This is the Greek village I’m originally from, called Skiadas (my dad’s village). The name in Greek means “Hades’ shade” or “Hades’ shadow”, since my village is built by the Acheron river, close to where the Cerberus and the entrance to the UnderWorld was located according to the ancient Greeks. According to the myth, when Plouto had too much of Hades’ darkness (or too much bickering from Persephone, his trophy wife), he would come out to the living world to rest, but because he hated the sun (he was the God for the UnderWorld no less), he had to find a place that had shade for a long time. The sun is obscured by a large mountain in front of Skiadas, so we don’t get sunshine there earlier than 11:00 AM for most of the year. A perfect hideout. The actual entrance to Hades is nearby another village, which is where my mom is from. I guess you can say that I have a creepy lineage…

I only lived about 5 years in Skiadas overall, but it’s my real home. At 00:45 sec you can see my school (now deserted, I went there for 3 years). You can ignore the terrible local music in the video btw… That kind of music has become my nightmare since I was a kid, as I was often forced to line-dance to it (social pressure).

Now that my health is back on track, next time I’m there I will be able to shoot a proper video of my village and its people. Maybe I’ll shoot it as a documentary.

When I’m at my local farmer’s market I behave like a kid in the candy store. I want a bit of every thing and every variety of it too! Right now my fridge is super-full, and I’m afraid that some of all this food will go to waste. So I decided to make a weekly diet plan that maximizes in nutrients, and also offers a plan for vitamin supplementation that makes some sense based on what’s to be eaten any given day. I’m no doctor or a nutritionist, but I’ve accumulated a lot of knowledge in the last 4 months while trying to fix my health issues through the Paleo diet. Some notes to self:

- This is a rough guide for the main courses, there can always be fruits, soups, salads, raw honey, lactose-free goat yoghurt/cheese, nuts, fermented foods etc.
- There’s only one pork main dish because sausage/links/bacon/ham would be consumed during breakfast almost daily.
- Beef marrow bone broth would be used extensively. It would almost be a daily companion to most recipes.
- Coconut oil for cooking, extra virgin olive oil for salads.
- Chamomile (morning), Kombucha decaf (tea time), and Greek Mountain Tea (after dinner). Enough water.
- Must prepare my own wakame salad with sea-vegetables (commercial one has wheat-based soy sauce in it — makes me sick).

I’m also thinking of going ketogenic if my weight continues to refuse going down (although weight loss is not my primary goal, gut health is). In this case, some additional steps are required for a Paleo-ketogenic diet:
- Supplementation with L-carninite 2-3 times a week.
- Supplementation with Psyllium fiber 2 times a week.
- Supplementation with Potassium 2 times a week, and never miss the sauted Swiss chard & beet greens twice a week.
- Supplementation with Iodide 2 times a week, always use iodized salt, and never miss the sea vegetables.
- Pancakes, honey, and most fruits (except berries) are a no-go in keto… Coconut oil is a must. Fermented foods, more water too.

I have also signed up with Cron-o-meter (free account), where I can approximately find out which vitamins/minerals I might be missing, after I input in the system what I eat daily. Then, I can supplement accordingly.

The general consensus among Paleo dieters is that dairy is a Neolithic food, and so milk, yoghurt and cheese are not allowed (although butter, ghee and sour cream is still consumed by most Paleo dieters). Even the Primal faction of Paleo, which is more relaxed, suggests caution when it comes to dairy. The main disapproval for dairy on Paleo is its lactose and casein, both known allergens and inflammation agents.

The idea is that when you go Paleo, you’re supposed to eat brassica vegetables & spinach daily, eat the heads & bones of sardines, and that your gut will take care of absorbing calcium better now that you got Paleo. Even with all that, a Paleo dieter gets about 60% of the RDA for Calcium daily, but then they come and tell you that the US RDA number is unnaturally high and was measured against modern dieters, not Paleo ones. Funny how the die-hards don’t use the same argument for all the other vitamins!

Honestly, these suggestions are kind of laughable. Who eats broccoli daily, and who eats sardine heads daily? And what about all of us who came from the Standard American Diet (SAD) and have leaky and damaged guts after years of eating grains, and we can’t absorb nutrients as well yet? My teeth were transparent like glass when I first found Paleo!

My home-made lactose-free goat yoghurt rocks with raw honey, berries, nuts!

To get adequate calcium and phosphorus on the Paleo diet one must drink slow-cooked bone marrow broths from grass-fed cows or wild game. It’s the main way to get any serious amounts of minerals and vitamins, and I suspect that this was the main way our dairy-free Paleolithic ancestors were getting by too (and by eating eggshells too).

But the problem is that the vast majority of Paleo dieters don’t take the time to cook bone broths (or eat offal). A lot of people come to Paleo for weight loss and not for its amazing health benefits, and so they omit such basic requirements. They simply remove foods from their diet (e.g. grains, beans, sugar etc), but they don’t add other foods that are needed (e.g. fermented foods, offal, broths etc). That’s not Paleo that they’re doing! It’s SAD-lite!

Now, in all fairness, the Paleo arguments about lactose and casein are valid. Lactose is a complex poly-saccharides sugar (gut bacteria love these, as lots of it goes undigested in our bowels), and bovine casein is even more difficult to break apart, since the right enzymes are usually not present in our stomach (because the milk was pasteurized, and its enzymes were nuked).

But there’s a workaround, and it’s what I’ve been using myself with great success (for my gut, bones, and teeth). Remember, Paleo is a template, not a hard-line religious dogma. This has been more evident lately, as more and more Paleo dieters have been adding more kinds of foods in their diet, as long as their bodies seem to tolerate them. Dairy seems to be popular in the Paleo world as of late too, but this is my regime on how to get the most out of dairy, without accumulating any of its negative effects too.

