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Dried fruit is a healthy-snack staple, especially for kids. Mini-boxes of raisins are easy to throw into a lunchbox, fruit leather is easy and fun, and it’s easy to feel good about: you’re feeding your kid fruit, right? What could possibly be wrong with that?

For the grown-up crowd, dried fruit also makes an appearance on top of salads, in bowls of breakfast cereal, in trail mix with nuts and other goodies, and as plain as a snack for some quick energy.

Everyone is very happy to buy into the image of raisins and banana chips as health food, mostly because they taste good and they’re convenient. If they’re given a sweet-tasting, finger-friendly snack that they can also feel virtuous about eating, most people aren’t very inclined to go looking for problems. But before you dig too deep into the bulk bins, there’s one potential problem to be aware of. It starts with “s” and ends with “ugar.”

Dried Fruit and Sugar

Fruit naturally contains a relatively small amount of sugar. When you dry it, you take out all the water, which concentrates the sugar in a much smaller package – it instantly becomes much, much easier to get a huge amount of sugar without even noticing it, while you’re supposedly eating something “healthy.”

Try to imagine eating 180 grapes as a “snack.” You’d get sick to your stomach and stop before you got halfway through. But you could very easily eat those 180 grapes as raisins. A regular box of raisins is 1.5 ounces, which is approximately 90 raisins. A grown-up could easily eat two boxes (or more) of raisins at a sitting. That’s 180 raisins – all the sugar from the 180 grapes they came from – as a fairly small snack that probably won’t even keep you full for long.

Here’s the equivalent in raw fruit for a “snack” of some different dried fruits:

Dried fruit	Sugar content (assuming no sugar added)	Sugar equivalent in whole fruit
Dried apples	49 grams in 1 cup	2 raw apples
Dried apricots	69 grams in 1 cup	23 raw apricots (no, that’s not a typo for 2.3)
Banana chips	35 grams per 100 grams of chips	2 raw bananas
Dried blueberries	68 grams per 1 cup	4.5 cups of raw blueberries
Dried cranberries	10 grams in 1 cup	2.5 cups of raw cranberries
Raisins	25 grams in 1 normal-sized box	90 grapes
Prunes	66 grams per 1 cup	4 cups of raw plums

1 cup is not unrealistic at all if you’re snacking on trail mix or dried fruit without really thinking about what you’re eating, or if you’re eating it as a meal replacement. It’s very easy to get much more sugar from dried fruit than you’d ever realistically get from eating whole fruit, just because it’s so finger-friendly and easy to eat, and it’s easy to forget how much sugar it actually has because it’s so “healthy.”

And that’s the unsweetened versions. If you’re buying it from the store, dried fruit is frequently also full of junk oils and added sugar. Cranberries are the worst for this – it’s extremely hard to find a brand of cranberries without any extra sugar dumped on top of all the sugar that was already there. Blueberries can also be a problem, and they’re not even tart to begin with! But even without anything added, most dried fruits still have a lot of sugar in a very small (and not particularly satisfying) package:

The high amount of sugar in dried fruit may be particularly problematic for people with a FODMAP intolerance, fructose malabsorption, or other digestive problems, because it just concentrates the carbohydrates causing the problem.

Dried fruit can also prolong sugar cravings if you keep eating it as a substitute for the junk food you really want. If you keep giving your brain and body sugar as a quick-fix for a bad mood or boredom, you’ll keep craving it. Comfort-eating dried fruit or trail mix only drags out the process of finding another way to manage those emotions; it’s much easier in the long run to rip off the band-aid all at once.

But It’s Natural Sugar!

It doesn’t matter. It’s still sugar.

But Fruit has Vitamins and Minerals! And Fiber!

Yes, it does have vitamins and minerals – lots of them, actually. But the dehydration process didn’t put them there; you can get plenty of them from eating the fruit in its original, non-dried form.

As for fiber: the fiber and water in whole fruit are beneficial because they add sugar-free bulk, which helps make you feel full before you get an overload of sugar. With dried fruit, the bulk is gone. Fiber also has a delayed-action effect on fullness once it gets to the gut, but that process takes a while, and experience shows that most people can eat through a lot of dried fruit before it happens. Fiber also has other health benefits, but you don't have to eat dried fruit to get it; fresh fruit and vegetables are just as good.

So Dried Fruit is Bad?

Not necessarily. The point isn’t that dried fruit is “bad,” just that it’s very high in sugar and ought to be treated accordingly. Just like other Paleo sweeteners (honey, maple syrup…), it has a place, as long as you know how much sugar it actually contains and plan your diet based on that, not on some vague assumption that it’s fruit, so it must be healthy.

Here’s how to work dried fruit into your diet in a way that won’t give you sugar overload:

• As a salad topping, for flavor and texture.
• As one ingredient in a trail mix that also includes lower-sugar options like nuts and unsweetened coconut flakes.
• As an ingredient in savory recipes, like this lamb stew.

There’s also nothing wrong with eating dried fruit on its own as a treat or a dessert once in a while – just don’t treat it as a meal replacement unless it’s truly a dire emergency and your choices are a bag of raisins or a bag of Cheetos.

The point is to make choices that reduce your need to consciously control your sugar intake. You could carefully measure out portion-controlled amounts of raisins every day for lunch, but that takes effort and it’s prone to human error. It’s much easier to change the way you treat dried fruit in general, so that it becomes a habit to use it in a healthy way (on top of salads, as an occasional treat) and not as a large component of everyday meals.

Summing it Up

Natural sugar is still sugar. Sugar that comes packaged with vitamins and minerals is still sugar. And dried fruit is pretty high in sugar, as Paleo foods go. It’s far from the worst thing you could be eating, but it’s also far from the most nutritious.

To get the flavor without all the sugar, try dried fruit as a flavor punch on top of salads, or used sparingly in other applications. It’s not so great as a meal replacement (e.g. fruit and nut bars), especially if it’s every day. Too much dried fruit can easily stall weight loss, not to mention causing digestive trouble in people who have sensitivities to various different types of carbohydrates.

Everyone has a different tolerance for sugar, so some people will be able to eat more or less dried fruit without causing any issues. And some people may feel better with it out of their diet altogether. It’s not “bad,” and if you enjoy it, there’s nothing wrong with eating it – just remember the sugar content and plan your consumption accordingly.

It’s a basic Paleo principle that you should get as much of your nutrition as possible from whole foods, not isolated nutrient supplements. There are all kinds of reasons for that. Supplements are often contaminated and the ones that aren’t are typically expensive. Taking a bunch of pills is annoying and hard to remember. But even if you’re happy paying out as much as you need to get the best supplements and don’t mind dedicating your second bedroom to your pill bottle collection, there’s another reason to get your nutrition food: nutrient synergy.

No, your vitamins aren’t sitting around in a circle holding hands and feeling their life energy. “Nutrient synergy” is the way that two or more different nutrients work together to produce an effect that you can’t get from either nutrient alone. Sometimes they help each other do the same job; other times, one nutrient helps you absorb more of the other. It’s a little bit like building a house. You can have a pile of bricks in one place, a separate pile of mortar, a third pile of shingles, and a fourth pile of drywall, but that doesn’t give you a house. To get houses that actual people can live in, you have to have a little bit of all those things and combine them.

It’s the same way with nutrients: you can take some Vitamin C, some Vitamin E, and some other antioxidants, but it won’t give you all the benefits of eating fruits and vegetables. And you can even scale it up to food combinations and dietary patterns in general: certain combinations of foods are more effective at promoting health than the foods in isolation (wouldn’t you know it, these typically happen to be the same combinations typically found in traditional diets).

We don’t even know exactly what it is in some of these foods that causes the effect, so we can’t possibly replicate it in a pill. But it’s clear that eating healthy foods will give you more benefits than eating isolated nutrient supplements, and an overall healthy diet pattern will give you even more benefits than just eating the foods alone. There’s more to food than the sum of the numbers on the nutrition label.

Here’s the case for how that actually happens with some specific nutrients.

Antioxidants

Several studies show that antioxidants work better in teams – which is exactly how we get them in whole foods. Vitamins C and E, for example, are well-known as antioxidant buddy cops, which is convenient since they tend to come packaged together in a lot of the same foods (mostly dark leafy greens).

This article makes the case for the synergistic effects of antioxidants and other polyphenols in the health benefits of fruits and vegetables. Trials of antioxidant supplements have had lackluster results compared to the obvious and well-studied benefits of eating whole fruits and vegetables, possibly because the supplements can’t recreate the full antioxidant experience.

Just to take a couple specific examples…

• This study found that ascorbic acid (Vitamin C) and alpha-tocopherol (Vitamin E) worked synergistically with beta-carotene. Know what has all of the above? Spinach, kale, mustard greens, and other dark green leafy vegetables.
• 
• In almonds, flavonoids work synergistically with Vitamins C and E to reduce oxidation of LDL cholesterol.
• Rats who ate tomato powder got more protection against prostate cancer than rats fed pure lycopene (that’s the antioxidant in tomatoes that everyone talks about for protecting against prostate cancer, and in human studies, whole-food tomatoes do seem to work)
• In this study, intact freeze-dried broccoli was more effective for cancer prevention than isolated chemicals found in the broccoli.
• This study found that the anticancer effects of ginger are caused by synergy among all the antioxidants it contains, not just one.

You could argue that antioxidants in a supplement would work synergistically just as well as antioxidants in the whole food, but that doesn’t account for the huge number of antioxidant phytochemicals that we can’t put in a supplement because we haven’t even defined or discovered them yet. You could wait to get all the good stuff in a tomato until scientists exhaustively measure every single phytochemical it contains and stick it in a pill for you…or you could just eat the tomato.

Antioxidants can also work synergistically in combinations of foods – it doesn’t necessarily have to be just within the one food. To take one tasty example, this study found that consuming both red wine and olive oil at the same meal provided greater antioxidant benefits than consuming either one separately. This one found that adding milk or lemon juice to green tea improved the bioavailability of the catechins it contained. And this one found that eating tomatoes with broccoli was even better for prostate health than eating either alone.

Micronutrients and Fat

It’s not just antioxidants, either! Another example of nutrients working together comes from various combinations of micronutrients and healthy fats

The obvious example is the absorption of fat-soluble vitamins: Vitamins A, D, E, and K need some fat to be absorbed. So isn’t it convenient that they often come packaged right with the fat in the same food? Think about Vitamin A in liver, Vitamin D in fish, or Vitamin E in almonds. With food sources that don’t naturally contain a lot of fat (like vegetables), it’s easy enough to add some olive oil or avocado (or both!) to your salad.

Another example is B vitamins with Omega-3 fats. In this case, it’s not about absorption: B vitamins aren’t fat-soluble, but some evidence shows that B vitamins and Omega-3s may have synergistic effects on heart health. This may be one of the reasons why fish (a natural source of both Omega-3 fats and B vitamins) is such a healthy food, but isolated Omega-3 supplements have had mixed results for preventing heart disease (or anything else). Yet again, whole foods trump supplements.

Summing it Up

Supplements do have a place even in a healthy and nutrient-dense diet: if you pick them carefully and use them wisely, they can be absolutely great. But the majority of your nutrients should come from whole foods, partly because the nutritional content of whole foods is more than the sum of its parts. And the nutritional content of an overall nutrient-dense diet is even better than the sum of its whole foods. There’s a limit to how much we can know about foods by counting up their individual nutrients, and a limit to how much nutrition we can really get from supplementing with a smattering of purified vitamins and minerals.

Whole tomatoes are better for you than isolated lycopene, and tomatoes eaten with other nutritious vegetables are even better than whole tomatoes. It’s about the big picture – so go grab yourself some tomato and spinach salad, and chow down on a big plate of nutrient-dense foods; it’ll do you better than a supplement, and it’s tastier to boot.

Plastic containers are everywhere, and most of us use them without thinking twice about it. But could they actually be dangerous?

When it comes to worries about chemicals leaching from plastic containers, it’s important to be very skeptical about the potential dangers. It’s easy to get caught up in panic about “toxins” and plastic being “unnatural,” but unless there’s actually evidence of specific substances (not generic “toxins”) that cause demonstrable harm in the amounts a normal human might reasonably get from typical use of plastic containers, there’s no reason to worry.

In this post, you’ll get a look at the potential problems with plastic containers – especially if you’re heating or stressing them in any way – and a realistic approach to minimizing harm that real people can actually manage. If you’ve always rolled your eyes at the calls to eliminate plastic because seriously, who can do that? Do these people not have jobs? Then this is the article for you.

What’s Wrong with Plastic? BPA and Pthalates

The major human health concerns about plastic revolve around chemicals with estrogenic effects. These chemicals act like the sex hormone estrogen, which affects reproductive health, thyroid health, fat metabolism, proliferation of fat cells, and other important processes. Obviously, if something actually is causing abnormal changes in your estrogen levels, it's cause for serious concern.

Estrogenic chemicals would be fine if they stayed in the plastic containers – after all, it’s not like you’re eating your Tupperware. But if plastic containers are heated up (or even left in the sun), scratched, stressed, or exposed to acidic substances like vinegar in salad dressing, then some of these estrogenic chemicals can leach out of the plastic and into your food.

The big name here is BPA. BPA stands for Bisphenol A; it primarily comes in contact with your food through plastic containers and the linings of cans.

It’s hard to tell exactly what – if any – health effects BPA exposure has in the real world. Almost all Americans have some BPA in their urine. Urinary BPA is almost universally below the recommended upper limit for daily exposure, but since the recommended upper limits were established, new studies have shown possible dangers at much lower concentrations, especially when exposure continues over a long time.

Some evidence has confirmed an association between higher urinary BPA and problems like obesity, diabetes, and other cardiometabolic problems. But associations can’t and don’t prove causation. For example, people with obesity may have higher urinary BPA because they eat more junk food out of BPA-containing containers, but was it the BPA that caused the obesity, or was it the junk food?

This review also points out that the way we measure BPA exposure may have some serious problems: it’s not at all clear whether BPA actually causes any of the issues it’s associated with.

There’s more substantial evidence for potential harm in infants and young children, who aren’t as good at metabolizing BPA, but overall there’s no conclusive evidence either that BPA causes harm or that it’s safe.

Next up: phthalates. Pthalates are another type of potentially estrogenic chemical found in plastics. They're also found in everything else, like cosmetic products and building materials, not to mention plastic products that have nothing to do with food, like medical equipment. This makes it harder to tell whether plastic food containers really have that much of an impact on total phthalate exposure, since there are so many other sources.

The link between phthalates and any potential dangers is even more tenuous than the connection for BPA, but there’s some preliminary evidence that they may cause reproductive problems. Many people in the US have high exposure to pthalates, especially children and toddlers, which is bad news because phthalates, like BPA, may also be more dangerous in children. The big source of exposure to phthalates seems to be not from plastic bottles and containers that you buy, but from processing equipment like conveyor belts and wrappers that your food comes in.

This is actually good news for Paleo eaters, because far and away the largest dietary source of phthalates is dairy foods (phthalate exposure comes from the milking equipment), which Paleo eaters minimize or eliminate. So looking just at food-related plastic use, Paleo is already a low-phthalate diet.

The bottom line: BPA is probably more of a problem for the Paleo crowd, because Paleo minimizes food-related phthalate exposure anyway. There's some evidence that it's reason for concern, especially in children, but it's far from a closed case.

Convenience vs. Perfection

So in all, there may be some reason for concern about plastics coming in contact with your food, but the problem with trying to reduce plastic use is that it can add an extra layer of work to the already time-consuming job of cooking all your food at home, grocery-shopping for raw ingredients, planning meals, and cleaning up after meal prep. For some people, this can make Paleo completely impossible – plastic containers are their answer for lightweight, water-tight, portable containers for easy packed lunches and breakfasts, and without that packaging, packed Paleo meals just aren’t going to happen.

Even if there are some health risks to eating out of plastic containers (as there may or may not be), Paleo + plastic is better than junk + plastic. You’d get plastic exposure eating junk food anyway; it’s not like you’re adding any plastic by filling your plastic containers with real food instead of junk. Even if the plastic is leaching artificial estrogens into your food in levels that could have negative health effects, getting healthy food with a side of BPA instead of junk with a side of BPA is a net benefit.

If you do have the desire and the energy (and the resources) to start reducing plastic in your life, it’s probably a good idea – for environmental reasons, if nothing else. Here’s how to start, in order from biggest to smallest impact:

• Replace containers that you heat things in (or containers that you put in the dishwasher) – swap out plastic for glass, metal, Pyrex, ceramic, or other materials. Most of the concern about chemical leaching revolves around plastics that are heated, especially heated multiple times.
• Replace containers that you’re going to use more than once: water bottles, food storage containers, etc.
• 
• Replace other containers and packaging as much as you reasonably can.
• Choose foods that don't come packaged in plastic as much as you reasonably can (on Paleo, this shouldn't be very difficult, since most of your food is fresh and unprocessed anyway)

Is BPA/Pthalate-Free Plastic Better?

The problem with replacing BPA, phthalates, or other substances in plastic containers is that they have to be replaced with something else. And that “something else” may have the same or potentially even worse effects. For example, here’s the case against BPA-free plastics, and here’s a report of a phthalate replacement called DINCH having unexpected and potentially serious health effects that simply weren’t studied before it went to market.

Since it’s just not clear whether the replacements for BPA or phthalates are actually better than the chemicals they’re replacing, it doesn’t seem reasonable to go through the hassle and expense of replacing your plastic containers with something that might turn out to be just as bad.

Summing it Up

When you look at systematic reviews and meta-analyses that examine a lot of studies in context instead of cherry-picking studies to fit a preconceived idea, it’s not clear whether eating things out of plastic containers has any demonstrable health effects.

Even if it does, the practical truth is that it’s better to get Paleo food + whatever potential bad stuff is in plastic than it is to get junk food + that same bad stuff. If plastic makes it possible for you to eat Paleo, then by all means, use plastic.

If you can, it may be better for you – and it’s almost certainly better for the planet – to swap plastic containers for reusable ones. But don’t let plastic perfectionism turn you off from cooking your own food at home; if plastic containers are what it takes to make Paleo work for you, then by all means, keep using them.

If you’ve ever looked up recipes for homemade almond butter, you’ve probably seen pictures of food processors – shorter and wider than a blender, with a little plastic cylinder sticking out the top. If you don’t already own one, it might seem impractical to buy a whole appliance just for a few recipes, but actually, food processors are useful for all kinds of things! They’re rarely pictured in recipe progress photos because they’re not very photogenic, but unless you require your kitchen to look Instagram-worthy at all times, that’s nothing to stress over.

So if you don’t have a food processor – or if you have one that’s just gathering dust because you don’t really know how to use it – here’s how to make Paleo easier and cheaper by making the most out of your food processor. It’s especially great for…

• Big families.
• Cutting down on food prep time.
• DIY food projects.

A food processor isn't the same thing as a blender, but a bunch of these techniques do also work just as well with an ordinary blender (or can be adapted to one); those are all noted so the blender-owners can play along.

Add Nutrients to your Diet (can also use a blender)

You know what’s incredibly nutritious, super cheap, and easy to add to hamburgers, meatloaf, meatballs, soup, and stew? Liver.

If you just crinkled up your nose and made a little disgusted noise, then you’re probably a cook in need of some Secret Ingredient Liver. You will need:

• A recipe for some kind of dish made with ground meat. If you’re out of ideas, try this.
• Liver from the same animal that the ground meat was from (e.g. if you’re using ground beef, use beef liver. If you’re using ground pork, use pig liver).

Blend up the liver with some water in your food processor (a blender works just as well) until you get a thin paste. You’ll probably have more liver than you want for one recipe; divide it into single-use amounts and freeze all but one of them (ice cube trays work well).

Using your hands, mix the one unfrozen bit of liver in thoroughly with the ground meat. Then proceed with the recipe as usual. You’ll never know it was there. You can start with a very tiny amount (like a thumb-sized piece of liver for 1 pound of ground meat) and slowly increase to see how much you can add before you taste it.

Another way to add some extra nutrients to your diet is to do the same thing, but with vegetables. Puree some spinach, kale, or something else, and add it to chili, tomato sauce, meatballs, or other recipes.

Save Time with Make-Ahead Cooking

How many times in the week do you chop onions? It’s practically every time you cook – so many recipes start with cooking fat, garlic, and onions in the bottom of a pan. Wouldn’t it be convenient to have a big bowl of pre-chopped onions ready so you can just reach in and grab a handful?

You can do exactly that – just haul out the food processor at the beginning of the week and chop all your onions; then store them in a well-sealed container in the fridge (otherwise your whole fridge will smell like onions) and use them as you need them. You only have one set of cutting equipment to wash, and it saves a lot of time.

Do the same for carrots, celery, and any other vegetables you use a lot of during the week. If you’re making something chopping-intensive like vegetable soup or a salad, it can save a lot of work.

Save Time and Money with DIY Paleo Substitutions

Paleo substitutes for unhealthy old favorites aren’t always the easiest to make – it might be healthier to have a cauliflower crust for your pizza, but it’s certainly easier to just head out to the store and buy some pre-made pizza dough. And the Paleo versions are often expensive, too – compare the price of 1 pound of almond flour to 1 pound of regular flour! But with the right kitchen equipment, you can make big batches of Paleo staples to save on time and money.

Nut butters/flours (can also use a blender)

Nut butters and nut flours aren’t everyday foods, and some people feel better without them at all. But with that said, some people like a bit of Paleo baking now and again, and making your own nut butters and flours is much cheaper than buying them.

If you throw some nuts into a blender or food processor and turn it on, you’ll first get flour out of them – if you want flour, you can stop there. If you keep going, you’ll end up with nut butter instead.

