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SKIRTING A PALEO REBELLION Getting Kids (Even Teens) on Board
with the New Food Regimen
I
was the first in our family of six to walk the
Paleo trail following an epiphany in a barber’s
chair. At age 37, looking in the mirror, my
head framed by the neck-down apron, I
asked myself, “How did I get so fat?” At
five feet 10 and of small frame, I was pushing 190
pounds. Time for a change.
At the library the next day, I began avidly reading
about health, nutrition and the food system. The
consistent thread I found pointed to the benefit of an
ancestral mode of eating—something that resonated
with me thanks to my archaeology degree and my
understanding of pre-agricultural diets.
We designed a plan to maximize our chances of
success with the least pain for everyone.
First, we gave
up substitutes; no
replacement of
unnatural, food-like
substances with “Paleofriendly” equivalents.
Why? Personal dieting
experience over two
decades made us acutely
aware that substitutes are
unfulfilling. Alternative
breads and pastas, for
example, don’t have the
same mouthfeel, taste, or effect on blood chemistry.
Dissatisfaction with substitutes often left us craving
the real thing even more. Better to stick with natural,
whole foods.
Second, we began educating the kids to spur a
mental shift in how they viewed what they put in
their bodies. We explained why we were no longer
consuming gallons of milk in favor of more green leafy
vegetables, how probiotics in homemade sauerkraut
would build our gut flora and why butter would be
appearing more frequently on the table. The hands-on
side of this effort, aimed at bringing the kids closer to
their food sources and preparation, has put them in
charge of preparing our family’s supply of homemade
kefir, dried fruit and jerky, and they’ve even mastered
making butter and lacto-fermented pickles.
The more we brought the kids into the process, the
more they took ownership of the new plan and even
started showing pride in their work. Even little ones can
benefit from this when you entrust them with things
they can handle, like preparing a bowl of nuts or seeds,
or slicing fruit if they can safely wield a knife.
We also announced that our weekly family
movie night was becoming a double feature. Each
entertaining video would be preceded by a shorter
documentary. “The Perfect Human Diet,” “Milk?,”
“Food Inc.,” “Fresh” and “Ingredients” are a few they’ve
enjoyed. We also began sharing and discussing
articles at dinner and assigned a book for the older
ones (though it’s challenging to get teenagers to set
aside vampire romance for Mark Sisson).
Next, we declared two new boons. One, “dessert”
would be served nightly: usually a large fruit plate,
sometimes with a handful of raw nuts or seeds,
and on weekends or special occasions, a bar of 80
STONE
TOOLS
TO HELP
YOU
I went cold turkey. THROUGH
A month passed. My wife, unbending to my efforts
to persuade her to join me, watched from a dietary
distance. She saw the weight loss, that I slept less but
deeper and that I had more energy. Then, one day,
she simply said, “Okay. I’m in.” No longer the dietary
outlier, I convinced her that to make this work we
needed to go “all in” and make it a family effort.
WHY
ANCESTRAL
EATING
FOR
1
KIDS?
A conversation ensued over the merits of bringing
the kids, ages 6 to 14, on our new eating journey. We
agreed on three things:
We could help the kids avoid our mistakes—four
decades of wrong eating—and engrain in them
a nutritional lifestyle that would preclude years
of food-related struggles later on.
2
Ample evidence—even from conventional
quarters—showed that whole-foods diets benefit
kids, and a growing body of data (such as
recent studies on animal-fat consumption) indicated
the same for even more “radical” na \