CHAPTER 13:
MEAT, SEAFOOD, AND EGGS
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“My seven-year-old was diagnosed with PDD (similar to autism) at the age of four. He has always had behavior issues (screaming, tantrums, hitting his siblings, hurting himself), and I’ve tried everything I could to change this—including taking parenting classes, because I thought I was doing something wrong. In December 2011, my husband and I were introduced to the Whole30. Within just a few days, he was like a brand-new child! He woke up one morning with a smile on his face, was very compliant, and would even sit down and do his homework without whining and crying about it. We are so happy with the results of our whole family that we have continued to eat clean foods, and we rave about this program to anyone who will listen.”
—Nicole L., Corona, California
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Usually at this point, people start wondering what the heck they’re supposed to eat. We assure you that there are lots of good foods on your horizon! So let’s talk about the foods that meet all four of our Good Food standards—the foods that should be on your plate. (And it’s not just that these are the only foods left over—each of these food groups also has specific properties that have positive effects on your health.)
FOLLOW ALONG
You may want to download the detailed shopping list (complete with our “best choice” recommendations) from our Web site before flipping through this section. You can find it at http://whole9life.com/itstartswithfood.
Our way of eating is sometimes referred to as “radical.” (That’s the nice way of putting it—we hear “crazy” pretty often too.) But when you take a look at the foods we think make you more healthy, how radical is it, really?
We want you to eat meat, seafood, and eggs. You know—the stuff your great-great-grandparents ate, like beef, chicken, and salmon. You don’t have to eat liver and tongue (although you can if you want to), and we are not encouraging you to be carnivores. But including some high-quality, nutrient-dense protein with each meal doesn’t sound that radical to us.
We want you to balance that protein with plenty of plant matter—namely, vegetables and fruit. You don’t have to “juice” or take super-green pills or replace one meal a day with a smoothie—we just want you to eat your veggies. A dietary plan that recommends that you eat a wide variety of nutritious vegetables and fruit isn’t that unusual either, is it?
Finally, we’re going to include healthy fats in your meals. Not fast-food-cheeseburger fat, not seed oil fat, and not fake-plastic-butterlike-foods fat, either. Healthy sources of fat to provide energy and keep your metabolism humming. Nothing too crazy there, right?
As you read through this section, close the door on all the things you won’t be eating.
Instead, think about all the things that you get to eat.
Delicious, whole foods, rich in nutrition the way nature intended. Meals that satiate—leave you full, satisfied, and well nourished, not hungry, wanting, and craving. Foods that encourage a healthy relationship with food, keep your hormones in balance, make your gut healthy, and minimize inflammation.
Sounds totally sane and reasonable to us.
ANIMAL PROTEIN
The first category of foods that make you healthier includes meat, seafood, and eggs—all dense protein sources, without any of the downsides of vegetarian protein sources like kidney beans, whole grains, and tofu.*
You remember why we need adequate protein, right?
It’s necessary for growth and repair of skin, hair, tendons, ligaments, and muscles; helps you recover from general activity and exercise; and is used to produce hormones, enzymes, neurotransmitters, and antibodies.
THE COMPLETE STORY
Protein is made of amino acids. There are twenty-one amino acids, nine of which are “essential” (cannot be synthesized by the human body) and must be obtained from food. A complete protein is a protein source that contains all of the essential amino acids in useful proportions and quantities. All animal protein sources are complete, while most plant-based protein sources are incomplete.
Aside from meeting your physiological needs, protein is the most satiating of all the macronutrients. Upon digestion, complete proteins send signals to your brain that tell you to stop eating, as you are full and well nourished. Eating meals and snacks that include moderate servings of complete protein will help you avoid overconsumption, effectively stave off hunger pangs, and maintain a healthy body weight.
So what do we mean by “animal protein sources”? Here are some common examples (but not an exhaustive list).