For more detailed instructions:

• Homemade almond butter (Fast Paleo)
• Homemade almond flour (Amazing Paleo)
• This post on nut butters has a bunch of other suggestions for butters made with various different nuts, including some gourmet variations that will have you licking your testing spoon!

Riced Cauliflower

It’s a pizza crust! It’s a bagel! It’s a tortilla! No wait, it’s a cauliflower!

Riced cauliflower is the basis for all kinds of Paleo substitutions, but it can be a pain in the neck to grate up a head of cauliflower when the entire point of rice is that it’s a quick side dish. SO don’t! Rice up a couple of heads with your food processor (blenders don’t work as well for this), wring out as much water as you can, and freeze it in plastic bags (try to squeeze out as much air as you can).

Flavor your Food with Amazing Dressings and Condiments

One of the big shortcuts you might be tempted to take with Paleo is condiments – who has time to make their own sauces? But Paleo condiments don’t have to be complicated and time-consuming, especially if you have the right equipment.

Probably the best example is how easy a good food processor can make homemade mayonnaise. No need to get an arm workout whisking up a storm – save that for the gym and make easy, non-breaking homemade mayo the easy way. (For the blender-owners, you can also do this with a regular blender or an immersion blender).

Do I Need a Food Processor if I Have a Blender?

In a perfect world, everyone would have both…in their enormous, beautiful kitchen in their imaginary dream house. But if your counter space is limited, here’s a guide to picking which of the two you should get:

A blender is better for…	A food processor is better for…
Chopping ice Smoothies Pureeing soup Vinaigrettes and liquid-based salad dressings	Chopping vegetables Shredding vegetables (e.g. cabbage for coleslaw)
You could use either for…
Nut butters and flours (easier in food processor but can use either) Pureeing liver to add to other recipes Mayonnaise

Food processors are generally more versatile, since they have all different attachments that you can switch out to get different effects, but some people only need a blender, especially people living alone who aren’t making vegetable soup for 5 on a regular basis. Pick the one that works best for your kitchen and enjoy!

It’s one thing to study individual parts of your diet – does cholesterol cause heart disease? (No.) What about fat? (No.) What about salt? (No.) But eventually you start realizing that it’s not so much individual foods that cause the big-picture effects. It’s really your entire dietary pattern. Are you eating that delicious bacon in the context of a highly inflammatory diet full of junk food? Or are you eating it in the context of an anti-inflammatory diet rich in fruits and vegetables? The health effects of the bacon will depend on the answer, because context matters.

That’s why it’s useful to have overall studies that look at Paleo as a big-picture dietary pattern. So here’s a look at some of the studies measuring exactly that – with explanations of exactly what kind of “Paleo” was used in the studies and their strengths and weaknesses, because “Paleo” can mean so many things that at this point that it really does need some specifying.

As it turns out, several studies have been done on Paleo-type diets, with very encouraging results.

Studies on Weight Loss

This study on a Paleo diet for weight loss is great because it’s relatively long-term. You can get study subjects to adhere to just about any random bizarre diet for a week (especially if they’re being paid to do it) and if they lose enough water weight, you’ll get some impressive numbers even if your diet is completely unsustainable. But this study is was relatively long-term (2 years), so it gives a good idea of how Paleo works in the long run.

The study compared the effects of a Paleo diet to the effects of a standard low-fat diet on 70 obese postmenopausal women. Paleo was a high-protein, moderate-carb, low-ish-fat version of Paleo, “based on lean meat, fish, eggs, vegetables, fruits, berries, and nuts. Dairy products, cereals, added salt, and refined fats and sugar were excluded.” The diet was not very low-carb: the researchers didn’t include daily food logs, but given the reported amounts of carbohydrates eaten, it could have easily allowed for a few servings of starchy vegetables every day.

Unfortunately, dietary adherence was pretty lousy in the Paleo group, which makes it hard to tell whether or not the diet as written would have worked. Specifically, none of the women ate the recommended amount of protein. But the results are still encouraging.

At 6 months, the Paleo group lost 6.5 kilograms (14.3 pounds), and the low-fat group lost 2.6 (5.7 pounds). At 12 months, the Paleo group was down 8.7kg (19 pounds), and the low-fat dieters were down 4.4 (9.7 pounds). Both then regained some of that weight: at 24 months (2 years), the Paleo group was still down 4.6 (10.1 pounds), while the low-fat group was down 2.9 (6.4 pounds).

The subjects in the Paleo group also had lower triglycerides. They didn’t show a significant increase in insulin sensitivity, but that was because they had normal insulin sensitivity at baseline.

Other studies on Paleo and weight loss:

• Paleo is more satiating per calorie than a standard “diabetes diet” or a Mediterranean diet. People eating a Paleo diet naturally reduce their calorie intake without actually counting calories.
• This study wasn’t actually focused on weight loss at all, but it includes this gem: “Despite efforts to keep bodyweight stable, it decreased in the Palaeolithic group compared to reference.” In other words, the researchers did everything they could to prevent their Paleo subjects from losing weight (including extra snacks), but they couldn’t do it: the Paleo group kept losing anyway. How’s that for effective?

Studies on Diabetes, Metabolic, and Cardiovascular Health

Paleo isn’t just good for dropping pounds; it’s also effective for health problems associated with obesity, like diabetes and metabolic

syndrome. It’s funny how actually addressing the problems causing weight gain instead of just treating the symptom of excess fat tends to treat these diseases as well!

This study found that a Paleo diet was much better than a diet full of “heart-healthy whole grains” for improving cholesterol profiles in men and women (lower LDL and triglycerides; higher HDL). The subjects were 20 men and women with high cholesterol. First, they ate a heart-healthy diet for 4 months; then they ate a Paleo diet (“vegetables, lean animal protein, eggs, nuts, and fruit” with no calorie limit) for 4 months.

Paleo included up to ½ cup of potatoes, 1 ounce of dried fruit, and 4 ounces of wine per day, but strict avoidance of all grains, legumes, and dairy. Despite having no calorie limits on Paleo, all the subjects spontaneously ate less, and lost significantly more weight (in fact, the women lost no weight at all on the AHA diet but an average of 8 kilograms (17.6 pounds) on Paleo.)

The researchers measured their blood lipids at several points throughout the study.

• LDL cholesterol: LDL dropped very slightly during the AHA phase, but dramatically during the Paleo phase.
• Triglycerides: The AHA diet had no effect on triglycerides, but Paleo reduced them by almost half.
• HDL cholesterol: The AHA diet lowered HDL cholesterol, but Paleo raised it. (As far as we can tell from what we know about cholesterol, this is actually good).

This study is interesting because it confirms what we already knew from shorter studies. It’s nice to see that Paleo is promising when subjects eat that way for 10 days, but it’s even better to see it working in a long-term study.

This study lasted for only two weeks, but it did find that Paleo was more effective than a “healthy reference diet” (think whole grains and lots of low-fat dairy) for lowering blood pressure, total cholesterol, and triglycerides, while raising HDL cholesterol. Paleo was “based on lean meat, fish, fruit, leafy and cruciferous vegetables, root vegetables, eggs and nuts. Dairy products, cereal grains, legumes, refined fats, extra salt and sugar were not part of it.” The study subjects were 36 men and women, age 54 on average. (This was the same study where the Paleo subjects lost weight even though the researchers tried to prevent it).

Other studies on Paleo for diabetes, cardiovascular, and metabolic health:

• This study that a Paleo-style diet improved markers of Type 2 diabetes in 13 patients compared to a standard diabetes diet.
• This one isn’t technically Paleo (it’s called the Spanish Ketogenic Mediterranean Diet), but it was a ketogenic diet based on olive oil, green vegetables, salads, and fish, with moderate red wine consumption - Paleo in everything but the name. And it had impressive effects on body weight, blood pressure, cholesterol, and blood sugar in 31 obese subjects.

Summing it Up

The studies we have are mostly done on a higher-protein, moderate-carb version of Paleo, but studies on a Paleo-style ketogenic diet show similar benefits. In all the studies that have been done so far, Paleo has either matched or outperformed the typical “healthy” carb-based, whole-grains type of dietary pattern; it’s especially well-studied for diabetes, cardiovascular health, and weight loss.

In other words, it’s absolutely not true that there’s no evidence supporting a Paleo style of eating. It would be great to also get some evidence on a high-fat version of Paleo with lots of red meat: hopefully with the recent moves towards accepting saturated fat and cholesterol as perfectly healthy parts of the diet, those studies will be coming soon!

Low-carb diets are  powerful for weight loss, but even the people who all agree that they work can’t agree on precisely why they work. Is it only because eliminating a food group automatically forces you to eat fewer calories, so it bypasses all the ways that humans are terrible at calorie-counting and tricks you into eating a low-calorie diet without realizing it? Or is it actually via hormonal pathways that affect physiological drivers of fat storage?

You might say it doesn’t matter – if it works, it works, and who cares why? But the answer does actually have consequences, and luckily, it’s been studied – quite a bit, actually.

Low-carb vs. Low-fat Diets with Equal Calories

One way to test the question would be to put two groups on a diet with equal calorie content, but have one group eat low-carb and the other just restrict calories. If low-carb diets cause weight loss for some reason other than strict calorie restriction, then the subjects in the low-carb group should lose more weight despite eating the same number of calories.

This meta-analysis looked at exactly that: studies of isocaloric low-carbohydrate vs. balanced (whole grains, low-fat, the typical Food Pyramid type of diet) diets. The weight loss achieved by both diets was basically similar, on average:

	Low-carb	Low-calorie
3-6 months	2.65-10.2kg	2.65-9.4kg
1-2 years	2.9-12.3kg	3.5-10.9kg

There was no difference between the average weight loss of all the people eating low-carb diets and all the people eating low-calorie diets at either time point. Basically the same thing was true in diabetics: people with diabetes had lower average weight loss across the board, which didn’t differ between low-carb and other diets when calories are held constant.

This suggests that it’s really the calories, not the hormonal effects of a low-carb diet that matter. But hang on for a second and take a look at another review.

Unmeasured Low-Carb vs. Calorie Counting

The 2014 review above only included studies in which calories were roughly equal. A 2009 systematic review of randomized controlled trials that compared low-carbohydrate and low-calorie diets, without specifying that calories had to be equivalent (most of the low-carb diets didn’t actually specify calories at all, just carbs). The review looked at studies that lasted between 6 months and 1 year, and concluded that low-carbohydrate diets were overall more effective for weight, HDL, trigs, and systolic blood pressure, and that they were generally easier to stick to.

So how did two reviews of the evidence come to opposite conclusions? Probably because they have only one study in common: otherwise, they compared completely different studies. The 2014 review excluded studies where the low-carb subjects got to eat as many calories as they wanted, which took out most of the studies in the 2009 review. In most of the studies from the 2009 paper, the subjects in the low-carb group ended up eating slightly fewer calories than the subjects in the other groups.

So is it the Calories or the Hormones? Or Is That the Wrong Question?

In general, you could say that the 2014 review represents what you’d get under very controlled lab conditions, where the 2009 review represents what actually happens when real people eat low-carb compared to low-calorie diets. In the real world, most people who embark on something like Atkins or low-carb Paleo don’t count calories, so the 2009 review gives you a better idea of what would actually happen to them

So far, here’s what we know:

• If calories are held constant, people on low-carb diets lose roughly as much as people on high-carb diets.
• If calories are not held constant, people on low-carb diets naturally eat fewer calories than people on calorie-restricted diets, and thus in the real world, they tend to lose more weight.

So, it’s a closed case, right? Calories count; low-carb diets just make it easier to eat fewer calories and hormones don’t actually do anything?

Not quite. Because that still doesn’t explain why people on a carb-restricted diet eat fewer calories even if they aren’t instructed to reduce them. They’re allowed to eat as much as they want, so presumably, if they eat less, it’s because they’re just not hungry and don’t want any more food.

But what makes them less hungry on a lower amount of calories? Hormones! What allows them to burn the calories they eat for energy instead of storing them as fat? Hormones! The insulin-sensitizing effects of a low-carbohydrate diet, the overall hormonal regulation that comes along with it, and the improvement in appetite regulation when you’re not on and off the blood sugar rollercoaster all the time make it possible and even easy to eat fewer calories without calorie-counting.

It’s not a question of calories or hormones. It’s a question of how hormones affect calorie intake and use. The amount of food that most people actually eat is driven by their hormonal signals, not by calories, even if they’re trying to calorie-count. The hormonal regulation on a low-carb diet is a very important reason why they work so well, because it lowers calorie intake and improves nutrient partitioning naturally.

The success of low-carb diets is a perfect proof of the point that “calories count, but don’t count calories.” Consciously trying to manipulate your calorie intake by counting them just doesn’t work as well as eating a diet that regulates your hunger hormones (which are the real drivers of what most people eat, regardless of what calorie goals they have).

Problems with Both Reviews

Just as a side note, both reviews had some issues, most notably that a lot of the “low-carb” diets weren’t. A lot of these studies (for example, this one and this one) included up to 40% calories form carbs in the “low-carb” group – that’s certainly lower than a typical American diet and lower than the high-carb control group, but it’s nothing at all like “low-carb” by Paleo standards.

Just to give you some context, if you ate 3 eggs fried in butter with a big pile of wilted spinach for breakfast, a salad with beets, leftover pork roast, and vinaigrette for lunch, a handful of almonds for a snack, and then a baked sweet potato with 2 chicken drumsticks and some fried onions for dinner, your day would be roughly 27% protein, 56% fat, and 17% carbs. That’s a moderate-carb diet by Paleo standards, and it still has half the carbs of some of the “low-carb” study diets.

It’s worth noting that even the 40% carb diets were more effective than the high-carb study diets for naturally reducing calorie intake, but still – if you’re trying to get an idea of the results you’ll get from eating low-carb Paleo, a 40% carb diet probably isn’t it.

Summing it Up

It’s not a question of whether low-carb diets work through lowering calorie intake or through regulating hormones. That’s really the same question: they lower calorie intake because of the way they regulate hormones. In the real world, low-carb, calorie-unrestricted diets work better for weight loss than low-fat, calorie-restricted diets, because they’re better-aligned with the way humans are actually designed to regulate our diet: by following our hunger hormones, not our nutrition tracker.

Bear in mind that this indicates nothing about whether or not low-carb diets make you healthier: health and weight loss are two different things. It also doesn’t touch on people with specific medical conditions that might make weight loss harder or just different. The health benefits of low-carb diets are a different question, but for weight loss specifically, you can’t separate the hormonal advantages from the calorie restriction.

The practical takeaway:

• In the real world, eating a moderate to low-carb diet is better for weight loss than low-fat calorie restriction.
• You don’t have to be extreme about it. Remember that the study diets showed results at up to 40% of calories from carbs.
• If you’re eating a low-carb diet, eat to hunger, but don’t go nuts adding fat to things for the sake of adding fat to things.

There’s nothing wrong with white potatoes if they work for you. But not everyone does well with them – here are 10 other delicious vegetables that you can easily transform into fries.

None of these fries taste exactly like potato fries, but all of them have their own attractions, and all of them hit the spot for that finger-food something to dip in your ketchup (or garlic mayo, or sriracha…) alongside a big juicy burger and some salad.

If you have duck fat, it’s by far the superior fat for making fries out of just about anything. If not, any Paleo cooking fat will do the trick. Most of these recipes are for oven fries, because most of us don't want to deal with actual deep-frying in the kitchen, but you could also use the same spices and seasonings with an at-home deep-frying setup if you're up for it.

For the carb-counters, the list is arranged from lowest to highest net carbs per (roughly) 1-cup serving.

1. Zucchini

Carbs per 1-cup serving: 5 grams

Zucchini is one of those versatile vegetables that works as noodles, or cheese…or fries! To get the crispy outside, you bread it in a Paleo-friendly flour, which also gives you the opportunity to add all kinds of herbs and spices for flavor.

Recipe Inspiration:

• Zucchini Fries (Our Little Paleo Family)
• Baked Zucchini Fries with Bloomin’ Onion Dipping Sauce (Primally Inspired)
• Paleo Fried Zucchini with Cool Dill Dip (Paleo Newbie)

2. Turnips

Carbs per 1-cup serving: 8 grams

Turnips don’t have to be bitter! Try baking them into a big plate of fries, maybe with some extra seasonings like chili powder or your favorite herb blend.

Recipe Inspiration:

• Baked Turnip Fries (Yaya Recommended)
• Spicy Turnip Fries (PaleoMazing)
• Baked Turnip Fries with Cumin Aioli Dipping Sauce (Edible Harmony)

3. Celeriac

Carbs per 1-cup serving: 9 grams

When you go to the grocery store for the first time to pick up some celeriac, just keep repeating to yourself that it tastes better than it looks. It’s downright ugly on the shelf, but chopped up with some salt and pepper, it makes some pretty tasty Paleo-friendly fries!

Recipe Inspiration

• Celeriac Fries (Paleo Plan)
• Posh Chip Shop Chips and Curry Sauce (The Creative Caveman)

4. Eggplant

Carbs per 1-cup serving: 9 grams

If you remember eggplant as a mushy or slimy vegetable, you’re in for a surprise with eggplant fries. They’re just another example of the way adding fat to vegetables changes them for the better in pretty much every possible way. Like zucchini, eggplant typically needs to be breaded before it’s transformed into fries, but that just gives you even more seasoning options.

Recipe inspiration:

• Paleo Eggplant Fries (Freckled Italian)
• Baked Eggplant Fries with Spicy Tomato Sauce (The Iron You)
• Baked Eggplant Fries with Rosemary and Thyme (Paleo Grubs)

5.  Jicama

Carbs per 1-cup serving: 13 grams

Jica-what? Jicama is a vegetable that looks like a pale brown turnip. It’s about the size and shape of a slightly squashed grapefruit, and you can usually find it with the potatoes and onions. On the inside, it has a pleasant sweet-savory taste, and crisps up nicely into fries.

Recipe inspiration:

• Paleo French Fries (Bravo for Paleo)
• Spicy Jicama Fries (My Man’s Belly)
• Spicy Spiralized Shoestring Jicama Fries (Inspiralized)

6. Carrots

Carbs per 1-cup serving: 13 grams

They’re practically already cut into fries for you – carrots make great sweet-savory fries in the sweet potato fry tradition.

Recipe inspiration:

• Paleo Carrot Fries (Paleoaholic)
• Spicy Cilantro Carrot Fries (Fast Paleo)
• Cinnamon Carrot Fries (Primal Palate)

7. Butternut squash

Carbs per 1-cup serving: 21 grams

Butternut squash is a great less-starchy alternative to sweet potato fries for low-carbers who love the taste but don’t want quite that much starch. Try them salty, spicy, or herbed; they’re good with almost anything.

Recipe inspiration:

• Butternut squash fries (Paleo Leap)
• Roasted Chipotle Butternut Squash Fries (Sue’s Nutrition Buzz)
• Paleo Curried Butternut Squash Fries (Oatmeal with a Fork)

 8. Sweet Potatoes

Carbs per 1-cup serving: 23 grams

If you’re in it for the carb cutting, then sweet potato fries won’t do you any better than regular old white potato fries, but if you’re just avoiding nightshades or have some other reason for skipping the potatoes, then sweet potatoes are a great alternative.

Recipe inspiration:

• Greek-Style Sweet Potato Fries with Balsamic Glaze (Colorful Eats Nutrition)
• Indian-Style Sweet Potato Fries (Canada Girl Eats Paleo)
• Sweet Potato Fries with Garlic “Mayo” (Paleo nonPaleo)

9. Parsnips

Carbs per 1-cup serving: 27 grams

Parsnips are woodsy and sweet, with a fresh flavor that goes perfectly with anything herbal.

• Paprika Parsnip Fries with Sriracha Dipping Sauce (PaleOMG)
• Chili-Topped Parsnip Fries (Testes of Lizzy T.)
• Paprika Parsnip Fries with Cilantro Lime Aioli (Naked Cuisine)

10. Plantains

Carbs per 1-cup serving: 50 grams

Starchier and hardier than bananas, plantains are a great alternative for sweeter fries. They’re not quite as sweet as sweet potatoes, but notably more so than white potatoes – if you can’t decide which flavor to go with, why not go with plantains for a little of both?

Recipe inspiration:

• Duck Fat Plantain Fries (South Beach Primal)
• Jerk-Style Plantain Fries (Fast Paleo)

Warning: If you have or are recovering from an eating disorder, this post may be triggering for you; read at your own discretion.

We live in a world where you can easily go for years at a time without feeling real, physical hunger caused by a physiological need for additional calories (this is different from cravings, which come from your brain, not your body). Food is available everywhere, and it’s completely normal to eat it just because it’s there, regardless of whether your body actually needs the energy or not. We eat before we’re hungry, just to make sure that we’ll never have to experience it. We worry about snacks to bring “just in case.”

Even experts on weight loss constantly advise people to “never go hungry:” if you let yourself get too hungry, the theory goes, you’ll end up grabbing the first easily-available food you can find when your willpower snaps and the hunger makes you desperate, and you’ll almost always end up eating something unhealthy because unfortunately, unhealthy foods are usually the most convenient.

There’s some truth to that. It’s true that going hungry all the time is not a sustainable weight-loss plan: it’s unpleasant and most people won’t keep it up in the long term. It’s also unnecessary. You don’t have to be hungry all the time to lose weight.

But there’s also another side to the coin: going hungry on occasion, under the right circumstances, can actually help you develop a calmer and healthier relationship with food. Hunger is not unhealthy, and it’s not an emergency – if humans are built to do one thing well, it’s to function in the face of temporary food shortage. Hunger isn’t comfortable, but it can be very educational, and the small discomfort can bring you significant benefits down the line. And it can even make your meals taste better!

