Pregnancy, Evolution, and Nutrition Data

My recent post outlining my own pregnancy prompted a lot of questions about whether the primal diet is safe for pregnant women. The fear is that they might end up deficient in some nutrients if they don’t follow the advice of their doctors to eat whole grains and the government guidelines to eat 6-11 servings of them per day.

Without a doubt it is pretty rebellious to go “against the grain” and not everybody has the experience or the knowledge to go it alone. Thankfully, I, and all the other paleo women making noise about this, are here to give you courage.

Is the Paleo Diet safe for pregnant women?

The question might be more appropriately posed: Is it safe to eat the foods that naturally occupy this earth or do they first need to be altered in a factory?

Anyone asking this question is no less than brainwashed by grain pushing big business, but don’t feel bad about it, we all have had to climb out of the same hole.

Evolution prescribed our diet long ago

Think about it for a second. All the animals on the planet (except for us) need only venture beyond their den’s opening to find sustenance. And humans too, used to do the same. Nature’s pantry is stocked full with meat, fruits, and vegetables (and insects, fish, and other moving things). We were designed, from the beginning, to eat the foods that god, if you will, placed here. Packaging and processing is a trend so new you could barely blink an eye at it. For hundreds of thousands of years we have been hunting and gathering our food, not walking down isles of extended shelf life.

So, in answer to the question, yes, it is safe to eat unadulterated foods and nothing but unadulterated foods. Every animal on the earth does it, and our human ancestors used to do it too (some remote humans today still do).

They all are and were the better for it. Disease of modern man is just that: modern, and this is because we had not evolved, in all our hundreds of thousands of years, to eat foods which are devoid of life and nutrients. Evidence of this can be seen in books about traditional cultures. Or one could visit one of the few un-civilized peoples left on earth and observe, first hand, their superior health. But if that is still not convincing enough, you can compare the nutrient profiles of the two diets.

Nutrition Data Comparison

I have included the nutritional data of two sample diets. One is an example of the SAD (standard American diet) and the other is a day in the life of a whole foods, paleo eater.

At NutritionData.com I added foods into the recipe calculator to show the difference between the Standard American Diet and the Paleo Diet. I have included screen shots here (you might want to increase your screen resolution (Ctrl+) to view them closer).

Standard American Diet: Breakfast is a bowl of raisin bran with ½ cup of 1% milk, some frozen strawberries, and a glass of OJ. After the insulin drops, the modern pregnant American pops in at Carls Jr for a blueberry muffin; her mouth watered for more but she controlled her urge. At lunch she tries to keep it healthy with a low fat turkey sandwich and a Sprite. For dinner she has pasta with beef and tomato sauce, a slice of bread with margarine, and a small brownie for dessert. Notice that the glycemic load is very high, the nutrient profile is low, the cholesterol and fat are too low, and the protein is incomplete. This is the health conscious version of the SAD. Imagine what the real American diet looks like!

The Paleo Diet: For breakfast this healthy and energetic woman has two slices of bacon, two eggs cooked in butter, and some strawberries. This high fat meal takes her all the way through lunch where she has a hearty helping of wild salmon with some vegetable soup which includes celery, carrots, and swiss chard. For dinner she has beef brisket with liver, a sweet potato, and spinach. She eats organic vegetables and pasture raised animals and so the nutrient profile will actually be higher than what NutritionData.com offers. In this data, notice how anti-anflamitory the diet is, how high in nutrients, and how low the glycemic load.