Paleo Recipes That Aren’t

I just came across a Pinterest page entitled Healthy Paleo Snacks and Treats.  Of course, I had to take a peek.

And, of course, many of the recipes were just…not.

A few in particular that stood out: 

• Guilt-Free Ice Cream! Just 3 ingredients: frozen bananas, peanut butter, and cocoa powder (peanut butter?)
• 1/2 cup peanut butter to 1 cup greek plain non-fat yogurt. (peanut butter…and dairy, too?)
• Blueberry Yogurt Cookies. Made with greek yogurt -no butter or oil in them. ( so not just dairy, but low fat dairy?)
• apple sandwich with granola, peanut butter, and chocolate chips (really?)

These things are not Paleo.  Even if we swapped the peanut butter for almond butter and the dairy for full fat coconut, it defeats the purpose if you’re eating these concoctions regularly, rather than using them to make the occasional special occasion splurge.

The idea is to mimic what our ancestors ate, with foods readily available to us in our farmer’s markets, grocery stores and our own gardens, to create an alkaline, balanced, local, seasonal means of eating real food.

The idea is not to take an item representative of the Standard American Diet and work backwards from an acid forming, leaky-gut causing recipe, replacing some ingredients with slightly less offensive, semi-Paleo-ish ones and create a high-sugar, refined thing to eat with no protein, no veg and no balance.

If it seems like it doesn’t really make sense within the realm of what True Paleo is, such as a peanut-butter and granola ‘treat’, it probably isn’t.

Be creative!   Mix and match, go for color, flavor, taste and variety.  And if one decides to eat something that is not Paleo and take a picture of it and post it online, go ahead and do that, too.  But please don’t pretend it’s still Paleo.   It’s only going to confuse people and not reap any benefit  from eating these (non) foods… the very things that make people ill in the first place!