Physical Hunger vs. Cravings

Not every desire to eat comes from your body’s physical need for food. True hunger, or “body hunger” is a physiological need for more nutrients – your body needs more fuel, and it sends you the message via physical sensations like twisting or emptiness in your stomach. When you’re physically hungry, you’re happy to eat just about any nutritious meal.

But you can also feel the desire to eat because you’re stressed out, bored, lonely, sad, or feeling another emotion, even if you’re not physically hungry at all. You can feel the urge to eat just out of habit, because you always eat at that time. You might have a very strong urge to eat, but this isn’t true physical hunger because you don’t actually need any nutrients. Often this “brain hunger” comes in the form of strong craving for a particular food (e.g. chocolate) and it won’t be satisfied by “just” eating a nutritious meal.

“Brain hunger” is a topic all of its own, but here we’re looking at “body hunger:” why you might want to let yourself feel it for a while sometimes, and how to do it.

Why would I Want to Do That?

Because you can’t “eat when you’re hungry” unless you know what “hungry” feels like.

The generally excellent advice to “eat when you’re hungry; stop when you’re full” is meaningless if you don’t know what hunger actually feels like. If you’ve never paid attention to the sensation of physical hunger, it’s hard to distinguish from other things that make you want to eat.

That’s important because paying attention to hunger is a great weight-loss strategy. Very few people gain an unhealthy amount of weight by eating enough to satisfy their hunger and then stopping when their physical hunger is gone. But many, many people gain huge amounts of weight by eating in response to “brain hunger:” cravings, social pressure, boredom, and the rest of it.

If you aren’t familiar with true hunger, it’s very hard to distinguish from all these other reasons to eat, which makes it hard to know how much food your body actually needs to feel great and perform well without gaining extra weight. Calorie-counting is a very laborious and imprecise substitute, and it doesn’t work well for most people anyway. If you know what hunger feels like, because you’ve actually been hungry and paid attention to the sensations, then you have an intuitive, accurate, and easy way to judge how much fuel your body needs.

Because you’re going to have to deal with it eventually.

A second reason to get comfortable with hunger is that you are going to have to deal with it eventually, and knowing how to manage that feeling without panicking can help you stay on track with your healthy eating plan.

At some point, you’re going to be hungry. Maybe you’ll be stuck on a subway, a plane, a bus, or a long stretch of highway at night. Maybe you’ll be trapped in a class or meeting you can’t get out of. Even in the modern world, it’s going to happen.

Most people who rarely feel hunger have a very strong emotional reaction to it when they do have to experience it. They start to feel frantic and desperate. Once they’re free from whatever the situation is, they typically race to the nearest food source they can find to make the unfamiliar and distressing feeling go away.

But if you’re familiar with hunger, you can acknowledge the physical sensation without experiencing any emotional distress. It’s just a sensation, like a change in temperature or a noise in the background. It doesn’t upset you to the point of feeling desperate or afraid. When you finally eat, you’ll do it calmly, and you won’t frantically make unhealthy choices just to get something in your mouth.

You can’t reach that point of familiarity unless you’re experienced at sitting with your hunger and letting it exist without getting upset over it. So occasionally going hungry and noticing how you feel can be very good practice for those situations.

Because Hunger Really Is the Best Spice

Food tastes amazing when you’re truly hungry. When you’re downright ravenous, plain hard-boiled eggs and steamed broccoli can taste divinely inspired. There’s nothing more to say here, because you really have to experience it to believe it.

Hunger Training: How to Do it Right

So, you want to get comfortable with hunger? Here’s how to start.

• Try letting yourself get physically hungry between meals. Don’t snack “in case you get hungry” later on; wait until you feel the physical sensation of hunger to eat something.
• If you don’t get truly hungry between meals, try pushing back a meal until you feel hunger in your stomach, not just the desire to eat because you always eat at that time, or because you’re bored, or because you’re afraid you’ll get hungry later.
• When you feel hunger, don’t eat immediately. Stop and pay attention to it. The first time or two, write down how it feels physically. What’s the sensation in your stomach? Do you feel it anywhere else? Or is it actually "brain hunger" and not "body hunger" at all?
• When you’re done experiencing your hunger, eat slowly and calmly; don’t rush over to the kitchen and start cramming down everything you can find. Remember: it’s just hunger, and hunger is not an emergency. You're designed to be extremely resilient and functional over long-term periods of nutritional scarcity. Skipping one meal is not dangerous and there’s no reason to panic over it.

If you’re not accustomed to feeling hunger, do this slowly and start on days when you don’t have a lot of stressful stuff to do (weekends work well).

Summing it Up

Nobody is suggesting that you should be hungry all the time, or that you have to starve yourself to lose weight. And again, if you’re in recovery from an eating disorder, or if you have another medical problem that could make skipping meals dangerous, none of this applies to you. But for people who don’t have an eating disorder or any other relevant medical conditions, occasionally going hungry can help you get back in touch with your body’s actual need for fuel, prepare you for times when you won’t be able to avoid hunger, and make your food that much better when it does come. It’s worth an experiment or two, at least!

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:

Sweetener:	Table sugar (white or brown)	Maple syrup	Honey	Dates
Grams of sugar per 1 tbsp:	12	12	17	(per 1 date): 16

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.

Eating seasonally is a great way to get the freshest, most flavorful produce around, and as local markets start filling up with early-spring vegetables, it’s finally time for the asparagus-fest to commence! Here’s a guide to 10 springtime vegetables that you just have to try while they’re in season.

1. Asparagus

Sure, you can technically get “asparagus” year-round, but the kind of “asparagus” you get in a grocery store in November really ought to come with a warning label reminding you that it only passingly resembles the real thing. Truly fresh asparagus picked at the height of its season has a delicate flavor and a light crunch that works perfectly with eggs, steak, or just about anything else.

Try it in…

• Asparagus soup with a hint of Lemongrass (Made by Jayne)
• Chicken, Bacon, and Roasted Asparagus Salad (The Healthy Foodie)
• Truffled Spring Green Omelet (Colorful Eats Nutrition)

2 . Radishes

Raw radishes add a sharp crunch to salads, relishes, and burgers. Cooked, they have a more savory flavor with just a hint of bite remaining – choose your favorite method or just buy a couple bunches and make several.

Try them in…

• Carrot and Radish Sauerkraut (Fermented Food Lab)
• Paleo Skirt Steak with Radish & Cucumber Salsa (Rubies and Radishes)
• Sautéed Radishes with Butter and Parsley (Delicious Obsessions)

3. Rhubarb

Rhubarb has a bit of a pucker to it, to put it mildly. It’s not the kind of vegetable you just grab and chow down on. But you also don’t need to drown it in sugar, and in fact, it doesn’t even have to be dessert at all! Try it in…

• Chicken aux Herbes de Provence & Savoury Rhubarb (The Saffron Girl)
• Strawberry Rhubarb Omelette (The Primalist)
• Roast Pork with Cherry Rhubarb Sauce (Gutsy by Nature)
• Easy Rhubarb BBQ Sauce (Seasonal and Savory)

4. Spring onions (scallions)

Onions are a year-round crop, but spring onions are best in the earlier months – these are the ones with the long green stems and white bulbs that are just barely thicker than the ends of the stems. They’re pretty mild, and they’re particularly great for people with a FODMAPs sensitivity, because most people can still eat the green stems, even if they can’t eat the white bulbs. Try them in…

• Asparagus and Caramelized Spring Onion Saute (Slim Palate)
• Pickled Spring Onions (Sippety Sup)

5. Mustard greens

Mustard greens have a slightly peppery flavor, a little bit like arugula, but not quite so intense. Most people like them better cooked than raw; they make a nice change from spinach and kale. You can use mustard greens in almost any recipe that calls for collards or other cooking greens, or try them in…

• Braised Mustard Greens with Bacon (Stupid Easy Paleo)
• Indian-Style Mustard Greens (Food 52)

6. Fresh apricots

You can get dried apricots at any time of year. But for the best fresh ones, you’ll want to stick with their actual growing season; otherwise, you’re liable to get ones that were plucked before they’re ripe and don’t have much flavor. In the late spring and early summer, apricots are at their most flavorful, so take advantage them as a nice preview of the summertime fruit season to come. Try them in…

• Curry Apricot Relish (Cranking Kitchen)
• Apricot Ginger Applesauce (Stupid Easy Paleo)
• Rabbit and Apricot Skewers (PaleOMG)

7. New potatoes

Yes, white potatoes are fine to eat. New potatoes are in season in the late spring to early summer – they’re small and tender, and perfect for salads or roasting. They’re slightly sweeter than regular potatoes, and have a firmer texture. Try them in…

• Crushed New Potatoes with Olive Oil and Chives (Lemon Squeezy)
• Syracuse Salt Potatoes (The Black Peppercorn)
• Herbed New Potatoes (Clean Eating)

8. Arugula

Arugula, or rocket, is a green with a serious attitude. You can get it spring through fall, but it’s a little bit milder in the spring, so if you’re not totally sold on the full-on bite of summertime arugula, the springtime version is much milder. Try it in…

• Spring Salad with Prosciutto and Grapefruit (Primal Palate)
• Zesty Zoodles with Wilted Arugula (Balancing Paleo)
• Spring Green Arugula Pesto (Colorful Eats)

9. Strawberries

Strawberries are the early birds of berries, showing up at the start of the season to whet your appetite for the summertime bounty to come. (Unless, of course, you live in Florida, in which case strawberry season is in the late fall!). Strawberries are tasty in desserts, but here’s a collection of savory recipes that feature them in salads or with vegetables as part of a main course:

• Sauteed Balsamic Brussels Sprouts and Strawberries (The Fitchen)
• Creamy Strawberry Chicken Salad (Jan’s Sushi Bar)
• Strawberry Poppy Seed Salad (Paleo Leap)

10. Foraged Wild Plants

From tender young dandelion greens (get ‘em before they bloom!) to the famous morel mushrooms to regional favorites like fiddleheads, what you forage will depend on where you are. A good place to start for recipes is to search for foraging guides for your area; in the mean time, here are some common favorites:

• Dandelion greens: everyone knows what they look like; here’s how to make them into dandelion green salad. (Terra Americana)
• Morel mushrooms: here’s a quick guide to identifying and finding them, including some lookalikes to avoid, and here’s a recipe for trout with morels and wild onions. (Hunter Angler Gardener Cook)
• Ramps: ramps are wild onions that grow on the East Coast of the US and have an intensely devoted following among amateur foragers who just can’t get enough of the taste. Here’s how to cook them with eggs and bacon. (Serious Eats)

Are you working on a Paleo challenge but struggling to fit in all that cooking and meal prep – and maybe looking longingly at the prepackaged “Paleo” bars and cookies at the checkout counter? Or maybe you’re craving snack food more than you thought you would, or you’re not sure what to even eat for snacks without dried fruit and nut butter.

Trying to fit Paleo into a modern lifestyle isn’t easy. If you’re already doing it, or even if you’re trying your best, pat yourself on the back, because you’re swimming upstream against a very strong current of takeout culture and convenience foods at every turn. To help you along the way, here’s a masterpost of tips, advice, simple recipes, and resources for making your challenge a success.

Finding Time to Cook Without Prepackaged “Paleo” Foods

A lot of people struggle with Paleo because they’re “too busy to cook.” So they end up eating a lot of convenience foods that they didn’t want to eat, just because they think they don’t have time to make something at home. Alternately, they end up way too reliant on processed “Paleo-labeled” treats like bars and trail mix – which is exactly what the Paleo Basics challenge asks you to eliminate.

Here’s how to squeeze Paleo into your daily schedule without relying on the prepackaged convenience foods, sugary smoothies, or a handful of trail mix masquerading as a “meal.” Pick your problem below to get solutions and resources for tackling it.

I don’t have time to make breakfast in the morning.

• Solution: go for a make-ahead breakfast, like egg muffins/mini frittatas or mini meatloaves.
• Resources: Here are 8 make-ahead breakfast recipes.

I don’t have time to pack and prep lunches.

• Solution: cook a double dinner at night. Put half on your plate and half on your lunchbox. You just packed your lunch in about a minute of extra time.
• Resources: Here are all our recipes tagged as “good for leftovers” for your browsing convenience.

I don’t have time to make dinner after work.

• Solutions: (pick one or more)
  • Invest in a slow-cooker or pressure-cooker.
  • Make one-pan skillet meals like skillet rosemary chicken to minimize prep time and cleanup.
• Resources: Here are all our recipes tagged as “fast cook” for inspiration.

What can I eat for quick snacks?

• Solutions: (pick one or more)
  • Eat enough at meals so you don’t need snacks at all. It’s OK to eat big meals. There’s no metabolic advantage to eating six times a day: the only reason to do it is if you like it.
  • Eat exactly what you’d eat at a meal, just less of it. Good food is nutritious whenever you eat it; there’s no reason why “snacks” demand special kinds of food.
• Resources: Check out this list of 10 nut-free, low-sugar Paleo snacks; mix and match until you get something with both protein and vegetables in it, and chow down!

Tip: if you batch-cook one or more of the following at the beginning of the week, you’ll have a much easier time finding snacks later:

• Hard-boiled eggs, egg muffins, or egg salad.
• Chicken drumsticks.
• Guacamole.
• Homemade mayonnaise.

Keeping the Basics Interesting

“Basics” is not a synonym for “boring!” You don’t have to give up flavor or pleasure just because you’re giving up stuff that’s designed to imitate junk food. In fact when you let go of the “Paleo treats,” you might be surprised to discover exactly how enjoyable your “regular food” can be.

Some tips and resources for keeping your interest going:

• Don’t skimp on fat or salt. Both are perfectly fine to eat (fat doesn't make you fat, and salt isn't a devil food), and they give your

food flavor. If you try to eat meals without fat or salt, your food will taste like cardboard and of course you’ll be bored of it – so don’t do that to yourself! Maybe as a special treat to carry you through the challenge, you could experiment with duck fat or something else really luxurious.

• Explore all your vegetable options. Challenge yourself to try one or two new vegetables per week – most people have at least one thing in the produce section that they’ve always kind of looked sideways at but never really explored.
• Switch up your leftovers to avoid getting sick of recipes you batch-cook. Here’s how to use leftovers without getting bored.
• Look up recipes and techniques to make basic staple foods interesting: here are some ideas for eggs, roast chicken, salad, and ground beef.
• Keep your mind stimulated in other ways. If you’re relying on food for all the interest or stimulation you get in your day, then it’s going to be awfully hard to give up hyper-stimulating junk food: humans crave pleasure, and we need to get it from somewhere. If you’re trying to cut the junk, try introducing a non-food pleasure as well to shift your focus.

But Why Can’t I Have Paleo Treats on the Paleo Basics Challenge?

You “can” have anything you like: you’re an adult and you get to decide what goes into your mouth. If you want to, you “can” have Paleo treats – in fact, if you want to, you “can” have regular, non-Paleo treats full of high-fructose corn syrup and refined flour; it’s not like they’re illegal. Nobody will stop you at the door and set a dog to sniffing your bags for hidden sugar.

But for the Paleo Basics challenge, you’re choosing to abstain (and yes, the way you say it matters!) from those treats even though you technically “can” have them. Treats aren’t part of the Paleo Basics challenge because it’s about your emotional relationship with food as much as your physical diet. It’s fine to enjoy occasional treats; it’s not healthy to be dependent on food for comfort or entertainment. If you really are eating those treats occasionally, within the spirit of Paleo, then abstaining for one week shouldn’t be a big deal at all.

If you’re finding it impossibly difficult to even think about not eating Paleo treats for a week, it might be a sign that you’re depending on them for emotional reasons – to feel good after a long day, to handle work boredom or stress, to reward yourself for a job well done. In that case, it might be worthwhile to take a hard look at your relationship with food, and maybe some ways to reward yourself without food.

Are you doing the Paleo Basics Challenge How’s it going? Let us know on Facebook!

The debate over whether you should snack at all shows no sign of dying down. But there’s no evidence that snacking either helps or hurts weight loss in the abstract, so the most reasonable approach is to just do what works for you.

If you’re not a snacker, you can close the tab now. But if you are a snacker – or if your kids are – then finding Paleo snacks can be hard. Most of them revolve around nuts, dried fruit, and sugar substitutes like honey and maple syrup. For some people, those foods are completely fine, but for others they tend to trigger overeating, further sugar cravings, or eating out of boredom just because you have treats lying around, instead of eating because your body is hungry.

So for the non-nut snackers, here’s a list of 10 nut-free, low-sugar snacks that focus on protein, vegetables, and healthy fats (just like the rest of Paleo!). They’re all tagged for convenient skimming:

• [L] = Lunchbox-friendly (something you could take to work or send to school with your kids)
• [P] = contains a notable amount of Protein.
• [F] = contains a notable amount of healthy Fats.

1. [L, P, F] Hard-boiled eggs with salt and pepper. One or two hard-boiled eggs makes a great snack to tide you through the afternoon – go deviled if you really want something fancy.
2. [L, P, F] Prosciutto or another cured meat, like salami or summer sausage. You’ll have to watch out for junk ingredients here, but you can often get high-quality products with just meat, spices, and salt.

3. [F] Vegetables with guacamole. Grab some pepper strips, baby carrots, cucumber slices, or other favorite vegetables and dip them in a bowl of fresh homemade guacamole.
4. [L, P, F] Beef jerky, either store-bought (watch out for junk ingredients, though!) or homemade (scroll down to the bottom of the page for the recipe). In high-end grocery stores, you can even get salmon or turkey jerky for a nice change of pace.
5. [L] Rainbow carrots. Rainbow carrots are the fun multicolored ones you see in bunches – they’re great for kids because they’re fun to eat (and all the colors taste just like normal carrots). Eat them plain, cut into strips or chips, and/or with your favorite dip.
6. [L, P, F] Can of sardines, tuna, or other fish. Canned fish will keep almost indefinitely in your glove compartment or at the bottom of your gym bag; throw a couple tins in there for emergencies and you’ll always something to lean on.
7. [L] Kale or other vegetable chips. Kale chips are easy to roast up in advance, and you can flavor them however you like.
8. [L, F] Olives. A handful of olives makes a tasty snack. If you need them on the go, you can buy 100-calorie packs that are already pre-divided into conveniently snack-sized bags (counting calories is still a bad idea for most people, but while there’s a product available in a convenient package, you might as well take advantage)
9. [P, F] Deli meat roll-ups. Yes, Paleo-friendly deli meat does exist! The trick is to get the kind that’s freshly sliced behind the deli counter – it’s basically just ordinary roast beef (or turkey breast, or whatever it is) sliced into a different thickness. Meat doesn’t magically become non-Paleo because it’s put through a slicing machine; the only “deli meat” to avoid is the mystery meat you find in prepackaged plastic baggies in the refrigerator section. Smear one side with mayonnaise and wrap around pepper strips, sprouts, baby greens, shredded cabbage…
10. [P, F] Egg salad in celery sticks or cherry tomatoes. This one is a little more involved, but great for weekends or playdates. Whip up a batch of egg salad and use it to fill in the channel in celery sticks, spoon it into cherry tomatoes, or just eat it as a dip for any other vegetables you like.
11. Bonus: small amount of leftover anything. Any Paleo leftovers can be a snack if you eat a snack-sized amount. Leftover kabobs? Just have one instead of the 2-3 you’d normally eat at a meal. Extra pork chop? Grab half of it and throw a tablespoon of sauerkraut on top for some crunch.

If you’re thinking something like “…but none of these are snack-y. Where are the coconut date balls? Where are the Paleo cookies?” – well, that’s the point! This is a list of snacks to give your body energy, not snacks that you eat for fun. If treats based on nuts and dried fruits work for you personally, that’s fine, but they’re not right for everyone, and even the non-treat-eaters need something to eat when they get hungry in the middle of the afternoon.

What's your favorite savory snack? (Bonus points if it provides some protein and fat to keep your energy high for a while). Let us know on Facebook or Google+!

It’s one thing to list alternatives to comfort-eating when you’re stressed, or give some advice for avoiding the lure of quick-and-easy junk food. But you know what would be even better? Not wanting food for comfort in the first place!

There are ways to do that with food – eating enough carbs helps, eating enough calories really helps, and to a certain extent you do just have to grit your teeth and power through the “withdrawal” from using food as an emotional crutch. But craving comfort food isn’t just about what you eat. It’s also about how you think about food. Specifically, it’s about making food into a moral issue.

Food is not “good” or “bad” by itself, and Paleo is not some kind of punishment that you “deserve” for eating “bad food.” That line of thinking actually leads to even more urges to comfort-eat. Here’s the proof, and what to do instead.

Food is Not Inherently “Good” or “Bad.”

Even if you don’t usually notice it, you’re surrounded by messages that assign moral value to food – some foods are “good,” other foods are “bad,” and you are “good” or “bad” for eating or not eating them.

To break it down a little more, here’s what it means to live in a society where food has moral value:

• Talking about food as “good” or “bad” in a moral sense. Think of phrases like “guilty pleasure,” implying that by eating the food you’re doing something wrong. How many times have you heard a decadent treat described as “sinful”?
• Judging our own and other people’s worth by what we ate or didn’t eat. If you eat a salad, you’re “being good;” if you eat a brownie, you’re “being bad.” This is the same mindset that makes people think it’s OK to shame and put down people they perceive as overweight.
• Punishing or shaming yourself for eating certain foods, or feeling guilty after eating them.

None of these thought patterns are healthy. Food does not have moral value. You’re not a good person because you ordered the salad, and you’re not a bad person because you ordered the pizza. You might be a person with a stomachache, but that doesn’t make you bad.

