by Frank Tufano
Wherever you are, there are probably some tradeoffs. First of all, don’t instantly fall for the marketing hype. Local does not necessarily mean quality. They farm 30 miles away may not be a multinational that buys agrochemicals by the cargo ship. But you can’t always trust everything they say. And even the ones with the goods tend to rip people off. I have learned this firsthand — and way too many times. You need to be careful.
Then there are other factors. Conventionally raised beef may be cheaper in Texas and Colorado, whereas Massachusetts and Vermont have a farmer’s market culture that promotes CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) options for pastured pork or raw milk. These places also have cheaper seafood. But long winters mean any beef you get in February wasn’t recently feeding off grass, as it may have been at certain Texas farms all year round.
Getting the best food quality at the best price is about understanding what is available. Do your best to find food locally and learn what you can buy online or in retail stores as more of a commodity (like canned cod liver or cod liver oil). In the winter, it may make sense to lean on stuff like this to make sure you get your nutrients and consume steak more so for calorie and protein needs.
You Get What You Pay For
This may all sound great. But what if you can’t afford grass-fed meat? Getting all the nutrients you need — and avoiding inflammation — really is the most important aspect of your health. So it is something you need to start prioritizing in your life. This may take some sacrifices. Everything worth achieving usually does and this is no exception.
Look, everyone has their own definition of a budget. Some people really do lack the means to afford the type of animal products they should be consuming. That is a sad statement on the job market and how most people eat in this country.
Still, there is a huge difference between feeling like you have to live off of potatoes, rice, and ramen vs. being strict about your spending and finding a way to be healthy. And this isn’t like paying for a gym membership. You always have the option to spend either $100 per month or $0 per month on a gym membership. But nobody can spend $0 on food. You will be paying something to eat. The question is more about how you spend your money.
The average person in the United States spends $660 per month on food, according to the most recent statistics from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). This is even higher for many people living in cities like Seattle ($913), San Diego ($832), Houston ($762), and Los Angeles ($727).
You may think that sounds like a ton of money. But we’re not just talking about groceries here. This includes all spending: that daily breakfast bagel, going out to lunch twice a week, and treating yourself to an ice cream at the end of a hard week.
Of the $7,923 spent on food by the average American in 2018, nearly half — $3,459, or 43% — came on “food away from home.” While nobody is suggesting you can never eat out, we all know that our money goes a lot farther at the grocery store — even if you go shopping at “Whole Paycheck” or the farmer’s market.
So ask yourself this: Is higher-quality food something you truly can’t afford? Or is it something that you just care about less than new clothes, football tickets, or video games?
Food Quality on a Budget
Some people really are scraping by and can’t come up with anywhere near $150 per week for food. Others in the same boat might be trying to improve their health on a college student budget.
At the end of the day, yeah, there are ways to make a carnivore diet work on a few dollars a day. This mostly means you’ll be buying conventionally raised ground beef, off-the-shelf grocery store eggs, and regular old butter. This is super cheap stuff. Generally, the best solution isn't to start purchasing a lot of cheap, grain-fed meat. It’s to go for more affordable wild-caught fish, like mackerel and herring.
You may even consider possibly substituting in foods like rice or potatoes for the remainder of your calories. This is a big sacrifice, but you will avoid the troubling agrochemicals that are rampant in conventional beef feed. A diet of 50% wild fish and 50% sweet potatoes is infinitely better than a feedlot beef diet.
Ultimately, the nutritional differences between grain-fed and grass-fed beef can be made up in other ways. But the agrochemicals — especially the estrogenic herbicide atrazine used widely in soy and corn feed — cause hormonal issues. This can be especially damaging for male fertility, according to some studies. So, in many respects, you need to try to avoid the bad stuff as much as you look to obtain beneficial nutrition.
At this price, you are really losing a lot of the health benefits and not getting all the nutrition you need. It is still better than they Standard American Diet — especially for reducing inflammation — and even commercial eggs have more nutrition than a lot of the “health food” people waste their money on. But there will be a tradeoff. High-quality food, unfortunately, does come at something of a premium.
Another good way to reduce costs is with supplements. Getting DHA and Vitamin A through actual animal sources will always be better, but there are decent fish oil pills, cod liver oil, Vitamin K2, and Vitamin D3 supplements on the market at reasonable prices.
If you can’t find the money for eggs from pastured chickens or raw cheese, there may be compromises worth making on occasion. Supermarket eggs should be avoided, but organic Omega-3 eggs are passable. So eating (slightly) more conventional versions of these foods and supplementing with Vitamin K2 can be something of a solution to make sure you don’t become deficient. Fish oil alone — especially from the cheaper pills — likely won’t give you all the Omega-3s or Vitamin A that you really need in your diet. But it could help until you can make a little more money to buy wild-caught fish more often.
There are also sardines, canned salmon, and canned cod liver. Depending upon the brand, these are not always the highest quality. But everyone can afford these options though, and consuming them even once or twice per week is better than nothing. You really can improve your nutrition without spending $50 per day on grass-fed Wagyu beef and Copper River salmon.