Step 1: Don’t eat bovine dairy, but go for goat/sheep dairy. Goat/sheep’s casein chemical structure is closer to that of humans’, so we are able to digest it way easier than cow casein. Some people who are allergic to cow casein are able to have goat/sheep dairy without a problem! There are some cows that produce the “right” casein, but these cows are not bred much anymore. We are the victims of 10,000 years of cow un-natural selection! Buffalo have the right casein, but who can milk a buffalo?

Step 2: Limit lactose. Go only for harder goat/sheep cheeses (which contain only traces of lactose), and make your own, home-made, lactose-free, multi-probiotic goat/sheep yoghurt (fermented for 20-24 hours so the bacteria have time to consume most of the lactose & galactose sugars).

Step 3: From cows, only have grass-fed butter or ghee, and sour cream (if you can tolerate cow casein). Sour cream usually has very little lactose left in it (this is the lactose-free one I personally buy). If I could find butter/sour-cream from goats or sheep (or buffalo/bison), I’d switch in a second!

Step 4: Never drink pasteurized animal milk, unless it’s raw goat/sheep milk, *and* you can trust the farm you bought that milk from! Raw milk can indeed be dangerous, so you must be sure that what you’re drinking is safe. Preferably, go for coconut milk instead, and use it mostly for cooking.

Step 5: Don’t forget the bone broths! A lot of other bone-related minerals are found in bones/marrow that can’t be found in dairy!

Alternatively, you can buy a vitamin that includes Ca+D3+Mk4+Mg (all elements are needed to absorb calcium), but such a pill is not ideal either. For example, phosphorus is as important as calcium for bone health, but it’s very rare to find it in most vitamin pills. Eating real food is still the preferred way to get mineralized.

The idea of running a restaurant has been in my mind for years and years. Of course, these days these thoughts surround the Paleo diet and its foods. There is only a single Paleo restaurant in the whole world so far (in Germany), while at the same time the Bay Area is full of Paleo dieters. There’s definitely some business opportunity here…

Well, these are the dishes I’d feature in that imaginary Paleo restaurant, trying to cater primarily to Paleo & Primal diets, and secondarily to gluten-free, Atkins, SCD, or other low-carb or ketogenic diets. All foods would be cooked with virgin coconut oil, olive oil when indicated, while the sea salt used would have added iodine in it. Local plant produce, pastured meat, wild-caught fish would be used. All dairy is optional, lactose-free, and mostly goat-based (except grass-fed butter, and lactose-free sour cream which would be cow-based). Wherever sweetening is required, raw & unfiltered local honey is used.

Appetizers
- A grass-fed beef marrow bone, served hot with salted radishes
- Garlic & herb-roasted chicken wings
- Kale chips (oven roasted with olive oil, salt)
- Guacamole, served with endive leaves
- Mixed greens salad with bacon, apple, walnuts, olive oil vinaigrette
- Three separate tapenade: Olive, eggplant, and red pepper, served with almond-flax crackers
- Home-made honey/tamari-cured beef jerky
- Chicken liver pate with almond-flax crackers
- Fried minty meatballs, served with green olives

Main Courses
- Greek Moussaka (lasagna-style) dish (optionally topped w/ cheese)
- Zucchini-based carbonara/alfredo “pasta” with eggs, cream, and your choice of bacon, chicken, or shellfish
- Fried white fish with boiled amaranth greens and lemon, olive oil
- Beef meat or beef tongue in multi-veggie stew, cooked in beef bone broth
- Shepherd’s lamb pie with sweet potato and cauliflower mash (optionally topped w/ cheese) (choice of side dish)
- Herb-roasted game (duck, goose, rabbit, turkey, ostrich, deer pieces) (choice of side dish)
- Grilled pork ribs and half a heart, roasted (choice of side dish)
- Tuna or salmon steaks, grilled or fried (choice of side dish)
- Meat & veggie loaf, with home-made ketchup (choice of side dish)
- Beef steak, grilled (choice of side dish)
- Beef liver, grilled (choice of side dish)
- Kokoretsi (all parts of goat’s offal, including lungs, spleen, intestines) (choice of side dish)
- Patsas (goat or sheep tripe avgolemono soup)

Sides
- Cauliflower-based colcannon
- Steamed broccoli & fried mushrooms
- Roasted squash with honey & apple cider vinegar-caramelized onions
- Celeriac, kohlrabi, cabbage and carrot coleslaw in home-made olive-oil mayo
- Root chips mix: sweet potatoes, beets, turnips, rutabaga, carrots, parsnips, sunchokes, fried in beef tallow, with herbs. Served with home-made ketchup, or Dijon mustard.
- Home-made live sauerkraut
- Sea vegetables medley
- Mache, purslane, cress, with avocado, tomato and cucumber slices in French vinaigrette
- Crust-free Greek spinach pie with spinach, beet greens, Swiss chard, leeks, turnip greens, etc.
- Soup of the day (various)

Desserts
- Almond/coconut flour and honey cookies (plain, nuts, chocolate)
- Almond/coconut flour with honey, fruits, cream-frosted muffins (for birthdays)
- Home-made SCD probiotic lactose-free goat yoghurt, served with nuts & seeds, berries, and live local honey
- Coconut milk “breakfast bowl“, served with nuts & seeds, berries, and live local honey
- Coconut and berries ice cream
- Paleo waffles, served with berries, and honey-based syrup
- Home-made chocolate bar with nuts, lightly sweetened with honey, coconut flakes
- Fruit salad of the season
- Fruit of the season sorbet (sweetened with live, local honey)

Drinks
- Coconut milk, with optional honey
- Fruit smoothie of the season
- Kombucha green tea (decaf available)
- Herbal tea (chamomile, or Greek Mountain Tea)
- Sugar-free (dry), local wines
- Evian mineral water

I was reluctant to write this article, because I’m not a doctor, and I have never tried a ketogenic diet myself, neither I have a mental disorder that I know of. The depression I had accumulated in the past 10 years because of IBS-D ruining my life, is already gone with the plain, less-restrictive Paleo/Primal diet.

