The Paleo Diet - Loren Cordain [67]
The good news is that most spices are easily digestible and well tolerated and add subtle flavors and overtones to almost all dishes. They’ll make your food come alive.
Individualizing Your Diet
The starting point for the optimal Paleo Diet lies in our genes. In some respects, we’re all the same. We’ve all got the basic human genome, shaped by more than 2 million years of evolution and adapted to eat lean, wild animal meats and uncultivated fruits and vegetables. But we’re all different, too. Our own genetic differences ultimately influence how we react to certain foods or food types, or how much of a particular nutrient, vitamin, or mineral we need to maintain good health. Even though seafood should be a central part of the Paleo Diet, for example, it’s clearly out of the question for people who are allergic to it. If you have a nut, shellfish, or other food allergy, then obviously these foods cannot be part of your individualized program.
The National Academy of Sciences has provided DRIs (Dietary Reference Intakes) for vitamins and minerals. However, these one-size-fits-all guidelines aren’t necessarily perfect for everyone. For example, people who are exposed to extra environmental pollutants (say, cigarette smoke) have been shown to require extra antioxidant vitamins. Certain diseases and disorders are known to impair the body’s ability to absorb nutrients; pregnant women and breast-feeding mothers need more nutrients than other women do.
No universal dietary recommendations apply to everybody, even though we all have the same starting point—our evolutionary past.
Many people don’t even know that some foods—particularly, grains, dairy products, legumes, and yeast—are to blame for some of their health problems. They may not make the diet/health connection until they eliminate these foods and then reintroduce them. Listen to your body as you gradually return to the diet nature intended for us all. Find out what works for you and be sensible ; alter your diet so that you can live with it—but remember, the further you stray from the basic principles of the diet (lean animal protein, fresh fruits, and vegetables), the less likely you’ll be able to reap its health benefits.
Vitamins, Minerals, and Supplements
When we eat the foods that we’re genetically programmed to eat, we won’t develop nutritional deficiency diseases. As I discussed earlier, pellagra (niacin deficiency) and beriberi (vitamin B1 deficiency) have never been found in hunter-gatherers—modern or Paleolithic. In chapter 2 I showed how the vitamins and the minerals eaten every day on the Paleo Diet—a modern Paleo diet—far exceed the RDAs in almost every category. This diet is nutrient-rich by any standard, and it provides us with everything we need to be healthy.
This does not mean that people on the Paleo Diet don’t need supplements. You may choose to bolster your diet with certain supplements, including those discussed next.
Vitamin D
Except for fatty ocean fish, there is very little vitamin D in any commonly consumed natural (that is, not artificially fortified) foods. This wasn’t a major problem for our Paleolithic ancestors, who spent much of their time outdoors and got all the vitamin D they needed from sunlight. Today, for most of us, sunlight exposure is a hit-or-miss proposition. This is why, to prevent rickets and other vitamin D-deficiency diseases, processed foods such as milk and margarine are fortified with vitamin D.
Do you get enough sun? (“Enough” means about fifteen minutes a day.) If you don’t, and you’ve stopped eating margarine and milk, you should supplement your diet with this nutrient. The DRI for vitamin D is 200-600 IU (for “international units”). Because many studies have suggested a link between low vitamin D levels in the blood and a number of cancers—including breast, prostate, and colon cancers—you may want to boost your daily supplementation to 2,000 IU. However, this is not one of those “more is better” nutrients. Vitamin D is fat-soluble, which means it can accumulate in your tissues and eventually become