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We all know that lunches can get tricky on Paleo. With sandwiches being out of the question, it's easy to start thinking that the options are very limited, but it doesn't have to be like that. Using bento boxes makes it easy to pack fun, tasty and varied lunch options that can be enjoyed cold. They are good for all kinds of salads, leftover cooked meats, dips, condiments, roasted or raw vegetables, fruits, ...

We like to use the non-reactive stainless steel ones. They are great for kids and adults alike, and bound to make your coworkers jealous of your healthy lifestyle. Bring more than one if you have a large appetite or on very active days and try to keep them refrigerated when out for extended periods of time.

Here are 8 original Paleo lunch ideas in bento boxes to help you get inspired for you own lunches:

1. Grilled salmon with fresh dill and lemon slices, radishes, kiwi slices and blueberries:

2. Grilled chicken with kale and cranberry salad, almonds, macadamia nuts, cherry tomatoes and jerky:

3. Mini grass-fed beef burgers with olives, carrots and applesauce:

4. Hard boiled eggs, guacamole, salsa, grilled portobello mushrooms and red bell pepper slices:

5. Chicken salad, cucumber, pineapple, dried apricots and roasted chestnuts:

6. Natural cold cuts, pickles, homemade mayonnaise and peach slices:

7. Sardines with lemon and portobello mushroom slices, strawberries, almonds, sliced apple with almond butter:

8. Celery sticks with almond butter and raisins, cherries, chocolate pudding, broccoli, fried sweet potatoes with bacon:

Most people’s mental image of “meat” is a thick, juicy T-bone steak. On Paleo, bacon might be a close second. But while there’s nothing wrong with steak and bacon, focusing too closely on just a few kinds of animals can lead to a very limited menu of poultry, beef, and pork. Even if you eat a variety of organs and different cuts of meat, restricting yourself to land animals like this can reduce the variety and micronutrient content of your diet, not to mention cutting you off from a whole world of delicious recipes! Two thirds of the Earth is covered with water; fish and other types of seafood present a wide array of Paleo meal options. While it’s important to be aware of environmental issues and potential food toxins, the benefits of eating fish are far greater than the risks, making seafood one important part of a balanced diet.

Nutritional Benefits of Fish

Fish isn’t quite as much of a micronutrient superhero as liver , but its nutritional profile is nothing to be ashamed of. In fact, the micronutrients found in fish are so important to proper brain development that some scientists speculate that we may even have evolved as coast-dwellers to take advantage of these essential nutrients.

As well as being an excellent source of protein, fish contains high levels of Omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA). In particular, seafood provides significant levels of two especially beneficial Omega-3s, a pair of long-chain fatty acids called EPA and DHA. While it’s important not to eat too much PUFA, making an effort to eat some O3s can actually be healthy, because the ratio of Omega-3 to Omega-6 also matters, and the modern diet contains far too much O6 and not nearly enough O3. Eating high-quality seafood can help you improve your health by balancing this ratio: studies have shown that moderate doses of EPA and DHA protect against heart disease. On the other hand, more is not necessarily better: above a “modest consumption,” (about two servings of wild-caught salmon or mussels per week) the risk of a heart attack was not lowered any further. Like safe starches, O3s are best consumed in moderation, rather than avoided entirely or eaten to excess.

Fish and other types of seafood also contain Vitamins A, C, and E, and even some Vitamin D (although to get all your required Vitamin D from food, you’d have to eat quite a lot!). Even better, seafood contains two essential minerals that can be hard to find from other foods. Iodine is one: table salt is fortified with iodine, so most people eating the Standard American diet get plenty of iodine from the iodized salt found in processed foods. On Paleo, though, it’s fairly easy to develop an iodine deficiency, especially if you don’t eat a lot of seafood and aren’t used to adding salt to your food. This is dangerous, since iodine is extremely important for healthy thyroid function, brain function, and cell metabolism. Iodine deficiency can cause thyroid problems and mental retardation, especially in babies born to iodine-deficient women. Anything that lived in the sea at some point (fish, shellfish, seaweed, or anything that ate them) will contain significant amounts of iodine.

Another essential nutrient found in seafood is selenium. This makes seafood an ideal dietary choice for people avoiding nuts, since the other major dietary source of selenium is Brazil Nuts. Like iodine, selenium supports thyroid function and helps prevent oxidative stress. Although most people get plenty of selenium in their diet, people with malabsorptive disorders (like undiagnosed food intolerances, Chron’s disease, celiac disease, or IBS ), and people with chronically inflamed guts are more susceptible. Thus, getting enough seafood is especially important if your gut is damaged, because people with gut disorders should generally be avoiding nuts, including Brazil Nuts.

Unsurprisingly, the fattier a fish is, the more nutritious it tends to be: salmon far ranks very lean fish like Swai or Tilapia. It’s also useful to look beyond eating only fish: mollusks (clams, oysters, and mussels) are extremely nutritious, with high levels of B vitamins and iron in addition to the micronutrients above. Shrimp, crab meat, squid, and lobster are also delicious options, and aquatic vegetables like seaweed can be prepared as a salad, or dried for a crispy, salty snack. Eating a many different types of seafood will provide you with a rich variety of micronutrients – and help keep your diet constantly interesting and exciting.

Heavy Metals and Toxic Pollutants

Fish is a tasty and very nutritious addition to your diet. But like land animals, fish can also contain various environmental toxins that seep into our seas and oceans from commercial farming operations, manufacturing plants, and other wastes. One of the most common of these toxins is mercury, a heavy metal used in all kinds of industrial applications. Microorganisms in marine environments convert this mercury into methylmercury, which accumulates through the food chain. This means that the higher a fish is on the food chain, the more concentrated the mercury in its body will be: small fish like sardines and anchovies have a very low concentration of mercury, while large, predatory fish like swordfish have more.

Mercury poisoning is the first risk of fish consumption that many people think of, and it’s definitely a serious problem – mercury is a very dangerous neurotoxin (a toxin that damages your brain and nervous system). Exposure to large amounts of mercury can cause loss of brain function in adults, and mental retardation in children. Pregnant women in particular are often warned to avoid mercury exposure, because of the risk to the fetus.

As serious as mercury poisoning is, all the well-intentioned warnings against eating fish may not actually be warranted. Mercury is certainly toxic, but the high levels of selenium in most fish naturally protects against mercury poisoning by binding to mercury, preventing the body from absorbing it. Thus, there’s no reason to avoid fish because you’re afraid of mercury poisoning. If you’re very concerned, make an effort to eat fish lower on the food chain, and avoid fish that are very high in mercury. The four worst offenders in this regard are Tilefish, King Mackerel, Shark, and Swordfish: Tuna gets a lot of bad press for being loaded with mercury, but this is mostly because tuna is very popular, not because it’s particularly problematic.

Another common concern with fish consumption is the presence of other toxins, like PCBs and dioxins. Like mercury, these chemicals are industrial byproducts that leak into the water supply and contaminate our food from there. Although these chemicals are definitely cause for concern, fish isn’t the major source of them in most people’s diets: in the US food supply, 90% of the contamination from PCBs and dioxins comes from other foods, with only 9% from fish. Reducing your fish consumption to lower your overall risk from dioxins and PCBs is like running outside naked in the winter, deciding you’re cold, and putting on one sock. It won’t hurt, but it won’t do much to help, either. In fact, if you replace the fish in your diet with foods higher in dioxins, you might even be making the problem worse. If you’re concerned about environmental toxins – and you should be – you’re better off focusing on the meat and vegetables in your diet.

One last toxin that might sneak its way into your dinner is BPA. BPA is an environmental estrogen (a chemical that prevents your hormonal systems from functioning normally) commonly used in the lining of aluminum cans: from there, it can leach into your food. If you buy salmon, tuna, sardines, or other canned fish, make sure to choose a brand packaged without BPA.

Thus, although it’s impossible to completely avoid consuming the toxins that modern industrial facilities spew out into the water, you can avoid BPA entirely by choosing your canned fish carefully, or simply buying fresh fish and avoiding cans altogether. As for mercury, PCBs, and dioxins, studies agree that the benefits of fish consumption are well worth the risks. Comparing the dangers of these toxins to the health benefits of a moderate fish intake, scientists found that the potential dangers were insignificant compared to the obvious and well-documented benefits.

The Ethical Carnivore: Undersea Edition

While fish farms don’t raise the same animal-rights issues as factory farms for mammals like cows and pigs, fish consumption raises an entirely different kind of ethical issue: sustainability. The oceans are vast – but they aren’t endless. Our current fishing practices are simply catching too many fish, diminishing populations faster than the fish can reproduce. This leads to long-term population decline, which has the potential to disrupt entire ocean ecosystems. Further destruction of the undersea food chain can then occur when fishermen move on down the food web, slowly eroding the base of the food chain and removing the food that other species need to survive. Many species of fish are becoming endangered due to unsustainable fishing practices, especially fish that reproduce slowly, and fish that we especially like to eat, like tuna and cod.

Unsustainable fishing practices are putting ocean resources in serious danger, and these poor fishing practices are directly driven by consumer demand: if nobody wanted to eat salmon, nobody would bother catching it. This puts the responsibility on all of us to make sure we only eat fish that can are harvested in sustainable ways. Good methods include hook-and-line fishing (the kind you’d do with a fishing rod and a worm) and specially designed traps that allow young fish to escape while doing very little damage to the seafloor. Bottom trawlers, by contrast, drag huge nets over the seafloor, destroying local ecosystems and killing everything in their path. As well as damaging the physical face of the ocean floor, these methods trap huge amounts of bycatch, fish that just happen to get caught in the net even though the fisherman wasn’t looking for them and has no use for them. Bycatch kills huge numbers of animals for no reason – they’re just thrown back into the sea, and most of them don’t survive.

Avoiding fish caught with unsustainable methods can be tricky, since fish companies love to make their harvesting practices sound better than they are. If you’re lucky enough to buy your fish from a local fisherman, you’ll be able to ask questions firsthand about how the fish was caught. If you’re stuck with the grocery store, look for the blue Marine Stewardship Council certified label to find fish that was sustainably harvested by operations that treat their workers fairly. When you’re dining out, the Monterey Bay Aquarium offers wallet-sized cards that you can print and carry with you.

The Great Debate: Farmed vs. Wild-Caught

One of the biggest ethical issues concerning fish is the choice between wild-caught and farm-raised animals. At first glance, fish farms seem like the perfect solution to overfishing: if humans like to eat a particular species of fish, we can just grow more of it, saving wild populations from depletion. This is why nobody is worried about whether cow or chicken populations can keep up with demand: if we need more, we’ll just breed them. Why couldn’t we do the same with fish?

Unfortunately, it isn’t quite so simple. For one thing, the fish most people like to eat are high enough up on the food chain that they eat other fish. This means that fish farms have to catch smaller fish to feed their products – they simply shift the damage of overfishing further down the food chain, rather than eliminating it. This problem can be somewhat alleviated by raising naturally vegetarian fish, like barramundi or tilapia, which don’t require much (if any) other fish in their diet.

Farmed fish also raise the possibility of genetic modification – a company called AquaBounty, for example, has introduced a new breed of salmon called the AquAdvantage Salmon, which is genetically engineered to grow twice as fast as an unmodified fish. Such genetic modification raises the same health concerns as modification of plants like soy and corn, as well as ethical considerations (AquAdvantage salmon would be the first genetically modified animals to be distributed for human consumption). Also, even if these hybrid fish don’t pose any risk at all to humans, they could still damage local ecosystems if they escaped from fish farms (as farmed fish quite commonly do) and began breeding with wild, unmodified fish populations.

Furthermore, although most people aren’t as horrified by the crowding and unnatural conditions in a fish farm as they are by the cruelties inflicted on factory-farm animals, the fact remains that diseases and infections spread very rapidly in a fish farm environment, requiring farmed fish to be regularly dosed with massive amounts of antibiotics. These drugs can then go on to damage the health of the person eating the fish. Fish farms also have the potential to release enormous amounts of pollutants in very concentrated doses, since they involve much more concentrated populations of fish than would ever occur in the wild.

To add to these disadvantages, the fish themselves are not as nutritious: farmed fish have no Vitamin D and contain much lower levels of the Omega-3s that make seafood so beneficial. Conversely, they do contain higher levels of Omega-6s, which most of us get too many of already. This is most likely due to their diet – a steady stream of industrially manufactured pellets can’t replace the variety of fresh, wild food the salmon would otherwise be eating. The amount of waste generated by these fish farms also makes farmed fish slightly higher in toxins than their wild-caught cousins (although even farmed fish don’t contain enough toxins to outweigh the benefits of eating them).

Fish farms aren’t perfect. But they aren’t all doom and gloom either: a new type of farm, based on a model called recirculating aquaculture, shows serious potential to resolve at least some of the problems with current fish farming methods. A recirculating aquaculture operation involves both fish and fields: the fish are grown in tanks on land, and their waste provides fertilizer for the plants. This eliminates the problem of fish farms dumping waste into the oceans and the danger of farmed fish escaping into wild populations. Scientists studying sustainable aquaculture are also experimenting with different ways of feeding farmed fish to make aquaculture operations truly sustainable and farmed fish more nutritious – one USDA formula uses corn, soy, wheat, and barley proteins instead of food made from smaller fish. While this may or may not be ideal for human nutrition (meat from grain-fed fish might have some of the same nutritional deficiencies as meat from grain-fed cows), it represents an encouraging effort to preserve ocean resources and support sustainable development.

By combining recirculating aquaculture operations with naturally herbivorous fish, fish farmers have the potential to create truly sustainable operations that can help take some of the pressure off the world’s overexploited oceans. However, it’s important to note that not all fish farms are recirculating aquaculture operations. For consumers concerned about the environment, therefore, both wild-caught and farm-raised fish can be good options, depending on the specific operation in question. The most important point is not whether the fish came from an ocean or a farm, but whether it’s nutritious and non-toxic to eat, and whether it’s produced in a sustainable way. Rather than making snap judgments in favor of one or the other, look for the Marine Stewardship Council label and focus your efforts on supporting workable, real-world solutions to the problem of overfishing.

Fish Oil Supplements

Whether they’re tight on money, too busy to cook, or just plain don’t like the taste of fish, many people try to get the benefits of dietary seafood from fish oil supplements instead. Unfortunately, supplements are rarely as good as the real thing. Although they provide a more highly concentrated dose of EPA and DHA, this might be a drawback, rather than a benefit, as too much O3 contributes to inflammation. Moreover, fish oil does not contain any of the other beneficial nutrients found in fish, and isn’t absorbed as well.

If you do take fish oil, make sure to choose it carefully. Unlike whole fish, fish oil does not contain selenium to counteract the negative effects of any mercury that it might contain. Thus, it’s very important to find a brand made from fish with low levels of mercury. If you’re pregnant, nursing, or particularly worried about mercury poisoning, ask the manufacturer for a Certificate of Analysis, verifying that an independent lab has tested the product and found it safe. You could also take a selenium supplement with your fish oil, or eat another dietary source of selenium, such as Brazil nuts. As well as paying attention to the potential toxins, choose a brand of oil made from sustainably harvested fish: it should be certified by a reputable body. To get some additional vitamins with your O3s, maximizing the benefit of your supplement, you could also look into fish liver oil.

