Great question – and something that needs to be considered more often. The two biggest methods of dealing with ADHD outside of medicine are Exercise and Diet. Although they aren’t a panacea, together they are 80% of the battle and create a solid biolo…

My sister is starting to wean her infant (9 months) off the natural nipple. She has been feeding him Paleo solid food up to this point. She asked me what to do with regards to dairy after he is weaned. I made a suggestion off the top of my head that high quality dairy (organic, free-range,grass fed, consider goat) would be ok during his youth as he is growing. I based this off of a Robb’s discussion (in the context of mass gains) about dairy having growth potential beyond basic nutrient content. After doing initial reading (i.e. reading Dr. Cordain’s essay on Paleo in infants), I realize I may have seriously misinformed her. Should the dairy be completely avoided? Are the negative effects greater than any benefits? I was just wondering if you Paleo parents out there have experiences with weaning, good resources, or any input on the matter that I could pass along to my sister.
I have no experience with kids and have no idea what infants are supposed to eat.
Thanks,
Jesse

My husband has been talking about going Paleo since reading Dean Karnazes’ book over 3 years ago (he mentions eating like a “caveman”). He’s a science geek (love it!) and he’s been doing research on Paleolithic eating for years…I got sick of hearing him preach about it, but not actually follow it, so I bought your book for him and finally got him to pull the trigger! Not only did I switch MY diet and his diet, but I completely changed our children’s diet! I feared the little carb monster in our kids, but I figured it would be better to treat it like a bandage and just rip it off quick in one fell swoop. We’ve only been eating Paleo for a week, and I cannot BELIEVE the changes in my children!!!

Our kids are 6, 5 and 4 years old (yes, I’m a rock star, I know) and they HATED veggies. My youngest, Alexander, at age 4 surprised me the most. Xander took to the new foods like a fish to water. This is a child who would not even LOOK at veggies without making the “puke” face. I sat, AMAZED, while this kids DEVOURED a plate of carrots with organic peanut butter! Later that day, he said that he wanted celery (CELERY!) with peanut butter and raisins!! This kid doesn’t even like to WEAR green, let alone put it in his MOUTH! I was so happy I almost cried….not kidding.

I’m having trouble figuring out what to send in their lunches though. I’ve been sending them off with apple slices, peanut butter, 100% juice boxes, carrots, hard boiled eggs etc. But I know they’ll get sick of that fast. My oldest, I’ve been sending him with some lunch meat…but no bread. I’ve been making steak tips, chicken and turkey over the weekend, and sending them in their lunches too, along with fruits and veggies. Do you know of any resources for Paleo Kid lunch ideas? I’m an avid visitor to http://everydaypaleo.com/ (I adore Sarah’s blog!) and she has some AMAZING ideas….but do you know of any others?

Robb, I can’t thank you enough for the way you’ve changed our lives. Though it’s only been a week, I can tell that this is going to be something special, and something my family will follow for the rest of our lives! (which will be much longer now, thanks to you!)

Cheers,
Ashley

I don’t care if you tan daily, if you’re farther north than say the Mason-Dixon line and it’s not mid-summer, eat stuff with vitamin D in it. Don’t stop at that puny little daily value amount either. Your skin makes many thousand IU of vitamin D under optimum conditions–eating or supplementing a couple thousand IU isn’t going to kill you, especially if you get it in proper proportions with vitamins A and K.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20171055

I’d be interested in your comments

So I am loving this diet the more I read and study it, and I have studied nutrition quite extensively as I practice energetic medicine and natural sports medicine on horses, equine athletes, mostly. But I also have worked with people and their health as well.

So originally I was under the impression that high protein diets contribute and can even cause osteoporosis, and then I dug a little deeper-and found this article

here is a great article- its not Paleo but generally supports the Paleo diet findings-
http://www.westonaprice.org/Dem-Bones-Do-High-Protein-Diets-Cause-Bone-Loss.html

on another note- I don’t see it mentioned here, and it may very well be in another thread as i am very new here- but the tables with the nutrition values do not specify organic or conventional vegtables, and fruits and meats, nuts etc. I also do not see the nut nutrition specified as raw or roasted, which are VERY different in reaction and absorbtion and by product in the body and nutritive value.
And as we all know the nutritional values of foods grown conventionally and even “organic” as our soils are SO depleated, can really create a very wide variance in these numbers. As well as what conventional foods are treated and sprayed with, irradiated, GMO’d etc..

Any thoughts or comments?

Lastly I also personally feel and have experienced the cause of overabundances of yeast, organisms and /or parasites in my system and in the systems of people and animals which can really affect how a person eats and the choices we make in food. These little guys have thier own consciousness, and switching diets to one that gives very little food to our little “friends” usually causes an uproar from them and we experience it as intense cravings and it being very difficult to be consistent with not eating the carbs and simple sugars etc. So I do cleanses often and also parasite and organism cleanses to keep them at a minimum and found it very simple to switch. Just a suggestion for anyone interested to look into.

thanks Robb!