Animal Protein Sources Examples
Meat: Ruminants Beef, buffalo/bison, elk, lamb, venison, moose, goat
Meat: Poultry Chicken, duck, turkey, pheasant, ostrich, quail
Meat: Other Pork, wild boar, rabbit
Seafood Fish, mollusks (squid, octopus, scallops, clams, mussels, oysters), crustaceans (crab, shrimp, prawns, lobster, crayfish)
Eggs Usually from chickens
Various: Organ meats Liver, tongue, kidney, heart, sweetbreads, etc.
Various: Bones Marrow, bone broths
BEAUTIFUL BROTH
While bone broths are not a dense source of protein, they do provide valuable amino acids not found in large quantities in muscle meat. They are also an excellent source of vitamins and minerals, including calcium and magnesium, and digestive-tract healers like gelatin (collagen). There are several delicious bone broth recipes in Appendix A.
However, not all meat is created equal. There are two things we consider above all else when evaluating the quality of our animal protein sources.
Here’s what matters: the way the animal was raised and the food it was fed.
Both factors contribute significantly to the health of the animal, the quality of its meat, and ultimately your health.
NATURAL VS. INDUSTRIAL
Animals raised in a natural environment and allowed to express their normal social and biological behaviors are healthier and require fewer medical interventions. For cows, this means they’re raised on pasture. For chicken and pigs, it means they’ve got free, unrestricted access to pasture or grazing land. Animals raised in a natural environment in a truly “organic” fashion (certified or otherwise) aren’t given growth hormones, preventative antibiotics, or other potentially toxic substances and have less exposure to pesticides, fertilizers, heavy metals, and other environmental toxins.
NATURAL SCHMATURAL
The term “natural” is grossly overused in food labeling and marketing. It is meant to imply that these foods are minimally processed and do not contain manufactured ingredients, but there is no legal standard. We are using the term literally, to define the environment and food supply these animals would have access to in nature.
When farmers take care to raise their animals in a natural, healthy environment, the animals are generally allowed to eat their natural diet too. This means cows and sheep (ruminants) eat grass; chickens and pigs (omnivores) forage for roots, seeds, insects, worms, leaves, and grasses; and fish eat krill, plankton, algae, and other aquatic life forms. Not only are these animals healthier, their meat is also measurably healthier (compared with the industrially-raised product), containing more vitamins, minerals, and healthy fats, and fewer environmental toxins. Since the animals are healthier, grass-fed, and pastured, they are also far less likely to transmit the harmful E. Coli bacteria through their meat.
GOOD-FOOD BUZZWORDS
Not sure how to tell whether the meat you are eating was naturally raised and fed? Look for terms like grass-finished or grass-fed, pastured, certified organic, hormone- and antibiotic-free, and wild-caught. If you don’t see them, assume that your meat, seafood, or eggs were industrially raised.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of meat, fish, and eggs sold in the United States doesn’t come from health-conscious small-scale farms. Instead, a full 99 percent of our farm animals are raised and slaughtered in assembly-line fashion in mass-production operation known as “factory farming.”
Factory farms don’t have the green pastures and red barns most Americans imagine when they think of farms. Instead, factory farms are large industrial facilities that produce food in high volume with little to no regard for the health of the animals or the consumers.
Factory-farmed animals are denied the most basic aspects of their natural environments. They are confined in tight quarters (often indoors, crowded together in pens or cages), with no room for movement or normal behaviors and with minimal, if any, access to sunlight and fresh air.
Because of their congested and unsanitary living conditions, the animals are dosed with preventative antibiotics to ward off disease. Depending on the species, they may also be given hormones to make them grow faster. Finally, their environments and feed commonly expose them to environmental toxins like pesticides, herbicides, and heavy metals.
The animals in our profit-driven factory-farming system are fed diets designed to make them grow fast and fat—and keep feed costs down. Their feed consists primarily of industrially-produced commodity crops like corn, soybeans, and grains, and includes such unsavory “fillers” as feathers, meat from other animals, and other animal byproducts and waste, like chicken manure. (Yes, really. Chicken manure.)
