A couple weeks ago one of my newsletter readers lamented that it seems like everything she has in her diet is bad for her.  She loves my newsletters, but it seems that with each newsletter another group of her favorite foods gets put on the avoid list.  She wanted an explicit menu plan she could follow.  Well.....

I don't personally follow an explicit menu plan because I never cook the same thing twice.  I enjoy the creativity of coming up with something new each time I go into the kitchen.  I can't even scramble eggs the same way twice.  For me life is about exploring the "what ifs" of my existence.  What I do have is a clear goal.  I know what kinds of food I want to be putting into my body and what kinds I want to avoid to stay healthy.  This is a lifestyle choice made by attraction to what I want in my life.  

Never the less I will attempt to create a basic menu plan with substitution lists for the rest of the world that just wants to know what to eat to be healthy.  My general cooking style might be called Fresh Paleo Low Carb, the foods of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, but with modern twists for our modern palettes.  

The common image of eating Paleo is hunching down around a campfire and chowing down on endless amounts of freshly barbecued meat still on the spit from over the fire.  While this is an entertaining Hollywood image of cavemen, the true diet of hunter-gatherer people is far different.  That image is kind of like how in the movies every time anyone ever visits Rio de Janeiro the Mardi Gras festival is always happening.  

The gorging on fresh meat was a rare occurrence for the Paleolithic family.  Most of the time they were eating vegetables.  They would eat leaves and stems and seeds and roots primarily.  When they could find them, they would steal eggs.  They would catch fish, rabbits, rodents, and any other small game they could run down.  Insects were a common food.  In the autumn they would eat as much ripe fruit as they could find to put on weight for the winter where they might go weeks at a time eating nothing at all.  But mainly they ate lots and lots of high fiber plant foods.  It is estimated that they consumed around 200 grams of fiber a day.  Today we are lucky if we get 20 grams of fiber a day.

200 grams... do you know how much fiber 200 grams is?  That is 83 cups of broccoli or cabbage.  That is 43 cups of boiled, drained spinach.  That is a total mountain of non-starchy vegetables every day.  In an attempt to be reasonable modern nutritionists recommend we eat 40 grams of fiber each day, so that means 17 cups of broccoli or cabbage or 9 cups of boiled drained spinach per day.  So in a modern Paleo lifestyle you would be eating around 5 cups of vegetables at every meal.

If your desire is to lose weight, this is the approach I suggest - 5 - 6 cups of non-starchy vegetables 3 times a day plus a couple ounces of lean meat with those vegetables.  Use as many spices, herbs, and vinegars as you like to create a variety of stir fries, soups, and salads.  I assure you that you will not be hungry, bored maybe and possibly craving something more if you don't let your creative juices flow to come up with recipes you like, but you will lose weight.

Personally I follow a Low Carb lifestyle because that is what works best for my health.  Everyone would benefit from following a low glycemic load lifestyle, but not everyone needs a low carb lifestyle. If you are insulin resistant or diabetic then definitely your body is telling you to get off the carbs.  

We are all built differently and our needs are different.  Consequently we need two menu plans - one for folks like me that hardly eat any starches at all, and one for the folks that do fine with starches.  Which one are you?  Look to your scale.  If you are carrying 40 pounds or more of excess weight, or you have any blood sugar problems, you are probably one of the folks that need a low carb lifestyle. Carbs make us fat.  So if we are fat, chances are we are carb sensitive.  

This is not always the case.  I was just talking to my brother last week who is quite slim.  In spite of being a total food health nut and growing most of his own food, he was showing up with high blood sugar levels.  He started on a very low carb eating plan and his blood sugar came right down to 85 - a good number.  But he had to keep his carb level below 20 grams a day to get that good number.  Just increasing the level to 35 grams a day, the amount in a cup and a half of blueberries or 2 slices of bread), and his blood sugar levels jumped up to almost 100 - a not good number.

