The Paleo Cure: Eat Right for Your Genes, Body Type, and Personal Health Needs -- Prevent and Reverse Disease, Lose Weight Effortlessly, and Look and Feel Better than Ever

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!

If you know Chris Kresser's website and podcasts, then you will literally hear his uniquely droll, intelligent voice resonating through the pages of this book, making it a pleasure to read. It is written for a fairly general reading public, assuming nothing of what the reader might already know about biochemistry, physiology and human anthropology. So it takes the reader through some complicated questions in a very step by step fashion, qualifying its terms and sparing the reader the vast tomes of footnotes that have informed the text. Some of us would have been very happy to see all those footnotes at the bottom of each page, and would prefer less of the basic explanation and more detail. But for most readers, that lack of specialist clutter will no doubt be welcome. You can find the references and more details on his website. If you are new to the idea of eating ancestrally (or "paleo"), this book is a very balanced and rigorous introduction which is also incredibly practically orientated. It is based on Kresser's considerable clinical experience in functional/integrative medicine, as well has dogged absorption in peer-reviewed scientific literature. So it is a complete guide to transforming a diet based on nutrient-poor foods to one beaming with health, and to overcoming autoimmune problems, gut disorders, weight gain, dislipidemia, metabolic syndrome and various other things. But it also has plenty of tips for the more seasoned nutritional self-hacker. I bought it thinking I might give it to someone else because I already knew everything in it. But the sense of being reminded of all these different valuable perspectives compacted into one book has actually been really pleasurable, even though not much in it has surprised or newly informed me. I have now scribbled on it too much with a pencil to give it to anyone! So it looks like I might buying some more copies....

I have been gaining weight steadily for years because of hormones, adrenal fatigue, low blood sugar (now pre-diabetes) and have tried everything to lose the extra 60 pounds I ended up with. Nothing worked until now. I combined the instructions in this book with Garcinia Cambogia (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00GIBR198/ref=oh_details_o07_s00_i00?ie=UTF8&psc=1), Konjac Glucomannan Powder 500g bag (the main fiber ingredient in an expensive weight loss capsule advertized on TV), and Solray Adrenal Caps. I lost 11 pounds effortlessly in the 30 day diet plan in this book. It cleansed me and set me up for a much healthier life. It was effortless in terms of cravings, primarily because of the Garcinia Cambogia. After the 30 day diet, there are ways to customize a Paleo eating plan to your specific health issues. Also, Mr. Kresser has an excellent website to support your efforts further. There are meal plans, shopping lists, updates on the latest health research and groups to join for support or for specific interests involving Paleo nutrition. And Mr. Kresser welcomes feedback. My only criticisms of the book are with the meal plans and recipes for the 30 day diet. This was a real challenge for a newby to eating and cooking Paleo style. I spent hours cooking, grinding my own herb combinations and shopping for things that were ultimately unavailable in the high desert of New Mexico without driving a hundred miles round trip. One of my main complaints is about the recipes. The instructions need to be clear at the start with regards to preparation times. I would think "twenty minutes - I can do this!" and at the very end it might say "marinate overnight" or "marinate in the refrigerator for three hours." This was invariably at 5:30 in the evening with a hungry man in the next room. Also, I was cooking for two and had to adjust the shopping lists and recipes to cooking for two. The shopping time and cooking times took up a huge chunk of my day and I just retired last December. I don't know how someone working full-time could handle this without a crew of four. I suspect more people fail at this plan because of a lack of time, than for any other reason. For example, I ate a lot of frozen organic chopped spinach with bacon and egg breakfasts. If you are already getting up at 4:30 or 5:00 to get ready for work, that's about all you have time for. And getting home from the commute at 6 or 7 PM doesn't lend itself to a long prep time for dinner. The recipes for lunches didn't work for the most part for packing a lunch for work. I ended up with so many breakfast and dinner leftovers that they went to work as lunch. The lunch recipes were often as demanding as the breakfast and dinner recipes and basically never got used for lunch, but instead for dinner. That said, I ate stuff I never dreamed I would eat and the recipes made these foods delicious. But while I heartily recommend the book for it's excellent content and information, I really don't think you need to grind your own masala herbs when you can buy a lovely masala mix at Whole Foods, for example. I think the recipes could be a lot simpler for folks who want to try this approach, but who don't have hours to simmer a bone broth, or shop for hours looking for (occasionally obscure) fresh herbs when you live in a climate not suited to their storage, no matter how good they might be for you fresh.

