The Paleo Diet - Loren Cordain [17]
• Leafy green vegetables
• Fish oil capsules, available at health food stores
Meal Preparation and Typical Meals
Eating unadulterated, healthful lean meats, seafood, fruits, and veggies at every meal requires a little bit of planning and foresight, but once you get into the swing of things, it will become second nature. Even working people who must eat away from home can easily incorporate real foods into their busy schedules; so can people who travel often or who must frequently dine out.
One of the keys to becoming a successful Paleo Dieter is to prepare some of your food at home and bring it with you to work either as a snack or as a meal. For lunch, nothing could be simpler than to brown-bag a few slices of last night’s lean roast beef or skinless chicken breasts along with some fresh tomato wedges, a few carrot sticks, and an apple or a fresh peach.
Eating Paleo style while dining out is also quite easy if you follow a few simple guidelines. Order a tossed green salad with shrimp, but hold the croutons and dress it with olive oil and lemon juice. For breakfast out, try two poached eggs and half a cantaloupe, skip the toast and bacon, and treat yourself to a cup of decaffeinated coffee or herbal tea. In chapter 8, I fully outline how to pull off a Paleo Diet in our fast-food world.
Although you will be eliminating grains, dairy products, refined sugars, and processed foods from your daily fare, you will soon discover the incredible bounty and diversity of delicious and healthful foods that the Paleo Diet has to offer. How about a breakfast omelet made with omega 3-enriched eggs and stuffed with crab and avocado and covered with peach salsa? A filet of sole simmered in wine sauce accompanied by spinach salad and gazpacho soup for lunch? For dinner, does roast pork loin, a tossed green salad dressed with flaxseed oil, steamed broccoli, a glass of Merlot, and a bowl of fresh blackberries sprinkled with almond slices sound tempting? These are just a few of the six weeks’ worth of meal plans and more than 100 Paleo recipes I provide you with in chapters 9 and 10.
The Paleo Diet: A Nutritional Bonanza
Many registered dietitians and knowledgeable nutritionists would predict that any diet that excludes all cereal grains, dairy products, and legumes would lack many important nutrients and would require extremely careful planning to make it work. Just the opposite is true with the Paleo Diet—which confirms yet again that this is exactly the type of diet human beings were meant to thrive on, as they have for all but the last 10,000 years.
The Paleo Diet provides 100 percent of our nutrient requirements. My research team has analyzed the nutrient composition of hundreds of varying combinations of the Paleo Diet, in which we’ve altered the percentage as well as the types of plant and animal foods it contains. In virtually every dietary permutation, the levels of vitamins and minerals exceed governmental recommended daily allowances (RDAs). The Paleo Diet even surpasses modern cereal- and dairy-based diets in many nutritional elements that protect against heart disease and cancer, including:
• Vitamin C
• Vitamin B12
• Vitamin B6
• Folic acid
• Magnesium
• Chromium
• Potassium
• Selenium
• Soluble fiber
• Omega 3 and monounsaturated fats
• Beta-carotene and other plant phytochemicals
In fact, the Paleo Diet is packed with much higher levels of many nutrients that are deficient in both vegetarian and average American diets, such as iron, zinc, vitamin B12, vitamin B6, and omega 3 fats.
Let’s take a quick look at the daily nutrient intake of a twenty-five-year-old woman on the Paleo Diet. Out of a typical 2,200 calories, half come from animal foods and half from plant foods—all available at the supermarket.
For breakfast, she eats half a cantaloupe and a 12-ounce portion of broiled Atlantic salmon. Lunch is a shrimp, spinach/vegetable salad (seven large boiled shrimp, three cups of raw spinach leaves, one shredded carrot, one sliced cucumber,