The Paleo Diet - Loren Cordain [64]
Peanuts are forbidden. As mentioned, they are not nuts at all; they’re legumes—and legumes contain lectins and other antinutrients that can adversely affect your health, particularly if you are suffering from an autoimmune disorder.
Important note: Many people are allergic to nuts, and pine nuts can be particularly troublesome for some people. Listen to your body carefully as you begin the Paleo Diet and fine-tune the diet to your specific health needs. Although nuts and seeds are true Paleo foods—and were certainly part of the diets of our ancient ancestors—they were not the staples.
When you shop for nuts:
• Try to buy raw, unsalted nuts. You can find them in their natural state at most supermarkets in the late summer and early fall when they come into season.
• If you don’t like cracking nuts, you can find packaged, hulled nuts at some supermarkets and most health food stores. However, read the package label. Hulled nuts are sometimes coated with trans fat-containing oils to increase their shelf life.
• When in doubt, go for walnuts. They have the best omega 6 to omega 3 ratio and are your healthiest choice for a snack food or to use in other dishes. Other nuts should be considered garnishes in salads and other dishes, rather than eaten in quantity.
Purchasing Oils
Vegetable oils were obviously not a component of any pre-agricultural or hunter-gatherer diet, simply because the technology to produce them did not exist. Oils made from walnuts, almonds, olives, sesame seeds, and flaxseeds were first produced using crude presses between 5,000 and 6,000 years ago. However, except for olive oil, most early oil use was for nonfood purposes, such as illumination, lubrication, and medicine. It wasn’t until the beginning of the twentieth century, with the advent of mechanically driven steel expellers and hexane extraction processes, that vegetable oils started to contribute significantly to the caloric content of the Western diet. Today vegetable oils used in cooking, salad oils, margarine, shortening, and processed foods supply 17.6 percent of the total daily energy intake in the U.S. diet. The enormous infusion of vegetable oils into the Western diet, starting in the early 1900s, represents the greatest single factor responsible for elevating the dietary omega 6 to omega 3 ratio to its current and unhealthful value of 10 to 1. In hunter-gatherer diets, the omega 6 to omega 3 ratio was closer to 2 to 1. If we use the evolutionary template exclusively, vegetable oils should probably constitute a minimal part of modern-day Paleo diets.
So, if this is the case, why should we not eliminate all vegetable oils from our diet?
I still believe that certain oils can be used to cook with and add flavor when making condiments, dressings, and marinades. Simply stated, there are four oils (flaxseed, walnut, olive, and avocado) that can promote health and facilitate your getting the correct balance of good fats into your diet. Because hunter-gatherers ate the entire carcasses of wild animals (tongue, eyes, brains, marrow, liver, gonads, intestines, kidneys, and so on) and relished fatty plant foods (nuts and seeds), they did not have to worry about the correct balance of fatty acids in their diet. It came out correctly in the wash.
For most of us, the thought of eating organs is not only repulsive, but is also not practical as we simply do not have access to wild game. Consequently, by eating lean meats, fish, and seafood, along with healthful oils, nuts, and seeds, you can get the correct balance of fatty acids in your diet.
As you can see from the table on page 134, only three vegetable oils have omega 6 to omega 3 ratios of less than 3. These are flaxseed (0.24), canola (2.0), and mustard seed (2.6). Although I originally recommended mustard seed