In the long run, finding the money for better food will pay off. Think of it as an investment. I’m a big believer in spending as much as you can on better food.
Even in just a few months, you will become much closer to the optimal version of yourself. You will have more energy. You will feel better. And this is exactly what you need to find more success in all aspects of your life. With a little luck, a better version of yourself may just be able to start earning enough money to buy even better food.
Eating Nose to Tail
There is one other big factor in nutrition that is constantly overlooked. Eating the entire animal — something commonly referred to as eating "nose to tail" for land animals — will give complete nutrition. This means you will get everything your body needs and in natural ratios.
This is because animals store the nutrients we need all throughout their body. Muscle meat (and, really, only a few specific cuts) is what most modern diners prefer. But cows don’t store that many nutrients in their muscles. There are a few vitamins and lots of protein, but not much else. So you can’t just eat a few steaks and expect to get everything you need — unless maybe you found some mutated Wagyu steak raised on the highest-quality pasture in the world. You’ve gotta eat the fat and the organs too if you want to get the actual nutrition.
The same thing applies to clams, mussels, and crabs. They all offer complete nutrition as well. And you actually do get all of those nutrients because they are small animals that you essentially eat whole. This doesn’t make them necessarily better. But it does mean that seafood makes it easier for you. Everything is right there in just a few bites. Obtaining their full nutritional profile is as easy as ordering one for your plate. Going to a restaurant and slugging down half a dozen oysters with some lemon juice is about the healthiest thing you can do.
And that’s just the way it will always be — at least until we figure out how to shrink a cow down to the size of an egg so
we can get it all in one bite. Without that technology, you will just have to learn to enjoy some organs and eat fattier meat.
If that doesn’t sound appetizing, you can cheat a little bit. You can also get this complete nutrient profile through animal products such as dairy and eggs. Like a clam, both of these products contain all the essential substances your body needs. And this is why I advocate for raw, grass-fed dairy so much. It’s delicious and far more approachable than a raw oyster.
Along with food quality and complete nutrition, we should be considering the specific nutrient profile of each item we consume. As you learn more about all the different foods that will become important in your diet, you will start to understand this all better. That way, you will know how often you need to eat foods high in, for example, DHA or Vitamin K2 to reinforce your daily effort to eat products that offer complete nutrition on their own.
Chapter 8
Food Sourcing: What to Eat and How to Get It
When it comes to food quality, there is good news and there is bad news. The good news is that there is great food out there that will give you all the nutrients you ever need. The bad news is that it can be hard to get your hands on. And even if you do find the very best, it can be expensive.
This is simply the world we live in, especially in the United States. Corporate food producers have spent decades chasing profits and pushing volume over quality. And consumers have gone along for the ride because price and convenience win out over everything in this day and age.
The sad reality is that if you want to be healthy and get all the nutrients you need, you do need to start putting some effort into “food sourcing.” The more time and effort you devote to it, the better the results will be. You will get as much out of this as you put in.
For some people, the biggest change is a mindset shift. Every year, more “specialty” animal products go mainstream and become more widely available. There is now a larger market for organic and local food than at any time since your grandparents were growing up. (Back then, almost all the food was high-quality food. So much for modern progress.)
Maybe your local grocery store has great grass-fed steaks that you can even afford, but you simply have been buying conventionally raised beef out of habit. Now that you understand the reasons to buy grass-fed instead, it’s just a matter of doing it.
Other people may have to start going to a different store. Costco frozen hamburger patties are out. Whole Foods grass-fed strip steaks are in. Even going from the cheapest butter in the store to Kerrygold is a step in the right direction. And don’t overlook local Asian markets, fish markets, or wholesale distributors. These spots may not have been on your radar before. But they are all over the place and can be great sources for great food — at great prices — if you live near a large population center.
Making the Effort: Levels of Food Sourcing
Knowing that you have to look harder for better food is half the battle. But that won’t win you the war. To achieve your optimal health and to really follow the Ancestral Indigenous Diet, you will probably need to try a bit harder than simply going to Whole Foods.
This is a decent start, but the quality is all over the map and it becomes quite expensive quite quickly. Because, unfortunately, even if you think you are buying the best quality meat, misleading marketing terms have allowed companies to sell feedlot meat as "organic" and even "grass fed." Both organic soy and corn stalks fall under those constituents.
This doesn’t have to become an obsession (like it has for me). It may be very easy to find a local farm that raises grass-fed beef — without hormones or antibiotics — and will sell you pounds of liver all year long. Maybe you can just drive a half-hour out to the farm once a month for a massive haul of steak, beef fat, liver, eggs, and cheese. BOOM. You’ve solved all your food sourcing issues in about the same amount of time that you spend getting haircuts each month. Some farms even deliver.