These moral judgments about food cause a lot of unnecessary pain, shame, and suffering – and ironically, they also have a very clear relationship with comfort-eating. Treating food as a moral issue inevitably leads to a mindset where healthy eating and avoiding junk food is tied up with shame and punishment, and all the evidence shows that shame about food and your body rebounds in the form of comfort eating.

Why Dieting as Punishment Doesn’t Work

When food is a moral issue, and eating unhealthy food is a “bad” thing that makes you a “bad” person, then trying to eat well and lose

weight becomes a kind of punishment for something you did wrong, and/or a constant struggle against cravings that are trying to tempt you into sin. It’s easy to be cruel to yourself when you see the urge to eat a cupcake as a moral failing on your part, especially with all that language about "guilty pleasures" and "sinful desserts" is right there at your fingertips. It's easy to shame or even hate yourself for eating a cookie if you think it makes you a bad person. And it's tempting to try to shame yourself as a motivational tool (e.g. "You ate a cookie; this is why you're fat and disgusting; now get on the treadmill and don't you dare come off for an hour!")

Unfortunately, shame doesn’t work, mostly because it tends to make people miserable. It’s well-known that negative mood is a strong trigger for cravings – and shaming or punishing yourself is a great way to get a raging negative mood in no time. An incredibly common and well-documented response to being shamed about weight, size, and eating is to turn to food for comfort. When people feel like they’re being forced or shamed into a diet, they actually comfort-eat more in response. That response doesn’t magically go away just because you’re turning the shame on yourself.

Shaming yourself doesn’t work for weight loss, either. This study noted that among patients who attempt to lose weight, relapsers showed more “disengaging coping strategies,” a category that included negative self-talk (beating up on yourself). By contrast, people who successfully kept the weight off used less self-shame and more “engaging coping strategies” like tackling the problem head-on or getting support from a friend.

Shaming and punishment are direct consequences of seeing food as “good” and “bad,” and they rebound spectacularly. But at this point, you might be thinking something like “if I can’t punish myself for eating unhealthy food, how am I supposed to find the motivation to avoid the junk food? If I didn’t get mad at myself or feel shame about my body, I’d have no motivation to stick with it!” That’s not actually true, and you do have alternatives.

Staying Motivated Without Shame and Punishment

The diet industry has spun us all a very convincing lie that we can (or even have to) hate and shame ourselves into being healthy. Just look at the way the trainers treat contestants on The Biggest Loser. But you do have options for convincing yourself to make good choices without self-hatred and moral judgment.

First of all, take a look at the case for habit. Habit is a more effective strategy for long-term behavior change than relying on emotional motivation (positive or negative). The point is not to replace shame with some kind of positive emotion; it’s to replace it with habitual behaviors that don’t require you to get all emotionally fired up before you do them, because they’re so routine you do them on autopilot.

When you do need some emotional motivation, replace “I’m going to punish myself for eating bad food/being a bad person” with “I’m going to respect myself by making the healthiest choices for me, because I’m inherently worthy and deserve to feel great.”

Try it for One Day

It’s pretty daunting to think about completely overhauling your emotional frame of reference for food, so why not take it for a test drive? For one day, try an experiment and see how you like life when you don’t treat food as a moral issue. For your one-day test-run…

• Don’t refer to foods as “good,” “bad,” or “evil” (no, not even sugar!). If you accidentally do, stop and correct yourself.
• Don’t refer to yourself as “good,” “bad,” etc. for eating or not eating particular foods. If you accidentally do, stop and correct yourself.
• Don’t deprive yourself of food in general or specific foods in particular as a punishment for something you think you did wrong.
• Don’t force yourself to do things with the promise of food as a reward. This includes exercising to “earn your carbs.” If you’re alive and hungry, you have already “earned” the right to eat as much as you need to feel full.
• If you start experiencing a craving for a food you know isn’t healthy for you in the long run, say some variation of this out loud: “I choose not to eat ____________, because I respect my body and want it to be healthy and feel amazing.” You have the power to reshape your thoughts; shape them into something positive.

Try it out, just for a day, and see how you like it!

Summing it Up

If you want to avoid urges to eat for comfort, it really helps to completely dissociate food from shame, blame, “goodness,” “badness,” or punishment. Better living through violent self-hatred just isn’t a sustainable way to go, and research shows that it actually increases cravings in the long run.

Instead, focus on habit change and reframe healthy eating as a way of respecting yourself – if you’re skeptical, just try it for a day (or maybe a week, if you want a longer period of time to get more data on how it affects you). Paleo is not a punishment that you "deserve" for anything you may or may not have eaten in the past; it's a way of eating that should make you feel like a million bucks all the time - and you can't feel like a million bucks if you're too busy shaming yourself over food!

It’s a kitchen workhorse. It’s often the cheapest cut of beef available, so most of us end up buying a lot of it. But making the same chili, meatball, meatloaf, and burger recipes gets old after a while – and there’s no reason you need to keep doing the same old things with such a versatile food! So here are 10 interesting recipes to keep ground beef from getting dull.

1. Karniyarik (Turkish stuffed eggplant) (The Domestic Man). Sure, you’ve had stuffed peppers (if you’ve been on the ground beef train for a while, you’ve probably had every conceivable variety of stuffed pepper in existence). But have you tried stuffing anything else?

If you liked that, try some other recipes for stuffed vegetables...

• Paleo stuffed eggplant (Everyday Maven).
• Giant stuffed mushrooms (Everyday Paleo).
• Stuffed acorn squash (Yaya Recommended).

2. Indian ground beef curry (My Heart Beets). It’s a little bit like chili, if chili got an Indian-themed makeover. Adding potatoes makes for a hearty meal, and don’t forget some cauliflower rice to soak up the sauce!

If you liked that, try some other Indian-inspired recipes...

• Indian Kheema Matar (Buttoni)
• Deconstructed Samosa (Nom Nom Paleo)

3. Ground Beef and Baba Ghanouj Breakfast Bowl (The Healthy Foodie). Ground beef gets a Middle Eastern makeover with a smoky eggplant dip and fresh tomatoes. And eating it for breakfast is a nice change of pace from eggs.

If you liked that, try some other Mediterranean and Middle Eastern-themed ideas...

• Paleo Ground Beef Kebabs with Tzatziki Sauce (Jackson and Laguna). The sauce contains dairy, but the kebabs are dairy-free.
• Spicy Beef and Cucumber Salad with Cashew Raita (Eat Drink Paleo).

4. Moroccan Beef and Fig Stew (Things My Belly Likes). Get some sweetness in your ground beef with a big bowl of stew full of North African flavors.

If you liked that, try another African dish...

• Sukuma Wiki (Kenyan Braised Collard Greens and Ground Beef) (The Domestic Man)

5. Bakso (Indonesian Beef Balls) (The Clothes Make the Girl). These have a different texture from typical ground beef recipes, so if you’re suffering from texture fatigue, they’re a great alternative.

If you liked that, try some other Asian flavors...

• Vietnamese Beef Meatballs (Three Beans on a String)
• Asian Ground Beef and Veggie Lettuce Wraps (Paleo Plan)

6. Chili, Coriander, and Sweet Potato Biohacker Beef Sausage (Biohackers Recipes). Whether or not you’re into biohacking, you have to admire their dedication to spices. From a biohacker perspective, the spices all have special antioxidant, anti-inflammatory benefits; to the rest of us, they’re just plain tasty.

If you liked that, try some other homemade sausages...

• Garlic Beef Sausage (The Paleo Mom)
• Paleo Beef Breakfast Sausage (Hollywood Homestead)

7. Pumpkin and Beef Sautee (Keto Diet).

If you liked that, try another recipe pairing ground beef with sweet-starchy vegetables...

• Keto Taco Salad (Paleo Leap)
• Afghani Pumpkin and Beef (Kaddo Bourani) (Stuff I Make My Husband)

8. Boston Baked Beef (TGI Paleo). Yes, like Boston baked beans. Except hold the beans. If you’re missing pork’n’beans or any other legume-based comfort food, this one is a must-try.

If you liked that, try some other savory-spicy recipes...

• Smoky Beef and Lamb Stew (Paleo in PDX)
• Sweet Potato Beef Paprikash (Life Made Full)

9. Salted Mocha Burgers (Popular Paleo). Burgers: they don’t all have to taste the same! There are endless ways to get creative with the flavors - if you've never considered putting coffee in a hamburger before, you might be surprised by how much you like it!

If you liked that, try some other interesting burgers...

• Cinnamon Chipotle Sliders (PaleOMG)
• Aussie Burger (Paleo Leap)

10. Cashew Beef Stir-Fry (Paleo Foodie Kitchen). Adding nuts to your stir-fry mixes up the texture with a little bit of crunch and takes it beyond the typical rotation of meat and vegetables.

If you liked that, try some other stir-fries...

• Stir-Fried Kelp Noodles with Ground Beef, Broccoli Slaw, and Spinach (Nom Nom Paleo)
• Taco Beef Cabbage Stir-Fry (Unrefined Kitchen)

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+!

You’re peering into the fridge, staring down a rapidly yellowing head of broccoli. It would be a shame to throw it out, but you also don’t really want any broccoli right now – maybe you’ve been eating broccoli a lot lately and you’re just kind of sick of it. What to do: throw it out? Eat it even though you don’t really want it?

Maybe you bought a lot of something on sale without really thinking it through. Or maybe you’re excited about your new CSA but really don’t know what to do with the massive pile of zucchini sitting on the counter.

Food spoiling is a special problem with Paleo because almost everything on the menu is perishable. There’s no coming home with boxes of pasta and cans of sauce that you can leave for literally years before they go bad. The clock is ticking on everything as soon as you pick it up in the store.

The solution:

• Get better at meal planning, so you only buy what you can use, and
• Get good at preserving your food so it lasts longer when you do slip up.

That second point is what this article focuses on. This doesn’t have to mean busting out a canning rack or a bunch of crazy equipment: if you want to go all survivalist with your food preservation, you can, but plenty of methods only require ordinary kitchen equipment like an oven or freezer.

Learning preservation tricks for saving food about to go bad can help you avoid wasting money - and it can also help you take advantage of sales later on. Once you know you'll have a way to keep your bounty fresh, you can fearlessly take advantage of every special you see. So here are some last-minute preservation tricks for anything that might be about to go bad in the fridge.

Fresh Herbs

Herbs are perennially a problem because they’re sold in giant bunches, but most recipes only call for a little bit. So what on earth should you do with the other ¾ of the cilantro?

• Freeze herbs in olive oil before they go bad. This preserves the flavor for easy use whenever you want it.
• Dry them. Dried herbs will last for longer; here’s a guide to DIY drying, including methods for hanging them, using a dehydrator, using a microwave, and freezing.
• Infuse oils or vinegars. Herb-infused vinegar adds a delicious touch to salad dressings, and it’s a quick way to get some use out of a bunch of greens. Add some garlic and lemon if you like.

Fresh Vegetables

There are so many different kinds of vegetables that no one method will work for all of them. But there’s a way to deal with everything!

• Freeze them. This works best for “hardy” vegetables like broccoli, cauliflower, squash, and Brussels sprouts. Just chop them into bite-sized pieces, stick them on a baking tray, and put the tray in the freezer. Once they’re frozen, you can take them off the tray and put them in a bag to save space.
• Cook and freeze them. This method is better for vegetables that don’t stand up well to freezing on their own, like eggplant and tomatoes. For example, you could make a huge batch of tomato sauce and freeze it; it’ll keep better than the tomatoes.
• Ferment them. You can ferment just about anything, and it’ll buy you an extra few days or a week of fermentation time before you can even start thinking about eating the results. Try making sauerkraut with extra cabbage, or throwing in a quick batch of pickled onions or carrots.
• Dry them in the oven or a dehydrator. You probably wouldn’t want to eat dried and rehydrated vegetables plain, but you can rehydrate them easily in soups or stocks – think sun-dried tomatoes. Here are some tips on dehydrating pretty much everything.

Lettuce and other salad greens are typically the hardest to manage. One thing you could try with lettuce is making lettuce soup (yes, really!) or finding some other way to cook it before it gets slimy and gross. For spinach, kale, or hardier green vegetables, try cooking them into soup and freezing that.

For more information on freezing, the National Center for Home Food Preservation has a massive list of tips and techniques for pretty much everything you might consider sticking in the freezer.

Meat

Got some meat that you’re worried about going bad? One way to handle it is just to cook it now: cooked meat keeps longer than raw, so you can buy yourself a few days with just your oven. If you’re not going to cook it yet, but still want to save it for later, here’s how:

• If it’s never been frozen before, freeze it. This does not apply to meat that’s already been defrosted (for that, see below). But if it’s never been frozen before, just wrap it tightly in plastic wrap (or something else airtight) and stick it in the freezer. The trick is to make sure there’s no air touching the meat (this will leave freezer burn and damage the texture and flavor).
• If it’s been frozen before, cook it and freeze it. All of us have defrosted something and then thought better of it at some point, but don’t just put it back in the freezer: re-freezing tends to damage the flavor and texture. It’s better to cook the meat into something freezer-friendly first: try a chili, soup, or meatloaf. Then freeze the final product.
• Cure it. If you’ve got pork belly, make bacon. Duck breast? Make duck prosciutto. Pork shoulder? Make ham. Curing is one of the oldest and easiest meat preservation techniques in the book.

Fresh Fruit

Fruit is expensive, especially out of season, so don’t let it go to waste!

• Freeze it. You can freeze most fruits just like you freeze vegetables: chop it into slices or bite-sized pieces (except for berries; those are small enough to freeze whole) and spread across a baking sheet to freeze as fast as possible. When the fruit is frozen through, transfer it to a bag and seal it up. Eat it plain, or use it in smoothies. Or for a really special treat, try some chocolate-covered popsicles.
• Make apple butter or peach butter to keep it tasty.
• Make fruit popsicles as a quick way to get frozen fruit without worrying about freezing methods.
• Dehydrate it into banana chips, fruit rolls, or anything else you can think of.

Everything Else

Then there are a few extra items that don’t really fall into any of the categories above, but still cost you money if you just throw them out:

• Coconut milk: It freezes just fine, but the texture will change – this isn’t a big deal in a soup or curry, though.
• Nuts or nut flours: just stick them in the freezer in an airtight bag; they’ll be perfectly fine.
• Ketchup or BBQ sauce: pour them into an ice-cube tray and freeze that. Then pop out the cubes into a plastic bag. When you want some, you’ll have it all pre-divided so you can reheat just as much as you need.

Got another thing that’s about to die in your fridge? Why not ask for some help with that on Facebook or Google+?

Imagine a world where cooking with lard was the standard, and canola oil didn’t even exist. It might sound like a foreign country, but it wasn’t actually that long ago! Vintage cookbooks are absolutely full of Paleo-friendly recipes that embrace nutritious whole foods like egg yolks, liver, and butter – not to mention every part of the animal from head to toe!

Your grandmother (or great-grandmother, or great-great-grandmother, depending on how old you are) knew a whole lot about putting real food on the table. So here are 10 delicious vintage recipes that show off just how good food used to be.

1. Eggs with Brown Butter

Recipe from A Plain Cookery Book for the Working Classes (1852).

Brown butter is one of those simple culinary joys that will make you wonder how you ever lived without it. It’s like butter, but even more buttery – poured over eggs, it’s a delicious way to celebrate your love of healthy fats.

(And if you liked that, try this recipe for just the sauce on everything from vegetables to steak!)

2. Larding

Recipe from Domestic French Cookery (1836).

Larding is a technique that never should have fallen out of fashion: it’s basically “sewing” bacon fat through another kind of meat, so the base meat ends up imbued with the flavor of the bacon all the way through. It’s a quick and easy way to transform skinless chicken or turkey breast into a food with actual flavor, and it’s incredibly easy once you get the hang of it. You’ll need a larding needle, which you can buy for less than $10 online or at a cooking store.

3. Chestnut Soup

Recipe from New Vegetarian Dishes (1892).

Chestnuts are a delicious source of healthy carbs, and they're not only good roasted! Cooking them with a few other vegetables and some simple seasonings makes a very pleasant and mild soup, great for warming up on a cold evening.

4. Calf’s Feet Broth

Recipe from Directions for Cookery, in its Various Branches (1840).

Before we had Jell-O to eat when we were sick, we had broth, and it probably did a lot more for us! This broth recipe would gel perfectly – with 2 calves’ feet, it’s got plenty of collagen and other good stuff. Adding an egg yolk makes it even more nutritious: it's the perfect answer to a sick day when you need some nutrition but don't feel up to actually eating.

5. Savory Fat

Savory fat recipes: Recipe 1, Recipe 2, and Recipe 3, all from Foods That Will Win the War and How to Cook Them (1918).

Rendering your own fat is one of the easiest and cheapest ways to get high-quality animal fat into your meals – some butchers and farmers even give the raw fat away for free because nobody wants it! Plain home-rendered fat is already delicious, but it’s even better when you add some extras: here are three recipes for adding a little extra flavor to home-rendered fat, so you can get the “cooking with bacon fat” effect even if you’re not actually using fat that originally came from bacon.

(The recipe assumes that you already know how to render fat because…well, everyone at the time already did! If you don’t, here’s how to do it.)

6. Pickled Onions

Recipe from The White House Cookbook (1887).

These aren’t fermented, so they aren’t probiotic, but pickled onions are still delicious over salads or a baked potato. And unlike pickles you buy in a store, you can be sure that they won’t be full of preservatives and other unwelcome additions.

7. Spanish Tripe

Recipe from Better Meals for Less Money (1917)

Tripe is an organ meat we’ve mostly forgotten how to cook, but it used to be considered an affordable treat for people who didn’t have a lot of money to spend on groceries. Try this flavor-heavy recipe to dress it up a little in a Spanish-style stew: the vegetables and bacon help tone everything down a little so you don’t have to confront the tripe all on its own right away.

8. Bubble and Squeak

Recipe from The Cooking Manual of Practical Directions for Economical Every-Day Cookery (1877).

Leftover meat gets a new life with a reheating technique that won’t dry it out or make it tough – if you don’t like microwave-warmed leftovers, this is an easy workaround. And adding the cabbage makes it into a full meal.

9. Brains with Egg Sauce

Recipe from The International Jewish Cook Book (1919).

When wasting any part of the animal just wasn’t an option, people used everything and found a way to make it tasty – fortunately, brains don’t take a lot of work in that regard. They taste very light and almost fluffy, and they’re fantastic with the richer flavor of the egg sauce (just leave out the flour in the sauce).

10. Vegetables

Recipe from The Healthy Life Cook Book (1915).

Some recipes are valuable because they’re delicious, and some are just fun to read – this one is really in the latter category. This author of this advice on vegetables is on a nutritional crusade against boiled vegetables, and he’s not wrong! Boiled vegetables do actually lose a lot of nutrition, and they aren’t as tasty, either (even if you don’t completely agree with the author that eating them produces “pale, flabby individuals who succumb to the slightest strain, and suffer from chronic dyspepsia.”). So here’s to roasting, pan-frying, and even steaming over boiling the life out of your sides.

Prepping a big batch of something (chili, soup, pulled pork…) and then eating off it all week is a great way to save time, save money, and plan ahead for all the little emergencies that inevitably pop up during the week. You can make a week of breakfasts on the run and then just grab something from the fridge instead of worrying about cooking in the morning. Even if you don’t need to bring breakfast or lunch to work, it’s nice to have pre-cooked meat to quickly throw in a soup or stir-fry for an easy dinner.

But bulk food prep isn’t something everyone can just do intuitively. So here’s a guide to mastering the art of once-a-week batch cooking.

• What kinds of things can/should I make in batches? What about fragile things like salads?
• How can I avoid getting bored of eating the same thing all week?
• What kinds of tools and equipment do I need to do this?

What to Prep in Batches and How to Do It

If you think of a Paleo meal, it really has four parts:

• Required: meat or other animal protein (e.g. eggs)
• Required: fat (this might be provided by your protein source, e.g. bacon, but if you’re cooking lean protein you need to add some).
• Required: non-starchy vegetables.
• Optional: starchy vegetables, fruit, and/or nuts.

Typically, when you batch cook, you’ll be cooking one of these three parts. Many people only batch-cook protein – this doesn’t completely eliminate meal prep, but it makes everything a lot faster. Protein is typically the longest part of the meal to cook, so you’ll get the biggest time savings here.

You can eat the batch-cooked protein on its own, or throw it into soups, stir-fries, salads, and all kinds of other meals.

Other people batch prep vegetables as well. This can get tricky because you do have to make sure to use up all the vegetables before they go bad, but it’s definitely possible, especially if you choose wisely.

For a good batch-cooking recipe, you want something that’s easy to make in large quantities, keeps well for several days, and ideally tasty with a variety of different sides so you can mix it up.

Protein

If you only prep one thing ahead, make it your protein. Cooking a big batch of meat or eggs at the beginning of the week can save you incredible amounts of meal prep time. Here are some ideas:

• Eggs: hard-boiled eggs or mini frittatas.
• Meat: chili (pork or beef), shredded pork or beef, chicken breast, steak, any kind of roast, meatballs, or meatloaf.

Non-Starchy Vegetables

Non-starchy vegetables can get a little tricky to prep ahead because they can easily get slimy or gross – especially salads.

One great trick with salads is to keep the dressing separate. Wash your greens, chop them up, and mix all you like; just leave the dressing in a separate container until you’re ready to eat it. It also helps to layer your salads – put wetter things at the bottom so the juices don’t get all over the greens. Another tip is to prep salads for the beginning of the week and prep hardier vegetables for the end – or just have a second mini-prep day in the middle of the week where you make another batch of salads.