Savannah

I was considered slightly pudgy when I was a kid, however that was in the 60′s – to today’s kids I look average if not lean.

How times have changed!

David-
nice place to start there. So, once your friend is elbow deep in the names of anti-nutrients, what;s his gripe going to be THEN? LOL, peopel are funny.

He usually loves meat, eggs, nut-butters, and fruit. The problem is veggies, it is just so hard to get him to eat them most of the time. He will eat some carrots or sweet potatoes, but not always, and refuses anything green most of the time. There are times it seems he will only eat rice. I really try to limit the number of times per week he gets rice, but it is really hard when he refuses everything else. The extended family doesn’t make it any easier.

I worry about the rice. I also worry about him eating so much fruit with all of the info about fructose being so bad that has been on the podcast recently. I think we are on the right track, but it is hard, and I expect it will only get harder as he gets older and there are more outside influences.

That said, we can agree on the obvious details like nutrient density. The mini might eats eggs and butter for breakfast with Dad, loves fish, kills a plateful of broccoli and will eat the ham, tomato and butter out of a sandwich and toss the bread. Lean by imitation!

Grandparents are the weak link, but I remember Loren making a point that also keeps me from getting all paleo-fanatical at home: Kids grow up in a world where they are exposed to huge volumes of Neolithic foods that are tied up in our cultural conventions, and will routinely come up against figures of authority and trust who will advise them against high fat, high protein, saturated fat, red meat, grainlessness etc. Having a little elasticity can let kids be kids and, hopefully, avoid both metabolic and behavioral diet-related baddies. Something to think about.

A couple of quick things: saw some research-in-progress from PNG suggesting that food allergies and disease appear in proportion to exposure to Neolithic foods. No surprise, but this was on mainstream TV. Good shiz.

I’ve been advising a friend on leaning out some. He came to me on ‘FatBlaster pills’, a herbal remedy and accupuncture. No dramas. Tell the man to eat eggs for breakfast, protein at every meal and as much paleo fat, coconut cream, and veggies as they can handle and suddenly he’s fielding text messages from ‘concerned’ friends, relatives and trainers.

Anyway, you last comment struck a chord with me. Why is it harder to help family than strangers? I’ve had exactly the same…failures I suppose…with my own family, where friends and work colleagues respond much better to my advice (fitness and weight loss). Can’t work it out, and it cuts me to the core…

I’ve helped a lot of people but my family has not been among them. It’s both ironic, and a bitter pill for me at times but it;s just how things are.

Our son Jax will be two in a couple weeks. We have been feeding him a 85% paleo (some gluten and legumes that Grandpa and Grandma sneak in). He was breastfed for the first 10 months or so of life, and my wife supplemented with at least 2g-3g of fish oil the entire time.

He has been “underweight” (according to flawed recordings of kids weights from a while back – when breast was not ‘in vogue’). Almost always below 10% – 15% of where he was supposed to be. . . Now that being said, he was in the 90th percentile for height. Yup, bottom 5th for weight, top 10th for height. We must be doing something right.

He just passed the 97th percentile for height (he is about 38″ at 26.5lbs), and I believe it is his diet. I know it is N=1, I am tall (6′ 4″) and my wife is no shortie either (5’5″), but he is half Chinese. . . and that has got to count for something.

He also started sleeping 12 hours a night at about 8 weeks of age. And he continues to do so, 12 hrs a night with a 2-3 hr nap every day.

All I know is that I expect him to have larger C&J and a faster 400m than me before age 10.

-jj

My only thought on the Vit-d is how low MOST people are. Life guard…we are kinda talking a different story, but obviously I’m making assumptions here.

maybe i had autoimmune issues. the whole scoliosis thing is weird since my 3 siblings had pretty much the same crappy diet and the same sun exposur, but don’t have scoliosis. i also did gymnastics, which i read may have factored in.

i will have to ask my student about her diet in the ivory coast, i just know she has a lot of soup made with goat meat/bones.

i lived in taiwan 7 years so i know that besides the bone-broth soups, they are heavy consumers of vegetables, meat, and seafood- more so now that their average income has gone up in the last 40 years. of course they eat lots of rice. i was super skinny when i ate their non-diary non-gluten diet. i looked like they did.

I would really appreciate the info on your clients who reversed osteoporosis. it would be of maximum benefit if i had a good idea of what they were eating. thanks for all the work you do.

Ironically “optimum foraging strategy” of a kind is the argument I keep getting from people as a dodge against Paleo; e.g. who has the time / money / opportunity to cook every meal / source grass-fed meat / grow their own vegetables; although I think they’re failing to optimize for health. Takes us back to your reply to Dawna regarding convenience.

So, when we look at the actual energy cost of obtaining these foods, Grains, legumes and dairy fail to match up again. Nuts and seeds play a minor but important role due to fat content.

Now, this is getting persnickety on my part, but you guys are looking for the full accounting, so here we go! If we added a few other qualifiers like “known allergen”, “suspected gut irritant” etc. and re-compare the lists, grains and legumes fall far, nuts and seeds maintain their at best, marginal placement.

