Fact:
Cattle are fed grains in the final stages of their lives to quickly fatten them for slaughter.

Fact:
The US government encourages people to eat grains in an effort to lose weight and become "healthy".

Now, I hope you can all see the problem here. If you can't, I am here to help.

Here is a picture of cattle being fed grains in an effort to fatten them:

Here are a couple of people being fed grains:

Now, I know there will be at least one of you out there who will argue that grains are metabolized differently by cows than they are by people. If you believe this, please explain to the rest of us how that is. Seriously, since the government started pushing grains on the American public, diseases of civilization have been on the rise and obesity has increased to such a level that it is being considered a pandemic! You are all smart enough to know the solution by now.

Long post short, grains are great for fattening both cattle AND people. Love yourself for a change and stay away from those damn dirty grains!

Yesterday we discussed how prudent it may be to spend more on food now in order to save a lot on healthcare later. Is it absolutely necessary though to spend more on food to avoid the diseases of civilization?

In layman's terms, NO!

Here are a few ideas for going Paleo on a Budget:

1. Eat at home - you will lose money faster eating out than you would if you sat at home setting $1 bills on fire
2. Join a food club - find a local CSA or Co-op and enjoy the discount benefits of ordering agricultural products with a group of people
3. Grow your own - if you have the time and interest, start your own garden
4. Buy in bulk - buy your meat a quarter of a cow or more at a time and stock your freezer for the next year
5. Buy in season - stick to fruits and vegetables that are locally in season and save considerably
6. Buy frozen - fruits and vegetables are just as nutritious when frozen, but a fraction of the price
7. Go carnivore - stay away from those expensive fruits/veggies and stick solely to animal products

My family is currently making an effort to eat at home more often. We also try to buy our meat in bulk as much as possible. I feel that we have had pretty good success at keeping the cost down to this point. Personally, I have gravitated very closely to carnivorism over the past several months, so I will use that as an example.

A typical day for me will consist of 1.5 pounds of beef rib eye and 2 pounds of ground beef. This comes out to a grand total of $14.47 per day for food. I could also very easily swap out 3/4 of a pound of rib eye for 14 large eggs (7 whole eggs + 7 egg yolks) and arrive at a very similar level of macronutrients for a total of $10.39; a savings of $4.08!

With that being said, I challenge you to come up with a day's worth of food that contains approximately 4,000 calories and costs less than $14. If you are feeling really adventurous, you can try to outdo the cost of the second example. Feel free to use restaurants, fast food joints, supermarkets, mail order, whatever. We will then compare the nutritional profile of my daily intake to whatever you can come up with.

One last note. I will be more than happy to do a follow-up on the health merits of a completely carnivorous diet if requested to, but please don't flame me in the comments. Stay focused on the main objective of this post.

One of the arguments that usually surfaces when trying to get someone to eat Paleo is cost. Sure, organic fruits and vegetables combined with raw nuts and other goodies can add up quickly, but being sick at some point in your life will cost even more. Here are the numbers:

Cost of living with heart disease or stroke:

• According to the CDC, living with heart disease will cost you upwards of $121,200 over 20 years.
• If you need surgery or other forms of ongoing care, the cost can realistically exceed $4.8 million over your lifetime.
• The estimated lifetime cost of a severe stroke in a younger individual is $500,000.

Cost of individual procedures:

• The average cost of a cardiac catheterization in 1992 was $10,880.
• The average cost of coronary artery bypass surgery in 1995 was $44,820.
• In 1996, the estimated first-year cost for a heart transplant was $253,200. The estimated annual followup cost was more than $21,200.
• The average cost of a coronary angioplasty in 1995 was more than $20,000.

Cost of living with diabetes:

• People diagnosed with diabetes spend over $4,100 more each year on medical costs than people who don't have diabetes.
• This gap increases by an average of $128 each year following the initial diagnosis.

As you can see, the cost of being sick is outrageous. Prioritizing your physical health and thinking long term is the perfect justification for making the switch to Paleo and allocating more of your resources (i.e. money) to food.

