Paleo Cure

This review was originally featured on AncestralizeMe.com.Chris Kresser has finally written a book, and it could very well be the last nutrition book you ever buy.Alright, that might be a stretch, since our knowledge about nutrition is always evolving and who knows what we'll understand even a year from now. But as far as evidence- and experience-based recommendations go, Your Personal Paleo Code will definitely be tough to beat when it comes to future books on nutrition.Your Personal Paleo Code is unlike any other diet book out there, for these reasons:1. It's not a one-size-fits-all diet.Unlike many other diet books out there, Your Personal Paleo Code doesn't recommend one diet for everyone. Sure, the 30-Day Reset component reduces most readers' diets down to the bare basics, but once Step 2 is reached, customization is the name of the game. Chris's book may be the only "Paleo" book that permits readers to reintroduce gray-area foods like full fat dairy and properly prepared grains.Yep, I just said grains and dairy. After all, while a 100% grain-free dairy-free diet may be useful for certain people, it's unnecessarily restrictive for many others. Readers who have good digestion, moderate to high activity levels, and limited health considerations may find that including properly prepared grains not only has no negative impact, but may even support their health and increase their dietary variety. If you love gourmet cheese, the occasional ice cream treat, soaked oatmeal, and even homemade sourdough bread, Chris teaches you how to determine if these foods deserve a place in your diet. After all, Chris emphasizes the 80/20 rule of nutrition, and if you can enjoy these formerly forbidden foods with no health repercussions, there's no reason to indefinitely avoid these traditional foods, especially since some of them do have health-promoting effects.2. It helps you set your priorities.One of the hardest parts about changing your diet, especially if you're fairly health conscious already, is it's hard to prioritize the changes you make. Perhaps you're already pretty compliant with Paleo, but you're still struggling with health concerns. So now what? Do you add more carbs, or restrict them further? Eliminate eggs? Add dairy? Cut back on red meat? Reduce your cruciferous vegetable consumption? It's enough to make your head spin, and can be overwhelming for someone who's not a nutrition expert.That's why Your Personal Paleo Code is a great addition to anyone's health book collection, especially those who have already gotten on board with an ancestral diet but are still struggling with nagging health problems that aren't going away. Perhaps the one-size-fits-all Paleo diet isn't what you need to be optimally healthy, but you're not sure what to do to make your diet more personalized. You can use the quizzes included in many of the chapters to help determine if a certain area should be a priority for you. There's an entire chapter dedicated to fine-tuning your diet, including determining appropriate caloric intake, macronutrient ratios, and helpful supplementation. The book provides guidelines for athletes, pregnant women, those who are significantly overweight, those with specific health conditions, and more. Whoever you are, you can use Your Personal Paleo Code to determine what and how to eat to support your best health in your current stage of life.3. Chris understands there's more to health than food.There's a reason why Your Personal Paleo Code doesn't have the word "diet" in the title: this book is so much more than a book about nutrition. There are six chapters that solely focus on factors unrelated to diet that have a strong influence on your health, such as sleep, stress, socialization, play, and more. Chris acknowledges the importance of these factors and strongly recommends attending to them, perhaps even at the expense of following a "perfect" diet.These chapters contain quizzes that will demonstrate if these behavior-related issues should be priorities for you. Perhaps your diet is perfectly healthy, but you sacrifice social interaction because you're concerned about being exposed to unhealthy food. While noble, this is certainly not a healthy (or enjoyable) way to live, and Chris's book gives recommendations on how to nurture your social relationships without completely derailing your diet. Perhaps you're an internet junkie, so in between eating grass-fed beef and doing Crossfit workouts, you're parked in front of a screen most of the day: for you, Chris has included an entire chapter on increasing your outdoors time. I'm willing to bet there isn't a single person who couldn't benefit from reading Chris's book, no matter how healthy you think you are, or how complete you believe your health knowledge to be. I've certainly learned a great deal from it myself!4. The book doesn't end on the last page!This is probably my favorite feature of Your Personal Paleo Code - the bonus chapters and additional resources featured online, completely free to book buyers. It's like a buy-one-get-one-free deal! The bonus chapters include recommendations for high blood pressure, high cholesterol, thyroid disease, adrenal fatigue, and more. The additional resources include cheat sheets that help you implement the changes recommended in the book, as well as hundreds of links to products, services, and resources that can help you get the food you need for your new diet, the gear that can help you get fit or sleep better, and the programs that can help you manage your stress or sleep better. It's like an encyclopedia for healthy living! Chris doesn't tell you how to live your life and then leave you hanging; rather, he makes evidence-based recommendations for purposeful changes to make, and then helps you make these recommendations a reality in your life. With Your Personal Paleo Code, there's nothing standing between you and your healthiest life.I could continue writing reason after reason why Your Personal Paleo Code is such a great book, but I think you get the picture. If you're looking to start 2014 on the right foot, make sure you know which steps you should be taking. Let Chris's new book guide you to optimal health!