Remember that old adage “You are what you eat”? We like to take that one step further, borrowing a clever turn of phrase from author Michael Pollan.
“You are what what you eat eats.”
VOTE WITH YOUR DOLLAR
We cannot in good conscience support an industrialized, profit-driven, secretive “farming” system with no regard for its animals, its workers, our environment, and our health. We’d love it if all of you visited the Sustainable Table Web site (http://sustainabletable.org) or watched the documentary Food, Inc. and immediately abstained from supporting the factory-farming system. But we understand if that might be overwhelming for you right now, in light of the other challenging dietary changes we are promoting. Our simple hope is that you will continue to explore this issue using the resources in this book and begin to “vote with your dollar” sooner rather than later to support local, humane, ethical, and responsible farming operations.
ANIMAL PROTEIN STRATEGIES
The conditions under which factory-farmed animals are kept and the food they are fed make the meat of these animals less micronutrient-rich and more contaminated than that of their naturally raised, naturally fed counterparts. However, there are steps you can take to mitigate the negative health effects of eating industrially-produced meat.
First, buy the leanest cut possible, and trim or drain all the visible fat. Residues in factory-farmed meat (such as those from pesticides, insecticides, feed additives, hormones, and antibiotics) are often fat-soluble, which means they are stored in the animal’s fatty tissues. When we consume the fat from these animals, we are also ingesting these toxins. These residues can be hazardous to humans and are dose-dependent (the more you consume, the greater the potential risk). By purchasing lean cuts of conventionally-raised meat and removing all visible fat, you can reduce your exposure to these potentially injurious substances. But allow us to make one critical point.
It’s not about the fat itself.
As you’ll see in a later chapter, we’re not fat-phobic, and we aren’t suggesting you should eat nothing but lean meat. We just don’t like the toxins that come along for the ride in factory-farmed meat. However, if you’re eating 100 percent grass-fed, organic meat, it’s perfectly fine to eat a fatty rib-eye! The type of fat found in naturally raised and fed animals contains many healthful properties, with none of the contaminants that result from factory farming—and we believe that kind of fat really does make you healthier.
VITAMINS, MINERALS, MEAT
Hold on—you’re concerned about eating all that saturated fat, aren’t you? We thought so. Remember how we cautioned you against oversimplifying the nutrients in food? Well, much as dairy isn’t just calcium and whole grains aren’t just fiber, red meat isn’t just saturated fat! Many people think of meat, seafood, and eggs as protein (or as saturated-fat delivery mechanisms), but did you know that “meat” is also a dense source of micronutrients, some of which you simply can’t effectively get from plants? All types of meat contain the most bioavailable forms of vitamin B12, a nutrient essential for good health, and iron, called “heme iron.” You simply can’t get adequate B12 or this form of iron from plants—yet another reason to throw another steak on the barbie. (And, no, we haven’t just ignored your concern. We’ll cover saturated fat in detail soon.)
To quell some of your meat concerns, we’ll also assure you that we want you to vary your animal protein sources. We don’t think you should eat rib-eyes at every meal, seven days a week, even if they are grass-fed and organic. Different meats contain different vitamins and minerals, so the more you rotate the foods you eat, the better chance you’ll have of getting the full complement of micronutrients that make you healthier. If you don’t like certain types of meats, that’s OK—there are still plenty of options for you.
WHAT ABOUT EGGS (AND CHOLESTEROL)?
Two of the most common questions we hear are, “Can I eat eggs every day?” and “How many eggs can I eat?”
The answers are yes and a reasonable amount.
Allow us to explain.
The concern with eggs is usually in reference to the egg yolk, and comes from health-conscious folks who worry about their cholesterol intake. Generally, they’ve been told that eggs are cholesterol bombs, that cholesterol in their body comes primarily from their diet, and that cholesterol is inherently “bad.”