I work with a few people who have been following a Paleo way of eating and was interested to learn more. I don't go in for fad diets, or any kind of "diet", but this seemed different so I did some quick research, discovered Chris' book and ordered it. I read it cover to cover (on my Kindle) as soon as I got it and it goes into considerable depth about food and what we eat and what is generally accepted to be "healthy" and "nutritrious". This is the first book I truly believe hits the nail on the head in regards to why we are what we eat. It MAKES SENSE! I am only at the beginning of my journey back to eating real food and in a way I am happy with. I recognize every single thing on my plate (or in my bowl) and I have given thought to how it got there. I am a 53yo woman and this way of eating closely resembles the kind of food I grew up with. I had reached a point where all the aches and digestive issues, the foggy brain, the restless sleep etc; I kept putting down to age. My doctor even suggested as much, along with hormonal issues for a "woman of my age". But since I began eating with more mindfulness and more knowledge of the whys and wherefores, I have noticed a change. I no longer hurt when I wake up from a night of tossing and turning and feel like I've been run over by a MAC truck! I don't have the awful bloating and discomfort, the upset stomach, the horrible plummet after eating lunch, when all I want to do is crawl under my desk and go to sleep. I have more energy, I sleep better and on the whole just feel better. I intend to continue this journey and make more improvements so I can enjoy the next 20 or so years with an active and good quality of life! This is not a rigid "you must eat this" or "you cannot have that" kind of book. Yes there is a 30 day kick start where you eliminate a lot of things you would normally eat - but the food you do eat is REAL food, with good, tasty recipes and not something manufactured that comes in a box. There is research and the chance to arm yourself with enough knowledge to make educated choices about what you consume and what WORKS FOR YOU. I highly recommend not only getting this book, but adopting what is in it.

Like the layers of an organically grown onion, Chis Kresser L.A-c unravels the story of healing and restoration using real food in Your Personal Paleo Code. Chris (an integrative and functional medicine practitioner) is the quintessential nerd, geek, and bio-hacker, who also knows how to effectively communicate. Having personally met Chris, heard him lecture, followed him online, and now read his book, I can tell you that this man is brilliant! He now shares with readers his discoveries through years of personal research and clinical experience in his highly anticipated first book. The book challenges current “healthy” mainstream nutritional guidelines and addresses the unhealthy standard American diet. Chris discusses how farming and industry introduced unhealthy, nutrient-void, refined foods containing grains, sugars and industrial seed oils into our modern diet. From an evolutionary perspective, he discusses how these modern foods remain foreign to the human body relative to human existence. These foods were not consumed by our healthy ancestors in their current form, and appear to directly cause many of the chronic diseases that we see today in modern society. The book provides valuable lessons from our ancestors: eat traditional whole, nutrient dense foods including animals, plants and natural fats to heal and restore. The book is broken down into a one-size does NOT fit all 3-step plan: reset, rebuild and revive, to lose weight, reverse disease, and stay fit and healthy for life. It sounds simple enough; however, further reading reveals how in-depth the content really is, addressing specific health conditions including weight, diabetes, cholesterol, hypertension, hormone imbalance and digestive disorders just to name a few. The book will serve as a great reference for all bio-hackers, healthcare professionals, and the general public. The principals spelled out in Chris’ book compliment our progressive family medicine office. Our functional approach addresses primary prevention and chronic disease management using whole foods, often replacing or bypassing medication. This book is a must read for my patients and for anyone interested in learning more about the life changing power of real food. Jeffry Gerber, MD Denver’s Diet Doctor

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.