Once you’ve chosen and bought your supplement, make sure the oil is fresh by breaking open a capsule and smelling it. If it smells like rotten fish, it’s rancid – throw it out! Since fish oil goes bad very easily, make sure to keep it in a cool, dark place so that it stays fresh. Take the supplement with a fatty meal, to aid in absorption: all the DHA and EPA in the world won’t do you any good if your body can’t use it.

By paying attention to the brand you choose, treating it carefully, and taking it correctly, you can maximize the benefits of a fish oil supplement. But taking a pill for anything should always be your second choice: before you think back on your grandmother’s soggy fish sticks and despair, try some of the recipes below and see if you can’t find a way to prepare fish in a way you like.

Fish and Seafood Recipes

There are two kinds of fish recipes: recipes for people who love fish and want to revel in it, and recipes for people who can barely stand it and want to disguise the taste as much as possible. If you find yourself hovering over the fish counter in breathless anticipation each week, you’ll want a recipe that lets the fish itself shine. Baking or grilling a whole fish isn’t as difficult as it sounds, and makes an impressive centerpiece for a special-occasion dinner. Eating the whole fish also has substantial nutritional benefits: the bones, eyes, and skin are all good for you. This tuna steak recipe unapologetically showcases the tuna flavor with a fresh-tasting marinade. For a light summer dinner, try some shrimp with fruity salsa or baked salmon on a bed of greens. Canned sardines are a tasty snack on the go, and also make a delicious topping for a spinach salad – as a bonus, the fat in the sardines will help you absorb the valuable fat-soluble vitamins in the spinach.

If you’re not wild about the taste of fish but want to enjoy the health benefits anyway, try a recipe like fish tacos, which have a very mild taste if you make them with a white fish like tilapia. You can add tomatoes, herbs, and spices to disguise the flavor of the fish, or even replace half the fish with a very mild-tasting vegetable like cauliflower. In this recipe for salmon with cherry tomato salsa, the bright, refreshing taste of the tomatoes balances out the stronger flavor of the salmon. Thanks to the potatoes in these fish cakes, the taste of the fish itself is quite mild – to further disguise it, you could eat the cakes with tartar sauce or another kind of dressing.

Seafood skeptics might also want to look beyond fish: other types of seafood contain many of the same nutrients, without the strong fishy taste. Scallops are extremely nutritious and have a very mild flavor – try them baked or pan-fried, or as a salad topper in this spicy scallop salad. Mussels are among the most nutrient-dense foods available, and taste delicious covered in a variety of sauces, from this very sophisticated white wine sauce to a simple topping of butter and pepper.

No matter what kind of fish recipe you prefer, if you live anywhere near the coast, you’ll want to check out your local fish markets: everything tastes better when it’s fresh, and fish is no exception. A local fisherman can also answer all kinds of questions about how the fish was harvested, to help you make the most healthy and sustainable choices.

Conclusion

As a delicious source of many important vitamins and minerals, seafood is an important component of a balanced Paleo diet rich in high-quality animal products. Although many people are afraid of mercury poisoning, the high levels of selenium found in seafood provide an effective antidote to any mercury-related problems – if you take reasonable precautions to avoid the fish that are highest in mercury, you’ll be fine.

Another common objection to fish is sustainability: if the oceans are so devastated by overfishing, should we really be eating any seafood at all? If we’re lucky enough to have a choice about what we can eat, shouldn’t we avoid fish and give the planet a chance to recover? Sustainability is a serious problem, and a valid concern, but by choosing to support ethical seafood, you can actually help encourage the fish industry to develop more environmentally friendly ways of producing fish, whether through better fishing methods or through sustainable fish farms. While there’s no need to eat fish for every meal (or even every day) it’s one important part of a nourishing, balanced diet: experiment with fish recipes until you find one you like, and enjoy the chance to add a variety of nutritious recipes to your culinary routine.

Not all people on keto diets eat cheese - and that’s totally fine! If you can’t tolerate dairy, here are some dairy-free cheese substitutes to consider. But if dairy sits well with you, then it can add some variety and nutrition to an otherwise restrictive keto diet. And one of the most beloved forms of dairy is cheese.

Cheese is the all-purpose keto replacement for crunchy-salty snacks. You can make it into puffy snack bites, crisps, pizza crust, ooey-gooey dip, and all-purpose high-fat deliciousness. But not all cheese is keto-approved - some kinds of cheese actually do have a significant number of carbs. And there are a few really great kinds with very few carbs that many people aren't aware of.

Here are 8 kinds of cheese that work great in keto or low-carb diets. Note that all the carb counts are both total carbs and net carbs, since none of these cheeses have any fiber.

1. Halloumi

Claim to fame: Halloumi is known as “grilling cheese” because...you can grill it! It’s pretty hard and it doesn’t melt as easily as softer cheeses like mozzarella and brie. That means you can use it a lot like meat in a culinary sense, to add some variety to the summer menu.

Carbs per serving: 0-1 grams of carbs per 1 ounce, along with about 6 grams of protein and 7 grams of fat.

Use it in… grilled skewers, along with meat and low-carb vegetables. You can also grill slices of halloumi and toss them over salad, maybe with some nice olive oil and fresh tomatoes.

2. Feta Cheese

Claim to fame: Feta is made of goat’s milk, which can make it easier on the stomach even for people who have trouble with cow’s milk cheese.

Carbs per serving: Per ¼ cup of crumbled feta cheese, 1.5 grams of carbs (none of that is fiber, so it’s 1.5 grams net). Per ¼ cup, you’ll also get 4 grams of protein and 6 grams of fat.

Use it in… These Greek-style burgers - or any Mediterranean-inspired salad, like this one.

3. Brie Cheese

Claim to fame: Brie cheese is really high in fat, and also melty and delicious on just about anything.

Carbs per serving: Per 1 ounce, 0.1 grams of carbs, along with 6 grams of protein and 8 grams of fat.

Use it in… eat brie with slices of hard sausage as a snack or appetizer - or melt it over a frittata or other baked egg dish.

If you’re not doing keto, you could also eat brie with apple slices, or with gluten-free/Paleo crackers.

4. Gruyere Cheese

Claim to fame: Delicious with eggs; very close to 0 grams of carbs. What more could you want in a cheese?

Carbs per serving: Per 1 ounce, 0.1 grams of carbs, along with 8.5 grams of protein and 9 grams of fat.

Use it in… Oven omelets, egg bakes, frittatas, and other egg dishes. For example, toss it in these!

5. Cream cheese

Claim to fame: Cream cheese has an almost sweet flavor to it, which makes it ideal for low-carb, high-fat desserts. It’s the star in a lot of keto dessert recipes.

Carbs per serving: Per 2 tbsp. 1.6 grams of carbs, along with 2 grams of protein and 10 grams of fat.

Use it in… Keto baking (as the main ingredient in keto cheesecake, or to add heaviness/moistness to other keto treats). You can also use it to make savory foods - like breakfast pinwheels with smoked salmon, cream cheese, and arugula.

6. Romano cheese

Claim to fame: Romano cheese is tasty in a lot of the same places you’d use Parmesan - it’s a hard, grater-friendly cheese that tastes delicious over Italian food and in salads. In fact, you’ll often see Parmesan/Romano (or Parmesan/Romano/Asiago) blends available with the Parmesan. But Romano is lower in carbs, making it preferable for keto diets where every carb counts.

Carbs per serving: Per ¼ cup of shredded Romano, about 1 gram of carbs, along with about 9 grams of protein and 7 grams of fat. That makes Romano slightly easier on the carb limits than Parmesan, which has about 3.5 grams of carbs (along with 7 grams of protein and 7 grams of fat) for the same amount of cheese. If you’re sticking to a strict, 20-gram net carb limit for keto, cutting down by even 2.5 grams can help a surprising amount!

Use it in… low-carb “pasta” made with spaghetti squash - like this recipe or this one. Or sprinkle it over Paleo pizza for that special finishing touch.

7. Paneer

Claim to fame: Paneer is a staple cheese in Indian food - if you head out to an Indian restaurant, you’ll probably see saag paneer (spinach with fried paneer), mattar paneer (peas and paneer with a tomato sauce), and paneer tikka masala (paneer in a spicy curry sauce).

Carbs per serving: Per roughly a 1-inch cube, 1 gram of carbs, along with 6 grams of protein and 7 grams of fat.

Use it in… Curry, and all kinds of other delicious Indian/southeast Asian dishes. Fry it and serve on top of curry vegetables - yum!

8. Cheese Curds

Claim to fame: Cheese curds might be familiar as one part of poutine, but they’re tasty low-carb snacks in their own right (although you’ll have to hold the fries).

Carbs per serving: 0-1, depending on the brand - but note that this is for the plain curds only. If you pour gravy on top of them, that’s extra, and sadly the curds in a big plate of poutine have no power to suck all the carbs out of the fries. Also beware of packaged flavored cheese curds in the store: the flavorings probably add some carbs.

Use them in...Make a keto-friendly breading out of almond meal and some egg, coat them, and fry them. Or throw them in at the very end of the cooking period with any kind of roasted vegetables, like broccoli or cauliflower. Once the vegetables are basically done, transfer them to a casserole dish, add the curds on top, put it all back in the oven just until the cheese gets melty, and dig in!

Higher-carb cheeses: use caution with these

We’re not saying don’t eat them, but be aware of how much you’re eating when you dig into some higher-carb cheeses like…

• Labneh and similar yogurt cheeses: they can often have 4-5 grams per serving, depending on the brand and exact style.
• Cottage cheese: per half a cup, this can have 5-6 grams of carbs.

As a general rule, go for full-fat versions of cheeses where possible, and watch out for packaged shredded cheeses: some of them have anti-caking agents that add carbs to the total. If in doubt, it’s safer to shred your cheese yourself at home.

What kinds of cheese do you like in your low-carb/keto diet? How do you use them? Let us know on Facebook or Twitter!

Ask anyone how to avoid hunger while you’re on a diet and they’ll tell you to eat more fiber, eat more protein, and drink plenty of water. And these are mostly OK tips - well, except for the water thing, which isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. But there’s more to appetite control than just fiber and protein!

The best overall thing you can do to manage your appetite is to eat a diet - like Paleo or keto - that plays nicely with your body’s hunger and fullness signals. Don’t eat foods that are specifically engineered to override natural “stop eating” signals - or in other words, don’t eat hyper-processed junk food. Do eat foods that naturally hit the “I’m full” buttons in your brain - yes, including fiber and protein. That’s the foundation, but any good foundation can always be tweaked. So here are 5 ideas for appetite management that you might not know:

1. Get more sleep

Is there anything sleep can’t do? Several studies have found that both acute and chronic sleep deprivation can really make people hungry - and in particular it sends them chasing after sugar, which is doubly hard to deal with. A couple selected examples:

• Just one night of sleep deprivation significantly increased self-reported hunger, as well as physiological levels of the hormone ghrelin in healthy men.
• Another study found that a night of partial sleep deprivation (subjects went to bed at 2:45 am and woke up at 7) increased hunger by messing with the endocannabinoid system.

Getting more sleep can prevent all this from happening. Sleep is a powerful tool in the weight-loss toolbox: use it!

2. Consider Omega-3 fats

These anti-inflammatory good guys found in fish and seafood may help suppress hunger during weight loss - or at least, that’s what this study found. In overweight people who were put on a diet, subjects who got extra omega-3s felt less hungry than subjects who didn’t. And the amount of omega-3s used in the study wouldn’t require any supplements beyond just eating fish. The Omega-3 group got about 1300 milligrams of Omega-3s per day, which is about as much as you’d get from a small serving (3 ounces) of cooked salmon.

Interestingly, this effect doesn’t seem to hold true in healthy subjects not trying to lose weight - it’s possible that it’s only measurable for people in a calorie deficit, or for people who were overweight or obese to start with. But if that’s you, it’s worth a try.

3. Try some spices

Hot sauce is the condiment of choice for a lot of athletes and dieters because it has almost no calories and adds flavor to otherwise bland food like chicken breast with broccoli. And as it turns out, hot peppers and other spices may actually have appetite-suppressant effects as well.

Eating soup with cayenne pepper in it improved feelings of satiation after a meal in this study, compared to soup with no cayenne. This study found similar results with two curry spice mixes in healthy young men. Another study found that, compared to placebo, supplements containing the capsaicinoids that make chili peppers spicy reduced appetite in healthy people.

If you’re into the spicy food, you might try some 5-minute spicy shrimp or Thai-style spicy grilled chicken skewers. Or, you know, just slather some homemade Paleo sriracha on everything. Your call.

4. Eat a bit more, but add workouts

Exercise doesn’t “make up for” a bad diet, but it can amplify the success of a good one

Basically, human hunger signals seem to be better at responding to dieting than to exercise, even at an equal number of calories burned/cut. This study lasted only 3 days, but the researchers found that after 4 days of diet-induced energy deficit, people got pretty hungry - but after 4 days of exercise-induced deficit, they were much less tempted to compensate by overeating. It’s worth noting that the strength of this response doesn’t depend on the intensity of the exercise, at least not in well-trained people (the study didn’t test total beginners). A moderate level of exertion is enough to get the appetite-suppressant effect; totally destroying yourself isn’t necessary.

This doesn’t mean that it’s fine to eat junk if you work out - the vast majority of people can’t exercise nearly enough to eat a bunch of junk and not gain weight. (Not to mention that eating hyper-processed junk food is awful for you independently of weight gain!) But it does suggest that in the context of a nutritious, cooked-from-scratch kind of diet, regular exercise with slightly more food is better than less food with no exercise.

Also - remember how sleep deprivation makes people hungry? This study from above found that exercise may be able to blunt part of that effect. Realistically speaking, most adults aren’t going to get enough sleep no matter how important they know it is, so this offers one potential way to mitigate the appetite-related damage.

5. Consider intermittent dieting

There are a million definitions of “intermittent fasting” out there (6-hour feeding window every day? 24 hours of total fasting per week? One meal a day?), but defined it as “1–7-day periods of severe energy restriction.” That could include, for example, one-day fasts every Monday, or a one-week protein sparing modified fast followed by a week or two of normal eating.

In a review of studies on that approach, the authors found that it may help people control appetite compared to continuous dieting. In other words, some people might feel less hungry if they restrict the amount of food they eat for just a few days and then take a couple days off and eat to hunger (which doesn’t mean eating junk - eat nutrient-dense food that otherwise follows whatever variation of Paleo or keto makes you feel great, just eat as much of it as you want.)

Summing it Up

To quickly recap, 5 strategies that can supplement a basically good diet and help reduce physical hunger, if that's still a concern after going Paleo:

• More sleep
• Omega-3 fats (think: fish)
• Spicy foods
• Regular workouts
• Intermittent dieting

It’s worth mentioning that these strategies only address hunger, and physiological hunger isn’t the only reason why people overeat. If you’re eating out of boredom, loneliness, stress, habit, or social pressure, then reducing hunger probably won’t do much for you, because it wasn’t the factor driving you to eat in the first place. On the other hand, sleeping more and getting regular exercise will also help with a lot of those other problems, and the other suggestions won’t exactly hurt - you can also check out some tips for emotional eating and managing cravings.

