Low-Carb Paleo SHOULD be a reenactment
Isn’t this a cool photo? This guy is like the Arthur Fonzarelli of paleo men. I bet his keto breathed ass gets all the ladies down at the old watering hole.
A few years back I wrote a post about “What Our Ancestors ate“. That post was fairly popular one for this little blog. I’d like to expand on that a post a little bit today.
Much to my pleasure, the problems with the standard low-carb “paleo” approach are finally starting to surface. There could be many reasons for this:
A) There have been a few of us “angry high-carb” beaters out there spearheading this non-sense for a few years now. B) People have finally been doing it long enough to expose problems and are being forced to take action. C) People are realizing that “fat adaptation” is a total and complete joke unless you’re try to survive the apocalypse. D) Starches are “the new black.”
I’m not going to beat on about why you should eat carbs (you should) in this post. All I want is to plant a few seeds and point out a few less talked about problems with the low-carb approach to paleo. If you’re going to continue to drive down that road, here’s a few things you should keep in mind (non-low-carbers too).
Ok, so here’s the reenactment part… Eat The Whole Animal
Funny enough, Weston Price Foundation has paleo figured out better than paleo. The good majority of paleo dieters think steaks, bacon, and salads are the key to health. Keep it simple right? The older wiser paleo dieters are smart enough to include organ meats (applause from the peanut gallery). At least organ meats are nutritious. There are several problems with consuming only muscle and organ meats. In order to keep you reading until the end, I’ll keep this very laymen.
Problem #1:
By eating only muscle and major organs of the animal, you’re getting excessive amounts of the “essential” amino acids cysteine and tryptophan. Aminos are good though right? And being “essential” we should probably overdose on bacon, steaks, and liver so we can be sure to get enough of them right?! Wrong. I’m no research scientist, but common sense says your beloved paleo man after eating animals for a few million years (and didn’t know a macronutrient from a hole in the ground), had a pretty good idea where the good shit was in the animal.
Collagen. What’s that you say? It’s the “good shit” that I mentioned above. It makes up 50% of the protein of an animals tissues. Assholes and elbows. Well maybe not the assholes (that would be muscle meat), but definitely the elbows. Skin, joints, bones, tendons, ligaments, cartilage, heads, feet, all that good stuff. Sounds appetizing right? Well I’ve got news for you… it is! Cue Weston Price. WAPF is big on making “broth” or stock. What is broth/stock? Basically it’s all the parts above boiled very slowly. When you do this, the collagen (and vitamins) in those parts disolves away into the cooking water. When cooled, this leaves you with a jelly like substance called gelatin (ie.. cooked collagen). Yes, the stuff the make JELL-O with! By making broth, you get all these normally thrown away (Western societies) animal parts in palatable form.
So why would you want to eat this? Remember our essential friends cysteine and tryptophan? Well eating too much of them increases stress hormones like serotonin, which increases cortisol, yada, yada, yada, and also suppresses thyroid. WOW? Is it really a brain buster that this might be a piece of the puzzle to why so many paleo dieters have horrible metabolisms, whacked hormones and jacked up thyroids? Broth/stock/collagen/gelatin contain very few or nil of these two amino acids, therefor consuming it helps keep your amino acid balance at the appropriate levels.
My unprofessional and non-medical advice? Eat more broth and or gelatin and dial WAY back on the meats. It’s kind of like the omega 6 thing… don’t consume oodles of omega 3, just so you can keep eating crap and “balance” your omega 6. Heed this advice or don’t. I’m just an idiot. I haven’t learned anything about lowering stress hormones in my body hack pursuit to compete in one of the longest ultra triathlons out there.
Problem #2:
Thyroid and other glands. When you eat the whole animal and/or eat the delicious heads of animals or fish in these broths/stocks/soups, you’re getting these glands. These glands stimulate your own glands promoting a healthy metabolism. I hate to burst you grass-fed tri-tipped bubble, but you’re beloved Inuit didn’t eat only blubber (“healthy fats” LMFAO), muscle meats, and liver.
Problem #3:
Iron. Too much of it! Red meats are very high in bioavailable iron. Especially you’re beloved liver. This is bad for a lot of reasons. I’m not your resident expert on iron, but I do know it promotes disease. You’ve got fingers and Google, go look it up. Iron is pretty bad stuff for dudes. You can find some info about on Anthony Colpo’s site here (warning he eat’s carbs. This is the real reason I posted the link). For once that annoying bleeding female cycle is good for something, but it’s not a free pass to go nuts on iron! Females are better iron absorbers than men.
I guess there’s one thing the low-carb paleo world going for it… It’s reliance on coffee and cream to function does help block the absorption of iron 
That’s all for today. I’m bored with blogging already. Carry on.
Guess I should tell you how to make gelatin.
Go to the store and buy the cheap stuff like ox tail, chicken feet, cow feet, misc other bones, turkey necks, anything that anyone else wouldn’t buy.