As it happens, in the last week I kept researching about ketogenic diets as a way to lose more weight. But what I ended up finding instead, is a whole new way of fixing (== making asymptomatic) disorders that until very recently I’d thought to be “unfixable”. I always thought of mental disorders as this whole other thing, medically. It’s not like a broken arm, where you put it in a cast, and it gets fixed in a month or so. Or even like with my own problem, IBS-D, where you remove certain foods, while adding others, to fix this GI issue. Mental disorders are shrouded in this mystique of the unknown, which I always found fascinating, and scary as hell at the same time.

So while researching (some links: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7), I found that the known ketogenic diet for epileptics, actually has magical effects also to autistic/aspergers, bipolar, depressed, anxious, and even schizophrenic people. Other positive benefits of a very low-carb, high-fat diet was found during the treatment of Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, Lou Gehrig’s disease, and even brain cancer patients! Unfortunately, no research was ever done for adults to study the alleviating of these illnesses’ symptoms with a keto diet. The epileptic keto diet is mostly tested on children, who are not allowed to eat more than 10 grams of carbs daily. A number of children who have followed the diet, generally saw a reducing of the number of seizures within a few weeks, and in some cases, they got a complete loss of seizures within a few months. There are also a lot of autistic kids who got their ability to connect with others, and even speak, or go to normal school, just by following the similar to Paleo & Keto diets: the GAPS and SCD diets. A bipolar woman got so much better that she even managed to stop her medication within 6 months time of following a strict ketogenic diet (with the agreement of her doctor, one of the few doctors who suggests diet as a prescription). There are these who claim that most mental disorders are nothing but metabolic disorders. A completely “physical” problem that is.

A ketogenic diet is a diet that removes most sugars and starches from the diet. Adult patients are not allowed to eat more than 30 grams of carbs a day, or about 10-20 grams for children. After 2-3 weeks, the body stops burning glucose as its fuel, and instead runs on fat! There are sticks you can buy where you pee on them in the morning, and you can see for sure if your body has gotten into a ketosis mode or not (also, bad breath, and stinky unine are other ways to know). While in this mode, the brain then will produce a byproduct called ketones. The body can also run on protein, but it prefers sugar or ketones/fat. By changing the fuel that floods the brain, the seizures get minimized or stop, because the whole dynamic of the brain changes. Your mood will stabilize, you will focus better, and a whole new world will open up for you (hopefully — as with other illnesses, “only” about 90% of the cases usually respond to diet changes).

So, to start, follow the Paleo diet (including bone broths, offal, lactose-free probiotic yoghurt), plus this additional protocol here (except for the suggested honey). Never put grains in your mouth again, not even in the form of a beer. In addition of what you can’t eat while on the plain Paleo diet (that is, all grains/corn/rice, sugar, legumes/soy, and white potatoes), you must also remove the following to go Ketogenic: parsnips, sunchokes, sweet potatoes, tapioca, taro, yams, honey, maple syrup, lactose, and the big one, most fruits. Rutabaga, carrots and beets must be eaten in small quantities, while turnip tubers/greens, beet greens, and celeriac are safer, since they have fewer sugars/starches. The rest of the veggies are OK, but you’d have to always measure how much of it you eat (no more than 10-15 gr of carbs per meal that is). If you can tolerate dairy, you can make your own home-made probiotic lactose-free goat yoghurt, and also eat goat hard cheeses. For milk, you go for unsweetened almond or coconut milk. For fruits, you can chop two small strawberries in your yoghurt, or 4-5 of the smaller berries per day (that’s overall about 3-5 grams of carbs). The rest of the fruits are pretty much out, unless you’re ok eating very small pieces of fruits, pieces that overall don’t have more than 5 grams of carbs (e.g. 1/4 of a small peach).

The kinds of plants allowed or not in a keto diet. When after a year you will move out of ketosis and you start adding the more carb-y veggies, still, never eat anything again from the “avoid” category (except sweet potatoes, parsnips and raw honey which are “safer” health-wise)

A tip: While you’re calculating carbs, you can remove the fiber from the calculation, so that gives you some more vegetables to eat. For example, if a veggie has 10 grams of carbs for 100 grams of its weight, but 4 of these grams are fiber, then in reality that’s 6 grams of carbs. So add more than 100gr of the vegetable in your plate! Yum, more to eat! Also, the suggested vitamins here will be beneficial (supplementation for loss of vitamins), while the krill oil stabilizes the mood. For people specifically on a keto diet, it’s important to also supplement with L-Carnitine (at least in the beginning) at no more than 50-100 mg/day, a substance that helps the body metabolize fat into fuel. Also, make absolutely sure that you cook mostly with pure coconut oil (MCT oils are imperative for mental health). Make sure your salt has added iodine in it, and that you do eat salt. Also try sea-vegetables for their iodine. Beet greens and swiss chard can keep a good level of potassium too. A few times a week you might want to take some fiber too (psyllium). Here’s a diet plan I put together, with additional info about Paleo-keto towards the end of the article.

Finally, cut off completely on cigarettes, recreational drugs, alcohol (you could still have a bit of dry wine every now and then), and definitely get off caffeine. Caffeine has some good effects itself, but it can send some people with mental disorders into a manic state. Herbal tea (e.g. chamomile) and decaf kombucha green tea should be in your future. If you’re an alcoholic, you must cut off alcohol slowly, so you don’t get ketoacidosis. If you have to cut down all these substances, then it makes sense to go for the plain Paleo diet in the first month, and only after you’re free from addiction to go for the Paleo-keto version of the diet.