Throwing together a salad is easy: lettuce, cucumbers, red onions, walnuts, chicken, oil, vinegar, done.

Throwing together an interesting salad is a harder job! Especially if you eat salad day after day, the same old variations on a theme can get really old, really fast. If that’s you, check out these low-cost grocery staples that can liven your lunch back up and add a bit of interest without sending you to a dozen specialty stores or breaking the bank.

1. Cabbage

Coleslaw is technically a salad, and a great option if you’re sick to death of lettuce. But even beyond that, a handful of crunchy cabbage can really pep up a pile of greens - or substitute for them.

Nutrition

Per 1 cup of shredded cabbage (any color):

• Protein: 1 gram
• Fat: 0 grams
• Carbs: 4 grams (2 grams net)
• Fiber: 2 grams

Pair with…

• Kale, apples, almonds, and a simple oil-and-vinegar dressing
• Cranberries and pecans
• Mayonnaise for a classic coleslaw

Substitutes

Matchstick carrots have a similar snap and are lower in FODMAPs, which makes them a bit easier on the digestion.

2. Winter squash

Butternut or acorn squash adds a warm, savory-sweet note to any salad, and it’s a great counterpoint to crunchier toppings like nuts or bacon. Or branch out into new varieties like delicata, kouri, and buttercup - a salad is a nice, low-stress way to test a new squash since you can just pick it off if you hate it.

Nutrition

Per ½ cup of cubed cooked butternut squash:

• Protein: 1 gram
• Fat: 0 grams (If you roast the squash, you'll also get some fat from the oil or butter)
• Carbs: 10 grams
• Fiber: 3 grams

Pair with…

• Parsnips, baby spinach, and a mustard vinaigrette
• Greens, red onions, toasted almonds, and a sun-dried tomato dressing

Substitutes

Cooked beets (roasted or boiled - these are good hot or cold)

3. Broccoli or cauliflower (cooked or raw)

Broccoli and cauliflower add a nice heft to a big leafy salad - roast them in plenty of olive oil for a nice deep flavor and crispy exterior, steam them lightly, or leave them raw for even more crunch.

Nutrition

Per ½ cup of broccoli or cauliflower (they’re so similar that the nutrition info is essentially the same):

• Protein: 1 gram
• Fat: 0 grams
• Carbs: 3 grams
• Fiber: 1 gram

Pair with…

• Gingered beef, mixed greens, and a tasty vinaigrette
• Bacon, oranges, and red onions
• Mayonnaise, hard-boiled eggs, and bacon

Substitutes

Roasted Brussels sprouts or artichoke hearts would both add a similar weightiness and taste pretty good with the same types of dressing.

4. Marinated or pickled vegetables

The tangy sourness of a good pickle goes very well with a big pile of veg, and there’s a whole lot more out there than just dill cucumbers! You can also get a pretty intense flavor just by marinating vegetables before you add them to a salad. One easy first step towards marinated toppings is to grab or make some sumac onions - these are the pink-purple onions that you can get at Middle Eastern restaurants. On the pickle front, kimchi is a great addition to any Asian-inspired salad, and giardiniera works well in a hearty winter mix.

Nutrition

(Will depend on specifically what vegetables you pick, but most have almost no protein, very little fat, and maybe a couple grams of carbs with some fiber - unless there’s sugar in the pickle)

Pair with…

• Try dill pickles with hamburger, mixed greens, tomato, and onion.
• Try giardiniera with kale, Italian sausage, and red peppers.
• Try pickled or marinated beets with spinach, walnuts, and red onions.

Substitutes

There aren't really any substitutes for the flavor of pickled things, but you could try seaweed if you want a strong-flavored topping with a bit more wetness to it - just get one of those little containers of seaweed at the grocery store and divide it up among several salads as a topping rather than eating it all by itself as a side. (Or scarf it down immediately because that stuff is delicious).

5. Alfalfa sprouts

Sprouts add a fun fluffiness to a salad and they have a nice mild crunchy texture. Yes, alfalfa is technically a legume. But studies on sprouts indicate that they contain very little of the antinutrients that ordinarily make legumes less than great. There are biological reasons why this is the case - the antinutrients are there to protect the seed, not the whole sprout, for example - but basically they’re a non-issue unless you’re eating piles and piles of sprouts all day every day.

Nutrition

Per 1 cup of sprouts:

• Protein: 1 gram
• Fat: 0 grams
• Carbs: 1 gram
• Fiber: 1 gram

Pair with…

• Shaved carrots, green onions, and an almond-butter dressing
• Carrots, broccoli, snap peas, and chicken with Chinese dressing

Substitutes

Kelp noodles (exactly what it says on the tin: noodles made from kelp) for a pile of fluffy stuff with a slightly different flavor.

6. Water chestnuts

Water chestnuts are available in the Asian food aisle, usually in a can. They have a very mild and pleasant taste, but the real appeal is in the crunch - they’re just so nicely snappy and crisp between the teeth.

Nutrition

Per ½ cup of chestnuts:

• Protein: 1 gram
• Fat: 0 gram
• Carbs: 15 grams - these do have a few more carbs than many other vegetables, so low-carbers might want to pick another crunch.
• Fiber: 2 grams

Pair with…

Water chestnuts go really well with just about anything Asian-inspired. If you have any leftover black pepper chicken or sweet garlic chicken, try throwing it on top of some greens with water chestnuts and broccoli raab.

Substitutes

Apples or pears might substitute some of the juicy crunch texture, but admittedly with a much sweeter flavor profile.

7. Tahini

Tahini is a paste made of sesame seeds, and it’s delicious in salad dressing. Mix up equal parts of tahini and olive oil, then add lemon juice to taste and water to make it thinner if you like. Pour over your vegetables of choice and enjoy! It’s a little bit earthy but also very bright, and delicious with all kinds of salads.

Nutrition

Per 2 tbsp.

• Protein: 5 grams
• Fat: 16 grams
• Carbs: 6 grams
• Fiber: 3 grams

For the Omega-6 and PUFA-watchers, the fat breakdown per 2 tbsp. is:

• 2 grams saturated
• 6 grams monounsaturated
• 7 grams polyunsaturated

Pair with…

Leftover lemon and thyme chicken, pomegranate salmon, or zaatar grilled chicken - on a bed of spinach with some cucumbers and sumac onions.

Substitutes

Nut butter-based dressings can offer a similar texture; check out cashew butter or almond butter for potential alternatives.

What’s in your favorite salad? What’s your secret ingredient to make it delicious? Let us know on Facebook or Twitter!

Eating in season is a delicious way to save money and get the freshest produce available, not to mention making sure your diet stays interesting. And who can resist those colorful piles of beets and pumpkins?

So in honor of the autumn harvest here’s a meal plan built around seasonal produce, plus a shopping list to go with.

The plan is written for two, but it’s easy to adjust up or down, depending on how many you have to feed.

Day 0 (the day before day 1)

• If you’re going to be packing lunch tomorrow, cook up a batch of apple and squash stuffing. To feed two people, make half the recipe as directed.

Day 1

Breakfast:

• Pan-fried sausages with onions and cabbage (if the sausages don’t give off enough fat to cook the vegetables, just throw a little extra cooking fat in there).

Lunch:

• Lettuce wraps filled with apple and squash stuffing.

Dinner:

• Balsamic Roast Beef. Make a full recipe as written and save half for lunch tomorrow.
• Optional: If you want a second vegetable side, pan-fry some beet greens or spinach with garlic in a Paleo-friendly cooking fat.

Make Ahead:

• If you’re going to need breakfast on the go tomorrow, make a quick frittata. Use this recipe, except instead of tomatoes, use 1 large red onion and as much kale as you want. Toss the onion and kale in with the bacon to sauté and carry on with the recipe as directed (excluding the tomatoes).

* Each frittata makes 4 servings. You’ll be making two of these during the week, so if you want to, you can just make them both now to save some time.

Day 2

Breakfast:

• 1 serving of frittata per person (so between two people, you’d be eating half a frittata).
• Add an apple or a baked sweet potato if you like some carbs with breakfast.

Lunch:

• Leftover balsamic roast beef, sliced thin over your favorite salad greens and tossed with oil and vinegar.

Dinner:

• Beanless chili. Make half the recipe as written (this will give you 4 servings: 2 for tonight and 2 for tomorrow’s lunch)
• Roasted Brussels sprouts (just grab a pound of Brussels sprouts, cut them in half, and roast with olive oil and garlic about 45 minutes or until they get crispy around the edges).
• Optional: Pesto mashed potatoes. Make the whole recipe as written; this will give you enough for tonight and leftovers on Day 4.

* White potatoes? White potatoes are perfectly healthy for most people – see here for details.

Day 3

Breakfast:

• 1 serving of your frittata (if you’re feeding two, this should be the end of the second frittata).
• Add an apple or a baked sweet potato if you like some carbs with breakfast.

Lunch:

• Leftover chili.
• Fresh vegetable salad: salad greens, red onion, bosc pear slices, and walnuts with olive oil and vinegar. (If you’re packing lunch, just make this the night before and pack the dressing separately).

Dinner:

• Butterflied roasted chicken. Make a full recipe as written and save half for lunch tomorrow.
• Carrot and rutabaga mash. Make half the recipe as written and just eat it all.

Make Ahead:

• If you didn’t make two frittatas on Day 1, make another one tonight.
• Pesto mashed potatoes. If you didn't make the optional mashed potatoes on day 2, make half this recipe as directed for lunch tomorrow.

Day 4

Breakfast

• 1 serving of your frittata,
• Add an apple or a baked sweet potato if you like some carbs with breakfast.

Lunch:

• Leftover butterflied roasted chicken.
• Leftover pesto mashed potatoes.

Dinner:

• Cranberry apple stuffed pork loin. Make a full recipe as written and save half for lunch tomorrow.
• Roasted cauliflower with bacon. Make a full recipe as written and save half for lunch tomorrow.

Dessert (optional):

• Hot pumpkin custard. Just mix 1⁄2 a can of mashed pumpkin per person with coconut milk, vanilla, cinnamon, and nutmeg to taste. Heat until warm and enjoy.

Day 5

Breakfast:

• The last of the second frittata.
• Add an apple or a baked sweet potato if you like some carbs with breakfast.

Lunch:

• Leftover pork loin and roasted cauliflower.

Dinner:

• Grilled maple-dijon salmon with bacon. (If you don’t have a grill or if it’s too cold out, you can cook it on the broiler in your oven).
• Beet and walnut salad. Make a full recipe and save half for lunch tomorrow.

Make Ahead:

• If you’re packing lunch tomorrow, hard-boil 3 eggs for each person (so 6 in total if you’re cooking for two)
• Roast up some winter squash (see recipe below).

Day 6

Breakfast:

• 3 eggs, prepared however you like them (hard-boiled if you need them on the run).
• Roasted winter squash of your choice (acorn, delicata, butternut, buttercup...).

Lunch:

• Leftover salmon with beet and walnut salad.
• Optional: If you’d like, you can convert your leftovers to a salad by separating the salmon into bite-sized pieces, chopping the beets very small, and tossing them with spinach or your favorite salad greens.

Dinner:

• Mustard balsamic baked chicken. Make a full recipe as written and save half for lunch tomorrow.
• Oven-roasted garlic cabbage. Just make as much as you want for dinner tonight.

Make Ahead:

• While you’ve got the cabbage in the oven, slice up a meal’s worth of parsnips and just stick them in for 45 minutes or so at the same time for tomorrow's breakfast.
• If you’re going to be packing lunch tomorrow, put in a batch of kale chips.
• If you’re going to be packing breakfast, take a look at the recipe below and see if you’ll need to make that ahead as well.

Day 7

Breakfast:

• Parsnip hash. Pull out your roasted parsnips from last night and toss them into a pan with some dried cranberries, salt, pepper, and either (a) 3 eggs per person or (b) bite-sized pieces of cooked turkey or chicken breast. Stir everything together until it’s warm and enjoy. If you need this to go, make it the night before.

Lunch:

• Leftover mustard balsamic chicken.
• Kale chips.

Dinner:

• Paleo spaghetti. Make as much as you want, so you can have leftovers to freeze for whenever you want them.
• Optional: if you want a second side, quickly pan-fry some Swiss chard or collard greens with garlic, salt, and pepper.

“What should my macros look like on Paleo?” - it’s a common question and it’s sometimes frustrating to hear that there really is no one “right” answer. As far as anyone can tell, Paleolithic hunter-gatherer diets probably had a wide range of different macronutrient ratios, depending on the season and the geographic location of the tribe. That’s certainly how it works with modern hunter-gatherer groups - groups closer to the equator generally tend to eat more carbs, while groups closer to the poles generally tend to eat fewer carbs.

But Paleo isn’t even really about imitating hunter-gatherers, ancient or modern; it’s about how humans can eat to be healthy and strong. And the research here also backs up the “different strokes for different folks” theory of macros. Different people have hugely varying “optimal” macro ratios, and some lucky people who are relatively healthy can adjust to a huge range of equally acceptable options.

But with all that said, there are a few big macronutrient patterns that tend to emerge within the Paleo/keto/ancestral health community because they work well for a lot of people and offer some kind of structure for people just starting out. For example, a lot of people adapt Paleo food choices to a ketogenic (keto) macronutrient pattern. But there are a lot of Paleo-friendly macro choices that aren’t anywhere near keto. Paleo is a way of thinking about food that could theoretically be adapted to a wide range of macros, while keto is a specific set of macronutrient ranges - you can combine the two, but you can also do Paleo in a non-keto way.

Here’s a look at 5 keto and Paleo macronutrient ratio plans that might work for you - try them, modify them, or throw them out the window and do your own thing!

1. Extreme low-carb/carnivore

Protein: 20-40% (depends on whether you’re eating lean or fatty meat)
Carbs: ~1% (you will get trace amounts of carbs from eggs, dairy if you eat dairy, etc., but the total amount is extremely low)
Fat: 60+%

This is the most extreme approach to a nearly 0-carb diet you can get - basically the concept is to eat only meat, no plants, and particularly no plant foods that contain any amount of carbohydrate. Salt is allowed and encouraged. Some people modify it a bit with eggs, dairy, and/or or spices.

This is a very extreme approach and it’s worth noting that there’s almost no research on the long-term efficacy or safety of carnivore diets - and nothing on long-term consumption by overweight people in the 21st century looking to drop a few pants sizes. One of the best long-term accounts we have is the notes taken by Vilhjálmur Stefansson back in the early 1900s - his report on the Inuit diet is interesting and cool but not really a great scientific foundation by modern standards. There are a lot of unanswered questions here about nutritional deficiencies, especially if you're not eating a lot of organ meats.

The carnivore diet is probably best for people who want to try an interesting new diet experiment and really like meat but aren’t afraid to quit and try something else if it doesn’t work. If you want something low-carb but better-researched and less extreme, you could always try...

