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

of dishes that are based on traditional recipes (both relatively new and ancient) found all over the world. If human beings have been eating this way since antiquity, why switch things up now?







The Paleo Template
    I’d like to take a second to go over the basis of the Paleo diet for anyone who’s new to the concept.
    The Paleo (short for Paleolithic) diet is based on the ancestral human diet. It focuses on whole foods like meats, vegetables, and fruits while avoiding foods that are problematic to many people’s digestive systems. The Paleo diet is not a reenactment of prehistoric diets; it uses scientific study and evolutionary evidence to figure out the optimal diet for our modern age.
    The Paleo diet is not the first attempt at restoring an ancestrally minded lifestyle. In the late 19th century, a movement known as the Physical Culture Movement sprang up as a reaction to increasingly sedentary lifestyles of post–Industrial Revolution society. Followers of the movement avoided what they considered “diseases of affluence” by eating natural foods, increasing exposure to air, bathing in rivers, and getting plenty of sunshine.
    Weston A. Price was a dentist who found a relationship between dental health and nutrition; in researching for his 1939 book, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration: A Comparison of Primitive and Modern Diets and Their Effects, Price studied many pre-industrial populations around the world and found that those eating indigenous diets were free of diseases that had become typical in the West. His work is the basis of the Western A. Price Foundation, one of the largest whole-foods and traditional movements today.
    In 1975, gastroenterologist Walter L. Voetlin published a book called The Stone Age Diet, which concludes that humans are primarily carnivores by nature, with some allowance for carbohydrates. Since the 1980s, several doctors, nutritionists, and scholars have published works asserting that a diet based on ancestral principles is ideal for modern societies. Loren Cordain, a professor at Colorado State University, first published The Paleo Diet in 2001, and it became the basis for our modern interpretation of the diet, focusing on meats and vegetables. Robb Wolf published The Paleo Solution in 2010, which refined Cordain’s principles and attracted mainstream attention and popularity.
    Today, several versions of the Paleo diet exist. Dallas and Melissa Hartwig’s Whole30 program (outlined in their book It Starts with Food ) provides a tough-love plan to transform your diet through their 30-day reset, which follows strict Paleo guidelines. Mark Sisson’s The Primal Blueprint is consistent with most Paleo principles but is more lenient with dairy and alcohol. In the Foreword to this book, Paul Jaminet describes his Perfect Health Diet, which advocates moderate consumption of safe starches in ratios that are aligned with those found in indigenous diets worldwide. The Perfect Health Diet is the diet that I follow and demonstrate in this book; indeed, you could call this the first Perfect Health Diet cookbook.

My Dietary and Culinary Tenets
    As you’ll see in later sections, I support a historically minded way of eating that is delicious, sustainable, and based on Paleo diet principles. The concept of dieting is both foreign and unnatural to how humans have lived for all of history. Instead, I believe that the way we eat should be a healthy combination of traditional practices and informed research to find what works for us as individuals.
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    Guiding principles
    In this modern world of processed, hyper-palatable (and, admittedly, delicious) Frankenfoods, I find that the key to maintaining a healthy diet is to focus on tasty, nutrient-rich foods. The foundation of this book rests on the idea that throughout history, humankind has been cooking with taste—not health—in mind, and that our natural taste preferences are actually tuned in to what is most healthful; that’s why our