So what does a healthy (non-diet) plate of food look like?  If you are doing low carb then three-quarters of the plate is covered with non-starchy vegetables and the last quarter has full fat protein foods like nuts, eggs, meats, fish, seeds, fermented soy and baked goods made from almond, coconut, or flax flour.  Once a day you may have a side dish of ½ cup of low carb fresh fruit. So your low carb meal plan for each of three meals per day is:

4-5 cups of non-starchy vegetables
2-4 ounces of full fat protein foods
2 ounce serving of a low carb baked goodie
Low carb sauces/dressings made with healthy fats, spices, and herbs
Coffee, Tea, Herb Tea, Stevia sweetened beverages
½ cup low carb fresh fruit 1 time per day

The vegetables and meat can obviously be cooked together as a complete dish - just keep the same ratios.  I don't recommend most dairy products as most of them are toxic.  Some people can do fine on raw milk dairy products and imported cheeses.  But so many people are allergic to dairy and don't know it that I generally suggest avoiding dairy.

For specific recipes there are now several Paleo cookbooks available.  A quick search on Amazon shows me over 300 Paleo cookbooks are now available, so there is no shortage of recipes out there.  Here is a link.  The trick with these recipes is to check the ingredients to make sure they are low carb for the low carb lifestyle plan.  Also be aware that a lot of cookbook writers really have no clue about health and will simply convert their favorite unhealthy recipes into paleo recipes by exchanging honey for sugar and alternate flours for wheat flour.  This is not what I am advocating.  A good Paleo eating style never consumes simple carbs other than a little fruit.  

So what are the common non-starchy vegetables we can eat?

    Anything leafy and green
    artichokes
    asparagus
    avocado
    broccoli
    bean sprouts
    bok choy
    Brussels sprouts
    cabbage
    cauliflower
    celery
    chard
    Chile peppers
    Cilantro
    cocoa - small amounts
    coconut - small amounts
    collard greens
    cucumbers
    dark green leafy lettuce
    eggplant
    fennel
    green beans
    green, red, yellow peppers
    iceberg (head) lettuce

    tomatoes
    turnips
    turnip greens
    watercress
    wax beans
    zucchini

And what are the full fat protein foods?

    beef
    bison
    chicken
    chicken eggs
    duck
    duck eggs
    goat
    goose
    lamb
    pork
    rabbit
    turkey
    venison
    tempeh
    miso
    almonds
    cashews
    coconut
    hazelnuts (filberts)
    peanuts
    peanut butter
    pecans
    pistachios
    pumpkin seeds
    sesame seeds
    sunflower seeds
    walnuts
    any wild fish low in mercury / toxins
    catfish
    cod
    flounder
    haddock
    halibut
    herring
    mackerel
    pollock
    porgy
    salmon
    sea bass
    snapper
    swordfish
    trout
    tuna
    clams
    crab
    crayfish
    lobster
    mussels
    octopus
    oysters
    scallops
    squid (calamari)
    shrimp

And the low carb baked goodies are breads, crackers, cookies, and cakes made from almond flour, coconut flour, or flax flour - no other flours are used.  For sweetness only use stevia, lo han, glycerin, inulin, or erythritol.

Healthy fats are coconut oil, avocado oil, olive oil, lard, ghee, palm oil, cocoa butter, animal fat, or fish oil.  Pastured butter is fine for some people but not all.  Small amounts of sesame oil, grape seed oil, almond oil, and other nut oils can be used.

Your choice of spices and herbs is unlimited plus you can use vinegars of all sorts, as well as fish sauce and coconut aminos.  Some people can tolerate soy sauce while others can not.

The second higher carb lifestyle would be three meals a day of:

4-5 cups of non-starchy and starchy vegetables
2-4 ounces of full fat protein foods
2 ounce serving of a grain free baked goodie
Sauces/dressings made with healthy fats, spices, and herbs
Coffee, Tea, Herb Tea, Stevia sweetened beverages
½ cup fresh fruit 2 times per day

This eating plan is for people who have no blood sugar problems or weight issues.  It seems similar to the low carb menu except it includes starchy vegetables and higher carb goodies.  

