I'm waiting on a new book, "The Primal Blueprint", and one of the things I noticed over at the Mark's Daily Apple blog was the Primal Blueprint food pyramid, it has a 'base' of vegetables, fruit, and then the next layer is the protein etc.

http://www.marksdailyapple.com/how-...imal-blueprint/

(scroll down to see the Primal Blueprint Food Pyramid)

This is very new-ish thinking for me, as I've still got that old Atkins mindset happening. I do eat vegetables, but had to really push myself to eat them at first. I hardly ever eat fruit. Maybe a few berries here and there, but not as a regular menu item.

That said, the 'base' of my diet still seems to be meats/fish etc. I'd like to go in new-ish direction here, and was just wondering what everyone here thinks of the Primal Blueprint Food Pyramid. Also - is it just my eye, or does it look as though the 'base' of the pyramid is skewed slightly in favour of more vegetables and less fruit?

What does everyone here think of the idea of making the 'base' vegetables and fruit?

editing to add: for the longest time, I avoided vegetables for the most part, believing they'd make me gain weight, and when I finally decided to follow Atkins induction and make sure that 'most' of my carbs were actually coming from vegetables, my weight loss sped up. No one was more suprised than I was. I *still* have a teensy bit of 'carb phobia' going on, as if a piece of fruit or too 'many' vegetables is going to mess me up or something. Seems silly, but that's why I'm asking for your opinions/experiences re: vegetables and fruit.

That's certainly not how I do Paleo.

I think for some people, vegetables can be fine - obviously in your case they have helped you. I would always be cautious about fruit though. In my opinion, eating fruit year-round is not the Paleo way, and regardless, I think the fructose and sugar alcohols in fruit can be a problem for many people.

I find that vegetables and fruits make a nice garnish for the meats.

i try to avoid fruit and nuts and eat a lot of meat, eggs, and leafy greens, but if i thought i could live well off of homemade mayo w/curry powder, i would do it!!!

I love fruits, always have, and it seems I can't spend a day without eating 2 to 5 pieces. Fructose tastes good, unfortunately. I eat vegetables and like them a lot as well, but meat and eggs are always the centre of the meal.

Whenever I cook meat in a pan, a dark green leafy vegetable goes in there with it. I probably eat more veggies than normal because I came to paleo from raw veganism.

Here are some examples of veggies dishes I make:
Garlic kale sauteed with meat
Spicy tatsoi sateed with sausage
Kombu seaweed soup with pumpkin
Austrian beet salad
Duck confit with celeriac "fries" cooked in the excess fat
Marinated mushrooms with pumpkin parsley puree
Fennel and orange salad
Parsnip scallion pancakes
Salmon with hijiki salad
Endive and arugula salad
Chrunchy oven baked kale with roasted bone marrow

My goal is to do at least one veggie recipe a day. Soup is an excellent way to get stock into your diet. I used to eat more fruit, but now do so only seasonally. I eat plenty of seaweed for the minerals.

I'm gonna start coming to your house for dinner! I want to eat everything you just listed but I dont want to cook it

I eat quite a bit of fruit and veggies, more fruit actually. I get stuck because I am too lazy to cook and fruit digests so easily for me. I know it isn't the best because I have a really hard time losing weight but I just always fall back on fruit and nuts. I have to really think about remembering to eat some meat everyday or I can go for a week without it. I eat eggs more often than meat. I love veggies but sometimes they are a pain in the butt to prepare too. Really if I wasn't so lazy I would try to eat more meat and less snacky food.

klowcarb, where do you buy your ground meat that you eat raw? Do you think you could do meat and water if you cooked your meat or do you think the raw makes it more nutritious? I really love the simplicity of that meat/water diet and I like raw ground beef but I am still a little worried about grocery store ground beef. Do you ever grind your own, or do you ever eat horseradish or something else to help with bad bugs?