Fascinating, thoroughly researched, solution oriented. This book will be a Best Seller. Your Personal Paleo Code written by Chris Kresser is about how you can create your own personalized approach to Nutrition and Lifestyle. An approach that is designed exactly for your body, custom-made for your individual genetic blueprint. One size doesn't fit all. As a Licensed Clinician, who practices Integrative, and Functional Medicine, Chris developed through his research a simple 3 step process to help many of his seriously ill patients resolve their health challenges. And now he is sharing his results in this book. Step one is a 30 day diet using the Paleo Diet as a template to reset your body and get you on track to better health and a happier life. Step Two The Rebuilding Phase, is where the personalization begins. How to make individual adjustments to support your needs and circumstances. Learn how to move like your ancestors, get better sleep, manage stress, and why spending time outdoors, social connections and more play time is essential for optimal health. Step Three. Rive Your Health, is where you learn to fine tune your Personal Paleo Code. Complete with information about the proper Macro Nutrient Ratios appropriate for your specific health concerns. Learn solutions for loosing weight, high cholesterol, heart disease, high blood pressure, autoimmune disease, diabetes, digestive disorders and more. The book also includes a 7 Day Meal Plan with easy to make, delicious recipes to help you get started. The Rustic Meatball and Tomato Stew is fantastic! The idea of the 80/20 Rule adding flexibility to the program to fit the way you like to eat is one of the ways this book separates from other Paleo Diets. Chris offers many great tools, resources, bonus materials and access to a special community of like mined people for discussions and support. An outstanding book! Thanks Chris for sharing this remarkable work. This review copy was provided by the publisher.

I'm a 22 year old Med Student, I suffer hypothiroidism since I was 16, diabetes type 2 since 3 years ago, Polycystic ovary syndrome, long depressive episodes, extreme fatigue, among many others. I have seen many doctors throughout these years, and none of the usual treatments seemed to work. I take metformin on a daily basis, levothyroxine for 7 years already, and I have just felt like the walking dead these past years since I got diagnosed. In 2020 when the pandemic started, I experienced one of the worst depressive episodes I have ever experienced. I was unable to loose weight (had to loose about 50 pounds), I felt tired all the time and it was just too much. This is when I met Dr Hili, an outstanding functional medicine physician. Dr Hili changed my life, she is not just an outstanding licensed physician, but also a Dr that goes the extra mile. She sent me to therapy, I had a lot of emotional healing to do, she added new meds, but also she changed my diet to Paleo. At first, I hated paleo since im a big fan of dairy. I quitted paleo until I read this book. This book has 3 steps, the reset, the rebuild and then the revive. With this book I understood that one diet does not fit all, and that we can all create our own personal Paleo diet, without taking out the foods we love, but focusing on what makes us feel good. This 360 change, helped me with my blood sugar problems, I was able to loose a lot of weight, and also feel a lot better. There's definitely a before and after. If you want to understand paleo diet and not just follow it because others do, read this book.

Very good content but bad paper quality

Good book with lots and lots of information.But for many things you have to revert to their website.In that sense it is a little incomplete .At the end of reading this book you are still left wondering how to practically implement the personal paleo code.Could have been more descriptive.

I had been doing Paleo style eating for several months before reading this book. I had lost weight and was feeling more energy and overall satisfied with the diet, but it wasn't optimal. I was having troubles with digestion, sleep and further fat loss. Kresser's book does such a great job of personalizing the Paleo Diet. I am not a dogmatic person and I don't like the idea of following a rule that doesn't apply to my situation. Kresser lays out a great approach to eating that initially eliminates a lot of troublesome food, but then allows you to reintroduce what you want/ can handle in a systematic approach. The bonus chapters you can get free online addressed so many of my personal body issues that I started to think the man was psychic. I have read through a half dozen books on Paleo-style eating and this is easily my favorite.

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.

Libro molto denso, base functional medicine e tanta esperienza clinica su come trovare il proprio regime alimentare ideale per stare bene ed evolversi. Massiccia quantità di informazioni extra, circa 150 pagine in più dal suo sito. Irrinunciabile