There is alot of to do about bacon and Paleo. Some non-paleo people seem to think that is all you eat on the Paleo diet. We have shirts about bacon, we buy it in bulk and make everything from meatballs to tacos and ice cream exclusively from bacon. But is it Paleo?
I have two thoughts about bacon.
(1) It is delicious.
(2) No. Bacon really hearkens
back to a blog post that I will do later. If you look at the ingredients, are each of the ingredients
Paleo? No. Would Paleolithic people have eaten bacon? Yes, if it was around. Was it around in the Paleolithic era. No
Bacon traces its earliest roots to the Roman time when the word “Petaso” was used to describe a food item was pork and it was boiled with figs and eaten with a pepper sauce.
The way we see bacon was first seen in the 15th century when peasants would eat a version of it because it was cheap. Generally it was just cured at that point. Then in the 1770’s the first bacon manufacturing plants was opened in Wiltshire, England.
It wasn’t until the 1920’ts that Oscar Meyer started producing and selling sliced prepackaged bacon as we know it now. So bacon does not go back as far as the Paleolithic era, nor does coconut four, coconut oil, or cashew butter.
So what makes coconut oil distinctly Paleo and bacon gets a cold shoulder? Neither were around in the Paleolithic era.
One of the goals of Paleo is to stabilize the glucose level in the body. If you look at bacon it has the ingredients of (and these vary depending on what package you read) Pork belly, sugar, celery salt) It also could include celery juice, coconut sugar, and various spices. The the key word is SUGAR. Sugar is sugar no matter how you look at it. I can make bacon with no sugar and reduce down dates and bacon in date sugar. There is no difference in the sugar content, but one is Paleo and one isint? Fig bacon doesn’t sound very good.
So my answer is that (1) Bacon is delicious, which leads me to conclude that for me, bacon is Paleo. I eat sugar in my fruit, in my coffee, on my pancakes in the form of maple and in Paleo balls in the form of honey. I can make bacon with any of these sweeteners and get the same sugar content.
The Paleo lifestyle is more than watching labels, it is watching what I am eating. If I eat nothing but bacon, I should not expect great results, but bacon is not what I am living on, just as I am not exclusively living on honey.
