Topics:
1. What’s new for you from Diane & Liz [2:02]
2. Something new that I’m into: The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up [6:57]
3. What is paleo, why do we eat this way? [13:54]
4. 30 day challenges [31:07]
5. The whys of certain foods [39:08]
6. Nuts and seeds [49:25]
7. Antinutrients [52:40]
8. Dairy [57:00]
9. #Treatyoself: lactation cookie dough bites [1:07:00]
[smart_track_player url=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/balancedbites/20720final2028ep201820replay29.mp3″ title=”#207: BB Classic: Paleo 101, Part 1″ artist=”Diane Sanfilippo & Liz Wolfe ” color=”00AEEF” social=”true” social_twitter=”true” social_facebook=”true” social_gplus=”true” ]
Links:
Subscribe to DianeSanfilippo.com
The episodes are also available in iTunes & Stitcher.
Show sponsors:
 |
 |
 |
Balance Bites: Episode #207: BB Classic: Paleo 101, Part 1
You’re listening to the Balanced Bites podcast episode 207.
Welcome to the Balanced Bites podcast with Diane Sanfilippo and Liz Wolfe. Diane is a certified nutrition consultant, and the New York Times bestselling author of Practical Paleo, The 21-Day Sugar Detox, and co-author of Mediterranean Paleo Cooking. Liz is a nutritional therapy practitioner, and the best-selling author of Eat the Yolks and The Purely Primal Skincare Guide. Together, Diane and Liz answer your questions, interview leading health and wellness experts, and share their take on modern paleo living with their friendly and balanced approach. Remember our disclaimer: The materials and content within this podcast are intended as general information only, and are not to be considered a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment.
Liz Wolfe: Hey everyone! It’s me, Liz. With Diane.
Diane Sanfilippo: Hey!
Liz Wolfe: Hi! How you doing friend?
Diane Sanfilippo: I’m great, how are you?
Liz Wolfe: Wonderful.
Diane Sanfilippo: {laughs} Super, thanks for asking.
Liz Wolfe: Super! Let’s hear a word from our sponsors.
Liz Wolfe: We’d like to thank Vital Choice for supporting our podcast today, and we encourage you to visit their online store at vitalchoice.com. You’ll find an amazing array of some of the world’s best seafood, including wild Alaskan salmon, halibut, tuna and cod, as well as sustainably harvested shellfish. These foods are not only delicious, but vital choices for your health. You’ll also find grass-fed organic Wagyu beef, live fermented foods to promote gut health, wild organic blueberries, and dark organic chocolates. Eat better, think better, and feel better with deeply nourishing foods from Vital Choice. They’re offering our listeners 15% off any order using code BALANCEDBITES. Remember that orders of $99 or more ship free.
1. What’s new for you from Diane & Liz [2:02]
Liz Wolfe: Diane, what are you updates?
Diane Sanfilippo: Well, I actually kind of have the same updates as last week, so I’ll try and breeze through them really quickly. If you listened last week, you probably heard these. But quickly, I’m on Periscope pretty much every single day. I know people are getting social media exhaustion, but Periscope is super fun. So download the app; you’ll get notifications, make sure it’s checked off. And you can come and type messages live, and we can chat and have fun. It’s cool. And you don’t have to be on camera; only I’m on the camera. So super fun. So check out Periscope.
And I mentioned this last week, I’m trying to get more time to finish this up, but the new Balanced Bites/Diane Sanfilippo website is launching soon, so if you're not already an email subscriber, jump on my email list because I’m sending out Practical Paleo Quick and Easy, it’s an eBook going out just to subscribers when the website launches. It’s a collection of some of my fastest, easiest recipes using the fewest ingredients, taking the least amount of time. So if you have all of my books, you probably have these recipes in different places, but what I’m doing is putting them all in one place. So if you’re like, it’s a week night, I just want to look at stuff that’s super quick, you’ll have this eBook handy that you can grab from your phone or your iPad, or wherever. So there’s that.
Also very quickly events coming up. Mediterranean Paleo Cooking Caitlyn and Nabil are doing a demo in New York City, and I just want to make sure everyone listening knows about it. I will not be there, but you guys should definitely go meet them. They’re awesome. They’re really fun. Caitlyn can answer your nutrition questions. Nabil is super charismatic and really fun to be around, and learning from them about cooking and flavors and all that good stuff. So Tuesday, September 15th, at Broadway Panhandler, 4:30 p.m. I think you’ll be getting some bites of food, so {laughs} check that out.
Lastly, event updates, I’ll be doing a joint book signing in San Francisco on September 21st at Books Inc. in the Marina with Juli of PaleOMG and Vanessa of Clean Eating with a Dirty Mind. They both have brand new books out, so I think that will be really fun. I will probably have more details on it; I’m pretty sure it’s at 7 p.m., so it’s a Monday night, 7 p.m. here in the city. But join us, because that’s a super fun collection of paleo authors you get to meet all at once. I think Kristen from Living, Loving Paleo is going to be here too, and maybe a couple of other Bay area paleo bloggers, so get to meet a whole bunch of people at once. So what’s new with you?
Liz Wolfe: Golly, I actually, nothing.
Diane Sanfilippo: {laughs} Just treading water, holding it together.
Liz Wolfe: Yeah, pretty much. Head above water. That’s about all I can do right now.
Diane Sanfilippo: Yeah.
Liz Wolfe: And that’s ok. It’s ok. We had a rough night of sleep the other night, and I have a semi mobile baby, so it’s a little bit more challenging now, because now it’s like I’m keeping stuff out of all; mouth, eyes.
Diane Sanfilippo: {laughs}
Liz Wolfe: She’s taking stuff off her head and it’s just, it’s a lot. I had no idea how kids can be so demanding. It’s ridiculous.
Diane Sanfilippo: You’re like, you only weigh, how much does she weigh, like 20 pounds or something. I have no idea.
Liz Wolfe: I have no idea. {laughs}
Diane Sanfilippo: I’m guessing. Oh, what, you don’t have a scale? {laughs}
Liz Wolfe: I wanted one so bad. I’ve wanted a scale. Because you freak out about that stuff in the beginning. How much does she weigh? Is she gaining weight? Is she gaining weight? And now I’m like, oh no, she’s still heavy, I can kind of carry her, we’re good.
Diane Sanfilippo: {laughs}
Liz Wolfe: We took her to the beach today, and she ate some sand.
Diane Sanfilippo: Aww. {laughs}
Liz Wolfe: I’m wondering how early is too early to be eating sand. It’s like, everything in my brain is getting crowded out in favor of types of diapers; cloth, wool. It’s just. It’s ridic.
Diane Sanfilippo: A lot of decisions to be made. It’s a whole new business over there.
Liz Wolfe: Yeah. Every decision is also the end of the world; P.S. It’s like the biggest decision I’ve ever made. Like, are we going to start putting her in socks?
