7 Ways to Know If Your Meat Is Paleo

 

Click HERE to Discover these 80 Keto-Friendly and Healthy Slow Cooker Recipes

7 Crucial Ways to Tell If Your Meat is Paleo or Not

The first time I ate a free-ranging chicken of a heritage breed, not a caged, overfed white roaster, I knew immediately that the meat is Paleo.

While butchering it, I noticed that even its skeleton was noticeably different. Built to run, this bird was almost all dark meat, with long legs and thin breasts. And the flavor! I had not eaten a chicken that good since childhood. This meat is Paleo for sure!

I’ve had similar epiphanies eating pork and beef that lived the good life before going to slaughter. Experience has taught me that happy animals make for happy meat.

Grazing herd animals, chickens with full run of the yard, pigs that forage for acorns, wild birds and fish and meat, are more flavorful, even more evocative and possibly even more nutritious.

These days, it seems as though food is just a bar of compressed gruel for powering through the next few hours. Paleo is a reaction against this over-industrialization of our lives.

Studying our ancient ancestors has taught us that meat was our first staple food, and continues to be the most important part of our healthy diets. But as important as meat is to the Paleo diet, many newcomers to the Paleo lifestyle are doing it wrong.

Simply replacing commercial white bread with commercial pork chops isn’t going to make your diet Paleo. More importantly, it is the meat itself that has to change.

Want to know if your meat is Paleo? Here are seven ways to know for sure that is definitely is NOT.

1. Your Grazing Animals Don’t Eat Grass

The first place to make this switch is in your red meat choices. Large grazing animals should be the foundation of your diet, and they should eat mainly grass.

We’ve been eating various kinds of domestic cattle for about 9,000 years. In all that time, we could rarely afford to feed them anything but pasturage. Only in the past hundred years have we intensively fed grain to cattle, and they’re not designed to eat it any more than you are.

Feedlot cattle suffer painful bloating and poor health from their filthy and cramped living conditions as well as their inhumane diet. Cattle cannot digest grain any better than we can. Choose grass-fed beef whenever possible!

The solution: Choose grass-fed beef. When you can, choose beef from grass-fed heritage breeds and bison to more closely emulate the profile of ancient cattle.

2. Your Meat Isn’t Wild

Animals that fend for themselves have different nutritional profiles from those raised domestically. How much that differs can vary depending on how the animals are raised: the more wild-like the conditions, as well as the cultivar or species, the more wild-like the meat. Modern domestic cattle simply did not exist in the Paleolithic; neither did modern broiler hens.

The solution: Eat more meat from undomesticated species, and when you do eat domesticated meat, choose those raised in the most wild conditions.

3. Your Fish is Toxic or Endangered

Seafood is highly varied, nutritious, and can still often be found for sale in its wild forms. However, a great deal of popular seafood, from shrimp to tilapia, is farmed, and like industrially farmed meat, seafood farmed on large scales doesn’t eat a native diet.

However, because of the nature of the toxins we have deposited in the oceans, mainly from burning coal, many species of wild seafood are considered dangerous to eat, while others have suffered so much depletion from overfishing that they are endangered.

The solution: Expand your knowledge of the species you eat from land based to aquatic livestock. Know where and how your favorites are typically produced, if they are farmed, whether they contain high levels of mercury or other toxins or are endangered, and whether alternatives exist.

Avoid unsustainably harvested seafood. Expand your diet to include more species that are sustainably harvested or farmed there are biodynamic and small aquatic farming operations.

4. Your Poultry Doesn’t Eat Bugs

Domestic chickens on small farms are fed supplemental grain as well as vegetables and even scraps of meat. Free ranging chickens spend their days foraging for insects to eat. They’re omnivores.

Just as humans don’t thrive on an all-vegetable diet, neither do chickens. Chickens should be able to spread wings, scratch the dirt, and act like birds. Avoid poultry from industrial farms!