2. Basic keto

Protein: ~15%
Carbs: <5% (under 20 grams net carbs, not counting fiber)
Fat: 80+%

This is how most people do keto - enough wiggle room in the carb count that you can at least have a salad and some cauliflower pizza crust, but not enough wiggle room to actually go out of ketosis. Unlike the carnivore plan, the goal of garden-variety isn’t to eat only meat and avoid plant foods; the goal is to get a specific set of macros (high fat, very low carbs).

This plan has more fat and less protein than the pure carnivore plan, and likely less meat: even fatty meat isn't all that fatty by keto standards (for example, a nice juicy grilled T-bone is a whopping 38% protein, although you can lower that percentage rapidly by adding butter on top). With keto, you don’t necessarily eat a whole pile of T-bones; it’s more like half a T-bone with a lot of butter and some avocado and spinach salad.

Sample meals

• Chorizo and spinach omelette - 16% protein, 5% carbs (7 grams), 79% fat
• Baked salmon with avocado salsa - 29% protein, 3% carbs (6 grams), 68% fat
• Salt and pepper pork belly - 7% protein, 2% carbs (6 grams), 91% fat

If that's still a bit too much fat for you, or if you like really big salads with more roughage, what about...

3. Low-carb, not quite keto (aka keto with more vegetables)

Protein: 15-30%
Carbs: 10-15% (typically under 75-ish grams of carbs in total)
Fat: 55-75%

This type of macro scheme works well for people who want to avoid dense starchy sources of carbs (potatoes, rice, bananas) to keep their blood sugar under control, but who  still eat more fresh vegetables than they can fit into a traditional keto plan. If you’re not aiming for keto specifically, you also have way more flexibility with protein - ramping up the protein content can help prevent hunger, and maintain muscle mass during weight loss.

Sample recipes

• Tex-Mex Stuffed Peppers - 32% protein, 17% carbs (17 grams), 51% fat
• Slow-cooker Cuban-style beef - 34% protein, 11% carbs (19 grams), 55% fat

4. Moderate-carb Paleo

Protein: 20-30%
Carbs: 15-30% (up to 150-ish grams of carbs)
Fat: 40-65%

On this type of plan, you get to eat not just low-carb vegetables but also more carb-dense foods like potatoes (sweet or white), bananas, plantains, and dried fruit. A whole lot of people just feel better eating like this, particularly people who do a lot of sports, people with active jobs, pregnant women, and children and teenagers.

This is also a good starter plan for people new to Paleo who are worried about the “low-carb flu.” You almost certainly won’t have that problem on this type of plan.

Sample recipes

• Paleo sausage quiche - 22% protein, 24% carbs (19 grams), 54% fat. Serve with roasted delicata squash (adds 12 grams of carbs and a bit of extra fat) as a side.
• Creole jambalaya - 30% protein, 18% carbs (20 grams), 52% fat. Serve with garlic green beans (adds 13 grams of carbs and a bit of extra fat) or your other favorite greens.

5. Carb cycling

Protein: 20-30%
Carbs: Depends based on the day/time
Fat: Varies based on carb level

This is a little different from the other types of plans because it adds a timing dimension. The goal isn’t just to eat X amount of protein, fat, and carbs in a day; the goal is to eat those nutrients at certain times and not at others.

This plan is good for people who want the benefits of low-carb eating most of the time but struggle with lack of energy during workouts or recovery from hard workouts. Timing carbs just around your workout can get you over that hump but still give you the benefit of low-carb eating for most of the day.

This type of plan is also good for people who like periodic planned “cheat” meals for their own mental health. If a big carby dinner on Saturday night keeps you on the straight and narrow the rest of the time, then it can be a great psychological tool for long-term consistency.

Sample recipes (low-carb phase)

• Salmon with lemon-butter capers - 29% protein, 2% carbs (4 grams), 68% fat
• Balsamic chicken salad - 18% protein, 11% carbs (15 grams), 71% fat

Sample recipes (high-carb phase) - just add any of these to your other food whenever you need more carbs

• Grilled zesty sweet potatoes - 33 extra grams of carbs
• Hasselback potatoes with Paleo sour cream - 66 extra grams of carbs
• Curried purple sweet potatoes - 22 extra grams of carbs

Pick what works for you.

Paleo really isn’t about any single macronutrient ratio - a ketogenic Paleo diet is definitely one way to go, but you don’t have to do keto to be Paleo. The five macro schemes above are five common plans that work well for a lot of people: if you’re new and don’t know how to start, you could do a lot worse than picking one of those, giving it a college try, and tweaking it to make it perfect for you.

If you’re a bit lost with the low-carb life and don’t know where to start, here’s a 101 guide to the produce section. It doesn’t cover every single low-carb vegetable (you’d be here all day and probably forget most of them by the end of the list) but it does hit 5 basic staples that every low-carber should at least try. Start out with these and you’ll always have something in the fridge that you can throw together as a side dish or a quick salad.

1. Cauliflower, the amazing rice replacer

Use cauliflower as an easy low-carb substitute for all kinds of white starchy foods (potatoes, rice, pizza crust…). You can even buy it pre-grated into rice-sized grains now, no elbow grease required! It’s also tasty just tossed in the oven to roast with some olive oil and black pepper.

Carb count: Per 1 cup chopped raw cauliflower: 3.2 grams net carbs (5.3 grams total - 2.1 grams of fiber = 3.2 grams net)

Nutritional highlights: cauliflower is high in vitamin C and some B vitamins. It’s also rich in antioxidants, especially if you steam it or stir-fry it instead of boiling it to death. On the other hand, cauliflower can be hard to digest for some people because it’s high in FODMAPs, so if you have a really sensitive stomach, it might not be for you.

Recipe inspiration:

• Cauliflower shepherd’s pie
• Keto cauliflower pizza
• Keto creamy mashed cauliflower

Substitutes: Broccoli or Brussels sprouts for something quick to roast; nut flours for Paleo/keto baking.

2. Spinach, the speed demon side

Spinach is incredibly easy and fast to cook, goes with almost everything, and makes a perfect delivery vehicle for butter. Or eat it raw as a more nutritious lettuce substitute in salads.

You can also buy bricks of frozen spinach and just throw them in a pot of soup or chili for some extra nutrition - it looks like a lot of spinach, but it really almost vanishes in the pot.

Carb count: Per 1 cup raw spinach: 0.39 grams of net carbs (1.09 grams total carbs - 0.7 grams of fiber = 0.39 grams net)

Nutritional highlights: Spinach is full of essential minerals, like magnesium and copper. It’s also high in folate and other B vitamins (notably B2 and B6) and even some iron (although the iron isn’t very easy to absorb, so you’re still better off eating meat). It’s pretty low in FODMAPs, so it should be fine for people with IBS or FODMAPs sensitivity.

Like other intensely green vegetables, spinach is also rich in chlorophyll. Chlorophyll is how the plant makes energy out of sunshine, but it’s also a powerful antioxidant. No need for an expensive greens supplement when you could just eat some leaves!

Recipe inspiration:

• Keto smoked salmon salad with spinach and mushrooms
• Creamy mushroom and spinach chicken
• Chorizo and spinach omelette
• Keto ham and spinach egg cups

Substitutes: lettuce for eating in salads; beet greens, kale, or chard for cooking.

3. Cabbage, the savior of grocery budgets

Cabbage is incredibly easy on the food budget. If you shop sales, you can get a big head for 40-50 cents/lb and sometimes even cheaper in the late fall when it’s in season. For budget-conscious shoppers, cabbage is definitely the vegetable to stock up on.

Carb count:Per 1 cup raw cabbage: 2.96 grams net carbs (5.16 grams total carbs - 2.2 grams of fiber = 2.96 grams net)

Nutritional highlights: Cabbage gives you all the benefits of other cruciferous vegetables - broccoli, cauliflower, kale, and the better-known members of the “superfood” crowd - at a budget price. It’s particularly full of vitamins K and C, plus anthocyanins, glucosinolates, and other antioxidants. Unfortunately, it’s also high in FODMAPs, so this would be another one to avoid if you’re sensitive to them.

Recipe inspiration:

• Keto slow-cooker cabbage casserole
• Simple keto coleslaw
• Cabbage-wrapped salmon (leave out the onions and peppers to reduce carbs if necessary).
• Keto egg roll in a bowl

Substitutes: Celery or cucumbers for something crunchy to eat cold. If you're looking for more budget-savers, frozen vegetables are typically just as nutritious as fresh (since they're picked at peak ripeness, so they lose nothing in travel/sitting in the store) and typically cheaper.

4. Zucchini, the noodlemaker

Zucchini is one of the best vegetable choices for making low-carb noodles (“zoodles”). Cauliflower might be great for other recipe replacements, but it’s pretty hard to make satisfactory noodles out of a cauliflower - zucchini is a little bendier and generally more suited to spiralizing. You can even buy it pre-noodled now, which is convenient for everyone on the run.

Carb count:Per 1 cup raw zucchini: 2.66 grams net carbs (3.86 total - 1.2 grams of fiber = 2.66 grams net)

For anyone wondering, zucchini is lower in carbs than spaghetti squash (the other vegetable typically used in Paleo noodles). 1 cup of raw spaghetti squash has about 5.5 grams of net carbs, compared to about 2.7 in raw zucchini. Or if you take them cooked, you’ll get just under 8 grams of net carbs in a cup of spaghetti squash, compared to about 3 in a cup of zucchini.

Nutritional highlights: One nutritional highlight of zucchini is everything it doesn’t have. Zucchini is OK for basically anyone to eat. Keto? Autoimmune protocol? FODMAPs sensitivity? No problem!

Recipe inspiration:

• Zucchini fries
• Keto zucchini noodles with tomato-basil sauce
• Lemon chicken kebabs with grilled zucchinis
• Zucchini gremolata
• Garlic shrimp with zucchini noodles

Substitutes: yellow squash (they’re basically the same thing) or spaghetti squash for a slightly higher-carb noodle substitute.

5. Avocado, the high-fat, low-carb fruit

Avocado is the only item on this list that’s technically a fruit and not a vegetable. In fact, it’s one of the few fruits with a low enough carb count that you can actually eat it on keto (read more about fruit on keto here).

Carb count: 3.65 grams net carbs (17.15 grams total carbs - 13.5 grams fiber = 3.65 grams net)

Nutritional highlights: The big selling point for avocados, other than the fact that they're delicious, is the fat. Avocados are packed with monounsaturated fat, the same kind found in olive oil, making it absolutely perfect for low-carb, high-fat diets. Particularly for people who don’t like eating a ton of butter or other animal fats, an avocado here and there is a great way to up the fat content in your diet.

Avocados are also a great source of vitamin E (especially important if you don’t eat a lot of nuts). Here's a more in-depth look at all their nutritional benefits.

Recipe inspiration:

• Grilled lamb burgers with avocado sauce
• Keto avocado egg salad
• Keto baked salmon with avocado salsa
• Avocado vegetable dip

What’s in your fridge?

What’s your favorite low-carb pick from the produce section? Let us know on Facebook or Twitter!

“High protein” is the new “low fat:” all kinds of processed junk food from breakfast cereal to freezer dinners is getting a high-protein makeover in an effort to make it look healthier, and nutritionists are all busy telling us to eat more protein for appetite control and weight loss.And unlike the low-fat craze, the current high-protein moment does actually have some research in its favor: it actually is true that eating more protein tends to help people lose weight more easily (get a closer look at the evidence for this here). But does that still hold true on keto?

Keto was originally designed as a high-fat diet, with enough protein to keep you alive but not much extra. So how does protein fit into keto? Is it still good to eat a high-protein diet even if you’re trying to get into ketosis? Will a lot of protein throw you out of ketosis?

The bottom line is that depending on your reason for eating keto in the first place, eating a relatively high-protein diet may be helpful. There’s some evidence that up to 30% protein can be fine for weight loss on keto and it might be a good option for people who primarily want to lose fat and/or gain muscle. Check out all the research below!

Keto was designed as a low-protein diet...but does your keto have to be?

According to this review, the classic ketogenic diet, as it was originally developed for kids with drug-resistant epilepsy, has a 4:1 or 3:1 ratio of fat:everything else. That would be 3 or 4 grams of fat per 1 gram of (protein + carbs). Since fat has more calories per gram than protein or carbs, that translates to roughly 6.75-9 calories of fat per 1 calorie of (protein + carbs). Some newer versions use lower ratios (aka less fat, more protein and carbs). So the diet might go up to 10-15% of calories from protein, depending on the exact ratio and the carb target.

The reason for the protein restriction on the classic ketogenic diet is simple: to control epilepsy, the patient needs to be making a lot of ketones. Just like carbs, protein triggers the production of the hormone insulin, which suppresses ketone production. With all other things being equal, eating more protein = producing fewer ketone bodies = less reliable seizure control. So for optimal seizure control, protein is kept low.

On the other hand, most people who eat keto for weight loss aren't worried about seizures at all, which raises the question of whether these super low protein targets are still necessary. If you make more ketones than you need and they just come out in your urine, you haven’t accomplished anything except a nice photo of your ketostix for Facebook or Instagram. Ketones are a bit like vitamins: it’s good to have enough, but if you take a megadose of vitamin B6 and it all just goes into the toilet, what did you actually gain?

You personally might not need an ultra-high rate of ketone production to stay in ketosis, and you might do better eating more protein, even if it cuts down on the ketone numbers a bit. After all, you don’t see your ketone bodies when you look in the mirror; you see your actual body, and if your actual body is changing the way you want it to change, then your mission is accomplished no matter what the ketostix say. So with that in mind, check out some of the research on protein and keto:

Higher-protein keto: research and evidence

First, a look at some studies on protein in adults trying to lose weight with keto (NOT kids with epilepsy, because if you’re reading this you’re probably not 5 years old and having uncontrollable seizures).

Here’s a study where the researchers tested a ketogenic diet with 30% calories from protein (4% carbs, 66% fat) on a group of 17 obese men. Take this with a grain of salt because the study only lasted for 4 weeks, but the researchers found that the 30% protein keto diet successfully caused weight loss and reduced hunger in the men. That level of protein didn't kick anyone out of ketosis (all the men were in ketosis during the study diet), and the high-protein keto diet outperformed a moderate-carb diet.

From that study, it looks like otherwise healthy adults who are eating keto for weight loss can go up to at least 30% protein without compromising their weight-loss goals (although maybe these men might have been even better off with 15% or 20% protein - the study didn’t test that.

In another study of a high-protein ketogenic diet, researchers didn’t specifically give subjects a protein target, but asked them to stay under 20 grams of carbs per day, with unlimited meat and other 0-carb foods. The subjects naturally ended up eating about 26% protein (at least, based on their food diaries, which aren’t super accurate) and over the 24 weeks of the study, they had great results for weight loss, with an average of 9.4 kilograms (21 pounds) of fat lost in the low-carb group.

In other words, if you’re looking for weight loss, evidence suggests that it's very possible to lose weight on a higher-protein version of keto.