Diane Sanfilippo: {laughs}
Liz Wolfe: I don’t know. Because I’ve had this barefoot baby the whole time, and every once in a while somebody will be like oh! Look at her little bare feet! And I’m like, is that wrong? She’s not walking on the ground.
Diane Sanfilippo: {laughing}
Liz Wolfe: Why do I need to cover a baby’s feet. I feel weird.
Diane Sanfilippo: Well, it’s also been summer.
Liz Wolfe: Yeah!
Diane Sanfilippo: Spring and summer, so I don’t think it’s weird.
Liz Wolfe: Yeah, so nothing really to report. I’m working on Baby Making and Beyond every chance I get, which is not super often, but we’re still plugging away at just kind of melding the content together, making sure we cover, you know, things that I don’t think have been covered before in pregnancy programs or in a lot of different pregnancy and birth information outlets, trying to bring it all together.
Diane Sanfilippo: Awesome. It’s going to be awesome!
Liz Wolfe: Yep.
Diane Sanfilippo: Sweet.
2. Something new that I’m into: Magic Tidying Up [6:57]
Liz Wolfe: Alright. So, Diane, what is the new thing that you’re into lately.
Diane Sanfilippo: Ok, so I’m into, and I’ve gotten, I wouldn’t say, not really by default, but by association gotten Scott a little bit into it, Marie Condo’s Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up, which I’ve talked about somehow before I think on the podcast. I didn’t finish the book yet, so those of you who have read it, or who are reading it, take this with a warning that I haven’t finished it yet. But, I’m totally into it because she has this way of approaching things where; actually her approach for tidying up your things, which this is totally relevant to just healthy lifestyle, healthy diet, cleaning up your life, nutrition, all that stuff.
But she talks about basically; let’s say you’re going to clean out your clothes and get rid of stuff that doesn’t fit, or you just don’t love, or whatever. She says to bring all of your clothes into the room, put them in one pile. Clothes from everywhere in the house. So maybe not winter coats and things like that; you can probably assess those separately. But anything that is at all going to then go back into a shared area that you’re going to organize it and keep it tidy and all that good stuff.
Anyway, I can’t speak to the full realm {laughs} of assessment, but I know that part of her way of assessing things is you hold it, and does it spark joy for you? And for me, with clothes, part of things not sparking joy is when they don’t fit, and you're keeping it because you’re like, well maybe one day it will fit again. Or it fit when I felt like I was, I don’t know, the right weight or size, or whatever the case may be. I think that’s a really cool thing to get rid of the clothes for those reasons.
Sometimes I hold onto clothes because I have a nice memory with it; like it’s a dress I wore to a certain event, and it does spark joy, because it gives me that little memory. But truthfully, it’s helping us. We moved from 2000 square feet to 1000 square feet in an apartment. We actually; it feels like we have less than half the space because we don’t have an extra couple of bathrooms. We had 2.5 bathrooms in the other place. It was just a condo that was a little too big for us.
But anyway, we have a lot less space, so we’ve been arranging our things into one closet. We have all our clothes together in one big closet, the two of us. So what I’ve been into lately, is basically this book and this approach, but also just simplifying and getting rid of more things. Scott and I have talked about taking maybe one day a month to do the thing that we did while we were purging things for the move. Where basically we sit in an area, and there’s a pile of something, or a box of something, and just go through it again. Force yourself to get rid of things that you truly don’t need, and that don’t bring you joy.
I have some stuff that I’ll probably just keep in a box that are mementos and he has the same thing. Little trinkets, or trophies, or papers or things that are just memories from life, and I’m ok with keeping some of that stuff. I have pamphlets and brochures and menus from when I ran Balanced Bites as a meal business. And for me, those are just, I don’t know, they’re partially great memories, partially stuff that maybe one day when I’m teaching about marketing, I’ll want to show people. This is some really old stuff that I had, and the original version of the 21-Day Sugar Detox eBook is printed out. All this stuff, I like keeping that because I think it does bring me joy.
But at the same time, I know there are still boxes, even after this move, that we need to go through stuff and just get rid of it. So I’m totally into this whole Marie Condo thing, simplifying, not just organizing your stuff better but getting rid of more of it. Because I think we all have more stuff than we really need. So I’m trying consistently; even though you guys know I get Stitch Fix where it’s like I might get a couple of new pieces of clothing more often than I would in the past, but I try very, very hard to consistently purge some out at the same time. I almost always have a bag in my closet that’s ready to go to Goodwill, for that reason.
But that’s it! The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up. It’s been a number one New York Times’ bestseller for like a bazillion weeks, and it’s a cute little tiny book, great one to pick up at an airport, which is where I got it. Yeah, hopefully you guys will enjoy it. Come let me know wherever you can, if you are enjoying it.
Liz Wolfe: Whenever I throw something out, I always wish that I had it two weeks later.
Diane Sanfilippo: Really? What kind of stuff?
Liz Wolfe: Like a shirt that I’ve never worn, my whole life I’ve had it, and then two weeks later I finally have an occasion to wear it. So I get scared. I just get scared. I get gun shy.
Diane Sanfilippo: So one of the things; I don’t know whose method this was, but this was something that Scott threw out there when we were looking at what should we get rid of, etc. One of the rules was, can you replace it? Somebody can tell me where this is from because I don’t remember. Can you replace it for, I want to say, less than $30 in under 30 minutes, was one rule of a way to just. So for example, for us, we had a million different wires that were like, we don’t know what these are. We have to get rid of them.
Liz Wolfe: Yes. Yes.
Diane Sanfilippo: So it was like, we got rid of them, and then we realized that there was one that we might have needed back, so we ended up having to go get it. But we got rid of, you know, bags and bags of wires finally doing the purge, and maybe we lost something that we would have needed, but it was totally worth it. I really think the vast majority of the time you’re not going to need most of that stuff. But maybe you’re just an oddball. So you should never throw anything away, and become a hoarder. {laughs}
Liz Wolfe: Probably. You know what though, if a book about tidying up has been on the New York Times’ bestseller list for a really long time, there has to be something magical about it.
Diane Sanfilippo: I would give it a whirl.
Liz Wolfe: We are thrilled to have Paleo Treats back on our sponsor roster. We love their treats, from the Mustang bar to the Bandito and everything in between. They have been serving the paleo community since 2009, and were recently recognized by FedEx as one of the top 10 small business in America. Which of course, speaks to how much paleo and healthy eating is growing, but it also speaks to how passionate our friends Nick and Lee and the Paleo Treats team are about what they do. Use the code BALANCEDBITES one word, no space at http://www.paleotreats.com/ for 10% off.
Diane Sanfilippo: Hey guys. This episode is a replay of a super popular episode we had in the past, and we wanted to make sure y’all heard it, so enjoy.
3. Paleo 101: What is paleo, why do we eat this way [13:54]
Diane Sanfilippo: Yeah, maybe we can get rolling into our paleo 101, what do you think?
