Laura Schoenfeld: That’s kind of a specific question to where you live in the country because where I live there’s a decent amount of certain about health and farm-to-table stuff and eating healthy foods. It’s not crazy. I’m sure people in San Francisco and New York and stuff have much more options for super-Paleo restaurants, but I typically tend to go to places that have gluten-free options. I like to eat things that are farm to table, so if they have lots of local meats and local plant foods and they have a more simple menu than people who are cooking these crazy … like everything is fried or whatever. I like to go for the more basic foods.
I also really like ethnic food, and I think a lot of traditional ethnic food is actually a lot closer to Paleo than a lot of American foods are. Now, the one downside that I think is a problem in most restaurants is the vegetable oil use. That’s really hard to find a restaurant that doesn’t use vegetable oil for their cooking. That’s one of the reasons that it’s hard to find a 100 percent compliant Paleo restaurant, but there are a lot of places that I like to eat that are traditional Asian restaurants or traditional South American restaurants.
I like to go to Vietnamese a lot because they have things like pho, where they have meat and rice noodles and bone broth and vegetables and all that stuff. Sushi tends to be pretty Paleo friendly if somebody is eating rice. If you go to a steakhouse, it’s pretty easy to get a piece of meat and a potato or sweet potato and some veggies. If somebody needs to be very strict, then steakhouses tend to be pretty good.
Again, this kind of goes into that travel question because I personally like to branch out and try different foods when I eat out, and a lot of times my dietary restrictions are not a major factor in the food that I choose to eat. I will avoid foods that make me feel terrible. For example, pasta is something that I absolutely just would never eat because it just makes me feel awful. Then there are other things, like pizza, for example, that generally I hate eating because it makes me feel terrible, but there’s one pizza restaurant down the street from my house where they grind their own flour, they source all their ingredients locally, and for whatever reason, that one doesn’t bother me to have a slice or two. That’s something that, again, you have to figure out what your particular issues are and what foods you need to avoid and which ones you can loosen up about, but looking for ethnic restaurants that are traditional and then also gluten free if you need to be gluten free. A lot of restaurants will have a gluten-free menu if you ask.
Again, just discovering what is necessary for you to be strict about and when you’re eating out, not over-analyzing every single thing because I can pretty much guarantee that’s going to be something wrong with the food you’re eating. That sounds terrible, but even just the vegetable oil piece is such a prevalent thing in restaurants these days that there’s always going to be something that you could say isn’t Paleo about what you’re eating. So just figuring out what’s important for you to avoid to feel your best and then relaxing a bit about the stuff that’s not that important is what I would recommend, not only for those of you listening to this call, but also for your patients so that people are feeling totally neurotic and discouraged.