My Move From Low Carb to Paleo & 500 Paleo Recipes

So as not to bury the lead, I’ll start by saying this: My new book, 500 Paleo Recipes, is now available through Amazon.com. All of you who have pre-ordered it should have your copies this week, and have my sincere thanks. All of you who haven’t ordered it yet will, no doubt, want to go order it immediately, plus an extra copy for the paleo person or low carber on your Christmas list. And again, thank you very much.

The story behind 500 Paleo Recipes

When I went low carb in 1995 – yes, 17 years ago – there were no low carb specialty foods available. No Dreamfields pasta, no soy muffin mixes, no low carb meal bars, no soy cereals, no bread or tortillas. As a result, going low carb meant giving up all processed food, replacing it with meat, poultry, and fish, eggs and cheese, butter, cream and olive oil, nuts and seeds, vegetables and low sugar fruits.

At the time, the only low carb community I could find was an email list-serve of about 150 like-minded souls, scattered all over. Repeatedly, people wrote that not only were they losing weight without hunger, they were having surprising improvements in their health, with all sorts of seemingly unrelated ailments clearing up.

In 1997, Ray Audette published a book called Neanderthin. Audette wrote of curing his type 2 diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis by eating a caveman’s diet – no grains, no legumes, no separated sugar, no artificial additives. Cooking, Audette said, was a technology that enabled Paleolithic hunter-gatherers to eat grains and beans, which were toxic eaten raw. This led to the Agricultural Revolution and civilization, but also to the diseases of civilization. Audette’s rule was simple: If you couldn’t gather it with only a sharp stick and a rock, and eat it raw, it was not food. I wrote at the time that I found Audette’s ideas fascinating, and that while I was doing well on a low carb diet that included modest quantities of soy and grain products, not to mention artificial sweeteners, if I had intractable health problems I would consider his approach.

In 2003-2004 came the Atkins Boom

Suddenly everybody and their best friend was on a low carb diet. It was all over the news and the women’s magazines. Predictably, the market followed. There was an explosion of low carb specialty products, most of them highly processed, loaded with soy and chemicals, and many of them questionably low carb anyway. The nadir was reached, I believe, when Entenmann’s introduced a “low carb” coffee cake that contained both white flour and corn syrup.

I used some of this stuff, and carried ads for some products in my ezine. But I also repeated over and over that people should use such products as a treat, not as staples, and that they should always, always, always base their low carbohydrate diets on real food.

But it is common for people to want to “change without changing.” Many people who would have balked at the idea of basing their diet on low carb whole foods jumped on the bandwagon by eating low carb muffins for breakfast, a sandwich on low carb bread for lunch, and low carb pasta for supper. I may exaggerate, but only a little. Whole brick-and-mortar stores were devoted to this stuff, and people bought it in great, expensive, soy-and-gluten-laden piles.

I have long believed that this was part of the reason for the Atkins Crash of ‘04. Mainly, of course, it was because most people consider a “diet” something they do for 6 weeks before a high school reunion, and because the media, having wrung all the attention they could out of low carb, moved on. But part of it, I am convinced, was the sea-change wrought on low carbohydrate nutrition by all of that processed junk. People weren’t losing weight. More importantly, they weren’t feeling as flat-out wonderful as so many of us early adapters had while living on meat and vegetables. Feeling well is a tremendous motivator.

By 2004, there were reports that low carb was “dead.”

It wasn’t true, of course. If you took out the spike year of 2003, growth in interest had been steady, and continued to climb.

But low carb has been evolving over the years. More and more, I hear from people who are interested in whole foods. I hear from many who have given up soy, even more who have dropped gluten. (If you haven’t read Dr. William Davis’s Wheat Belly yet, do. You’ll never look at wheat the same way again.) More and more people are using stevia, erythritol, or xylitol instead of artificial sweeteners.

There is a move, too, to improved food quality. Many are paying hefty prices for pastured eggs, grass-fed beef, and raw, grass-fed dairy products. There is a backyard poultry-keeping boom, of which I am a happy part.

While low carb has been evolving, there has been another nutritional movement growing: the paleo movement. Unlike the low carb movement, which has drawn heavily from the ranks of the overweight and obese, the paleo movement started among athletes. Yet the two diets are remarkably similar: Both embrace meat and eggs and shun sugar. Paleo completely eliminates grains, legumes, and potatoes, ruling out the most common sources of carbohydrate. It also eliminates most vegetable oils, since they have been in the human diet for roughly a century, and have proven to be profoundly pro-inflammatory. Paleo also generally rules out dairy products, although the term “primal” – coined by blogger/author/athlete/World’s Hottest 60 Year Old Mark Sisson – has come to mean paleo-plus-quality-dairy.

There is considerable debate in the paleo community about carbohydrate restriction. Some feel it’s beneficial, while others insist that “safe starches” like sweet potatoes are an important part of the diet. Too, many paleo folks eat more fruit than low carbers would. It seems obvious to me that the carbohydrate question has to do with most paleo enthusiasts being athletes: It’s a self-selected group of people with robust carbohydrate metabolisms. But most paleo meals are also low carb meals.

Most Low Carb Meals Are Also Paleo Meals

The reverse is not necessarily true – that most low carb meals are also paleo meals. Many, if not most, low carbers still use some grain products, soy, artificial sweeteners. But the two movements grow closer every day. Hence this book.

500 Paleo Recipes is not a strictly low carb cookbook. It contains a few recipes for “safe starches” and some of the higher-carbohydrate vegetables, and fruit-based dessert recipes that are too high carb for many of us. But without grains, legumes, potatoes, and sugar, most of the recipes are, indeed, low carb. 500 Paleo Recipes also offers tons of alternatives for low carbers who have quit dairy, for those who prefer stevia to Splenda, for those who are simply not using any processed or packaged foods anymore. All low carbers will enjoy this book, but it will be really invaluable for those who are both low carb and paleo.

As for the hard-core paleo community, the athletes who have hitherto not made up much of my readership, I don’t know how they’ll react, but I very much hope they’ll find the book fun and useful. I had fun writing it.

And I now know roughly 359 things to do with coconut milk.