• Vegetables that keep for 1-3 days: fresh vegetable salad, fruity coleslaw, most steamed or roasted vegetables (e.g. broccoli, cauliflower, squash, etc.), most leafy salads if you keep the dressing separate.
• Vegetables that keep until the end of the week: roasted squash, cooked beets, chopped carrots or bell peppers. You may also have luck with coleslaw or other uncooked vegetables, depending on how fresh they were when you bought them.

Starchy Vegetables

If you’re batch-cooking breakfast, there’s a good chance that it’s because you need something to eat between the gym and the office – and in that case, you’ll want some starch with that. Here are some ideas for batch-cooking starchier foods:

• Mashed or roasted white or sweet potatoes (yes, white potatoes are Paleo).
• Sweet potato salads: one, two.

Or just add some starch to your protein, like these twice-baked sweet potatoes.

How to Keep it Interesting

You’ve cooked up enough pulled pork to feed the army with leftovers to spare. If the apocalypse happened tomorrow, you could subsist on pulled pork until you died of natural causes. But halfway through your week of pulled pork bounty, you realize that you’re so incredibly bored of it you don’t want to take another bite.

Oops.

Here are some strategies for preventing that in the first place or fixing it if you’re stuck there:

• Batch cook two main proteins and freeze half of each. Basically this puts you on a two-week batch cooking schedule instead of 1 week. So for example, instead of cooking just pulled pork, cook pulled pork and beef chili. Freeze half of each dish for next week. That way you’ll be able to rotate between them and you won’t feel like you’re eating the same thing every day.
• Use the protein as a base, not the final product. Put your batch-cooked protein in salads, stews, curries, or stuffed potatoes. Dress it up with different spices and seasonings. Chop it up and stir-fry it. Put an interesting sauce on it to add a new flavor. Here are 17 ideas to keep it interesting, and here are three soups that put a different twist on leftover meat: coconut lime chicken soup, ham and pumpkin soup, and winter vegetable soup.
• Rotate different proteins and side dishes together so you can get some variety on your plate even if you’re eating the same meat.

Useful Tools and Equipment

You don’t need a lot of special tools to get started with batch cooking. But it does help to have…

• Containers and a label system for storing the food once you make it. If you’re prepping grab-and-go meals, just put everything into meal-sized containers as soon as it’s done cooking for maximum convenience.
• A slow-cooker for cooking big cuts of meat painlessly while you do other things.

You can absolutely do batch cooking without a slow-cooker, though; you’ll just have to find a time when the oven is free.

Summing it Up

Batch cooking is an easy way to save yourself some time and make Paleo cooking possible for busy families. Some people cook all their breakfasts or lunches in advance for the whole week and just grab them out of the fridge as they go. Other people just cook their proteins and then use the cooked meat to make quick weeknight dinners like stir-fries and salads.

Either way, batch prep is a very useful shield against the lure of takeout and vending machines: find a recipe that looks tasty and give it a try!

By the time they find Paleo, most people have at least one or two “failed” diets under their belt, often with the rebound weight to prove it. If that’s your history, how do you know Paleo won’t just be another short-term “diet” that you can only really stick with for a couple weeks?

Well, first of all, stop thinking about “failing” diets. You didn’t fail a diet. The diet failed you. Yes, you can change yourself to be a healthier eater, but you can also change your diet to be a better fit for your own personality and eating style. Successful diet change isn’t about white-knuckling through a miserable life on willpower alone; it’s about learning from your past failures to make a reasonable plan that doesn’t require any white-knuckling in the first place!

Learn from the past…

Wouldn’t we all like to forget our failures like they never happened? Just sweep them under the rug and start out fresh?

Resist that urge: your own failures are your most valuable teachers. Instead of pretending they never happened, treat them as valuable opportunities to learn what doesn’t work for you.

Why did you fail the last time (or two, or three, or ten times)? Was it because…

• You didn’t know how to cook tasty meals and got bored of the same old “diet food” every day? (check out easy beginner meals here, plus ways to make Paleo salads,

eggs, and roast chicken interesting).

The food was too expensive? (check out Paleo money-saving tips here and here).

You got caught in a sticking point?

You tried to jump in too fast and got overwhelmed?

You were hungry and miserable all the time? (check out reasons why you might be hungry on Paleo here)

The plan was too inflexible so one slip-up sent you off the rails for good? (check out some tips for managing flexibility here and here)

Something else?

If your answer is any variation on “I didn’t have enough willpower,” don’t stop there. Instead, fill in the blank: “I didn’t have enough willpower to deal with __________________.” The blank is the real answer, not “willpower.” That’s what you really need to address. Successful lifestyle change is not about “having more willpower,” and even if it were, you’re not going to get more willpower by beating yourself up for not having it (if anything, the stress and negative emotions increase cravings for junk food).

Instead of banging your head against the willpower wall, think about what specific situation or problem overwhelmed your willpower in the past. What specifically was the problem that caused you to fail, and what specifically can you do to make sure that same thing doesn’t trip you up again? If you’re going to make it work this time, you need a specific plan; you can’t just ignore it and hope it won't happen again!

For example, let’s say your problem was that you couldn’t find a way to eat healthy and enjoy a good social life at the same time. You felt too deprived not being able to go out and eat with your friends – so understandably you chose to have a life you could enjoy and gave up on the diet.

Wanting to enjoy social time with your friends isn't a lack of "willpower;" it's a perfectly normal desire and a diet that deprives you of that is making unreasonable demands on your life. Instead of trying to bull your way through the loneliness and isolation with "willpower," think of what you could do to solve or avoid the problem in the first place. Maybe proactively make arrangements to do things that don’t revolve around food, plan to host a dinner party instead of going out, or search out restaurants that serve Paleo-friendly meals.

If you keep doing what you’ve always done, you’ll keep seeing the results you’ve always seen. If you want to stop getting tripped up by the same old problems, you have to find a way to address them head-on. Yes, it really stinks having to remind yourself of all the times you did things that you weren’t proud of, but there’s just no easy way out.

To make it even easier, here’s a fill-in-the-blank:

Last time I tried to eat better, I failed because ___________________________. This time, I will address that problem by ______________________________.

…But Then let the Past Go.

You are not permanently pinned down by anything you’ve done in the past. Every time you make a new choice, you have an opportunity to start re-defining “you.”

Learning from the past doesn’t mean dwelling on it, or getting completely caught up in identifying as someone who “fails diets” or “can’t lose weight.” It means figuring out what made you that person before, and how you can make yourself into a different person this time around.

This is actually notoriously hard to do – just to take one example, people who lose a lot of weight very often struggle with understanding themselves as a thin person. It's all to easy to get stuck in a feedback loop of "I made one mistake, so I'm obviously about to fail just like I've always done, because I'm just a failure at [whatever you're trying to change]." That's not true: you're doing things differently this time because you've addressed the reasons why you failed before. Your choice to learn from your mistakes was already a step towards being different person, and every single healthy choice takes you further along that road; it just takes you a while for that identity to sink in.

If you're worried about getting stuck in the past, make a plan for working through those feelings: journaling might help, or talking to someone who’s been down the same road and can help you figure it out.

Summing it Up

Too many people “fail” diet after diet because they keep trying basically the same thing: they head into a plan that doesn't work for their life, try to bull through with willpower alone, get overwhelmed, quit, blame themselves for “not having enough willpower,” and regain all the weight (often with some to spare).

Don’t do that. Instead, think about what stopped other diets from working for you, and find a way to change that so you have a diet that doesn’t require so much willpower in the first place.

Successful lifestyle changes rely as little as possible on willpower. That doesn't mean that they're always easy, or that they require no effort at all, but they should minimize willpower whenever possible so you can save it for when you really need it. If you've failed at changing your diet or lifestyle before, it's probably because something about the diet you tried just didn't work for your life. If you want to do it right this time, think back on those problems and make a plan for addressing them head-on this time so they won't keep you caught up in the same old cycle.

If you like exploring new recipes, then Christmas is the perfect excuse to branch out and try your hand at something a little bit different. And to give you some inspiration, here are 10 traditional Christmas recipes from all around the world.

Even if you’re already planning a Christmas dinner in line with your own traditions, you could always try one of these recipes on some other night (maybe New Year’s Eve if you’re throwing a party?) They lean towards the warm and comforting, so they’re perfect for any cold-weather feast.

1. Bacalao (salted cod) (Spain, Portugal, South America)

Bacalao, or salted cod, is an Iberian tradition that spread to South America as well, and a delicious way to take care of any latent salt needs while you enjoy a tasty meal. It can be fried or cooked into a stew. You can buy bacalao from all kinds of grocery stores – often you’ll find it in a box at room temperature instead of in a refrigerator case.

Recipes:

• Bacalao (Salted Cod) (Gnom Gnom)
• Bacalao salt cod with potatoes and rice (Steamy Kitchen) – just replace the rice with cauliflower rice if you don’t eat regular rice.
• Best Baccala Salad (Linda’s Italian Table)

2. Flaekesteg (roast pork with crispy skin) (Denmark)

Flaekesteg is a roast pork dish from Denmark featuring crispy, crackling skin with fatty meat underneath. It’s a true fat-lover’s treat, perfect for a Paleo-style Christmas dinner. Make sure to get a pork roast with the fat and skin layer still on it, or it won’t come out right.

Recipes:

• Danish Roast Pork Loin with Crackling (Flaeskesteg) (Stuffed Pepper)
• Flaeskesteg (Honest Cooking)

3. Vitel Tonnato/ Vitel Toné (veal with tuna sauce) (Italy and Argentina, respectively)

It tastes better than it sounds! Another recipe that spread from Europe to the New World, the Italian specialty of Vitel Tonnato became Vitel Toné in Argentina, where it’s traditionally served for Christmas. The tangy tuna sauce really brings out the milder flavor of the veal, and the result is delicious (if you’re worried about the ethical side of veal, this recipe has some perspective)

Recipes:

• Vitel Toné (Hispanic Kitchen) (Replace the cream with coconut milk if you don’t do dairy).
• Vitello Tonnato (Saveur)

4. Kissel (fruit juice pudding/soup/drink) (Eastern Europe and the Baltic Sea area)

Kissel is a thick fruit juice preparation that’s eaten all different ways. If you’re looking for a healthier substitute for fruit punch or eggnog, you can make it a little on the thinner side and use it as a drink; if you’re after more of a pudding or dessert, you can add a little more thickener and chill it until you get a kind of homemade fruit pudding.

As a cold dessert, it would also be great for a Paleo Christmas in hot weather (Calling the Australians…). Here are a couple recipes for various different ways to swing it:

• (as a drink or pudding) Winter Kissel Recipe (Natasha’s Kitchen).
• (as a soup) Traditional Russian Food Kissel (Peaceful Dumpling).
• (as a drink or dessert) Paleo Kissel (Payton’s Paleo)

5. Brazilian Christmas Turkey (Brazil)

If you want a turkey for Christmas but you’re interested in doing something a little bit new and different with it, here’s a recipe to try. Christmas turkey gets a festive makeover with champagne and plenty of fruit; it’s a nice change from the typical savory seasonings.

Recipe: Ceia de Natal (Fiery Foods Central)

6. Potatiskorv (Swedish Christmas Sausage)

Scandinavian food is full of special Christmas sausages; here’s one of them. Potatiskorv is a little different from the sausages you buy in most American grocery stores because it includes potatoes right in the sausage – there’s nothing wrong with white potatoes, but you could probably substitute cauliflower if that really bothers you. This would be great for a holiday brunch,

Recipes:

• Potatis Korv (no sausage stuffer/casings required) (CD Kitchen)
• Swedish Korv (with casings)
• For the hunters: Elk Potatiskorv (with casings) (Field and Stream)

7. Fish Soup (Eastern Europe, Italy, Spain)

In many parts of Europe, the Christmas Eve dinner is traditionally a pescetarian affair thanks to Roman Catholic food traditions. For a pescetarian meal, there’s no meat, eggs, or dairy, so fish takes center stage in various forms. You might not want to go all the way with a full Italian Feast of the Seven Fishes, but you can still enjoy various tasty seafood soups that make an appearance on Christmas Eve.

Recipes:

• Vánocní Rybí Polévka (Czech Christmas Fish Soup) (Soupsong) – just replace the flour with almond flour.
• Christmas Shellfish Soup (Recetas Del Señor Señor)

8. Schäufele (pork shoulder roast) (Germany)

Schäufele is the traditional meal on Christmas Eve in the South of Germany. In some places, it’s a straight-up roast, but in other areas the pork shoulder is cured and smoked before being slowly roasted with spices (and sometimes beer). If you want to use beer for this, you could make it easier on your stomach by going with gluten-free beer. Schäufele is traditionally served with potato salad – also Paleo-friendly, if you do white potatoes!

Recipes:

• Schäufele (Baden Remembered) – this is a version with smoked pork, and it also includes suggestions for using smoked turkey if you can’t get smoked pork shoulder.
• How to Cook Schaufele (Recipe Mash) – this recipe doesn’t require a smoked shoulder.

9. Spiced beef (Ireland)

Spiced beef is not the same thing as corned beef! But if you like Irish food in general, you’ll probably like this one too – it’s a traditional Christmas recipe that adds a little punch to a beef roast. Recipes for spiced beef do call for a little bit of sugar. You could replace table sugar with your favorite alternative (honey, maple syrup, coconut sugar…), but remember that “natural” sugar is basically still sugar; the only real difference is in the taste. The total amount is so low that it’s really no big deal even if you just want to use table sugar.

The traditional recipe also includes saltpeter. This is a potassium salt used for food preservation and all kinds of other applications (most famously gunpowder). You can buy it online, or just try the second recipe below, which leaves it out.

Recipes:

• Irish spiced beef (with saltpeter)
• Ballymaloe Spiced Beef (without saltpeter)

10. Red Beet Salad (Sweden)

Christmas Eve dinner in Sweden is typically a Julbord – a multi-course, buffet-style dinner with all kinds of hot and cold dishes laid out for everyone to enjoy. This colorful pink salad is one classic addition: it’s great for getting a few vegetables into your holiday feast. You can make it with or without herring, with or without potatoes, with olive oil or mayonnaise, roasted or pickled beets: pick a variety that looks tasty and go for it.

• Herring and Beet Salad (Saveur) - substitute coconut cream for the whipped cream
• Rodbetsallad (TSG Cookin) – contains dairy.
• Pickled beet and herring salad (Epicurious) – dairy-free; very tiny amount of sugar.

What's your favorite Christmas dish and where does it come from? Let us know on Facebook or Google+!

Does this sound like you?

• Breakfast: eaten one-handed while you’re running around getting ready to go.
• Lunch: scarfed down at your desk while you’re working on three different things at once.
• Dinner: sometimes at home, sometimes in the car, or eaten out of a Tupperware at some random place (kids' piano lessons, the gym, the doctor's waiting room...).

It’s understandable: we’re all busy, and food seems like such an incredible time suck sometimes. Who has the time to actually sit down and eat a whole meal after you’ve already spent all the time cooking Paleo food from scratch? If you made time for a full breakfast, you’d have to get less sleep, and isn’t that bad, too? What's anyone supposed to do?

The problem everyone always talks about with eating on the run is what you’re eating: it’s the way “eating in the car” typically means “eating fast food in the car.” But even if you’re eating healthy food, cramming it down on the go isn’t ideal. So here’s the case for making it a priority to sit down and pay a little more attention to your food, at least at dinner time.

Satiety and Food Intake

The first reason to sit down and eat calmly is that you’re much less likely to overeat.

On Paleo, the idea is that you don’t have to count calories because you’re not eating food that wreaks havoc on your hunger cues, so can just listen to your body to tell you when it’s full. But if you’re paying attention to your email while mechanically shoveling in food with the other hand, you’re not listening to your body at all. If you’re distracted, that feeling of “I’m full” doesn’t appear as quickly, and it isn’t as strong:

This study studied people eating in four situations: driving, watching TV, talking to other people, or just eating alone. Among their findings:

• People who watched TV ate the most.
• People who ate alone had a lower desire to eat after finishing their food, but people who were driving did not. (In other words, eating didn’t make them any less hungry).

Given the same amount of food, the distracted subjects felt less full after eating.

This study also found that women who ate while playing a computer game didn’t feel as satisfied by their food as women who weren’t distracted. If the distracted hadn’t been given a set amount of food by the researchers, they probably would have eaten more than the non-distracted women in order to “feel full.”

This effect is especially true if the meal is also energy-dense (think: trail mix, guacamole, dried fruit, Paleo “bars” and treats). Eating in a hurry may also be independently associated with overeating, regardless of distraction.

This effect means that eating while distracted makes you much more likely to overeat, relative to your body’s actual needs. It takes more food to make you feel full, because the satiety signals have to shout over all the other noise in your brain before you can hear them. And you’re eating faster, so you eat more bites before that feeling of “I’m not hungry any longer” gets to your brain. Those natural signals that do away with the need to count calories are effectively gone.

This might be one reason that eating family dinners is strongly associated with protection against obesity for children and teenagers, especially when the relationships at the table are positive. Taking your time over a meal is very beneficial for your weight, compared to neglecting the food while you worry about something else.

If you can’t sit down:

• Don’t eat out of the bag. Instead, serve yourself however much you want to eat, and put the container away. This will help prevent overeating even if you aren’t paying attention, because there just won’t be any more food within easy grabbing reach.
• Replace family mealtimes with other ways of communicating – movie night, game night, or even just talking in the car.

Nutrition

Another problem with eating on the run is the type of foods most people turn to. And it’s not just junk food: even if you’re eating Paleo, you might still not be getting the best nutrition.

For the one thing, vegetables are a pain in the neck to speed-eat. They’re bulky, they’re hard to transport, they take a long time to eat, you often have to use utensils instead of your hands – if you’re looking for something to grab and go or eat in the car, vegetables aren’t great.

Accordingly, most people tend to skimp a lot on vegetables when they’re rushing through a meal – instead, they’ll turn to something like Paleo granola bars or trail mix. But using nuts like this as a staple food is not in the spirit of Paleo, even though it technically fits the letter. There’s not enough protein, too much Omega-6 fat, and again, nuts are very easy to overeat.

If you can’t sit down:

• Pack carrot sticks, pepper strips, or other finger-friendly vegetables with the meals you grab on the go.
• Try one of these make-ahead breakfast ideas instead of nuts for a quick protein source. A lot of them are finger-friendly.
• Try Mason jar salads for a quick way to bring more vegetables to work for lunch.

Stress and Digestion

Stress is another reason why rushed meals aren’t great. Sit-down meals give us time to relax, slow down, and switch from “fight or flight” mode back to “rest and digest.” Taking time to relax at lunch can help prevent any morning stress from snowballing into a nightmare in the afternoon: you get a break and some perspective when you get back. Winding down at dinner can help you relax after anything that might have happened during the workday, so it doesn’t keep you up at night.

In other words, traditional meals help you manage the constant influx of stress that comes with the modern world – take them out, and you’ve done away with a major stress management tool.

That would be bad enough, but trying to eat while you’re in “fight or flight” mode also has negative consequences for digestion. High-stress “fight or flight” mode means that blood is directed away from your intestines and into your muscles, exactly the opposite of where you want it for digestion. If you’ve ever felt like the food "sits like a brick in your stomach" after eating when you’re really tense and stressed, that’s one reason why.

If you can’t sit down:

• Find another form of stress management to replace the benefit you would otherwise get from meals. For example, you could take up meditation, journaling, or some kind of art or handicraft-type hobby.
• Reduce stress while you eat. If you have to eat while you work, try to do it while working calmly, not while you’re frantically rushing to meet a deadline. If you have to eat in the car, take a deep breath and let go of any road rage before you take a bite.

Summing it Up

Cramming down meals on the go just isn’t ideal. It makes most people more likely to overeat, it’s stressful (which can really mess with digestion), and it tends to steer people towards less-healthy meals even if they’re eating Paleo food and not drive-thru. There are some ways to do damage control, like making an effort to pack fresh vegetables or manage how much you’re eating – and it’s absolutely better to do them than not. But the best is to sit down, eat calmly, and savor your food: it’s healthier, and it’s also much more pleasurable.

Leftover turkey is great…for the first day or two. Then it starts getting a little blah, and re-creating the flavor profile of a Thanksgiving feast in different forms doesn’t help! So here are 5 ideas for jazzing up your leftovers, with a few recipes for each just to get you started.

1. Transform it into Curry

The generous amount of spices in most curry recipes gives the meat a completely different flavor and reduces the distinctive taste of the turkey itself.

Some recipes to help you spice it up:

• Leftover turkey yellow curry (Stupid Easy Paleo)
• Apple turkey curry on cauliflower rice (Fast Paleo)
• Taj Mahal turkey curry (The Clothes Make the Girl)
• Curried chicken (or turkey) salad (Chris Kresser)

2. Add Different Vegetables

Turkey can taste completely different if you pair it with vegetables that don’t typically make an appearance on the Thanksgiving table. Make it spicy, savory, or even sweet – just use the plants to add some interest to the same old turkey breast.

Some recipe ideas:

• Turkey chili (Paleo Leap) – tomatoes and bell peppers aren’t typical “Thanksgiving” vegetables, and adding a hint of the Southwest gives your taste buds a break from the flavors of all the foods that go with gravy.
• Turkey zucchini hash (Fluffy Chix Cook) – zucchini and mushrooms are also unlikely to be on the Thanksgiving menu, and who doesn't love a savory breakfast hash?
• Turkey Thai basil (Paleo Parents) – bok choy! Fish sauce! Okay, fish sauce isn’t technically a vegetable, but this recipe still perks up leftover turkey with a healthy dose of delicious greens, including the eponymous Thai basil.

