“Organ meats
When most people think of organ meats, they think of liver. Liver is the Paleo version of a multivitamin. It’s high in protein and packed with Vitamins A, B6, and B12, folate, iron, phosphate (also called phosphorous), zinc, copper, and selenium. The cholesterol in liver also helps you synthesize Vitamin D. Many people like to sauté liver with onions, but if you’re not the biggest fan of the taste, try toning it down with some liver pâté. You could also disguise the liver a little by including it in a recipe for hamburgers or meatballs, along with a healthy helping of ground beef and spices.
Other organ meats, like heart, kidney, tongue, or brain also provide many more micronutrients than traditional muscle meat – and as a bonus, they’re usually cheaper. Like liver, heart contains high levels of B vitamins, thiamin, folate, selenium, phosphorous, and zinc, and heart tastes very similar to a roast, making it more palatable if you’re used to muscle meat. Kidney is also a good source of Vitamins C and B12, selenium, iron, zinc, copper, riboflavin, and phosphorous. Like liver, kidney has a strong taste – mixing it with steak in a casserole can tone down the flavor, or go all-out and try some Irish kidney soup. Other organ meats include sweetbreads (the thymus and pancreas glands of young animals), tongue, tripe, gizzards, and brains. The best place to get organ meats is from a butcher you know, but most supermarket meat sections have at least beef and chicken livers, and sometimes they have other organs behind the counter if you ask.
Kale
One cup of kale provides a hefty dose of Vitamin C, as well as manganese and Vitamins A and K. It also has smaller amounts of a variety of nutrients, including calcium, copper, and Vitamin B6. If straight-up kale tastes too bitter or tough for you, jazz it up with a little bacon, or whip up some kale chips for a salty, crunchy Paleo snack. Kale is also a wonderful ingredient in soups or stews.
Spinach
Popeye, as it turns out, was wrong: spinach isn’t actually a great source of iron. But it does deliver Vitamins A, C, and K, as well as folate and manganese. Spinach can make a delicious replacement for lettuce in any kind of salad, but if you don’t enjoy the taste, you can unobtrusively add quite a lot of spinach to a curry or any spicy dish: the leaves shrink drastically when you cook them, and the flavor is almost undetectable.
Mollusks
Mollusks pack an incredible nutritional punch. Mussels, clams, octopus, and oysters are powerhouses of B vitamins, and also have high levels of Vitamins C and A, riboflavin, niacin, iron, phosphorous, zinc, copper, manganese, and selenium. The last two make mollusks especially useful for anyone avoiding nuts: nuts are commonly cited as excellent sources of manganese and selenium, but they’re not the only ones. Mollusks can be as simple or as fancy of a dinner as you have time for. In a rush, you can steam them, throw some butter on top, and call it dinner. For a slightly more sophisticated meal, try steaming your mussels with tomato and basil, or spicing up your clams with some coconut-lime sauce. These oyster dolmades even include spinach, another nutritional MVP.
Seaweed
Seaweed is best known for its iodine content – iodine is an essential micronutrient that supports cell metabolism and healthy thyroid function. Most Americans have no problem getting enough iodine, since they consume huge amounts of processed foods loaded with iodized salt. But on a diet devoid of takeout pizza and Doritos, your salt intake is likely to be much lower, especially if you also switch to sea salt (which contains other minerals but does not provide iodine). This makes seaweed a smart addition to your meals, especially since it’s also full of all kinds of other minerals that it absorbs from the sea. You can eat seaweed as a salad, or add it to soups and broths for a salty, delicious flavor.
Bone broth
Bone broth gives you access to nutrients stored in the animal’s bones, which you wouldn’t get from just eating the meat. As well as containing generous amounts of minerals like calcium, magnesium, and phosphorous, bone broth is also a source of gelatin, which supports your body’s connective tissues (this is why it congeals when refrigerated – if you end up with beef Jell-O, you’re doing it right). As well as containing nutrients in its own right, bone broth also helps heal your gut from any damage caused by irritating foods or chronic disease, making you better able to absorb other nutrients. You can make broth on a stove or in your slow cooker. It does a while, but you can spend almost all of that time doing other things while your broth simmers slowly away.
Fermented foods
Fermented foods don’t necessarily contain high levels of nutrients themselves. Instead, they support the beneficial gut flora that allow you to digest and use those nutrients from other foods. For all these vitamins and minerals to do you any good, your body has to be able to process them first. Yogurt is the most common fermented food in the modern supermarket, but if you react poorly to dairy, you still have a wide range of options including sauerkraut, kimchi, kombucha, and water kefir. You can buy these at your local grocery store, or save a little money by making them yourself.
Sunshine
It’s not technically a food, but sunshine does deliver one essential micronutrient. When you go out in the sun, cholesterol in your skin reacts with the UVB rays to synthesize Vitamin D. While some foods (most notably fatty cold-water fish like salmon) do contain Vitamin D, sunshine is an essential part of the equation because most people can’t get enough from dietary sources alone.
Unfortunately, this makes the modern lifestyle the perfect way to develop a deficiency of one of the most important vitamins for overall health: most people work indoors, drive home to spend their leisure time inside, and wear sunscreen (which blocks the absorption of UVB rays and prevents the synthesis of Vitamin D) when they do go outside. Vitamin D is crucial for bone health; low levels of Vitamin D are also strongly associated with diabetes (both Type 1 and Type 2 ), metabolic problems, and obesity. Inadequate Vitamin D can provoke an autoimmune response in the gut, and some evidence also links low Vitamin D levels to certain types of cancer.
While you shouldn’t rush out to lie on the beach all day without sunscreen, regular sun exposure is the best way to make sure you get enough Vitamin D: do your body a double favor by combining your sun time with a walk or a swim.”
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