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alkaline loads in the body. When you adopt the Paleo Diet, you won’t have to worry about excessive dietary acid causing bone loss—because you’ll be getting 35 percent or more of your daily calories as healthful alkaline fruits and vegetables that will neutralize the dietary acid you get when you eat meat and seafood.

Toxic Salt
    Most low-carbohydrate, high-fat diets don’t address the dangers of salt; some even encourage its use. And yet there is a ton of medical evidence linking salt to high blood pressure, stroke, osteoporosis, kidney stones, asthma, and even certain forms of cancer. Salt is also implicated as a factor in insomnia, air and motion sickness, Ménière’s syndrome (an agonizing ear ringing), and the preeclampsia of pregnancy.
    Salt is made up of sodium and chloride. Although most people think that the sodium portion of salt is entirely responsible for most of its unhealthful effects, chloride is just as guilty, if not more so. The average American eats about 10 grams of salt a day (this turns out to be about 4 grams of sodium and 6 grams of chloride). Chloride, like cereals, dairy products, legumes, and meats, yields a net acid load to the kidneys after it is digested. Because of its high chloride content, salt is one of the worst offenders in making your diet more acid.
    Paleolithic people hardly ever used salt and never ate anything like today’s salty cheeses, processed meats, and canned fish advocated by most of the low-carbohydrate weight-loss diets. Do your body a favor and throw out your saltshaker along with all the highly salted, processed, packaged, and canned foods in your pantry.

Lean Meat Helps You Lose Weight
    It’s taken half a century, but scientists have finally realized that when they stigmatized red meat, they threw out the proverbial baby with the bathwater. Meat is a mixture of fat and protein. Lean meat—such as that found in wild game and seafood—is about 80 percent protein and about 20 percent fat. But fatty processed meats like bacon and hot dogs can pack a whopping 75 percent of their calories as fat and only 25 percent or less as protein. What should have been obvious—that it was the high level of a certain saturated fat, palmitic acid, not the protein, that caused health problems—was essentially ignored. Meat protein had unfairly become a villain.
    Here again, there’s a major lesson to be learned from looking at the distant past: for more than 2 million years, our ancestors had a diet rich in lean protein and healthful fats. It gave them energy and, combined with fruits and vegetables, helped them stay healthy.

Protein Increases Your Metabolism and Slows Your Appetite
    When scientists actually studied how lean protein influences health, well-being, and body-weight regulation—and this has occurred only in the last two decades—they found that our ancestors were right all along. It turns out that lean protein is perhaps our most powerful ally in the battle of the bulge. It has twice the “thermic effect” of either fats or carbohydrates, which means it revs up your metabolism. In other words, protein’s thermic effect increases our metabolism and causes us to burn more calories than if we ate an equal caloric serving of either fat or carbohydrate. Also, more than fats, more than carbohydrates, protein has the highest “satiating value”—that is, it does the best job of making us feel full.
    The principles I have laid out in the Paleo Diet—all based on decades of scientific research and proved over millions of years by our ancestors—will make your metabolism soar, your appetite shrink, and extra pounds begin to melt away as you include more and more lean protein in your meals.

Lean Protein and Heart Disease
    But this diet gives you much more than a slimmer figure. Unlike other low-carbohydrate diets, it’s good for your heart. High-protein diets have been shown by Dr. Bernard Wolfe at the University of Western Ontario in Canada to be more effective