplus will still lead to weight gain!

The paleo diet in and of itself isn't a weight loss diet, so if losing weight is something you routinely struggle with, you may need to adopt some specific strategies along with the basic principles of healthy paleo eating in order to effectively burn off that unwanted bodyfat.

Remember that getting comfortable with paleo, and fully making the transition to eating paleo on a very consistent basis, is critically important as a starting point - be sure to focus on this basic lifestyle transition exclusively for the first few months of your paleo journey, and you'll make things way easier on yourself once the basic habits of paleo eating have already become second-nature to you.

Once you've reached the point where eating paleo is comfortable for you, and you'd like to start focusing more on losing weight, there are a few simple strategies that you can implement (in conjunction with the basic principles of the paleo diet) to optimize the paleo diet for fat loss. We'll discuss a few supplementary strategies later in this chapter, but when it comes to weight loss, the paleo diet mostly focuses on one simple strategy: reducing your consumption of carbohydrates.

### The Benefits of Cutting Carbs for Weight Loss

As you know by now, the paleo diet is much more than just a "low carb diet"; in fact, depending on your personal preferences, food tolerances, and physical activity level, paleo doesn't necessarily need to be particularly low carb at all. But reducing carbohydrate consumption is considered by many followers of the paleo diet to not only be optimal for health, but also the most effective way to lose weight.

Reducing the amount of carbohydrates you consume (and by the same token, replacing them with protein and healthy fats), has a number of positive effects that stack up to create a powerful fat burning environment in your body. Reducing your carb intake will reduce the spikes in blood sugar and insulin that promote fat storage, increase your body's insulin sensitivity, reduce appetite (which leads to a natural reduction in your calorie intake), and will overall just switch your body into "fat burning mode".

As an added benefit, eating a low carb paleo diet will typically allow you to lose weight without counting calories! You don't need to weigh or measure your food, or keep a food journal; the absolute most you'll have to do is keep a rough estimate of how many grams of carbohydrate you're eating in a given day, and even this extra step is usually unnecessary. All you really need to do is focus on eating foods from the lower-carb spectrum of the paleo diet, like meat, eggs, and vegetables (as well as the accompanying herbs and spices that make them delicious!), and if you base most of your meals around these foods, there's a good chance you'll be able to lose weight without counting, measuring, or recording a single calorie!

So with all these benefits in mind, exactly how much should you be cutting carbs in order to lose weight as quickly, efficiently, and easily as possible?

### Determining Your Ideal Carb Intake

There are a number of factors to consider when determining how many carbs you should be eating in a given day for achieving the optimal balance between weight loss and simple ease and convenience. We're going to give you some specific targets in a second, but before you decide exactly what your personal intake should be, there are a few guidelines you should keep in mind:

Measuring carbs

The carbohydrate targets listed below are, of course, quantified using numbers; specifically, how many grams of carbohydrate per day you should be eating for a specific goal. This doesn't necessarily mean that you need to literally keep a running tally of your daily carb intake in order to lose weight.

You certainly can track your carbs if you find that it helps you stay on track, but most people can get by without doing this. When you're first getting started, you'll probably need to look up the amount of carbs found in various paleo food groups you eat frequently (fruit, nuts, seeds, sweet potatoes, honey, etc). But once you get a solid picture of which foods are high-carb, moderate-carb, and low-carb, most paleo dieters find that they don't need to actually keep track in order to cut their carbs to approximately the right level for their goals.

Basically, our goal with the numerical guidelines listed below is just to give you an objective starting point to begin experimenting.

Adjusting for your activity level

In general, the more physically active you are, the more carbs you can eat while still losing weight. In fact, the majority of athletic, very physically active people find that if they let their carb intake dip too low, their mood, energy levels, and even athletic performance actually gets worse! So if you don't work out very often, you should probably be on the lower end of the spectrum, but if you're very physically active, you can experiment with slightly higher carb intakes and see how it affects your weight loss.

Adjusting for your personal physiology

First and most obviously, the following guidelines for carb intake are somewhat relative, and are geared towards an "average" person. However, it goes without saying that a six foot tall man is going to consume a different amount of food than a five foot tall woman, and therefore these two people are also going to consume different amounts of carbs. In this example, the large man's "fat burning zone" may be anything under 150 grams of carbs per day, while the petite woman's zone may be anything under 100 grams per day. So remember to adjust the numbers listed below to account for your body size if necessary.

In addition to this, there are many people who report anecdotally that they just feel better eating higher or lower amounts of carbs. On one end of the spectrum, some people find that their energy levels and mental focus are best when they keep their carb intake super low, while some people find that if they cut carbs too much they feel groggy and tired all the time. These reports are anecdotal, and technically don't have anything to do directly with weight loss, however they illustrate an important principle: if you find that eating within a certain carb range makes you feel better, listen to your body! The main point of living the paleo lifestyle is to feel great, not lousy. Plus, feeling lousy is going to prevent you from losing weight anyway, since it will make your diet unsustainable.

The takeaway from this is that if you start cutting carbs a bit aggressively in order to lose weight as quickly as possible, but you feel bad as a result, don't be afraid to scale it back a bit and reintroduce a few carbs to your diet. Slow and steady wins the race, and you're going to want to enjoy the benefits of eating a healthy paleo diet for the rest of your life; so make sure you're able to enjoy it!

Is it safe / healthy to cut carbs?

It should be noted that, although your body absolutely needs protein and fat in order to function (you literally cannot survive without them), it doesn't really need carbohydrates. In practice, carbs are useful and beneficial, because they allow you to have a more diverse, interesting diet, an easy way to get more nutrients (via fruit, nuts, seeds, etc), and make many people feel more energetic, particularly if they're physically active.

However, purely from a health standpoint, carbs aren't technically necessary to include in your diet, which means that you don't have to worry about a low carb diet being bad for your health. As long as you're getting enough nutrients from other sources (like veggies, pastured eggs, and organ meats), you can eat as few carbs as you want.

Please note that if you have any medical conditions that influence your blood sugar, insulin, or other factors related to consuming carbohydrates (most notably diabetes), or if you're taking any medication that might affect how your body responds to carbohydrates, you should carefully consult with your doctor before drastically changing your carb intake. The paleo diet is very healthy and safe, and in fact, many people even use it to manage chronic conditions like diabetes. But if you have a serious health condition, it's always best to play it safe!

### Carb Intake Guidelines

With the above criteria in mind, here are some general guidelines for how many grams of carbohydrate you should be eating per day in order to achieve various levels of weight loss or weight maintenance. The guidelines are organized into rough "levels" of carb intake (each one spanning a small range to accommodate individual differences), and a description of how each level can potentially fit your personal situation and goals.

300+ grams/day

The amount eaten by the average person on the "Standard American Diet", and a fairly normal level to reach if you're scarfing down bread and sugar with every meal. A bit harder to reach with a paleo diet, unless you're eating a pretty large amount of honey, fruit, and/or sweet potatoes, as well as packing away quite a bit of total food. Almost certainly unhealthy, and definitely not conducive to weight loss, unless you're a very active athlete.

200-300 grams/day

Probably the upper limit of "safe" for the paleo diet, and only if you're very physically active. For active or particularly large individuals, this level might be doable for weight maintenance, as long as all the carbs are coming from paleo foods. Even then, this level of carb intake will almost never result in weight loss, unless you're very physically active, or using other strategies like calorie-counting. The average person, even eating an otherwise healthy paleo diet, will probably see slow, steady weight gain at this level. Not necessarily recommended for the goals of the average person, but a possible "zone" for active and larger people (particularly towards the bottom of the spectrum).

150-200 grams/day

In practice, for the average person this will be the upper limit of carb intake that will still allow for weigh maintenance. Maintaining weight in this range will probably still require moderate amounts of physical activity (unless you're fairly large), and very few people will experience actual weight loss in this range (unless you have a fairly high amount of excess bodyfat). For many (but by no means all) people, staying moderately active and eating a healthy paleo diet will allow them to comfortably stay at  this level while maintaining a healthy weight.

100-150 grams/day

The beginning of the "fat burning zone" for the vast majority of people, preferably in conjunction with some physical activity. Possibly not enough for very active individuals to achieve their best athletic performance, but still fine for most activity levels. For the average person looking to lose weight, this is an ideal starting point for slowly, gradually, and easily burning fat over time, without the need for other strategies like calorie-counting or large amounts of exercise.

Since this level of intake is pretty moderate, eating habits and carb intake need to also be pretty consistent in order to maintain this weight loss over the long term. However, consistency is relatively easy at this level, since it still allows for moderate consumption of fruit, starchy root vegetables (like sweet potatoes), and paleo sweeteners (like honey). Lastly, for people who are particularly prone to gain weight, fairly inactive, smaller in stature, or who just want to maintain a very low bodyfat percentage, this might be more of a weight-maintenance level.

50-100 grams/day

The beginning of accelerated fat loss for most people. Heavier people will see relatively fast weight loss at this level, particularly in the first few weeks (after which weight loss will slow down but still continue at a steady rate). Most people who are already at a healthy starting weight will also be able to use this level of intake to get down to lower bodyfat percentages if desired. Most people will experience some degree of ketosis (burning extra fat to create ketones, which fill in where the body would normally burn glucose).

This level is not recommended as a long-term level of carb intake for most people, since diet becomes somewhat restrictive at this point, allowing mostly for intake of relatively small amounts of fruit with little or no sweeteners. Some people may also experience a reduction in energy levels at this level, possibly since calorie intake will naturally go down fairly significantly.

More vegetables and nutrient-rich animal foods (like organ meats and pastured eggs) should be eaten at this level, to keep nutrient intake high in the absence of a more diverse diet. After eating at this level for several months and losing a good amount of weight, most people will want to bump up their carb intake to a slightly higher level for maintenance purposes. This is rarely a good zone for very active people to be in, but occasionally useful for people who are inactive, suffering from blood sugar issues like pre-diabetes, or who simply feel subjectively "better" when reducing carbs in their diet (particularly sugars).

0-50 grams/day

Sharply accelerated fat loss for anyone in any situation, including a definite state of ketosis. It's almost impossible to overeat at this level, and in fact many people will need to be careful not to eat too little (since reducing calorie intake too sharply can sometimes lead to hunger cravings and reduced energy levels if you're not careful).

Most carbs at this level are coming from vegetables, with some nuts, nut butters, coconut products and miscellaneous items contributing the few remaining carbs; in all likelihood, no fruit, starches, or sweeteners are eaten at this level. Increasing consumption of vegetables, pastured eggs, and organ meats is vital to ensure proper nutrient intake, and if these foods can't be eaten regularly supplementation is a good idea.

Even the smallest, least active person will be able to lose weigh at this level, as well as people looking to reach very low bodyfat percentages. However, compliance becomes tricky, since the diet is now very restrictive. Definitely not recommended for long-term use; this level of intake can be used for rapid weight loss, or to get some medical conditions like pre-diabetes under control, before returning to higher levels of carb intake for weight maintenance. Highly effective for weight loss, but requires discipline to implement consistently.

### Optimizing and Troubleshooting

Although weight loss with the paleo diet is usually relatively simple, there are a lot of little ways that people can accidentally slow their progress down, or even cause weight loss to stall entirely. By the same token, there are a number of small tips, tricks, and refinements to the basic paleo weight loss template that can help speed up or optimize the process of losing weight. We're going to discuss both of these types of strategies here, since many of these strategies can go either way: if not implemented properly they can slow your weight loss down, and if implemented well they can speed it up.

Keep in mind that it's normal for weight loss to slow down or even temporarily plateau after some initial success. This an inescapable part of the process, and perfectly healthy, so don't get discouraged and give up if you've had trouble losing weight with paleo, or if you aren't losing it as fast as you'd like. Instead of giving up altogether, try using some of the tips below and see if they speed things up for you.

Eat more protein vs. fat

The primary method for weight loss that the paleo diet focuses on is reducing carb intake, and once carbs are cut the protein and fat usually take care of themselves. However, it can also be extremely helpful for weight loss purposes to not only decrease carb intake, but also to increase protein intake. In fact, some experts believe that the main reason why low-carb diets work is because they usually result in an automatic increase in protein intake (since protein and fat are both replacing carbs in a low-carb diet).

The main reason why increasing your protein intake is helpful for weight loss is that on a calorie-for-calorie basis, protein is more satiating than both carbs and fat. This means that if your protein intake is high, you can eat less food than normal without feeling any hungrier.

Protein also has a higher "thermic effect of food" than the other macronutrients, which simply means that it takes more energy (i.e. calories) for your body to digest protein than to digest carbs or fat.

Finally, when weight is lost on a high-protein diet, the lost weight will come more from burning stored bodyfat than from losing muscle tissue, because a high protein intake protects lean muscle during a calorie deficit. This will benefit you even if you don't want to actually build muscle; you'll simply lose more fat, rather than losing both fat and healthy, lean muscle tissue.

The good news is that the paleo diet tends to be naturally high in protein by default, especially with a low-carb paleo diet, so your protein intake may already be pretty good. However, because many paleo foods are high in healthy fats, for weight loss it may be helpful to focus a bit more on keeping your protein intake high and keeping your fat intake more moderate.

This may mean pulling back a bit on some foods that are low in protein but high in fat (avocados, healthy oils, nut butters, ghee, tallow, bacon fat, etc) and focusing more on foods that contain relatively higher amounts of protein (most notably meat and eggs). You may even want to start eating leaner cuts of meat than usual if you normally eat very fatty meats (for example, cutting down on the bacon and eat more chicken breasts).

As a rough rule of thumb, your protein intake for maximum weight loss should be about 1 gram of protein for every pound of your "ideal" bodyweight. For example, if your target bodyweight is 150 lbs, you should be eating about 150 grams of protein per day. This amount of protein is pretty high for most people, and requires you to make protein-rich foods like meat the main part of every meal you eat, but it's very effective.

Note that you shouldn't cut back on your fat intake too harshly when increasing your protein intake; the healthy fats found in paleo foods are absolutely vital for good health. The takeaway here is simply that if you're eating a very high-fat diet, you may want to dial it back to a more moderate fat intake while adding in more healthy, whole-food protein sources.

Don't forget exercise

For the vast majority of people, changing their diet is a much more effective way to lose weight than changing their exercise habits. In fact, most people can lose a lot of weight with diet alone and zero exercise.

That being said, engaging in healthy, low-intensity physical activity on a regular basis provides a great foundation for fat loss by helping to burn some extra calories and keep your body healthy overall. It's something you should be doing for your general healthy and wellbeing anyway, so if you haven't yet gotten around to making healthy exercise a regular habit, now is a good time to start! Not only will it help with your overall health, it will also help a bit with your weight loss. For details on paleo exercise principles, see the chapters on Low Intensity Exercise and Higher Intensity Exercise.

Cut carbs more strictly

Some people find that for whatever reason, the guidelines for carb intake listed above aren't quite strict enough for them. You may need to lower your carb intake because you're smaller than the average person. You may be one of those people who anecdotally seems more prone to gain weight from eating carbs. You may even be inaccurately estimating your carb intake, and consuming more than you think!

Whatever the reason, it's worth a try to knock your carb intake down a bit. Start with eliminating roughly 25-50 grams of carbs per day (depending on how many you're eating now), or simply cut out some carb-based foods like fruit, and see if it makes a difference.

Clear out your pantry

It's pretty common for many people who have mostly switched to the paleo diet to still have some unhealthy food lying around in their house. It may be for occasional snacking, it may be "comfort food" to eat after a particularly stressful day, or you may just not have gotten around to clearing out your cupboards in a while. For whatever reason, many people who eat paleo still have chips, candy, soda, bread, or other non-paleo items stashed in their kitchen, despite the fact that their diet is mostly paleo.

Having some non-paleo food around isn't always an issue, but in some cases it can be a bit of a problem, particularly if you have a history of struggling to lose weight. Having junk food in the house will tempt you to stray from your healthy eating habits, simply because it's there, ready and waiting and convenient. And even though occasional indulges are fine, and not something to beat yourself up about, indulging on a regular basis can really throw off your healthy eating habits, and potentially stall weight loss.

The bad news is that if you live with people who aren't paleo, you aren't really going to be able to implement this strategy (unless you get them to go paleo with you!). The good news is that if you're able to clear out your pantry, the simple habit of not keeping any unhealthy food in your house makes it surprisingly easy to consistently eat healthy. As long as you've got at least a few convenient, easy to prepare paleo meals and snacks on hand, you'll find that you're much less tempted to eat junk food, since getting that junk food becomes much more inconvenient.

So if it's possible with your living situation, go clear your pantry out right now: don't worry about things like wasting a few dollars worth of food you haven't finished (consider it a "health tax"), not having snacks for your non-paleo friends (they'll understand that you're trying to be healthy), or other concerns. We think you'll find that clearing out the last of the junk food from your house is a surprisingly liberating experience!

"Cheat" less often

The flip side of the above point is that some people may find that, although they're being very consistent in keeping their diet paleo at home, they may find themselves in other situations in which they're "cheating" a bit more often than they should be.

It's certainly fine to indulge occasionally, or to go "off your diet" in certain situations: if you're celebrating a birthday party with a friend, go ahead and have some birthday cake! Just be sure that these occasional compromises don't creep into your diet too often, otherwise you may be compromising your diet more than you realize.

People often allow themselves to eat extra junk food in situations where it isn't really a necessary compromise; you may get a burger and fries when you're out at a restaurant with your friends (because it's cheaper than getting the steak with veggies), buy yourself a candy bar at the office (because it's more convenient than making your own paleo power bars at home), etc. Each of these little compromises is fine in and of itself, but over time they can add up to a significant amount of extra calories, carbs, refined sugars, and other substances that interfere with weight loss.

Again, we definitely don't recommend that you become neurotic about your eating habits! But if you're the type of dieter that regularly allows yourself to "cheat", you may want to re-evaluate your regular eating habits and try to come up with some easy, enjoyable, and more paleo-friendly replacements for your current list of "cheat" foods.

Check your body composition, not your scale weight

Most of us have been conditioned to think about our body composition primarily in terms of how much we weigh, and not so much in terms of more relevant factors like our bodyfat percentage, blood work, etc. Even the language we use to talk about our bodies is misleading: the term we all use to refer to  losing fat is "losing weight", and our doctors talk to us about keeping ourselves within a "healthy weight range".

On closer examination, this focus on weight is silly. After all, we all know that there's a huge difference between a guy who weighs two hundred pounds because he's skinny but very tall, a guy who weighs two hundred pounds because he has huge muscles, and a guy who weighs two hundred pounds because he's morbidly obese. And to use an even more obvious example, if "losing weight" was really all that we were interested in, you could easily lose twenty or thirty pounds immediately by simply cutting off one of your arms!

The takeaway here is that if you think you aren't making progress because you aren't losing weight as quickly as you'd like, you may want to take a step back and look at the whole picture.

For example, if the scale isn't budging, but you feel better and seem to be noticing differences in your appearance, you may simply be losing some fat and gaining some muscle. This is particularly easy to miss if you still have a decent amount of bodyfat, since your bodyfat will hide the new muscle you're gaining. This can discourage people in the beginning phase of a diet and exercise program, because they think they haven't made any progress, when they're actually making perfectly good progress without realizing it.

Another example occurs when people think their weight loss has "slowed down". This is often a result of the fact that when a person first starts going on a diet and losing weight (particularly a low carb diet), much of the weight they're losing is water weight, not bodyfat. The initial water weight gets lost quickly, making it seem like weight loss is slowing down once the excess water is gone. This can discourage people into thinking they're doing something wrong, when in actual fact they're simply settling into a healthy, steady, normal rate of fat loss.

So before you jump to conclusions because your scale is telling you that you aren't losing weight, be sure to balance that abstract, context-free, isolated number on the scale against other factors, like the way you look in the mirror, the way your muscles feel, how recently you began your weight loss journey, etc. "Weight" isn't everything!

Manage your stress

Many people don't realize it, but stress isn't just a purely emotional phenomenon. Experiencing stress causes your body to produce increased levels of the hormone cortisol, the "fight-or-flight" hormone that your body only naturally produces in emergency situations.

In small, occasional doses cortisol is perfectly fine, such as during periods of intense exercise. But when you're stressed on a regular basis (as a result of financial, personal, emotional, or other issues), the resulting chronic increase in cortisol can have serious negative health consequences. This includes breaking down and weakening healthy lean muscle tissue, worsening insulin sensitivity, and (most relevant to this discussion) promoting the storage of bodyfat. It can also interfere with your sleep quality, which is another contributing factor to obesity.

The good news is that reducing stress is something that most of us would really like to do anyway! So if you feel like you're regularly stressed out, but haven't had the time or motivation to actively do anything about it, having the added goal of losing weight gives you the perfect reason to get started.

The exact methods that you use to deal with stress are up to you; people benefit from a range of strategies, including meditation, massage, calming exercise like tai chi or yoga, nature walks, etc. You're encouraged to experiment with any and all stress-reducing activities that appeal to you; whatever you choose to do, if it reduces your stress, it will help you not only lose weight, but also just lead a happier, more stress-free life!

Get more (and better) sleep

At first glance, it doesn't seem like sleeping habits and weight loss should have anything to do with each other. After all, every behavior that contributes to weight loss (like diet and exercise) takes place while you're awake. However, the connection between sleep habits and weight gain/loss has been studied fairly extensively, and the conclusions are clear: bad sleeping habits tend to lead to weight gain.