Spend more now, save a lot later!

This is a picture of our refrigerator. More precisely, it is 25 pounds of meat, or 7 days worth of nourishment for me. With the help of my girls, this meat probably won't make it past day 5

The following are two posts from the Heart Scan Blog on wheat addiction and its subsequent withdrawal. For most of you, giving up grains has and always will be super easy. For the rest of us, we struggle with withdrawal because of the addictive properties of wheat.

"I can't do it"

Anne sat across from me, bent over and sobbing.

"I can't do it. I just can't do it! I cut out the breads and pasta for two days, then I start dreaming about it!

"And my husband is no help. He knows I'm trying to get off the wheat. But then he brings home a bunch of Danish or something. He knows I can't help myself!"

Having asked hundreds of people to completely remove wheat from their diet, I witness 30% of them go through such emotional and physical turmoil, not uncommonly to the point of tears. For about 10-20% of people who try, it is as hard as quitting cigarettes.

Make no mistake about it: For many people, wheat is addictive. It meets all the criteria for an addictive product: People crave it, consuming it creates a desire for more, lacking it triggers a withdrawal phenomenon. If wheat were illegal, there would surely be an active underground trafficking illicit bagels and pretzels.

Withdrawal consists of fatigue and mental fogginess that usually lasts 5-7 days. Just like quitting smoking, wheat withdrawal is harmless but no less profound in severity.

People who lack an addictive relationship with wheat usually have no idea what I'm talking about. To them, wheat is simply a grain, no different than oats.

But wheat addicts immediately know who they are. They are the ones who can't resist the warm dinner rolls served at the Italian restaurant, need to include something made of wheat at every meal, and crave it every 2 hours (matching the cycle of blood sugar peaks and valleys, the "valley" triggering the craving). When they stop the flow of immediately-released glucose that comes from wheat (with blood sugar peaks that occur higher and faster than table sugar), irresistible cravings kick in. Then watch out: They'll bite your hand off if you reach for that roll before they do.

Break the cycle and the body is confused: Where's the sugar? The body is accustomed to receiving a constant flow of easily-digested sugars.

Once the constant influx of sugars ceases, it takes 5-7 days for metabolism to shift towards fat mobilization as a source of energy. But along with fat mobilization comes a shrinking tummy, reducing the characteristic wheat belly.

If you try to quit smoking, you've got "crutches" like nicotine patches and gum, Zyban, Chantix, hypnosis, and group therapy sessions. If you try and quit wheat, what have you got? Nothing, to my knowledge. Nothing but sheer will power to divorce yourself from this enormously destructive, diabetes-causing, small LDL-increasing, inflammation-provoking, and addictive substance.

Wheat withdrawal

It happens in the hospital every so often: A clean-cut, law-abiding person is hospitalized for, say, pneumonia, kidney stones, knee surgery, etc.

Everything's fine until . . . they're running down the hospital hallway stark naked, screaming about snakes on the wall, accusing nurses of trying to kill him, all while yanking out IV's and monitor patches.

It's called alcohol withdrawal. Alcohol withdrawal can range from tremulousness and sweatiness, all the way to delirium tremens, the full-blown form that leads to disorientation, seizures, fever, even death. Withdrawal can also be associated with a number of chronically used agents, such as sedatives/sleeping pills, pain medication/opiates, among others.

How about wheat?

I wouldn't have believed it, but after witnessing this effect countless times, I am convinced there is such a phenomenon: Wheat withdrawal.

You'll recognize it in someone who previously ate bread and other wheat flour-containing products freely, then eliminates them. This is followed by extreme cravings, usually for bread, cookies, or cake; profound fatigue; shakiness; mental fogginess; blue moods. The syndrome can last for up to one week.

Then, bam! Sufferers of wheat withdrawal report mental clarity superior to their wheat-crazed days, improved energy, decreased appetite and cravings, heightened mood, and, of course, fantastic drops in weight.