3. Freeze it Properly

You don’t have to eat everything now. It’s perfectly fine to either freeze the turkey as-is, or to make something with it and then freeze it - then you can pull it out later when you're ready for turkey again. But if you’re going to go the freezer route, here are some quick tips:

• Do any carving before freezing. Who wants to try to carve a half-frozen breast off the bone? Nobody. Do your future self a favor and get the knife out now.
• Divide the meat into portions you’ll want to use. Cooking for one? Separate it into single servings before freezing. Then you can just take out however much you need at once, and more easily spread the meat out, instead of just delaying the problem of “half a bird to eat.”
• Use the proper containers, and seal them tightly (for plastic wrap, make sure it’s airtight). Freezer burn is nobody’s friend.

4. Add Another Meat

There’s no rule that once you’ve put turkey in a meal, your protein quota is filled and all other animals are barred from the plate! Why not mix it up by adding sausages to your leftover turkey soup. Or what about bacon? Everything’s better with bacon!

Some recipe ideas…

• Creole shrimp and turkey stir-fry (Paleo Periodical)
• Turkey sausage soup (On Sable Hill)
• Paleo turkey sweet potato hash (with bacon) (Conscious Eatery)

5. Switch up the Soup

Leftover turkey soup with turkey, celery, carrots, and onion? It’s good, but if you’re tired of turkey, it doesn’t really help, and just throwing in a bunch of kale doesn't always do the trick either. So here are some ways to make that soup pop:

• Thai coconut turkey soup (The Endless Meal) – just replace the soy sauce with coconut aminos.
• 
• Turkey-butternut squash soup with celery root (Everyone Eats Right)
• Spanish garlic soup with saffron and cumin (Eating the Scenery)

So…what’s your favorite way to make turkey leftovers interesting? Let us know on Facebook or Google+!

For some people, it's religious: restricting certain animal foods is part of their faith. For other people, it's a taste or texture issue. And then there are meat allergies: they're rare, but they do happen. Some people are allergic to red meat in general; other people can’t eat chicken or poultry (this can happen whether or not you have an egg allergy to go with it), and some very unlucky folks are allergic to all meat regardless of the source.

Often, red meat allergies are childhood problems that just disappear on their own as the child grows up, but other times they persist as life-long problems. And in a few bizarre cases, a tick bite can actually induce an allergy to beef, lamb, and pork in people who didn’t have it before.

(note: fish allergies are so much more common than meat allergies that they actually got their own post; it’s here if you want to look at it. The same goes for problems with eggs, which you can read about here.)

Whatever the reason, if you can't eat red meat, pork, poultry, eggs, and fish, then Paleo probably isn’t the diet for you. But the vast majority of people with meat restrictions can enjoy at least one of the above, and typically more. If that’s you, it’s absolutely possible to go Paleo. Here’s how:

Nutrition and Meat Restrictions

Meat is one of the most nutritious foods around, but there's no one "perfect" meat. As long as you’re eating at least some type of animal protein and plenty of different vegetables, you’re probably not at risk for any nutrient deficiencies. If you aren't eating any red meat and you aren't eating any dairy, and you aren't eating any eggs, you might be deficient in conjugated linoleic acid, but that's a fairly extreme case to begin with. It might be worth plugging everything into a nutrition calculator for a week just to see how it all turns out, but you shouldn’t be having any major issues.

Keeping it Interesting

One major challenge of going Paleo with meat restrictions is just keeping your diet interesting so you don’t feel like you’re only eating the same thing all the time at every meal.

Branch Out

The most popular types of meat in the United States are beef, pork, and chicken, but that doesn’t even begin to cover all your options. If you go just a few steps beyond the easy options, your “allergy diet” might well be more varied and diverse than most people’s “unrestricted” diets.

Make a list of all the types of meat you can eat, and look for the less-common varieties you might not really be thinking about. For example…

• If you have a red meat restriction, have you tried pheasant, Cornish game hens, or other wild birds?
• If you can't or won't eat chicken and poultry, have you tried lamb, goat, rabbit, bison, venison, and other wild game meats?
• If you can't have any kind of land animal, what about all the fish and shellfish in the sea? There's more down there than salmon and tuna!

You can often find these meats in the freezer section of the grocery store, even if they aren't out in the butcher's counter. Another strategy is to eat different parts of the animal. Liver tastes very different from muscle meat; kidney is completely different from both. And what about other organ meats?

Eggs also deserve special mention – even a poultry allergy doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll be allergic to eggs as well (although of course, check this with your doctor first!). And if you tolerate it well (not everyone does), dairy can be an excellent supplemental source of protein and healthy fats. If your meat options are severely restricted, one meal per day with dairy serving as the only animal food can really liven things up.

Use Vegetables, Seasonings and Spices

In general, (although there are exceptions)  the people who get over-the-moon excited about steak and bacon are people who aren't Paleo. The Paleo veterans like their meat, but they tend to get more enthused about the vegetables: huge piles of broccoli roasted in olive oil, tender braised cabbage, bowls of crisp fresh lettuce. The steak is good, but the vegetables are better. Use that to your advantage: cook soups, curries, and chilis where you can add variety to the dish with vegetables and spices, even if the main protein is the same.

Another technique is to switch up the sauces that you use. Try…

• Mayonnaise
• Guacamole
• Sriracha
• Salsa or relish

If you’re stuck for ideas, look into discovering different cuisines. Have you tried eastern European food? Scandinavian? South American? North African? Also try substituting ground chicken or turkey for beef in a burger, or swapping out pork chops for a steak if there’s a new sauce you want to try.

Different preparation methods can also completely change the experience of eating the same thing. The more limited your choice of foods is, the more you can benefit from hunting down different methods of preparing what you can eat. Just for example, take steak. You can pan-fry it, grill it, chop it up for a stir-fry, stuff it with something tasty, or slice it into thin strips to use as wraps. And that’s just the steak, without even going into all the other parts of the cow. There’s no reason why every dinner should be the same “pan-fried steak with a side of asparagus.”

Relax on the Protein

Not every meal has to be based around a huge amount of animal protein – it’s important to get enough protein, but “enough” is not actually all that much. If you’re feeling bored of the meats that are safe for you to eat, it’s perfectly fine to eat a little less of them. Protein doesn’t have to be the “main event” at every meal!

Just for example, try serving pâté as a dip or spread for vegetables, alongside a baked potato with butter and maybe some soup. You’ll still get some protein (and plenty of nutrition, thanks to the liver!), but you won’t have to feel like you’re eating a bunch of meat again. Alternately, you could mix your meat up in a soup or salad with all kinds of different vegetables going on. (As a side note, if you’re going to do this, it can be really helpful to eat a little more fat and/or carbs at that meal than you normally would.)

Summing it Up

An allergy to one type of meat or another isn’t actually a Paleo death sentence – you can eat a varied, delicious, and nutritionally complete diet without having to eat anything you react badly to. Just think of it this way: instead of eating all the foods you’re not technically allergic to, you’re picking out only the nutrient-dense ones and eating those instead!

It doesn’t have to be boring or repetitive either. With some clever use of different seasonings and cooking methods, even a more restricted diet doesn’t have to drive you up the wall. Try it; you might be surprised at how much you like it!

If you’re cooking on a budget, or only cooking for one person, you might be tempted to just pass over the fresh herbs. After all, when money is tight, spending $1.50 on cilantro will only give you a garnish but spending $1.50 on lettuce will give you a meal’s worth of vegetables – or more! And for the single cooks, it’s endlessly frustrating to buy a huge bunch of something and then have ⅔ of it get slimy and gross in the fridge.

If money really is so tight that you can’t afford a few dollars on fresh herbs, then you’re probably making the right choice spending that money on other vegetables instead, and hats off to you for perseverance and determination for sticking with Paleo regardless! But in other cases, you might want to reconsider: fresh herbs have great health benefits, and there’s a way to cook them for every cooking style.

Health Benefits of Herbs

The problem with reports on the health benefits of herbs is that so many are overhyped. A lot of studies go something like this: first, the researchers purify some compound in the herb, standardize it, and concentrate it to levels that would be impossible to get from eating the fresh plant. Then they feed the purified, concentrated active ingredient to rats (or sometimes inject it straight into their bodies, or put it directly on tumor cells in a test tube), and notice that it has some effect. The researchers report this as something like “Composition and Antiproliferative Effect of Essential Oil of Origanum vulgare Against Tumor Cell Lines” (yes, that’s an actual study) but the media repackages it as “Oregano cures cancer!”

If you’re going to go around purifying your herbs and injecting them directly into your tissues, these studies will give you a decent idea of what to expect. But they don’t tell you about the health benefits of eating some oregano in your tomato sauce. So leaving out the unwarranted hype, what are the actual health benefits of herbs?

Antioxidants

The antioxidants in herbs (and spices) might not make you cancer-proof but they do help protect your food from oxidative damage, even at levels that a normal person might reasonably eat. Just adding herbs to a meal or marinating sauce can help protect any fats they come into contact with.

Oxidative damage is a major problem because it makes fats in particular more inflammatory and less healthy, so preventing it is a major benefit. This is particularly great if you’re cooking anything fatty over high heat: marinate those chicken thighs before you grill them!

Food Safety

Food fraud is a big problem, and dried, jarred seasonings are some of the biggest targets. How would you like to find out you’re actually getting some chickory, bark, sawdust, grass, or other random contaminants with your jar of basil?

With fresh herbs, you can completely avoid that possibility, because it’s much, much more difficult to pass off bark or sawdust as a bunch of fresh basil than it is to sneak them in as fillers to the dried jar. So you’re protecting yourself automatically from the lion’s share of potential contaminants.

Other Benefits

There are plenty of other proven benefits to herbal extracts or essential oils – for example, peppermint oil is quite an effective treatment for IBS and other digestive disorders. That’s powerful stuff, but in that case you’re using the herb as medicine, not as food. And this is an article about the benefits of putting peppermint in your salad, not the benefits of taking peppermint oil in purified form as a pill.

Herbal medicine is interesting and powerful, but it’s not the same thing as eating herbs in normal quantities as part of your meals. And if culinary use of herbs is what you want to study, the evidence for all the anti-cancer, anti-diabetes, anti-Alzheimer’s benefits is thin. It’s useless and misleading to say that oregano cures cancer in real live humans just because a purified extract killed isolated cancer cells in a test tube.

It may very well be true that the benefits of the extracts extend to the herbs, but without actual studies on herbs in the diet, it’s impossible to say for sure (especially since cooking the herbs changes their composition even more, with unknown effects on their benefits). So for now, we’ll leave the benefits at the antioxidants and food safety – and if you want to check out all the different uses of herbal extracts in supplements, there’s a cheat sheet for that!

Buying, Cooking, and Storing Herbs

How and where to buy

You can buy fresh herbs in the produce section of any grocery store, but if you have access to them, check out ethnic markets for much better deals and a fresher selection.

If you’ve got a sunny window (or better yet, a garden), you can also grow an herb garden yourself and save a lot of money – they’re very easy to take care of and the seeds are incredibly cheap. And as a bonus, you don’t have to worry about freshness, since you can just snip off what you need as you need it.

If you never use the whole bunch before it goes bad

It’s all about preservation! Fresh herbs are fragile, so if you don’t use the whole bunch in a week or so, you’ll need to find some way to keep them safe.

One foolproof way to save herbs is to freeze them in olive oil. Then just pop out the cubes of olive oil to use when you need a flavored fat for cooking. (If you’re making multiple flavors of frozen oil cubes, this is your advance warning to label the bags: you will not be able to tell parsley from basil on sight after freezing!)

Alternately, check the freezer section of your grocery store. Many of them carry convenient little pre-frozen packages of herbs (no oil, just the herbs) that you can pop out like ice cubes out of a mold.

Another tactic is to dry the herbs yourself: here’s a guide to that.

Using Fresh Herbs

What can you cook with fresh herbs? Well, everything!

• Make condiments. Fresh herbs will liven up the taste of everything from pesto to salad dressings to salsa. One recipe for inspiration: Salted Herbs (The Healthy Foodie).
• Add them directly to salads. If your greens are getting dull, try shredding some mint or parsley right into the mix. One recipe for inspiration: Persian Herb Salad

(The Little Plantation) – American readers, note that “coriander” in British English refers to the herb you know as “cilantro,” not coriander seeds.

• Rub them on meat. A few sprigs of rosemary over your fish, some fresh thyme rubbed into a chicken: there’s nothing to it. One recipe for inspiration: Skillet Rosemary Chicken (Paleo Leap).
• Put them in eggs. Garnish a frittata with fresh herbs, or just throw them into omelets in place of dried.
• Make tea with them. Mint is the obvious choice, but you can make herb tea with all kinds of herbs. One recipe for inspiration: Sage Tea (The Herb Gardener).

A few other recipes just to get you started:

• Grain-free Herbed Cauliflower Rice (Colorful Eats Nutrition)
• Herb-Infused Oils (Paleo + Life)
• Fresh Herb Soup (Seasonal and Savory)
• Spicy Chicken with Herb Sauce (Paleo Leap)

You can also substitute fresh herbs for dry herbs in recipes; a good rule of thumb is to use three times the quantity of fresh. So if a recipe calls for 1 tbsp. of dried oregano, put in 3 tbsp. of fresh.

Summing it Up

Herbs might not be the miraculous answer to every disease known to man, but then again, what is? They're tasty, they're great for protecting fats in your meal from oxidation, and they spare you any worry about food fraud - plus, they're a great way to add flavor even on restrictive diets like an autoimmune protocol. What's not to love?

So…what’s your favorite herb and how do you use it?

For yourself, you might be perfectly happy to dump a can of tuna on top of some lettuce and call it lunch (or dinner, or breakfast…). Even if you’re cooking for a family, the pressure is low and you’re probably familiar with everyone’s tastes. But what if you’re in charge of feeding a group?

With the holiday season coming up, parties and family dinners can quickly turn into a headache – but they don't have to be! Here’s a guide to making it all work.

Party Hosting Tips

Planning your Menu

If you’re following traditional menu (e.g. turkey and cranberry sauce on Thanksgiving), then it’s almost easier, because you don’t have to plan what to serve, only how to make it tasty. But even if you don’t have a traditional menu to rely on, the principle is the same: focus on what you are eating, not what you aren’t, and serve dishes that highlight what Paleo food does incredibly well:

• Fearlessly delicious meat. The low-fat shackles are off: you can cook delicious, succulent cuts of whatever you like. Whether it’s steak for a gourmet dinner or chili on Game Day, almost every occasion has some kind of classic dish that’s made to show off the meat.
• Surprisingly good vegetables. Fatphobia is just as bad for vegetables as it is for meat. Show off your chops at making vegetables so delicious they’ll disappear first!
• Totally-worth-it starches. When Paleo eaters eat starch, we eat it in style - no huge vats of gluey and flavorless pasta or soggy bread!

The foundation of a gourmet menu is meat and vegetables, cooked in ways that bring out their natural flavors instead of hiding them, and seasoned with rich spices and plenty of fat. If it’s impressive enough for high-end restaurants it’s impressive enough for your guests!

A few other general tips for meal planning:

• If you’re feeding vegetarians or vegans, don’t make them starve on salad and broccoli all night. Serve at least one filling course that meets their diet restrictions (here’s one, just for example), and do them an extra favor by not giving them grief about it.
• If you’re feeding other people’s kids, bear in mind what kinds of foods they’ll expect to find. For the sake of everyone having a pleasant time, you may want to stock up on hot dogs and easy mac – not because “kid food” is nutritionally adequate or in any way appropriate for any human being to eat, but because you can’t force other people to make their kids eat Paleo if they don’t want to, and as the host your job is to give your guests a pleasant evening that isn’t summarily interrupted by a temper tantrum over broccoli.
• You don’t want to spend the whole evening in the kitchen without ever seeing your guests: look for recipes that you can make at least partly ahead, and recipes that aren’t terribly fiddly. For complicated menus, it helps to make a kind of “timetable” of what you’re going to cook and when, and pin it up in the kitchen (assume that everything will take 10 minutes longer than it says on the recipe). Alternately, if it’s that kind of party, you could ask the guests to help you cook.
• 
• Unless you're hosting for a tribe of foodies or fellow Paleo eaters, serve dishes familiar enough that people won’t be intimidated. Don’t go for something “weird” like liver – yes, it’s real food, and yes, it’s extremely nutritious, but most people are not adventurous eaters; they want options that are familiar to them.
• Consider a seasonal menu. Plan your meal around something seasonal, and you’ll be getting fresh ingredients at their finest.

Managing Non-Paleo Food and Expectations

Even if you serve the most delicious, gourmet-restaurant steak and salad, most people will expect bread with it because that’s what they’re used to seeing. You’re going to have to decide what you want to do with this. Here are some potential ways you could manage it:

• Play Paleo ambassador and explain to your guests that you don’t serve bread (or whatever else they might be expecting) in your house.
• Sneak an “accidentally” Paleo meal under the radar by making everything so delicious they don’t miss the junk. It’s not a “Paleo meal” it’s just the best food they’ve ever tasted…that just so happens not to involve any grains or legumes! If you go this route, bear in mind that most people expect to find a starchy side dish with their meal. A plate of roasted potatoes or sweet potatoes can send them there instead of leaving them wondering where the bread is.
• Make a Paleo-ified version of whatever you’re expected to serve (Paleo bread, Paleo cookies, Paleo cake for birthdays, etc.). Fair warning: you probably will not be able to pass this off as the “normal” version.
• Serve non-Paleo food because that’s what people expect. You can either serve it yourself or ask them to bring whatever they prefer. You can eat it yourself or simply let others enjoy it if they choose.

There’s no right answer; it’s all about what works for you and your guests.

Menu Inspiration

And now the fun part: what to eat! It’s impossible to cover every occasion, but here are some menu suggestions for a few potential needs.

Appetizers and Finger Food

Potlucks (and Similar Events):

With potlucks, you want something that’s relatively inexpensive to make for a big crowd, easy to store and transport, and a classic crowd-pleaser. Here are some ideas:

Main Dishes	Vegetables
Beanless Paleo chili (here’s a spicy version) Sweet potato Buffalo chicken casserole Apple and squash stuffing Slow-cooker barbecue ribs Asian pulled pork	Mashed potatoes Chipotle scalloped sweet potatoes A big leafy salad (you might be surprised at how many people really do want salad if it’s not wilted, slimy, and gross).

Casual Dinner with Friends

	Italian-inspired menu	Roast Chicken Feast	BBQ Party
Starter/appetizer	Egg and pesto stuffed tomatoes (one per guest) or oven-roasted garlic cabbage.	Wild Mushroom Soup	Oven-fried pickles
Main course	Herb prosciutto stuffed steak	Butterflied roast chicken	Portobello burgers (or Aussie burgers, if you’re brave)
Side dish 1	Tomato spinach salad	Roasted acorn squash and shallots	Spicy sweet potato wedges
Side dish 2	Zucchini mushroom pasta	Ratatouille stuffed zucchini	Fresh summer salad

Dinner Party for Adventurous Foodies

• Starter/appetizer: basil cinnamon cranberry chicken and heart pâté.
• Main course: spiced duck breast.
• Side dish 1: roasted bone marrow served on a bed of arugula.
• Side dish 2: warm winter salad.

Game Day Party

For something like the Superbowl, here’s a menu of many smaller dishes for easy snacking: think of it as more like a tapas-style meal than a traditional three-course dinner.

• BBQ Chicken Wings
• BLT Dressed Eggs
• Slow-cooker buffalo chicken meatballs
• Sweet potato fries
• Miniature Portobello pizzas (vegetables!)
• These three Superbowl recipes: buffalo drumsticks, Paleo fries with herbs, and spiced nuts.

Etcetera

Looking for Thanksgiving recipes and menu ideas? Here you go! And keep watching the site: more will be coming up in a later post!

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:

Food	Type of fat
Fish and seafood. Salmon, sardines, and mackerel are particularly good.	Polyunsaturated: Omega-3s.
Red meat. Fatty beef, lamb, duck, and other red meat is good for you!	A mix of saturated and monounsaturated fat, typically in roughly equal amounts.
Egg yolks	Mostly monounsaturated and saturated.
Butter and ghee (clarified butter)	Mostly saturated
Coconut oil, coconut milk, and other coconut products.	Saturated
Olive oil	Mostly monounsaturated
Avocados	Mostly monounsaturated
Other Paleo cooking fats (see also: animal fats and plant fats)	(varies; mostly saturated and monounsaturated)

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!

You’re interested in the idea of Paleo. It makes sense. And it even sounds pretty tasty. But then it hits you: on Paleo, there’s no Lean Cuisine. There’s no Subway, no pizza delivery, not even slapping some turkey between two pieces of bread and calling it lunch. All those delicious-looking recipes were made by hand, from scratch.

Oh.

It’s true that there are such things as pre-made Paleo meal services, but they tend to be pretty pricey and they aren’t available everywhere. You’ll save a lot of money by learning to cook for yourself – and it’s really not impossible. Humans have literally been cooking since we could skewer things on sticks and hold them over a fire: if some unwashed troglodyte can do it, so can you! Here’s a guide to going Paleo even if don’t know how to cook a thing (or if you’ve long since given it up as hopeless)

Pinterest Lies.

An incredibly common mistake for beginner cooks is to start with some delicious but complicated recipe and turn cooking into a big event. Three hours later, the food is great and it looks beautiful, but who has time for that every night?

95% of people who cook meals from scratch every day do not cook like that. The goal of Paleo cooking is to put nutritious and tasty food on the table, not to create cookbook-worthy five-course meals.

That doesn’t mean your food won’t taste good; it just means that it might not look like something you’d see in a professional cookbook. You don’t have to cook a “recipe” for every meal. Hard-boiled eggs and a microwaved bag of frozen broccoli with a pat of butter melted over it is a fine Paleo meal from a nutritional standpoint, but that’s only a “recipe” in a very generous sense of the word. Eating leftovers is also perfectly normal and very common: most families who cook at home eat leftovers at least two or three nights a week.