Overall the book is a bit rambly, with the typical "personal antectdotes" that can't really be scientifically reviewed from his own patients and personal history. He cites studies to prove his points, but often proves contradictory points, and I can guarantee you there's a study to support pretty much everything. I appreciate that he quotes Weston A. Price but I find it interesting that he glosses over the groups Weston A. Price studied that ate rye as a significant part of their diets. He writes it off as "genetics" but concludes that gluten is still evil (despite a long human history of us consuming it...). He also has chapters on stress management, sleep, etc... and while they are interesting, there are whole books written on these topics that do a much better job of addressing them. I appreciate he included them in the book as a "whole body" notion of health, but I certainly did not find them helpful nor realistic. For instance, he suggests making your workplace "Paleo" by alternating between a standing desk, a treadmill desk, a yoga ball, and a balance thingy in your office chair... soooooo... that all sounds pretty complicated and I don't think he's really thought this through. If it's what he does at home, I really don't know how he gets any work done always worrying about how he's sitting at his desk.I purchased this book because I've been following the "Primal Blueprint" version of Paleo for 3 years to lose weight and I have been having issues in the past year. I started Paleo at 180 and managed to get down to 160 with Intermittent Fasting and extremely low carb, but I started gaining weight again about a year later and having other physical problems (low energy, loss of appetite, severe muscle cramps). I've read Kresser's blog for awhile and thought his book might offer a more reasonable solution. I think if I'd started on this book instead of the Primal Blueprint, I would have been better off. I like that he suggests going on a 30 day detox diet and then slowly introducing things back in (including grains and dairy) to see if you can tolerate them. I learned that my issues are basically due to not eating enough carbs and increasing my carbs has improved most of my symptoms.However, the whole point I was avoiding grains is because I was trying to eat low carb. If I'm not eating low carb, then why should I avoid grains, especially if historically I've never had issues with them? Kresser provides a list of foods by nutritient density.. yet he recommends tapioca, plantain, and potatoes as sources of carbs and starch over whole grains. If you're baking a gluten free pie crust and you use tapioca and plantain flour (which is what I used to do) you are getting significantly less nutritional value and more of a blood sugar spike than if you just used sprouted whole wheat. Furthermore, not having gluten to hold your crust together is a real pain. Unless you really have an issue with gluten, I think it's just silly to label it as "the devil" and say "never eat this"! He ignores the fact that many people who have "gluten sensitivity" due to "leaky gut" are actually able to eat it just fine after taking a year to heal their gut through a detox diet like Paleo. Finally his logic is just broken when he admits a majority of the population doesn't have any issue with gluten yet you should avoid it anyways "just to be safe". By that logic, I guess we should all also avoid nightshades, nuts, peanuts, and shellfish because way more people have legitimate allergies to those things than gluten.And then there's magnesium. And sodium. He talks about it briefly, but doesn't go into enough detail. One of the things that helped my symptoms was taking a magnesium supplement. Most of my muscle pain went away.And anyone who's been on low-carb knows, you need more salt when you start out, and in general. If you feel sick, eat more salt. He doesn't even touch on that.He mentions the whole "correctly prepared grains" thing but doesn't go into much detail because, per the Paleo Religion, you shouldn't be eating them anways. He doesn't even talk about how fermentation changes the structure of gluten and improves overall digestability. His argument is that grains have such little nutrient density we shouldn't eat them anyways but fails to mention that yuca fries have significantly less nutritional value than a stack of whole wheat sourdough pancakes.. oh but wait they have "resistant starch" which is a "prebiotic" which our gut flora need to survive... err.. sure dude, sure..The thing that drives me nuts (besides the demonization of gluten) in the Paleo community is this argument that once we became agrarian our physical health changed, therefore the agrarian sedentary lifestyle was bad. Alright people, there are anthropologists spending whole doctorates on portions of this bold statement to determine the reason for this. I don't buy it. First off you have to ask what caused the shift to agrarian sedentary, if life was so great as hunter gatherers, tons of theories on this one. THEORIES. And the author makes barely a mention to the fact that human health in Europe in particular for the working class in the mid-victorian period was SUPERB. Guess what they ate? half their diet was oats and whole wheat. Oh right and that Weston A. Price guy he likes to selectively quote... again.. no nutrient deficient people in sedentary agrarian communities that ate whole grains as half their diet.Finally, he presents his "menus"... alright diet book authors, this drives me nuts. These menus are ridiculous requiring a person to spend a fortune at the grocery store and literally cook from scratch 3 meals a day plus snacks. There's no sense of using leftovers or reusable ingredients. Furthermore most of us work in an office and have to take lunch to work... suggesting things that aren't really packable, again, not realistic.So like I said, I think this book is better than the other Paleo stuff out there because he does try to take a fair and balanced approach and suggests ways to determine if things are working for you or not. That being said, it still has the strong religious undertones of the Paleo Diet. If you're trying to treat an illness, I think this book could be a very helpful starting point. I argue it's very incomplete because many of the dots aren't connected and many of the ideas aren't fully developed nor logically consistent. I would argue that he hasn't actually tested some of these things with real people in real settings despite his antectdotes (the reality of an implementation is much different than the patient's account of how they did something). I also didn't like how he kept referring to "the bonus chapter on his website" and "see my website for more info on this". I bought your damn book, please include it as an appendix.