Having said all that, be careful with such a diet, and always ask the permission of your doctor. Of course, most doctors don’t believe that a diet works for mental illnesses, because there are only anecdotal testimonials about it so far, no backing research (except for epileptic children). If your eyes are starting to get dry, add a few more carbs. There is also the danger of ketoacidosis, kidney stones (make sure you drink enough water), and constipation (follow the protocol here). Also note, that most people who got out of the diet had their symptoms eventually returned. A Paleo diet is not a panacea, but it’s a way to manage your problems, and eventually & hopefully (with your doctor’s approval), to stop taking these drugs that usually have so horrible side-effects, and most often than not, they just don’t work. But no matter what, always keep your doctor(s) in the loop!

Here’s how a sample menu looks like in a Paleo-ketogenic diet:
* Breakfast: 2 eggs, 2 sausage links, 2 bacon strips, cooked in coconut oil. Serve with a dollop of lactose-free cream, and drink a cup of bone broth, along water or unsweetened coconut milk. That’s almost 0 net carbs for breakfast. It’s best to eat within 30-40 minutes of waking up.
* Lunch: A small cup of a vegetable+bone_broth+sour-cream soup. 1 beef steak or 1 pork chop, fried in coconut oil. Serve with a big dollop of unrefined coconut oil, and a cup of steamed greens, or 1/2 cup fried mushrooms or other greens. Have some goat hard cheese with it. Overall, that’s 10 net carbs.
* Dinner: Green salad with olive oil and French vinaigrette. Two-three roasted chicken drumsticks served with cream or a big white fish fried in coconut oil. Serve with 1/2 cup of mashed cauliflower or a cup of other greens, bathed in cream or butter. Have 1/2 cup of your home-made probiotic lactose-free yoghurt, served with 4-5 small berries, and nuts & seeds from the allowed list, chopped. That’s overall another 15 grams of carbs.

Overall for the day, rounding up on error, that’s about 25-35 grams of carbs, which is low enough to keep most adults under ketosis, and high-enough to not be completely unmanageable. A considerable amount of fat is consumed, since that’s what’s running the body now. Don’t be afraid about cholesterol, as with the Paleo diet, the diet itself will balance everything out as of magic. There are a lot of myths about cholesterol out there, but there’s also rebuttal (1, 2, 3). Finally, you will feel headaches, brain fog, cramps, moodiness, and fatigue in the first 30 days of the diet, this is normal and to be expected. Do not eat more carbs to combat all this, your body will adjust to the new fuel eventually.

The most difficult part of this diet is of course to keep it up. Most people can’t keep it up for long. But if you can keep it up for 2-3 months, and then you see the benefits of the diet in both your body & mind, it’s up to you if you want to continue getting drugs for the rest of your life (drugs that very rarely work), or get with the program and find your inner peace. Maybe after 6 months on a ~30gr-of-carbs-per-day Paleo-keto diet, after you stabilize and heal, you could increase carb-intake every three months by 10gr or so, and see how you do (although it would probably help to not exceed 100gr of carbs daily in your lifetime). By adding more carbs, after a year you would be essentially doing normal Paleo, not Paleo-ketogenic, which is a great way to do maintenance for the condition. Think about it, and do your own research online. As importantly, start a blog about it, and share your progress while on such a diet! Spread the word!

Update Dec 20 2011: A new article, at NPR, about dieting and mental health.
Update Jan 6 2012: Coconut oil fixes Alzheimer’s.
Update Jan 20 2012: Positive effects of the ketogenic diet on behavior and cognition.

Note: Read on about how to fix other things apart of constipation too.

You might have read my story about battling IBS-D for 10 years, and how the Paleo/SCD diets helped me got rid the IBS menace & all sorts of other problems. However, about 2 weeks into the diet, my diarrhea had morphed into constipation of sorts. Apparently, a lot of people (with IBS or not) get constipated on Paleo/SCD at first, because they enter these diets with a badly altered gut flora. Eating “more fiber”, doesn’t really help.

But early-on, a comment on PaleoHacks.com made me see the light. The guy said something to the effect of “diarrhea is usually the outcome of some food that shouldn’t have been consumed, and constipation is food that should have been consumed, but it wasn’t“. This made sense to me somehow. Since my diarrhea went away after I stopped eating grains and bean lectins, it only made sense that constipation was here just because I was not doing enough to fix my terribly damaged gut flora. I was not eating everything I was supposed to eat. I was simply eating “the Standard Western Diet, but without grains/beans/sugar”. The part I was missing from the whole story was that there were other, ancient types of foods, fermented foods, that our modern society has completely shunned off. In the olden days, people were eating fermenting foods all the time. Even their bread was always hyper-fermented.

It’s been 2.5 months since I started the diet that saved my life, and based on this new information I was able to fix my constipation within a week of following the regime below. As my leaky gut heals (chances are you have one too, you just don’t know about it), bowel movements & overall health are getting better. For a month now I have one, firm bowel movement within 30 to 45 minutes of waking up (no matter if I eat/drink or not). It’s like a freaking clockwork. A few days I might have two BMs a day, but they’re always well-formed and looking healthy. This is a kind of healthiness I wasn’t accustomed to after 10 years of feeling like the shit I was over-producing.

If your condition is too extreme (I’ve heard nightmare cases about constipation — and I thought diarrhea was bad), give it at least 4 weeks on the regime below. For me the problem went away in a week, but then again I had already started Paleo weeks before, and my case was very mild anyway (I never had pain for example).

This regime might also be helpful for those with diarrhea who are following the mainline Paleo/SCD/GAPS diets, but somehow these diets haven’t help them alleviate their symptoms (because they might be battling mutated bacteria/parasites/protozoal/H.Pylori, which eat anything that falls into the stomach, not just carbs). In that case, add more carbs in to your diet (e.g. parsnips, turnips, sweet potatoes, beets) to empower your “good” gut bacteria, while introducing more “good” bacteria and competition using with the regime below.