A number of large-scale observational studies have linked lack of sleep to increased bodyfat, and science has discovered that the reason for this is hormonal. Sleep is a critical time for your body's production of all kinds of hormones, and it affects two hormones that play a key role in weight management: ghrelin and leptin. Ghrelin and leptin regulate your appetite; ghrelin is the "go" hormone that tells you when to eat, and leptin is the "stop" hormone that tells you when to stop eating.

Studies have shown that one of the effects of sleep-deprivation is to increase your body's production of ghrelin and decrease its production of leptin. This means that, although missing out on sleep doesn't directly affect your bodyfat, it does trigger a hormonal response that makes you more hungry and prone to overeat, which in turns causes the weight gain.

This doesn't mean that the more you sleep, the more weight you'll lose; getting more (and better) sleep only benefits you up to the point where your sleep is "optimized". For example, if you currently sleep eight hours a night, sleeping an extra half hour a night isn't going to make you drop that last ten pounds. However, if you're only sleeping six hours a night, and start increasing it to seven or eight, you'll almost certainly start to see some extra weight coming off from this one factor alone.

So if you've been skimping on sleep lately for whatever reason, you may want to consider taking a second look at your sleeping habits - not only will good sleep improve your overall health, but it will help your weight loss efforts as well. See the chapter on Sleep for guidelines.

Cut down on "healthy" processed foods

There are a fairly large number of processed or semi-processed foods on the market which are actually pretty paleo-friendly. Common examples you can find in most grocery and health food stores include beef jerky, many energy bars, bottled drinks (coconut water, fruit juice, kombucha), gluten-free bread or noodles, sweet potato chips, pre-made condiments (salsa, ketchup, guacamole), prepared meats like sausages, and many others.

Most paleo eaters have no trouble with these foods as long as they're somewhat careful about reading labels. However, if you find yourself eating these types of pre-packaged, semi-processed foods as the majority of your diet, you may be introducing some unhealthy food additives into your diet without realizing it.

Many of these products contain at least some added sugar, even if the food itself isn't sweet (for example, condiments like ketchup and salsa, or prepared meats like sausage). The same goes for foods that are artificially sweetened (most commonly diet sodas), which don't technically contain any calories or carbs, but which may have other ingredients that negatively affect your appetite, digestive bactieria, etc.

If your diet consists largely of "products" (even low-carb products), you may want to consider backing off a bit on the pre-packaged stuff and instead shifting to a diet based more around real, whole foods that you prepare yourself at home. "Natural" foods aren't magic, but eating a diet based around unprocessed whole foods simply helps ensure that you're taking in a diet rich in micronutrients, and avoiding empty calories and unnecessary food additives that may be sneakily creeping into your diet and interfering with weight loss.

Try food journaling

Food journaling is a more mainstream tactic employed by people looking to lose weight and get in shape, and simply involves keeping a record of all the food you eat in a given day, along with the corresponding calories and macronutrients that go with it. This is a bit of a last resort for most paleo eaters, because one of the benefits of adopting a paleo diet is that most people can get down to a lean, healthy weight relatively easily without ever needing to track their food intake. However, there's nothing wrong with food journaling; the only reason not to do it is because it's a pain, and usually unnecessary, not because there are no benefits to doing it.

This means that for people who have firmly adopted a paleo lifestyle, tried losing weight, and not gotten the results they wanted, it can sometimes be helpful to at least temporarily keep a food journal in order to track how many calories and macronutrients they're consuming on a daily basis. This can potentially help reveal little problems or oversights that have cropped up in your diet which may be compromising fat loss without you realizing it.

For example, some people start consuming lots of healthy food on the paleo diet, but because the foods they choose are fairly calorie-dense, they're still eating a calorie surplus at the end of the day. You can lose weight without counting calories, but that doesn't mean calories don't count! It's particularly easy to overeat with healthy fatty foods like coconut products, nuts, avocados, etc, since fat is very calorie-dense. So making sure that you aren't taking in more calories than you thought is a good double-check.

Another common example is that a person eats what they think is a low-carb diet, but since they're only roughly estimating how much carbohydrate they're eating, they may be off by a significant amount. Fifty grams of carbs is enough to change the "weight loss zone" you're in, and this relatively small amount of carbohydrate can sneak up on you sometimes, depending on your eating habits (a tablespoon of honey and a piece of fruit, for example, can easily contribute fifty grams of carbs to your diet). The same goes for underestimating how much protein you're consuming (remember that high protein intake promotes fat loss).

Finally, without taking an objective look at your overall diet, you may be letting a bit more junk food into your diet than you realize. A cookie here, a bagel there, a few pieces of candy from the candy bowl at work... your brain isn't very good at remembering these small indulgences, but sometimes they can really add up over the course of weeks and months.

If you decide that you'd like to give this a try, you can either use one of the many food-tracking websites or apps out there (many of them free to use), or simply jot it down yourself in a text file on your computer or a simple notebook. It will be a little bit of a pain, because you'll have to be fairly thorough about recording the exact amounts of everything you eat and drink, and you'll also have to look up the calorie and macronutrient content for each type of food. You'll also have to be brutally honest about confronting your own eating habits: no more hiding from the little snacks and bits of junk food that you add into your diet throughout the week!

The upside is that you'll only need to keep this journal for a few weeks in order to get a pretty good representative sample of what your normal diet looks like. The paleo diet is designed to be fairly simple, intuitive, and easy to follow; one of the big benefits of paleo is that in the long term, you don't have to count calories and track every bite you eat. This is why we're only recommending you try food journaling for a few weeks. At the end of this few weeks, you should have a good idea of what your over all calorie and macronutrient intake is, as well as getting a more objective sense of how well you're sticking to the paleo diet, and from there, it's an easy matter to determine what changes you need to make (if any).

Keep doing what you're doing!

The paleo diet is an extremely effective fat loss method, but it's not necessarily a fat loss shortcut. Some people start to see results almost instantly from cutting out carbs, grains, sugars, and vegetable oils, while others may need a few weeks to adjust before the weight starts coming off.

Many people don't realize that weight loss is typically a relatively slow process, and the rate at which people lose weigh on a diet is often pretty irregular. For example, most people who are substantially overweight lose a pretty significant amount of weight when they first start a paleo diet, but after this initial burst their weight loss slows down pretty significantly.

Some of this is a result of losing "water weight" in the first stage of your new diet, and some of it is just a natural part of your body adjusting to the fact that it's losing its fat stores. Your body is evolutionarily programmed to conserve energy and hold onto stored bodyfat as an emergency supply of calories in times of famine, so it will try to defend these fat stores if it can.

It's also true that the more weight you lose, the slower you'll lose additional weight in the future. It's actually very easy to lose 30 lbs when you weigh 300 lbs to start with, but losing even 10 lbs is much more difficult when you're around your "ideal bodyweight". If you've lost a fair amount of weight, but would like to continue losing weight, you'll just have to be content with a slower rate of progress than you had in the beginning.

It can be discouraging to feel like you're doing everything right and still not losing as much weight as you want. But sometimes this type of plateau isn't caused by you making any mistakes, it's just a normal part of the journey. You should definitely use the above list of troubleshooting strategies to double-check your habits and make sure you aren't accidentally doing anything to undermine your weight loss plan! But if you've carefully double-checked all your weight loss habits and determined that you're doing everything right, you may just need to accept the fact that reaching your desired bodyweight is simply going to take more time, patience, and consistency over the long term. So if you're doing everything you're supposed to be doing, all that's left is to hang in there and make it happen!

### Qualitative Guidelines for Cutting Carbs (Without Counting)

To determine what foods you should base your diet around for various levels of carb restriction, here's a rough guideline you can use to qualitatively restrict the amount of carbs in your diet without actually counting carbs:

  * Least amount of carb restriction that will produce consistent fat loss: foods to eat include meat, fish, eggs, organ meats, vegetables, healthy oils, nuts, seeds, some fruit, very small amounts of sweet potatoes and yams, and possibly very small amounts of paleo sweeteners (honey or maple syrup).
  * Slightly more carb restriction: foods include meat, fish, eggs, organs, vegetables, healthy oils, nuts, seeds, and some fruit.
  * Even more carb restriction: foods include meat, fish, eggs, organs, vegetables,  healthy oils, nuts, and seeds.
  * Highest level of carb restriction: foods include meat, fish, eggs, organs, vegetables, and healthy oils.

A few notes to keep in mind with the above guidelines:

  * Paleo-friendly artificial sweeteners (stevia and xylitol) can also be included in the above plans, since they contain virtually no calories or carbs.
  * Grass-fed butter can be included as a healthy fat, even though it's technically dairy, if you're comfortable including it as part of your paleo diet.
  * Non-sweet fruits (like tomatoes and avocados) can safely be counted as "vegetables" for the purposes of the above list, since they're extremely low in carbs.
  * If you're eating sweet potatoes, paleo sweeteners like honey or maple syrup, or even fruit, these carb sources should ideally be consumed after exercise, so that the glucose in these foods goes towards replacing lost muscle glycogen (rather than stored as fat).
  * Herbs and spices have no calories or macronutrients, so they can obviously be used as much as you want.

# Organic Food and the Paleo Diet

The organic food movement is fairly controversial, with many health experts advocating organics and many skeptics who think that organic food is an expensive scam. Eating organic is not necessary on the paleo diet, but at the same time, many paleo health experts recommend organic food as being the optimal choice if you can afford it. In this chapter, we'll provide you with some basic information so you can decide for yourself whether to make organic food a priority as part of your paleo lifestyle.

### What's the difference between organic and conventional food?

All organic farms and agricultural products must meet the following guidelines (verified by a USDA-approved independent agency):

  * Abstain from the application of prohibited materials (including synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and sewage sludge) for 3 years prior to certification and then continually throughout their organic license.
  * Prohibit the use of genetically modified organisms and irradiation.
  * Employ positive soil building, conservation, manure management and crop rotation practices.
  * Provide outdoor access and pasture for livestock.
  * Refrain from antibiotic and hormone use in animals.
  * Sustain animals on 100% organic feed.
  * Avoid contamination during the processing of organic products.
  * Keep records of all operations.

### Should you buy your food organic?

Organic food is notorious for coming with a higher price tag than conventionally grown food, and there's also some controversy as to whether or not it's actually healthier than conventional food as well. These considerations make it tough for some people to decide if organic food is worth the extra cost. This is a pretty big topic, but we'll try to give you some guidelines in this section so you can make your own choices.

For starters, keep in mind that your first priority should always be to eat from the various paleo food groups (meat, vegetables, fruit, etc), and once you're doing that, organic food is only of secondary importance. After all, eating a salad of conventionally-produced vegetables is healthier than eating an organic cookie!

This means that if money is tight for you and you truly can't afford organic meat and produce, go ahead and buy the conventional stuff. Being perfect is less important than just doing the best you can and staying on the paleo diet!

With that being said, we feel that there's a fairly significant body of evidence indicating that organic food has a number of health benefits over conventional food. Some studies have found that organic produce tends to be slightly higher in nutrients, including valuable antioxidants and phytonutrients. Conventional produce also arrives in your shopping cart with more pesticide residue, and there's evidence that these trace amounts of pesticides, while probably not a big deal for adults, may be harmful to young children, as well as developing fetuses if you're pregnant. Many studies have also shown that organic farming methods are better for the environment, the sustainability of the farm, and the health of its workers.

Please keep in mind that there are also some studies that contradict all of the claims made above! However, we feel that despite the overall body of research indicates that organic food is at least marginally better for both your health and the environment. At the very least, it indicates that the health claims of organic food products have some merit, so if you can afford organic food without too much financial pain, we think it's a good investment.

Finally, if you can't afford to buy organic food, or can only afford to make some of your food organic, there are some guidelines you can use when purchasing conventional meat and produce to minimize the amount of toxins in your food.

### Meat Guidelines

If you can't afford organic meat (much less grass-fed, wild-caught, etc), then your main priority should be focusing on the leaner cuts of conventionally-raised meat. Conventional meat contains a less healthy fatty acid profile than organic or pastured meat, and there's also a higher risk of environmental toxins being stored in the fat.

If you can't afford pastured or organic meats, the following cuts of conventional meat are good compromise choices:

  * Skinless chicken and turkey breasts.
  * Eye of round roast or steak.
  * Sirloin tip side steak.
  * Top round roast and steak.
  * Bottom round roast and steak.
  * Top sirloin steak.
  * Low-fat ground beef (90% or so).

When buying these leaner meats, you'll be reducing your intake of healthy fats, so you may want to take care to eat more healthy fat from sources like coconut milk/oil, olive oil, grass-fed butter, etc. You can also eat any seafood you like (including both fish and shellfish), since farmed, non-organic seafood is still pretty high in healthy Omega-3 fats (although wild-caught is still better).

### Produce Guidelines

The Environmental Working Group (an American environmental nonprofit organization) tests the pesticide residue levels of conventional produce every year and publishes a list of both the most and least contaminated .

Below are the most recent recommendations: the Dirty Dozen are the most contaminated items, and should therefore be purchased organic if possible. The Clean Fifteen are the least contaminated (generally because they have a tough, inedible exterior that protects the edible insides from pesticide exposure), making them the safest non-organic choices.

The Dirty Dozen

  * Apples
  * Celery
  * Cherry tomatoes
  * Cucumbers
  * Grapes
  * Hot peppers
  * Nectarines
  * Peaches
  * Potatoes (not paleo)
  * Spinach
  * Strawberries
  * Bell peppers
  * (honorary mentions)
  * Summer squash
  * Kale / collard greens

The Clean Fifteen

  * Asparagus
  * Avocados
  * Cabbage
  * Cantaloupe
  * Sweet corn (not paleo)
  * Eggplant
  * Grapefruit
  * Kiwi
  * Mangoes
  * Mushrooms
  * Onions
  * Papayas
  * Pineapples
  * Sweet peas
  * Sweet potatoes

# Guidelines for Buying Animal Products

Animal products form a key part of the paleo diet, and as long as you're getting the basics of the paleo diet right, the exact type of animal products you buy aren't a big deal. However, if you're looking to maximize your health, minimize your environmental impact, or support more humane animal treatment, the ideal choice is to choose pasture-raised or wild-caught animal products over factory-farmed ones.

### Factory-farmed vs. pasture-raised

To start with, pasture-raised animals (cows, pigs, chickens) and wild-caught animals (fish, crustaceans, deer) are higher in beneficial nutrients across the board.

For example, when comparing grass fed beef to grain fed beef, grass fed beef is higher in Omega-3 fatty acids, vitamins and minerals (Vitamins A, D, and E, zinc, iron, etc), healthy fats like CLA, and even antioxidants.

The same applies to every other type of animal product, including both the flesh of the animal and any byproducts the animal produces (like eggs or butter). This is why, if you can find/afford it in your area, you are strongly encouraged to consume animal products from pasture-raised/wild-caught sources. It's not strictly necessary, but it's highly recommended!

Another benefit to consuming pasture-raised animal products is that these products are far more environmentally friendly than those produced by factory farms. The factory farming system consumes a massive amount of resources. For example, it takes about 13 pounds of grain to produce 1 pound of meat, simply because the animal expends most of the food energy it consumes in order to stay alive. And this is on top of all the fuel it consumes and the environmental pollution it causes.

Pasture-based farming, on the other hand, is extremely sustainable. The animals eat a diet either partially or completely composed of wild grasses (which people can't eat), their waste naturally fertilizes the fields the live in, and the land they occupy is often unsuitable for farming. This means that pasture-raised animal products aren't just healthier for you, they're also more environmentally sustainable.

The one downside to purchasing pasture-raised animal products is that they're usually more expensive than factory-farmed alternatives. This is simply because our current agricultural system is based around factory farming, which means that large factory farms benefit from economies of scale, as well as subsidies and tax breaks, that many smaller pasture-based operations don't benefit from.

If cost is an issue, we have a number of money-saving tips for purchasing high-quality meat inexpensively in the chapter Saving Money on Paleo. These strategies will help you reduce your expenses on both pasture-raised animal products specifically, and the paleo diet in general.

But if you find that you simply can't afford to buy pasture-raised animal products where you live, just buy whatever factory-farmed animal products you can afford and follow the paleo diet to the best of your ability. Factory-farmed meat is a compromise, but it's better than missing out on the benefits of the paleo diet altogether!

That being said, if you're able to afford it, the following guidelines will help you choose the healthiest, most nutrient-rich animal products available to you.

### Guidelines for purchasing

When purchasing animal products from grocery stores, there are a few things you should look for, depending on what kind of animal produced that food, and how it was raised, fed, and treated. Below are some general guidelines, divided by animal type.

Chicken

Note that when purchasing chicken meat or eggs, there are two labels that don't mean anything in terms of health benefit:

  * Free-Range: This simply means that the chickens aren't kept in cages: nothing else. In most cases, "free range" chickens are still confined in closed and relatively small sheds; they can technically move around, hence the name "free range". These chickens don't have much room to move, and still live only off of corn and other unhealthy grains.
  * 100% Vegetarian Diet: Chickens aren't vegetarians by nature. When foraging in open pasture, they often consume bugs and worms, in addition to the grains and grasses that form the bulk of their diet. For this reason, this label is mostly meaningless, and usually just means the chicken in question lived 100% off of grain (which isn't a benefit to you or the chicken).

The label you'll want to look out for when buying chicken products is "pasture-raised" or "pastured", which indicates that the chicken spent at least some of its time on open pasture, consuming pasture-based foods like grass and bugs. Since chickens are birds, and birds do consume grain when they find it, its still fine if their diet incorporates grain. The key point is that grain-based feed should  only be part of their diet, not all of it.

Cows

All types of beef (as well as butter if you're comfortable including it in your diet), should ideally be from cows which are either mostly or entirely grass fed. Some beef is 100% grass fed (and often labeled as such), but some is simply primarily grass fed, with a bit of grain used to supplement its diet. This is particularly common in areas where animals are housed indoors during cold winters, like the Midwest region of the United States. Choosing 100% grass fed beef is ideal, but as long as the animal is mostly grass fed, the difference is negligible.

Note that labels like "certified organic" and "pasture-raised"/"pasture-fed" are not necessarily the same as "grass-fed". Organic beef is simply beef that comes from cows fed organic feed, and pastured beef comes from cows raised on open pasture. These are both good labels to look for; just make sure the beef is also grass-fed in addition to these labels.

Pigs

Pigs are omnivores that can eat just about anything, and are less picky about their diet than most of the other animals we eat. That being said, their diet should still be pasture-based, still consist of at least some grasses, and they should still have room to roam around freely at will, just like cows and chickens.

For this reason, when purchasing pork products it's ideal to find products labeled as pasture-raised or pasture-fed. This tends to indicate that the animal was well-treated and well-fed.

Fish

As a general rule of thumb, the healthiest, most nutrient-rich fish are wild-caught, rather than farmed. However, many types of farmed fish are still a solid source of Omega-3 fatty acids (the primary health reason most people are interested in eating fish), which means that for the specific purpose of getting these healthy Omega-3 fats, farmed fish are a viable alternative to wild-caught.

Depending on your personal priorities, it's also worth mentioning that in many ways consuming farmed fish is more environmentally sustainable than consuming wild-caught fish. This is because populations of wild fish have been steadily declining over the years as a result of over-fishing, meaning that (unlike other forms of meat, like beef, chicken, and pork), there is a potential environmental consideration that comes with eating wild-caught fish.

For health reasons, wild-caught fish will usually be the most nutrient-dense on a calorie-for-calorie basis. However, farmed fish is cheaper, more readily available, often more environmentally sustainable, and still fairly high in nutrients. You'll have to make your purchasing decisions based on your personal priorities.

Alternately, if you'd like to avoid the issue altogether, fish oil supplementation is a valid alternative (see the section of fish oil in the chapter Optional Supplement Guidelines).

# Paleo Lifestyle Habits

The main focus of the paleo diet is, of course, the diet, because the way we eat is by far the most significant factor that controls our body composition, energy, mood, longevity, and overall health.

However, the paleo philosophy also extends to other areas of life besides the way we eat. The same logic that we use to determine what is healthy for humans to eat (by looking at what our species biologically evolved eating) can also be used to determine how our bodies are best adapted to other activities, like exercise and sleep.

We can understand this dynamic using the same "zookeeper" metaphor that we introduced at the beginning of this book. If you're a zookeeper, responsible for making the animals under your care as healthy and happy as possible, you'd give each animal the type of food they evolved to eat (lions would get meat, cows would get grass, etc). But you wouldn't stop there: you'd also design each animal's habitat to suit the environment it evolved to live in.

For example, to allow the animals to exercise, you'd give the cows flat, open space to roam around in, you'd give the monkeys tree branches to climb and swing from, etc. You'd also give each animal an appropriate area to sleep: birds would be given twigs, branches, and grasses to build nests, burrowing animals would be given dirt to create burrows, and so on. And you would definitely be careful not to mix up the nocturnal animals (like bats) with the animals that prefer to be active during the day.

Humans are the same way - and in the same way that our bodies evolved to eat a diet that doesn't always fit with our modern eating habits, our bodies have also evolved to follow certain natural habits and behaviors which don't always match up with a modern industrial lifestyle.

In this section, we'll explore a few of the largest and most common ways in which we can use a paleo philosophy to improve our health with simple lifestyle changes in some specific areas: sleep, sunlight, sitting and standing habits, and exercise.