Liz Wolfe: Yeah, let’s do it. We’s going to talk paleo 101.
Diane Sanfilippo: Cool.
Liz Wolfe: I guess we’ll start with the very basic question; what is paleo? What are the rules, and why do we follow it? And I think you’ve got that pretty much on lock, so if you want to jump right in, Diane.
Diane Sanfilippo: Yeah, cool. We collected questions up from the whole library of questions that have been submitted to the podcast through Facebook, through the website, whatever. So some of these, these aren’t all user specific questions, so we’re just going to kind of roll in.
So, what is paleo, what are the rules, and why do we follow it. So first off, there’s no one cookie-cutter “paleo” diet. Not only are we basing the concept off of historical estimations, which can be quite accurate as has been shown by guys like Dr. Eades, I think we had talked about a recent post, series he had on his blog about estimating what paleo man might have eaten. But we’re also looking at history in many different parts of the world. So we know that different animal and plant food would have been available in different climates, different terrain, etc.
So what is it, then? What is paleo? Well, to me it’s really a way of looking at the oldest possible food available to humans that we can eat now in modern times. So even if paleo man might have eaten things like wooly mammoths, well we don’t necessarily have the exact same food available. We need to look at what’s available now that we can track back to be as old as possible. It’s about eating what was traditionally eaten. If you really want to be very detailed about it, depending on your own ethnicity and heritage, you might revert back to what your own lineage ate, based on what was available to your ancestors, not what was necessarily available to all of us today.
This could be, for example, something like if you are 100% Italian in heritage, and you look at what area of Italy your family comes from, or different areas, and you look back historically. And I’m not even talking just maybe your parents, grandparents, even great grandparents. I’m talking a little bit further back from that, even, and just looking at what they would have eaten. So it’s not about what do they eat today, but what was available then.
This question actually comes up a lot too, because we talk a lot about things like coconut products, and some people say, well that might not have been something that my culture would have eaten. It may not have been available to my people. And it’s like, well if you want to take it there, that’s fine. If you think that maybe only eating foods that your heritage would have had access to, go for it. But we can also look at, what do we know about how food works in the body today, and what we do have access to in modern society, and how those foods may either promote health or not.
So the “rules”, and I say that because I just don’t really think there is any one sort of bible for paleo. I don’t think there’s one set of rules that literally every person can and should follow to achieve optimal health. I just don’t believe that. So I think that they vary. Well, I know that they vary, based on whose original book or whose following you may have. So if you’re reading Robb Wolf’s book, the Paleo Solution, for example, or maybe you read Loren Cordain’s book, or Mark Sisson’s, you might have a different set of rules that you’ve been introduced to.
For example, I know that Robb Wolf, who was the first person I learned about paleo from, his sort of shtick is, no grains, legumes, dairy. And that’s his sort of basic, overarching, at least do that for a while, see how you feel, and then check back with yourself sort of. Loren Cordain pretty much the same kind of teachings; his original book, The Paleo Diet, focused on things like lean meats and eschewed saturated fats, until recently. I think he’s revised his stance on some of that. I think his original focus on lean meats had a little bit of a misunderstanding, because when we look at modern grain fed meat versus historical or even modern grass-fed meat; grass-fed meat is pretty lean. So I think people got a little bit confused about why he was saying that. I don’t know. I’m not in his head. I think essentially it’s looking at well raised meats, and well raised animal products, wild fish, etc.
Mark Sisson’s Primal Blueprint; the rules he puts for us are a little bit looser because he does allow for some dairy in this primal approach, and he also tends to have a little bit more of a hard line on the carbohydrate intake, where as I know Robb Wolf is definitely, a ‘your carb intake mileage may vary’, and I’m not really sure where Cordain stands on all of it.
So sort of the basic rules that we like to set up are this overarching eliminating foods that we know are not usually tolerated well by most people, but that’s a most, and a usually, and it’s not a hard and fast set of, if you don’t do this you won’t be a healthy robust person. So the way that I boil that down to some general tenants, or some rules to follow, and this is also based on holistic nutrition education, and then coming into paleo as we’ve talked about, you and I Liz, a bunch of times, we have this whole different sort of landscape of our view of what healthy foods are, but then we both sort of follow this paleo or traditional type of foods approach.
So really, the rules as I see them are, number one to eat whole foods. By eating whole foods, you’re eliminating the need to deal with a lot of sort of other rules. Most people, and when I say whole foods, I mean primarily you take it from the ground, and by your own hand, maybe do one or two things to it. If it was an animal and you killed it and skinned it or whatever you’re doing to sort of hand process this thing to make it more edible; that’s it. That’s a whole food.
I get questions a lot; well, you know, wheat grows from the ground and that’s whole from nature. And I say, you can’t actually eat it from the ground, or even just start to kind of pick it apart by your own hands. We don’t eat it that way, that’s not what happens. It gets highly, highly processed before it becomes something “edible”. So that’s kind of that different approach. But number one is eating whole foods.
The next step is really avoiding what Kurt Harris calls Neolithic agents of disease, and I like that term. It could be called just basically Neolithic foods, but I don’t necessarily consider them all to be amazing food sources. So avoiding Neolithic agents of disease, which includes grain products, and specifically and especially gluten containing grain products; industrial seed oils like corn, cottonseed, canola, or rapeseed oil as it’s called elsewhere, and soybean oil; and excessive refined sugar and sweetener consumption, primarily in the form of things like fructose or high fructose corn syrup.
This isn’t to say that some people don’t do ok eating a bunch of fruit; that’s a whole food. If you’re following rule number one, eating a whole food, you may be just fine. But it does mean things like soda, any processed or refined foods that are sweetened with high fructose corn syrup; we need to be avoiding those. I think some of that can be really easy for people to understand. Refined foods tend to include a lot of these Neolithic agents of disease. And we can talk a little bit more specifically about the why’s of each of those, but I just wanted to kind of get through the general rules, and then if we want to go back to the why’s, I think we have a few breakdowns of, why not grains, why not beans, and why not seed oils. But that’s the first two; eat whole foods, and avoid Neolithic agents of disease.
Number three I have eat to maintain proper digestive function. This is something that a lot of people who are following a paleo diet, they just stumble into it, and it’s like, well here’s a rule of foods I’m supposed to eat that are supposed to make me healthy. But the real issues are these next two rules. So number one is maintaining proper digestive function. The reason we want to avoid foods that are unhealthy for is that we can’t digest them properly, and it disrupts the entire process that our body has to fighting pathogens and creating a strong immune system.
This might vary from person to person based on what I like to call their constitution. And that can be things like where were you born? Were you born in this country or were you born in another country? What was the food supply like when your mother was pregnant with you? Were you breastfed? What were you fed for the first several years of your life? Did you have lots of infections, were you pretty healthy and robust? That can lay the groundwork for a whole different constitution amongst different people even of the same age group.