Let’s clear up some cholesterol misconceptions, shall we?
CHOLESTEROL DEFINED
Cholesterol is transported in the bloodstream by tagging along with structures called lipoproteins to form complexes of lipoproteins plus cholesterol molecules. We bet you’ve heard of these lipoprotein-cholesterol complexes, but you probably know them by their oversimplified abbreviations, like LDL (low-density lipoprotein) or HDL (high-density lipoprotein). When doctors talk about LDL or HDL, however, they are actually referring to the lipoprotein-cholesterol complex, which is more accurately abbreviated as LDL-C or HDL-C.
First, don’t take a reductionist view here—eggs are more than just cholesterol. They’re packed with protein (half in the white, half in the yolk), and pastured eggs provide more than a dozen essential nutrients, including vitamins A, B12, D, and E, brain-healthy choline, omega-3 fatty acids, and eye-healthy lutein … all of which are found in the yolk.
That being said, one large egg yolk does have almost 200 mg of cholesterol, and conventional wisdom says that since eggs are high in cholesterol, eating eggs every day will increase your blood cholesterol, leading to heart disease and stroke.
This is one example of something that sounds right (eating cholesterol = higher cholesterol levels), but isn’t factually accurate.
Blood-cholesterol and lipoprotein levels are controlled by far more powerful factors than the cholesterol in your diet. In fact, the vast majority of your blood cholesterol is produced by your own body: depending on your health and diet, your liver makes three to ten times more cholesterol than the amount that comes from your food. So what would make your body produce abnormally high amounts of cholesterol?
Overcarbsumption and systemic inflammation, that’s what.
When, as a result of dietary and lifestyle factors, we create systemic inflammation in the body, the liver is forced to pump out more and more lipoprotein and cholesterol in an attempt to manage our inflammatory status, fend off infection, and repair damaged tissues. In addition, when we are under physical or psychological stress, cholesterol increases significantly—because cholesterol is an important precursor of cortisol. (Remember cortisol, that “stress hormone?”) More stress equals more cortisol production equals more lipoprotein and cholesterol production.
So knowing that the vast majority of your total blood cholesterol comes from your own body, if your doctor says you have high cholesterol, what will have the biggest impact—eliminating three eggs a day or making changes to reduce systemic inflammation and avoid overcarbsumption, thus dramatically reducing your body’s own production of cholesterol?
That’s what is known as a rhetorical question.
STATIN DRUGS
Many physicians will recommend statin drugs for elevated blood cholesterol levels. Statin drugs work to reduce cholesterol, but how do they work? They interfere with cholesterol synthesis … and reduce systemic inflammation! Of course, reducing systemic inflammation is something you can do simply by changing your eating habits, thus eliminating the need to take medications with serious side effects for the rest of your life. That sounds like a better option to us too.
In addition, cholesterol is not evil—it’s a necessary part of our hormonal production and cellular structure. You need cholesterol for the production of hormones like cortisol, estrogen, and testosterone, to make vitamin D, to build and repair cell walls, and to produce bile acids and salts to help you digest food. It’s also critical for normal function of neurons (nerve cells), including those in the brain.
Which means our goal is not to get to zero cholesterol—in fact, cholesterol levels that are too low are quite harmful and increase your risk for a variety of disorders, including cancer, depression, stroke, and anxiety. No, the goal is to arrive at a place of appropriate cholesterol levels, with numbers that reflect a low risk for lifestyle-related diseases and conditions.
The thing is, that might still look a lot like “high cholesterol” on paper.
High cholesterol is not always an indicator of disease. As with everything, context matters.
