So … I guess you’re wondering what a paleolithic diet is, eh? Here’s what Wiki has to say about it:
“The Paleolithic diet consists of foods that can be hunted and fished, such as meat, and seafood, and can be gathered, such as eggs, insects, fruit, nuts, seeds, vegetables, mushrooms, herbs and spices.”
No grains, legumes (e.g. beans and peanuts), dairy products (eggs are okay though), salt, nor refined sugar or processed oils are allowed.
Now the “why” of this sudden diet. Well, our son recently came to visit and he’s always playing around with different recipes and researched this particular diet and offered to cook for us. And guess what we said? Â “Why not?” Â So, he’ll be cooking for us every day and I’ll be posting pictures (and hopefully links to the recipes) of what we’ll be eating.
This diet will be quite different for me. I grew up eating a Puerto Rican diet which pretty much consisted of chicken, rice, beans and corn. That was the “poor” Puerto Rican diet. We did eat other things but that was our staple.
Then, when I became a Seventh-day Adventist as a young adult, I became vegetarian for 20 years or so. Later, when the children were grown, it came a little more difficult to be a vegetarian since my husband prefers some meat so I became a semi-vegetarian (I know, I know there’s no such thing but it’s a point of reference, i.e. some days we’d eat meat and other days we wouldn’t).
My son has tweaked some of the recipes a little so use your own creativity. Not being able to eat gluten means no bread, cereal, farina, etc. And no sugar … well, there goes my hot chocolate for a little while.
I’ll let you know how things go. The first day’s meal was dinner since we had to shop for the ingredients earlier in the day. And here it is …
The meal consisted of grilled tuna steak with olive relish, carrot and squash stir fry and asparagus with ginger. (Click on the links to see the recipes.)
This meal was great! The tuna didn’t taste like tuna to me but more like an actual steak (not as chewy though). The olive relish was also delicious as this diet is supposed to be low in sodium and the olives gave it some salt flavor. The carrot and squash stir fry and the asparagus with ginger were equally good.
First meal on a paleolithic diet was a success!
Have any of you ever been on this diet? If so, I’d be interested in how you liked it.
I can understand avoiding grains, as they are “inflammatory,” but I wonder what the advantage is to elliminating the legumes. Your vegetarian SDA’s (myself included) wouldn’t think much of replacing their legume protien with meats.
Keep in mind that we are following this diet because we have a “cook” who is trialling it. Re the legumes though, here’s a quote I found on why the diet removes them:
“As cereal grains, legumes are great sources of antinutrients, such as lectins, saponins or protease inhibitors which wreak havoc on the hormonal and immune systems.
Increased intestinal permeability has been associated to many chronic low-grade inflammatory and autoimmune diseases, such as celiac disease, rheumatoid arthritis, type 1 diabetes or multiple sclerosis. Lectins and saponins are able to increase intestinal permeability hence increasing the risk of inflammatory diseases, see Dr. Cordain’s scientific paper …”
If you’re interested, here’s a website with Q & A’s on this very question: http://thepaleodiet.blogspot.com/2010/02/paleo-diet-q-12-february-2010-no.html.