Oh Great Paleoista ... What Shall I Eat?

A little rant.

A friend once said that in the diet and fitness industry it is rarely what you know but who you know.   I'd have to say that on balance, I'd have to agree with that.  There are a few outliers and gems of course.  Whenever you wonder how so-and-so managed to get a book published ... think who they know.  There's usually your answer.  So it is, I believe, with Paleoista Nell Stephenson.  She knows Cordain through some route.  End of story.  No, I haven't read her book.  I do, on occasion, peer at her blog when it pops up on paleobuzz.

So it was this morning with:  OMG, OMilk is Omazing.

OMilks are nut milks.  There are four flavors:

Cashew Classic: made with Madagascar vanilla bean, unfiltered – enjoy this milkshake-like treat as an afternoon snack, meal replacement or even as dessert

Organic Almond: this is our most versatile nut milk, scarily close to the real deal. Use this on or in anything or enjoy on its own

Cold-Brew Coffee Almond Milk: We took our refreshing almond milk and mixed in a rockin' cold-brew coffee extract for a delicious summer pick-me-up

Pumpkin Pie Cashew Milk (seasonal): A lightly sweetened cashew milk seasoned with a blend of cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, ginger and more — like Fall in a bottle!

Unfortunately going to the website did not bring me to the ingredients so I'll take Nell's word for it that there is no dastardly cane sugar "lightly sweetening" the pumpkin pie variety.  Honey perhaps.  

But ... whoa up there!  Cashews?  Now ... cashews are a tricky one.  While the poor peanut is an easy no-go for the legume eschewing paleoists, the cashew is more difficult.  The cashew is technically a drupe that is attached to a cashew apple that grows on a tree.  Although called a nut, a drupe is more technically a seed ... if you're going to be picky.  Now while Cordain allows them, it's quite odd that he does.  Let's turn it over to another expert, Mark Sisson!  

... the interior of their shells are lined with a poisonous resin called cashew balm. Cashew balm is used in insecticides, so don’t go shelling your own cashews.  The cashew is, however, one of the richest sources of phytic acid in the nut and seed world, containing more phytate than almonds, hazelnuts, walnuts, and chestnuts. For that reason, I consider it helpful (and perhaps paramount) to soak your raw cashews before consuming them...

So there you have it.  Canola is from rapeseed and they make mustard gas out of that, grains are full of phytate, raw potatoes have toxic saponins ... Yeah but cachews are totes primal!  Just don't overeat them because ... well ... shhhhhhhh ... calories do count.  Which is why the prima doyenne of paleo these days, Diane Sanfilippo, doesn't allow cashews on her 21 Day Sugar Detox diet:

Cashews tend to trigger sweet-taste habits and become hard to limit, so they are out.  (Kindle location 974)

Sweet taste habits.  But macadamias not so much?  Apparently, these are OK on 21DSD!!  OK .... let's allow them.  

Almonds ... those are great, right?  Well not so much really.  Despite them holding up quite well in terms of consumption vs. benefit, if we pick apart the poor almond it's pretty bad.  A horror show once you add in the phytates.  It's a good thing that almonds share the universal quality of plant foods so cherished in paleo:  low absorption of caloric content.  (This is discussed here - you may wish to browser search on almonds).  

Almond milk, however, is low in everything so it should be OK, but apparently Paleoista hasn't read the Manifesto of one Comedy Central star John Durante!  Almonds are GMO folks.  

Bad, baaaad, baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaddddd.   

Ahhh, but that's not the impetus for this rant in the end.  It is because of what Nell signs off her post with:  

Now, do keep in mind that this would still be something to consider a special treat once in a while, or a good option for an endurance athlete to have after a long session, rather than something to chug down for breakfast each and every day.

Have you looked at the nutritional info on almond milk?   I don't know that I've ever had this brand but it's roughly in line with what I remember.  So even if you chugged a whole quart of the stuff, we're under 200 calories, with nary a carb in sight.   Even the coffee variety.

Is she talking about the pumpkin variety?  What could possibly even be in that to make it so dastardly -- a few grams of honey? 

No ... athletes only need apply for any regular use of this food (which differs from her paleo smoothie daily thing on Oz, but eh, it's TV and all standards go out the window then.)  But not just any athlete!!  Must be endurance (dreaded chronic cardio) athlete ... and only then after a long session.   