Keep in mind, this is an amalgam of 200+HG groups. With some fiddling we can find a few situations with a borderline exception, until we consider the energy cost of those foods in the ancestral environment. Now, that may not matter to us as we can buy any and all of these foods from a supermarket, but it places these foods in their prober ancestral context.

I claim my $5K. (joke, especially as who eats only a few grams of grains / dairy as they’re more usually the majority of a neolithic diet)

Also I thought the main reason for recommending avocado or coconut oil over nuts and seeds as fat sources was the decreased omega 6 intake? I didn’t realize there are digestive issues too.

Not trying to be a pain here. Just geeking out on the details.

I’m also afraid you missed the entire point here: Your folks from the ivory coast do not consume large amounts of meat, veggies or fruit. It is not surprising they have adopted bone soups, but this is wholly unnecessary with a paleo approach. You are not consuming the anti-nutrients of grains, you receive more than adequate calcium and 5-10x more magnesium which is the counter ion to calcium and works to spare calcium in the body. I’ll post some before and after radiographs of clients who did nothing other than alter their nutrition towards paleo and reversed advanced osteoporosis. Both male and female, old and young.

By all means, supplement as you like, but the logic is flawed to look to people who consume the vast majority of their calories from grains for insight on what to do in this situation. The Pima of early America found they would avoid certain disease if they added lye to their corn meal. Do we then need to supplement our diet with ash? Absolutely not, just avoid excessive amounts of the problematic food and displace that with meat, fruit and vegetables.

i tried to do some research on scoliosis, and it seems the cause is still a mystery, but one source said being deficient in magnesium could be a reason.

i teach immigrant students and many of my students are from countries where they traditionally don’t take in a lot of calcium- like the ivory coast (africa) and china. these kids are consuming bone broth soup daily. while i am starting to prepare bone broth soup, my kids don’t like it (yet). so i have the older 14 yr old who loves paleo take a calcium/d supplement 2x a day and the other daughter who’s 12 still eats a lot of yogurt and drinks milk, but i still have her take a supplement.

so unless you paleo parents have kids who love bone broth soups, i say supplement with calcium.

You say “We have a meal plan built from the most nutritious foods available (lean meats, seafood, veggies, fruits and nuts)”, but in the rankings in figure 1, nuts are ranked lower in many nutrients than either grains or dairy. So why then are nuts considered more nutritious? Is it simply that when the anti-nutritents / gut irritant factors of grains and dairy are accounted for the absorbed nutrition is greater for nuts than neolithic foods, or is there some additional reason for including nuts.

I know the diet is from a hypothetical paleolithic diet, and so is based partly on food availability rather than optimal nutrition. I suppose the question is centered about how the data in table 1 should inform our current dietary practices?

But people already believe that vegetables are nutritious. Nervous relatives need to be convinced that meat is healthier than whole grains and dairy.

By the way, I pulled out CRON-O-Meter and played around with the diet studied in the second paper. By substituting 250g nonfat unfortified milk for 11g walnuts and 2g almonds, we get a diet with equal calories that still has sky-high levels of all previous nutrients, plus it meets the RDA for calcium. I think this new diet qualifies as more nutritious by the standards of that paper.

In lieu of $5000, I would accept a copy of your upcoming book! I’ve just started eating paleo and I’m looking forward to reading it.

The problem is that many do not keep expanding their knowledge or even question what is taught.
This was the article that I couldn’t argue with -
“Cereal Grains – humanities double edged sword” by Loren Cordain

http://www.direct-ms.org/pdf/EvolutionPaleolithic/Cereal%20Sword.pdf

What if you gave her the link and asked her to read it? And tell you what she thinks?

Mu kids have very little grains, no legumes and very little dairy. it is hard to cut them all out, however I’m going to try and further cut them down especially cut out gluten grains. They are just so healthy and fit and virtually never get sick and if they do it’s minor.

“The Food and Nutrition guidelines suggested are of great concern to me, especially for young students. As a Nutrition Educator and NSPA certified personal trainer I agree with eliminated processed foods, and limiting trans fats and added sugars. However, eliminating low fat dairy, whole grains and legumes is not considered to be part of a healthy diet plan even for a short period of time. There are too many health benefits of these foods to eliminate them from the diet even temporarily. ”
Unbelievable. I tried to talk to her and find out which nutrients she was afraid the kids would be missing out on and she couldn’t answer but would not budge. My own kids, 3 and 5 eat very close to paleo and thrive. We notice huge behavior problems following birthday parties where the are throwing back pizza and cake. Thanks again

great post robb! (even though kids are a loong way away)

I recently removed all processed foods and simple carbs from my children’s diets. Someone said to me, “It should be safe as long as they are getting all the nutrients they need” and that’s when it sunk in. They were certainly not getting all the nutrients they need from frozen waffles, goldfish crackers and pretzels. We are going full steam ahead and they are completely different kids in only one week. I know that sounds hard to believe but the changes we have seen are blowing us away. Paleo is the ONLY safe food to feed them.