This book is a duplicate book by Chris Kresser 'Your Personal Paleo Diet'. Only the titles differ. It would be helpful if a note was made of this for buyers to avoid disappointment.

This is a book like no other. Chris Kresser has poured over every bit of research and is constantly critically appraising new research (see his website) so his approach to health is evidence based. This is not a diet book this is a book for people who are serious about changing their health, healing their body and preventing disease. I gave up sugar and wheat and within a week all of my joint pain was gone. As Chris explains there's a lot more to paleo than stacks of meat, and one size does not fit all. Read it and change your health and your life.

Essential reading for anyone who has digestive issues or autoimmune disease - actually it's important reading for everyone looking to lead a healthier lifestyle. Recommended this book to so many people already. It's slightly different to other paleo books out there as it's not 'strictly' Paleo but explains why. Chris Kresser is a must follow if you need to understand diet and lifestyle choices and how they impact upon your health.

Great idea and works well, if you can stick to it. Not so good if you already have restricted diet due to food intolerances/allergies. Need to start this when you are not busy as you may feel unwell (book does tell you this) and I found I got very light headed due to the lack of carbs.

A well researched, compelling read- written in an engaging style which is easily understood by lay readers, yet providing plenty of reference material in the accompanying online resource for those who wish to explore in greater detail. Far from being a dictatorial ode to the Paleo movement, this book tests the science behind it and builds a more sustainable approach to food, whilst also delving into the other pillars of good health such as stress reduction, exercise and sleep. Check out Chris Kresser's website if you haven't already, it's a wonderful resource for those wishing to take a healthier approach to their lifestyle.