For example; I have a friend who was born and raised in Ireland, and he just has not experienced the same issues with gluten that a lot of other Irish people I know that do; it’s sort of an inherent issue that a lot of them have. We can look at people and say, they probably will have this issue with gluten; we know that these different cultures do. But he was born there, was probably breastfed for a long time, was raised on whole foods, meat and potatoes kind of diet, and he does fine. You can’t argue with how a person feels and what their health is like. But when you know how these foods generally tend to work in the body, and that they’re generally not well tolerated, that’s kind of where a different constitution will lay different ground work for how different people tolerate foods.
This whole thing of maintaining proper digestive function, it means avoiding foods to which you are intolerant, to the best of your ability. So if you know that foods like dairy, or grains, or soy for example, cause gas, bloating, any sort of side effects or discomfort, headaches, skin rashes, anything. If you experience anything from those foods, avoiding them as often as possible should be your goal. Just because you think having a little bit of gas is no big deal, doesn’t mean that eating dairy many times a week is the right approach for you. Because what you’re doing is disrupting your own digestive process, which is then disrupting in a cascade your entire immunity.
The reason that’s happening is that around 70% of your immune system lies in your gut. You have immune cells that are lining your small intestine; they’re called Peyer's patches, and I think I talked about this when I talked about leaky gut a bunch on a couple of podcasts ago, but essentially, if you’re constantly eating foods that are challenging your immune system, you’re demanding immune response at your gut lining all of the time, and so all of these other diseases that we’re trying to fight off and just stay healthy and not have issues. If we’re constantly challenging our digestive system, we’re not allowing our body to fight other issues. So that’s really the biggest thing about avoiding foods that we can’t digest properly. We’ll get into a little bit more about why that’s happening when we talk about specific foods.
And the last reason that I think we sort of follow a paleo diet, or why I tend to follow it, is that we want to eat to maintain proper blood sugar regulation. So when we’re avoiding refined foods, we do that a lot better because we’re eating foods that our body understands how to respond to more naturally. If you can tolerate eating a bowl of fruit and you don’t feel hungry a few hours later, then ok. That might be fine for you. But if you’re eating a bowl of fruit for breakfast, and then an hour later or even two hours later you’re hungry, what you’re doing is sending your blood sugar levels on a rollercoaster, up and down, and what we know about the way disregulated blood sugar affects our health typically begins with this whole demand for excess insulin. Which can lead to increased cortisol production, it’s very stressful for our body.
We are living in a time where we are experiencing so much chronic stress that then compounding that with foods that are stressing our body out at a systemic level is not what we want to do. We’re compromising our own hormone production, our stress hormones are prioritized, and our sex hormones are left sort of to the wayside. So we see a lot of issues with mood, energy, fertility, things like PCOS, at earlier stages, and progressing into complications like metabolic derangement, other diseases associated with that like cancer and diabetes, and even perhaps things like infertility all because blood sugar is not regulated properly.
So, when we look at how we apply these general rules to our everyday lives or somebody comes to me as a client who maybe doesn’t know anything about this whole approach, it doesn’t even matter what you call it. I get a person eating whole foods, and removing the refined foods that they’re eating; I get them to remove gluten, specifically gluten-containing grains, and all grains if I can. I get them to remove industrial seed oils, refined and excess sugar, and we work on things like improving their digestive function and their blood sugar regulation. And that’s it. The minutia and the details of every specific food, and should I eat this or that? That’s not really the point in my view. The point, when it comes down to which foods are good or bad, or worse, it’s really more about how do those either feed into helping you with keeping this level of health or not. That’s when we can talk about things like the specific foods and how those can disrupt the problems.
Liz, do you have more on what little maybe rules you have for your approach to this whole thing? I know it’s not, this is not a standard set of rules that I’ve come up with, but what do you think about that?
Liz Wolfe: Yeah, I think that, well I guess I’ll start by saying you’ve got one through four; I want to add five, number five which would be patience.
Diane Sanfilippo: Mm-hmm.
Liz Wolfe: {laughs} I feel like people often, at least a lot of the people that I talk to, will wig out by the number on the scale every single day, or they’ll try changing their diet for 2 days and they feel horrible so they give it up, or you know, whatever it is. They get frustrated, they get impatient, and we get a lot of questions along those lines.
Diane Sanfilippo: Right.
Liz Wolfe: Like, I’ve been paleo for 2 weeks and I’ve only lost 0.5 whatever. And the fact is, if you buy into this. If it intuits well with you, and you understand that the logic goes both ways. It’s not just, what a caveman ate. It’s actually we’re looking at what actually is resolving physical conditions, it’s, I mean, Robb Wolf has talked about this a lot. There is reversal of what has been considered hereditary, just totally doom and gloom conditions. This is real stuff. It’s not just acute, you know, let’s all dress up and loin cloths and eat raw meat and club each other. This has a good body of actual legit, current, medical, nutritional, and holistic wisdom behind it.
So, you just have to implement that over the long term, not as a diet strategy, but as a lifestyle and wellness strategy, and allow that adjustment period to happen, allow yourself to learn more, and realize you don’t have to know everything right away, you just have to the best that you can, and just let it unfold. It’s been several years for me, and I’m in a completely different place now than I was 2.5 years ago. But I’m still operating under the same values. You know; you just have to be patient. And figure out what works for you.
4. Paleo 101: 30 day challenges [31:07]
Diane Sanfilippo: Yeah. I think that’s a really good point, and I almost think; and this could be skewed because of who we both are, too, and how we both came into paleo. And for better or for worse, I think that a lot of people came into paleo; and I would say for the better, because of guys like Robb Wolf. I think a lot of people read Loren Cordain’s book; but I think Robb has probably had a more currently active role in sort of spreading the word and educating the masses, in a sense. And I think because that word was spread largely throughout a community of people who have a mindset of intensity and results and are super driven; what can I do, I want to do everything possible to have optimal health, and I want it now, and I want it in 30 days, kind of deal.
Again, I don’t have an issue with people wanting to do something for a month as a challenge; obviously I have a challenge that I run, but I think that people who come in with that mentality are not getting it, that this is not about a diet, like you said, and it’s not about 3 weeks or a month. It’s about reversing issues that they have had for years and years, and that patience is critical. I think you and I kind of both are on the same page with the idea of your weight is just not what the important part is at all. At some level, sure, your body should let go of excess weight. It should. If you get it to the point where you’ve figured out what all the problems are; but that can take years. We know this from other people in our own community who eat squeaky clean; they eat an amazing diet, and the weight just doesn’t come off. And it’s not just about, ok, I’m not eating of those foods, and I’m eating these, and that’s the answer to everything. But as the foundation, you have to know, and you have to understand that eating garbage will never lead you to health. {laughs}
That’s kind of the underlying, I think the biggest underlying tenant, is I don’t know how anyone; I guess, you now, we’ve all been there, right? I ate all that low fat refined foods and everything that I thought was “healthy” for a long time. But when you finally get that light bulb moment that, hey, I should be eating food, not food-like substances as Michael Pollan calls them, or edible food products, or edible products. I think Paul Chek calls them edible products. But when you finally get that, that’s when you start to just take that journey, as you were talking about, that’s like, ok you’re on the journey now. Now you’re just trying to figure out how to get your own body healthy. And we all have a different user’s manual that’s going to get us there to the best of our ability.