## Low Intensity Exercise

One of the key foundations of a paleo fitness plan is low intensity physical exercise. Sometimes referred to as "moderate exercise" by mainstream health experts, the basic gist of low intensity aerobic activity is just what it sounds like: moving around at a low level of intensity.

This is designed to mimic the way humans evolved to move; rather than spending most of our day sitting, ancient hunter-gatherers spent most of their day walking around foraging, building shelters, squatting over cooking fires, fishing, etc. None of these activities required any formal attention to exercise, they just required regular, low-level physical effort.

Our bodies became adapted to this kind of frequent, low intensity daily movement, and now that most of us spend all day behind a desk or on the couch, we're missing out on all the benefits this type of informal "exercise" provides, which modern science has been able to quantify. Scientific studies have found that low intensity exercise has the following benefits:

  * Reducing the risk of certain chronic diseases like metabolic syndrome, breast cancer, and heart disease.
  * Reducing systemic inflammation.
  * Improving mood and sense of well-being, even in people with depression.
  * Gently strengthening muscles, bones, and joints, particularly in the elderly, and laying the foundation for more vigorous exercise.
  * Improving cardiovascular function.
  * Stimulating the immune system.
  * Aiding in weight loss.

So what kind of low intensity exercise should you be doing (and how much of it) in order to get all of these amazing health benefits? That's where the news gets especially good.

First of all, the exact type of exercise doesn't matter; in fact, it doesn't even need to be the kind of physical activity we normally call "exercise". Activities like walking, hiking, and gentle jogging all qualify, but so do fun informal activities like playing in the park, ice skating, and dancing. Literally any type of physical movement works, as long as it's in the right intensity "sweet spot": not too high, and not too low.

In concrete terms, this means that you should be somewhere in the ballpark of 50%-70% of your maximum heart rate. This may sound like a lot, but even the upper limit of 70% is fairly gentle: at this pace, you'll break a light to moderate sweat, be able to breath easily enough to maintain a conversation, and finish the activity feeling energized or relaxed rather than outright fatigued. And you don't have to actually measure your heart rate to reach this zone: just move around at an intensity level that matches the description above, and you're there!

Getting into this low intensity heart rate zone will require different levels of activity from different people, depending on how athletic they are to start with. For a very athletic individual, for example, it might require more active movement like light jogging, biking, or a difficult hike. But if you're just starting out on your fitness journey and aren't yet in the type of shape you'd like to be, a brisk walk around the neighborhood is more than enough to get your heart pumping at a healthy rate. Depending on how vigorously you do it, you could even get this level of exercise from household chores, like pulling up weeds or mowing the lawn.

The second point to consider is how much of this low intensity activity you should be doing. Our paleolithic ancestors spent pretty much their entire day engaged in low level exercise of one form or another, but thankfully it isn't necessary for modern people to mimic this behavior in order to get all the great health benefits that come with it.

For an upper limit, you actually can move around all day if you want to: for the most part, more is better when it comes to this type of gentle exercise. The longest-lived and healthiest populations on Earth all tend to be pretty physically active in this way, engaging in lots of walking, physical chores, etc (very similarly to our paleolithic ancestors). So if you want (and are able) to move around and gently exercise this much, feel free to do so!

For a lower limit, you can get away with as little as 2-3 hours per week of low intensity exercise and still get lots of benefit from it. More would probably be better, but you'll still be getting tons of health benefits from even this small amount.

But how do you find the time to do all this moving around? On paper, even 2-3 hours of exercise may seem like it would be hard to fit into your busy weekly schedule. But in reality, it's much easier than you might think.

First, note that 2-3 hours per week only equates to around 15-25 minutes per day. If you're really strapped for time and just want a basic level of health maintenance, going for a nice 15 minute walk every day is an easy, painless way to keep your body tuned up. And pretty much anyone can squeeze in 15 minutes!

Second, remember that what we're talking about is just physical activity, not formal exercise, and therefore doesn't require scheduled exercise time, equipment, commuting to a gym, etc. This means that in many cases you can squeeze in some of your daily quota simply by doing things you wanted to do anyway, particularly in the form of vigorous physical chores, like cleaning or maintaining your home, washing your car, etc.

The low intensity level means that it can also be easily combined with other activities. For example, you can use the time you spend walking to talk to a friend (over the phone or invited to walk with you), listen to an audiobook, or mentally plan your schedule for the day. And the fact that you don't need any special equipment, or even much space, means that "workouts" can be done anywhere. Even if you didn't want to leave your room, you can do some easy jumping jacks while watching TV or listening to music.

Given how easy it is to fit this type of exercise into your schedule, how beneficial it is for your health, and how good it makes you feel, there's no reason not to start making low intensity physical exercise a regular part of your daily routine. You can even get started today!

## Higher Intensity Exercise

The other type of exercise that is beneficial to include in your weekly regimen is the kind of exercise that is short, time-efficient, and reasonably intense. The best example of this type of exercise is strength training (specifically, the kind of strength training done to improve "functional strength", as opposed to bodybuilding), but can also include activities like sprinting, shorter and more intense sessions of biking or swimming, martial arts, or any sports that involve quick bursts of activity.

This type of exercise replicates the short bursts of activity required by paleolithic humans during their daily lives, the kind of brief all-out efforts that would occasionally be interspersed with the low-intensity pace of hunting and gathering: attacking a wild animal to kill it for its meat, carrying a heavy load of firewood, sprinting away from dangerous predators, etc.

Although these activities were conducted as matters of necessity, rather than formal exercise, regularly engaging in these short bouts of exertion gave hunter-gatherers lean, strong, functional bodies that were ready for anything.

In the modern world, this type of brief, intense activity (when conducted safely) will strengthen your bones, joints, and lean muscle tissue, stimulate the production of beneficial hormones, bump up your metabolism, strengthen the cardiovascular system, and (as a fun bonus) produce a lean, toned body that looks good naked!

Although there are many ways to engage in short, intense bursts of physical activity, a good default option is functional strength training. We can't stress this enough: we're not talking about bodybuilding! Instead we're talking about the type of easy, time-efficient, and very practical strength training that focuses on improving your health, strength, and mobility, rather than just "bulking up". Functional strength training can be done in as little as 20-30 minutes twice a week, and although it's "intense" in comparison to slower activities like jogging, it's still very safe, relatively easy, and can even be done with little or no equipment in the comfort of your own home.

We mention strength training here because it's one of the most popular options for high-intensity exercise among the majority of people who follow the paleo lifestyle. However, strength training (as well as other higher-intensity activities like sports, martial arts, etc) are topics so large that entire libraries of books have been devoted to each of these subjects individually. Needless to say, we don't have enough space to give you a good overview of all the possibilities in this book! Instead, our general recommendation is that you start with a basic program of simple, functional strength-training exercises that you can do at home with little or no equipment.

The simplest way to start is with bodyweight exercises like squats and pushups - you can find step-by-step video tutorials of these exercises for free online which will be far more detailed and useful than anything we can describe here. If you don't know where to start, a simple program of classic bodyweight strength exercises is an ideal place to begin your personal experimentation.

If strength training doesn't sound interesting to you, you can also investigate other types of higher-intensity physical activity that are more dynamic or complex. Many of the more complex activities will require you to attend classes or join a gym, but depending on your personal tastes, you may find these activities more fun or rewarding. Great examples of higher-intensity activities include martial arts, rock climbing, and fast-paced team sports. You can also modify some activities to be higher-intensity than normal:  cycling and swimming can be modified into "bicycle sprints" and "swim sprints", some forms of yoga focus more on dynamic power moves and strengthening poses, etc.

Whatever activities you choose for your intense exercise sessions, make sure it's an activity designed to cultivate strength, rather than endurance, and which focuses on basic, functional movement patterns like lifting, throwing, sprinting, etc.

Also, make sure that you can practice your chosen activity safely! Some of this relates to your body type and personal level of starting fitness. For example, if you're a senior citizen, you should start with some very easy strength training exercises and slowly work your way up to more intense activity as your joints get stronger. Another example is body weight: if you're currently very heavy, you'll need to lose some of your excess bodyfat before you can safely engage in certain physical activities like sprinting. And as a general safety note, you should always choose physical activities which have a relatively low risk of injury. Strength training should be done with good form and careful technique, martial arts should be practiced with an experienced instructor, and so on. High-intensity exercise is only healthy if you don't get injured while doing it!

When you combine the type of short, intense physical exercise described in this section with the more-frequent, lower-intensity physical activity described in the previous section, not only will you feel better, have more energy, and lose more weight, you'll create a strong, healthy, functional body that would make any hunter-gatherer proud!

## Sleep

Sleep is something that everyone needs, but very few people get enough of. Whether we're staying up late socializing, working odd hours, or just getting sucked into binge-watching our favorite TV show, almost everyone has a reason for putting off sleep time every night in favor of other things. And since most of us need to wake up (to an alarm clock) at a specific time the next day, we rarely get a chance to make up the difference.

This is in stark contrast to how we evolved. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors didn't have access to round-the-clock electrical light on command, so when the sun went down, so did they. Just like animals in the wild, the human species evolved to sleep when the sun set and wake when the sun rose.

The upside of living in modern, well-lit houses is that we can get more work done, learn more, spend more time on relaxation and recreation, and have the flexibility to decide on our own schedules, without being forced to depend on the sun for light. The downside is that our sleeping schedules are often hectically shortened and irregular, and even when we do sleep, the quality of our sleep is often interfered with.

In this chapter, we're going to discuss how you can have the best of both worlds: the convenience of a modern sleep schedule, and all the crucial health, weight loss, and energy benefits that come from a solid, restful night of high-quality sleep.

A wide range of scientific studies have shown that high-quality sleep produces some key physical and mental benefits, with a single night of good sleep producing benefits such as:

  * Triggering the release of human growth hormone (HGH), a key hormone for cellular regeneration.
  * Improving memory performance and creative problem solving skills on cognitive tests.
  * Improving athletic performance, including speed, strength, and accuracy.
  * Increasing overall mood, feelings of positivity, and resistance to stress, as well as increasing how energetic you feel.
  * Boosting the function of the immune system, including cutting your risk for contracting the common cold and other illnesses.

By the same token, lots of research has shown that not getting enough sleep is terrible for your health. If you get too little sleep (or low-quality sleep) on a regular, extended basis, not only will you miss out on all the benefits above, you also run the risk of nasty side effects such as:

  * Impairment of long-term memory.
  * Impairment of nerve cell generation.
  * Increased risk for depression and other psychological illnesses.
  * A chronic increase in systemic inflammation, and reduced ability to deal with oxidative stress.
  * Increased likelihood of becoming obese.
  * Increased risk of heart disease, diabetes, and even all-cause mortality.

Needless to say... sleep is important! Not only does good sleep help prevent a host of serious health problems, it can even help with the other reasons people switch to the paleo diet, like losing weight and looking good!

So how do we make sure that we're not only getting enough sleep, but that the sleep we get is as high-quality and rejuvenating as possible?

Quantity of Sleep

The general recommendation to get eight hours of sleep per night is a good goal to shoot for as a rough rule of thumb. Most research on sleep indicates that on average, 7-8 hours per night is the amount associated with the smallest number of health problems and the best brain performance. People who average less than seven hours of sleep a night usually have more health problems, and interestingly, people who sleep a lot (9-10 hours), also tend to be unhealthy (possibly because unhealthy people tend to feel tired all the time, which leads them to wanting more sleep).

However, sleep scientists also confirmed that sleep requirements can vary quite a bit between individuals. Most of us tend to do best on 7-8 hours, but some individuals genuinely need 9-10 in order to feel rested. There are even some (very rare) genetic mutants who can get just a few hours of sleep a night without any negative health effects.

Most of us should ere on the side of getting too much sleep, rather than too little. Remember, our hunter-gatherer ancestors probably slept almost all night long; minus any time that may have been spent around a campfire at the end of the day, it was normal practice for people to sleep almost from sundown to sunup.

When determining how much sleep is best for you, your starting point should be the average eight hours recommended for most people. Try to be very consistent about getting this much sleep for at least a week or two, and notice how it makes you feel. If you still feel like you need more, try nine hours, and if you don't notice any particular positive effects, you can try cutting back to seven hours. Experiment in this way until you find a happy medium, where you're feeling as good as possible but aren't cutting into your waking time too much.

If you typically spend less time sleeping, realize that you might be mildly sleep deprived and not even know it! Sleep studies have found that after a while, your body gets used to chronic sleep deprivation, and you don't consciously notice it anymore - however, you still suffer all the negative effects! So if you routinely cut back on sleep in order to accomplish more during the day, try spending a week or two getting more sleep than normal, and see how it makes you feel. Remember: if spending and extra hour sleeping each day improves your physical and mental performance, it will make every single one of your waking hours better!

Note that all the numbers discussed above are averages. If you generally feel best after eight hours of sleep, and you only get six hours one night, it's not necessarily a bad thing to get nine or ten hours the next night. Listen to your body, and do whatever makes you feel the best!

And finally, if you're having trouble getting as much sleep as you'd like due to restlessness, wakefulness, difficulty falling asleep, or some health condition like sleep apnea, you can often increase the quantity of sleep you're getting by first improving the quality of your sleep (see the following section).

Quality of Sleep

One of the many benefits of switching to a healthy paleo diet (which is both super high in nutrients and free from unhealthy junk foods and other substances), is that the simple act of living a paleo lifestyle will probably be enough to make you sleep better all on its own. Many of the nutrients that the paleo diet provides have been linked to promoting good sleep, and just being in general good health is a big step towards improving your sleep quality.

However, there are also a number of sleep-specific factors that control the quality of your sleep, so it's worth exploring these factors individually in order to maximize how much restful rejuvenation you're getting each night. All of the following tactics will help you increase sleep quality as much as possible.

Sleep in complete darkness.

Our ancestors slept in complete darkness, without streetlights shining in through the cracks in the blinds, digital clocks glowing, etc. Your brain is evolutionarily hard-wired to sleep best under these conditions: you can certainly fall asleep if there's some light in the room, but it tend to subconsciously affect your wakefulness and restlessness during sleep.

There are a few ways to get around this problem:

First, it might not be an issue if you happen to live in a naturally dark area (like the countryside, for example); in this case, just be sure to remove anything that produces artificial light from your bedroom. The most common examples are digital clocks (specifically the models with glow-in-the-dark numbers), as well as the small power lights on electronic devices like TV's, stereos, etc.

Second, if you're like most people, you usually sleep with artificial light from outside your bedroom leaking in through cracks in your blinds/curtains. The amount of this light may be relatively small, but as long as it's strong enough for your brain to register that it's there, it can still interfere with your brain entering a state of deep, restful sleep.

To get around this, you have two options. The first is to put up "blackout curtains" in your room; these are special, heavy-duty curtains that are designed to both prevent light from shining through the fabric, and also prevent any cracks from forming around the outside of the curtains. The goal is to plunge your room into complete darkness (assuming you've removed any sources of light from inside the room itself, as detailed above).

The second option is to use a sleep mask to cover your eyes during sleep. This option is very affordable (since decent quality sleep masks can be purchased for a few dollars online and at most department stores), and very convenient (sleep masks are portable for travel, allow lights to remain on in the room, etc).

Any of these methods are fine, so you can go with whatever suits your personal preference. Just make sure that the final effect is that you can hold your hand up in front of your face without seeing it, and you'll know that you've achieved the necessary level of darkness.

Reduce exposure to blue light.

Our brains, and our circadian rhythms, have a unique biological reaction to blue light. This is because the sky is blue during the day, and our brains evolved to associate blue-colored light with the daytime. During our evolution, this made us more wakeful and alert during the day, and then when this blue light disappeared at night, it signaled our bodies that it was time to sleep.

In technical terms, this happens through the regulation of the hormone melatonin (commonly referred to as "the sleep hormone"). When we're exposed to blue light, our brains suppress melatonin, allowing us to stay alert and awake, and in the absence of blue light, melatonin increases, making us sleepy.

This system worked fine in the natural world, before we had artificial light. In the modern world, however, we have a problem: may types of modern electric lights emit blue light, on the same part of the spectrum as natural daylight. Our brains can't distinguish between this artificial blue light, and the natural blue light that we evolved to be exposed to during the day, which means that our brains' production of melatonin is thrown out of whack, and we're more wakeful at night as a result.

To get around this problem, it's important to reduce your exposure to this type of artificial blue light a few hours before bed. There are a few simple strategies you can use to do this:

First, for any web-enabled electronic device you own (like computers, phones, and tablets), download the free program F.lux. F.lux is a simple piece of free software which is inactive during the day, but which at night alters the color spectrum of the light emitted by your computer to remove the blue light from the display and replace it with warm orange, red, and yellow tones. This doesn't interfere with the computer's display at all: resolution is still as good as it always is, you can still read and watch movies without any problems at all , and the program can be temporarily deactivated (as well as easily uninstalled) whenever you want. It can be downloaded for free at http://justgetflux.com

For any electronic displays that you can't use F.lux on, simply don't use them before bed. This includes anything you'd watch on a normal TV set; if you really want to watch TV shows or movies, you can watch them on a computer or tablet that has F.lux installed. Otherwise, you can read a book or do something else non-electronic to unwind. Make sure you aren't exposing yourself to a normal television or similar device for at least two hours before bed (longer would probably be better).

Reduce the amount of white light you're exposed to from light bulbs, either by using orange, red, or yellow tinted light bulbs, or by covering white fluorescent bulbs with lampshades tinted these colors.

Alternately, if you find it convenient and enjoyable, you can turn off all electronic lights in your house about two hours before bedtime and for the last few hours of the day rely on firelight, from sources like candles and fireplaces. This approach will be inconvenient for most people, but it's extra effective, because it eliminates the small amount of blue light found in normal light bulbs and other electronic devices. It's also incredibly relaxing and enjoyable to spend the last part of your day bathed in the warm glow of natural firelight!

As a final alternative, you can opt to ignore all of the previous suggestions and simply wear blue-blocking glasses for the last few hours of the day. Blue-blocking glasses are similar to sunglasses, but instead of being tinted black to filter out sunlight, they're tinted a light orange color to filter out blue light. This allows you to simply put on the glasses and go about your normal life with no changes whatsoever, making them highly convenient if you want to watch TV, use normal light bulbs, etc.

There are a few potential downsides to blue-blocking glasses, depending on your personal preferences: you may not find it comfortable to wear glasses for the last few hours of the day, or you might feel a little silly. But for many people, the extra convenience of being able to get a great night's sleep without changing any of their nighttime habits is well worth it.

Blue-blocking glasses come in a wide range of models and styles, some of which are very cheap, and others that are very expensive; it's recommended that you find an inexpensive $10-$15 pair to experiment with when you're first starting out.

Note that "blue light" doesn't just refer to lights which literally appear blue. Most white light contains blue light as part of its color spectrum, which is why the light from computers and TV's is so problematic, regardless of what actual colors appear on the screen.

As an overall rule of thumb, you should be trying to (very roughly) simulate the lighting conditions that ancient hunter-gatherers would be exposed to throughout the day. This means that at night, the orange, red, and yellow colors that mimic natural firelight are the ones you should be favoring as much as possible.

Engage in relaxing activities

This suggestion seems more more subjective than the others (and to some degree it is), but it's based on sound science. If you go to bed in any emotional state that is stressed, preoccupied, or excited, it will interfere with your sleep. For optimal sleep, the emotional state you're going for is relaxed, calm, and tired, and there are a number of ways to achieve this state.

One of the most common is reading fiction; although novels are often exciting in terms of their actual content, many people find that the combination of a fascinating fictional story, combined with the lack of visual stimulation that comes from reading the printed word (as opposed to the lights and noises of TV and movies), ends up being very calming once you put the book down. Just be careful of any book that will stick with you after you put it down; this includes any type of nonfiction book, which engages your rational, conscious mind on a level that will keep you awake.

An even better approach is to engage in some type of formal relaxation / stress-relief activity, like meditation or self-massage. These types of activities tend to relax both your body and your mind, which is perfect for sleep, since your body and mind both need to be in a calm state in order to produce the most restful sleep possible. They also have the added benefit of reducing your overall stress levels, so you're getting a double-whammy of healthy benefits from even 15-20 minutes of these stress-relieving activities. If you're looking for a simple way to get started, simply use an online search engine to look up "mindfulness meditation" or "self massage", find a simple routine to start with, and take it from there.

The important takeaway is that you should find an activity that you can do immediately before turning the lights out which leaves your body feeling loose and relaxed, and your mind completely calm and free from distracting thoughts. The specific activity you end up choosing will largely be based on personal preference: experiment until you find a bedtime routine that works for you.

Avoid sleep-disrupting substances

The two main substances you should be avoiding around bedtime are alcohol and caffeine. This isn't as obvious as it sounds: although it's common sense that binge drinking or downing a few espressos before bed will interfere with sleep, most people don't realize that even small amounts of these substances can interfere with sleep to a surprising degree.

Alcohol is obviously not paleo, and you shouldn't be drinking it on a regular basis if you want to get good results from your paleo diet. However, keeping in mind that many people like to indulge, you should know that, contrary to how "relaxing" alcohol seems, consuming alcohol actually hurts your sleep. It does this by disrupting REM sleep, the deepest stage of the sleep cycle and the one most responsible for deep, restful sleep. This is true even if you only have a few drinks, and even if those drinks make you feel tired or relaxed: you may fall asleep faster after drinking, but the actual quality of your sleep will be disrupted.