1. Follow the Paleo diet. This is for now, and forever. It’s your new diet, for life. Get into the right brain mode, and accept the realities of why you’re sick and what you have to give up to get healthy again. The Paleo diet can fix, or make asymptomatic, a whole slew of inflammatory, auto-immune, gastro-issues, and even mental issues (e.g. light depression, ADD/ADHD etc)! If the mental issue is severe (e.g. bipolar, autistic etc), you might need to go Paleo-Ketogenic to see more change. If your auto-immune disorder is severe, you might also need to follow the auto-immune Paleo protocol (which also removes “nightshade” vegetables, shellfish, eggs, nuts, and all dairy — eliminating each for a period of time until you find the “offending” food). But just for constipation issues, the plain Paleo diet, is enough.

2. Make your own, home-made, probiotic, lactose-free goat yoghurt (recipe). Goat’s casein is more tolerable than cow’s, and being lactose-free is key because candida, a prime suspect for constipation, loves lactose. Cut down its food, while promoting competition to the “bad” bacteria/yeast in your gut with a probiotic yoghurt starter.

3. Use multi-probiotics. I personally take two pills of iFlora right before bed. If you were never breast-fed, then your gut flora has a bigger probability of being messed up, so you might need this one too. If you instead have diarrhea (and especially if you suspect Clostridium Difficile as the culprit), go for Florastor and alternate between them.

4. Start using some virgin coconut oil to cook with in addition to the rest of the allowed oils. Coconut oil’s lauric acid has anti-fungal and anti-microbial properties.

5. Eat RAW and unfiltered local honey (unless you’re doing a ketogenic diet, in which case you can’t have honey at all). This kind of raw/unfiltered/undiluted honey is the only real honey. The more bits of bee shit and bee body parts you have in there, and the more cloudy it is, the better the honey is. Such honey has major anti-microbial & probiotic properties. Prefer your honey to be local, because when you eat local pollen, you reduce your chances for spring allergies too (you will have anti-bodies). New Zealand’s Manuka honey is the strongest anti-microbial honey in existence, but it’s expensive, and well, it’s not exactly local.

6. Get the rest of your health up to speed, supplementing with some vitamins. Vitamins D3, magnesium, K2 and Calcium are important for everyone who’s coming from the Standard Western Diet. Years of leakiness in the gut means that you’re likely malnutritioned from malabsorption. Here’s a Paleo dieter’s amazing tooth restoration within a single week, using these vitamins. I’d suggest you also try a multi-vitamin (I personally use “Alive“), alternating with the D3+K2+Mg+Ca every other day. Maybe 2-3 times a week, when you’re not eating fish, you can also take some krill oil (which is a much strongest omega-3 oil than plain fish or cod liver oil). Unfortunately, supplementing is needed because the kind of vegetables/animals we can buy today were aggressively selected in the last 10,000 years for more sugar content, more eggs, or more milk — usually at the expense of their vitamins/minerals. Even the water we drink today is terribly poor in minerals compared to what the paleolithic people were drinking. In any case, don’t take as many pills daily as these supplements suggest, you don’t want to be overdosing.

7. Make your own probiotic sauerkraut. Unfortunately, sauerkraut sold in cans is “dead”, they contain no alive cultures. Same goes for natto (more difficult to make though).

8. Drink Kombucha tea, 3-4 times a week (or daily if you don’t drink other coffee/tea). Kombucha is fermented green tea. Some people don’t tolerate it well, but others thrive on it. I use the decaf Yogi version. Sweet-enough all by itself to not require any sweetener. Stop kombucha and any non-herbal tea/coffee when your gut starts working properly. There’s no reason to poison yourself with fluoride, when there’s herbal tea.

9. Eat a jicama 1-2 times a month. Jicama’s FOS-type sugars have prebiotic benefits (“prebiotic” is not a typo). The problem with this is that jicamas are mostly found in the Americas, I’ve never seen them sold in Europe. If you can’t find jicama, there are some other prebiotic foods to try too.

10. If you have to have wheat bread (note, grains are forbidden in all the gut-related diets), go only for the einkorn ancient variety, which contains a different, more tolerable kind of gluten (it has 14 chromosomes instead of the 42 found in the modern Frankenstein, selected varieties of wheat). Then, you must ferment your bread to make sourdough bread. The fermentation will help reduce the amount of gluten in the bread, since the bacteria will eat part of it. But honestly, avoid all grains. The more you cheat with non-Paleo foods, the longer the leaky gut takes to heal, and the longer your health problems will carry on.

Bonus: Drink enough water, and don’t forget to eat offal, and make bone broths. No, I don’t care if you think that offal is disgusting. It’s the most nutritious part of the animal. Muscle meat is like junk-food compared to offal.

Oh, and start researching for yourselves! All of what you read above is knowledge accumulated in the last 2-3 months, after spending hours and hours reading everything related to my problems that made some sense. From testimonials, to research papers, to science blogs. Don’t expect doctors to fix your chronic issues, this is almost never possible. For chronic issues, you need chronic, radical changes. There is no magic pill.

Good luck!

What can you and can you not eat on a Paleo diet? Here’s a rundown. This could be your first Paleo shopping list! We will be using all these items to cook your first 3 Paleo meals!

1 dozen pastured or omega-3 or cage-free eggs
1 pack of bacon
1 large pork chop (or fish steak)
1 beef liver
6 beef marrow bones
1 celery
3 big carrots
1 bunch of radishes
1 head of cauliflower
1 plain unsweetened coconut milk (get the diluted beverage one)
1 bottle of olive oil
1 bottle of unrefined Virgin Coconut oil
1 green salad mix
1 raw & unrefined honey
1 bag of walnuts or pecans
1 medium onion
1 garlic head
1 avocado
1 jar of olives
1 tomato
1 box of berries
1 lemon
1 apple
1 peach
1 butter
1 jar of mustard (if you don’t like it buy 1 more lemon)
1 salt with iodine
1 whole black pepper with grinder
1 oregano

If you spend less than 20-30 minutes in the sun daily, consider supplementing with vitamin D at about 1000 IU. Enough Vitamin D (also K2, magnesium & krill oil), along the bone marrow broths, raw coconut oil spoonfuls, and offal consumption 1-2 times a week, is one of the secrets of Paleo’s success.