One result of industrial farming is that poultry are raised indoors, in barns, eat exclusively grains, and never get to engage in normal chicken behaviors: scratching in the dirt, foraging for bugs, preening themselves and taking dust baths, and spreading their wings, literally and figuratively. 

Birds bred for the outdoors, and which live healthy lives foraging, are more like the kinds of birds we’ve eaten for centuries than the birds most commonly sold in supermarkets and restaurants today.

The solution: Eat less poultry. It’s not a staple food because small animals are not fatty enough to sustain humans. When you do eat poultry, choose free-ranging chickens.

You might need to find a farmer nearby and check out the operation to be sure. The same goes for your eggs: choose eggs from free-ranging hens for the most rich, delicious, and nutritious yolks.

5. You Don’t Eat the Whole Animal

We humans didn’t get to where we are today by being wasteful. When the hunt was successful, we ate not just tenderloin, but heart, kidneys, and intestine, and we made a habit of it. In each human culture, there are recipes and traditions for the preparations of each part of the animals eaten, from roasts to bone stock.

The proportions of liver, muscle, and fat that we eat when we eat from the supermarket case are dramatically different from when we would kill and prepare one animal and eat all of it, sooner or later. Eat the whole animal: heart, kidneys and intestine. No part should go to waste.

If we believe that the differences between how we lived as hunter gatherers and how we live now accounts for the poor health of most Westerners, then this is a significant difference. Man does not live by chops alone.

The solution: Buy whole animals when this is reasonable to do so. If you can, get an extra deep freezer so you can buy and store whole or half beeves, pigs, and seasonally available seafood and poultry. Seek out new ways to enjoy offal or other cuts with which you’re less familiar.

The diet we ate before we became agriculturalists was wilder, wider, and more flavorful. Purchasing whole, organic animals is a surefire way to make sure your meat is Paleo. Enjoy your food!

6. You Choose Lean Meats

It’s not just the types of animals you eat and how they were raised, but in what proportions we eat the parts. Nowadays, we choose tenderloin, not chuck; loin, not shoulder; breast not thigh; tilapia, not eel.

Our previous programming for a low fat diet, familiarity with the low-fat cuts we grew up eating, and their current ubiquity in the modern industrial foodscape mean we are choosing lean cuts of meat, and missing out on the nutrition, not to mention flavor and satisfaction, of eating animal fat.

The solution: Don’t be afraid to try fattier cuts of meat. Remember, well-marbled, free-range meat is Paleo!

7. You Eat the Meat Alone

In every culture, people eat together. They share food and mealtimes fulfill important social functions: to see and be seen, to belong, to share and ensure that everyone receives what they need. We take cues from watching one another on how slowly to chew, how much to choose, and which foods to prize.

The solution: Arrange to eat with co-workers at midday instead of at your desk. Offer to share your food with others. Face your family members over the dining room table instead of all orienting toward a screen.

Talk about the food you’re eating: what it reminds you of, how it makes you feel, food combinations you enjoy. When you do have to eat alone, do it meditatively, with appreciation and attention. Eating is a time to enjoy being alive. Savor it!

Watch this video –Paleo Diet for Beginners // Food List & Rules

Written by Justin Cascio

Author Bio:

Justin Cascio is a food and lifestyle writer. A founding editor of Trans-Health.com, he is currently senior editor at The Good Men Project. You can follow him on Twitter @likethewatch.

A lot of people have gotten results from the Keto diet, and enjoyed the foods that it has to offer. However, many of the people who are following this diet have a hard time finding the recipes that they need, especially ones that are quick and easy to complete.

Fortunately, Kelsey Ale, noticed this problem, and decided to do something about it. She’s found that making recipes in a slow cooker gives you meals which are not only delicious, but also take very little time to make. Mostly you just put a few simple ingredients in the slow cooker, and let it do the rest.