More evidence from low-carb, non-ketogenic diets

In other studies of non-ketogenic low-carb diets, people eating more protein diet also tend to do better than people eating less protein. For example, this study compared a high-protein and a normal-protein diet, both low in carbs but not ketogenic (25% energy from carbs). The high-protein diet was 20% protein, or 1.1 gram of protein per kilogram of body weight per day (if you weigh 150 pounds, that would be about 75 grams of protein). the low-protein diet was 10% protein, or 0.7 grams per day (for a 150-pound person, that’s about 48 grams of protein). The high-protein group did a lot better with their weight loss than the low-protein group.

In general, higher protein diets have some advantages for fat loss, especially because they help manage hunger. If you want to gain muscle (or keep it while losing fat), eating a bit more protein is likely to be helpful - yes, it’s an old cliche that bodybuilders are totally obsessed with protein, but they’re obsessed with it because it works.

What does 30% calories from protein actually mean?

This can all be a bit hard to get a handle on, so just for reference:

10-15% calories from protein:

• 2 eggs fried in 1 tbsp. butter with ½ an avocado
• Salad: 3 cups of spinach with ¼ cup of crumbled bacon, 1 ounce walnuts, and 1 tbsp. each olive oil and vinegar
• 3 oz. pork belly with asparagus roasted with bacon (put the uncooked bacon in the roasting pan and let the asparagus cook in the fat from the bacon) and slathered in hollandaise sauce (2 tbsp.)

20% calories from protein:

• 3 eggs fried in 2 tbsp. butter
• Salad: 3 cups of spinach with ½ an avocado, 3 ounces of salmon, 2 tbsp. olive oil, and 1 tbsp. vinegar
• 3 oz. pork shoulder with grilled asparagus slathered in hollandaise sauce (2 tbsp.)

30% calories from protein:

• 3 eggs fried in 1 tbsp. butter with 1 ounce of smoked salmon
• Salad: 3 cups of spinach with 1 can of sardines packed in oil + 1 tbsp. each olive oil and vinegar
• 3 oz. pork loin roast with asparagus roasted in 1 tbsp. butter

An addition to consider: MCTs or Coconut Oil

If you want to eat more protein but you’re scared of getting thrown out of ketosis, you might consider eating more protein and also eating more medium-chain triglycerides (MCTs). Because of the way they’re digested, MCTs are super ketogenic fats, so they give you a bit more leeway to eat protein and carbs. The best dietary source of MCTs is coconut oil (you can also buy MCTs in supplement form if you can’t handle coconut oil).

Hint: recipes like this keto taco skillet and this cilantro-lime chicken recipe combine protein and MCTs in one delicious package for ultimate keto convenience.

Summing it Up

Just to summarize very briefly:

• Adults told to limit carbs but eat unlimited meat will likely end up around 25-30% protein naturally.
• The classic ketogenic diet is low in protein, but research suggests that it’s probably fine to eat more protein on keto if weight loss is your main goal.
• Everyone is an individual and depending on your reasons for eating keto, you may do better or worse with more protein.

So...how do you manage protein on keto? Let us know on Facebook or Twitter!

The Science of an Energizing Breakfast

There’s a lot of confusion about exactly what makes for a “good” breakfast, but here’s a quick look at some relevant research:

• Protein is important. Following this study, all of the meals below have at least 20 grams of protein.
• Getting the right kind of carbs can help. Specifically, studies like this one and this one have found that fiber-rich carb sources at breakfast can improve energy and mood throughout the morning.
• Match carbs to protein. This study found that subjects got post-breakfast blood sugar crashes only if they ate more carbs than protein. A 4:1 ratio of carbs to protein caused blood sugar problems, but a 1:1 ratio (equal amounts of carbs and protein) didn’t. A 1:4 ratio of carbs to protein (meaning that the subjects ate more protein than carbs) also didn’t cause any problems.

Of course, some people feel best with very few carbs in their diet in all. So in deference to the low-carb crowd, each suggestion below has both a higher-carb and a lower-carb option.

From a Paleo perspective, an energy-friendly breakfast should also be anti-inflammatory. Inflammation is a huge mood and energy suck, and it’s a possible reason for daytime sleepiness.

So to sum up, a fatigue-fighting breakfast should have a decent amount of protein. If it has carbs, they should come from fiber-rich whole foods and there shouldn’t be more carbs than protein. The breakfast should also be anti-inflammatory. With that in mind, check out 5 travel-friendly, energy-boosting Paleo breakfasts.

1. Creative Egg Bakes

For the restless, the easily bored, and the enthusiastic experimenters-with-new-vegetables, these options are simple to bulk prep for the week but give you a little more scope for creativity and mixing things up.

Carb-friendly option: Twice-baked sweet potatoes with eggs

Protein: 20.3 grams
Carbs: 20.75 grams
Ratio of carbs to protein: around 1:1
Anti-inflammatory highlights: eggs are high in healthy fats but very low in inflammatory PUFA (learn more about PUFA here). Sweet potatoes are high in vitamin A while white potatoes are high in vitamin C - both have powerful antioxidant activity.

Modifications: replace the sweet potatoes with white potatoes (equal carbs), curried purple potatoes (equal carbs) or beets (slightly lower in carbs); add any vegetables or spices/seasonings you like...

Low-carb option: Oven-baked Vegetable Omelettes: keep the eggs and coconut milk, but replace the vegetables in the recipe with any low-carb vegetables you like.

Protein: 21 grams
Carbs: 6 grams
Ratio of carbs to protein: between 1:3 and 1:4 (in other words: 3-4 times as much protein as carbohydrate in this meal)
Anti-inflammatory highlights: like eggs, coconut milk is full of healthy fats and has essentially no PUFA; that’s without mentioning the vegetables.

2. A Real Stick in the Meat

Way more fun than a stick in the mud...it's a stick in the meat! Breakfast doesn’t have to be all about eggs: One simple and easy way to make non-egg breakfasts is to do kebabs (also spelled kabobs). They’re so easy to make in bulk, and you can either slide them off the sticks to eat with a fork or just pick up the skewer and go to town for a handheld A.M. treat.

Carb-friendly option: Ham and Pineapple Skewers: if you ever enjoyed cold leftover pizza for breakfast, you’ll love these as a make-ahead breakfast treat.

Protein: 27 grams
Carbs: 26 grams
Ratio of carbs to protein: around 1:1
Anti-inflammatory highlights: pineapple is rich in antioxidants, including vitamin C.

Low-carb option: Grilled Asian-Balsamic Steak Skewers (nutrition given for ⅙ of the recipe - the recipe makes 4 dinner-sized servings, but that's a bit more than most people want for breakfast. For breakfast-sized servings, you could easily get 6 from this recipe)

Protein: 30 grams
Carbs: 10.3 grams
Ratio of carbs to protein: 1:3 (3 times as much protein as carbohydrate)
Anti-inflammatory highlights: when meat is served with balsamic vinegar, melanoidins in the vinegar may help protect the fats in the meat from inflammatory oxidative damage. Plus there’s all that delicious polyphenol-rich olive oil.

3. Seafood Spectacular

From the perspective of fighting inflammation, it’s hard to get better than seafood. Fish are high in antioxidant minerals like selenium, inflammation-fighting omega-3 fats, and other goodies that make them one of the most anti-inflammatory foods around. The protein in the fish is a great source of long-lasting energy, and it’s easy to add some complex carbs for even more breakfast power (or not, if that works better for you)

Carb-friendly option: Breakfast casserole with salmon and hash browns: use this recipe, but substitute 8 ounces of smoked salmon (or half a can of drained canned salmon) for the sausages.

Protein: 24.75 grams
Carbs: 16.25 grams
Ratio of carbs to protein: about 1:1.5
Anti-Inflammatory highlights: eggs and salmon, plus onions and garlic to add those tasty plant antioxidants.

Low-carb option: Grilled garlic and lime salmon fillets - these are delicious served cold the next day, with a little bit of mayo on top if you feel that they’re too dry.

Protein: 40 grams
Carbs: 7.1 grams
Ratio of carbs to protein: about 1:6 (6 times as much protein as carbohydrate)
Anti-inflammatory highlights: on top of the salmon, this recipe is also rich in anti-inflammatory garlic and fresh herbs.

4. The Utilitarian

For the superheroes too busy saving the world to worry about fancy breakfasts, but too health-conscious to go through the drive-thru at Dunkin Donuts, check out these minimalist breakfasts - they get you the nutrition you need without the fuss.

Carb-friendly option: 3 hard-boiled eggs + one baked sweet (or white) potato.

Protein: 21.1 grams
Carbs: 20.9 grams
Ratio of carbs to protein: around 1:1
Anti-inflammatory highlights: on top of being low in PUFA, free-range eggs are also rich in carotenoids, the antioxidants that give their yolks that deep orange color.

Low-carb option: Grilled chicken breast with vegetables

Protein: 30.5 grams
Carbs: varies, depending on the vegetables. If you have half a pepper + half an onion, it’s 6.7 grams.
Ratio of carbs to protein: between 1:4 and 1:5 (4 to 5 times as much protein as carbohydrate)
Anti-inflammatory highlights: vegetables for breakfast is about as anti-inflammatory as you can get - especially if you cook them in polyphenol-rich olive oil.

5. What a Sausagefest!

Continuing the egg-free theme, what about that other breakfast staple meat: sausages are fun because they come in so many different flavor varieties, from spicy chorizo to sweet maple-bacon.

Carb-friendly option: Simple Sausage Casserole (made with 5 sausages and 2 large sweet potatoes for 4 servings)

Protein: 21 grams (Exact number will depend on the type of sausages you use)
Carbs: 24.75 grams
Ratio of carbs to protein: almost 1:1 (technically 1:1.2)
Anti-inflammatory highlights: this recipe is full of lycopene-rich tomatoes, even before you get to the other vegetables and the sweet potatoe.

Low-carb option:Southwest Sausage Skillet: for one week of breakfast, fry up 1 lb of sausage with kale, onions, garlic chili powder, salt, and pepper. You can use loose sausage meat or sausage links chopped into pieces.

Protein: 24.1 grams (Exact number will depend on the type of sausages you use)
Carbs: 10.1 grams (for 1 cup kale and ½ onion)
Ratio of carbs to protein: between 1:2 and 1:3 (2-3 times as much protein as carbohydrate)
Anti-inflammatory highlights: it’s got kale, so you know it’s super healthy - and that’s without mentioning the chili powder.

What’s your favorite breakfast for all-morning pep? Let us know on Facebook or Twitter!

Whether you accept dairy as a reasonable Paleo compromise food or avoid it as a neolithic invention, one thing is undeniable: dairy gets pushed very, very hard as the #1 calcium food around. (If you want to know why that is, look no further than the dairy industry's lobbying budget - dairy has been buying its way into the US Dietary Guidelines for years now.) But think about it for even a few seconds and that starts sounding really silly.

• Almost all people whose ancestors lived in east Asia are lactose intolerant - there was no tradition of eating dairy in Asia until very recently. And they all still had bones!
• Dairy farming only appeared for the first time about 7,000 years ago and there have been humans on Earth for the last 2 million years (that's 2,000,000). So for 1,993,000 years (give or take) we somehow made it without dairy foods as a regular part of our diet.

Obviously, humans don't need dairy to get enough calcium.

We've already gone through a comprehensive look at non-dairy calcium sources, including the different absorbability of different sources (that's here if you want to look at it). But here's the quick version: 5 dairy-free meals with as more calcium than a single-serving yogurt cup. A typical single-serving yogurt is between 5 and 6 ounces, so we'll call it 5.5 just to take the average. According to the USDA nutrition database, 5.5 ounces of low-fat yogurt has 275 mg of calcium in it - and that's if it's all yogurt and not half strawberry Jell-O or Oreo cookie crumbles or granola or whatever they're even putting in them these days (no seriously, walk by the yogurt aisle and the candy aisle - it's the same stuff). But let's be generous and assume it's plain yogurt.

To get 275 mg of calcium, check out what you could eat instead (all numbers are from the USDA nutrition database).

1. Workday Lunch: 1 can of Sardines + Leftover Roasted Broccoli

Calcium breakdown:
1 can of bone-in sardines (3.75 ounces, which is the typical can size) = 375 mg
1 cup of cooked broccoli = 34 mg
Total = 409 mg

As long as you get bone-in sardines, every can of sardines is a little calcium bomb in a conveniently delicious package. In fact, you'd be good even without the broccoli. You could throw the sardines over salad greens or eat them with any other random vegetable and still have more calcium just in a can of sardines than in a yogurt cup. But roasted broccoli with plenty of olive oil and garlic is delicious with sardines, so why not?

2. Comfort Food: Roast Pork with Braised Collards

Calcium breakdown:
4oz roast pork = 17 mg
1 cup cooked collards = 268 mg
Total = 285 mg

Collards: a surprising superstar of the vegetable calcium sources. Collards actually have the most calcium of any green vegetable. And they're cheap! You can get a huge bag for $2 or $3 already pre-cut and everything.

Note: the collards don't have to be braised. You can cook them however you like. Calcium isn't destroyed by heat, so there's no need to be particular about cooking methods here.

3. Dinner for Company: Salmon Salad with Avocado and Grilled Asparagus

Calcium breakdown:
⅓ can bone-in salmon = 258 mg
1 cup asparagus - 42 mg
½ avocado = 12 mg
Total = 312 mg

Make a classy salmon salad with some avocado in it - like this one - and serve some asparagus on the side. Just like with the sardines, make sure to get bone-in salmon (the calcium is in the bones, not the flesh of the fish). Again, the asparagus doesn't have to be grilled. Cook it however you want.

4. Super-easy Dinner: Roast Chicken with Mixed Greens

Calcium breakdown:
1 chicken leg (drumstick + thigh) = 27 mg
Greens: it varies! Mix and match from one or more of the following...

• 1 cup cooked kale = 94 mg
• 1 cup cooked turnip greens = 197 mg
• 1 cup cooked beet greens = 164 mg

An easy way to cook the greens is to just load them all onto a baking sheet, drizzle with olive oil (or your cooking fat of choice - lard is delicious with kale), and pop in the oven until they wilt. Take them out, sprinkle with salt/pepper/red pepper flakes/chili powder/whatever you want, and enjoy!

Bonus: gnaw off the ends of the chicken wings.

1 chicken wingtip = 1,000 mg calcium.

Bones are an incredibly concentrated source of calcium. An amount of bone the weight of a penny has around 1,000 mg of calcium in it! (you can see the math for this here.) If you occasionally nibble off the wingtips (or the tips of your drumsticks, or any other soft and easily-chewed bones), you'll be beyond set for calcium.

5. For Fun: Sesame-Crusted Shrimp

Calcium breakdown:
2 tbsp. sesame seeds: 176 mg
4 ounces shrimp: 103 mg
Total: 279 mg

Did you know that sesame seeds actually have quite a bit of calcium? And shrimp aren't exactly slouching in that department, either. Sesame-crusted shrimp would be really fun to dip in some homemade Paleo cocktail sauce.

Not a shrimp fan? Try sesame-crusted tuna instead and maybe throw in a few greens to make up for the missing shrimp.