Here’s how to use these products you just bought:

Breakfast: Fry two eggs in coconut oil with salt & pepper. Remove the eggs when done, add 4 strips of bacon and fry them until crisp. Cut half an avocado, peel it, slice it (reserve the rest in the fridge unpeeled, in plastic wrap). Serve all of that with 1/4 cup of berries, and a glass of coconut milk beverage, or water.

At 9 AM (once a week only): In a big pot (or slow-cooker) fill it with water, and put in there the beef marrow bones, two washed celery talks, 1 washed & chopped carrot, 1 peeled & chopped onion, 2 peeled cloves of garlic, salt & pepper. Cook with the lid closed, until 6 PM in low heat. Let it cool for an hour or so, add two tablespoons olive oil, and then strain the broth into a big glass jar. Drink a glass of that bone broth with your dinner (eat the marrow itself too, but discard the veggies/bones), and keep the rest of the broth in your fridge. Consume it within one week.

Lunch: Wash the 2 carrots and the radishes, and cut them in 1″ pieces. If radishes’ greens are in good shape & they look fresh, wash these up too and chop them. Place them all in a baking dish, and then drizzle 1 tablespoon of honey on them. Place the beef liver in the middle of that same baking dish (make room). Then add two tablespoons coconut oil, salt & pepper, and 1/4 cup water. Bake at 400F (205 C) for 50 minutes until soft, turning the liver a few times in between. In the meantime, wash and slice the tomato, peel and cut the second half of the avocado in pieces. Add these half of the the green salad mix in a salad bowl, and then pour on the salad some olive oil, black pepper, and half of a washed lemon. Toss the salad, and then put the used half-lemon in the still-cooking bone broth. Enjoy your liver with mustard or some lemon. Have a peach for dessert.

Dinner: Cut half of the cauliflower, and wash it (refrigerate back the rest). Boil it in lots of boiling water, until soft (optionally, add a clove of garlic if you like it garlicky). Strain the water out, add 1 tablespoon of butter, salt, pepper, and 2 tablespoons coconut milk. Mash the cauliflower with a potato-masher, or use a blender, until it’s pureed. Meanwhile, use a frying pan and add two tablespoons coconut oil in it, the pork chop (or fish), salt & pepper, oregano. Fry in medium heat until cooked through. To prepare dinner’s big salad: add the rest of the greens from the salad mix, some walnuts, peel/seed/slice the apple, and add them all in a salad bowl. Juice some lemon on them, and add olive oil, salt, pepper, and then toss well. Enjoy your dinner, with the still-warm bone broth & marrow, a few olives, and water.

After 2-3 hours of dinner, it’s time to sleep now. Always eat enough during meals so you’re never hungry in between, and never skip breakfast (or you WILL be hungry by 10 AM eating random garbage). There’s no snacking after dinner (or ever), and try to keep the food times constant every day. You can have caffeine-free plain herbal tea at any time though, and of course, water. Smoothies as occasional desserts are ok, as long as all the pulp is in there too.

Tomorrow, if you have left overs (e.g. roasted radishes), you can incorporate these in your breakfast instead of the avocado (microwave them to get them hot again). For your future shopping list consider eating all kinds of allowed veggies (some of them will be a new tasting experience for you), meat/fish/offal, and fruits. Mix and match, the sky’s the limit. Forget real desserts, and breads btw. Nobody should be eating 3 cups of almond flour in a bread/cake form, because you wouldn’t be eating as much almond normally (not even within 2-3 days). Overdosing on that stuff is not good for you, and it’s one of the reasons why grains are such a problem today (too much wheat or corn or rice in everything). Learn to live without these kinds of “processed or complex” recipes. Simplicity is key.

Article is updated below.

The vast majority of the reasons people go to the doctors are preventable. 25% of Westerners for example, have gut issues. Possibly another 50% is about conditions ranging from depression (1 in 10 Americans take dangerous drugs for it), to painful period, to acne, to asthma, to cancer. In my (non-scientific) estimation, 75% of all conditions that drive people to visit doctors can be prevented if these people were to go Paleo/Primal, and most importantly, if they were grown up with such a diet (most current adult patients can only be made asymptomatic on such a diet, but they can’t fully heal, while kids can). Think how much cheaper a free healthcare government program then it would be. Republicans wouldn’t even make such a fuss about it.

This is how my worldview changed in this past month, after my switch to Paleo:

Of course, having everyone feasting on game, pastured meat, organic & local veggies/fruits, and completely ditching grains & beans is not sustainable for 7 billion people. But this does not negate the above reasoning, it just says that we need to limit our numbers on this planet, so we can live healthy lives. Quality, not quantity.

More information on the leaky gut, that you most probably have without knowing it, here.

UPDATE: How to reset your leptin resistance (a master hormone that also regulates cortisol & insulin), and gain your health back (based on Dr Jack Kruse‘s protocol). It is what I follow myself. On this regime, if you’re overweight you’ll lose weight, if you’re underweight you’ll gain weight:
Rule 1: Never miss breakfast, eat protein with some fat. Avoid carbs if you can.
Rule 2: No snacking at all, but especially after dinner. Timing is important. Eat breakfast between 6-8 AM, lunch between 12-2 PM, and dinner between 6-8 PM. If your day falls differently, then adjust. Meals need to be spread out to give the liver time to use gluconeogenesis again.
Rule 3: Follow the Paleolithic diet explained below, for life. Learn to eat all kinds of veggies (including rare ones), and get used to eating offal & bone broths.
Rule 4: Supplement with a good multi-vitamin. The most important vitamins are D3 (the recommended value is apparently too low at 400IU, especially if you’re not going out in the sun much), K2 MK-4, Magnesium, and DHA/EPA. Eat fermented foods, or get a multi-probiotic, especially if you have gut issues.
Rule 5: Walk. Lift some weights occasionally. No need for heavy exercise.

