Free The Paleo Diet by Loren Cordain Page B

percent—to give us more energy and help us burn off extra calories. Look at the numbers: For every 100 calories, cereals average only about 12 percent protein—compared to 83 percent protein for game meats. Legumes like lentils, peas, and beans average 27 percent protein.
    As for dairy products, the phenomenon of the “milk cow” (or goat or sheep) happened roughly 9,000 years ago. Milk contains 21 percent protein, cheese averages 28 percent protein, and butter has absolutely no protein—but a lot of fat.
    The bottom line: Most of us are getting only half of the protein we need. Why is this bad? As I’ll discuss in the next three chapters, a low protein intake contributes to weight gain and a high blood cholesterol level and increases your risk of many chronic diseases.
2. Too Much of the Wrong Carbohydrates
    The USDA Food Pyramid is based on carbohydrates; we’re a nation of starch and sugar eaters. Carbohydrates make up about half of the typical Western diet—a considerable difference from the Paleo Diet. For our ancient ancestors, carbohydrates accounted for 22 to 40 percent of the daily calories—but these were good carbohydrates, from wild fruits and vegetables. These low-glycemic foods—which don’t cause blood sugar to spike—are digested and absorbed slowly.
    With nonstarchy fruits and vegetables, it’s very hard to get more than about 35 percent of your calories as carbohydrates. For example: There are 26 calories in the average tomato. To get 35 percent of your daily calories as carbohydrates from tomatoes only, you’d have to eat thirty tomatoes. And this is why, with the Paleo Diet, you can indulge yourself by eating all the nonstarchy fruits and vegetables you want. When you eat the right foods, getting too many carbohydrates—or eating too many high-glycemic carbohydrates, which can cause a dangerous rise in your blood sugar and insulin levels—is simply not something you have to worry about. The average carbohydrate content of fruits is only about 13 percent per 100 grams, about 4 percent for nonstarchy vegetables—and zero for lean meats, fish, and seafood. In stark contrast, the average carbohydrate content of cereal grains is 72 percent per 100 grams.
    Why are many carbohydrates bad? Many whole grains and legumes don’t have a lot of vitamins and minerals. They’re poor dietary sources of these important nutrients. So a diet that’s tilted too heavily toward grains and legumes—at the expense of lean meats, fruits, and vegetables—can lead to vitamin and mineral deficiencies. This is why so many of our breads and cereals are fortified with extra nutrients. Food shouldn’t need to be supplemented with vitamins, and if you’re getting the right balance of lean meats, fruits, and vegetables, neither should you.
    Worse, cereal grains and legumes even contain “antinutrients”—chemicals that actually prevent your body from absorbing the proper nutrients and can damage the gastrointestinal and immune systems. Too many grains and legumes can disrupt the acid balance in the kidneys as well, and can contribute to the loss of muscle mass and bone mineral content with aging.
    Finally, if you eat more carbohydrates, you’re eating less protein. Protein is the dieter’s friend: it reduces your appetite and increases your metabolism—and this translates rapidly into weight loss.
    One of the great dietary myths in the Western world is that whole grains and legumes are healthful. The truth is that these foods are marginal at best. But what about the “health-food” breads? At best, they’re less bad than the overprocessed, super-refined white breads you could be buying. But they’re still not part of the Paleo Diet. Formerly (before “progress” brought refined milling technology to bread making), almost all cereal grains either were eaten whole or were so crudely milled that nearly the entire grain—bran, germ, and fiber—remained intact, and flour was much less refined than the kind