Technically corn is a grain, so I’m being a bit redundant.  Corn however holds a special place in the hearts of Paleo adherents as a grain to be avoided because of how heavily modified corn has gotten in the last century or so.  While all plants that we have domesticated have been radically transformed in order to better serve us, corn has dominated our food system more for the last 75 years than it has at any other time in history.  We have never consumed more corn per capita than we have today.  You don’t recall the last time you ate corn?  That doesn’t matter.  In fact most of the corn you eat isn’t as corn proper.  There will be corn in certain dishes, or cornmeal used in the preparation of some prepared foods.  However it is really in the form of corn starches and corn syrups that most of our corn consumptions come from.  Corn is the “C” in HFC (high fructose corn syrup).  You recognize that evil acronym but won’t be seeing it much longer as the corn lobby has successfully convinced people that “corn sugar” is both more “accurate” and more marketable.

Why are they called nuts?  Actually, nobody really knows.  Alternative names for peanuts back in history are “ground nut” or “ground pea.”  They sort of look like pea plants while they are growing but then they produce a nut like product, so did “ground pea” and “ground nut” become a “pea nut” hence “peanut”?  That’s really one lost to history.  It’s a domesticated food that is native to the Americas, which European settlers started taking a liking to in their gardens as they populated the new world.

When the vision of a healthy diet is conjured in ones head one of the first things that come up (after whole grains and vegetables) are beans.  Many people, especially in the vegetarian movement, believe that beans are a great source of nutrients and an all around healthy food.  It will come as a bit of a shock to someone from that mindset that the Paleo community is one hundred percent against the consumption of beans and legumes without exception.  Their reasons for this are because of what they consider to be a poorer nutrient to calorie ratio and chemicals in them that cause problems in people.

Eggs are a rather universal food amongst omnivores and carnivores.  They are nutrient dense little packages that are easy to consume, and in our cases store and transport.  It’s therefore no coincidence that eating eggs is a rather standard part of human diets in regions all over the planet where interactions with birds is common.  While there is no specification on the species of bird eggs to eat, you are probably going to most likely be encountering chicken eggs at the store.

Nuts are really good source of vitamins and minerals, but they are also very calorie dense little packages.  That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t eat them, but that we should be conscious of how we are eating them.  Before we get started, we want to make sure we talk about the one nut that is in many things that isn’t on the list: peanuts.

Fish and shellfish are a big part of diets throughout the world, and it is also a potential big source of nutrition in a Paleo diet.  There is no real prescription on the types of fish to eat in the diet in general.  As with the eggs it’s preferable that in most cases you go to a wild caught source of your fish versus farm raised.  There are some types of shellfish you can eat farm raised that may not have any difference in nutrition, like oysters and mussels.  However fish like salmon and tilapia often have a very different nutritional profile when you buy farm raised over wild caught.

I saved the most obvious for last, but probably also the first one everyone thinks of when it comes to the Paleo diets: meat.  With almost Pavlovian like repetition the one thing that I see about the Paleo diet, but both supporters and detractors alike, is the bacon orgy marketing message.  After years of being scared away from eating full fat bacon the simplified Paleo message that resonates the loudest is often the “You Can’t Eat Too Much Bacon” message.  That’s both overly simplified and not exactly correct either.

This is the first of a series of articles about the dos and don’ts of Paleo eating, as is commonly pitched in the Paleo Community at the time of my experiment.  I’ve been over the general principles in the past, but for those that want a really quick introduction to the foundation of the diet, I would recommend the Food Guide over at Paleo Plan. To start things off on a positive note, I figured we’d talk about what we can eat versus what we can’t.