But it probably won’t be that easy. And just when you find the best source of liver ever, the season will change and you’ll be coming up dry. The raw milk provider you relied on for months might go out of business. The fishmonger that has the best fish roe may stop stocking it.
For those problems — and especially for people just getting started — the following guidelines will help you get going. These four basic levels of food sourcing offer something of a roadmap that you can follow as you continue to get more advanced.
Level 1: Beginner
Sources: Supermarkets, wholesale retail locations (like Costco), Asian markets for fish (H Mart)
Pros/Cons: Food access is limited, pricing and quality is hit or miss
Level 2: Moderate
Sources: Farms, farmers markets, co-ops, local butchers
Pros/Cons: Better quality, more expensive, meat is often frozen
Level 3: Advanced
Sources: Restaurant purveyors, buying whole primal cuts
Pros/Cons: High cost, may need business license/credit line, having personal meat storage for bulk
Level 4: Expert
Sources: Buying whole animals for slaughter, hunting, owning a farm
Pros/Cons: best food possible, very intensive in terms of time, effort, and knowledge
How Much Does It Cost?
There are great bargains all over. And some of the best foods out there really aren’t that expensive. Still, in a general sense, you will largely get what you pay for. There are ways to get most of your nutrients on a budget, but one goal in your food sourcing should be to spend more on higher-quality products.
How much can you really get at different levels? The following offers a rough guideline of what you can expect to find at various price points.
Conventional Diet: $150 per month
Core Foods: Cheap wild fish, whatever meat you can afford, conventional eggs, cheap dairy, canned fish, supplements, substituting in some cheaper plant foods
Middle of the Road: $300-$400 per month
Core Foods: Basic steaks, grass-fed organs, cheaper wild-caught fish
Perfect Diet: $600+ per month
Core Foods: Grass-fed everything, pastured pork, true free-range eggs, raw dairy, wild-caught fish eggs, wild game, trustworthy cod liver oil
Prized Foods
Say you’ve struck it rich. Congrats. You now have all the money in the world and access to every animal on every farm. In an ideal world, what must you start eating to get all the nutrients you need and stay free of inflammation?
First of all, don’t always think about this in terms of cost. Some of the best foods are going to cost a bit more. But prized foods aren't necessarily expensive. A fish-monger fileting fish tends to throw out the eggs and organs. You can even get them from free sometimes.
Throughout history, our ancestral forebearers have shown preferences for certain foods. For the indigenous hunter who we want to follow, the preference would have been the fattier parts of wild game such as the marrow or kidney fat. The same goes for animals living in the wild. For a bear, it might be the skin, brains, and eggs of a salmon swimming upstream. The one consistent factor is a craving for calorically dense nutrition. If we cannot all the nutrients and all the energy we need, we wouldn’t be able to survive times of famine.
Today, of course, finding calories is never a problem. Our issue is acquiring the micronutrients we need without all the garbage that causes inflammation and many modern diseases.
Ancestral food preferences can also be seen in the wide variety of preparation methods that indigenous groups used. Different parts of each animal would be prepared differently.
If a hunter killed a caribou, for example, the group might have enjoyed the lower leg bone marrow raw then boiled the upper leg marrow. Maybe they boil the head to get at the brains and then roast the kidney fat over a fire as it dries out. One tribe may have given the raw salmon eggs they found inside the catch to their nursing women. Another may have added it to seal-meat soup.
In many recorded accounts, it seems th
e preference was to first eat nutrient-dense foods, including fat, whenever calories were otherwise plentiful and there wasn’t a major threat of starvation.
In the 1937 book Foods America Gave the World, A. Hyatt Verrill wrote about one tradition of eating honey ants he encountered. "In many places,” he wrote, “the natives are very fond of the female of queen ants when filled with roe … In Mexico no wedding breakfast is considered complete without a side dish of the big honey ants."
He found that, in Barbados and other areas of the Caribbean, the natives consider “sea eggs” — a spiny sea urchin that in “certain seasons is full of roe” — to be “by far the best of the seafoods.” And in other places, “the eggs of the iguanas are also highly esteemed by the natives.”
Today, when I eat for nutrient density, I am generally looking for high-value foods like liver (for all vitamins and especially its unmatched Vitamin A content), salmon roe or other fish eggs (for DHA and EPA), bone marrow (for complete nutrition), and brain (for DHA and vitamins general).
These were prized in ancient times as well, but in reality, almost every single part of an animal besides the muscle meat was coveted. Kidney, sweetbreads, spleen, thymus, and reproductive organs. They all serve a purpose in acquiring both nutrition and calories.
The Top Ancestral Indigenous Diet Prized Foods
Beef/Veal Liver (All Vitamins and Minerals, Copper/Vitamin A/B Vitamins notably high)
Brains (DHA, EPA, Vitamin C, Vitamin E)
Kidneys (All Vitamins and Minerals, Selenium notably high)
Bone Marrow (Fat Soluble Vitamins, Calorically Dense)
Salmon/Fish Roe (All Vitamins and Minerals, DHA/Iodine notably high)