Because ...

We don’t want to lose focus on the mainstay of our diets being fresh, local veg, wild proteins and natural fats, but knowing this product exists for specific occasions is quite refreshing!

OK ... this has been bugging me for forever now.  This idea of fresh local veggies.  She snuck that in on Dr. Oz during both appearances.  She mentions it as almost synonymous with paleo.  I happened to note the URL of her nut milk supplier there ... Brooklyn, NY.  Now I know they're not getting their almonds and cashews from anywhere local, and I could have sworn Nell hailed from California.  That Forager's Market where she found this?   Also out of Brooklyn.  Hmmm.   I did a double check on the CA thing and this news report on LA dining paleo mentions two homes.  So she's been staying at her east coast home in NYC.   Guess it's easier to eat local when you have two homes in different climates, and I'm taking they spend less time in the NY home in the winters.  Perhaps she needs to live for a full year in NY because it's no small point that there would be no fresh veggies (except dastardly root veg) and only frozen with the help of modern appliances for the majority of the year. 

There haven't been local veggies here in the northeast in months.  Months.  And it will be some more months before there will be any.  The reality here is that we have fresh, "local" grown produce maybe 4 months of the year tops, unless you extend that with some early spring and late fall items.  Also, whatever extended seasons we have involve hot houses.  I'm getting kinda tired of the local movement.  It's snobbish.  It's really strange that the farmers markets in some big cities have cheaper produce when in season than you can buy in the supermarket Salatin chides we are all addicted to.  Also in more rural areas.  But here in suburbia?  Crap, "the farm" (and it is a farm, been there since I can remember as a child and you can see the stuff being grown and harvested) where we can buy stuff in the summertime is super expensive, sometimes twice the price which is already inflated in this area.  

Now I live where I can be in the boonies quite quickly in a car ... but ... there's that car thing.  While I don't live in a city, my area is quite densely populated, and I've made the point here before that even if "just" everyone from my town sourced veggies from the local area in season, we'd be in deep trouble.  It's not a matter of supporting local farms because they'd run out of produce and there's nowhere for them to expand.   So ship in from elsewhere ....  it's not local when you do that.  Ahem ... Brooklyn.  Which is in no way to diss the farmer's markets and such, but just to be realistic.  The Forager's Market website states:

In 2009, we even established our own farm in Canaan, New York to help meet our customers' demands for local produce and pastured eggs.

There's that word *local*.  WOW!!  By that standard, I went to college locally, as Canaan is not far from Troy.   Google maps puts the distance from Brooklyn to Canaan at 144 miles.  That isn't local, especially in the paleo sense before the wheel let alone cars.

So as "paleo" has become nothing more than a marketing term intended to imply  "real whole food eating", it seems that "local" has become the code word for something grown on a farm not owned by a multinational corporation.  While I am as cognizant as the next guy about the problems with "corporate", "factory", "industrial" or other "scare quote" farms, there are certain realities these folks simply do not want to deal with.  I'm happy for the person who has access to and can afford to live by Paleoista's standards for food, but what of the vast majority that can't?  For starters they get the guilt trip, then there's the "everyone can afford grass fed beef if they care about their health, why it's only $5/lb for ground beef".  I can eat my own dry age prime rib for just a couple dollars more than that.  Salatin lost me in one of those Croxton summits when he discussed the lawn area in the US and how we could all have chickens.  Oh yeah, that would go over well in my neighborhood!  Local eggs are easier to find but still.  

Then there's the notion of paleo and farm in the same sentence.  Agriculture.  Remind me the evils of that again?  But I digress ...  Oh wait, one more point, even the Masai consume the dairy but far less rarely the animal from which it came for meat.  OK ... now to sum up.

Nell, like every other endurance athlete, uses gels and such when racing.  Nell, like the vast majority of paleos eats her fair share of refined foods (yes, drinking food through a straw counts there).  Nell, like the vast majority of everyone eats foods that were grown/raised anything but locally.  Nell, like the vast majority of everyone else doesn't eat remotely seasonally.  Enough code words, kay?  Oh and 99.999% of humans aren't endurance athletes and yet the vast majority consume starch (tubers, grains and legumes) and sugar (fruit) as a significant portion of their diet and thrive.