Take it home and put it in the crock pot all day/days. Poor all the liquid into a container and put in the fridge (update: let it cool down first). After it cools, skim off the fat into the garbage can. Rewarm the liquid when you want a yummy soup base or drink.
Eat the left over bones and stuff if you want. I do
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Comical typo in sentence #3 of your comment. I’ll let you find it.
A frequent dish at my wife’s relatives’ holiday parties (they’re Filipino) is stewed pig’s feet. Soooo much gelatin. The spoon will literally get glued to the bowl if you let it cool long enough.
Seriously though, I would suggest *not* putting the container of hot stock/broth directly into the fridge. Let the container cool instead in a sink of full of ice or ice water. Or, if it’s wintertime (and you live in a temperate climate), put it outside in the snow. Then put it in the fridge. It will cool much more rapidly that way, and won’t risk overworking the refrigerator and/or warming up everything else inside it. If you make small quantities, though, it probably doesn’t matter.
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Yeah, I was notified and coming back to fix it. You beat me
I’m sooo damn tired.
Good tip on the no fridge. Forgot that part. What he said ˄
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Hmm, I don’t get how I never thought of using all the cheap “nasty” parts of the animal in my soups that I make all the time… I’m totally gonna buy some next time! Very good for broth.
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So you’re not a “Fruitarian with the occasional raw tuna” anymore?
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The overwhelming bulk of my calories still come from fruit yes. I’m not reneging on anything I said before, at least not yet
I have upped my animal products (don’t read into this too much) via lean protein yes. It has helped with exercise recovery, and partly because it’s easy calories. Overall caloric intake from animals still remains low in the scheme of things.
You can eat something like 15 large bananas to get the same amount of tryptophan that you’d get from one egg.
It’s hard to write about the things I test, because it comes over periods of months and there are so many variables. I’m not a science writer. I’m not a writer of any kind. I don’t even know where to start when I sit down, because it’s such a web processes and I don’t know how to make it practical. I can talk, but I’m horrible at developing thoughts in a monolog. This is why my videos suck and I don’t post them often. Maybe the podcast can bridge some gaps.
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I recently read an article in the Wall Street Journal of all places about making bone broth. The writer was a vietnamese woman who talked about the broths her mother used to make when she was young. She recommended taking a mallet or some such to break the bones to let the good stuff inside them come out in the broth.
This whole bone broth idea has been on the back burner of my mind to try. A grocery store in town sells chicken feet. Tell me, is it okay to use things like thighs, too?
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Cathi, Perfectly ok to use things like thighs, but they are mostly fat and muscle meat. The idea behind the broth is for the other stuff like collagen. If you were making a stew or something of course you might want some extra meat.
I suppose if you broke them, you’d potentially get more of the marrow contents if the bones were not already cut. Exposing the insides. I usually eat the bones and stuff, so I end up getting it anyway.
Chicken feet will work well. Once cooled, the broth is as thick as jello.
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Eat ALL the ANIMALS !
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And become a glucose deprived low-carb spammer just like our friend liam.
For any other aspiring spammers: Paleo is currently a hot trending diet. Jump on board and write a book with the same content as everyone else and make yourself some loot!
Low-carb paleo is really simple… Eat meat and non-starchy vegetables. Especially bacon & liver. If you start to feel like shit, just add more fat. That’s it! Oh, and lower carbs too.
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I wanted to post an update on the bone broth issue. Yesterday, I bought some chicken necks, backs, and wings and boiled them up into some fabulous broth. It was very thick and gelatinous just like Chuck said. We ate it for dinner tonight over rice. Good stuff.
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Interesting post. I’ll turn it over in my head while I eat my giant plate of sliced apples and bananas and wait for my baked potato and steak to finish.
I’ve settled into a “fuck the dogma, eat real and tasty food” approach to all of this and it seems to working well. Wild caught trout from a pond it took a 7 mile hike to reach baked with some organic potatoes and a big bowl of stewed apples for dessert? Fuck yes.
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Alex, All sounds like a pretty good plan to me, just cook up and eat the fish’s head too
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I eat the eyes and so on, and what’s left of the heads after I’m done gets saved and cooked up in soup and so on. All my ground beef has organs in it as well, it makes it taste better in my opinion. Unlike most people, I actually raise, catch, and kill my own meat, so I’m not a fan of taking select cuts and letting a huge portion go to waste.
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Nice article Sir. And interesting.
Couldn’t “low carb Paleo” be more simply called “low carb?” If not, what are the differences?
Thanks, Bill
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@Bill, Low-Carb is a pretty big tent. All kinds of low-carb junk out there that isn’t allowed on a real paleo diet.
I’m not even sure why a primal or paleo diet should be thought of as low-carb these days. The idea of it seems pretty silly in hindsight.
The best thing paleo has going for it is advocating real food. Paleo itself is a very large tent that just about anything can be tossed under when convenient. Pretty much the only reason it’s still gaining traction.
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