I think that’s one thing that a lot of people; and the reason why, this is a question that I don’t think anybody presented to us, but I know that people don’t get this part. The reason why Robb or other people may say, do this for 30 days, there’s a completely logical and clinical reason for that. And this is stuff that we learned about in nutrition school; it’s just a standard elimination diet. This is what we do as clinicians and nutrition with clients who come to us and have issues. We say, Ok! Let’s have you remove commonly irritating foods. It’s like, you know, paleo or not paleo, I would have had people remove gluten, dairy, and soy off the bat. Then learning that other grains have similar effects to gluten-containing grains; ok, I can get on board with this whole if we see that people do well with eliminating all of them, then ok. Then we go forth from there.
But that’s why often people do this as a challenge for 30 days, it’s to sort of give you that eye opener of, wow, when I stop eating all of these foods, this is how I feel. And it does give you the strongest effect. It’s a lot stronger than saying phase into it. Because sometimes that’s hard for people. But for someone like me, when I first learned about all this stuff, to tell me to never eat something again without enough time to research and experiment and feel the effects of it; it wasn’t effective for me. At all, for someone to just tell me not to do it.
So I find what we do on trying to educate people on all of this background information, I guess we do it because we both probably needed that.
Liz Wolfe: Oh yeah. That’s exactly where I came from. And just, I do want to point out; this is the thing. The reason it’s hard to say, these are the hard and fast rules, is because that to me just precludes any kind of further learning. Does that make sense?
Diane Sanfilippo: Mm-hmm. Absolutely.
Liz Wolfe: Like, here’s the rules, and we’re not going to look at anything else. We’re not going to move forward with any other ideas. So if that had been the case for me, if I had followed some predetermined set of rules and just been on that track forever and ever, I never would have found the Weston A Price Foundation; I would have known nothing about vitamin K2, I would have never known anything about the synergy between vitamins A and D. There’s a whole world that I would not have discovered if I had just stopped at the set of rules that I came up with years ago.
So, to me there’s a quote, and I can’t remember what it is exactly. But basically, when people are accused of being changeable; what’s the big deal. If there’s wisdom that’s guiding you to change your stance or add something to the way you feel, to the way you explain something, that’s the right thing. And it’s a stark distinction to a lot of what goes on in medical science, which just completely never changes. Just more medicine, or stay on this medicine for 2 years; it just doesn’t change with more research and more knowledge. It’s just a bunch of people that are entrenched in these ideas, and defending them to the death. And that’s just not how we work here in this paleo universe. We are constantly accumulating information and more understanding. You know, it can be a demanding lifestyle, but you’re just going to stagnate if you’re not open to new information. And that’s a little bit off a tangent for me.
Diane Sanfilippo: No, but it’s true, and I think we have two things we need to address here. The one is, I know a lot of people have asked us to give them a little bit more of how they can explain things to others, which we’ll get into in a bit. But I understand that for people who may follow a paleo diet, or some form of it who don’t understand all of the stuff that we’re talking about right now, for them to explain why this food or not that food, that’s a burden. That’s a lot, and if you don’t understand why all of these things work and how they work, then trying to get into the details of that are just, it’s just too much, and it’s overload, and it’s not even really necessary. I think it probably threw some people off when several months ago Chris Kresser posted a buckwheat recipe.
Liz Wolfe: {laughs}
Diane Sanfilippo: People were like, oh my god, Chris Kresser is eating buckwheat; what the heck! Well, first of all, he knows his own body. He understands how to properly prepare these grains to not be as irritating to his system, he feels good eating it. I’m pretty sure that we all get to make our own rules on some level, right? It’s your body, my body, his body, whatever. So I’m going to trust that he knows what he’s doing, and I think we all need to kind of, as we’re more and more educated on this stuff, trust that each of us is going to do our own thing. And if you’re talking to someone who is just trying to learn about this stuff, you have to remember where you were when you didn’t remember any of this.
5. Paleo 101: The why’s of certain foods [39:08]
Diane Sanfilippo: Do you want to get into some of the details on the why’s of certain foods? Maybe that’s helpful for people. I know we have a question about beans, but maybe we can talk about antinutrients, because that seems to be a pretty common paleo 101 type of question.
Liz Wolfe: Yeah.
Diane Sanfilippo: You want to do that maybe?
Liz Wolfe: Let’s do that. You want me to just throw the bean question in now?
Diane Sanfilippo: Yeah, you can throw the question in and we’ll basically cover all of that, the whole grains and beans issue.
Liz Wolfe: Ok, this fits in really well right now, actually. So let’s talk about the magical fruit real quick. This kind of is a tangent to this conversation. The question is, “Why no beans? I thought they were a good source of protein and also I thought they were magical fruit.” Which, touché, question asker. Here’s an example of where we’re constantly learning more things. In the last couple of years, a lot of discussion in the paleo universe was about antinutrients, and lectins, and phytates and stuff like that in grains and beans. As we kind of learn more about these constituents, and these reasons that we were avoiding these foods, we understand that while they’re still totally probably worthless nutritionally, there’s kind of more to the story than we originally thought.
The common argument against beans, besides the cavemen didn’t eat them, whatever, is that they have antinutrients. Right? Commonly called lectins, as well as some sugars that are difficult to digest, hence them being a musical magical fruit. So what we kind of understand now is that these constituents are generally destroyed by heat. So, ok, if that’s not the problem with beans, can I eat them now? And my answer to that would be; they’re less nutrient dense than animal protein, the amino acid profile is not as well used by the body as straight animal protein is. So really, I think Robb calls them a third world protein. It’s just one of those things where it’s not where you want to drive the boat if you’re looking for optimum health, best function as you can possible get out of your body.
If you have to supplement a little bit for financial reasons, or cultural reasons, or whatever, that’s when we get into the proper preparation.
Diane Sanfilippo: Mm-hmm.
Liz Wolfe: And stuff like that. So that’s kind of where I land on it. What do you think?
Diane Sanfilippo: Well I think it’s basically the same approach with something like grains; and then maybe we’ll talk separately just a little bit about gluten-containing grains. So, let’s just say we’re talking about legumes; you know, black beans, pinto beans, garbanzo beans, red beans, even include things like peanuts and cashews, along with grains, so things like quinoa, which would be an ancient grain, even sometimes considered a seed; rice, millet, corn, what else, oats that are sort of non-gluten grains.
