The Archevore Diet

http://www.archevore.com/get-started/

The Archevore Diet - A pastoral whole foods diet that can improve your health by more closely emulating the evolutionary metabolic milieu and avoiding the hazards of industrial foodways.

The diet minimizes putative neolithic agents of disease, ensures adequate micronutrition, and may minimize food reward effects.

Go as far down the list as you can in whatever time frame you can manage. The further along the list you stop, the healthier you are likely to be. Earlier steps, in my clinical experience, will give more bang for the buck.

There is no counting, measuring, or weighing. Calories count, but why count them?* (Hat tip Ned Kock)

0. Get plenty of sleep and deal with any non- food addictions. If you're drinking 12 beers a day, or smoking 2 packs, diet may help but is hardly your first priority.

1. Eliminate sugar (including fruit juices and sports drinks) and all caloric drinks, including milk. Drink water, tea or coffee.

2. Eliminate gluten grains. No cake, cookies or pastries. No bread or pasta, whole grain or otherwise.

This rule pretty much eliminates anything that comes in a box.
White rice and whole meal corn products are reasonable sources of starch if tolerated, but not as nutritious as plant storage organs (root vegetables).

3. Eliminate seed oils - grain and seed derived oils (cooking oils) Eat or fry with with ghee, pastured butter, animal fats, or coconut oil. Avoid temperate plant oils like corn, soy, canola, flax, walnut, etc. Go easy on the nuts, especially soy and peanuts.

4. 2 or 3 meals a day is best. No snacking. You're not a herbivore. Whole foods prepared at home should be the rule. Low meal frequency is a powerful tool if you have weight to lose.

5. Favor grass-fed ruminants like beef, lamb and bison for your red meat. These meats have excellent n-6/n-3 ratios and their saturated and monounsaturated fats are a great fuel source. Wild game is good if you can process it yourself- but commercial venison and bison is too lean and is expensive. Eat fish a few times a week and pastured eggs if you like them.

6. Eat offal for the vitamins and choline- some fresh beef liver 1-2 times a week is plenty. Mix it with your ground hamburger if you prefer. Pastured butter is good source of K2.

7. Animal fats are an excellent dietary fuel and come with lots of fat soluble vitamins. It can work very well to simply replace your sugar and wheat calories with animal fats. If you are not diabetic and you prefer it, you can eat more starch and less animal fat.

Plant storage organs like potatoes and sweet potatoes are nutrient laden and well tolerated by most people. The soluble fiber in these foods is very likely beneficial, unlike the insoluble fiber in bran.

8. Make sure you are Vitamin D replete. Get daily midday sun or consider supplementation if you never get outside.

9. Fruits and vegetables - Besides starchy plants for fuel and micronutrients, eat a variety of different colored plants of whatever you like and tolerate. Think hormesis. Some is better than none, but neither big salads nor fruit to excess will save your life.

10. Get proper exercise - both resistance and "aerobic" exercise have benefits, including mental. Think hormesis again- the recovery periods are where you get the benefit. Lift weights every day or run marathons for "fun", but not for your health.

11. Most modern fruits aren't really just bags of sugar. That was hyperbole, people, a rhetorical technique. It's hard to get too much fructose too fast eating normal quantities of fruit, but don't make it your staple and don't go nuts with watermelon and agave, which are nearly pure fructose.

I do think a diet based on beef and potatoes is healthier than one based on granny smiths for most people.

12. If you are allergic to milk protein or concerned about theoretical risks of casein, you can stick to butter and avoid milk, cream and soft cheeses. Aged cheeses 6 months and older may not have beta-casomorphin and are good sources of K2.

No counting, measuring or weighing is required, nor is it encouraged.

I am agnostic on macronutrient ratios outside of very broad parameters.

Archevore eaters typically range from 5-35% carbohydrate, from 10-30% protein and from 50 to 80% fat (mostly from animals) but wider ranges are entirely possible if you are not dieting and you are meticulous about the quality of your animal food sources.

If you are trying to lose weight, really minimizing fructose and eating 50-70g a day of carbohydrate as starch is recommended. Skipping breakfast or at least no carbs for breakfast can be very helpful.

If you are at your desired weight and healthy, 20% of calories as carbs is plenty for most very active people.

Archevore diets tend to be lower carbohydrate than the standard american diet (SAD) because you can only eat so much, and eating animals gives you lots of fat. But it is emphatically not a "low carb" diet as you do not count anything, you just avoid certain foods that happen to contain carbohydrate.

It is perfectly acceptable if you don't gain fat with it to eat more starch and less animal fat.

Note that the 19th century categories called "Fat" and "Carbohydrate" are each broad macronutrient categories that contain both good and bad.

Saturated and monounsaturated fat is generally good. A lot more than 4% of calories from PUFA (whether n-3 or n-6) is likely bad.

For healthy non-diabetics, starch is good. Excess fructose (added sugar) may be bad.

In wheat, the carbohydrate starch is probably not the major problem. It is the gluten proteins and wheat germ agglutinin that come along with the starch that are suspect.

So forget "carbs vs fat".

It is neolithic agents of disease versus everything else. And consider that the way food is prepared and its cultural context (food reward) may itself prove to be a NAD.

Most Archevores only know macronutrient metrics in retrospect, as they don't target numbers just like wild humans didn't target numbers.

Your mileage may vary!

So eat what you want. This is simply free advice that has worked very well for me and at least hundreds of patients and readers. I'm not trying to save the world, as I find it generally does not want saving.

Note: The order of the steps is arrived at by balancing my best guess at the noxiousness of each neolithic agent or food with the prevalence of each agent in the north american diet and the effort/reward ratio of the step. If your culture has a different diet the order of the steps might change. For instance, Chinese who fry everything they eat in soybean oil and don't eat much wheat would move step three up to the step two position.



* If you prefer to suffer with a calculator and scale without trying this first, knock yourself out, but why not try it first? If it doesn't work, go to 70g of carbs a day and take out whatever foods you are "enjoying" the most. If that doesn't work, then you might indeed have to count calories. You might have lost the genetic lottery or it may just be too late.