So get rid of the idea that “cooking” has to mean anything you see on the Food Channel: it’s not. “Cooking” is using fresh ingredients to prepare tasty and nutritionally complete food – that’s all you have to do.

You also don’t have to find it profoundly joyful or meaningful or anything like that – it’s totally OK if cooking is just another item on the to-do list like walking the dogs. Maybe it works like that for you, and that’s great if it works like that for you, but not everyone is going to have a huge emotional connection to the kitchen and you’re not doing it wrong if your life isn’t transformed by scrambling eggs.

That still doesn’t tell you how to do it, though, so now on to the practical side.

How to Get Started

What You Will Need

• Basic kitchen tools. Cooking with the wrong tools can suck all the joy out of the process. Here’s a list of the very minimal kitchen equipment you will need.
• Either a friend who knows how to cook (best) or a good “beginner cookbook” (OK – just be aware that most of them are not Paleo-focused so you’ll have to wade through a lot of stuff about cooking with flour and avoiding fat). This will be a reference for you as you learn new recipes. If you choose the book, The Joy of Cooking is a classic but almost anything with positive reviews will be OK to start with.
• A positive attitude. You can’t learn anything if you don’t think you can learn it. And even if you don’t love cooking, you can still approach it cheerfully: it’s not a punishment!

Easing Into Cooking

Here's the good news: the hardest part about learning to cook is starting. Once you get into the habit and past the very first stage, you'll improve almost automatically. It's just the first couple weeks that trip so many people up.

If you’re a cooking beginner, you will be pretty slow at the beginning, and jumping right into the uncharted wilderness of cooking everything, all the time can get completely overwhelming.

Too many people rush in too fast. Then they get overwhelmed, because it’s all so new and exhausting, and the first unexpected time crunch or lousy day at work throws them completely for a loop. They eat something “wrong,” feel like a failure, and quit forever. Wouldn’t it be better in the long run to start slow, give yourself plenty of flexibility at the beginning, and gradually work up to cooking every meal?

Instead of jumping in with both feet, try this: start by making just one Paleo meal per day. A Paleo meal means at least one vegetable, at least one animal protein (meat or eggs), and some source of healthy fat (cooking fat, fatty meat, salad dressing, etc.). Cook and eat one Paleo meal per day. The other two meals can be whatever you want.

You can pick any easy recipes you like for this. If you have a friend to help you, ask for suggestions. If you don’t, here are three can’t-mess-it-up Paleo recipes:

• Breakfast: hard-boiled eggs with a piece of fruit. Take 3 eggs and put them in a pot of cold water. Turn on the heat. When the water starts bubbling, turn off the heat. Walk away for 7-8 minutes. Come back, peel the eggs, grab the fruit, and eat.
• Lunch: tuna salad. Dump a can of tuna over salad greens. Add olive oil and vinegar (or mayo, or guacamole – just make sure you get some fat in there). Toss and eat.
• Dinner: steak skillet with bell peppers.

Occasionally you will get kitchen disasters; that’s OK and it happens to all of us. Give yourself “credit” for cooking that meal anyway, eat whatever else you have in the house, and try again tomorrow.

Some convenience foods that may save your sanity during this stage:

• Steam-in-bag frozen vegetables. They’re just as nutritious as fresh, and if you can microwave a Hot Pocket, you can microwave broccoli.
• Pre-cut onions, carrots, peppers, and other vegetables. Save yourself some chopping; you’re worth it.
• Pre-bagged salad mix.
• Pre-cooked hard-boiled eggs or chicken breast.
• Canned fish that you can eat straight out of the can.

When you have the energy, try looking up new recipes and experimenting with them; when you don’t, fall back on the recipes you already know or ultra-easy "recipes" like scrambled eggs and microwave veggies tossed with butter. Keep cooking 1 meal per day until you have at least one or two recipes that you know how to cook in less than half an hour. Then you can move on to two Paleo meals per day, and finally go to all three. Before you know it, you’ll have a sizeable repertoire of healthy meals that you can cook in your sleep, and you’ll be eating Paleo all the time!

Cooking 102

Once you can cook at least most of your meals, it’s time to start thinking in terms of techniques instead of recipes. Here’s a good recipe for starting you off with that: try doing the same technique with chicken vs. fish, or with different seasoning blends. Look at recipes you like and notice the patterns: what goes into a roast (saute the onions and garlic, brown the meat, add the sauce, cover and roast)?

Starting with recipes will get you off the ground quickly, but using techniques will help you become a better cook in the long run.

FAQ

Where can I Find Recipes?

• Here’s the Paleo Leap recipe index (search for “easy”).
• There are a lot of Paleo boards on Pinterest.
• There are too many great recipe blogs to name; if you start searching for "Paleo ___________ recipe," you'll quickly find the ones that post recipes you're interested in.

Help! What Does _____________ Mean?

• For unfamiliar ingredients and tools, use the cook’s thesaurus.
• For unfamiliar techniques (blanch? Sautee? Braise?), here’s a list.

How do I do the Grocery Shopping?

• Here’s a guide to getting started with meal planning.
• Here’s a guide to saving time when you grocery shop.

What if I work during the day?

In that case, you’ll pack your lunch (and possibly breakfast) the night before. A very easy way to do it is to make extras for dinner and use them as one of your two packed meals. You can also hard-boil a bunch of eggs or make frittatas at the beginning of the week and eat them all week for breakfast.

What Other Tips Should I Know?

• How to use your leftovers.
• How to save time with Paleo cooking.
• How to make salad and eggs more interesting (salad and eggs are two of the easiest Paleo meals around, so you’ll be eating a lot of them.

Summing it Up

You can’t learn to cook by reading cookbooks. You can’t learn to cook by watching the Food Channel. You can only learn to cook by cooking. And the hardest part is just getting started.

Get the tools you need, a supportive friend or a good beginner cookbook, and dive in. A few months in, you’ll be wondering how you ever found it so intimidating!

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!

Eating Paleo in your own kitchen is hard enough. But doing it on the go can be even harder. In a contest between real food and processed junk, the real food wins hands-down on nutrition, but it really lags in ease of portability.

It’s not impossible, though! The obvious option for travelers is restaurants, but relying on restaurants for every single meal gets expensive, and if you’re stuck somewhere like an airport, there might literally be nothing OK for you to eat. It’s absolutely fine to eat at restaurants and most places will have something Paleo-friendly, but not everyone wants or can afford to do that.

It’s cheaper, and often tastier to pack your own food, so here’s what to pack for any length of trip, no matter where you’re going or how you’re getting there.

Paleo Foods that Keep

Unless you want to haul around a whole kitchen with you when you’re traveling, you need pre-cooked foods that stand up relatively well to room temperature.

The first suggestions are usually “bars” of various kinds – and you can find plenty of bars made with technically Paleo ingredients. Larabars are a favorite (most flavors are just nuts, dates, and spices), but there are also all kinds of other bars based on fruit and nuts (and plenty of recipes for making your own).

The downside of these is that making a meal out of dates and cashews is technically Paleo but well outside the spirit of Paleo nutrition. There aren’t any vegetables there, there’s not nearly enough protein, and these kinds of snacky foods make it very easy to overeat.

Instead of relying on high-sugar, low-protein bars, here are some better ideas:

Trip Length: 1-2 Days

For this length of trip, bringing a cooler makes it totally feasible to pack 100% of your own food if you want. Line the cooler with cold packs and stuff it with…

Protein	Fat	Fruit, vegetables, and carbs	Other
Hard-boiled eggs Pre-cooked chicken (or turkey) breast Pre-cooked meatballs Canned fish* Jerky (beef, turkey, or salmon)* Summer sausage* Pre-cooked ham or salami.	Olives (buy single-serving packs or just open a can and stick them in a baggie) Nuts or trail mix* Squeeze packs of nut butter* Avocados* or guacamole Hard cheeses, if you do dairy (not everyone does).	Bananas, apples, and other relatively hardy fruits Carrot or pepper sticks Baked or mashed potatoes or sweet potatoes	Salt and pepper (plus any other spices you like)* Vinegar (if you like it on your potatoes or avocados)*

*Anything marked with a * will keep at least a week and doesn’t need temperature control.

If you’re just packing for one, you can just get an insulated lunchbox instead of a whole big cooler.

Don’t forget to bring lots of water, too: dehydration on the road is the worst! And if you’re a coffee or tea drinker throw a little of your favorite kind in the pack too; if nothing else, it can be very relaxing to get that little taste of home.

Trip Length: 3+ Days

For trips much longer than a few days, you’ll probably need to stop and stock up on provisions partway through your trip. Before you take off, look up where the grocery stores will be along the way, and plan time for stopping by. You can usually find pre-cooked meat (chicken breast and ham, for salads) and eggs, or even take advantage of salad bars if you land somewhere fancy.

What About Airplanes?

If you have to travel by plane, it does get a little more complicated, but not by much.

First off, the bad:

• Don’t expect to bring any liquids past security. You can bring empty bottles, though. Bring empty water bottles and fill them up when you’re past the checkpoint to avoid taking out a second mortgage to pay for absurdly expensive airport water.
• Don’t count on finding any good restaurant food. You might – recently, airports have been slowly figuring out that not everyone wants to eat fast food all the time. Sometimes, there’s a salad bar or a couple healthier options. But don’t plan on it unless you’ve been to the airport before and already know the place.
• Plan for delays. Bring more food than you think you’ll need because it’s very likely that you’ll end up stuck there longer than you thought.
• Bringing food on the plane should be OK. Unless Security is really jumpy that day, you shouldn’t get any grief over bringing a reasonable amount of food.

If the TSA decides to wreck your day and take your food, don’t panic. Scope out the local convenience stores for dry-roasted nuts, bananas or other fruit, or fresh salads without too much gunk on them (it’s hard to find salads without some kind of breaded meat, but it’s worth a try).

What If I’m Staying in a Hotel?

For long-term hotel stays, the best option is to find a room with an in-suite kitchenette. In that case, you’re totally set: go to the nearest grocery store, stock up on provisions, and just start up your cooking routine as usual.

Failing that, the next best option is a room with at least a fridge. With a fridge, you can buy things like rotisserie chickens and bagged salad mix, and keep them good for a few days.

If you don’t even have a fridge, bring a big cooler (or buy one when you’re there – the Styrofoam ones are really cheap and if it saves you one restaurant meal it’s paid for itself) and keep replenishing the ice so you always have a reasonably cool place to store food for a day or two.

Summing it Up

Traveling Paleo is hard. But it doesn’t have to be impossible. Even if you plan to eat in restaurants most of the time, packing some food for yourself is still a good idea, because it gives you a fallback: what if there’s nothing at the restaurant for you to eat? What if you get hungry between meals? What if you get stuck at the airport over lunch?

Pack up some pre-cooked meat and healthy fat to go with it, and all those problems suddenly disappear. Or for a longer trip, just throw in a few cans of sardines or baggies of trail mix, and you’ll have a healthy snack to fall back on if you ever need it.

“Prebiotics” is a catch-all term that refers to all the different kinds of fiber that encourage beneficial species of gut flora to grow. You can’t digest them, but your gut flora can - and more food for the gut flora means more flora in very short order. Prebiotics are not the same thing as probiotics:

• PREbiotics provide food for the bacteria already living in your gut.
• PRObiotics provide a direct infusion of bacteria that weren’t there before.

“Synbiotics” refers to supplements that combine probiotics and prebiotics.

There are many different types of potentially prebiotic fibers, and scientists don’t even really agree on specifically what types of fibers count as “prebiotics” and which ones don’t. To be officially “prebiotic,” a type of fiber has to not just change the gut microbiome, but change in beneficial ways – but we know so little about the gut flora that it’s hard even pinning down what counts as “beneficial.” Resistant starch is one type of prebiotic, but it’s only one; another example is inulin, a fiber found in bananas, onions, and garlic (and low-fat salad dressings, but you shouldn't be eating those, anyway).

In any case, it’s certainly true that some of the commonly-accepted “prebiotics” have powerful effects on gut health, so here’s a look at what they do and how.

What are the Health Benefits of Prebiotics?

This review covers some of the health benefits of prebiotics.

The first benefit that probably comes to mind for prebiotics is better gut flora health, but the evidence for benefits is actually fairly inconclusive. On the one hand, prebiotics definitely do modify the gut flora, but on the other hand, it’s not clear that this translates into an improvement in any actual diseases or conditions.

When it comes to a healthy gut, just having any old bacteria hanging around in there isn’t enough. Nobody’s totally sure what the “ideal” gut flora composition is (if there even is one single ideal), but there are a few types that we can tentatively label as “good,” in the “you probably want more of them” sense.

Prebiotics selectively increase the number of two of those types: bifidobacteria and lactobacilli. That sounds very promising, but unfortunately, studies on the effectiveness of prebiotics for actual diseases have been pretty disappointing. Studies for the usual culprits – diarrhea, constipation, and related symptoms – are inconclusive at best and a lot of them show no real benefit. Prebiotics are also beings studied for specific diseases (Irritable Bowel Syndrome, Inflammatory Bowel Disease, mental health and mood disorders, and even cancer) but the trials in humans so far are inconclusive.

On the other hand, though, it’s not as though there’s no evidence at all for the benefits. For one thing, prebiotics are fermented into short-chain fatty acids, which provide energy for the cells lining the gut wall. This could potentially be protective against colon cancer and other diseases.

There’s also a surprisingly off-the-wall effect that has a lot of evidence behind it: prebiotics increase absorption of calcium and improve bone mineral density. Not exactly the first benefit anyone thinks of when it comes to the gut flora, but hey, why not?

Overall, prebiotics fall into the category of “promising, but not proven.” It’s very possible, especially from anecdotal reports, that they do have health benefits, but it’s way too early to make any definitive statements.

What Foods Contain Prebiotics

Prebiotics are probably already in your diet; you just didn’t realize it. Some foods high in prebiotic fibers include:

• Dandelion greens
• Garlic and onions (and any vegetables in that family, e.g. leeks)
• Asparagus
• Bananas
• Chicory (used in coffee substitutes)

In general, raw foods have more prebiotic fibers than cooked foods.

Prebiotic fibers are also commonly added to processed foods like low-fat salad dressings and low-fat yogurt to reduce calories without affecting taste. These foods aren’t good sources of prebiotics from a Paleo perspective, though – just read the rest of the ingredients label! You can get plenty of prebiotics from whole foods without relying on low-calorie junk.

Are there Any Downsides to Prebiotics?

Yes! In an ideally healthy world where we all had perfect gut health, prebiotics would probably be a good catch-all recommendation. But in the real world, where plenty of people don’t have totally perfect gut health, prebiotics can sometimes do more harm than good:

• People with Small Intestinal Bacterial Overgrowth (SIBO) often find that prebiotics are the exact opposite of what they need (if you already have too many bacteria, feeding them even more is not going to help).
• Many people with Irritable Bowel Syndrome or FODMAPs intolerance find that prebiotics make their symptoms worse.

If you’re in one of these categories, or if you feel bloated, uncomfortable, constipated, or generally gross after eating foods high in prebiotics, then maybe they just aren’t for you!

Should I Take a Supplement?

It depends. If foods high in prebiotic fibers already cause issues for you: definitely not. If you have a FODMAP intolerance or a related issue, then taking prebiotics is like taking purified FODMAPs in a pill.

If you’re feeling just fine eating plenty of prebiotic foods, there’s probably no real need to take a supplement (unless you just want to experiment).

If you rarely eat prebiotic foods, and for some reason you can’t start eating them, then a supplement may be helpful, but be careful: start small and work your way up instead of dumping a giant dose of fiber on your gut flora all at once! Most people’s gut flora aren’t fond of dramatic changes in diet, and tend to react by making you very uncomfortable.

Summing it Up

Prebiotics are interesting, and the high prebiotic content of fiber-rich traditional diets is one potential reason why studies keep finding that people eating non-Westernized diets have much healthier gut flora than people in Europe and North America. Prebiotics certainly do modify the gut flora, but so far, no solid evidence has connected that to measurable improvements in any particular disease.

On the other hand, it’s always possible that we just don’t know enough about gut flora to recognize the benefits that are right under our noses. And the benefits for calcium absorption are nothing to sneeze at, either!

Prebiotic-rich foods and prebiotic supplements aren’t right for people with SIBO, IBS, or FODMAPs intolerance. They might be a great option for people who don’t have any of those problems, though: just start slow and work your way up so you don’t overwhelm anything with the changes.

The Paleo take on salt has always been a little defensive: sure, eating a bunch of ultra-salty processed food is bad, can we really put that up to just the salt? And is it really relevant to adding salt to whole foods at your own table? The evidence that salt actually does cause high blood pressure isn’t great, and the typical Paleo line has been to salt to taste and not worry about it.

Recently, a trio of new studies came out with some supporting evidence: they didn’t find any compelling proof that salt per se causes high blood pressure. In fact, the studies found that too little salt seems to actually be as bad as too much! But the studies also pointed to another interesting question: the interactions between dietary sodium and dietary potassium.

Sodium and Potassium

Sodium and potassium are both electrolyte minerals necessary for life. Sodium is found in very small amounts in fruits and vegetables, but the vast majority of our sodium intake comes from salt. Most people in the modern world get the majority of their sodium from prepackaged food, and only a little bit more from adding salt at the table. This is true even if the food doesn’t taste “salty:” bread, ice cream, and cookies, for example, are often all full of salt.

On Paleo, with almost all the pre-packaged foods out of the grocery cart, your primary source of sodium is likely to be salt added at the table (or during cooking). Chemically, table salt is a combination of sodium and chloride, about 40% sodium by weight. Sea salt has exactly as much sodium as table salt. If you get a special “low-sodium” salt, it will have less sodium, with the specific amount depending on the product.

The conventional recommendation for sodium is 2,300mg per day or less, with 1,500mg for populations at risk of hypertension. Here’s what that means in terms of food:

• 1 teaspoon of salt: 2,300mg of sodium.
• 1 package of ramen noodles: 1,702mg.
• 1 serving (about ½ the can) of Campbell’s homestyle chicken noodle soup: 940mg.
• 1 hot dog: 500+mg (depends on the brand).

So much for sodium; now what about its lesser-known foil, potassium? Potassium is primarily found in fruits and vegetables. Some of the best food sources of potassium are:

• Potatoes: around 1,600mg per large potato (varies slightly depending on the type)
• Beet greens: 1,309mg per 1 cup cooked.
• Avocados: 690mg per avocado.
• Swiss chard: 961mg per 1 cup cooked
• Plantains: 930mg per 1 cup cooked.
• Bananas: 422mg per 1 medium banana

Could “Too much Sodium” really mean “Too little Potassium?”

For decades, we’ve all been hearing about how much we need to reduce sodium by eating less salt. But in fact, the new studies linked at the top of the page suggest that “too much sodium” might be a red herring. The real problem might be eating too little potassium. Consider that…

• A standard “high-sodium” diet is a “high-processed-food” diet. Such a diet is probably also low in vegetables and fruits, which would make it deficient in potassium. So are the resulting health problems due to the presence of sodium or the absence of potassium?
• The DASH (Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension) diet is a pretty effective diet for lowering blood pressure, at least compared with the standard American diet. It’s lower in sodium – but also much higher in potassium. So are the improvements thanks to the reduced sodium or the increased potassium?
• This study found that: “Dietary potassium estimated by food frequency questionnaire…was associated with a lower risk of all-cause mortality in subjects initially free of CVD and hypertension.”
• This study found that: “Potassium excretion and the sodium to potassium ratio were significantly related to systolic and diastolic BP only in subjects consuming more than 6 g/day of salt…[that’s about three times the recommended daily intake]. Our data indicate that when people have an increased intake of potassium, high intake of sodium is not associated with higher BP.”

It’s worth considering, at least, that high blood pressure is really about mineral balance, not just about sodium. And that would imply that lowering sodium as much as possible is only addressing half the problem.

What’s the Best Sodium:Potassium Ratio?

So if blood pressure is really about ratios instead of restricting salt, then what’s the target to aim for? Nobody knows for sure, especially considering that we all metabolize sodium and potassium differently, and that some people need more than others (e.g. athletes who sweat a lot need more sodium and more potassium to replace the minerals they lose through sweating).

The recommended daily intake of potassium (4700mg/day) is roughly double the recommended daily level of sodium, but considering that the recommended daily intake of sodium is based on the assumption that sodium causes high blood pressure, it’s not quite clear how accurate this is.

	Sodium	Potassium	Sodium:Potassium ratio
Most Americans consume	About 3500 mg	About 2600 mg	About 1:0.7
Recommended	1500-2300mg.	4700mg	About 1:2
Paleolithic	Nobody really knows; estimates vary.

In the actual Paleolithic, ratios of sodium:potassium intake have been estimated as low as 1:16, although it’s always important to stress that nobody really knows what anyone ate in the Paleolithic, and it’s extremely possible that they ate what they did because they could get it, not because it was optimal. Paleo is not about imitating cavemen; it’s about using evolution to figure out what’s actually healthiest for humans to eat.

With that said, it’s probably safe to say that most people on a typical Western diet could stand to lower their sodium:potassium ratio by eating a lot more potassium than they do right now. Whether the optimal ratio really is 1:2 or whether it’s even lower, chowing down on ramen and canned soup isn’t the way to – and that brings us to a potentially more important question: what do all these numbers actually mean in terms of food? If you’re eating Paleo, do you automatically fall in the healthy range, or is there something you might want to pay attention to?