Caffeine is a more obvious problem in some ways, but can also be more insidious than most people suspect.

For starters, caffeinated beverages are considered to be healthy and paleo-friendly, which means that unlike alcohol, you may choose to drink caffeine on a regular basis.

Second, although it's obvious that you shouldn't drink a cup of coffee right before bed, most people underestimate how long before bedtime they need to stop consuming the stuff. The exact amount of time will vary from person to person, depending on how sensitive to caffeine you are, but numerous studies have shown that caffeine can negatively impact your sleep quality and quantity when consumed up to six hours before bed! This is important to note, because the immediate effects of caffeine wear off after much less than six hours, and most people don't feel particularly stimulated after a break this long from caffeine.

You'll have to self-experiment to some degree to find what works for you, but the absolute minimum amount of time you should leave yourself for your last sip of caffeine should be about four hours before bed, and if you're caffeine sensitive, you may want to cut yourself off as much as eight hours before you plan on turning in.

## Sunlight

Although it doesn't fit most modern people's lifestyle, sunlight exposure is a natural and enjoyable way to secure your body's daily requirement of vitamin D, a critically important nutrient not found in food and which many modern people are sorely deficient in.

Since most people are unable or unwilling to spend large amounts of time outdoors, it's assumed that most people following the paleo diet will need to get their vitamin D from supplementation - for this reason, the role of sunlight and vitamin D production in your body is discussed in more detail in the Optional Supplement Guidelines chapter.

However, if you have the option of getting large amounts of sunlight exposure (whether through working outdoors, enjoying outdoor leisure activities, etc), you're encouraged to get your vitamin D the way our paleolithic ancestors got it - by spending lots of time outside. For guidelines on how much sunlight exposure you'll need to get your daily dose of vitamin D, what the role of supplementation plays in this area, and other factors relating to why and how sunlight exposure / vitamin D is an important part of your health, please refer to the section on vitamin D in the Optional Supplement Guidelines chapter.

## Sitting and Standing Habits

Sitting down while working or enjoying leisure activities has become a natural part of modern life. But if you think about it, sitting is a relatively modern behavior; through most of our evolutionary history, we didn't have the luxury of even the most basic chairs or couches to sit in.

Primitive humankind spend most of its time either standing, moving around, or laying down and resting, occasionally interspersed with relatively short bouts of squatting. But unless we came across a particularly well-proportioned stone or log, there simply wasn't much to sit on, other than the cold, hard ground. Combine this with the fact that the hunter-gatherer lifestyle required lots of walking every day (in order to hunt and gather), and the average paleolithic human didn't spend much of their time sitting.

In the modern world, however, sitting is the norm, and spending a significant portion of your day standing is something that you would only do if it's required for your job. Based on our evolutionary history, our bodies clearly weren't adapted to this behavior - but does that necessarily mean it's a bad thing to spend most of your time sitting down?

Unfortunately, a sizable body of research indicates that spending lots of time sitting down is actually fairly unhealthy. Part of this is obvious: the more time you spend sitting down, the less time you're spending on exercise. However, a number of studies have been conducted on people who exercise often but still spend the majority of their non-exercise hours sitting, and the results have been surprising. Even if you exercise regularly, spending lots of time sitting down is still unhealthy, with people who sit for longer periods having bigger waist sizes and higher levels of cholesterol, blood sugar and triglycerides, as well as increased risk of heart disease. Increased chair-time has even been linked to all-cause mortality (i.e. death from any and all causes), even when taking into account other factors like the participants' physical activity, overall energy expenditure, weight, and general health.

Finally, prolonged sitting has also been shown to cause muscle stiffness, poor balance and mobility, and lower-back, neck, and hip pain, simply as a result of the fact that your body isn't designed to spend long periods of time in the sitting position. You can probably relate to these issues if you have a desk job: when you spend long periods of time sitting, you probably feel pretty stiff, sore, or just generally uncomfortable after a while, and you may even experience more severe symptoms like back pain. This is because the artificial posture that sitting forces us into creates all kinds of structural and muscular imbalances, and puts low-level, sustained pressure on our bodies in ways they weren't designed for.

The solution isn't just finding the perfect ergonomic chair, using a yoga ball, or any of the other common fixes; your body simply isn't designed to sit for long periods of time,  no matter what you're sitting on. The solution is simply to spend more time standing!

The most effective habit that most people can implement in this area is to create a standing workstation for themselves. This simply involves finding or creating a table-top or other workspace which is tall enough (probably just above waist level) that you can comfortably work at it while standing. It should also preferably be adjustable, so that you can alternate between sitting and standing to prevent your legs from getting tired, and you should be able to comfortably stand in front of it with good posture (shoulders squared, both feet evenly carrying your weight, etc), for fairly long periods of time, interspersed with brief periods of sitting.

There are many different options for how to create a standing desk. There are a number of commercial products available for this specific task, everything from little mini-desktops that can be placed on top of normal tables, to fully integrated writing desks which can have the height raised and lowered by a crank. These options suffer from the drawback of being fairly expensive, so many people take a DIY approach and simply buy portable shelving units, tray tables, and other inexpensive items that can be placed on top of normal work desks. In fact, depending on how much table space you need, what your personal preferences are, and other factors, a "standing desk" can be as simple as setting a box on top of a chair and working off the top of the box.

The exact specifications are up to you - if you'd like some ideas for getting started, doing a simple internet search for "standing desks" will yield dozens of different ideas to suit any working conditions you can dream of.

If your job involves physical labor (like construction or landscaping), or even just being on your feet for long periods of time (like many retail or service industry jobs), you probably don't need to worry about this too much, since most or all of your work hours are spent standing or otherwise moving around. As long as you're still getting some "formal" exercise in your spare time (strength training, running, sports, martial arts, etc), you'll be getting all the exercise you need.

But if you're like most people, who spend most of their work hours sitting at a desk, and most of their leisure hours sitting on a couch, incorporating a standing desk into your existing workspace will do wonders for improving your posture, eliminating nagging aches and pains, and just generally improving your overall health and wellbeing.

# Eating Paleo at Restaurants

There are some restaurants that serve pasture-raised animal products, organic produce, locally-sourced food, and all the other things a paleo dieter would love to order. The majority of restaurants, however, serve factory-farmed meat, use low-quality processed ingredients, and load down most of their food with grain, refined sugars, and hydrogenated vegetable oils.

However, there are paleo options at many restaurants. The ingredients won't be as high-quality as many paleo dieters would prefer (factory-farmed animals products, non-organic ingredients, etc), but the basic paleo food groups (meat, eggs, fruit, vegetables, nuts, seeds, sweet potatoes, etc) can all be  found in various combinations. This means that eating paleo (or at least mostly-paleo) at restaurants is perfectly achievable; you just need to be aware of some common pitfalls that you'll face when trying to stay healthy while eating out, and make use of the guidelines in this chapter.

Guidelines and Strategies

Watch our for hidden ingredients

At most restaurants, there are a few very common non-paleo ingredients that you'll need to be on the lookout for at all times:

Industrial seed/vegetable oils: This is one of the most common, and most problematic, obstacles to eating paleo at restaurants. A huge percentage of restaurants use corn, vegetable, or canola oil in their cooking, and you often won't be able to tell from looking at the food or even reading the description on the menu. Be sure to ask about this whenever ordering any meat dish (although grilled dishes are often safe unless basted with these oils, and anything boiled or steamed should be safe).

Sauces and dressings: Can contain dairy, sugar, etc. Sweet sauces in particular can be extraordinarily high in empty calories, simply because they're made of almost pure sugar! The liquid base for many of these sauces is also frequently hydrogenated vegetable oil. You're generally safe with things like tomato sauces (although these often do contain small amounts of added sugar), but if you're getting a salad with any dressing more complicated than olive oil and vinegar, be sure to ask what the ingredients of the dressing are.

Hidden sugar: Some sugary dishes are obvious (desserts, pastries, etc), but occasionally sugar can sneak into an innocent-seeming food in a way that isn't immediately obvious. Any dish involving fruit, for example, can have sugar added in order to enhance the fruit's natural sweetness, and (as mentioned previously) many sauces and dressings can be secretly loaded up with sugar as well. Be aware of anything fruity or sweet tasting.

Breading: This one is obviously something you'll avoid if you can; just make sure that you don't accidentally order a meat dish that is breaded! It's easier to make this mistake than you think, even if you read the menu carefully (it isn't always mentioned), so be sure to double check with your server when ordering meat dishes.

Don't go show up hungry to the restaurant.

This is advice you may have heard in relation to grocery shopping, and it applies to eating out as well. If you're ravenously hungry while you're looking over the menu, you're way more likely to throw away your inhibitions and give in to temptation.

The strange thing about this is that there are probably some delicious paleo-friendly options on the menu you're looking at, so the problem isn't that. It's that the non-paleo items just look way more tempting than they normally do!

To avoid this, if you know you're going to be eating out later, be sure to eat a healthy, filling paleo meal a few hours before you go out, or a small snack right beforehand. You may also want to focus on foods that are high in protein, as protein-rich foods tend to be the most filling on a calorie-for-calorie basis.

It can also help to be prepared in case of spur-of-the-moment invitations. Depending on your particular social life, it may be an almost daily occurrence for one of your friends to call you up, mention that they're in the neighborhood, and ask if you want to go grab a bite. Or for your coworkers on your lunch break to decide that they all want to go eat together. Rather than turning down these invitations, it helps to be prepared for them by keeping some kind of paleo-friendly snack on hand, so you can partially fill yourself up before going out. This can be anything from a paleo energy bar (store-bought or homemade!) to a simple handful of almonds.

Don't be afraid to ask questions

Don't be shy or embarrassed about asking questions about the ingredients in your food, and don't feel guilty about "inconveniencing" the staff at the restaurant this way. You aren't being a difficult customer; you just want to know what's in your food! Restaurant staff are used to these questions, and get them all the time: many customers have food allergies, religious restrictions, dietary guidelines, etc. And if your server doesn't know what's in a particular dish, request that they ask a cook or manager.

They're the people making and serving your food: someone had better know what they're putting in it!

Plan ahead

One of the best ways you can give yourself an advantage when eating out is to plan ahead. The majority of restaurants post their full menu on their website, which lets you scan over your options and locate the most paleo-friendly items on the menu ahead of time. This way, you don't have to make your choice when you're hungry, distracted by talking with your friends, and so on, which will help you avoid temptation and make good choices.

The one limitation of planning ahead is that you can't conveniently ask questions of your server; however, you can get around this by calling the restaurant and asking to speak to a manager about whatever questions you may have. This has an added benefit: if you normally feel self-conscious about asking detailed questions of your server before ordering, speaking with someone over the phone will help you get over the intimidation of grilling someone face to face!

Planning ahead also applies in a more general sense, which is to know what options are available in your area. If you find yourself eating out frequently with friends or coworkers, you can research what's available in your area so that no matter what type of food your colleagues are in the mood for, you can always suggest a restaurant where you know you'll have healthy options.

Substitute

The main challenge of eating paleo at restaurants isn't finding paleo foods: it's finding paleo foods that haven't been combined with a bunch of non-paleo foods! Sometimes this is unavoidable: for example, any fried food you order at a restaurant will almost certainly be fried in vegetable oil (not to mention that it's usually battered or breaded). However, there are many instances where a particular entree is mostly paleo except for the side dishes it comes with (for example, a meat dish that comes with french fries). In this instance, it's usually possible to substitute the offending side dish for something more paleo-friendly, like sauteed vegetables, a salad, a bowl or piece of fruit, etc. This is easier at some restaurants than others, but almost every restaurant does this as part of their normal business; it's very common for people to substitute side dishes because they're on a diet, have allergies or food sensitivities, or just because they prefer one dish over another. You may occasionally have to pay a little extra if you'd like something that costs a bit more, but as a default option, you can generally substitute almost any side dish for a small salad without even raising an eyebrow from your server.

Assemble a meal from side dishes

If the regular entrees on a particular menu aren't paleo-friendly, you can often improvise a paleo meal by looking at what side dishes the restaurant offers, and ordering several of them to make a full meal. For example, at any place that serves breakfast food, you can order a side of eggs, a side of bacon, and a side of fruit or vegetables (like a salad or fruit bowl), for a complete paleo meal.

Ask for gluten-free options

Gluten sensitivity is a problem that people are becoming increasingly aware of, and a sizable minority of people are sensitive to gluten to some degree. This means that, in order to appeal to as many people as possible and avoid making anyone sick, many restaurants offer a gluten-free menu to supplement their regular menu. Even if you aren't particularly sensitive to gluten, gluten-containing foods represent a pretty large portion of the non-paleo foods you're trying to avoid, so tell your server that you're trying to avoid gluten and they'll be able to help you steer clear of any foods that contain the stuff.

Restaurants to Avoid

If necessary, you can eat at any of the following and generally be able to improvise something paleo. However, it will be an uphill battle, since most of these restaurants have menus that are just fundamentally based around non-paleo ingredients.

  * Sandwich Shops: Every item on the menu is made with bread, unless you're lucky enough to find a place where you can simply get the paleo-friendly contents of the sandwich (meat and veggies) served in the form of a salad rather than a sandwich. Even then, be wary of sauces and dressings.
  * Italian: Heavily based around pasta and grain, not to mention frequent appearances from cheese. Even the side dishes are mostly grain, with paleo items like meat and veggies simply used as toppings. The only salad that's available is generally a small side salad consisting of little more than a bowl of lettuce with a few other vegetables for garnish and some (often unhealthy) dressing.
  * Pizza: There's no getting around it: the basic concept of pizza is almost entirely non-paleo. Most types of pizza (except a few "gourmet" varieties) are absolutely dripping with cheese, and all pizza is about half bread due to the crust. The tomato sauce and meat aren't even particularly healthy, since they're usually highly processed. Pizza is probably the one type of commonly available restaurant food that simply can't be made paleo no matter where you get it or how you order it.
  * "Chinese": The American-ized version of Chinese food served almost everywhere in the Western world features dishes that are high in MSG, often breaded and/or deep fried, and almost exclusively cooked in industrial seed oils. There are almost never dishes prepared with paleo-friendly cooking options (like grilling, baking, steaming, etc), and the side dishes are generally limited to rice, noodles, or deep fried items, with no healthy substitution options whatsoever (not even a basic salad). There are probably some great paleo dishes in traditional Chinese cuisine, but the average "Chinese" restaurant in your area almost certainly has nothing to do with China.

Restaurants You Can Work With

Although you can almost always find something paleo at any restaurant, the following types of restaurants will usually give you the largest number of options to choose from, and with the fewest compromises. These aren't your only options by any means; they're just the ones that are usually easiest to work with.

  * Barbecue: The focus here is obviously on meat dishes, and if anything else comes with your meat, it's an easily-substituted side dish. Many barbecue sauces contain some sugar,but generally not in large amounts (and sauces are rarely made with industrial vegetable oils), so it's a relatively small compromise.
  * Greek/Mediterranean: Generally easy to find grilled meat dishes like kebabs, as well as salads with grilled meat and simple, healthy dressings (often just olive oil and vinegar).
  * Steak: This one is self-explanatory. You'll need to be slightly careful about side dishes, but bread or potatoes can almost always be easily substituted for veggies.
  * Seafood: Fish, shrimp, crab, lobster: these dishes are not only healthy on their own, but you can almost always get them steamed, which is a very healthy cooking option guaranteed to keep your meat free from industrial vegetable oils used in frying. Fish and shrimp are also frequently grilled, which is another healthy option. Just be sure to avoid non-paleo side dishes, and the rest is easy.
  * Large (Non-Fast-Food) Chain Restaurants: This one may surprise you, but large family-oriented chain restaurants (such as Applebee's, TGI Friday's, and Chilli's in the U.S.) are designed around appealing to as many different people as possible, and offering as many options as possible, so you'll almost always be able to find something on the menu that is tasty and at least 90% paleo. Although these chains are mostly based around decidedly non-paleo items like burgers and fries, you can also order grilled chicken or fish entrees, large salads with grilled meat, eggs, steak, etc. These large chains also generally make it easy to do substitutions, frequently offer gluten-free menus and allergen information, provide calorie and macronutrient info on their websites, and a host of other perks that make them easier to work with than you might think.

# Saving Money on Paleo

One common concern that a lot of people have when switching to a healthier diet is that their grocery bill will go up! This is a valid concern: many of the least healthy foods on the market (like refined flour and sugar, hydrogenated oils, etc) are also some of the cheapest foods on a cost-per-calorie basis. This is because our current agricultural system is geared towards producing as much of these foods as possible, as cheaply as possible, rather than with producing healthy foods like fruits, vegetables, grass-fed beef, etc.

To make matters worse, food industry lobbyists have succeeded in getting the government to create subsidies on many of these foods, making their sticker-price on the shelf artificially cheap in comparison to other foods which aren't being partially paid for by government tax dollars.

This means that there is good news and bad news when it comes to the cost of eating healthy. The bad news is that, as a general rule of thumb, you're probably going to end up investing more money in healthy food than you would otherwise be spending on unhealthy food. On a cost-per-calorie basis, nothing is going to be as cheap as foods that are mass-produced, artificially-subsidized, and packed with empty calories!

The good news is that, despite the built-in disadvantages that healthy eaters face, there are still a bunch of strategies you can use to save money while still eating the best, most high-quality paleo foods in the world! And in this chapter, we're going to share those strategies with you.

Depending on your particular lifestyle, geographical location, health goals, personal tastes, and other factors, you may not be able to take advantage of every single one of the tips and tricks contained in this section. But we can also guarantee that regardless of your situation, you'll definitely be able to find something in this chapter that will help you eat healthy while still saving money. In fact, if you use even one of the strategies outlined below, it will save you many times more than the cost of this book! How's that for a return on investment?

So in no particular order, here is a list of tips, tricks, and strategies that you can use to save money while still eating a healthy paleo diet.

Eat organ meats

Organ meats are an amazing bang for your buck. They're almost always rich in nutrients (including nutrients that are hard to get from other sources), and since they're not particularly popular in the modern diet, they're usually also extremely inexpensive.

Liver, for example, is often nicknamed "nature's multivitamin", for the dozens of highly-bioavailable nutrients it contains, and you can usually buy livers (either chicken or beef) for no more than a few dollars a pound. Other great options include heart, kidneys, and tongue.

If you aren't used to them, many of these organs will be an acquired taste, but this is usually just a matter of finding the right recipe to complement the natural flavors of the meat. To continue with our liver example, many people find the taste of liver off-putting at first, but grow to like it once they find a good recipe for something like liver pate (see the recipe for Chicken Liver Pate in the Recipe section of this book), or find a tasty brand of liver sausage at their local butcher shop.

Buy in bulk

Although most healthy eaters get their groceries from places like Whole Foods or local co-op grocery stores, if you're on a budget, you don't necessarily have to get your health food from health food stores!

Many outlets specialize in selling merchandise in bulk at a discount; you can order bulk items from large online retailers like Amazon.com, or from large warehouse stores (examples in the U.S. include Costco and Sam's Club). You can't always buy everything you need for a complete paleo diet at these stores (for example, you might have trouble finding grass-fed beef or other items with a short shelf life), but you can buy large amounts of canned goods (including canning staples like fish and vegetables), large jugs of healthy oils like olive oil and coconut oil, huge batches of nuts and seeds, frozen fruits and vegetables, etc.

Just be sure to check a few details before committing to shopping in bulk.

First, check the per-unit price of the items you're buying to make sure you're really saving money in comparison to buying those items individually in normal stores.

Also be sure that the discount you're getting on your food isn't a result of buying a low-quality item! Check labels to make sure there aren't any unhealthy fillers or additives being used to "bulk up" the food and make it cheaper.

Finally, make sure you can actually use the large amount of food you're buying before it expires! If you're buying for an entire family, this should be relatively easy, but if you're only buying food for one or two people, be sure to purchase items that you either use in large quantities, or that have long shelf lives (like frozen foods, canned goods, etc).

Buy sale items in bulk

If you don't find it practical to buy food in bulk through warehouse stores or online, you can still take advantage of a similar approach that works at any grocery store. All you have to do is keep an eye out for stuff you'd like to buy anyway going on sale, then buy as much of it as you possibly can! Doing this can cut the price you pay for your usual paleo staples by as much as half, and at most grocery stores there's never a time when there isn't something on sale.

To fully take advantage of this strategy, you'll still need to have the ability to store the food you buy. You can invest in a freezer unit for your home, or simply focus on foods with long shelf lives (canned goods, dry goods, oils, etc).

You'll also have a much easier time implementing this strategy if you're flexible about your diet. Instead of deciding in advance what you're going to be having for dinner for the next week or two, you can go to the meat counter, see which meats are on sale that week, and plan your dinners around that. This isn't as daunting as it may sound; if you have a small collection of good paleo recipe books (like the ones in the Practical Paleo Series!) you can buy whatever meat, produce, and other foods are on sale and be confident that you can go home and look up some great recipes for those ingredients.

Participate in a CSA

CSA stands for "community-supported agriculture", and it's kind of like a subscription service for healthy, local food. A CSA program is an arrangement with a local farmer in your area to purchase a share of their upcoming food products. The buyer (you) pays up front for the meat, eggs, produce, or whatever, and then on a regular basis (usually weekly or biweekly) the farmer drops off your share of the food they've produced at a convenient drop-off location in your neighborhood.