Bonus: Meditation, especially for those with cortisol problems.

Update 2: The Paelo/Primal/SCD diet food list. Do not count calories, do not eat processed foods, read labels! And remember, Paleo is a diet to get your health back, weight loss is just a natural outcome out of it only IF you’re overweight.

- Drink enough water. Between 2 and 3 liters a day, depending on sex, age and activity.
- ALL kinds of eatable vegetation, from green leaves to roots, herbs, spices, tubers, mushrooms, squashes etc. Starchy tubers (e.g. sweet potatoes) must be eaten in moderation, and after the first month of dieting. The ones that are NOT ALLOWED are: potatoes, grains/corn/rice, beans/soy — and all their by-products (always read labels of products you buy). Regarding flours, you can use almond and coconut flour, but even these must be used rarely.
- Meat, fish, eggs, shellfish, game. Offal (especially liver), and bone broths must be eaten regularly. Try to achieve a 2:1 ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 by purchasing pastured meat and wild-caught fish.
- All fruits, in some loose moderation. Berries, avocados, olives are the most-suggested fruits, the rest of fruits must be thought of only as a “dessert”. Commercial fruit juices are not allowed, but rarely you could make your own fruit juice or smoothie. These must include all of the fruit’s pulp.
- IF you can tolerate dairy, you can have *goat or sheep* hard cheese and home-made probiotic lactose-free goat or sheep yoghurt. Unless you can perfectly tolerate it, avoid cow dairy (its casein is problematic), except for grass-fed butter/ghee and possibly sour cream. Unless you can trust your local raw goat milk, avoid animal milk altogether (coconut milk is ok, soy milk is not ok, almond milk is so-so).
- Good fats: Coconut oil, olive oil, butter, red palm oil, ghee, tallow, lard, duck fat, a bit of nut butter. Vegetable/seed oils are not allowed.
- Nuts, except cashews and peanuts. These two are NOT nuts, they’re dried beans (although opinion is divided on cashews)! All the rest of nuts are allowed, unsalted and preferably raw — in moderation (they contain lots of phytates and PUFA, so take it easy with nuts & seeds).
- Seeds (in moderation). Squash/pumpkin, pine, and dried watermelon seeds are very nutritious. Quinoa & amaranth seeds are grain-like, and so they aren’t allowed (they contain saponins), but their green leaves are good to eat.
- Honey. Must be raw & unfiltered when eaten out of the jar, but it can be a whatever-kind for cooking. You can also sweeten foods with home-made no-added-sugar jam. You can use pure maple syrup, but only in small quantities. All other sweeteners, including sugar, stevia, agave, and all artificial ones are NOT allowed.
- 99% cocoa dark chocolate, in moderation. Don’t worry, after 4-5 weeks on this diet, you’ll be eating such a bitter chocolate without a problem. Your taste buds will regrow!
- Herbal Tea of your choice, decaf green tea. Avoid alcohol & caffeine (especially beer, it’s loaded with gluten). Yogi’s “Kombuscha Decaf” is a great fermented green tea, chamomile a great herbal tea, and the Greek Mountain Tea is another great one for health (if you can find it).
- Salt of your choice (especially sea salt), but with enough (or added) iodine in it.
- Modern veggies/fruits are aggressively selected and the earth has lost minerals after thousands of years of agriculture, so they’re often poor nutritionally. Consider supplementing with a multi-vitamin one day, and alternating to a D3+K2+Mg+Ca mix and Krill Oil the next day. Here is a more concise vitamins and meal plan.

Special Note: If you are not doing a Paleo-ketogenic diet, you could eat lentils after 6 months on the diet, sparingly, but only after you wash them, soak them in lots of water for 12 hours, and then you thoroughly scrub them among them, using your palms. This technique can get rid off up to 93% of the dangerous lectins found on lentils. Using the same technique, you can then also prepare natto (remaining lectins in the soy bean will be eaten-away during the fermentation process by the good bacteria). Finally, green bean & pea pods are ok to eat.

When I left Greece for UK in late 1996, I got a bit shocked on the kinds of vegetables British were eating. Sure, I could recognize most, but there were some that I couldn’t. Even after reading their names in the super-market labels they didn’t really sound familiar. Parsnip, turnip, rutabaga (sold in abundance in UK) were completely foreign to me. When I married my lovely French husband in 2001 and moved to the US, I learned to eat a few new things (mostly mushrooms), but still not a whole lot.

It wasn’t until I started the SCD/Paleo diet recently, that I kept visiting my local Farmer’s Market, and I started experimenting with more kinds of vegetables, in order to enrich my now-reduced diet. So I have started eating quite a few new kinds of vegetables, and I couldn’t be happier.

However, while searching for the Greek names of these foods (mostly so I could boast to my mom who eats very limited things), I got literally shocked to see that most of these veggies do grow in Greece, and that ancient Greeks ate them in large quantities! It wasn’t until the Ottoman Empire took over the area and some local foods were simply forgotten, as dishes with different ingredients were promoted as fashionable. The biggest dietary catastrophe though came with the introduction of the potato in the early years of the modern Greek State. Its excessively starchy root was so addictive, that Greeks left behind all the other tubers!

Today, foods that were eaten for thousands of years before, not only are not consumed anymore, but Greeks are not even sure what their Greek names are! Some of them use the same name for different species, and some confuse names that belong to different foods! So I decided to put a list here, and I also edited the Greek Wikipedia about it.

