The Paleo Diet - Loren Cordain [25]
Restoring the Balance in Your Diet
My research team and I have found that, ideally, a little more than half—55 percent—of your calories should come from lean meats, organ meats, fish, and seafood. The balance should come from fresh fruits and vegetables, some nuts, and healthful oils.
In the average American diet, not only is the balance of plant to animal food off-kilter, it’s almost exactly the opposite of what we are genetically programmed to eat. In the typical American diet, 24 percent of the calories come from cereals, 11 percent from dairy products, 18 percent from refined sugars, and 18 percent from refined oils. These foods represent 71 percent of the energy consumed in the typical American diet—yet virtually none of them are to be found on the Paleo menu of lean meats, fresh fruits, and vegetables. In the American diet, about 38 percent of the calories come from animal foods, most of them high-fat and unhealthy meats (hot dogs, fatty ground beef, bacon, lunch meats, etc.)—a far cry from the Paleo Diet.
How “Progress” Has Hurt Us
The Agricultural Revolution changed the world and allowed civilization—cities, culture, technological and medical achievements, and scientific knowledge—to develop. These were all good things. And yet, there was a huge downside. The Agricultural Revolution is also responsible for much of today’s obesity and chronic disease. The foods that agriculture brought us—cereals, dairy products, fatty meats, salted foods, and refined sugars and oils—proved disastrous for our Paleolithic bodies.
Nobody could have anticipated this revolution or its consequences. The early farmers didn’t have some great plan to overthrow the old system. They were just looking for better ways to feed their families in the face of a rising population and dwindling food resources. It all started in the Middle East about 10,000 years ago, when some enterprising people started to sow and harvest wild wheat seeds. Later, they domesticated barley and a few legumes and then livestock—sheep, goats, and pigs. They still picked wild fruits and vegetables and still hunted wild game, but the die was cast; the diet had changed dramatically.
Hello Grains, Hello Health Problems
The archaeological record clearly shows that whenever and wherever ancient humans sowed seeds (and replaced the old animal-dominated diets), part of the harvest included health problems. One physical ramification of the new diet was immediately obvious: early farmers were markedly shorter than their ancestors. In Turkey and Greece, for example, preagricultural men stood 5 feet 9 inches tall and women 5 feet 5 inches. By 3000 B.C., the average man had shrunk to 5 feet 3 inches and the average woman to 5 feet. But getting shorter—not in itself a health problem—was the least of the changes in these early farmers. Studies of their bones and teeth have revealed that these people were basically a mess: they had more infectious diseases than their ancestors, more childhood mortality, and shorter life spans in general. They also had more osteoporosis, rickets, and other bone mineral disorders, thanks to the cereal-based diets. For the first time, humans were plagued with vitamin- and mineral-deficiency diseases—scurvy, beriberi, pellagra, vitamin A and zinc deficiencies, and iron-deficiency anemia. Instead of the well-formed, strong teeth their ancestors had, there were now cavities. Their jaws, which were formerly square and roomy, were suddenly too small for their teeth, which overlapped each other.
What had gone wrong? How could the benign practice of agriculture—harnessing nature’s bounty—have caused so many health problems? We now know that although the population was soaring, the quality of life—as well as the average