The farmer benefits from this arrangement because all the up-front payments from the buyers allow them to plan how much food they'll produce in the upcoming season, invest in seeds and equipment etc. The buyers benefit because they're getting the absolute freshest, most locally-grown food they possibly can, and they're getting it at a discount price.

This discounted price comes from the fact that you're essentially "cutting out the middle man" by bypassing grocery stores and buying your food directly from the people who produce it, which means you aren't paying the grocery store's overhead and markup. You also get the opportunity to meet the people producing your food, and you can sometimes even visit the farms they operate if you're curious!

The most common types of CSA's are for fresh vegetables, but depending on what's available in your area, you can usually find CSA's that include fruit, eggs, meat, and even flowers. There are CSA's almost everywhere, even if you live in a major city; for more information on what's available in your area, just do an internet search for "CSA (your city name)", and go from there.

Buy strategically from farmers

This piece of advice relates to the previous one about CSA's, as well as any visits you may make to local farmer's markets, local farms, etc. If you are both a good customer who consistently does business with them, and a friendly person who strikes up conversations and develops a relationship with them, farmers will sometimes be willing to reward your loyalty with deals they don't offer to random strangers.

If you participate in a CSA, farm share or meat share, shop at a farmer's market, or have any other direct contact with farmers, you can sometimes take advantage of situational deals based on the farmer having surplus food. For example, if you show up to a farmer's market at the end of the day, farmer's will sometimes offer their remaining produce at a discount, because otherwise it will go to waste. Another example is that some farmer's may be willing to give you a discount on some of their less popular items like bones, organs, or fat (and may even give them to you for free), if no one else wants them.

It helps if you have a relationship with the farmer in question: if they like you and know that you're a loyal customer, they'll be much more likely to offer you a deal. But even if you don't have a relationship with the farmers you're buying from, it can't hurt to ask!

Buy frozen

Although fresh foods are often touted as being the healthiest choice (and sometimes are), frozen foods are actually extremely healthy as well, and they have the added benefit of generally being more convenient and less expensive. This guideline does not apply to prepared frozen dinners and similar items, but specifically to basic ingredients like produce and meat. These frozen foods actually maintain a lot of their nutrient density, because they're usually flash-frozen immediately after harvesting, and the freezing process preserves the nutrients extremely well.

It's uncommon to find good-quality frozen animal products (although seafood is often frozen, and the frozen version is usually cheaper than the fresh stuff). However, you can find tons of different fruits and vegetables in the freezer aisle that are inexpensive and super convenient to store. It's great to have a variety of fruits and veggies sitting in your freezer ready and waiting.

The only downside is that the texture of the produce is pretty much ruined by freezing and then re-heating it, and will pretty much always end up soggy and limp. This can be a deal breaker if you're trying to make a dish that relies heavily on the flavor and texture of fresh produce (like salad), but for dishes where the produce is part of a mixture, baked good, or blend (like smoothies, paleo baked goods, veggie frittatas, etc), the difference in texture is usually completely unnoticeable. So as long as you have dishes that can take full advantage of it, buying frozen produce is the way to go.

Buy canned

Canned goods are similar to frozen goods in their benefits: they have a long shelf life and are usually significantly less expensive then their fresh counterparts. For certain foods they also have the advantage of coming semi-prepared: for example, buying a can of pumpkin puree is much more convenient than buying a whole pumpkin, scraping out the seeds, scooping out the flesh, cooking it, and pureeing it yourself.

The only sacrifice you make with canned goods is that more nutrients are lost during the canning process than with other storage methods, making them a bit less nutrient-dense than their fresh or frozen counterparts. However, this nutrient loss isn't too severe, and the majority of the food's nutrients are left intact, so canned goods are still a great option in terms of both saving money and keeping a stockpile of paleo goods with a long shelf life.

Only buy fresh produce when it's local and/or in season

Fresh produce is most expensive when it's out of season and/or flown in from some distant region. When produce isn't canned or frozen, it has a short shelf life, and is easily damaged, bruised, etc, which makes it more difficult and expensive to ship. You as the final consumer end up paying for all this extra shipping and handling.

If you really want fresh produce, this means that the best way to buy it is local and in-season. This will be easy for people who live in a warm area where crops can be grown year-round, and slightly trickier for people who live in areas where the winters get cold (since, by definition, there is no local produce being grown when there's snow on the ground). But regardless of where you live, almost everyone has access to local and in-season produce for at least part of the year.

The best places to find local produce are farmer's markets, as well as the previously-mentioned CSA's. Most health food co-ops also make an effort to buy locally and in-season, so if you have one of these co-ops in your area, be sure to call them and ask about their policy on buying locally and seasonally.

A final benefit to buying local produce is that it tastes amazing! It is literally the freshest food you can possibly get your hands on, and was often picked just a day or two before you bought it. This means that most locally produced fruits and vegetables taste rich and aromatic, are beautifully textured, and extremely flavorful. Combined with the fact that they're often saving you money, and this makes local in-season produce a great deal!

Make your own salad dressings, condiments, and sauces

A lot of people don't think about it, because buying pre-made dressings, sauces, and condiments from the grocery store is relatively inexpensive. However, compared to the cost of simply mixing the raw ingredients yourself, the markup on these pre-made products is actually quite steep.

Sometimes the extra cost of doing this is worth it for the sake of saving yourself some time and effort. However, not only will you save money when making these items yourself, but the final product will also usually be much healthier, because store-bought dressings, sauces, and condiments usually contain unwanted ingredients like refined sugars, hydrogenated vegetable oils, and a host of chemical flavorings, dyes, and preservatives. This makes the appeal of homemade versions much higher, since you can cut out these nasty extras and use only the healthiest ingredients.

Making these foods yourself will also usually result in a more fresh-tasting and flavorful product. This can be a result of the fact that you're using fresh ingredients, or just using a better recipe that fits your tastes more than a generic store-bought brand. But when you make things like salad dressings and condiments yourself, they almost always end up having a better taste and texture.

In short, mass-produced dressings, sauces, condiments, and other products that were made in a factory and sit on shelves for weeks at a time are usually less flavorful, less healthy, and more expensive than the stuff you can make yourself. So look up some recipes and procedures for healthy paleo versions of your favorite staples, and try whipping up a batch for yourself (for starters, the Recipe section in this book contains recipes for paleo mayo, salsa, and marinara). Once you try freshly-made versions of these condiments, you may never go back to buying the store-bought versions again.

Buy part of a cow

This strategy is related to the general idea of buying in bulk, but it applies specifically to a method for procuring high-quality, pasture-raised beef at a price that is equal to, or lower than, low-quality discount factory-farmed beef. It's called "cowpooling".

To start with, if you don't already have a freezer chest, invest in an inexpensive one; this upfront investment is necessary, but will be quickly repaid in the amount of money you save on inexpensive, high-quality beef over the coming months and years. If possible, you can sometimes even find used freezer chests very cheaply on sites like Craigslist to cut down this start-up cost even more.

Next, find a local "cowpooling" resource; this is an organized relationship with a local farmer or rancher whereby a person or group of people purchase an entire butchered cow directly. Don't worry: you're not actually buying a cow carcass! All you have to do is buy a portion of a cow (usually a half or quarter cow - the rest will be sold to other people like you). Then the farmer kills one of their cows, pays for it to be butchered, processed, and packaged, and turns your share of the meat over to you.

The final product is just a large quantity of professionally butchered and packaged meat, just like you'd find in a grocery store. The only difference is that you're buying it directly from the producer, just like when you buy produce through a CSA or farmer's market, and you're buying the meat in bulk, so you take delivery of all your meat at once.

The meat you get from a cowpool is high-quality, pasture-raised, grass-fed beef, and includes pretty much every cut of beef imaginable. A large portion of it will be ground beef, but  you'll also get sirloin and T-bone steaks, beef ribs, and even nutritious "leftover" parts like soup bones and organ meats, all neatly cut up and packaged for you from the butcher. The overall cost of this meat usually works out to a few dollars a pound (depending on where you live, what specific source you're buying from, etc) - in other words, about the same price you'd pay at most grocery stores for low-quality factory farmed hamburger meat. And that price includes not only basics like ground beef, but pricey cuts like ribs and steaks too!

The availability of cowpooling varies quite a bit based on where you live: if you'd like to find out what options are available to you in your area, just do an internet search for "cowpooling + (your city or state)". You can also try inquiring at your local co-op grocer or butcher shop. Since cowpooling is still a bit of a niche market, it can sometimes take a little legwork to track down a good source; but once you've found a way to do it, your initial time investment will be repaid many times over in high-quality, delicious meat that saves you money.

Buy "thrift cuts"

When most people buy meat, they opt for the most tender cuts that can be cooked quickly and easily and then eaten right away; this drives up the price of these tender cuts pretty significantly. So instead of buying these tender cuts, opt for tougher cuts like shoulders, hocks, shanks, cubed stew meat, etc. These cuts are just as flavorful, and if you cook them properly, just as tender, but since they're less popular they usually cost much less (sometimes half as much as the more popular cuts).

Cooking these cuts isn't even particularly difficult, it just takes a bit longer. One of the best ways to cook these cuts is with a slow cooker or crock pot; all you have to is toss your meat and other ingredients in the slow cooker, turn it on, and then come back a few hours later to a delicious meal. The slow cooking process tenderizes even the toughest cuts of meat, which means you can save a significant amount of money by simply adding more slow cooker meals to your regular diet (in fact, if you'd like to learn all about slow cooking, including dozens of inexpensive, easy, and extremely flavorful recipes, we have a book devoted entirely to this subject; it's called Paleo Slow Cooking, and needless to say, if you're interested in paleo slow cooking, we think you should check it out!).

Another great option for inexpensive cuts of meat  is to buy ground meat. Although ground beef is the most popular, you can also get ground pork, chicken, turkey, and often lamb as well. These ground meats can sometimes be substituted for other cuts of the same type of meat in many recipes, and there are also lots of recipes designed to work specifically with ground meats, like meatballs and chili. They're just as nutritious and flavorful as other cuts, and usually just as easy to cook, so you're getting the best of both worlds.

So next time you're at the meat counter, consider trying out the tougher, less popular cuts, or the cheaper ground meats, and avoid the more expensive cuts like steaks and roasts. You'll get the exact same type of meat, and your wallet will thank you.

Buy whole chickens and fish

Buying whole chickens and fish (in which the meat is still attached to the skin and bones) is less convenient than buying the pre-cut and skinned filets of the same kind. However, because it's less convenient, it's also significantly cheaper. And it comes with a few fringe benefits as well. For example if you eat pasture-raised chickens and wild-caught fish, the skin is a healthy source of nutrients, and tastes delicious when cooked properly. You can even save chicken and fish bones to make bone broth/stock, which can be used as a rich, nutritious base for soups and stews. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors always made use of the whole animal, and there are benefits for modern people doing it too!

Stop wasting food

This may sound like an obvious piece of advice, but the vast majority of people waste more food than they realize.

You can start by getting in the habit of saving certain types of food you used to throw away. For example, you can save the bones from any meat you eat to make bone broth for soups and stews. You can also collect the pan drippings from when you cook meat, filter out the crispy bits by pouring the liquid fat through a strainer, and save this liquid fat to cook with.

You can also start planning your food purchases more carefully, so that the food you buy doesn't spoil before you have a chance to eat it. A certain amount of trial and error is inevitable when you first start a new way of eating, so don't worry too much about throwing food away if you try a new recipe that doesn't work out, or buy too much food on your first few paleo trips to the grocery store. However, once you start to get the hang of eating paleo, you should be able to plan out how much food you'll eat in a week more precisely, so that at the end of the week there aren't extra leftovers going to waste.

You should also be more consistent in your eating and cooking habits, so that paleo ingredients doesn't sit in your fridge uneaten while you go out for pizza!

Finally, if you have some extra food in your fridge that is in danger of going bad, start getting in the habit of freezing it if possible. This doesn't work for all foods, but things like meat, fruit, and vegetables all freeze well, and even when frozen they can easily be baked or blended into various tasty dishes.

Find extra money in your food budget

Most people, without their knowledge, have some extra money in their food budget that they can free up with some simple changes. The exact places where this money is "hiding" will vary from person to person, but almost everyone has a few areas where they're spending extra money for convenience that they don't really need.

One very common example in America is coffee. A lot of people buy themselves a cup of coffee from a coffee shop, gas station, or fast food drivethrough at least a few days per week (if not every day!). Even if it only costs them a dollar or two, brewing the same cup of coffee at home only costs a few cents, even when using pricier high-quality coffee beans. Even if you're just buying basic black coffee (much less the fancier espresso drinks), if you have a daily coffee habit you can save yourself a dollar or two per day over the course of an entire month - that $30-$60 dollars can buy you a few weeks' worth of grass-fed ground beef, and you don't even need to give up your coffee to get it!

There are many other areas where you can potentially make similar easy tradeoffs to find extra money in your budget - packing your own lunch for work rather than eating out, making your own snacks (like energy bars or beef jerky) rather than buying them pre-packaged, etc.

Don't inconvenience yourself too much if you don't have to (spending a little extra money on convenience is worth it if it helps you stick to a healthy diet!), but take a look at where you're spending your food budget, and if necessary, take some of the money you're spending on convenient food and spend it on healthy food instead.

Find extra money in your other budgets

The focus of this book is on eating habits, which is why almost all of the advice in this chapter is focused on saving you money specifically in your food budget. However, if you're going to make healthy eating a big priority in your life, you might want to consider checking out your spending habits in other areas of your life, and strategically transferring some of that money to your new healthy lifestyle.

There are a million ways that people can do this, so you'll ultimately have to evaluate for yourself how this strategy applies to you. But there are a few common examples we can use to illustrate the general idea.

For example, one common area people can save money on is their cell phone bill; people commonly spend a ton of money on their phone plan every month without even thinking about it. At the time of this writing, it's possible to get a basic prepaid phone plan (which includes talk, text, and data) for as little as $30 per month. Compare that to most people, who often spend $100 per month on a fancier plan that they don't need - the $70 difference between these two plans could buy you a week's worth of groceries!

There are dozens of other areas where similar easy tradeoffs can be made: entertainment (TV, movies, live shows, etc), eating out, clothes shopping, etc. We don't want you to give up anything you love in order to eat healthy (and we don't think you have to!), but we would definitely encourage you to take a look at your monthly spending in other areas of your life, and see if you can use some of that money to help finance your healthy new lifestyle!

Start a garden (indoors or outdoors)

Growing your own food (or at least some of it), can be an extremely rewarding experience on a number of levels. Rather than being "work" in the normal sense of the word, most people find the experience of gardening to be relaxing, enjoyable, and sometimes even therapeutic. The fresh air and sunshine is healthy and invigorating, it contributes to your daily quota of low-intensity exercise, and it's surprisingly effective at relieving stress.

And of course, there are the financial and culinary benefits as well. Having an abundant supply of fresh, delicious, fruits, vegetables, and herbs will transform your cooking: nothing tastes quite like food prepared with ingredients that were literally picked the same day in your own backyard. And the cost you pay as a gardener for some of the most delicious produce you'll ever eat is pennies on the dollar. You'll particularly notice the cost difference with more expensive items like berries (and freshly picked berries taste amazing!).

If you don't have access to an outdoor area where you can garden, you can still get a few of the benefits of gardening by growing your own herbs indoors. Most herbs can be grown in simple pots like any household plant, and are extremely easy to take care of; all they need is some water, light, and room to grow. If you have a family, teaching your kids to plant and harvest herbs is a great experience; kids love to watch a plant they're caring for grow and flourish. And did we mention: flavoring your food with your own fresh herbs tastes absolutely fantastic.

Growing your own produce requires an initial investment of time and effort, so it isn't going to appeal to everyone. But if you're willing to put in a little work on the front end, the practice of growing your own food is an extremely rewarding one.

Learn to hunt and/or fish

Hunting and fishing isn't for everyone, because it definitely requires an investment in time, money, and learning when you first get started. But if you've ever thought you might enjoy hunting or fishing, a good reason to learn more about it is that in the long run it can save you a ton of money on high-quality meat and fish.

Once you make an initial investment in equipment and permits, you can get a large amount of very high-quality food that is more nutritious than anything you can find in a store. Wild-caught fish, deer, elk, and other animals have lived off wild food their entire life, which means they're eating their natural diet: this, in turn, makes their meat extremely nutritious.

Fishing is easier to start with than hunting, because once you catch a fish it's very easy and quick to clean, and can then be stored in a cooler or cooked up on the spot over a fire.

Hunting requires a bit more work, particularly for larger animals like deer, which you'll need to haul to a butcher (or learn to butcher yourself), but yields a ton of meat. Your initial financial investment in a gun and license, and your initial time investment in learning the necessary skills, can potentially lead you to gaining hundreds of pounds of delicious, highly-nutritious meat, and save you thousands of dollars over the course of a year. There are other types of hunting you can also investigate, like turkey or duck hunting, which will yield less meat but are easier to handle (since the animals are smaller).

Hunting and fishing, since they're strictly regulated, are also very good for the environment.  
They keep local animal populations in check, and reduce the amount of food that needs to be produced through our current fossil-fuel intensive system. Hunting and fishing (as long as you're doing it legally, to allow for responsible regulation) are by definition some of the most local and sustainable meat sources in existence.

If you live anywhere near good areas for hunting and fishing, and if you think you might enjoy the process of learning these skills, hunting and fishing can be an enjoyable excuse to get out in the great outdoors, a rewarding way to learn new skills, and a source of inexpensive, super high quality food.

Befriend a hunter

The lazy person's version of the above tactic! If you can't (or don't want to) learn to hunt yourself, reaching out to any of your friends and family members who hunt can be just as good. Many hunters who hunt large game like deer have more meat than they know what to do with (since the animals usually way several hundred pounds), and are happy to part with some of it.

If the hunters you know are particularly generous, they may give you some meat for free. However, when emailing friends and family to ask if anyone hunts, be sure to say that you'd be willing to pay them a few dollars per pound for any surplus meat they don't want (remember, hunting costs them time, effort, and money). Even if you end up paying a few dollars a pound for your meat, it will be less expensive, and almost certainly more healthy, than any meat you could find in a grocery store.

Pick your own food

If you happen to live near a commercial orchard or similar operation, many of these businesses will have special deals during harvest season where they allow people to pick their own fruit at a discounted rate. The orchard benefits because you supply the labor and transportation for them, and you benefit by getting a large amount of fresh, local, delicious fruit that you can take home and freeze or otherwise preserve.

The cost and convenience of this option will depend on where you live. Not only do you have to live near an orchard or similar place, you also need to make sure the price is lower than the fruit you would normally buy at a grocery store. Be sure to compare the cost per pound, as well as paying attention to the quality of the food itself.

That being said, even if picking your own fruit isn't a huge financial savings, if you have a family it can be a fun activity. And if you find a place where you can save some money, all the better!

Eat more eggs

Eggs are relatively inexpensive for how nutrient-dense they are, providing a rich source of high-quality protein, healthy fat, and (if sourced from pasture-raised chickens) a diverse array of vital micronutrients.

You can often get pastured eggs fairly inexpensively if you buy them directly from a farmer or find another good local source, but even if you're forced to pay a premium for your eggs, remember that paying $5 a dozen still gets you four meals' worth of nutrient-rich protein. And since eggs are one of the most versatile foods around, forming the base for literally hundreds of different dishes and flavor combinations, you can eat them all the time without getting sick of them.

Eat more healthy fats and oils

Compared to other foods, fat is extremely calorie-dense, which means that in terms of cost-per-calorie, healthy fats are one of the most cost-effective calorie sources out there.

You can use healthy fats to increase the amount of healthy calories in your diet by focusing on fat-rich foods like avocados, eggs, and fattier cuts of meat (for example, chicken thighs vs. chicken breasts), grass-fed butter (if you're comfortable including it in your diet), etc. These foods may not seem inexpensive when you look at their sticker price, but their cost-per-calorie and nutrient density make them a great deal.

An even more cost effective strategy is to make use of healthy oils, like olive and coconut oil. These oils don't contain micronutrients like whole foods, but are pure healthy fat, and they're extremely cheap on a cost-per-calorie basis. Olive oil in particular can be purchased very inexpensively (as long as you aren't buying gourmet brands), it can be added to almost any dish (including sauces, smoothies, drizzled on salads, etc) and a single tablespoon contains 120 calories of pure healthy fat. Canned coconut milk is another great option, with cans generally costing about $1.50 and containing hundreds of super healthy calories and around 70 grams of healthy fat, as well as being a super-versatile ingredient in all kinds of paleo dishes.

If you can find ways to bump up the healthy fat content of your food, you'll be able to strike a nice balance between reducing the average cost-per-calorie of a meal while still getting your calories from a healthy source.

Cut down on eating out

This has been alluded to once or twice in previous tips, but it's worth focusing on. You can totally eat paleo at restaurants if you're smart about your choices, and you're encouraged to keep going out for meals with friends and family; no one wants you to become a hermit! That being said, if you eat out regularly (or order take out because you don't feel like cooking, etc), you can free up an absolutely shocking amount of money by cutting back on this habit.

Paying someone else to prepare and serve your food doubles or triples the cost of your meal, even if you're eating at a relatively cheap place like a fast food restaurant, deli, etc. If this extra convenience helps you stick with the paleo diet, and you can afford it, then by all means keep eating out! Staying healthy is worth the extra money if you can afford it (see the previous chapter, Eating Paleo at Restaurants, for strategies when eating out).