Sodium and Potassium in Paleo Foods

Most Americans might eat about 3500mg of sodium per day, but most Americans aren’t eating Paleo. Here’s a sample Paleo menu:

	Sodium	Potassium	Sodium:Potassium ratio
Breakfast
Zucchini and sweet potato frittata (1 serving)	380mg (assuming you use about .3 teaspoon of salt for the whole recipe)	540mg	1:1.5
Lunch
Spicy pork chili (about 1 cup)	200mg (assuming you use 1 teaspoon salt for the whole chili)	500mg	1:2.5
Beet and walnut salad (1 serving)	144mg (assuming you put a pinch or two of salt in the dressing)	322mg	1:2
Dinner
Baked potato with 0.5 tbsp. salted butter	66mg	1628mg	1:24
Barbecue meatballs (1 serving)	Approx. 362mg (depending on how much you use in the meatballs, the sauce, and the ketchup that goes into the sauce)	993mg	1:3
1 cup spinach, pan-fried in olive oil.	About 48mg	About 334mg
Total for the day
	1200mg	4317mg	1:3.5

If you plug that number into the table from above, you get…

	Sodium	Potassium	Sodium:Potassium ratio
Most Americans consume	About 3500 mg	About 2600 mg	About 1:0.7
Recommended	1500-2300mg.	4700mg	About 1:2
Modern Paleo diet	1200mg	4317mg	About 1:3.5
Paleolithic	Nobody really knows; estimates vary.

The Paleo day is doing better than the sodium-reduction recommendation even though you’re adding salt to every meal. That’s the power of eliminating processed foods and eating lots of vegetables! Without anything from a box or a package, it’s actually quite easy to undershoot even the most conservative recommendations for sodium intake, and significantly improve on that sodium:potassium ratio.

The upshot: there’s really no need to count or track sodium on Paleo; even if you’re salting your food to taste, it’s very hard to get too much. If you’re eating Paleo, you’ve already achieved a superior sodium:potassium ratio without ever worrying about it – and with all the problems in the world, who needs another thing to keep track of?

Summing it Up

As this review puts it: “the interaction of the sodium surfeit and potassium deficiency in the body, rather than either disturbance by itself, is the critical environmental factor in the pathogenesis of hypertension.”

Healthy blood pressure isn’t about shunning the salt shaker. It’s about avoiding processed junk food and eating plenty of fresh plant foods. Eating a vegetable-heavy Paleo diet already gets you there – no need to restrict salt at all. Remember that the newest studies found that extreme salt restriction might even backfire: there’s nothing unhealthy about salting your food to taste, if you do it in the context of an overall healthy and potassium-rich diet.

Want a quick spot-check on your diet? Here's a one-day food diary where you can plug in your meals and get some quick feedback. It's not a comprehensive review, just a check for a few common problems and concerns.

How to Use the One-Day Mini Food Diary:

• Try to plug in a typical day; if you plug in an unusual day of food, your results won't reflect your usual diet.
• Fill in the total number of servings of each food type that you ate at each meal (the size of "one serving" is defined in each question). When in doubt, round up.
• Remember that you might eat more than one serving of a food at one meal. For example, if you ate an enormous salad, that's probably 3-4 servings of vegetables. "Serving" is just a way to roughly quantify amounts of food; it's not a measurement of how much is "right" to eat at one sitting.
• You can enter decimals in the lines. For example, if you ate half of an apple, that would be 0.5 servings of fruit.
• If you didn't eat any of a particular food, enter 0. Do not leave the line blank.

Resistant starch: miracle cure for everything from diabetes to gut dysbiosis, or the #1 way to actually make the problem worse? Well, neither and both. How much resistant starch is best for you (and in what form) really depends on your personal tolerance and gut health. It has some interesting potential benefits, but the research is still new and fairly preliminary – and it also has some significant potential downsides. So here’s a guide to navigating it all and hopefully figuring out how much (if any) resistant starch you might benefit from adding to your diet.

What Is Resistant Starch and Where Does it Come From?

Resistant starch is a type of fiber. You can’t digest it, but your gut flora can. That’s why it’s called “resistant:” it resists breakdown in the stomach and small intestine, and makes it through to the large intestine intact. Once it’s in the large intestine, resistant starch acts as food for your gut flora. The gut flora ferment it into short-chain fatty acids.

There are four different types of resistant starch, but the only two you’ll probably be eating are:

Type 2: resistant starch that naturally occurs in raw foods. Sources include raw potatoes and green bananas.

Type 3: resistant starch formed in foods after cooking and cooling. Sources include potatoes that have been cooked and then cooled.

Quantifying the exact amount of resistant starch in different foods is tricky, because there’s no single method that everyone agrees on. Different papers all give different amounts of resistant starch for various foods. Food labels may or may not tell you anything about resistant starch – in the United States, the resistant starch content of a food is part of the total number for “dietary fiber,” but in the UK it isn’t.

You can also buy several different types of resistant starch supplements, most famously raw unmodified potato starch.

You’ll notice something about these starch sources, though: they’re not exactly the most common dietary staples around. Green bananas? Raw potato starch? The only thing on this list that most people would eat as part of a normal diet is cooked and cooled potatoes (e.g. in potato salad). So why would you want to start mainlining raw potato starch, again?

(Potential) Benefits of Resistant Starch

We’ll start with the potential good. This study summarizes the potential metabolic benefits of resistant starch:

Resistant starch intake seems to decrease postprandial glycemic and insulinemic responses, lower plasma cholesterol and triglyceride concentrations, improve whole body insulin sensitivity, increase satiety, and reduce fat storage. These properties make RS an attractive dietary target for the prevention of diseases associated with dyslipidemia and insulin resistance as well as the development of weight loss diets and dietary therapies for the treatment of Type 2 diabetes and coronary heart disease.

Sounds pretty miraculous, if it’s all true. But not everyone is quite so optimistic, so here’s a breakdown of the benefits claimed for resistant starch, and how well-supported they actually are. This review very nicely summarizes the evidence in more detail (and it’s free to read if you want to check it out yourself):

Colon Cancer and Overall Gut Health

The obvious link between resistant starch and gut health is the gut flora. On top of providing food for the bacteria, there’s also some evidence that resistant starch can make probiotics more effective, by protecting the bacteria while they travel to your gut.

Resistant starch is also fermented to short-chain fatty acids in the colon, and these fats are a primary source of fuel for cells in your colon. In theory, giving those cells more fuel keeps them healthier, reduces the risk of developing colon cancer, and improve gut health in other ways.

This seems logical enough, but the evidence isn’t actually watertight. For example, resistant starch doesn’t increase production of short-chain fatty acids in every study. Also, many of the studies directly connecting it to specific diseases are (a) observational, (b) very small, or (c) conducted on rodents rather than humans. That’s great for preliminary research, but doesn’t definitively prove anything about the effects of deliberately adding RS to the diet of humans.

For example, most studies that “prove” a beneficial effect of fiber on the risk of getting colon cancer are really just showing association – they simply show that people who eat more fiber tend to get less colon cancer. But fiber tends to come with fruits and vegetables, and fruits and vegetables supply all kinds of other good stuff: how do you know it was the fiber? Sure, isolated African tribes on a high-fiber diet get fewer gut problems, but fiber is not the only difference between their lifestyle and yours!

This study sums it up:

“It is not clear if low doses of resistant starch (10–20 g/day) affect colonic metabolism enough to modify disease risk.”

The short story: it’s plausible and promising, but not proven.

Blood Lipids

Another claim is that RS improves cholesterol levels. Studies in animals have found that RS can indeed lower LDL cholesterol, but studies in humans are conflicting. Some do, and some don’t bear this out. And considering how little we know about cholesterol anyway, who’s to say that lowering LDL per se is necessarily even good?

Blood Glucose and Insulin

The evidence for an effect on glucose and insulin is also mixed. The study reported that:

15 studies have reported an improvement in these measures following the consumption of a RS-rich test-meal, while 10 have showed no, or a physiologically irrelevant effect.

Nobody found that resistant starch made anything worse, but the evidence for benefits is mixed at best.

RS added to foods does lower the glycemic load, mostly because it’s replacing carbs you can digest. You’d get the same effect by replacing those carbs with protein or fat – it’s essentially just substituting not-carbs for carbs. The only problem with this is that it’s typically used in highly processed low-carb breads and cakes, which don’t have a central place in a Paleo diet anyway. If these foods are adding a significant number of calories to your diet, you’re not eating Paleo in the first place.

Weight Loss and Satiety

Another claim about resistant starch is that it helps you burn more fat, rather than carbs, for energy (the implication being that you’ll be burning through your own fat stores, thus losing weight). Unfortunately, the evidence for this is scanty at the very best, and doesn’t point to much benefit.

Studies about satiety (feeling full) returned mixed results. Some found that RS didn’t have any effect on satiety; others found that it helped, but only for a short time after the meal. It doesn’t seem to have a long-term effect big enough to modify total caloric intake.

There’s some very experimental evidence that RS can do other things – for example, improving calcium absorption, or modulating immune function – but again, we need more research in humans, not just animals and test tubes.

(Potential) Drawbacks of Resistant Starch

Overall, the evidence in the “pro” column is mixed. Is resistant starch a healthy component of whole foods? Probably. Is it a miraculous cure for diabetes and colon cancer? Probably not. And in fact, there may even be significant downsides for people with gut dysbiosis, especially small intestinal bacterial overgrowth (SIBO).

In SIBO, bacteria that ought to be in the large intestine spill over into the small intestine as well. These are the bacteria that just love a nice dose of resistant starch – if you give them that food, they’ll grow and multiply just like they would in the large intestine. But that’s exactly the opposite of what you want to happen! Think about it: if you already have a gut flora overgrowth, the absolute last thing you want to do is give your gut flora an all-you-can-eat buffet.

That doesn’t make resistant starch bad; it just means it’s not for everyone, and a quick look at the waters is very wise before you jump in with both feet.

Summing it Up

Ultimately, resistant starch is a very good example of why it’s better not to get too excited over every new “miracle nutrient” that comes along. Yes, it may have some interesting health benefits. If you already have a healthy gut, it might be wonderful – certainly there are plenty of anecdotal reports. But hyping it as the cure to everything that ails us is premature at the very best – the evidence just isn’t there. And in fact, people with bacterial overgrowth problems may want to avoid it altogether, since it could actually make symptoms worse.

If you want to know more, or you’d like to try it for yourself, here’s a good primer to start with.

Have you ever felt a little queasy and reflexively thought “well, maybe it was something I ate?”

Well, maybe you were right: all kinds of food issues can cause nausea, although there are also all kinds of non-food issues that can cause it as well (most notably first-trimester pregnancy and gastrointestinal infections). But in this article, we’re just talking about food: what’s going on when you change your diet somehow, and suddenly you feel nauseated, queasy, or just not quite right in the stomach?

Especially for the first few days of the transition period, nausea is pretty common and not necessarily a sign that you’re doing anything wrong. But it can still be unpleasant and a little alarming, so here’s a guide to figuring out why you might be nauseous, and what to do about it:

The Culprit: You Got Too Hungry

This is completely counterintuitive, but nausea can actually be a hunger signal for some people, and eating a small amount of food can be a perfect fix. Unfortunately, by the time you’re already nauseous, eating doesn’t typically sound like a very good idea. So here’s a quick game plan:

• Best option: eat a small, healthy snack with some protein and fat (e.g. a handful of nuts, a chicken drumstick, a few slices of deli meat)
• Better option: if you can’t do fat and protein, try some bland carbs (e.g. a little bit of rice, or a plain baked potato)
• Last resort: if solid food is not going to happen, try a cup of fruit juice, coconut water, or any other liquid with some calories in it.

Avoid tough or fibrous vegetables here; they’re a little harder on the digestive system and they have a lot of bulk (which is the last thing you probably want to be eating). Leave the kale salads, broccoli, cabbage, and cauliflower until you feel better.

The Culprit: Too Much Fat, Too Fast

Fat is an ideal human fuel. But that doesn’t mean you should switch overnight from low-fat vegan to a morning smoothie with 4 tablespoons of coconut oil! Adding a lot of fat to your diet all at once can cause nausea, queasiness, and diarrhea – and coconut oil, the Paleo favorite, seems to be one of the worst offenders.

This is especially true for anyone with gallbladder issues. Some lucky folks can have their gallbladder out with no ill effects, but others find it a rocky transition.

The fix: if you’ve recently increased your fat intake, drop back down and work up slowly.

• For the first few weeks, limit coconut oil and focus on olive oil, butter, or other Paleo-friendly fats.
• Spread your fat intake throughout the day, rather than having a huge plate of fat at one meal and a bunch of lean protein for the next.
• Add coconut oil to your diet 1 teaspoon at a time, not in huge chunks. Use it in mixed meals, not added to smoothies or coffee (or worse, eaten straight off the spoon).
• Some people just don’t tolerate coconut products at all; if they don’t sit well with you even after a slow introduction, just forget about them.

While you’re slowly reintroducing fat, up your carbs to make up the calories (and avoid Culprit #1 above!). For example, here are some sample breakfasts at three points during a slow fat re-introduction:

Day 1: large sweet potato with a small pat of butter; 1 skinless chicken breast (approx. 7 grams fat).

(Days 2-3: slowly increase the amount of butter)

Day 4: medium sweet potato with a generous pat of butter; 1 chicken breast with the skin (approx.. 15 grams fat).

Day 7: medium sweet potato with a generous pat of butter; 3 poached eggs (approx.. 22 grams fat)

In this plan, you gradually transition from high-protein, low-fat to high-fat, moderate-protein, hopefully without the stomachache!

The Culprit: Oversupplementing

Are you taking ultra high-dose fish oil? Vitamin D? Anything else? Or mixing a bunch of multis together “just for insurance?” You may be getting too much of one nutrient or another, which can be just as bad as not getting enough.

It’s hard to pin things down on one particular nutrient, but there’s a simple test to see if this is your problem: ditch the supplements for a few days and see if the nausea disappears.

The Culprit: Food Sensitivities

Paleo eliminates a lot of common food sensitivities, but not all of them! A sensitivity to any of the following can cause nausea:

• Eggs
• Coconut
• Nuts and seeds
• Nightshade vegetables
• Shellfish
• FODMAPs

That’s a huge long list of potential problem foods, so it helps to narrow it down: are you eating any one of these foods or food groups much more since switching to Paleo? (For example, many people start eating a lot more coconut products and nuts). Or do you notice that your symptoms get worse specifically after eating one particular food or meal? It will probably help to keep a symptom diary and see if you can connect the nausea to any particular item.

If you do try elimination, remember that it’s most useful to eliminate only one thing at once! Otherwise, how will you know which one you were really sensitive to?

The Culprit: General Transition Funk

Transitioning to Paleo can get a little crazy. Everyone’s body is different, and sometimes nausea can be part of the reaction, especially if you suddenly leap from a pile of junk food right into Paleo. There’s not always an identifiable reason behind it – some people chalk it up to “detox;” other people blame enzymes, or hormones, or the gut flora, but it’s hard to know for sure.

It really stinks to feel gross and nauseous, but if nothing else sounds right, and if you’ve only just started, give it a few days and see how you feel. Try drinking some ginger or peppermint tea to settle your stomach, maybe ease off on the vegetables a little if you’ve been making up for lost time a little too enthusiastically, and find a way to coddle yourself a little until the transition is done.

Summing it Up

There’s not always a clear reason for any given feeling of nausea. Sometimes it’s not related to food at all – for example, if you’re pregnant or you’ve just picked up a stomach bug. Other times, it might be an unusual amount of fat, a hunger signal, a food sensitivity, or just a transitional hangup that you’ll get over soon enough.

For the first week or so, it’s more than likely that your body just needs time to adjust and there’s nothing really wrong. But after that, it’s very possible that you’re struggling with a food sensitivity or that you introduced too much of a new food too fast. Try out some of the tips above for figuring out the problem, and see if it doesn’t help you feel better.

Disclaimer: some people do perfectly fine on very low-carb or ketogenic diets for years and years. If that’s you, great! But if that’s not you, then you might find something useful here.

Frustrated by low-carb? Did it stop working for you, or maybe you’re just tired of the intense restriction on everything from carrots to kale? It might be time to try a different tack: instead of focusing only on carbs, try a more rounded Paleo approach.

What’s the Difference?

On a low-carb diet, the goal is exactly that: to minimize carbs, usually for the purpose of weight loss (although sometimes it’s for other reasons – for example, people who try a ketogenic diet to control epilepsy). On a Paleo diet, the goal is to make appropriate nutritional choices considering your evolutionary history. You can do a low-carb version of Paleo, but just cutting carbs does not automatically make a diet Paleo, and Paleo is about a whole set of food choices, not just carbs. Here’s a chart comparing some key differences:

	Generic low-carb/keto	Paleo
Carbohydrate level	Low	Variable; low to medium.
Ultimate goal	Typically weight loss (although there are exceptions)	Better health (sometimes this includes weight loss)
Is soy sauce (containing wheat) allowed?	Yes, since the tiny amount of carbohydrate is negligible.	No, since wheat is a gut irritant.
Is canola oil (containing lots of Omega-6 fats) allowed?	Yes, since it has no carbs.	No, since Omega-6 fats are inflammatory and unhealthy.
Are sweet potatoes (containing significant amounts of carbohydrate) allowed?	No, since they have carbs.	Yes, since they are full of nutrients and do not contain any toxins or gut irritants.
Is tofu (containing soy) allowed?	Yes, since it has few carbs.	No; soy is full of inflammatory Omega-6 fats and other problems.
Is dairy allowed?	If it’s full-fat, to minimize carbs.	Maybe, if you personally tolerate it well.

You can eat a healthy low-carb diet or a junk food low-carb diet. You can eat a low-carb or a moderate-carb or even a high-carb version of Paleo. There’s a lot of overlap, because Paleo tends to be lower in carbs than a typical American diet, but they’re not even close to the same thing.

If you want to switch from generic low-carb to Paleo low-carb, it's pretty simple: just get rid of any vegetable oils, grains, legumes (including soy), and processed junk in your diet (if you were eating it in the first place). But if you want to try adding in more "safe starches," it gets a little more complicated. So this article is really for people who were on a low-carb diet – whether it was keto, Atkins, or a generic low-carb diet of your own invention – and want to try a moderate-carb version of Paleo instead.

Why Would you Want to Switch?

Good question! You might consider switching from low-carb to Paleo if…

• You went low-carb to lose weight, but it stopped working.
• You successfully lost weight on low-carb, but now you have other health issues that you’d also like to address with diet (e.g. acne).
• You went low-carb to resolve some health issue, and it cleared up partway but isn’t entirely gone.
• You went low-carb, but your workouts went down the drain.
• You tried low-carb, but you were constantly hungry, grumpy, miserable, or low-energy.
• (women) Low-carb dieting had negative effects on your period or fertility.

Low-carb just doesn’t work for everyone, and it’s not because you’re doing it wrong!

What Should you Change?

REMOVE these foods from your diet (if you were eating them):	ADD these foods to your diet (if you weren’t eating them):
All grains (even very tiny amounts of wheat in something like soy sauce) All legumes (even the low-carb ones like soy) All vegetable or seed oils (including canola/rapeseed, peanut, and soybean oil). Acceptable cooking fats on Paleo are animal fat, olive oil, coconut oil, and other healthy plant fats. All artificial sweeteners and low-carb processed food. Protein powder	Sweet and/or white potatoes. Winter squash. Fruit, including starchy fruit like bananas and plantains.

Add in the carbs slowly – don’t go all-out and starting eating meals comprised entirely of sweet potatoes! Also don’t start eating huge piles of carbs all by themselves. Instead, slowly replace some of the fat in your meals with more carbohydrate-dense foods. For example:

• Instead of eating a big pile of cheese on your salad, try a banana on the side.
• Instead of an avocado with dinner, try a sweet potato.

Eating carbs with fat and protein will minimize any blood sugar issues, and help you slowly work up to a level of carbs that works well for your own body.

What Should You Expect?

For the first week or two on a moderate-carb Paleo diet, here’s what to expect:

Water weight. You may gain 3-5 pounds of water weight (this is not fat!) because carbohydrates make you retain a little more water. Don’t freak out about it. Really. Retaining water is not the same thing as putting on fat.

Energy changes. During the transition period, your body gets used to eating more carbs again, you may notice any or all of the following:

• Either a gradual or a sudden increase in energy and mood.
• An almost uncomfortable kind of “nervous energy” or very strong drive to do something right now. Often this comes along with an inability to sit still (this should fade as you get used to eating more carbs).
• Strange energy highs and crashes.
• Feeling physically warmer.
• Better athletic performance, more focus in the gym, and higher endurance.

Most of the undesirable effects on this list will iron themselves out over a week or two; just give it time.

Hunger changes. You may feel either more or less hungry than usual. You might also find that your meals suddenly seem “too big” (because carbs are much less energy-dense than fat, so the same number of calories will physically take up more room on the plate).

Other changes. Everyone’s body is different. Some people have digestive changes or a period of adjustment to eating more carbs and fiber (this isn’t always negative either: eating more carbs sometimes helps a lot with constipation). Other people just keep running right along without a hitch.

Summing it Up

It’s hard to compare low-carb and Paleo, because there are so many different varieties of both. You can eat a low-carb diet that doesn’t come close to Paleo, and a Paleo diet that doesn’t come close to low-carb, but you can also eat a low-carb Paleo diet if that’s what works for you. Most whole-foods low-carb diets are fairly close to Paleo anyway, so in practice many people restricting carbs are already almost Paleo.

Which one is “better”? That’s up to the individual person. The point of this article isn’t to persuade anyone to “switch teams:” it’s just an outline of why you might consider a change, and how to go about it if you decide to take the plunge.