Dairy is Nice, but it's Not Necessary.

Some people do fine with dairy; other people don't. If dairy sits well with you, then full-fat dairy is probably the best choice and there's nothing wrong with enjoying it, even though technically it wasn't around in the Paleolithic. On the other hand, if you're in the latter group, no need to worry. A dairy-free diet is not a one-way ticket to osteoporosis. Read up on all the factors that affect bone health (it's not just calcium!) and take advantage of the colder weather to dive into the huge variety of winter cooking greens. And if you're looking for something to put in your coffee, check out some delicious Paleo dairy substitutes here.

This post was NOT sponsored by Trader Joe's, or by the manufacturer of any of the products pictured. Paleo Leap has never taken money from Trader Joe's for anything else, either. Everything here is pure opinion.

After the Whole Foods walkthrough, a lot of readers wanted a sequel with Trader Joe's - but unfortunately, Trader Joe's doesn't allow photography in their stores. It's a pretty silly policy to have in the social media age, but that's the policy they're sticking with. So here's the next-best thing: a guide to Paleo-friendly edibles from Trader Joe's, with pictures of some selected items that we took home and photographed there.

Just like the Whole Foods post, this one focuses on things that are unique to Trader Joe's. You can get fresh vegetables, ground beef, and olive oil anywhere - those things are the staples of a Paleo diet, but they're not unique or special to any one chain. So here's a look at the things that might tempt you specifically to Trader Joe's.

The big picture: Trader Joe's is a reasonable place to get some Paleo-friendly specialty foods, but some of their products require a little compromise on added sugar and citric acid.

• Sugar: added sugar isn't good for you, mostly because it makes overeating sugar very easy. There's no significant nutritional difference between table sugar and the sugar in Paleo foods like honey. The difference is all in the amount. That's why Paleo discourages using a lot of sweeteners and dried fruit, but allows fresh fruit: you can eat a lot more sugar from Coke than from strawberries or apples, plus the whole foods have actual nutrients in them. Some otherwise-nutritious foods from Trader Joe's have very small amounts of added sugar - less than the amount of sugar in a single grape. If you're doing an absolute sugar elimination challenge, those foods would be out, but if you're just trying to eat well, such a tiny amount of sugar is very unlikely to cause any noticeable problems, so they're on this list as "Paleo enough to be getting on with," in the spirit of making reasonable compromises and not being extreme over nutritionally irrelevant ingredients.
• Citric acid: this is in most canned foods, and Trader Joe's canned foods aren't exceptions. Some kinds of citric acid may be a problem for people who are extremely sensitive to MSG. But citric acid is so harmless for the vast majority of people that even the Whole30 allows it - unless you have an extreme MSG problem, then it's almost certainly fine.

Part 1: Meat

The meat section has a pretty good selection, especially of Paleo-friendly convenience meats.

If you're looking for pre-cooked convenience protein, Trader Joe's is the place to be. They also had some Paleo-friendly pre-grilled chicken strips (look for the ones labeled "just chicken").

But as always, be very careful about anything with a sauce or marinade: most of them have junk oils or sugar or both.

There were also some Paleo-friendly sausages, but if you're avoiding absolutely all sugar, be careful. Here are two different packages of Trader Joe's brand chicken sausages with sun-dried tomatoes. Only one has sugar on the ingredients list. Can you guess which?

Choice A:

Choice B:

A is the one with the sugar.

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Ingredients for package A:

Skinless chicken meat, water, salt, turbinado sugar, spices, tomato powder, dehydrated onion, dehydrated garlic, paprika, basil, parsley, diced tomatoes, sundried tomatoes (unsulfured).

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Ingredients for package B:

Chicken, sun-dried tomatoes, basil, water, salt, roasted garlic, paprika, dehydrated garlic, dehydrated onion, red pepper, white pepper, black pepper, chili pepper, coriander, extractive of paprika, in a natural pork casing.

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The amount of sugar in package A is quite small, and probably not enough to affect anyone's health. Package A would still be a decent Paleo compromise choice in a pinch - one sausage from Package A has about as much sugar per serving as a single grape. But if you're trying to eliminate added sugar completely, you'd want to go for B.

There was also some decent salami, by Paleo standards, but again with a very small amount of added sugar:

The ingredients list says sugar, but if you look at the Nutrition Facts panel, it says "Sugars: 0 g." Labels are legally allowed to round down to 0 if there's less than half a gram, so this means that there's only a very minimal amount of sugar per serving. The amount is so extremely low that it's probably not an issue health-wise (again, you'd get more sugar from one single grape), but if you're absolutely eliminating added sugar, read the ingredients, not the Nutrition Facts!

One last thing from the meat section:

This is a cool thing that Trader Joe's does: they sell "pieces" of some meats. This is exactly the same fish as the more expensive cuts of cod; it's just the weirdly-shaped bits that don't look very pretty. But it tastes the same and it's just as nutritious so the pieces are an easy way to cut down on the grocery bill.

You can also get "ends and pieces" of their bacon (sadly, not sugar free), and "pieces" of smoked salmon.

Part 2: Plants

Just like Whole Foods, Trader Joe's carries pre-grated cauliflower, which is very convenient for all kinds of recipes:

They also have a nice selection of pre-cut and bagged greens.

Unfortunately, every single one of the prepackaged salads (at least at this particular store) had some kind of junk in it. Canola oil in the dressing would be one thing (you can just leave the dressing off to avoid it), but even ingredients like "chicken" aren't just "chicken." If you look carefully, the ingredient listed as "chicken" often includes junk like canola oil and sugar that the chicken was cooked in.

There was also a decent house-brand salsa without any corn in it:

Again, the citric acid is there, but for most people that shouldn't be a huge deal.

Once again, if you're eating Paleo, the majority of your cart space should be full of fresh produce, but you can get that at any store so there's no real point dwelling on pictures of Trader Joe's spinach and cabbage in particular. It's there; it's fresh; eat a lot of it in all different colors.

Part 3: The Center Aisles

The center aisles are fruitful if you know where to look! Starting with the nuts and dried fruit aisle, the bad news is that every single one of the pre-packaged trail mixes had some kind of junk in it. Even if the front only listed nuts and fruit, the actual ingredients inevitably include canola oil or sugar somewhere - and not in the "tiny and unnoticeable amount" sense of sugar. These trail mixes actually had significant sugar content. Any dried fruit was typically dried in canola oil, and usually sweetened.

But if you're looking for unsweetened dried fruit to put on top of a salad...

The only ingredient in this is "cherries." Like all dried fruit, these are high in sugar - this particular package listed 19 grams of sugar per ¼ cup serving, which is a significant amount. That's why dried fruit is better saved as a salad topping or an occasional treat, not an everyday staple snack! But if you're specifically looking for something with absolutely no added sugar, these might be a nice break from cranberries.

Moving on to the canned goods:

Mmmmm, spice! Again, the citric acid is here, but that's really nothing to worry about for the vast majority of people.

And then there's this:

This is not coconut milk. This is coconut cream - it's basically like heavy whipping cream, but the coconut version. It's thicker and fattier. You can use it to make coconut "whipped cream" for treats like these or just for putting on top of berries. (You can also DIY coconut cream by putting a jar of regular coconut milk in the fridge overnight, and then scooping out the thick white stuff at the top and throwing away the water).

Most of the jarred pasta sauces had either canola oil, added sugar, or both. But there was a canned version that was A-OK:

If you look up in the corner of the can at that little red banner - yes, that does say "Low Fat." This might go down in history as the first time a Paleo site has advised eating anything labeled "low fat," but apparently at Trader Joe's, "low fat" means "we took the canola oil out," and that's a kind of low-fat even the Paleo crowd can get behind. Plus, you can easily fix the lack of fat with an extra drizzle of your own olive oil!

Continuing through the center aisles, the broth is another master class in reading the nutrition labels.

Just like the salame, the Nutrition Facts said 0 grams of sugar per 1 cup serving, so the total amount of sugar is very low and probably nutritionally insignificant. But it's still really annoying that they needed to put it in there in the first place: why does chicken broth need sugar? Chicken broth isn't supposed to be sweet!

Trader Joe's also had a brand of Paleo-friendly potato chips. White potatoes always stir up controversy, but they're just as nutritious as sweet potatoes, they don't cause autoimmune disease in people who don't have one already, and they're basically fine if you tolerate them. Not everyone does. Nobody has to eat white potatoes, and some people feel better avoiding them. But if they're fine for you, here's another snack:

And one last hidden gem from the center aisles:

Real live pre-made Paleo-friendly salad dressing. Now combine that with some of the kale from above with some crispy broiled pork belly on the side - sounds like dinner!

What are your favorite treasures from Trader Joe's? Let us know on Facebook or Twitter!

This post was not sponsored by Whole Foods, by the manufacturer any of the items pictured, or by anyone else. It is 100% un-funded, un-sponsored, purely private opinion.

If you think of organic groceries, Whole Foods is probably the first store that comes to mind - it's the retail giant of the natural foods movement. Whole Foods does carry a lot of Paleo staples, like grass-fed meat, wild-caught seafood, and a whole line of grain-free flours. But it also has some products that look Paleo but aren't.

Read on for a picture-heavy virtual "walkthrough" of a Whole Foods - what to snap up, and what to leave on the shelf.

Note: here, we're focusing on specialty foods that make Whole Foods different from other stores. On a Paleo grocery trip, the vast majority of your cart should be full of fresh fruits and vegetables, and fresh unprocessed meat. But if you want an apple or some chicken, you can go to any grocery store in the world. The point of doing a writeup for Whole Foods specifically is to see what makes Whole Foods unique or particularly interesting - which is mostly treats and "extras." So with that caveat, let's get started!

Part 1: Produce

Snack alert! Right when you walk in, you see a display of pre-cut fruit. You'll pay for the convenience, but these make handy snacks to grab in a hurry, especially for busy parents who need something kid-friendly.

The Whole Foods house brand guacamole and salsa pico de gallo are also Paleo-friendly and very convenient!

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Guacamole ingredients

• Avocado
• Tomato
• Onion
• Fresh hot chili pepper
• Cilantro
• Fresh lime juice
• Salt

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Salsa Pico de Gallo Ingredients

• Tomatoes
• Onions
• Fresh hot chili pepper
• Cilantro
• Lime juice
• Salt

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Just beware the other salsas; a lot of them have corn in them!

Pre-spiralized zucchini noodles! More convenience food, especially if you don't have a spiralizer. They also have spiralized beets, sweet potatoes, and butternut squash for all your Paleo-noodle needs

The ingredients list on each package had just one ingredient: whatever the noodles were made of (zucchini, butternut squash, or sweet potato, depending on which type you got). Paleo approved!

More convenience: precut vegetables. Take a look at the bottom row, second from the left - that's jicama. And speaking of convenience...

No time to grate your own cauliflower? No problem! Pre-crumbled cauliflower is perfect for making recipes like this soup.

Unfortunately, now it's time for something a little more negative. These supposedly "healthy" juices...aren't.

Don't be fooled by all the "100% juice" and "Vitamin C" on the front - take a look at that sugar content on the back. Ouch!

The lesson: not everything in the produce section is healthy.

Part 2: Meat

Moving on to the meat - and again, here we're focusing on things that are specific to Whole Foods. This stuff shouldn't take up the majority of space in the shopping cart.

This picture gives you a look at Whole Foods' special system of labeling meat. They have 5 "steps," where Step 1 is the most basic animal welfare provisions and Step 5 means the animals probably lived better than you do. The green sticker on this beef shows that it's Step 4, which is almost at the top. In case you can't read that tiny text, it says:

Step 4

Pasture centered

When living outdoors, chickens and turkeys get to forage, pigs get to wallow and cattle get to roam.

Ideally, look for Step 4 or above to get meat that's really good by Paleo standards.

These chicken livers are Step 2, which is still better than nothing!

Whole Foods also has some specialty meats that are pretty tasty, including smoked salmon. But beware what you bring home! Do you know which one of these two packages you should choose, and which one you should avoid?

The fish on the left is good to go, but take a pass on the package to the right. Farmed salmon from Norway has very high levels of toxins, and farmed salmon in general is less nutritious than wild-caught. The ingredients on the wild Alaskan salmon all pass the Paleo test: the label reads "sockeye salmon, salt, natural hardwood smoke."

Speaking of cured meat...

Prosciutto made with totally Paleo ingredients: pork, salt, and spices. Dessert, anyone?

Squeezing into the "meat" section even though it's technically in the center aisle is canned fish. Whole Foods has a nice selection of sustainably-caught fish. Some brands of tuna to check out:

Wild Planet is a favorite, but you do have other options:

See that little blue sticker on the cans to the left, with the white "MSC" and the fish on it? That's the Marine Stewardship Council sticker, and any fish with that sticker is sustainably caught.

Of course, no Paleo review of animal protein would be complete without eggs! You can find eggs at any grocery store, but the special thing about Whole Foods is the selection of cage-free eggs laid by happy chickens. See the green-and-yellow logo on this egg carton? That's the one to look for:

Up close, it says "Certified Humane Raised and Handled." Here it is on a couple other cartons:

You can see that the colors change, so watch out for the different -colored versions!

Part 3: Protein Powder, Supplements, and Bulk Foods

Who's up for an old-fashioned catch-all category? First up, let's take a look at some of those protein powders.  A lot of them were just full of junk and non-Paleo ingredients:

It looks so great until you read the ingredients list. Spinach! Kale! Broccoli! Raw, gluten-free, dairy-free, soy-free, protein AND vegetables? But brown rice, peas, and navy beans aren't Paleo. This is why it's important to read the back of the package.

On the other hand, there was one protein powder that looked more promising, if you absolutely have to have one:

You could do a lot worse, as protein powders go.

The supplement aisle at Whole Foods has a bunch of stuff you can find in other places, but the really great thing about it is this:

Correctly stored probiotics. In a refrigerated case, in opaque bottles and/or boxes to protect them from light. This is how you store probiotics if you want them to still be alive by the time the consumer puts them in her mouth! And their fish oil selection is just as well-treated:

Opaque bottles, and refrigerated. This is how fish oil ought to be stored!

Now for a look at the bulk foods. The bulk foods aisle at Whole Foods is a great place to save on nuts and dried fruit, not to mention spices. But take a look at the picture below. Can you pick out which one of these things is not like the others?

It's the peanuts! They're right in the middle of all the other nuts, but peanuts aren't nuts and they aren't Paleo. So skip that bin, but load up on almonds, pecans, and other nuts.

Beware the trail mix, though:

In case you can't read that teeny tiny writing, look at the ingredients: "Almonds (almonds, expeller pressed canola oil), cashews (cashews, expeller pressed canola oil, sea salt), cranberries (cranberries, cane sugar, expeller pressed sunflower oil)." If you just looked at the bin, this trail mix would look fine, but make sure to read the ingredients to catch any hidden junk.

Also in the bulk section...

...cheap spices! Bulk spices are much more affordable than the pre-jarred kind.

To round out the bulk offerings, Whole Foods also has a handy grind-your-own almond butter station:

Which comes in handy if you like your almond butter really fresh!