A diagnosis of “high cholesterol” is based on measuring the amount of total cholesterol circulating in the blood. However, measuring cholesterol and lipoprotein levels, interpreting these measurements, and drawing conclusions about their cause and effect is complicated. Some biomarkers, such as elevated total cholesterol or high LDL-C, are associated with increased rates of cardiovascular disease. But that doesn’t mean that the cholesterol in the blood causes cardiovascular disease! In addition, while elevated total cholesterol may be an indicator of disease, it might not indicate elevated risk at all.
Say your total cholesterol is 230 mg/dL (230 milligrams of cholesterol per deciliter of blood). If you have no systemic inflammation, high HDL-C, and low triglycerides, you can consider yourself generally healthy and at low risk for heart disease, even though your total cholesterol is “borderline high.” In this instance, some of your “high” cholesterol might come from your diet, but that is not a problem!
However, a cholesterol level of 230 accompanied by systemic inflammation, low HDL-C, and high triglycerides is a totally different story—this can happen even if you consume no cholesterol in your diet. In this case, high total cholesterol puts you at increased risk for heart disease and stroke.
Context matters.
Measuring just total cholesterol is kind of like watching a movie trailer—it gives you a rough idea of what’s going on, but you need far more information to evaluate the whole story. A better big-picture strategy is to use cholesterol measurements in conjunction with other lab values (such as LDL particle size, triglycerides, and C-reactive protein) to paint a multifaceted picture of your overall health.
CALCULATE YOUR RISK
So if total cholesterol by itself doesn’t paint a reliable big health picture, what else can you use to estimate your risk? There are a few indicators that are relatively reliable. Low levels of triglycerides and high levels of HDL-C are generally indicators of good health, even if your total cholesterol is high. In addition, calculating your triglyceride-to-HDL-C ratio may be the most effective way to evaluate your risk for heart disease. Divide your triglycerides by your HDL cholesterol to arrive at your ratio. Generally speaking, the lower the ratio, the lower your risk of a heart attack. More precisely, a ratio of 2 or less is ideal, 4 is considered high, and 6 puts you square in the danger zone.
In summary, eating cholesterol-rich foods as part of a healthy, anti-inflammatory diet like this one is not problematic. If you’re following our Good Food recommendations, your body won’t need to overproduce cholesterol, which means it’s totally safe for you to consume some in your food. We’re OK with regular consumption of whole eggs—even if you’re eating five or six at a time—as part of the varied, high-quality diet we’re outlining here.
In fact, one 2008 study summarized: “There is no convincing evidence to link an increased intake of dietary cholesterol or eggs with coronary heart disease through raised blood cholesterol. Indeed, eggs make a nutritional contribution to a healthy diet.”
Maybe we could have just said that.
PROCESSED MEATS
One last word on processed meats like bacon, sausage, deli meat, or beef jerky. While these foods are certainly convenient, they are not always the healthiest choice. Bacon and sausage often contain just as much fat as protein, and if that meat is coming from the factory-farming system, that fat contains a whole lot of potentially toxic byproducts. As with all protein, the quality of the meat and the manner in which it was processed determine how healthy the end product will be.
Some observational research suggests that processed meats are associated with higher rates of some cancers—but the how is still unknown and probably has to do with the way the animals were raised and fed (in our factory-farming system). If you are going to eat processed meats, our same quality guidelines apply. Select foods from naturally raised and fed sources (grass-fed, pastured, wild-caught, and organic), and find brands that are minimally processed with ingredients you can pronounce. And as always, make sure to vary your protein sources from day to day.
BACON
While it may be liberating to think bacon is no longer off-limits, we still want you to think before you eat it. Bacon is one of those technically OK foods that may still provide enough of a flavor and texture “hit” to lead to overconsumption. If you’re trying to lose weight and recover from metabolic derangement, use bacon as a condiment, rather than your main protein source. (In fact, bacon isn’t really a dense source of protein for anyone.) In addition, bacon lovers must take the time to find a pastured, organic source. This is non-negotiable, as factory-farmed bacon is perhaps the least healthy cut of meat you can eat.