The Ancestral Table: Traditional Recipes for a Paleo Lifestyle Read Free

the arteries using cow parts.
    As you might imagine, this procedure is tricky, and only a few places in the world do it. It carries a high mortality rate due to its inherent complications. I’m happy to say that I made it out okay. It was definitely one of the hardest and most painful moments of my life, but even more painful was the fact that the surgery didn’t ease my symptoms. After gambling with my life and hoping it would fix my ailments, I was on the same amount of medication and felt no significant improvement in my pulmonary performance.
    Bear in mind that through all this, life still went on—I got married a few months before the surgery and even went on a deployment between health crises. Without the support of my wife, family, friends, and military family, I’m not sure I could have made it through this crazy time.
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    Taking Matters into My Own Hands
    Years went by. Janey and I moved to the Baltimore area in 2008 and welcomed our son, Oliver, into the world in 2009. I continued to work as a translator in the Navy. The heavy medication was taking its toll, especially the steroids. I was nearly 40 pounds over my normal weight, my bones were becoming progressively more brittle, and I couldn’t build muscle to save my life. I was becoming increasingly tired all the time and was experiencing health events that were simply not normal for my age—I had a painful bout of shingles due to my compromised immune system, and I was having trouble remembering simple things, which is often associated with steroid therapy.
    And then in 2010 I came across a blog post that mentioned the Paleo diet. It was shown to reverse instances of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and autoimmune symptoms. Within a week I had thrown out all the garbage in our pantry and started eating whole foods and meals based on ancestral principles. I immediately felt better. My inflammation markers improved so dramatically in that first month that I convinced my doctors to decrease my immunosuppressant medication, and I was off steroid therapy quickly thereafter.
    I dropped those extra 40 pounds nearly overnight, and everything went back to normal, or at least closer to normal than I had been in many years. I simply started feeling like I did before getting sick. Over the course of the next few years, I was able to wean myself off every medication but one, when at my worst I had been taking more than a dozen pills a day and self-injecting medications into my stomach.
    I’ll be the first person to say that changing my diet didn’t completely cure me—there’s no mistaking the fact that I still have a serious and debilitating autoimmune condition—but I can say with confidence that changing my diet improved my health by leaps and bounds.

    Sharing My Story
    I started my blog, The Domestic Man, several months before switching my diet. I opened the website with the idea that we humans have become domesticated, that we have lost touch with our lineage. Many cultures have stopped passing down traditions from one generation to the next, one of the most important traditions being how we gather and prepare our meals. Today, an alarming number of Americans don’t know where our food comes from or how to prepare food beyond taking it out of a box and heating it up.
    So I decided to reconnect with nature by chronicling my cooking adventures. Once I started trying to write recipes that were in line with my new way of eating, I discovered a trend: there are a ton of delicious, healthy dishes to be found nestled in the pages of history. So I adjusted my website to focus on fundamental, traditional dishes that are historically relevant. Along the way I also realized that gourmet cuisine rests on the foundation of traditional foods and is quite possibly the ideal culmination of history and science. And the main idea of this cookbook was born.
    This book is the result of several years’ worth of research and experimentation, my attempt to compile a collection