Why would removal of wheat from the diet trigger a withdrawal phenomenon? I can only speculate, but I believe that at least part of this response is due to a physical conversion from a glycogen (sugar)-burning metabolism to that of a fatty acid (fat mobilizing) metabolism. People who lived in the up-and-down cycle of craving and eating wheat constantly fed the sugar furnace for years and are enzymatically impaired in fat burning; they've been growing fat stores. Eliminating wheat deprives the body of this easy source of glycogen, forcing it to mobilize fatty acids in the fatty tissues. Sluggish at first, people feel fatigue, mental fogginess, etc. Once the enzymatic capacity for fat mobilization revs up, then these feelings dissipate.

Could it also relate to the opioid sequences apparently present in wheat? I wasn't even aware of this fact until a reader of The Heart Scan Blog, Anne, left this comment:

Wheat protein contains a number of opiod peptides which can be released during digestion. Some of these are thought to affect the central and peripheral nervous systems.

When I gave up gluten, I felt much worse for a few days. This is a very common reaction in those who stop eating gluten cold turkey.

Dr. BG provides a fascinating commentary on the addictive/opioid aspect of wheat addictions in her Animal Pharm Blog.

Whatever the mechanism, I believe it is a real phenomenon. It can, at times, be so overwhelming that about 20% of people who try to eliminate wheat find they are simply unable to do it without being incapacitated. Of course, that might be a lesson in itself: If withdrawal is so profound, it hints that there must be something very peculiar going on in the first place.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-t0L8WAkfVE[/youtube]

I first came across Greg and Nikki a few years back on the CrossFit and Performance Menu forums. They were two of the people from whom I originally learned about the Paleo Diet. Here is an excerpt from a recent interview Nikki conducted of Greg:

Q.
The paleo diet has been shown to consist of foods which promote good health, while eliminating foods which do the opposite. However, is there a way someone could go 'wrong' when following the paleo diet to an extent that it would play negative effects on their health?

A.
Yes, and I'm glad you brought this up because I think it is an important issue to touch on. One of the things that I commonly see with people who think they're eating paleo is that they tend to assume that just because a food could have been attained in nature that it can and should be consumed in unlimited amounts. For example, when I first started eating paleo I ate nuts as my staple source of calories. I loved the taste of them and they filled me up quickly.

At first I felt great, probably because I eliminated all bad foods from my diet, but eventually I started getting some serious digestive disturbances. I eventually started to feel sick and lethargic after eating nuts. The reality is that it is hard to obtain large amounts of nuts in nature because it is very labor intensive and the nut intake of our paleo ancestors was probably not very high because of this. Nuts also contain protease inhibitors, which can interfere with digestion. A good way to reduce this effect is to soak the nuts in water over night and then dehydrate them (if they stay wet they'll grow mold).

You could also run into problems with a very high fruit intake. I have nothing against fruit and I eat quite a bit of it myself, especially during the summer months. However, modern varieties of fruit have been selectively bred over the years to contain much more sugar than wild varieties, and can cause some problems with insulin resistance when consumed in large amounts.

I would also advise people to keep their consumption of paleo deserts to a minimum. Some assume that just because a food has more natural ingredients that they can consume it in unlimited amounts with no consequences just because it's "paleo".

A good example is almond cookies. They contain butter, almond meal, and honey all in one snack.

Sure, they lack the anti-nutrients found in regular cookies and have a greater nutrient density, but when you combine large amounts of fat (from butter and almonds) with sugar (from honey) you're setting yourself up for fat gain. Not to mention that paleo deserts tend to also be quite high in calories. That said, I would save paleo treats for special occasions, which is completely acceptable and is obviously better than snacking on regular sugar/trans fat laden cookies.

About Nikki and Greg

Nikki Young is the founder of Feed the Fitness and the author of The Paleo Cookbook.
Greg Battaglia is a certified Level I CrossFit trainer and a dietetics student at Immaculata University.