- Parsnip: Παστινάκι, δαυκί, κοκοσούλες.
- Kohlrabi: Γογγύλι.
- Turnip: Ρέβα (some times is wrongly called γογγύλι).
- Rutabaga: Γουλί (some times is wrongly called ρέβα or μέγα-γογγύλι).
- Taro: Κολοκάσι.
- Cilantro: Κόλιανδρο (Greeks still use the seeds, but not the leaves anymore).
- Collard Greens: Κράμβη or λαχανίδες.
- Kale: Λαχανίδες.
- Rape: Λαχανίδες.
- Goosefoot or Lamb’s Quarter: Νένες, αγριόβλητο, χηνοπόδιο.
- Sea vegetables: είδη φυκιών θαλάσσης.
- Quince: Κυδώνι.
- Tarragon: Δρακοντιά, αψιθιά, αρτεμισία.
- Nettles: Τσουκνίδα.
- Cardoon: Αγριαγκινάρα.
- Arugula/rocket: Ρόκα.
- Savory: Θρουμπί.
- Garden Cress: Κάρδαμο.
- Watercress: Κάρδαμο.
- Beet Greens: Κοκκινογουλόφυλλα.
- Centaurea: Αλιβάρβαρα.
- Purslane: Αντράκλα or γλυστρίδα.
- Mustard Greens: Βρούβες.
- Hawthorn/thornapple: Μουρτζιά, κονδομηλιά.
- Gooseberry: Φραγκοστάφυλλο.
- Sorrel: Λάπαθο/λάπατα or ξινήθρα.
- Celery root: Σελινόριζα (Greeks only eat the leaves nowdays).
- Chicory: Κιχώριο or ραδίκι.
- Dandelion: Άγριο ραδίκι, αγριομάρουλο, γαλατσίδα, or πικραλίδα.
- Marjoram: Ματζουράνα (mostly used only as ornamental plant now).
- Sage: Φασκόμηλο.
- Mediterranean Hartwort: Καυκαλίθρα.
- Squash: Κολοκύθες (different types don’t have different names in common language).
- Mâche or corn salad or lamb’s lettuce: Βαλεριανέλλα (Valeriana crinii or valeriana olenea). Apparently it grows in the mountains of my home Epirus, and yet no one eats it or knows about it there?
- Many other kinds of berries are also not eaten anymore, while a number of wild greens that villagers would gather for “spinach pie” are close to getting forgotten since the knowledge is not passed down anymore to the younger generation. I don’t think most women younger than 50 years old anymore know what safe wild greens to gather anymore in my village. And we’re talking for at least another 10-15 edible wild species in my village’s area alone!

And of course, mushrooms (μανιτάρια). I really don’t know why, but most Greeks are avoiding mushrooms like the plague. Every time I visit Epirus there’s this collective FEAR of mushrooms. They wouldn’t buy them to cook with them, and most of them would remove on the side any mushrooms that might happen to be on their ready-made pizza.

Other vegetables, like dill (άνηθος), fennel root (μάραθος, φινόκιο), fresh peas (μπιζέλι), endive (αντίδια), asparagus (σπαράγγια), swiss chard (σέσκουλα), radish (Ραπανάκι), and amaranth leaves (βλήτα) are eaten less and less too! This is so disheartening!

Here is a list of new foods (originating away from Europe) that Greeks could learn to eat:
- Yam: Διοσκορέα or Γιαμ.
- Sweet Potato: Γλυκοπατάτα.
- Japanese Radish or Daikon: Ρεπάνι.
- Hearts of palm: Φοινικόκαρδο.
- Prickly Pear: Φραγκόσυκo.
- Jerusalem Artichoke/Sunchoke: Κονδυλώδης Ηλίανθος or Αγγινάρα της Ιερουσαλήμ.
- Jicama: Χίκαμα
- Bok Choy
- Avocado
And at least another 50 more kinds of fruits and veggies from around the world! But before Greeks move to new foods, I wish they RE-learn to eat their ancient foods that they have forsaken for rice, potatoes, and pasta!

Mom, I’m looking at you.

When I was on a very-low-calorie diet in 2006 (which cost me half my hair), I had constant cravings. I wanted chocolate, cakes, and white rice. I was never big on pasta, pizza or bread, but I loved my donuts, milk chocolate and Indian fragrance rice. So when on a diet, I’d go with artificial sugars or small quantities of high-caloric foods. But this was never satisfying. I managed to stay on this diet for 3 months, cheating every few days.

Now that I’m on the Paleo diet, things are different. Since Paleo brought back my health, I haven’t looked back. I do not crave donuts, chocolates, or rice anymore. I don’t give a damn anymore about grains and high amounts of sugar. I educated myself of their bad health effects and addictiveness, and so I now see them as the enemy.

Honestly, I don’t know why I don’t crave them though. I should be, but I don’t. I think that this is a case of mind power over body. I was willing to do anything to get my health back, so when I finally managed to figure it all out and subsequently become symptom-free, not eating certain foods for the rest of my life was a non-issue anymore. I haven’t cheated at all so far, neither I expect me to. If anything, I feel full most of the time just by eating enough. And I’ve lost 7 lbs so far.

Of course, there were times that my body was asking for some sugar (I was trying to deprive it from sugar on purpose, since I suffer from SIBO-style IBS), so these were the times that I’d simply eat a fruit. It worked every time. If instead I’d eat a teaspoon of honey, I’d feel guilty afterwards (even if the diet allows honey in moderation).

I don’t know if I’m the oddball here (or if I have a hypothyroid condition I don’t know about that makes me lose my appetite), but I’m not craving for any food anymore, except some fruit. So it made me MAD when I read two cases recently about two different women (one with diabetes and another one with IBS) who they gave up on their gluten-free diet because it was “too hard”, EVEN if they became asymptomatic with that diet. Here they have an easy, cheap, and healthy way to get out of a bad illness’ effects, and instead they go belly up selling their soul to the pasta devil.

As my husband very well noted the other day: “they’re just not desperate-enough“. I was. And it paid off.

Update, Sept 30 2011: I made some Paleo donuts today. Honestly, they taste more like cake than donuts, but they were actually very good. I had one and I couldn’t eat another. Too filling. In the past, I could have eaten 2 of them in one sitting. I had it with some whipped lactose-free sour cream (with added honey).