The Meat of the Matter

Go back to our evolutionary history, when there were no 24-hour produce markets brimming with brightly colored fruits and vegetables gown hundreds of miles away and ripened on trucks before making their way to your table. The bottom line is that most of what we think of as dietary staples are purely seasonal, and we didn’t have constant — if any — access to them while our genotype was being hammered out. So what made up the bulk of our year-round diet? Meat, say most anthropologists.

The problem is, the meat sources we co-evolved with were drastically different from the cellophane-wrapped cuts at your local supermarket, and what our food eats is just as important to our health as what we eat. Grass-fed beef, it turns out, contains the ideal 1:1 ratio of omega-3s and omega-6s, not to mention plenty of CLA, which helps with fat loss and can decrease insulin resistance. The polyunsaturated fat in grain-fed meat, on the other hand, comes mostly from omega-6 fatty acids, meaning it’s another sure-fire recipe for inflammation.

None of this should suggest that our ancestors ate nothing but meat, of course, but protein played a major role in our evolutionary development. As Robb points out, “The reconstructed human diet looks a lot like what bodybuilders would typically want, which is very high protein, anywhere from moderate to high fat, and carbohydrate filling in the rest.” If the words moderate to high fat set off an alarm, you’re likely not alone. But Paleo isn’t necessarily a high-fat diet. In fact, Robb claims that it’s “macronutrient agnostic,” as it focuses on food quality rather than food quantity. So long as you avoid gut-irritating Neolithic foods, you can customize your macros (protein, fat and carbohydrate) according to your body’s needs. That said, Robb insists that, based on what he’s seen in his athletes, a higher-fat approach leads to better results both in terms of performance and body composition. “When people step outside of the mainstream and start playing with their macros, they find that if they eat more fat, they feel better, they look better, they perform better and they recover better. It’s kind of a scary proposition when they’re counting calories [fat has 9 calories per gram, whereas protein and carbs have around 4 calories per gram], but inevitably they end up with better body composition,” he says.

And in case you’re worried about the saturated fat in many meat sources that we’ve been warned to avoid, Robb urges you to revisit the science. “As for the whole demonization of saturated fats, there have been several huge studies recently, and they just can’t pin anything on saturated fat and cardiovascular disease, saturated fat and cancer, or anything else. They’ve tried and tried and spent billions of dollars attempting to prove that saturated fat was a problem, and it’s just not penciling out to be the case.” The authors of a recent meta-analysis of 21 studies published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition are in full agreement with Robb on this last point, as they recently concluded that no study could associate saturated fat with increased risk of coronary heart disease, stroke or coronary vascular disease.

Putting Paleo into Practice

As mentioned, paleo is a diet that emphasizes food quality over quantity, and many of its followers find that once they kick agricultural staples — mainly grains — to the curb, they’re too satiated to overeat and they lose fat without ever thinking about calories. But Robb isn’t saying you should throw out the scale in your kitchen. “This is the appropriate place for someone to weigh and measure with paleo,” he says of the diet’s application to bodybuilding. “When we’re talking about an extreme level of leanness, we can keep people leaner during the offseason because they no longer have a binge-and-purge kind of scenario. We clean up their food and keep them within striking distance of their contest prep, and then when it comes time to really shrink-wrap them down, we bring in the additional attention to detail of weighing and measuring food and monitoring total caloric intake, and it’s easier because they’re already 5–10 pounds out of shape rather than 30–40 pounds out.”

For bodybuilders who are leaning out, perhaps the best part of using a Paleo approach is that you’re less likely to lose muscle as you shed fat. “We’ve worked with some NFL football players who have some really impressive body composition — guys who are anywhere from 280–310 pounds running sub-10% bodyfat — with almost world-champion powerlifting totals, and we’ve been able to keep more muscle mass on them using a Paleo-type approach than with anything else we’ve tried.”

So whether you’re prepping for the stage or you’re just looking to sport a six-pack this summer, Paleo offers some pretty striking benefits, from maintaining more muscle while leaning out to faster, long-term fat loss with less cardio, not to mention better nutrient absorption and improved overall health. But even after they hear about these advantages, Robb admits that many people — especially bodybuilders who’ve seen slow, steady success with standard bulking and cutting phases — aren’t motivated to give up the grains, claiming they’ve never experienced the gut irritation and inflammation that drive the Paleo approach. “Some people say they’ve never had a problem with these foods, but what they’ve never done is pull them out of rotation for a good 30 days to see how they actually do getting their carb sources from yams, sweet potatoes and maybe a little bit of post-workout fruit to refill liver glycogen.”

For Robb, this 30-day window is critical. Whereas few bodybuilders will agree to give up whole-grain pasta forever, once they’ve seen how much better they feel and look after just one month eating Paleo, they usually refuse to go back. “If they’ll go with a 30-day run and get their carbs from yams, sweet potatoes, squash and even regular white potatoes in lieu of the bread, rice and pasta, they definitely notice less water retention and being less puffy, and this is true regardless of where they are, whether they’re contest-prepping or they’re in a mass-gain cycle. In total, they have less inflammation, so they retain less water and recover better, and everything they’d want goes in a favorable direction.”

According to Robb and other Paleo adherents, whether you’re a bodybuilder, an elite athlete or simply someone who still wants to be bounding up stairs when they’re 90, Paleo is your best chance for getting a leg up. “Bodybuilding is definitely pushing the human genetic potential to the outer edges of hypertrophy expression,” he says. But the ancestral diet can still support that process. You may need to tweak and fiddle with the details, but it’s doable.” And even if your only immediate goals are to build a physique that’s composed of as much muscle as your frame will allow while dipping into low-single-digit bodyfat, Robb insists that your physique goals don’t need to override your overall health. “Let’s push that human performance element as much as we can, and let’s do it in a way that’s not completely messing us up” he adds.

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