Starchy vegetables

    acorn squash
    beets
    butternut squash
    carrots
    cassava
    cocoa
    corn
    fresh cowpeas or black-eyed peas
    green bananas
    green peas
    green lima beans
    hubbard squash
    onions
    plantains
    potatoes - all types
    pumpkin
    red peppers
    rutabagas
    sweet potatoes
    taro
    water chestnuts
    winter squash - all sorts
    yams


As you can see there is a huge amount and variety of food to eat on this lifestyle.  What is obviously missing are the grains, sugars, and legumes.  It is easy to reason why we leave out the grains and sugars - they stress our health with rapidly assimilated carbs that create insulin resistance and massive inflammation.  But what is up with leaving out the legumes for the higher carb lifestyle?  Give them a try for yourself after being off of them for at least three weeks.  Legumes are very high in a certain type of toxic substance called lectins.  These produce allergy type reactions in most people.  So legumes are like dairy foods - ok for some people, but not most people.

Hopefully this will serve as a starting point for folks to get a handle on how to eat from a healthier lifestyle.  The choice is what do you want in your life?  How do you want to feel physically, emotionally, and mentally every day?  What foods you put into your body hugely determines this.  Most of our poor food choices are a consequence of insufficient authentic happiness in our life.  We substitute junk foods for authentic joy because they pump up our brain's feel good neurotransmitters and numb us to our stress temporarily.  Unfortunately these foods very quickly end up making us feel so bad we can not feel joy anymore due to their longer term metabolic effects.  We get trapped using poor foods to cover the poor feelings that the poor foods are actually creating.  We need better coping skills for stress than simply blocking feelings with poor foods that make us numb to our feelings.  

We can choose happiness.  We can choose to build a lifestyle of health that allows natural joy and feeling good.  I have seen it over and over with patients when I put them on this lifestyle for just three weeks to address a simple blood sugar imbalance.  They feel better on all levels.  You can too.

Next time I will discuss how I play with the ingredients of the low carb Paleo menus to make them more interesting and doable in a modern life... hint: do I eat 3-5 cups of vegetables 3 times a day?  If I had a major symptomatic disease I would, but in reality I get that many vegetables once, sometimes twice a day.  So what do I do instead?

Yours in health,


David     

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Take care,

David            

Low fat milk linked to obesity

Once again our government's health recommendations have proven to create the exact opposite effect they were intending.  The assumption was that low fat and skim milk would reduce obesity in children.  The just completed study of 10,700 preschoolers over many years has shown that those that drank whole milk and 2% milk were less likely to become obese compared to kids that drank 1% or skim milk.  The thought now is that the higher fat content of the milk produces greater satiety and the kids ended up eating less over all.   

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Ecuadorian dwarf community 'immune to cancer and diabetes' 
 

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Kohler's $6,650 Numi toilet

Here it is, the ultimate toilet for the bathroom that has everything.  What makes this toilet so special?  How about a bidet and heated dryer, heated seats, foot warmers, custom settings for individual users, and a built-in music player, not to mention the blue tooth receiver, 7 color ambient lighting, an SD card slot to program custom playlists and personalized greetings, and a battery backup good for over 100 flushes.  I don't know how I will be able to live without one...

 "Seek not the favor of the multitude; it is seldom got by honest and lawful means. But seek the testimony of the few; and number not voices, but weigh them. "

~ Immanuel Kant 

About Dr. DeLapp

Dr. DeLapp has been a philosopher, non-force Chiropractor, medical intuitive, and health innovator for over 30 years.  He began experimenting with  medical intuition in 1972 while studying physics at UC Davis.  In addition to physics he designed and completed an individual major in the philosophy and psychology of education.  Shortly after he choose to pursue a career in the only truly health oriented profession available at that time, Chiropractic.  He graduated with honors in 1981 with his doctorate and opened a private practice. 
Since that time he has continued his research into the effects of consciousness and learning on health. 
He developed the Biomagnetic Retraining system for correcting movement abnormalities. 
Since 1991 he has focused on developing a powerful system for uncovering and assisting the mind-body connection in health and personal growth.  The in-depth coaching, guided by the subconscious direction from the body, is called Heartflow and the simpler mind-body retraining for health and unfoldment he has named Gracework.  Both are available at Fair Oaks Health.

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