Thursday, April 22, 2010

Lacto-Paleo

What do you call a diet which is limited to Paleolithic foods our ancestors ate, adding back in whole dairy products?

I was trying to come up with a name for such food choices. Previously, I'd made an impromptu, but detailed outline of my own Paleo-inspired menu. But try explaining that to someone in a sentence or two. It was no surprise that when "lacto-paleo" popped into the old gulliver that google found over 1,000 hits. It's just too obvious.

From one of the links comes Mark Sisson's* The Definitive Guide to Dairy, in which he offers detailed information (did you know there were A1 cows and A2 cows, with different characteristic caseins?). To help readers determine if dairy fits their goals, he sensibly suggests eliminating all dairy for a month to see how you feel. After that, resume using dairy and contrast your health symptoms. Personally, I'm not ready to try the dairy cessation experiment just yet.

Blue's Paleo Page and Blue's Diet Page provide a sensible framework for a Lacto-Paleo diet. She has some interesting facts about "New World foods" (squash, cucumbers) and Nightshades (tomatoes, potatoes, peppers). I love those foods (but will avoid potatoes now until I lose lots of pounds).

The Paleo Diet Defined is chock full of information (some of which I question), and provides a link to PāNu, described as lacto-paleo (even though the Get Started page says, "12. Eliminate all remaining dairy including cheese- (now you are 'Orthodox paleolithic')." I haven't read too much of PāNu, but it looks promising.




* Mark's Daily Apple is one of the most informative Paleo/Primal/Evolutionary fitness websites I've found, so far. His website is well organized, but a few articles I'd pick out for an intro are: this, this, this, and this.

2 comments:

Don Wiss said...

I am curious as to what in The Paleo Diet Defined you question. (I find Blogspot to be kind of lame, you can't subscribe to posts on a blog entry, nor can you often include the URL to your website. So unless you start a new blog entry that Google Alerts picks up I won't see it.)

My Diet 180° said...

You can subscribe to comments at http://mydiet180.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default
so you can see follow-up comments. That RSS feeds aren't specific to any one article, but that isn't really a problem at this blog right now, due to the low traffic. More than half is probably family and friends.

As for my The Paleo Diet Defined, I haven't read it thoroughly, but I did notice a few things. For example, I question the comments about beverages. I think it's impractical to avoid chlorine and fluoride, because the benefits outweigh the risks. Green tea is better than black tea. But I've read that white tea is better than green tea, as far as nutrients. They're all from the same plant, just picked at different points in the growth cycle.