However, if you're reading this chapter, you probably are concerned about how much money you're spending on your food, and for many people (particularly if you're a city or suburb dweller), eating out at least a few times a week is just part of the culture. If this description fits you, we'd encourage you to take a hard look at how much money you're spending at restaurants, and really ask yourself if this particular luxury is worth the extra cost.

For starters, preparing your own delicious home-cooked meals will drastically reduce how much you're spending on food, even if you buy really high-quality paleo ingredients and prepare borderline-gourmet dishes. It will also give you more control over the ingredients you use, and almost invariably will be healthier. You can certainly find healthy paleo options at restaurants, but there are certain things you just won't be able to find (like restaurants that use meat from pasture-raised animals, for example).

And there are fringe benefits to home-cooking as well. For example, if you don't know how to cook, taking this opportunity to learn will not only save you some money, but teach you an extremely valuable life skill that you (and your friends and family) will benefit from for literally the rest of your life. If you have a family, preparing meals together can be a great way to get some quality family time together. And if you're looking for interesting, inexpensive things to do with your friends, inviting them over and introducing them to exotic new paleo foods can be a lot of fun.

The bottom line is that when it comes to saving money, preparing your own meals beats eating out hands down. So if you're concerned about your food budget, but are still in the habit of eating out a lot, start cultivating a new habit of preparing your own delicious paleo meals at home.

Avoid ingredients you can't completely use

It's pretty common for people to read a great new recipe and run right out to buy the ingredients for it without first making sure that they can actually use all of the ingredients. For example, it's pretty common for people to buy a whole head of lettuce, use a fourth of it to make dinner, and then let the rest sit in the fridge until it gets thrown away, just because they can't think of what to do with the rest of it. And this person will probably never stop to realize that in practice, they just quadrupled the price of the lettuce they used.

Sometimes this kind of waste is unavoidable, but over the long term it's not good financial planning to pay for things you're going to throw away!

There are a number of ways to avoid falling into this trap. First, you can make sure that the meal you're planning will entirely use up all your ingredients (such as a large meal for your whole family). Second, you can make large batches of food with the expectation that they'll be stored and eaten throughout the week. Third, you can preserve leftover ingredients by freezing them (as long as they're the types of ingredients that won't be ruined by freezing, of course). And finally, you can simply be careful to choose recipes that don't require any highly-specialized ingredients that you have no other use for.

Combined, all of these strategies have the potential to cut your food waste (and by extension, your wasted food dollars) down to zero.

Find paleo-friendly coupons if you can

Unfortunately, coupons aren't usually a very effective money-saving strategy for people who practice paleo, simply because most stores don't offer many (if any) coupons for whole, unprocessed foods like meat, fruit, vegetables, etc. However, the stores in your area may be an exception to this rule, and there are also some paleo items which are put on sale more than others, so if you're willing to spend a little time hunting and clipping coupons, it's worth a shot.

In particular, you may be able to find coupons for certain paleo-friendly foods like coconut or olive oil, eggs, nut butters, etc. You can also expand your coupon search online, as digital coupons are becoming increasingly common. And when in doubt, don't be afraid to ask the staff at your favorite grocery store where the best place is to find coupons for that store.

Compromise if necessary

Sometimes, you have to pay for quality, and the way many paleo dieters do this is by buying pasture-raised animal products and organic produce. These options are great, but if you're really strapped for cash, you may want to consider compromising and buying the "conventional" versions of these foods.

Pasture-raised animal products are undoubtedly healthier than factor-farmed animal products, and most paleo enthusiasts also prefer organic fruits and veggies. But keep in mind that eating grain fed meat and conventionally-grown produce is still way healthier than eating a standard modern diet based around grain, legumes, and vegetable oils. It doesn't have to be all or nothing; just do the best you can.

Remember this basic principle: a diet based around factory-farmed animal products and conventional fruits and veggies is way healthier than a diet of organic white bread and sugar!

Recognize how much money you're already saving

It may seem counterintuitive, but when you start to really adopt paleo eating habits as a regular part of your lifestyle, you'll actually be automatically saving money in all kinds of little ways that you may not even notice.

You may start giving up small health expenses, like spending less on cold medicine, not having to buy acne cream, or going to the doctor less often. You may find yourself eating out less often, or when you do, saving a few dollars here and there because you skipped having soda, dessert, or booze with your meal. There may even be some big expenses that you've saved on, like reducing or eliminating your need for prescription drugs to manage a chronic health condition.

You're definitely going to want to use as many of the tricks in this chapter as possible to cut down on how much you're spending on healthy, wholesome paleo food. But even though the paleo lifestyle may sometimes seem more expensive, it pays to remember that one of the best ways in the world to save money is to be healthy!

# Saving Time on Paleo

Although we've already covered an extensive list of strategies in the previous chapter on how to save money while eating paleo, for many people, their primary concern is saving time while eating paleo. Some people have a job that allows them to buy as much grass-fed beef and organic produce as their heart desires, and some people are willing to scrimp and save for high-quality food, but everyone could use more time.

Regardless of your situation, it's valid to be concerned about paleo cooking taking more time, at least to some degree. After all, preparing home cooked meals out of nutritious whole foods is almost always going to take more time than just throwing a frozen pizza in the oven or nuking a microwave dinner. However, there are definitely some strategies you can use to cut down on the amount of time you spend shopping for and preparing the beautiful, healthy, mouth-watering foods that form the core of the paleo diet. Utilizing the strategies below will allow you to save hours of unnecessary cooking and shopping time every week, while still enjoying some of the best food in the world.

Plan Ahead

Most people waste the majority of their food-related time on bad planning and disorganization. Fortunately, all you really need to do to prevent this is to make a simple but detailed plan of what you're going to be eating for the next week or two and a correspondingly accurate grocery list.

This saves you time in two ways. First, it prevents you from doddering around your kitchen every meal wondering what you're going to be eating, looking through your fridge and cupboards, flipping aimlessly through recipe books, etc. If you know what you're going to be eating in advance, all you have to do is walk into the kitchen and make it!

Second, it prevents you from wasting time on unnecessary trips to the grocery store to pick up extra items you forgot. Even one needless trip (including dealing with traffic, parking, etc), can cost you an extra hour of boring errand time.

It may seem a bit tedious to plan out your meals for the week if you aren't used to it. But all you have to do is look up a few of your favorite recipes and write out a grocery list, and you're done! Between speeding up the meal preparation process and preventing unnecessary trips to the store, this simple weekly ritual will save you at least 2-3 hours per week.

Stock up on staples

For any cooking ingredients that you use on a regular basis , which also have very long shelf lives (nuts, olive or coconut oil, coconut or almond flour, frozen produce, canned goods, etc), you should consider buying large amounts of these items in bulk and keeping them on hand at all times.

This has two benefits. First, buying in bulk will often save you money on the per-unit cost of that item, which is always nice. Second, having a large supply of all your dietary staples means you'll need to make fewer trips to the grocery store to get them, and are also in less danger of running out at an inconvenient time. It also gives you the flexibility to try out new recipes on a whim, without having to make a special trip for ingredients. It's a real win-win strategy; the only thing that limits its usefulness is how much storage space you have.

Note that this strategy also applies to common household goods like toothpaste, toilet paper, soap, etc. If you have enough storage space to stockpile several months worth of goods at a time, it will allow you to visit the grocery store (as well as the drug store, supplement shop, etc) significantly less often.

Choose time-efficient recipes

This strategy may sound obvious at first, but when many people adopt a paleo diet they get distracted by all the creative, beautiful gourmet paleo dishes they can make, and forget that some of these amazing dishes unfortunately require them to spend a ton of time in the kitchen.

This is great if you're a foodie and like experimenting with new recipes and dishes. It's also perfectly normal if you're a paleo cooking novice (or just new to cooking in general), because when you first start learning a new skill it takes some extra time to get used to.

However, if you're finding that paleo cooking seems like it's taking up a lot of your time, you should consider that it might not be the case that paleo recipes take longer, but just that you're choosing the recipes that require more of a time investment than you're willing to put in.

This applies to all cooking, not just paleo cooking; for example, even with non-paleo foods, it's obviously going to take you a lot longer to make a multi-course home-cooked meal than to throw together a quick sandwich. Recipe selection matters!

So if you find yourself spending more time in the kitchen than you'd like, the first place you should start is with your recipe selection. Focus on recipes with short (or non-existent!) cooking times, relatively few ingredients, little or no prep work (like chopping, peeling, etc), and which don't require multiple stages of cooking (like cooking multiple ingredients separately). The specific recipes you choose will depend on your nutritional goals and culinary tastes, so don't be afraid to experiment!

A quick plug for some useful products:

If you're having trouble coming up with ideas for time-efficient recipes on your own, we don't mind mentioning that we've already done all the work for you! We currently offer two books that contain recipes hand-picked to be easy, tasty, and very time-efficient. The first is Paleo On the Go, a collection of recipes designed specifically to fit into a busy lifestyle without sacrificing the healthiness of the food or how good it tastes. The second is Paleo Slow Cooking, a book of delicious slow cooker recipes which allow you to pretty much just chop up some ingredients, throw them in your slow cooker, turn it on and walk away (paleo cooking doesn't get much simpler than that).

If you're interested in cutting down on the amount of time you spend in the kitchen, we think these two books will make it easy and painless for you to do just that, and we hope you'll check them out!

Prepare ingredients in advance

Although the overall amount of time it takes to prepare a given recipe is always going to be more or less the same, you can save yourself a surprising amount of extra "transition" time by prepping at least some of the individual ingredients for those recipes in advance. This involves choosing one or two days per week in which to prep several day's worth of ingredients; things like peeling and chopping veggies, combining dry spice mixes, grinding nuts, etc.

This serves two purposes. First, it drastically cuts down on your clean up time for any given set of ingredients (you'll be cleaning your dishes and appliances once or twice a week, rather than every time you make a given recipe). More importantly, it allows you to quickly throw meals together at a moment's notice throughout the week, even when you're strapped for time, as long as you've prepped some versatile ingredients. For example, diced/shredded/chopped veggies, combined with leftover meat from the previous night's dinner, can be combined with eggs to make a quick omelet or scramble, or some spinach or lettuce for a salad (with a simple olive oil and vinegar dressing).

This approach can be taken for almost any specific recipe you plan on making regularly: dry ingredients like almond/coconut flour and spices can be mixed in advance, fruit can be pureed, meat can be marinaded, etc.

Some ingredients aren't as suitable for this as others: for example, anything that involves actual cooking should be done right before you eat, so that your food tastes as fresh as possible. Similarly, there are some ingredients which will last longer than others: spice mixes, for example, will last forever, but chopped veggies will wilt faster than whole veggies.

If you're interested in trying this approach, go look over the recipes you plan on making for the next week and see which individual ingredients from those recipes can be prepared ahead of time in one big batch - you may be able to save yourself an extra few hours of cooking and cleanup this week.

Prepare meals in advance

Just like you can prepare individual ingredients in advance, you can sometimes prepare entire meals in advance to save yourself lots of time.

In most cases, it would be more accurate to say that you're mostly preparing a meal in advance, since it's very seldom that a home cooked meal will taste good without being actually freshly cooked. For example, if you'd like to have a marinaded meat dish for dinner, you can prepare the marinade and leave several meals' worth of meat to soak in it - this gives you several mostly-finished dinners ready to go in your fridge, where all you have to do is take as much meat as you want out of the marinade and pop it in the oven in order to have a delicious dinner.

You can use the same strategy for many types of mixture-based recipes, like paleo-friendly baked goods. In this case, you could prepare the dough or batter for a recipe like paleo bread, muffins, or pancakes, leave the batter in your fridge until you're ready to go, and then cook it up to have oven-fresh baked goods on command.

Additionally, there are a few recipes that can be prepared entirely in advance, since they don't have to be freshly cooked in order to be tasty. You can make paleo trail mix, bake or dehydrate some beef jerky, or mix up some assorted salad greens, to name a few examples, without the preparation process affecting the shelf life of any of the ingredients.

Have your groceries delivered

If you live in an urban area, there's a good chance that there is at least one grocery delivery service in your city that will deliver groceries straight to your doorstep. These services sometimes charge a fee, but the fee is small, and offset by the cost of gas if you drove yourself to the store anyway (not to mention your precious time!). And the cost of the actual food items is always very competitive with any standard grocery store (sometimes even cheaper, if you're lucky).

This may only be useful for certain staple items, and it may be hard to find some of the better paleo options, like grass-fed/pasture-raised animal products. But if you're just looking to pick up some basic staples like produce (both fresh and frozen), nuts, sweet potatoes, canned goods, and similar common items, it's worth looking into if you live in an area where it's available.

Buy (and use!) a freezer chest

Buying a freezer chest requires a moderate initial investment of money, but it allows you to stockpile a huge amount of food. You'll need to focus on items that can be easily frozen, like meat, vegetables, and fruit; luckily, these items form the core of the paleo diet!

Having a bountiful supply of grass-fed beef and colorful frozen produce ready and waiting in your freezer is a massive time saver (especially compounded over the course of several months where you rarely have to make a trip to the store). Additionally, you can make up the cost of your investment in the freezer chest by buying food in bulk at discounted prices, buying tons of food on sale and freezing it, etc, which means you'll make back your money plus interest.

If you have the necessary space and a little money for the initial purchase, a freezer chest is a great option.

Enlist family and friends

If you're used to cooking solo, try reaching out to your friends, family, and loved ones to get them to lend a hand. Even if they don't know anything about cooking, you can put them to work at simple tasks like washing produce, chopping or mixing ingredients, or even just helping with the clean up. Not only does it give you some extra help, and make the time go faster, but it's also a great excuse to share some time with people you care about.

If you usually cook for a significant other, tell them that you need their help with preparing the meals you're eating. If you have friends who are also interested in paleo, get together and do your meal prep for the week together. And if you have kids, you can certainly order them to help!

Besides getting to spend some extra time with your friends and family, it's also a great opportunity to teach them some valuable cooking skills if they don't already know how to cook. Your boyfriend/girlfriend/spouse will be able to pick up at least a few recipes from you, so that they can help out if you're ever too busy to cook, and your kids will get an early start on learning how to be self-sufficient and make their own healthy paleo food when they grow up. And you'll be able to do all of this while getting more cooking done in less time - it's a win-win for everyone involved.

Don't be afraid of wasting time at first!

Finally, we'd like to point out that if you're new to paleo cooking (or cooking in general!) you probably shouldn't get too hung up on maximizing your time efficiency when you're first starting out. Learning any new skill takes a bit of adjustment when you're getting started, but many people don't realize this about cooking; they think that they should be just be able to read a recipe and immediately jump into it with no mistakes, even if they have no experience.

Getting a basic grasp of paleo cooking (even enough of a grasp to impress your friends and family) is pretty easy to learn, but there will still be some trial and error at first. You'll need to experiment with different cooking and food prepping routines to see what fits your schedule, try out different recipes to see what types of dishes fit your taste and which don't, learn a few new methods of cooking, and so on.

If you're already an experienced cook, this initial adjustment period will probably be relatively short, but if you're starting with zero experience, there will probably be more of a learning curve.

Remember, any time that you "waste" in the beginning of your paleo journey is an investment in your future self. Once you get the hang of things, making delicious, healthy paleo food for yourself and your loved ones will become faster, easier, and smoother. So if you're just starting out, just focus on learning the ropes, and let yourself "waste" a little time. Then, when you've gotten your bearings and are more comfortable with the fundamentals of the paleo lifestyle, you can comfortably start experimenting with the tips and tricks in this chapter to make your healthy paleo eating habits as fast, efficient, and streamlined as possible.

#

#

# Beginner-Friendly Paleo Recipes

## Introduction to the Recipes

To get you started on your paleo journey, we've hand-picked a selection of beginner-friendly, easy to make, and absolutely delicious paleo recipes!

Our criteria for choosing these recipes were that they should include a broad sampling of the many types of paleo dishes out there: entrees, side dishes, desserts, meat, vegetables, smoothies, baked goods, finger foods, and more!

We were also very strict about only including recipes that could be made with basic, inexpensive equipment, and which are relatively quick and easy to make - starting a big lifestyle change can be challenging, so you don't need the extra challenge of spending all day in the kitchen.

And finally, our most important criteria was that each recipe should be super tasty! There are lots of simple, healthy paleo recipes out there which are designed more for being healthy than for gratifying your taste buds. But we don't think you should have to choose! If you're going to make the paleo diet a healthy, lifelong habit, it's absolutely vital that you enjoy your food! And we think the recipes we've selected for you meet this challenge admirably.

As soon as you'd like to broaden your collection of recipes, we hope you'll check out some of the great recipe books that are part of the Practical Paleo Series. We have  a wide range of books available on specialized topics (like desserts, smoothies, slow cooker dishes, etc), so that you don't have to waste time and effort hunting for high-quality paleo recipes: we've done all the work for you.

But in the meantime, we know you'll absolutely love these starter recipes, and we hope they'll provide you with a great foundation of easy, healthy, mouth-watering paleo dishes to get you started on your exciting new journey into the paleo diet!

## Ingredient Discussion

The vast majority of the ingredients used in the recipes in this book are self-explanatory, and almost all are commonplace in paleo cooking. However, there are some ingredients that require a little more explanation; some of them aren't widely agreed on as being strictly paleo, and some of them simply require clarification regarding where they should be sourced, how they should be used, etc.

### Cooking Oils

For any recipe that calls for cooking oil, you can choose from any of the options listed in the Healthy Oils section of the Paleo Food List and Reference Guide chapter.

### Butter

Butter (specifically grass-fed butter) has already been discussed in the Paleo Food List and Reference Guide chapter as a healthy semi-paleo food.

However, if you're a strict paleo purist (or extremely sensitive to lactose, casein, etc), and don't want to consume any dairy whatsoever, butter can usually be replaced with either coconut butter or coconut oil (depending on the recipe). For a compromise approach, you can also experiment with using ghee, a type of "clarified butter" that is 100% pure butterfat (i.e. animal fat), rendered down so that all lactose and dairy proteins have been completely removed.

When using any of these foods as a substitute for "normal" butter, be sure to experiment with the recipe carefully to ensure that the change in ingredients doesn't negatively impact the taste or texture of the dish.

Finally, if you do opt to use butter in the suggested recipes, be sure to use grass-fed butter, not conventional, factory-farmed butter from grain-fed cows. If you aren't sure where to get butter that's grass-fed, a common (and highly recommended) brand that you can find in most grocery stores is Kerrygold. Kerrygold is an Irish company that unfortunately doesn't list on the label that it's butter is from grass-fed cows. However, not only is this brand grass-fed, it's also widely lauded for its excellent taste and texture.

Remember, the previously-discussed health benefits of butter only apply if it's grass-fed! So if you can't find butter from grass-fed cows, you might want to skip it altogether and use a more paleo-friendly substitute.

### Alcohol

Note that small amounts of alcohol are used in a few of the recipes in this book. Alcohol really isn't primal (setting aside any arguments about our ancestors occasionally eating fermented fruit, etc), but these recipes are included in the book because, A) the amount of alcohol used is very small (rarely more than a single tablespoon per serving), and B) the alcohol is usually entirely optional, and can easily be omitted.

### Salt

Generally speaking, you can use any type of salt in you cooking, however sea salt is probably the ideal choice. Regular table salt is simply composed of pure sodium chloride (sometimes with added iodine), which is one of the four natural electrolytes. However, sea salt contains all four types of electrolytes (sodium, potassium, magnesium, and calcium), making it a bit healthier than regular table salt.

You can use any type of salt you prefer for the recipes in this book, but whenever "salt" is listed as an ingredient, it's assumed that you'll be using natural sea salt.

### Coconut Milk

Whenever a recipe in this book calls for "coconut milk", this refers to the type of minimally processed full-fat coconut milk sold in cans for cooking, as opposed to the processed, flavored coconut milks often sold in cartons for use as beverages. Th ingredients listed on the can should usually read something like "Coconut, Water, Guar Gum" (and nothing else).

This is an important distinction: if you use "light" coconut milk, or the thin, processed coconut milk sold in cartons, it will probably negatively affect the recipe. All the recipes in this book that list "coconut milk" as an ingredient call for full-fat canned coconut milk .

### Cocoa Powder (and Chocolate)

When the term "cocoa powder" is used in a recipe, this specifically refers to pure, 100% cacao, unsweetened cocoa powder. Some cocoa powders have added sugar, flavorings, etc; be sure to avoid these, since they're less healthy than pure chocolate powder, and also completely unnecessary from a culinary standpoint (every recipe that uses cocoa powder also includes natural sweeteners and flavorings).

Also, be sure to avoid any chocolate that has been "Dutch processed" or "alkalized"; these terms (which should be listed on the packaging if they were used) refer to processes that lighten the color of chocolate and remove some of the bitter flavor. Unfortunately, they also remove most of the beneficial antioxidant content of the chocolate. To avoid this, be sure to choose a brand of cocoa powder that is either raw or roasted.

### Coconut Aminos and Tamari (Soy Sauce Alternatives)

A number of recipes in this book call for either coconut aminos or tamari. These two sauces are used by many in the paleo community as healthy alternatives to soy sauce, and are often found in Asian-inspired dishes.

Tamari is simply a type of soy sauce made without wheat: normal soy sauce is made from a fermented mixture of about half wheat and half soybeans, while tamari uses just soybeans. It's flavor is very similar to regular soy sauce, so the two can be used interchangeably without affecting the flavor of a dish much.