Part 4: The Middle Aisles (Here Be Dragons)

Here be dragons, but here also be some unexpected treasure, so don't shy away too soon!

Let's start with the enormous display of energy bars. An energy bar doesn't count as a "meal" for Paleo purposes - there aren't any vegetables, and there's typically not enough fat. But they can be lifesavers in emergencies, especially if the choice is a Paleo-friendly bar or McDonald's.

Epic bars (on the top two shelves) and Paleo bars (bottom right) are two decent options.

So are some flavors of larabars, but watch out for peanuts! Paleo Leap members can see a full nutritional comparison of dozens of different Paleo-friendly bars here.

Moving on in the "bar" category from "energy" to "chocolate," Whole Foods also carries quite a bit of Paleo-acceptable chocolate. Just like nut butter and other treats, chocolate is a borderline food and a treat - some people might want to avoid it completely. But if chocolate fits into your version of Paleo, Whole Foods is a decent place to get it. Here are three examples of good choices from their selection:

You can see that they're all dark chocolate, which minimizes sugar. And if you look in the bottom left-hand corner of each bar, you'll see the Fair Trade logo - that's important! A lot of cheap chocolate is made by child slaves, which is horrible and not something you want to support. A Fair Trade logo shows that at least the company is trying to avoid that.

Another treat if chocolate isn't really your thing:

The ingredients are "coconuts, sea salt" - not bad!

There's also a whole shelf of stuff like this:

Which looks very virtuous and all because the only ingredient is bananas. But if you look at the back of the package, you'll see huge sugar counts - 24 grams of sugar in one serving, in this case! Dried fruit has a lot of sugar.

Right next to this stuff is an aisle full of chips. Some of them look like they might be Paleo-friendly, but look at the back of the package!

Sweet potatoes? Sweet potatoes are Paleo right?

Sure, sweet potatoes are Paleo, but corn, sunflower oil, safflower oil, canola oil, and cane sugar aren't. Pass!

This next bag looks even more promising, because you can see that the "chips" are made of actual sweet potatoes...

But flip it over and you'll see that they're cooked in "expeller pressed canola oil and/or safflower oil and/or sunflower oil" - that's batting three for three on gross industrial seed oils. Pass!

On the other hand, if you eat white potatoes, you actually have some options cooked in coconut oil. Even the mention of white potatoes always stirs up controversy - nobody is saying you have to eat them if you don't tolerate them. People with an autoimmune disorder might need to avoid them, and some people might simply prefer to skip them. But they're not any less nutritious than sweet potatoes, so if you do well with them, there's no nutritional reason to shun them. You can read a full comparison and defense of white potatoes here.

With that said, potato chips shouldn't be a staple in anyone's diet. But if you've got a craving, here are two brands cooked in pure coconut oil:

The healthiest food in the world? No. Better than Lays? Definitely.

OK, moving on! Predictably, the breakfast cereal aisle doesn't have a lot of choice, but there is this:

This is a very nut-heavy "granola," and nuts aren't a staple food, so this shouldn't be your breakfast every morning. But as a treat, it's not bad - and it looks pretty tasty!

Further down the aisle, there's all the baking stuff, and you'll find the Bob's Red Mill Display:

This is grain-free flour central. The labels are too small to read, but there are two different types of almond flour in here, plus tapioca starch and coconut flour. If you're looking for any Paleo baking ingredients, you'll probably make a stop here.

For some weird reason, this is also in the baking aisle:

Individual squeeze packs of almond butter. Super convenient for emergency snacks on the go. The ingredients in this one are just "almonds," which is totally fine. But be aware that the Justin's brand often has added junk. That's these guys:

They have a couple different flavors, but just to take one example, the honey flavor has added sugar.

Also in the baking aisle is cocoa powder.

Cocoa powder is full of antioxidants and great for adding some chocolate flavor to your food with total control over the amount of sugar you use. And if you squint on this one, you can see the important fair-trade logo just to the right of the organic logo on the bottom.

Now a detour into the international foods aisle:

Canned coconut milk is the kind to get - it has fewer preservatives than the shelf-stable boxed kind. Skip the boxes and get it in cans. On the left you can see full-fat coconut milk, which is the type to go for. The light coconut milk on the right is basically diluted full-fat milk for the same price, so you're just getting less food for your money. If you want it diluted, buy the full-fat milk and put some water in it for free at home.

And speaking of coconut products...

Paleo-friendly "soy sauce," aka coconut aminos.

There's also a whole display of seaweeds:

These are really delicious in broths; just throw them right in the pot to simmer and fish them out when you're done. Seaweed is full of important minerals and other nutrients.

Forging head through a whole aisle of pasta, there's not much here to tempt the Paleo crowd, but there's a selection of junk-free pasta sauces for the days when you might not be up to making your own. Here are three examples of pre-made tomato sauces without any added sugar or gross junk oils. (There are probably more, if you want to go hunting for them)

And of course, what would a Paleo shopping trip be without broth? The best way to get bone broth is to make it yourself, but not everyone can manage that. Luckily, there are a few different choices for decent store-bought broth:

That's for the chicken lovers, and there's also this brand:

These broths have a minimal amount of preservatives and overall they're pretty good choices.

...And that about wraps it up! Is there a specific category of food that you would have liked to see? Is there another store that you want a walkthrough for? Let us know on Facebook or Twitter!

Maple syrup is often mentioned in the same breath as honey as a “natural sweetener,” implying that it’s a better choice than refined sugar. People who understand that “natural” doesn’t mean “good” get more specific: it’s nutrient-dense than table sugar and rich in antioxidants, which sugar doesn’t contain.

The killjoy truth here is that “natural” sugar is sugar like any other sugar: fructose doesn’t magically become healthy because it’s “natural.” The best approach to any kind of sugar is to eat it in small amounts as an occasional treat, not as a regular part of your diet.

It’s true that maple syrup has more nutrients than refined cane sugar (not a terribly high bar to clear) and that it has some antioxidants, but these both come in relatively small amounts relative to its sugar content, and there’s nothing in maple syrup that you can’t also get from other sources. If you’re looking for a Paleo-friendly sweetener, maple syrup is far from your worst choice, and there’s nothing wrong with it in appropriate amounts, but don’t confuse it for a healthy staple.

Maple Syrup: Nutrients and Antioxidants

Maple syrup starts its life as sap from maple trees; then it’s concentrated into a sweet syrup by boiling it and letting the water evaporate. Because it’s relatively “unprocessed” and “natural,” it’s often claimed to have a higher nutrient content than table sugar – which is true, but less impressive when you look at the actual numbers.

1 tablespoon (20 grams) of maple syrup has 52 calories, almost all of which comes from sugar (around 12 grams of sugar).

Here’s a comparative sugar content to put “12 grams” in context:

Maple syrup has a lower glycemic index than table sugar, but that doesn’t actually mean much in context: glycemic index isn’t a very useful way of determining whether a food is healthy or not, and it doesn’t matter much if you’re eating the food as part of a mixed meal. Since you probably (hopefully!) aren’t sitting around guzzling tablespoons of maple syrup straight from the bottle, don’t sweat the glycemic index.

In terms of micronutrients, 1 tablespoon contains…

• 1% of the Daily Value of calcium, iron, magnesium, potassium, and copper.
• 6% of the Daily Value of zinc.
• 33% of the Daily Value of manganese.

The manganese is a nice-to-have in the context of Paleo because there aren’t a huge number of other Paleo-friendly sources. You can get it from other sources including beef liver, nuts, mussels, and spinach, but maple syrup is a nice additional source if you like it. Other than the manganese, though, there’s not much here that you couldn’t get somewhere else: it might be technically “more nutrient-dense” than sugar, but it’s not going to win any nutrition contests any time soon.

Like most other plant foods, maple syrup also contains a huge variety of phenols with antioxidant activity, but it’s not clear what effects most of these chemicals actually have in humans in whole-foods doses (as opposed to being squirted on cells from a test tube or used as an antimicrobial in a concentrated extract – these uses don’t prove that maple syrup as poured on your pancakes has any anti-cancer or antimicrobial benefits in humans).

The bottom line: it’s better than table sugar, but not by all that much, and it’s far from the most nutrient-dense thing you could be eating. As a treat, there’s nothing wrong with it, but it doesn’t clear the bar for Paleo staple foods.

Choosing Maple Syrup and Figuring out the Grading System

If you're choosing to eat maple syrup, you want to actually eat maple syrup, not high-fructose corn syrup with caramel color. Here's how to get the real stuff.

Most importantly, don’t even look twice at any jar labeled “maple-flavored syrup.” “Maple-flavored” is nothing but a euphemism for “corn syrup and water with some food coloring mixed in.” The same goes for “pancake syrup,” “table syrup,” “breakfast syrup,” or anything along those lines – they might have pictures of log cabins and trees on the bottle, but they’re not what you’re after.

Maple syrup is a common target of food fraud, so even bottles labeled “maple syrup” might not actually be legitimate. The safest way to buy it is to go local from a producer you can trust – if you don’t live in maple-syrup producing area, many smaller producers offer online ordering.

You’ll also see a variety of different “grades” of maple syrup, which can be confusing especially because they change depending on where you live, what country the syrup originally comes from, and what system you’re using. The system has also changed very recently, so if you’re wondering where the heck “Grade B” went, here’s the new system:

In the United States and Canada…

• Grade A: for eating and cooking with. It has four sub-categories, in order from light (mild-tasting) to dark (strong-tasting)
  • Golden
  • Amber
  • Dark
  • Very Dark (this is basically the same thing as the old Grade B)
• Processing Grade. This grade of syrup isn’t pretty or uniform enough to meet the Grade A standards, but there’s nothing else wrong with it, so it’s approved for use in food manufacturing. You probably won’t be buying Processing Grade maple syrup in stores, because it’s illegal to sell it in containers smaller than 5 gallons.
• Substandard grade. This grade isn’t even good enough to be Processing Grade. You almost certainly don't want to eat it even if you could get it, which is unlikely.

The new system officially went into effect in early 2015, but manufacturers in some states have a 1-year grace period to change their labels, so you might still be seeing other grades until January 1, 2016.

The darker the syrup, the more concentrated it is: darker grades contain more sugar, also have more flavor per tablespoon, so you need to use less of them to get the same flavor effect. They also have more of the nutrients and antioxidants per tablespoon, but again, you’ll probably be using a smaller total amount.

Summing it Up

Maple syrup is delicious and for most people it’s a perfectly harmless thing to have as a treat occasionally. If you like the flavor, it’s great on salmon or pork, in salad dressings – or yes, on Paleo pancakes.

That doesn’t make it a health food that you should make a special effort to eat, or even something that it’s healthy to have at breakfast every day. It has some nutrients, but nothing you couldn’t get from a source much lower in sugar; the only real reason to eat is that you like the taste.

Protein powders are popular for a reason: convenience. If you hit the gym before work or in the middle of the day, and you can’t go home to cook a real meal, it’s great to have something you can just grab, shake, and go.

From a Paleo perspective, though, protein shakes are something to avoid if you can – here’s an explanation why. So what to eat instead? Here are 15 real-food meals to deliver everything you need after a hard workout, on the run:

• Grab-and-go convenience: throw it in your gym bag and head out the door. All of these are either cooked in bulk on the weekend or not cooked at all.
• Protein and starch for muscle growth and recovery.
• No need to reheat: most of these meals taste fine if you do reheat them, but all of them are good even if you don’t (no cold soup here!).

Post-Workout Starches

Carbs are important for recovery after a hard workout. If one of the meal ideas has “+ starch” after the protein, it means to pick anything from this list (or any other Paleo-friendly starch, if you have one):

• Baked potato (yes, white potatoes are OK) or sweet potato.
• Roasted or scalloped potatoes or sweet potatoes – make ahead the night before your workout to save time.
• Sweet potato salad (fruity or chipotle version) – make a big batch at the beginning of the week.
• Plantain chips.
• Banana.

With that out of the way, on to the meals!

Egg-Based Meals

Cook these simple meals in bulk ahead of time, and you’ll have them ready to grab and do when you need something on the run. They’re also convenient because you can cook the starch in right with the protein.

1. Zucchini and sweet potato frittata. Use this particular recipe, or just cook potatoes or sweet potatoes into any kind of frittata. Try

different flavor combinations, like BBQ sauce and sweet potatoes for a Southwestern-style frittata, or a Greek seasoning blend with olives and white potatoes.

2. Twice-baked sweet potatoes with eggs. To get a little fancier with the potatoes and bring out their flavor a bit more, try this recipe.

3. Mini frittatas + starch (see the box titled “Post-Workout Starches” above). Or just substitute potato or sweet potato for the low-carb vegetables in the frittatas.

4. Hard-boiled eggs + starch. It’s a classic, and if you go with a baked potato or a banana for the starch, you don’t even need a fork! Make a dozen at the start of the week and you won’t have to fire up the stove in the morning.

Canned and Packaged Proteins

Proteins that come pre-packaged are often towards the pricey end of the spectrum, but you do get a lot of convenience for your money. And they’re great if you need your post-workout meal to keep without a fridge for a while: just bring a banana for your starch and you’ll be set all day.

5. Can of fish + starch. Try tuna, sardines, salmon, or any other fish you can get in single-serving cans. If you actually explore the aisles at the grocery store, you’ll find a surprising number of choices. (Octopus, anyone? Look for it: it’s probably there!)

6. Can of not-fish + starch. Not a big seafood person? Or maybe you just work in an office where cans of sardines aren’t welcomed early in the morning? Check out your options for canned chicken in the same aisle; they’re often pretty good.

7. Salami or summer sausage + starch. Hard sausages are a nice way to pick up some grab-and-go protein; just check the package for added junk.

Bulk-Cooked Meat

Not a fan of eggs? You can also bulk cook plenty of other recipes for quick and easy workout fuel! Add a source of starch to any of the below to make a post-workout meal that tastes good even if you can’t heat it up.

8. Roast beef with mustard + starch. This would be great with roasted potatoes.

9. Burgers with your choice of toppings + starch.

10. Indian chicken bites + starch.

11. Any baked or grilled chicken breast recipe + starch.

12. Brisket + starch.

Hashes and Casseroles

If you have a big skillet or baking dish, you can make several servings of these recipes at a time. Like egg recipes, they’re convenient because the starch is cooked right into the meal. Just cook up a batch on Sunday and divide it into separate containers to pull out of the fridge for each workout throughout the week.

13. Apple and squash stuffing.

14. Sweet potato buffalo chicken casserole.

15. Simple sausage casserole. (If you’re planning to eat this on the go, you could also cut up the sausage before you pack it, so you won’t have to fiddle with a knife)

What’s your favorite thing to grab on the go after a workout? Let us know on Facebook or Google+!

Confused about Omega-3 and Omega-6? Not sure what the “good fats” are or what makes them so “good” in the first place? Tired of hearing about grams of this and grams of that without any reference to actual foods you actually eat? Here are some quick facts to set the record straight, no biochemistry degree required!