Essentially, even if you don’t want to eliminate them entirely, that whole idea of what you were saying about soaking or fermenting, all of these processes that people can use that I think the Weston A. Price Foundation is really big on promoting, to help break down a lot of the antinutrients. I think one of the biggest reasons why we just say not to eat them is that most people are not doing that. Most people are not preparing them that way, or they’re dining out, or they’re getting something that’s prepared for them, or it’s in a package.
So would we argue that those who may follow a traditional vegetarian diet that’s culturally; perhaps a religious vegetarian, for example, who is eating tons of well prepared legumes. I’m not going to argue that they might not be perfectly healthy, because they may know how to prepare things in a way that they can digest well. Do I think that might lead to the most optimal health that they could achieve? I don’t know. I think understanding that getting rid of foods; I don’t know that we are really getting rid of everything that could be problematic for us when we do soak, and sprout, and ferment beans and grains.
So to that effect, just understanding that even if these processes to help make them more digestible, like 90% of people or more who are eating grains or legumes at all, are not eating them in that way. Maybe we are eating beans that are cooked, but then how many people are complaining about gas after eating beans that are cooked? If you have gas, you’re not digesting that food properly. If you’re not digesting that food properly, you’re compromising your immunity. Bottom line. So, it all comes back to the reason why we don’t want to be eating foods that compromise our digestion.
So when we talk about why grains and legumes specifically are generally avoided, as Liz mentioned, antinutrients are sort of the buzz word that we use, but I think the easiest way to think about it, and if you do want to get into holiday dinner discussions {laughs} somebody is asking you questions and you're sort of cornered and you need to answer this question, which, ok I hope that doesn’t happen to you. But what I like to describe to people; and I think, I probably got a lot of this from some of Robb Wolf’s seminars where he’s talking about, every living thing has a defense mechanism. When we look at eating the seed of a plant, or a grain, or a bean, we are eating its reproductive force. So anytime we are trying to consume the reproductive force of a plant, or even an animal. A lot of people have intolerance to eggs; it’s because eggs have antinutrients in them, too. Especially the white, because it’s protecting that reproductive force of the animal.
So if we’re trying to eat basically thousands or even millions of a reproductive force of a plant after it’s been refined; even refining it doesn’t make it more digestible for us. This is stuff that’s happening at a microscopic level that the constituents of these grains and legumes are interacting with the lining of our small intestine, and they’re trying to not get digested. Its’ their job as the seed of this plant to get back into the ground and reproduce. So that’s where this whole idea of antinutrients comes in, and that’s why things like animal proteins don’t have that, because the animal can run or fight. So, this is kind of why some people have this notion that animal protein is harder to digest, but it’s not. We actually are not encountering antinutrients in meat the way we encounter them in all plant materials, for the most part.
When we look at plants that are easier to digest, it’s those that we’re not trying to eat the reproductive force of them. So you can compare something like eating the actual bean; so eating black beans, or look at a strawberry, for example. We eat a strawberry, and when you go to the bathroom, those tiny seeds that you were chewing on the berry, and those tiny seeds will actually come out. You’re not actually digesting those. They never get broken down by your small intestine.
So this is also why we run what’s called the transit time test. If you want to find out how long it takes your food to go from your mouth to the toilet, you’ll swallow a couple of tablespoons of white sesame seeds, and I’m pretty sure I’ve gone through this before. You swallow those white sesame seeds, and they come out intact. This is happening at a level that you can see; this is happening all the time at a level that you can’t see if you’re eating any sort of refined grain or bean products that you’re not digesting. What happens to the white sesame seeds is, they’ll pass through your stomach, your small intestine, your large intestine, and you’ll eliminate them intact. Because when that seed comes in contact with the lining of your small intestine, nothing happens. It’s covered with antinutrients; we cannot digest those. So it literally continues its way all the way through. The compounds in those sesame seeds, in those whole seeds, are never accessed. You never get any nutrition from swallowing whole sesame seeds.
Does that kind of make sense, Liz? I don’t think you and I, I don’t think I’ve ever really talked about how that would work, before, and I think it makes sense logically. If you were to maybe eat pulverized sesame seeds, such as tahini, which is the ground up form, you’re body, you’ve actually done some of that processing and you can actually access a lot of that nutrition, where as when you're eating that whole seed, you’re not really accessing it.
Liz Wolfe: Yeah.
Diane Sanfilippo: But what’s happening when we’re trying to do this over and over again, and so the problems with grains that we really have, this is what I think you can tell me what you think, it’s not that people were eating a small handful of grains each day, and this is what happened, where all of a sudden we kind of can’t tolerate it and we’re getting sick. This was cereal for breakfast, sandwich for lunch, pasta for dinner, and this is how people have eaten for the last 30-50 years, even.
Liz Wolfe: Yeah.
Diane Sanfilippo: So when we kind of look at what’s causing problems, it wouldn’t have been one piece of this or that here and there, it’s that people started eating this stuff all day every day, and now we’ve really got a big problem on our hands. What are your other takes on that? I have a couple of other things I want to throw in about nuts and seeds, and then maybe.
Liz Wolfe: Yeah, let’s do it. Because I know people don’t like it when I agree with you, but I totally agree with you right now, and I want you to keep; I want to hear what you have to say about the nuts and seeds.
6. Paleo 101: Nuts and seeds [49:25]
Diane Sanfilippo: Yeah. So people have a lot of trouble understanding how we can eat nuts and seeds, but we can’t eat grains and legumes. I actually think there’s two parts to this; one, a lot of people don’t tolerate nuts and seeds. Point blank. And if you’ve got an autoimmune condition, and your digestion is compromised, if they have any reason to not have ,say, 1005 of the enzymatic processes that need to be happening at the lining of their small intestine are not happening, then they may not be able to digest those foods as easily as other people. But, when you look at something like a walnut, for example, it’s got a hard shell. When we crack that shell; that’s its protection. Then we’ve got the nut inside. It’s got skin on it, that’s also a level of protection, but what we’re getting at is all the way inside that.
I think the antinutrient value that’s on that; by the time you get to the nut, it’s almost like that’s the fruit of that hard thing that was covering it. So if you kind of think which have harder shells, what might be inside of it may be a little bit easier to digest or tolerate. So the walnut or pecan, or almond have the hard shell on it. Something like a peanut; I don’t even know what cashews look like with a shell on it, to be quite frank. But peanuts, we know, have a pretty weak shell, so I don’t know. By the time you get to that peanut, probably still loaded with a lot of antinutrients.