To find out more, click on – Keto Slow Cooker Cookbook

Cholesterol Myth and Reality – Does High Cholesterol Cause High Disease

 

Click HERE to Discover these 80 Keto-Friendly and Healthy Slow Cooker Recipes

Introduction

For the entirety of my lifetime, cholesterol has been demonized, claimed as the worst thing in the world and something to avoid at all costs. 

I mentally put it on par with the Boogeyman and the reminder to “never take candy from strangers.” I grew up in a time where Snackwells, high sugar, low fat products began taking the world by storm. I remember the 1990s very vividly and remember the advertisements on TV after school that told me to consume lots of fruit juice and sugary sodas.

When I began to learn that cholesterol was actually something essential to life and beneficial to health, I was very confused. 

It was as if everything I was told my entire life was wrong, and the opposite, which was always denied, was true. Sort of like when I found out Santa Claus looked suspiciously like my mustached father, eating cookies and placing presents under the tree at 11:40PM on Christmas Eve (I couldn’t sleep).

This article will cover the myth of cholesterol, the reality of what it actually does, why it’s important, and what foods to eat and to avoid. 

Though many in the Paleo community are already aware of the importance of cholesterol, there is still a widespread belief that it is to be avoided at all costs. So please, feel free to share this article with uninformed relatives, friends, and those otherwise confused.

Myth

So what used to be said about cholesterol? Well, let’s take a journey back into the annals of time, and find out!

Here is the Time Magazine cover from March 26th, 1984. Not looking so favorable towards cholesterol, right? The words were strong and widespread – don’t eat much cholesterol at all and you will avoid heart disease and all other illness! Quite honestly, this was far from true. But Ancel Keys certainly had his day in the sun (more on that soon).

I won’t spend too much time recounting “the horrors of cholesterol.” Most of us reading, lived through it. However, back in the mid-1900s, there was much more of an “accepted society” and it was very rare that many ventured outside of societal norms. My point here, is that this recommendation did maximum damage, because almost everyone listened to it!

Reality

Here is the Time Magazine cover from June 23rd, 2014. Perhaps they changed their tune?

If we look into the science behind cholesterol, we will see that many, if not all, of the conclusions that it was a negative thing came from experiments that were flawed for a variety of reasons. 

In fact, many diets of healthy cultures were all high in fats. This meant: meat with the fat, blubber, egg yolks, coconut oil, lard and butter. These are the exact list of foods that I was told to never eat as a child. Instead, I became hooked on chips and soda.

However, this is where the industries of Big Pharma and Big Food come in to play. Vegetable oils, added sugars, and poor health are all ways to make money.

Eating farm-raised eggs? Not so much. This isn’t to say it’s all one big conspiracy. It is, instead, a way to say that their interests don’t dovetail with ours, the consumers. Their job is to sell food and drugs. Period. Until most wake up to this cold hard fact, we will remain in limbo with our own health.

So what really happened? Rudolph Virchow, over 100 years ago, developed the lipid hypothesis. The idea was that the cholesterol in your blood, lead to the development of plaque in your arteries.

Again, this was a hypothesis. Meaning, it needed to be tested. Even more alarmingly, he based this hypothesis on studying corpses. Meaning, this was only a hypothesis that seemed to be true in dead people. The obvious issue here: what about ALL other variables, that may play a role in potential morbidity?!

This dovetails with the second part of our problem. Rabbits and cholesterol. What’s that you say? We’re not rabbits, and all information that was concluded from experiments on them should be taken with a grain of salt? I agree. But that’s not exactly what happened. In fact, far from it.

Nikolaj Nikolajewitsch Anitschkow fed rabbits cholesterol (they do not naturally consume it, since they are herbivores) and “proved” that cholesterol led to atherosclerotic issues.

To be clear, the first part of the issue was derived from studying corpses. The second part of the issue was derived from studying rabbits, who are not meant to consume cholesterol.

If this seems like poor science to you, I agree. If it seems very dubious to base an entire nation’s dietary recommendations on these kinds of experiments, I agree as well!