Aimee Joe:

I just get my ground beef at a regular supermarket -- Shaw's. It is very fresh and tasty. I don't think raw is necessarily more nutritious--Zero Carb cooked or raw is just fine, IMO. I do not grind my own or use any seasonings.

I personally think we are too phobic about germs in this culture. I think we are stronger without always making everything so "clean." I feel so great on the raw ground beef and don't want to go back to cooked. It just tastes better this way, and it is more filling and I do find I have more energy from it.

But I came to raw after months and months of cooked ZC. Cooked ZC and raw ZC are both fine, and superior to eating any carbs healthwise.

I'm a believer. I learned a lot about microbes from reading Sandor Katz and fermenting my own vegetables. (I'm interested in fermenting meat, but it's a little trickier). That pretty much killed my fear of "bad bugs."

I don't always prefer my meat raw - I like a variety. I think raw meat can sometimes be harder to digest because the proteins are not broken down as much. Fortunately, I can have all that variety in one burger if it I slap a cold one on a good hot grill...

Boy, do these sound appetizing! Don't laugh, but when I first started out with low-carbing (not really Paleo-ish at all), I didn't really know how to shop for, prepare or cook vegetables much. Years ago, a 'vegetable' was canned corn.

Interesting responses to the fruit & vegetable question. I would have to agree that for weight loss, limiting nuts and fruit is wise.

Still haven't received my book yet (Primal Blueprint), but it will be interesting to see if adding even more vegetables and/or some fruit is going to cause cravings or weight gain. Hmm...really the only fruit I've had is a few wild blueberries or something like that, and only very sporadically.

Like Mirrorball - I'd say that meat/fish/eggs has always been the centre of my meals as well. I started out with standard Atkins, so when I started transitioning towards a more Paleo-"ish" eating plan, it was a 'lower carb' version.

One nagging question/curiosity I have - in hindsight, it is really starting to seem like it wasn't just all about "carbs", but rather - eliminating dairy, grains, legumes, sugar, artificial sweeteners and the like - actually made the biggest difference of all.

Anyway - it's neat to see the wide variety of responses here - thanks

That's my impression of the "false fat diet" of Elson Haas. But to that list I would add fructose. Most low-carb versions of history that I've seen say that the "diseases of civilization" appear in any society that eats more than 70 lb of sugar per person per year. Lots of these societies were carb-heavy before introducing sugar (and white flour), but the carbs were coming from grains and root vegetables, which have comparatively little fructose.

Interesting. I'm not very 'good at' Paleo (understanding the hows and whys), I just found that taking a more "Paleo-ish" approach works very well for me.

Ok - you've just reminded me of the Grandma approach. Seriously. My 94 year old Grandma includes fruit, but it was always a 'treat', and only in-season. Apples from her own tree, local berries in late spring, that kind of thing. It was (and still is) considered a rare treat to have a mandarin orange at the bottom of your Christmas stocking. Nuts don't come from a can or a jar, no - they sit in a fancy wooden bowl with a shiny, polished nutcracker sitting in the middle of the bowl. Kinda tough to overdo the nuts that way.

If I'd listened to her a bit more, I might have been able to avoid a whole decade of being overweight/obese, yo-yo "diets" and the like.

I think you're onto something capmikee - it's only my parent's generation that has so many 'issues' - and I think the food has just gone bad. Stuff like HFCS, trans fats, way too much sugar etc.

Although I'm not taking risks, I often wonder if restricting carbs matters at all. The Kitavans eat a lot of tubers and are healthy. Even rice and traditional fermented soy products seem to be tolerated by a lot of people.

I wonder about this too. I'm not really all that interested in adding rice/tubers, but ...I'm not totally convinced it all boils down to "carbs".

I think in the beginning, it counted for a lot. Some sort of 'de-tox' or perhaps healing one's metabolic issues via "low carb" definitely helped, but more and more, I'm inclined to ask, "Just what kinda carbs are you talking about?" instead of automatically assuming that any 'carb' at all is really bad for us.