If the primary goal of Primal Nutrition is eating nutritious animals and plants, the secondary or corollary goal is to avoid poisonous things. For the vast majority of human history, our biggest problems were acute poisons and toxins.
For example, plants that were incredibly toxic and would kill you or make you immediately sick after eating. Or meat and other animal products that had gone bad or hosted food borne pathogens that could quickly kill or weaken you.
In the modern world, acute poisons are pretty much absent from the food supply. We’ve had hundreds of thousands of years to figure out how to avoid the foods that are acutely toxic, and food safety laws, for the most part, do a good job of limiting exposure to food borne pathogens.
What we have to worry about, and what our ancestors by and large did not, are foods to which we have not adapted. Modern foods that were largely unavailable before the advent of agriculture, and that were completely unavailable before the industrial food system.
Avoiding poisonous things these days means avoiding the sources of hidden dangers in our food system.
Grains employ chemical anti-nutrients to prevent or dissuade animals from eating them. After all, grains are seeds, and for a seed to propagate, it must avoid digestion by an animal and survive to germinationl. These anti-nutrients include things like phytates and lectins, and even the primary proteins in grains like gluten.
These compounds won’t kill you over the course of a day, a week, a month, or even a year, but they can suppress the immune system, impair mineral absorption, and negatively impact gut health over the long term. Eaten as a staple food, grains can make the diet less nutritious than it appears on paper, and it can result in nutrient deficiencies, poor growth, and impaired vitality.
The grains to limit, in order from worst to least bad:
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Wheat: Wheat is the richest source of gluten in the diet, and even if you aren’t celiac or gluten-sensitive, there’s evidence that it triggers zonulin—the compound that opens up the gut to invaders.
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Ancient wheats like emmet, spelt, korasan: The more ancestral forms of wheat don’t have all the same issues as modern dwarf wheat. They contain less gluten, and the gluten they contain isn’t as pernicious to the gut lining. They often are produced in a more organic manner that uses fewer pesticides. And since they retain the deeper root systems, they tend to be richer in minerals.
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Rye and barley: Rye and barley both contain gluten, but it’s a weaker, less potent form of the gluten found in wheat.
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Millet: Millet is an ancient grain with a long history of use by humans, albeit one with anti-thyroid effects. In fact, in vivo studies show that eating normal amounts of millet can elicit anti-thyroid effects similar to anti-thyroid pharmaceuticals.
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Oats: Oats aren’t the worst kind of grain, nor are they the best. Oats do have high levels of phytic acid, which can inhibit mineral absorption if you rely too much on it, but it also has some beneficial attributes like beta-glucan.
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Corn: Corn isn’t the worst. Just make sure to eat nixtamalized or sprouted corn when possible.
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Rice: Rice is fairly innocuous. White rice especially has little to no anti-nutrients and is a nice source of pure carbohydrate (if you need that sort of thing). Good for replenishing glycogen after hard workouts.
Refined sugar is another. In nature, in whole foods, sugar comes attached to nutrients and other compounds that aid and maintain our ability to metabolize sugar. The phytonutrients in fruits, the fiber in fruits, minerals like magnesium and potassium, improve glucose tolerance and help us process sugar and remain insulin sensitive.
For tens of thousands of years, we didn’t eat sugar without these accompanying nutrients, vitamins, minerals, and fiber. It simply wasn’t available.
That’s why, in modern clinical trials, people have vastly different metabolic responses to honey, which is a whole food source of sugar, versus white sugar, which is a refined sugar stripped of all nutrients. That’s why a piece of fruit is very different from a bottle of Coke. Heck, that’s why a glass of orange juice is very different from a glass of Coke. Even though the orange juice has just as much sugar as Coke, it also comes with phytonutrients and vitamins and minerals that change the metabolic consequences of consuming it.
Industrial seed oils represent perhaps the biggest change to the human dietary landscape in the last 10,000 years with the introduction and wholesale replacement of traditional animal fats with industrial seed oils. The fat we eat is used to build our cell membranes. The fat we eat literally determines the structure of our bodies, and a body built out of seed oils is very different from a body built out of traditional fats. Cells made of polyunsaturated linoleic acid found in industrial seed oils are more prone to oxidative damage and more prone to mitochondrial dysfunction, which means we can’t generate enough ATP to power the cells of our bodies. And our tissue’s composition of highly unsaturated fats helps determine our inflammatory response. If we eat too many industrial seed oils and have highly unsaturated omega-6-rich tissues, the result is a more inflammatory baseline.
Industrial seed oils are not just prone to oxidation in the body but also in the kitchen. Most restaurants use seed oils extensively in their deep fryers, in their pans, and in their sauces and dressings. The processed food industry also loads their products with seed oils because they’re cheap, they make food taste good, and they promote the formation of endocannabinoids that make us crave more junk food.
In nature, in whole foods, concentrated sources of linoleic acid come with antioxidant nutrients and vitamins, like vitamin E, that protect the fragile fats from oxidizing and going rancid. But once you turn those seeds into a slurry that you treat with hexane and other solvents to extract the oil, you produce a fragile source of concentrated linoleic acid that is prone to oxidizing, either in the kitchen or in your cells.
It’s also worth noting that most wild animals we evolved consuming were lower in linoleic acid than modern animals like poultry, pork, and farmed fish. The concentrated dose of linoleic acid found in seed oils and processed foods made with seed oils are an evolutionary anomaly we simply aren’t equipped to handle.
The oils to avoid:
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Soybean oil
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Sunflower/safflower oil
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Canola/rapeseed oil
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Grapeseed oil
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Rice bran oil
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Cottonseed oil
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Peanut oil
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* This blog reflects my personal views and opinions and isn’t intended as medical advice, but I hope it will be informative and inspiring as you pursue a healthy, fulfilling life.