The only downside is that Tamari technically isn't paleo, because it's still made with soy. However, since it's only ever used in small amounts, many paleo practitioners are comfortable using it. Note that some brands of tamari do in fact use wheat (as well as other non-paleo ingredients like refined sugar), so read your labels carefully when choosing a brand.

Coconut aminos are made by simply extracting the sap from a coconut tree and combining it with salt. This makes it 100% paleo compliant (since the only two ingredients are coconut sap and salt), and also pretty healthy, since the sap contains minerals, amino acids, and vitamins. Many people also find that (depending on the brand), coconut aminos also taste very similar to soy sauce.

The only downside is that coconut aminos tend to be significantly more expensive than either soy sauce or tamari, and can be harder to find as well. Check out your local health food stores (particularly if there is a section devoted to Asian food), try to do some bargain-hunting to find a reasonably-priced brand, or simply order online.

### A Note on Animal Products

Meat and animal products are used throughout this book. Please note that, although animal products from any source will work, for the sake of your health you should ideally be using animal products from pasture-raised animals. This means grass-fed cows, pasture-raised chickens (different from "cage-free"), pigs raised in open pens with room to move, and wild-caught seafood.

Again, from a culinary standpoint, any type of animal products can be used and the recipes will still turn out delicious! But there's a reason why every paleo health expert under the sun recommends pasture-raised animal products: they have a better fatty acid profile, lower levels of environmental toxins, and are consistently higher in micronutrients than their factory-farmed counterparts. Pasture-based or wild-caught animal products are better for animal welfare, better for the environment, and better for your health!

## Equipment Guidelines

To make the majority of the recipes in this book, the basic equipment you will need is:

  * A food processor.
  * A few saucepans and frying pans.
  * An oven-safe baking dish or pan (and parchment paper to line it, for a few recipes).
  * Measuring cups and spoons.

If you don't have them, these items can all be purchased very cheaply: in fact, it's recommended that when you're first starting out, you buy the cheapest versions of these items you can find (the cheap versions work just fine, and you can decide later if you want to save up your pennies for a more expensive model).

There are also a few more specialized pieces of equipment, which are technically optional, but are helpful (or sometimes even necessary) for certain  recipes. These include:

  * Kabob skewers (for making kabobs, of course).
  * A steamer basket (used for a yummy fish recipe here, but also useful for steaming veggies).
  * A donut pan or pans (for a tasty paleo-friendly donut recipe).
  * A blender.

These items, while somewhat more specialized, can also be obtained very inexpensively if you shop around a bit, and will usually last for years with proper care.

Finally, for non-U.S. readers, note that since this book was originally published for the American market, all measurements are based on the U.S. system (weight in pounds, temperature in degrees Fahrenheit, etc). We apologize for the slight inconvenience this causes; luckily, online calculators makes it quick and easy it to convert these measurements to whatever system you use in your home country.

# The Recipes

## Super Simple Kabobs

Ingredients

1 lb of meat (beef, chicken, pork, or lamb) cut into 1-inch chunks

1 small red onion, cut into large chunks

1-2 tomatoes, cut into large chunks

1 green bell pepper, cut into large chunks

Garlic powder to taste

Salt and pepper to taste

(optional - great with lamb) rosemary and/or oregano to taste

Directions

  1. Sprinkle the cubed meat liberally with seasonings, then arrange meat and veggies in an alternating pattern on kabob skewers.
  2. For outdoor cooking, use grill to cook kebabs on all sides until browned and lightly charred.
  3. For indoor cooking, heat a frying pan over medium-high heat and cook kebabs for a few minutes per side until lightly browned. You don't want to over cook your meat.

Notes

  * If you need to cook indoors but love the taste of grilled meat, you try cooking the kabobs with a grill pan.
  * You can easily change up (or add to) the ingredients in this recipe, adding or substituting your favorite veggies. You can also use seafood instead of meat (shrimp works particularly well), or even add chunks of fresh pineapple for a sweet, tropical flavor.

## Beef Lettuce Burritos

Ingredients

1 lb ground beef

1 avocado, cubed

3-6 large Romaine lettuce leaves

1 large tomato, diced

1/2 sweet yellow onion, chopped

1-2 cloves of garlic, crushed

1-2 tsp paprika

1/2 tsp chili powder

Salt and pepper to taste

Cooking oil

(optional) hot sauce to taste

Directions

  1. Heat a frying pan over medium heat and coat with cooking oil
  2. Add onion and sautee until translucent and just slightly browned.
  3. Add garlic and beef, and sprinkle with spices, salt, and pepper while the meat cooks, stirring regularly. Continue cooking until meat is browned, then remove pan from heat.
  4. Scoop even portions of meat mixture into lettuce leaves, filling each leaf like a burrito. Top the beef mixture with diced avocado and tomato (and hot sauce, if using), then fold each lettuce leaf closed to form the burrito. Serve warm.

## Turkey Omelet

The combination of eggs and lean turkey meat make this a great high-protein breakfast option for anyone looking to lose weight or gain muscle.

Ingredients

3-4 eggs

½ cup plain, cooked turkey meat (sliced turkey breast or ground turkey)

1 small tomato, diced

1 tsp fresh dill, chopped

1 tsp dried tarragon

Salt and pepper to taste

Cooking oil

Directions

  1. In a bowl, whisk the eggs until smooth and season with salt and pepper to taste.
  2. Heat a frying pan over medium-high heat and coat with cooking oil. Pour eggs into pan and spread evenly. Immediately begin stirring continuously, allowing uncooked egg to run underneath and cook evenly.
  3. When the bottom of the omelet is firm, but the top layer is still slightly moist, remove pan from heat. Add the turkey, tomato, and herbs, and season with additional salt and pepper if desired. Fold in half, and slide omelet off onto a plate. Serve warm.

## Flavorful Trail Mix

(Note: this is a sample recipe from the book Paleo on the Go, one of the many recipe books in our Practical Paleo Series)

Trail mix is a classic portable snack food that is convenient, easy to make, and has a long shelf life. This recipe aims to create a version of this outdoors-y staple that is both lower in sugar than conventional trail mixes (which often contain actual candy), while creating a unique, delicious blend of flavors.

Ingredients

1/2 cup almonds

1/2 cup walnuts

1/4 cup pecans

1/4 cup sunflower seeds

1/2 cup dried fruit (dried apricots work are a perfect fit, as well as various dried berries)

1-2 tsp coconut oil (warmed to liquid, if necessary)

1-2 tsp vanilla extract

1 tsp salt

½-1 tsp cinnamon

Directions

  1. In a bowl, combine nuts, seeds, and dried fruit and mix well.
  2. Drizzle the coconut oil and vanilla extract over the nut mixture and stir until nut mixture is evenly coated.
  3. Sprinkle the nut mixture with salt and cinnamon and stir again until mixture is evenly combined.
  4. Leave mixture to dry for several hours if desired, then store in an airtight container.

Notes

  * Although the salty-sweet combo will appeal to many, you can omit the salt if you'd like to make a more sweet-tasting trail mix.

## Strawberry Banana Green Smoothie

(Note: this is a sample recipe from the book Paleo Smoothies, one of the many recipe books in our Practical Paleo Series)

Don't let the simplicity of this smoothie fool you. Not only is it delicious, it's also a great way to easily squeeze several servings of fruits and veggies into your diet in a quick, convenient, and refreshing package.

Ingredients

1 cup strawberries

1 banana

1 cup almond milk

1/2 cup blueberries

(optional, but strongly encouraged) 1 cup fresh spinach

(optional) 1-3 tsp honey

4-6 ice cubes

## Lemon Garlic Chicken

Ingredients

2 boneless chicken breasts

1/4 cup lemon juice (or juice of 2 fresh lemons)

2 Tbsp coconut oil (melted)

1 clove of garlic, crushed

Salt and pepper to taste

Cooking oil

Directions

  1. In a bowl, combine lemon juice with coconut oil, garlic and salt and pepper to taste.
  2. Place chicken into the bowl with the lemon juice mixture and allow to marinate for at least 4 hours, or overnight.
  3. Heat a frying pan over medium heat and coat with cooking oil. Cook chicken breast,  until chicken is golden brown (and center is no longer pink). Serve warm.

Notes

  * The leftover marinade can be drizzled over the chicken breasts while they cook, or cooked in a saucepan over medium heat until the mixture reduces and thickens, forming a lemon-garlic sauce.

## Steamed Salmon Saute

A simple, flavorful fish recipe that makes a great dinner and is rich in healthy Omega-3's.

Ingredients

2 wild salmon fillets

1 cup white mushrooms, sliced

1 large red tomato, diced

1 tsp fresh dill, chopped

1 tsp paprika

Black pepper to taste

Cooking oil

Directions

  1. Fill a large saucepan with 1 inch of water, then add a steamer basket. Bring water to a boil, then reduce heat to a simmer. Place salmon in steamer, and cook for fifteen minutes.
  2. Add cooking oil to a frying pan over medium heat. Add mushrooms, sprinkle with dill, paprika, and pepper, and sauté for 5 minutes.
  3. Add tomato to pan and continue to sauté for an additional five minutes, then remove pan from heat.
  4. Once salmon has finished steaming, transfer the fillets to a plate and top with cooked veggie mixture. Serve warm.

## Baked Fish with Creamy Mustard Sauce

A dirt-simple but very flavorful dish that is perfect for night's when you want something quick, tasty, and healthy without much hassle. Goes very well with a green salad for a simple, nourishing meal.

Ingredients

2 white fish fillets

3 Tbsp paleo mayonnaise (see recipe in this book)

1 Tbsp mustard

Directions

  1. Pre-heat oven to 350 F.
  2. In a small bowl, combine pale mayonnaise and mustard.
  3. Coat fish fillets evenly with mustard sauce and place on an oven tray lined with baking paper. Bake for 15-20 minutes or until fish is cooked through. Serve warm.

## Herbed Shrimp Scramble

A great way to start your morning, with high-quality protein and brain-boosting Omega-3 fats to fuel the day ahead.

Ingredients

3-4 eggs

1/2-3/4 cup small cooked shrimp

¼ yellow onion, diced

1 tsp fresh dill, chopped

1 tsp dried basil

Cooking oil

Directions

  1. Heat a frying pan over medium heat and coat with oil. Add onion and sauté until tender, about 4-5 minutes.
  2. In a bowl, whisk eggs until smooth, then pour into pan with sautéed onions. Add shrimp, dill, and basil, and stir continuously with a spatula while eggs cook, in order to maintain an even consistency.
  3. Remove eggs from pan just before desired consistency is reached, since eggs will continue cooking in their own heat for a moment. Serve warm.

## Paleo Spicy Tuna Sushi Rolls

Sushi has become a popular restaurant food among seafood lovers; this simple recipe is designed to replicate the flavor of classical sushi with only paleo-friendly ingredients - we guarantee you won't miss the rice!

Ingredients

1½ pounds sushi-grade ahi tuna, cubed

2 Tbsp flaxseed oil

2 tsp cayenne pepper

1 tsp fresh ginger root, grated

4 sheets nori (toasted sushi seaweed rolls)

(optional) coconut aminos and wasabi for dipping

Directions

  1. Place tuna, flaxseed oil, cayenne, and ginger in a food processor and blend until well mixed.
  2. Divide sushi mixture evenly between nori sheets. Depending on what style of sushi you'd like to make, you can either roll it up into a cone shape, or form it into a tight cylindrical roll and then slice it into sixths, then serve.

## Paleo Meatloaf

A classic comfort-food recipe given the paleo treatment! Even if you don't like "normal" meatloaf, give this one a try and we think you'll be pleasantly surprised.

Ingredients

2 lbs ground beef

1 cup almond meal

2 eggs

1 (6 oz) can tomato paste

1 white onion, diced

½ cup fresh basil, chopped

4 garlic cloves, minced

2 tsp black pepper

1½ tsp salt

1 tsp marjoram

Directions

  1. Preheat oven to 350 F.
  2. In a large bowl, combine all ingredients and hand mix until evenly mixed.
  3. Transfer mixture to a large glass baking dish and form into a loaf.
  4. Bake for 1 hour (or until meatloaf is no longer pink in the middle).

## Paleo Deviled Eggs

A classic dish that works great as finger food at a party or a simple appetizer. As long as you get the taste of the Paleo Mayo just right (see recipe in this book), these are indistinguishable from normal non-paleo deviled eggs - plus they're just as tasty, satisfying, and easy to make!

Ingredients

6 large hard-boiled eggs  
1/4 cup Paleo Mayonnaise (see recipe in this book)  
2 tsp prepared mustard  
salt, pepper, and paprika to taste

(optional) 2 Tbsp sweet pickle relish, or finely chopped dill pickles

Directions

  1. Cut eggs in half and empty yolks into a mixing bowl.
  2. Mash yolks with a fork, then add paleo mayo, mustard, salt, pepper, and pickles (if using) and mash again, mixing ingredients thoroughly until well combined.
  3. Scoop egg yolk mixture into egg halves, dividing mixture evenly. Sprinkle with paprika, and additional salt and pepper if desired.

## Bacon-Wrapped Dates

This is a knockout recipe, with a really interesting blend of very different flavors that somehow meld perfectly together into a savory-sweet treat. Makes a great appetizer or party food to impress guests!

Ingredients

24 dates, pitted  
24 whole walnuts  
8 strips bacon, cut into thirds (or 12 strips cut in half)

Directions

  1. Preheat oven to 450°F.
  2. After each date has been sliced open and the pit removed, stuff each date with a walnut in the space where the seed used to be, then wrap each date with a piece of bacon.
  3. Place wrapped dates in an oven-safe baking dish, ideally (but not necessarily) on top of a cake rack to allow grease to drain. Loose ends of bacon should be facing down so that they don't unwrap from around the dates.
  4. Cook 8-12 minutes, flipping them over halfway through if desired.
  5. Drain and pat dry to remove excess grease, then serve

Notes

  * If serving these to guests as finger food or appetizers, it's a nice touch to pierce each date with a toothpick for ease of handling. Otherwise you can just grab a fork and gobble them up!

## Grape and Walnut Chicken Salad

Ingredients

1½-2 pounds cooked chicken (ideally skinless)  
1½ cups Paleo Mayonnaise (see recipe in this book)  
1 cup finely chopped celery  
1 small white onion, diced  
1 cup grapes, halved  
½ cup walnuts, roughly chopped  
1 Tbsp Dijon mustard

Salt and pepper to taste

Directions

  1. Shred cooked chicken with a fork or in a food processor, or roughly chop it into chunks of desired shape and size.
  2. In a large bowl, combine all other ingredients and mix until well combined.
  3. Add chicken to bowl and mix again until chicken pieces are evenly coated. Serve at room temperature or chilled.

Notes

  * As with all types of chicken salad, this makes a great topping for a bed of greens, or can be served on large romaine lettuce leaves as a wrap.

## Moroccan Chicken

Ingredients

2 chicken breasts, diced

¼ cup raisins

5 Tbsp pine nuts

4 Tbsp finely chopped fresh mint leaves

3 Tbsp lemon juice

2 cloves garlic, crushed

3 tsp cumin

1½ tsp cinnamon

½ tsp turmeric

Cooking oil

Directions

  1. Heat a frying pan over medium heat and coat with cooking oil.  Add diced chicken to pan and cook for 5 minutes, stirring regularly.
  2. Add garlic, cinnamon, cumin, turmeric, lemon juice and raisins to pan, cover pan, and cook for another 15 minutes, stirring occasionally.
  3. Add pine nuts fresh mint to pan, stir to mix evenly, and cook for another 1-2 minutes. Serve warm.

## Spicy Chicken Wings

Ingredients

18-20 chicken wings  
¼ cup butter

2 Tbsp hot sauce  
1 Tbsp apple cider vinegar  
½ tsp paprika  
½ tsp cayenne  
½ tsp black pepper  
¼ tsp garlic powder

Directions

  1. Preheat oven to 400 F and place wings on a baking sheet lined with tinfoil. Bake wings for 35 minutes, or until lightly crispy.
  2. To make the sauce, heat a saucepan over low heat and combine all remaining ingredients in saucepan. Stir until ingredients are well-combined, then simmer for 5 minutes and remove from heat.
  3. When wings are done baking, either brush each wing with a thin coating of sauce, or dip each wing in sauce to coat evenly and shake off excess sauce. Return coated wings to baking sheet and bake another 10 minutes or until done.
  4. Remove wings from oven and transfer to a mixing bowl. Pour remaining sauce over sings and toss until wings are evenly coated. Serve warm.

Note

  * These recipe also works great for grilling; just brush the wings with sauce while you grill them, and finish by tossing the wings with the remaining sauce as normal.
  * If using a commercial brand of hot sauce, be sure to check the label for any ingredients you don't want in your diet!

## Lemon Rosemary Salmon

Homemade Rosemary Salt (recipe here) has been a go-to in my kitchen for a long time. This recipe was a happy-accident since I never would have thought to pair rosemary with fish, but I tried it--and it was delicious!

Ingredients

1 lb wild salmon,either whole or in portions  
2 Tbsp butter, divided  
1 lemon, sliced  
2-3 tsp finely chopped fresh rosemary leaves

Salt to taste

Directions

  1. Preheat oven to 350 F.
  2. Place half of the butter in thin slices in a glass (or other oven-safe) baking dish. Place salmon in dish and sprinkle with rosemary and salt. Place remaining butter in thin slices on top of salmon. Finally, top with slices of lemon.
  3. Bake for 10-15 minutes, or until fish is cooked to your liking. Serve warm.

## Chicken Liver Pâté

Liver and other organ meats are extremely rich in nutrients and have a long history of being eaten in the traditional diets of many traditional hunter-gatherer cultures. For most people, however, liver is definitely an acquired taste. If you're one of the rare liver-lovers out there, or if you're simply interested in adding this potent nutrient-rich food to your diet, this is a great modern recipe for a wonderful ancestral food.

Ingredients

1 lb chicken livers  
1 small white onion, chopped  
1/2 cup butter  
1/2 cup red wine  
2-4 cloves garlic, crushed  
1 Tbsp lemon juice (fresh or bottled)  
3 tsp dried thyme  
2 tsp fresh rosemary leaves, finely chopped  
1 tsp Dijon mustard  
Salt and pepper to taste

Cooking oil

Directions

  1. Heat a saucepan over medium heat and coat with cooking oil. Add liver and onions and saute until livers are browned and onions are tender.
  2. Add the wine, garlic, mustard, rosemary, thyme, and lemon juice to the saucepan, and cook uncovered until most of the liquid is gone. Remove from heat and allow to cool.
  3. Transfer mixture to a food processor, add butter and salt and pepper to taste, and blend until smooth.
  4. Transfer pate to a sealed container and refrigerate until cool. Serve chilled.

Notes

  * Although pate is traditionally served on bread or crackers, paleo eaters can spread this on sliced veggies like cucumbers, or as a dip for veggies like carrots or celery.
  * In theory you could use another type of liver (like beef liver) for this recipe, but in practice, liver from other animals actually tastes surprisingly different from chicken livers, so this isn't recommended unless you're feeling particularly adventurous and experimental.

## Grilled Chicken Salad

Ingredients

1/2 lb cooked chicken breast, sliced

1 cup lettuce, spinach, or mixed greens

1/2 cup cherry tomatoes, halved

2 Tbsp extra virgin olive oil

2 Tbsp diced red onion

2 Tbsp pumpkin seeds, toasted

1 Tbsp lemon juice (bottled or fresh)

1 tsp basil

1 tsp thyme

Salt and pepper to taste

Directions

  1. Combine all ingredients in a large bowl and mix until ingredients are well-combined and evenly coated in olive oil/lemon juice. If desired, olive oil and lemon juice can be shaken in a jar to combine before tossing with other ingredients. Serve at room temperature or chilled.

## Apple Walnut Tuna Salad

Ingredients

1 can tuna, drained

1 cup chopped lettuce

1 small green apple, chopped

1/4-1/2 avocado, diced

1/3 cup diced green bell pepper

¼ cup chopped walnuts

Directions

  1. Combine all ingredients in a bowl and mix well. Serve at room temperature or chilled.

## Mixed Herb Salad

This simple salad tastes deliciously fresh and satisfying, and perfectly complements any meat or seafood dish.

Ingredients

1/2 cup spinach

1/2 cup arugula

1/4 cup fresh basil leaves

1/4 cup fresh mint leaves

2 Tbsp olive oil oil

1 Tbsp lemon juice (fresh or bottled)

(optional) 2 fresh lemon wedges

Directions

  1. Combine all ingredients in a large bowl and mix until ingredients are well-combined and evenly coated in olive oil/lemon juice. If desired, olive oil and lemon juice can be shaken in a jar to combine before tossing with other ingredients. Serve at room temperature.

## Strawberry-Spinach Salad

Ingredients

1 cup spinach leaves (roughly chopped if desired)

1/4-1/2 cup fresh strawberries, halved or quartered

2 Tbsp olive oil

1 tsp basil (fresh or dried)

½ tsp black pepper

½ tsp lime juice (fresh or bottled)

(optional) 2 Tbsp chopped walnuts (or other nuts)

Directions

  1. Combine all ingredients in a large bowl and mix until ingredients are well-combined and evenly coated in olive oil/lemon juice. If desired, olive oil and lime juice can be shaken in a jar to combine before tossing with other ingredients. Serve at room temperature.