So different ways to think about it. I think the sweeping generalization of just not eating them is the easiest for most people. And then when you get into this, and you live it for a long time, and you just need to find a way to have that sort of healthy balance, and I don’t think it’s an everything in moderation approach, but I think it’s a what works for you, what can you play with a little bit and still, you know, have good digestion and blood sugar regulation, that’s where things like figuring out, you know, do I tolerate nuts well? Can I eat some almonds and feel ok. I know a lot of people who can’t. I know a lot of people who take a handful of almonds, and they run to the bathroom. So those don’t work for you just because they’re “paleo” does not mean that they’re ok for everyone. We do just have to think about the whys, so you can understand how to implement things.
Diane Sanfilippo: Pete’s Paleo is a friend of the Balanced Bites podcast. They’re bacon is insanely delicious, and sugar free, and their premade paleo meals make your life so much easier when everything is getting busy and getting real food on the table is still a top priority, as it should be. Pete’s paleo is now offering a 30-day gut healing kit containing bone broth, gelatin gummies, instant organic soup packs, and an E-cookbook. It’s the perfect complement to any anti-inflammatory diet. Get yours today at guthealingkit.com. Use code GRABACUPPABROTH to get $25 off; that’s an amazing deal. It’s GRABACUPPABROTH, C-U-P-P-A. And you can grab that code any time at BalancedBites.com to just read and make sure you’re typing it in right. You can also use code BALANCEDBITES to get $5 off any of their regular meal plans. Check out PetesPaleo.com today. Pete’s Paleo; bringing fine dining to your cave.
7. Paleo 101: Antinutrients [52:40]
Diane Sanfilippo: Quickly, just to let people know. A lot of this is stuff that I cover in my seminar, so there are probably a bunch of people listening who are like, yeah I’ve heard her say all this before. But I guess the information doesn’t really change that much all the time. A bunch of parts of my seminar probably will change in light of some new information that I have, especially some stuff on Ancel Keys, which people may have seen Denise Minger’s post, but we’ll talk about that later.
But grains and legumes, just so people get, again, the 101. The elements that we do generally talk about are things like phytates, which are mineral binding antinutrients. I wrote about this a bunch in my calcium post; or my article in Paleo Magazine on calcium, and why eating a paleo diet is actually better for calcium intake and absorption. Because we’re not eating a diet rich in phytates, which phytates will bind to minerals and make them unavailable to us for absorption and digestion.
Lectins are primarily what you were talking about with the beans, Liz; they’re sugar binding proteins that can also lead to poor digestion. Lectins are what something like the blood type diet is based on, where different blood types would have different levels of agglutination or stickiness based on the different types of proteins that you’re eating that would not be digested and would get into your blood stream. Just a little fun fact about what the blood type diet is all about. Coincidentally it works well for a lot of people, because a lot of people in this country are type O, which tends to be a paleo diet.
And saponins are kind of the third category of antinutrients. They essentially punch holes in the gut lining, break it down. We cannot break down saponins; they’re essentially what emulsifies into soap, like saponification, what’s happening with soap nuts. Quinoa, beans, root beer, potatoes even. I would estimate largely it’s in the skin of the potatoes that we’re finding saponins. So antinutrients; it’s their job to resist our digestive enzymes. They breach the lining of our gut cells, and enter into our blood stream causing problems. They also destroy beneficial bacteria once they’re in our gut lining, and deliver their toxic compounds once they’re there. So we’re constantly talking about probiotics, good balance of our gut flora, having a good balance of beneficial and nonbeneficial bacteria, so that’s one more level that grains and legumes are destroying that beneficial bacteria.
And sort of that other argument of, why not to eat them? They’re just not nutrient dense foods and not biochemically available nutrient dense foods. Not as nutrient dense as other types of plants and animal products. So it’s kind of like; wow, they carry all these problems, and we’re not getting much nutrition from them anyway? Why were told to eat tons of them? It’s really just about money.
Liz Wolfe: Yep.
Diane Sanfilippo: The whole food pyramid and Food Plate are designed by the US Department of Agriculture. It’s not about health; it’s about selling a product that has been subsidized and made in excess. So that’s kind of the bottom line there. We see no nutritional advance to eating these foods at all. Any other notes on it?
Liz Wolfe: Well, I just want to say, a lot of these things, you can strip away all of the chatter and I think we have probably gone way {laughs} out into the pale. We are at paleo 501 honors right now.
Diane Sanfilippo: Shoot.
Liz Wolfe: But we see this stuff born out anecdotally. To me, it’s not, I mean I’m interested in the science and everything, but implementing this and implementing it with clients, it works. So, just do it. {laughs} Just do what we say.
8. Paleo 101: Dairy [57:00]
Diane Sanfilippo: No, seriously. {laughs} So why don’t we get into some of the other questions. Let’s see what we have here; I’m sure we’ll end up doing a follow-up to this, just like we’re going to do a follow-up to the adrenal fatigue podcast that we had, too. Because I know we tend to get off on some tangents. Sorry, go ahead.
Liz Wolfe: We should do adrenal part 2, and we should do a little, maybe we’ll do 101 part 2, because we’re circling in on an hour. I think this is overwhelming, almost even the worst commute.
Diane Sanfilippo: Why don’t we maybe just tackle the dairy question next.
Liz Wolfe: Yeah.
Diane Sanfilippo: And then kind of wrap up with that. I know we’ve kind of covered a lot of stuff right now, in just this sort of basic introduction. Yeah, why don’t we cover dairy, and then I guess we’ll do some more later. Maybe we’ll record it already, this week, so we can kind of cover a bunch of questions that are top of mind, and then get more in after people listen to this.
Liz Wolfe: Perfect. You’re a genius. Genius!
Diane Sanfilippo: Cool, so paleo and dairy. What is your take on this, Liz? I think you’ve probably got a lot more to say about it than I do.
Liz Wolfe: I do have a lot to say about it. I’ll try and keep it somewhat short. But the whole paleo and dairy thing is kind of a hairy topic for me, and I can be kind of a jerk about it. So I apologize in advance; I promise you I’m a nice person. This is more than just a calcium issues. You may hear a little bit in the old school discussion of dairy, calcium, and paleo, people talking about calcium retention as a function of acid-base balance. Just kind of wipe that off of your radar, because we kind of understand now that that’s really not the case; at least in my opinion and the way I’ve read things.
But the idea of how paleo and dairy kind of fit together is more than just a calcium issue. You don’t need milk for calcium; we understand that. Diane you’ve talked about that ad nauseam. There’s plenty of calcium that’s really highly bioavailable in different veggies, and we both really like the homemade bone broths, which is a great source of really bioavailable minerals. And we can put a few posts up in the show notes for that. The complexities of the issue, to me, I think it’s really severely narrow minded to write off all dairy for several reasons.
First of all, I do agree that modern, low fat, processed milk is toxic. It’s a dead food; I got that phrase from you, Diane.
Diane Sanfilippo: I got it from Paul Chek.