Types of Fats

There are three major types of fat: saturated, monounsaturated, and polyunsaturated. The differences have to do with their chemical structure, but you don’t have to understand that part to know what to eat (if you want to get into it, there’s an explanation in the Guide). Here’s the short version:

• Saturated fat is Paleo-approved – no, it doesn’t give you heart disease, or cancer, or diabetes, or anything else.
• Monounsaturated fat is also Paleo-approved.
• Polyunsaturated fat is a little bit more complicated. It has two types: Omega-6 and Omega-3. Without going exhaustively into the details, aim to limit Omega-6 and get more Omega-3s (if you want to go exhaustively into the details, here you go).

Food Sources of Paleo Fats

On Paleo, fat should be your major source of energy (calories). This won’t make you fat. Really. In fact, it’s much more likely to help you get (or stay) thin, because it’s a very satisfying, clean-burning fuel source. Fat from whole foods shouldn’t be avoided: keep those egg yolks, leave the skin on your chicken, and cook with real butter!

Here are some healthy sources of Paleo fat:

Fats to Avoid

Not all fat is good! Remember from above that you should aim to limit Omega-6 polyunsaturated fats. The following foods will set you up for too much Omega-6, so avoid them:

• Industrial seed oils: canola oil, corn oil, peanut oil, soybean oil, “vegetable oil” (could be any or all of the previous).
• Margarine, “buttery spread,” etc. Real butter is good for you; fake butter is not.
• Excessive amounts of nuts or seeds. It’s fine to eat them; just keep it to about a handful per day.

How Much Fat Should I Eat?

Even for people who understand that eating fat doesn’t make them fat, it’s still a little scary to suddenly dive headfirst into the “demon nutrient” of the last two decades. Is it really OK to make soup with coconut milk – doesn’t that have too much fat? Is it really OK to cook with a whole tablespoon of butter? To eat all the egg yolks? To leave the skin on your chicken?

Yes! It really is OK! In fact, it’s better than OK; it’s good for you. When you switch to Paleo, you’re cutting out a lot of unhealthy junk, but also a staple source of calories (grains). You’ve got to get those calories from somewhere else, and fat is where it’s at.

Without getting into calorie-counting (which isn’t necessary or even recommended on Paleo), here are some guidelines for making sure you’re eating enough healthy fats without going overboard:

1, Don’t make any effort to remove fat from whole foods. Leave the skin on your poultry. If you’re going to include dairy in your Paleo menu, make it full-fat dairy. Make your omelets with the whole egg, not just the yolk.

2. Make sure every single meal includes at least one of the following:

• A naturally fatty animal food (e.g. bacon, pork belly, fatty ground beef)
• At least 2 tbsp. of cooking fat (e.g. coconut oil), or
• An alternate serving of fat (e.g. an avocado or some coconut milk)

For example, if you’re having a salad with tuna (which is extremely lean), throw in some avocado, or use a dressing with plenty of olive oil. It’s fine to mix and match, and it’s also fine to eat more; this is a minimum, not a maximum.

3. On the other hand, avoid adding excessive or extreme amounts of fat to your meals. There’s no call to eat coconut oil off the spoon, do shots of olive oil, or deep-fry everything in lard. But this isn’t a huge problem if you're eating whole foods. It’s actually pretty difficult to overeat fat from whole food sources because most people just stop wanting it after a while.

Essentially, as long as you completely free yourself from all fear of fat “making you fat,” your taste buds and hunger will guide you towards appropriate amounts of fat.

Beginner Mistakes to Avoid

For the newbies in the audience, here’s an explanation of two very common beginner hangups about fat, and how to avoid them:

Trap #1: Protein Overload/Not Enough Fat

This is what happens to 90% of people who try to eat Paleo without letting go of low-fat dogma first. Uncharitably, it’s known as “Faileo.”

Breakfast: egg white omelet, apple.

Lunch: grilled skinless chicken breast over salad with a tiny dab of olive oil for dressing.

Dinner: steamed tilapia with broccoli.

Usually this menu is the prelude to questions like “why am I constantly so hungry?” and “where did all my energy go?”

Notice how this person is removing natural fat sources from whole foods (using just the egg whites; skinless chicken breast), deliberately limiting salad dressing (a “tiny dab” of olive oil), and going out of their way to choose cooking methods like grilling and steaming that don’t involve fat.

The fix: go back to the section above and follow the guidelines for adding a healthy amount of Paleo fats to your meals! Perhaps this person could eat the whole egg for breakfast, skin-on chicken breast with a generous amount of dressing, and some coconut milk sauce over the tilapia and broccoli roasted in olive oil.

Trap #2: Not Enough Food

In this case, the person is eating fatty foods, but she’s so terrified of getting “too much fat” that she’s just eating completely insufficient amounts of them. This menu looks like:

Breakfast: 2 hard-boiled eggs.

Lunch: ½ cup of soup made with leftover chicken and coconut milk; carrot sticks with .5 tbsp. mayonnaise.

Dinner: 2 rashers of bacon with roasted cauliflower.

Fat as a percentage of calories is perfectly fine – but this is a meal plan for an ant!

The fix: eat all the same things; just double (for women) or triple (for men) the portions – at least! Alternately, add a few more healthy carbohydrates ("safe starches") to make up the calories instead (you can learn more about Paleo carbs here).

Summing it Up

Eating a diet rich in healthy fats from whole foods shouldn’t be counterintuitive – this is how our ancestors ate for thousands of years! But if you’ve been hearing low-fat nutrition guidelines your whole life, it can be hard to shake, and a little scary to embrace the “bad guy.”

Hopefully this cleared up a few of the questions about which fats are good and bad. Really, once you let go of all the ways you might be consciously or subconsciously limiting fat, you’ll probably get enough all on your own. You don’t have to do anything ridiculous like shots of coconut oil: if you don’t skimp on cooking fat, use plenty of tasty salad dressing, and don’t panic about removing fat from your meat, you’re doing it right!

In many food cultures (India and Japan come to mind), the table is crowded with little dishes of relishes at every meal: spicy, sour, savory, and sweat relishes add more flavor to the meal and keep everything interesting (not to mention that they're often probiotic fermented foods). You might be eating relishes without even knowing it - if you've ever enjoyed a little pile of sauerkraut on the edge of your plate, or some salsa over fish, then congratulations: you were eating a relish.

A relish isn’t exactly the same as a sauce: sauces are liquid and smooth, but relishes have identifiable pieces of fruit or vegetables. Ketchup is a sauce made from tomatoes; salsa is a relish made from tomatoes. There’s some gray area in between, but overall a relish is something different.

Relishes can help make the meat interesting if you cook something like a chicken or turkey breast, especially if you need to add a little moisture or fat to make it tasty. They’re especially great if you’re on a diet that restricts certain types of spices, like an autoimmune protocol, because most of them are centered around fruits and vegetables, so they add a lot of flavor without forbidden spices.

Sounds pretty tasty, right? For your dinnertime pleasure, here are 30 delicious Paleo relishes, broken down by flavor: click to go to sweet, sour/tangy, savory, or spicy, or scroll down for all four.

Sweet (and sweet-tart)

Fruity or sweet salsas

Salsa is incredibly versatile and works as much more than a chip dip! Try it over fish, chicken, or burgers in place of ketchup. (If you’re looking for the more traditional, tomato-based salsas, they’re down under “savory”)

1. Mango + Avocado Salsa (Nom Nom Paleo)

2. Strawberry Ginger Salsa (Phoenix Helix)

3. {Paleo} Pineapple Salsa (Crave the Good)

4. Raspberry & Cilantro Salsa (Preppy Paleo)

5. Cherry, Basil, and Jicama Salsa (I Breathe I’m Hungry)

Chutneys & Other Sweet Relishes

Chutney is a traditional type of sweet cooked relish, originally from India; most chutneys are made out of some kind of fruit, with vinegar and spices (and sweetener, if the fruit isn’t already sweet enough).

6. Peach Mango Ginger Chutney (Stupid Easy Paleo)

7. Grilled (Pine) Apple And Red Pepper Chutney (Paleo Plan)

8. Spicy Plum Chutney (Not Just a Man’s World)

9. Spiced Cranberry Relish (Paleo in PDX)

Sour/tangy

Sauerkraut

Sauerkraut goes especially well as a relish over pork or really anything fatty – the tangy flavor makes sure the meat itself doesn’t get overwhelming.

10. Basic sauerkraut (Paleo Leap)

11. Beet, Fennel, and Leek Sauerkraut (Pure Fresh Daily)

12. Indian-Spiced Curry Kraut (Rising Moon Nutrition)

If you like sauerkraut as a relish, also consider other fermented foods, like kimchi.

Other tangy relishes

Add a bit of bite to your plate! Any kind of pickles work perfectly as relishes (if you want to cheat a little, you can just buy store-bought pickles and chop them up).

13. Brussels sprouts capers (Urban Nettle)

14. Herb-Caper Relish (Paleo Periodical)

15. Tangy pickle relish (Paleo Effect)

Savory and Herbal

Savory Salsas

These are perfect over meat or fish, or as salad dressings.

16. Fresh tomato salsa (Cook Eat Paleo)

17. Fire-Roasted Salsa (Paleo Leap)

18. Radish & Cucumber Salsa (Rubies and Radishes)

19. Roasted Tomatillo and Fresh Cilantro Seed Salsa (The Nourished Caveman)

Other Savory Relishes

20. Coriander pesto (Penny Pinching Pescetarians)

21. Curry Apricot Relish (Cranking Kitchen)

22. Tomato and Olive Relish (Kalyn’s Kitchen)

Spicy

Spicy Salsas

There’s a salsa for everything! If you’re craving some heat, try one of these.

23. Spicy Pear Salsa (Colorful Eats Nutrition)

24. Lacto-Fermented Tomatillo Salsa (Domestic Soul)

25. Salsa Macha (REM Cooks)

Other Spicy Relishes

These relishes are great on any kind of meat: for lighter cuts they add flavor, and for fattier cuts they’re strong enough to hold up on their own and give you a nice contrast.

26. Spicy Cranberry Relish (Mark’s Daily Apple)

27. Red onion and Jalapeno Relish (Things My Belly Likes)

28. Pickled Onions (DJ Foodie)

29. Spicy Relish (Plaid and Paleo)

30. Apple-Horseradish Relish (Paleo Plan)

What do you use as a relish? And what do you put it on? Let us know on Facebook!

Bored of eggs but love the convenience of a quick omelet or frittata in the morning? You can get a lot more mileage out of your convenience meals with just a few seconds of extra time with the right spices and seasonings!

Here’s a list of 10 ways to add punch to your omelets, frittatas, and quiches with just one more ingredient. It only takes 10 seconds to throw in the pan, and the result tastes almost like a whole new dish.

1. Za’atar

What is it? Za’atar is a spice blend familiar from Middle Eastern foods. It has a pleasantly earthy or woodsy flavor with a slight tang, so it's delicious with the richer flavor of eggs. You can buy it pre-mixed, or get a recipe here (just ignore the chicken and go straight for the spice mix).

How to use it: beat it into eggs for an omelet or frittata, or sprinkle over fried eggs just like you would salt or pepper.

If you like that, try…ras el hanout (another spice blend; you can find instructions in this recipe)

2. Thyme

What is it? Thyme is an herb that adds a very sweet, pleasant taste to eggs without being overwhelming.

How to use it: Toss one pinch of dried thyme per 2-3 eggs into the pan along with your salt and pepper:

If you like that, try…rosemary, tarragon, oregano, chives, or herbes de provence. There's a whole world out there beyond salt and pepper!

3. Sriracha

What is it? Sriracha is a famously spicy hot sauce that goes pretty well with just about everything. Since eggs are so mild by themselves, the spicy hot sauce really gives them a special zip – it’s great for waking up in the morning. You can get a recipe for Paleo sriracha here.

How to use it: Beat it into scrambled eggs, or drizzle over an omelet or frittata.

If you like that, try…chili powder and/or paprika

(and a bonus tip: if you love your sriracha and want to make big batches to stock up, just freeze the rest in an ice-cube mold and then pop out the cubes so you have quick single-serving portions when you want them).

4. Garam masala

What is it? Garam masala is an Indian spice blend. It typically includes turmeric, cinnamon, cumin, cloves, and cardamom. You can buy it pre-mixed or mix your own. It has a delicious earthy warmth to it – it’s not mouth-searingly hot, but it’s not a flavor you ignore, either.

How to use it: beat it into eggs for an omelet or frittata, or sprinkle over fried eggs.

If you like that, try…just a little bit of hot pickle or chutney folded into an omelet.

5. Salsa verde

What is it? Salsa verde is a spicy Mexican creation made with tomatillos – those little green things next to the tomatoes in the grocery store. There’s a recipe here.

How to use it: Beat it into scrambled eggs, or drizzle over an omelet or frittata.

If you like that, try…chimichurri

6. Pesto

What is it? Pesto is a topping made from ground nuts and herbs with olive oil. It's rich and herbal, great for turning ordinary eggs into a truly decadent treat. There’s a recipe here if you can’t find a Paleo-friendly brand at the store.

How to use it: Fold it into an omelet or just throw a little into the pan with your scrambled eggs.

If you like that, try…asparagus pesto.

7. Gremolata

What is it? Gremolata (also spelled gremolada) is a condiment made with grated lemon zest, chopped garlic, and parsley. It’s a classic ingredient in Mediterranean food, where it adds a bright, tangy flavor to everything from fish to beef. If you're missing the citrus flavor of orange juice in the morning, gremolata in an omelet might be a perfect alternative. You can find a recipe here.

How to use it: Fold it into an omelet or use it as a garnish after the eggs leave the pan.

If you like that, try…cranberry sauce (no, really! Just try it!)

8. Roasted garlic

What is it? Roasting garlic tones down the pungency and turns each clove of garlic into an irresistible spread to smear on just about anything. You can get instructions for roasting garlic here (just ignore the rest of the instructions about adding sardines).

How to use it: add to egg muffins or frittatas, or serve on the side of an omelet. You can make the garlic ahead of time: roast some up for whatever else you want, and then use any leftovers in your eggs.

If you like that, try…herb butter or herb-infused oils for cooking.

9. Prosciutto

What is it? Prosciutto is a type of cured meat. It’s got that trademark salty-smoky-fatty appeal going for it in spades – like bacon, but a little more sophisticated. You can find it in stores with the salami and other cured meats.

How to use it: fold it into an omelet, or chop it into thin strips and add to a frittata.

If you like that, try…smoked salmon, or any other cured meat.

10. Kimchi

What is it? Kimchi is a spicy Asian condiment made of pickled cabbage. It’s a probiotic food, so it’s very healthy for your gut flora, and you can usually find a Paleo-friendly brand at the store if you’re not into home fermentation projects.

How to use it: serve on top of an omelet or frittata, or on the side of a plate of scrambled eggs. Some people like it heated to the same temperature as the eggs; other people eat it cold and enjoy the temperature contrast.

If you like that, try…pickled onions.

What’s your favorite omelet flavoring? Have you ever made anything that sounded weird but turned out delicious? Let us know on Facebook or Google+!