Paleo Cookbook For Dummies (32 page)

Dairy products, including butter, margarine, milk, cheese, cream, half-and-half, flavored creamers, yogurt, ice cream, and frozen yogurt.

All soy frankenfoods, such as vegetarian burgers, hot dogs, and chicken nuggets. (
Frankenfoods
are processed foods that are made to look like a certain food product but are really made from wheat.) Pitch any tofu as well.

Fruit juices or other sweetened beverages, including soda or teas.

Lunchmeats, sausage, and bacon that contain gluten, nitrites, soy, or sweeteners.

Commercial condiments with sugars and artificial ingredients.

Frozen waffles, pizza, macaroni, or other frozen meals.

Popsicles and frozen fruit bars with sugar and artificial ingredients.

What's left in your refrigerator should be eggs, unprocessed meats, fresh fruits, vegetables, and condiments that don't contain sugar or other artificial ingredients.

If you decide to have a sweet, you're better off going out and getting a single serving rather than keeping it in your house. That way, after you eat it, you're done, and you're not tempted by it lingering around the house.

Refilling Your Kitchen with Paleo Foods

You decided to take action and committed to a healthy life by clearing out the old and making way for the new. The foods you'll be restocking your kitchen with are full of nutrients and bursting with flavor. They're the foods your body was designed to eat. Enjoy making these foods your base and get excited about your healthy, vibrant future.

Picking Paleo-smart protein

When you read or hear that animal proteins aren't good for you, often the
quality
of that protein is what's in question, not the protein source. Factory-farmed meat is less healthy than meat from animals raised humanely and sustainably. When you can, your best option is always to get meat from organic, pasture-raised, antibiotic-free sources. In fact, if you're going to strain the food budget somewhere, protein is the place. If doing so isn't in the budget right now, though, don't stress. Buying the leanest cuts you can find, removing the skin on poultry and the excess fat on red meat before cooking, and removing and draining excess fat after cooking are great strategies for making conventional meats as healthy as possible. (Turn to
Chapter 4
for more tips on improving the healthfulness of conventionally raised meat.)

The difference between grass-fed and pasture-raised really has to do with the animal.
Grass-fed
meat comes from animals that have lived on carefully managed pastures all their lives. When they are indoors during the winter, they are fed hay, but no grain whatsoever.
Pasture-raised
or
pastured
animals are omnivorous animals such as pigs and chickens that cannot exist exclusively on a diet of grass. They are kept on a fresh, clean pasture, and their diet is supplemented with some kind of grain. Bottom line: Beef and lamb are grass-fed; pigs and chickens are pastured.

Follow this advice for purchasing the best Paleo proteins your food budget allows:

Beef:
Grass-fed, organic beef provides you with the best balance of omega-6 fatty acid to omega-3 fatty acid ratios. In fact, when you buy grass-fed, you can eat all the fat — no need to cut or drain. Just be sure the beef you buy says both “grass-fed” and “grass-finished;” either one without the other means the cow likely wasn't exclusively fed grass.

Lamb:
All cuts are good; grass-fed is best.