## Cabbage Salad with Orange Tahini Dressing

A simple, mildly sweet salad, rich in powerful antioxidants and other nutrients from the red cabbage. Pairs well with many Asian-inspired dishes.

Ingredients

1 cup red cabbage, roughly shredded

1 small or medium carrot, finely shredded or grated

2 Tbsp olive oil

2 Tbsp orange juice (fresh or store bought)

1-2 tsp tahini

(optional) orange wedges for garnish

Directions

  1. Combine olive oil, tahini, and orange juice, and mix well. If desired, you can place the ingredients in ajar and shake well to combine them.
  2. In a bowl mix, combine shredded carrots and cabbage, then drizzle with tahini dressing and serve.

## Spinach Salad with Beets and Oranges

Ingredients

1 cup spinach  
1/4 cup cooked beets, grated  
1/2 of an orange, sliced or segmented  
1-3 Tbsp diced red onion  
2 Tbsp sliced or slivered almonds  
2 Tbsp olive oil  
2-3 Tbsp orange juice (fresh or store bought)  
(optional) salt and pepper to taste

Directions

  1. Combine spinach, beets, orange, onion, and almonds in a bowl and mix well.
  2. Drizzle with orange juice and olive oil and toss. Season with salt and pepper to taste and serve.  
Place mixed greens on a large salad plate.

## Paleo Mayonnaise

Ingredients

1 cup light tasting olive oil (try a brand that makes "extra light olive oil", like Bertolli or Filippo Berio)

1 egg (large or extra large)

1 Tbsp vinegar (white wine and apple cider vinegar both work well, but any will do)

1 tsp mustard

1 tsp salt

Directions

  1. Add egg, mustard, and vinegar to a blender and blend on low until well combine (just a few seconds).
  2. Leave blender running on low, and begin to very slow dribble the olive oil into the blender, one drop at a time. Be cautious, and literally add the olive oil drop by drop at first, allowing the drops to blend thoroughly. The mixture will slowly begin to thicken as you do this; this is called "emulsification", which just means you're mixing two liquids that are normally un-mixable.
  3. Once the mixture begins to thicken, you can start to add the olive oil a bit more quickly; about a teaspoon at a time. Just continue taking it slowly, and allowing each dollop of olive oil to blend thoroughly before adding the next one.
  4. Continue adding more and more olive oil until it has all been incorporated into the mixture. When the mayonnaise has thickened to your desired consistency, add salt and blend another few seconds to mix. Remove from blender, transfer to an airtight container, and store in refrigerator.

Notes

  * Mayonnaise pairs very well with herbs and spices: you can try spicing it up with cayenne pepper or hot sauce, adding flavorful herbs like basil or cilantro, etc. Generally speaking, these ingredients should simply be stirred into the mayonnaise after the blending/emulsifying process is complete.
  * Olive oil is a great base for mayonnaise because it's mild-tasting, inexpensive, and readily available. However, you can use any mixture of healthy oils you prefer. For example, a mixture of half olive oil and half coconut oil works well. Walnut oil, avocado oil, and macadamia nut oil also work well (either partially or fully replacing the olive oil). You can even use bacon fat if you want to make "baconnaise".
  * For best results, all ingredients should be at room temperature when preparing this recipe. Although not strictly necessary, it really does make a difference, and your final product will turn out creamier as a result.
  * Using light-tasting olive oil (like "extra light olive oil") is also highly recommended. If you use extra virgin olive oil, the olive oil flavor will probably be too strong.

## Basic Salsa

Ingredients

6 tomatoes, quartered or roughly chopped  
1/2 bunch cilantro  
1/2 of a white onion, peeled and quartered or roughly chopped  
juice of 1 lime

1 Tbsp olive oil  
1-3 cloves garlic, peeled

1-2 jalapeño peppers  
Salt and pepper to taste

Directions

  1. Add all ingredients to a food processor and pulse carefully until desired consistency is reached. Alternately, chop all ingredients by hand to desired consistency, drizzle with olive oil and lime juice, and mix well.

## Classic Marinara Sauce

This classic recipe is designed to be used with a decidedly non-classic (but healthier) paleo-friendly pasta option, such as spaghetti squash (see the following recipe for Paleo Pasta aka Roasted Spaghetti Squash Noodles).

Ingredients

4 tomatoes, chopped

1 small white onion, chopped

1/4 cup red wine

2 cloves garlic, finely diced

1-2 Tbsp finely chopped fresh oregano

1-2 Tbsp finely chopped fresh basil

Cooking oil (ideally olive oil)

Directions

  1. Heat a saucepan over medium heat and coat with oil. Add onion and sauté for about five minutes.
  2. Add garlic and cook for one more minute, stirring to mix, until garlic is lightly browned and fragrant.
  3. Add tomatoes and wine and continue cooking for five minutes, stirring frequently.
  4. Add oregano and basil, stirring to mix, then cover pan and reduce heat to low, and simmer for twenty minutes.

## Paleo Pasta (aka Roasted Spaghetti Squash Noodles)

Spaghetti squash is a healthy, grain-free alternative to normal grain-based pastas. It has a different texture than normal pasta, but the difference in taste is minor, since pasta noodles are deliberately designed to be bland in order to carry the flavor of whatever sauce you use it with. Spaghetti squash serves exactly the same role. And luckily, not only is it way healthier for you than traditional pasta, it's also a cinch to make!

Ingredients

1 Spaghetti squash

Salt and pepper to taste

Cooking oil

Directions

  1. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.
  2. With a large, sharp knife, cut the squash in half lengthwise so that you have two long halves. Scoop out the seeds and loose pieces in the center.
  3. Brush the cooking oil on the inside surface of the squash liberally, then sprinkle on the salt.
  4. Place the squash in an oven safe baking dish with the oiled/cut side facing down. Bake for 30-45 minutes, until the edges of the squash are golden brown and the flesh is soft all the way through. Allow to cool.
  5. Use a fork to scrape lengthwise down the inside of the spaghetti squash: this will pull out the natural, noodle-like strands of the squash's flesh, which can be treated exactly like normal pasta, and combined with any paleo-friendly pasta sauce (see previous recipe for Classic Marinara Sauce).

Notes

  * You'll have to be very careful when first getting used to cooking spaghetti squash: properly cooked spaghetti squash will yield noodles that feel just slightly "al dente", while overcooking it will result in the flesh becoming mushy, and therefore not particularly noodle-like. For this reason, you should plan on going through a bit of a learning curve when first learning how to make it, and you might want to buy a few "practice squashes" for your first attempt.
  * For a more quick-and-dirty method, spaghetti squash can also be prepared in the microwave instead of the oven. Simply poke a few holes in the squash's skin with a fork or knife, then microwave the squash on high for anywhere from 8-20 minutes, depending on how large a squash you're using (and how strong your microwave is). You'll also want to flip the squash over every 4-5 minutes to ensure it cooks evenly. It's done cooking when it can be easily pierced with a steak knife; at this point, simply let it cool, cut it in half, gently remove the seeds, then scrape out the "noodles" as normal.

## Paleo Rice (aka Cauliflower Rice)

Cauliflower is a healthy vegetable that is both low carb and high in beneficial nutrients. It's also mild-tasting, and when prepared properly has soft grainy texture that allows it to very closely mimic boiled white rice. The only difference is that it's light and healthy, and won't weigh you down like a ton of bricks after eating it!

This basic recipe is completely unflavored, just like actual boiled white rice - once you've learned how to make it, you can flavor it however you'd like, or combine it with whatever sauces, condiments, meat dishes, and other foods you'd normally pair rice with. It goes particularly well with Asian-themed dishes, as you might expect, but the possibilities are endless.

Ingredients

1 head cauliflower  
1 Tbsp water

Directions

1 Cut leaves from cauliflower by slicing through the stem between the head and leaves with a knife; remove and discard leaves and stem. Cut around core with knife, being careful not to separate florets from head. Remove and discard core, then rinse florets to clean.

2 Pour 1 inch of water into a large saucepan. Place cauliflower in water, stem side down and cover. Bring to a boil over high heat, then reduce heat to low and simmer 10 to 12 minutes until cauliflower is tender. Drain and allow to cool.

3 Break florets apart and place in a food processor. Process carefully (in short pulses if necessary) until cauliflower has been evenly chopped to the consistency of rice (be careful not to over-process it, or it will get pulverized into mush). Remove from food processor, drain off any excess liquid that has accumulated, and serve warm.

Notes

  * For expediency, you can usually find bags of frozen cauliflower florets at most grocery stores that can simply be cooked in the microwave. These cooked florets can then be processed to a rice-like consistency as normal.

## Simple Kale Chips

A great alternative to the carb-heavy, industrial-oil-fried potato chips found in grocery stores, made from kale, one of the most nutrient-rich vegetables around. Although fairly different in taste and texture from potato chips, these work well with many of the same dips and condiments you would normally use potato chips for, especially rich, fatty foods like guacamole!

Ingredients

1 bunch kale  
1 Tbsp melted oil or fat (coconut oil and bacon fat work well)  
Salt and pepper to taste

(optional) 1/2-1 tsp garlic powder

Directions

  1. Preheat oven to 350 F.
  2. Rinse the kale leaves under cold water, pat them dry with a towel, then cut the leaves off of the stalk.
  3. Cut the kale leaves into large pieces, and place them in a large mixing bowl. Top the kale with your melted fat/oil of choice, and massage the oil gently into the kale, spreading it evenly over all of the leaves.
  4. Arrange the kale in a single layer on two baking sheets, and sprinkle them with garlic powder (if using), salt, and pepper to taste.  Bake for 10-15 minutes or until the kale becomes crispy

Notes

  * Keep a close watch on the kale as it bakes: the leaves are relatively thin and delicate, so they'll burn easily if you aren't careful!
  * You can easily season these chips with any spices you want, and customize the flavor to whatever you're dipping. For a Mexican flavor you can use a taco seasoning blend, to make it spicy you can add cayenne pepper, etc.

## Oven-Baked Sweet Potato Fries

Ingredients

2 large sweet potatoes

2 Tbsp coconut oil, melted

Salt and pepper to taste

(optional) additional seasonings (see notes)

Directions

  1. Preheat oven to 400 F.
  2. Peel sweet potatoes and cut into fries, being sure to keep the size of the pieces relatively similar to allow them to cook evenly.
  3. In a bowl, toss the raw fries with coconut oil, salt, and pepper until evenly coated.
  4. Arrange the fries in a single layer on a foil-lined baking tray, and cook for about 30 minutes, using tongs to flip the fries halfway through. The fries are done when they are tender in the center but the edges are lightly browned.

Notes

  * Be sure to give the fries lots of room on the baking tray, otherwise some of them may cook unevenly and turn out mushy.
  * The mild sweetness of sweet potato is a great complement to many different spices, so you can tinker with the basic recipe a lot by adding herbs and spices. To begin your experimentation, you can try seasoning your fries with cayenne pepper (if you like a little spiciness), and sweet potato always pairs well with cinnamon.
  * Depending on how they're seasoned, sweet potato fries go well with ketchup (get a paleo-friendly brand with no sugar, or make your own), paleo mayonnaise (see recipe in this book), and even more interesting dips/toppings like guacamole. They're very versatile, so try them with anything!

## Paleo Candy Bars

These "candy bars" are more of an energy bar by most people's standards, but they have a delicious sweet flavor that makes them an ideal paleo treat. With proper storage, they also work pretty well as a portable snack or small meal when you're on the go.

Ingredients

3/4 cup shredded coconut

1/2 cup unsalted nuts such as almonds or hazelnuts

1/4 cup cocoa powder

3 Tbsp coconut oil, melted

1-3 Tbsp honey, melted

(optional) cinnamon to taste

(optional) vanilla extract to taste

Directions

  1. Add nuts to a food processor and grind to desired consistency.
  2. In a large bowl, combine all ingredients and mix well.
  3. Line a small baking dish or similar receptacle with parchment paper. Pour mixture onto sheet/dish and spread evenly to fill the pan.
  4. Refrigerate until hardened (approximately 2 hours). Cut into bars of desired size and serve chilled or at room temperature.

Notes

  * The dish you use to hold the mixture should be just large enough so that your mixture fills it completely, and ideally should be square-shaped so that the final product can be conveniently cut into bars.
  * To harden the bars further, they can be placed in the freezer for several hours - this is helpful if you're planning on carrying them with you as a snack for later and are concerned about them melting.

## Dairy-Free Chocolate Mousse

(Note: this is a sample recipe from the book Paleo Desserts, one of the many recipe books in our Practical Paleo Series)

A smooth, delicious, and decadent chocolate mousse recipe, made with some unconventional ingredients allowing it to be completely free from dairy, refined sugar, and other unhealthy foods. This thick, sumptuous mousse is guaranteed to please any chocolate-lover and vanquish any chocolate craving!

Ingredients

1 avocado

1 cup coconut milk

1 tsp vanilla extract

1/2 cup cacao powder

1/2 cup pitted dates

raw honey to taste

(optional) cinnamon to taste

Directions

  1. Soak the dates for at least 30 minutes until they're soft.
  2. Peel and pit the avocado.
  3. Place the avocado and dates in a food processor and process until smooth (don't stop until the dates are fully blended with the coconut milk and avocado, otherwise the mixture will turn out a little chunky).
  4. Add the coconut milk, cocoa powder, honey, and vanilla, and process again until the mixture is smooth.
  5. Serve at room temperature, or allow to set in the fridge for one hour.

Notes

  * For a creamier texture, you can substitute half or all of a medium-sized banana for the dates. This will usually create a smoother texture than the dates, however, bananas have a very distinct flavor, whereas the dates simply add natural sweetness, so your choice will depend on your preferences.
  * You can also substitute more honey for the dates, if you'd like more sweetness and a smoother texture; just be careful that you aren't consuming more sugar than you want!
  * The ratio of avocado to coconut milk will affect the thickness of the final product, as well as the dish's subtle underlying flavors, so you can experiment with changing this ratio to suit your preferences.
  * This dish will thicken when chilled, so if your make a batch that comes out a little more "runny" than you'd prefer, popping it in the fridge for a few hours will often solve this problem.
  * Just before serving, you can add cacao nibs and/or fresh berries as a garnish.

## Oven-Baked Stuffed Apples

These mouth-watering baked apple treats are an amazing dessert any night of the week, but they're also a particularly fitting dessert for holiday occasions. Serving a tray of these to your friends and family at a holiday dinner is guaranteed to impress.

Ingredients

3 large apples (ideally Granny Smith)

1/3 cup walnuts or pecans, roughly chopped

¼ cup shredded coconut

¼ cup dried cranberries

2 Tbsp butter

1 tsp cinnamon

¼ tsp ground cloves

¼ tsp nutmeg

Directions

  1. Preheat oven to 350 F.
  2. Remove only the cores from the apples (i.e. leave the rest of the apple intact, unsliced and unpeeled, with only the core removed so that the center is hollow).
  3. In a bowl, combine all other ingredients and mix well.
  4. Dividing the mixture evenly between each apple, scoop an even portion of the mixture into the hollowed-out core of each apple.
  5. Bake the apples in a glass baking dish for 35-40 minutes, or until the apples are tender. Serve warm.

## Paleo Banana Almond Donuts with Cinnamon Frosting

This fun paleo-friendly donut recipe is a prime example of how you can use a paleo flour substitute (almond flour or, in this case, coconut flour) can be used to make healthier versions of normal, non-paleo baked goods made from unhealthy ingredients. It's not the kind of thing you should be eating every day, but if you're in the mood for a tasty high-carb treat, these donuts are delicious!

Ingredients

Donuts

1/2 cup coconut flour

1/2 cup almond butter

1 medium, ripe banana

5 eggs

2 Tbsp raw honey

1 Tbsp vanilla

1 tsp cinnamon

1/2 tsp baking soda

Cooking oil (to grease pan) - coconut oil works well

Frosting

1 cup palm shortening

2 Tbsp honey

1  Tbsp vanilla

2 tsp cinnamon

Directions

Donuts

  1. Preheat oven to 325 F.
  2. Whisk the eggs and mash the banana into a paste.
  3. In a bowl, combine the banana, almond butter, honey, and vanilla and mix until well combined. Then add the eggs and banana and mix again until mixture is smooth (using an electric mixer makes this process easier).
  4. Add the coconut flour, baking soda, and cinnamon and mix until well combined.
  5. Scoop mixture into a greased donut pan. Bake for 15-20 minutes, until a knife inserted into the middle of a donut comes out clean.

Frosting

  1. In a bowl, combine all ingredients and mix well, then beat until smooth (an electric mixer makes this process easier).
  2. Divide frosting evenly and spread onto donuts. Serve warm.

## Coconut Pumpkin Pudding

Ingredients

1 cup coconut milk

1 (15 oz) can pumpkin puree

2 eggs

1/8 cup honey

1 tsp cinnamon

½ tsp nutmeg

½ tsp cardamom

½ tsp salt

(optional) coconut flakes to garnish

Directions

  1. Preheat the oven to 350 F.
  2. In a bowl, combine coconut milk, pumpkin, spices, salt and honey in bowl and mix well until smooth..
  3. Add eggs and mix again until smooth.
  4. Pour mixture into a glass baking dish. Bake for 15-20 minutes, until edges are lightly browned.
  5. Sprinkle with coconut flakes (if using) to garnish, and serve warm.

# More Books in the Practical Paleo Series

Our goal with the Practical Paleo Series is to provide you with practical information that makes your healthy lifestyle easier and more enjoyable. We've written a number of practical recipe books, each one packed with healthy, paleo-friendly recipes that are easy to make and absolutely delicious! Our current selection of books includes:

Paleo Slow Cooking

Newcomers to the paleo diet often find that preparing healthy paleo meals requires tons of time and effort. Let's face it: prepping and cooking meals from scratch, not to mention cleaning all the pots and pans afterward, can take a lot of time from your already hectic schedule.

Fortunately, there's a perfect solution to these concerns: the humble slow cooker! Unlike other cooking methods, slow cooking allows you to simply throw a few ingredients in your slow cooker, flip the switch, and then come back a few hours later to find a healthy, delicious paleo meal ready and waiting for you.

In Paleo Slow Cooking, you'll learn how to make delicious, healthy paleo meals the easy way with paleo slow cooker recipes like Cocoa Sweet Potato Chili, Spicy Pineapple Shredded Pork, Candied Carrots, Spiced Apple and Pear Butter, and many more! And like all books in the Practical Paleo Series, the recipes in Paleo Slow Cooking are practical, easy to prepare, and absolutely delicious.

Paleo Smoothies

Many people who make the switch to the paleo diet find it difficult to get all the vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, protein, healthy fats, and other other beneficial nutrients they need in their diet, without resorting to popping supplements or chewing on salad all day.

Fortunately, there's a perfect solution to these concerns: paleo smoothies! Incorporating smoothies into your paleo lifestyle allows you to supercharge your body with all the vitamins, minerals, and nutrients you need to feel your best, in as little time as it takes to throw a few ingredients in a blender!

In Paleo Smoothies, you'll learn how to make delicious, healthy paleo smoothies the easy way, with gourmet smoothie recipes like Spiced Raspberry Mocha, Strawberry Chai, Mango Amaretto, Honeydew Green Tea, Sweet Potato Pie, Mexican Chocolate, and more! And like all books in the Practical Paleo Series, the recipes in Paleo Smoothies are practical, easy to prepare, and absolutely delicious.

Paleo Desserts

Many people are worried that when they adopt a healthy paleo diet, they'll have to give up their favorite sugary, indulgent desserts.

Luckily, it doesn't have to be this way! In Paleo Desserts, you'll learn how to indulge yourself the healthy way with amazing paleo deserts like Mint Chocolate Chip Truffles, Mocha Brownies, Candied Pecans, Apple Cinnamon Custard, Chocolate Brownie Chunk Ice Cream, and many more! And like all books in the Practical Paleo Series, the recipes in Paleo Desserts are practical, easy to prepare, and absolutely delicious.

Paleo On the Go

Even after becoming familiar with the basics of cooking paleo at home, many people find that it's tough to eat paleo on the go. Most paleo recipes aren't particularly portable or convenient, so it's hard to grab a quick breakfast on the way out the door, eat a healthy lunch at work or school, and then come home at the end of a busy day to prepare a healthy dinner from scratch.

Luckily, it doesn't have to be this way! In Paleo On the Go, you'll learn how to make quick, healthy breakfasts, portable and fresh lunches, and delicious, satisfying dinners designed specifically to fit into a busy on-the-go lifestyle. These recipes are designed to be either fully or partially prepared in advance, whenever you have the time, so that when your week gets busy and you just don't have time to cook, you can still enjoy healthy paleo meals that taste just as good as they make you feel!

You'll enjoy delicious gourmet paleo dishes like Sundried Tomato Basil Chicken Wraps, Apple Cinnamon Muffins, Spicy Almond Citrus Tuna Salad, Coconut Mocha Energy Balls, and many more! And like all books in the Practical Paleo Series, the recipes in Paleo On the Go are practical, easy to prepare, and absolutely delicious.

# A Final Word

Thanks very much for reading; we hope that you've enjoyed the book, and are eager to get started on making the paleo diet part of your life!

If you've enjoyed the book, we would really appreciate it if you would take a moment to leave a quick customer review on whatever website you purchased this book from (Smashwords, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, etc). Reviews assist new readers in finding our work, and also help spread the word about the paleo diet!

Thanks again for reading, and happy cooking!