Liz Wolfe: Thank you Paul Chek! So I don’t think that whole modern low-fat processed milk is toxic mentality can be extrapolated to things like full-fat cream, or raw fermented dairy, or especially butter and ghee from grass-fed cows. And ghee specifically. It’s a casein free product, and we know celiac disease and casein intolerance often occur together. And I’ve read a lot of this literature; including and especially the book, Food and Western Disease by Stafffan Lindeberg. While I understand that dairy has been shown to have all this myriad of negative health effects, and a lot of people in this community, including myself, have talked about that in the past. But from what I see now, when looking at context, those negative effects, that’s modern dairy. That’s this weird fake, white water garbage that’s in every grocery store that most of us were raised on. I just don’t think that’s a good enough reason to avoid dairy.
I’m almost done, I promise. Here’s what I believe. Our buddy Laura from Ancestralize Me has talked about this; Chris Masterjohn has talked about this a ton; Chris Kresser has talked about this. Vitamin K2, along with fat soluble vitamins A and D, are literally some of the most potent, most commonly deficient, and most remarkably health promoting substances on the planet. I’ve seen it in my own life, I’ve seen it in other people’s lives. And K2 can only be extracted from pastured dairy fat from cows grazing on green grass, and organ meat. So which one do you want to eat? Do you want to eat good quality, raw, pastured dairy? Or you want to eat organ meat? Pick one. You know?
Anyway, unfortunately I think folks doing paleo a lot of times just as much as folks on a Standard American Diet can be totally deficient in K2 if they’re not using stuff like full fat pastured dairy or organ meats. Which are traditional foods that are really, really nutrient dense. So that’s why I take fermented cod liver oil with butter oil every day. I think butter is an amazing health food, along with coconut oil. It’s some of the first stuff that I tell clients to start using; grass-fed butter or ghee is amazing, and the synergy is remarkable. And I think that’s about all I have to say about it. I just think it’s a really important distinction; yeah, get rid of disgusting modern milk and hormone laden dairy products. But I want people to kind of get past this blanket fear of all dairy products, and try and incorporate some of those really nutrient dense foods. So that’s my soapbox.
Diane Sanfilippo: Yeah, a couple of things come to mind after hearing your whole take on it. Number one; the whole idea of not eating dairy or milk because paleo man didn’t, it’s sort of that first rule that people need to get over. What we’re trying to do; what you and I are trying to do, what those of us who are just out educating in the clinical practices, look at what we know about how food works in the body today. So while looking back as far as paleo times may help shed light on what we’re doing now, it’s not where that learning process stops.
You had said something about that before, about we don’t make hard and fast rules because we’re always learning something new. And we may be wrong about something later. And this may be something that, you know, the original paleo diet got it wrong on essentially. But you know what, it’s called the paleo diet. So that’s got to follow this rule about dairy; I don’t know. Just because we call it paleo, I think for us it just means old. It just means, what’s a way of looking at old food and making it something that works for us now.
I think another issue that people have with raw, fermented, grass-fed dairy is that either, A) they can’t find it in their area, it’s cost prohibitive for them. There are a lot of barriers to entry, essentially, on getting that type of dairy that’s just what’s out there is the garbage. So they’re having a hard time saying, well I can never have dairy? Oh my god! Because you’re telling me it’s all or nothing. And actually, I’m with you on this, where I tell people, look, if you need to do conventional meat, it’s still going to be less of a problem than continuing to eat bread. But I don’t really like to say to people; well, you can still drink milk if you tolerate it ok and you just get regular organic milk. I just don’t think that’s an option as a food; I don’t think it’s something anybody should be eating.
There’s some in our refrigerator because I can’t get my parents to stop buying the stupid 2% milk. And the day they sent me to the store to buy milk, I asked them what they needed, they said milk, I was literally like, how am I going to come home with milk? How am I going to do this? And luckily I was at Whole Foods and there’s grass-fed milk, it’s not homogenized, but it is pasteurized, but at least it’s from grass-fed cows. I was like, this is the best I can do, I’m going to buy the best one I can. So I think if people can look at those levels; if you tolerate dairy, if you can do the ghee, it doesn’t have the casein in it, or clarified butter. That’s sort of that level 1. If you can tolerate some lactose, go through those next levels. Is it unpasteurized, is it grass-fed? If you have to get a pasteurized milk product, at the very least you want it to be grass-fed.
When it comes to butter, if you’re cooking with it and heating it, it doesn’t matter if you get it raw for the most part, unless you’re going to use it to just melt on something after you cook it, then the raw butter actually is fantastic But if you’re going to cook, then you're pasteurizing it right there. So, I think people take things a little bit to extremes. I think a lot of that has to do with the mentality of a large influx of the population who came into this whole paleo scene from potentially a Crossfit mentality, versus what I think is awesome about people who are starting to follow both myself and your information. Is we’re getting a lot of people who are completely new, have never even heard of Crossfit, they’re finding paleo for health reasons, which is what I love, and we can teach them something just in general about how to chose foods. And it’s not about being super dogmatic, and it’s not about just making arbitrary rules for every single person. But having them kind of work with their own diet and lifestyle was in a general construct of, what is old food that will promote health today.
9. #Treatyoself: lactation cookie dough bites [1:07:00]
Diane Sanfilippo: Alright Liz, what is your #treatyoself for this week?
Clip: Three words for you; Treat. Yo. Self.
Liz Wolfe: Oh my. Well this is only for a very specific portion of the population {laughs}, I’m sorry. But Real Food RN lactation cookie dough bites; what could be better than treating yoself and also upping your milk supply at the same time? {laughs} I just can’t think of anything.
Diane Sanfilippo: {laughs} I really couldn’t possibly know.
Liz Wolfe: Yeah, it’s just incredible. So yes, this is my new thing. The lactation cookie dough bites from Real Food RN. It does have almonds, so sadly Diane, you probably won’t want to try them.
Diane Sanfilippo: {laughs}
Liz Wolfe: And also for other reasons, you probably won’t want to try them because you’re not lactating. But it is super excellent; it’s like almond butter, almond flour, some brewer’s yeast. And if you folks are looking for brewer’s yeast and you don’t have any of your leftover brand that I recommended in the skin care guide, you can go for bluebonnet, that’s a good one. Look for a gluten free non-GMO brand, because you can get brewer’s yeast that’s not actually from brewing. Lewis Labs does have some brewer’s yeast that you can use, it’s just a little lower in chromium than what I recommended in the skin care guide. So you can go for that. And, add a little chocolate chips, and you know what, if you tolerate oats, those are always pretty good too. But yeah, we’ll link to those in the show notes.
Diane Sanfilippo: Awesome.
Liz Wolfe: Alright, so I guess that’s it for this week. You can find me, Liz, at http://realfoodliz.com/ and as usual, you can find Diane at http://dianesanfilippo.com. Join our email lists for free goodies and updates that you don’t find anywhere else on our website or on the podcast. While you’re on the internet, please leave us an iTunes review. We would greatly appreciate it. See you next week.