Another flaw, though less obvious at the time, was the notion that all cholesterol in the blood comes from diet. This is far from true and is one of the misnomers that led to this massive confusion. Your liver makes sure that you always have cholesterol in your body since it is required to make cell membranes. In fact, as we will see, even proponents of this theory were cited as saying that dietary cholesterol was unlikely to lead to issues. Are you shaking your head yet at this inane situation?

Things only got worse and really reached maximum acceptance with the aforementioned Ancel Keys. Dr. Keys’ famous work was the Seven Countries Study. This is already dubious as Keys had data from 22 countries. However, he kept this point nice and quiet and ignored all rational thought.

Instead, he chose to focus on the 7 countries that supported his idea: cholesterol is bad and we should all stop consuming it. And, believe it or not, that’s exactly what happened.

To be more specific, Keys claimed that dietary fat itself caused heart disease (cholesterol goes along for the ride). This completely ignored the countries that ate TONS of fat and had very low rates of heart disease. Interestingly, it also ignored the countries that ate almost NO fat and had high rates of heart disease.

Based on Dr. Keys’ conclusions, Americans then assumed that we should go as low fat as possible. We are now similar to those “low fat diet, high heart disease rates” countries that Keys ignored in his initial study. Irony?

Sadly, the politics of the time gave Keys a lot of clout. Although some very clearly disputed his conclusion, power won the day. We all were told to cut out dairy, eggs, animal fats, red meat, and butter. And so we did. This has led us to the worst state of our nation’s health, in history. A state that is bankrupting us, and making us sick.

Every country, even ones who were previously healthy, that has adopted our diet, has come down with the same diseases. The addictive and rewarding nature of carbohydrates (especially sugar) is strong. And that’s where we are at right now.

What To Eat?

As we’ve seen, foods high in cholesterol are not the problem. Foods high in sugar, foods high in vegetable oils, and foods which provide no nutrients with lots of calories are the problem.

So eating eggs, meat (grass-fed, please), butter, coconut oil, etc. are all good choices. This doesn’t mean to make them the only foods in your diet. Just as important are vegetables and good sources of carbohydrates.

What to Avoid?

Quite frankly – anything the food industry is trying to sell you! Anything with added sugars, dyes, trans fats, or anything not naturally found in nature, shouldn’t really be going into your mouth – at least on a regular basis. This logic may seem obvious, but I bet most people would struggle to go one entire month without eating the garbage that’s out there.

Watch this video – Debunking Cholesterol Myths

Conclusion

Though I realize many in the Paleo community already know why cholesterol is not the demon we all perhaps once thought it was, it is important to remember that the community grows every day. This is great, but underscores the need for information and truths to be dispersed.

The danger of low cholesterol and over-carb-consumption is very real; it can have a huge positive impact on someone’s health to start eating eggs and limit their processed carbohydrate consumption. This article is as much for them as it is for me.

Until we get more mainstream minds on board, we remain a cult movement. An ever-enlarging cult! Clear and concise language, clean and clear science, and sharing of information is the best way to make not only ourselves but everyone in the world healthier!

Written by Casey Thaler

Author Bio:

Casey Thaler, B.A., NASM-CPT, FNS is an NASM® certified personal trainer and NASM® certified fitness nutrition specialist. He writes for Paleo Magazine®, The Paleo Diet® and Greatist®. He is also an advisor for Kettle and Fire and runs his own nutrition and fitness consulting company, Eat Clean, Train Clean®.

A lot of people have gotten results from the Keto diet, and enjoyed the foods that it has to offer. However, many of the people who are following this diet have a hard time finding the recipes that they need, especially ones that are quick and easy to complete.

Fortunately, Kelsey Ale, noticed this problem, and decided to do something about it. She’s found that making recipes in a slow cooker gives you meals which are not only delicious, but also take very little time to make. Mostly you just put a few simple ingredients in the slow cooker, and let it do the rest.

To find out more, click on – Keto Slow Cooker Cookbook