My Practically Paleo Meals 3/19/10

Today I decided to do a nutrition analysis of my meals in addition to posting photos.

Breakfast

Very rare beef rib steak, two soft boiled eggs, and a sauteed medley of onion, garlic, kale, and red pepper using olive oil.

About a cup of kabocha squash with coconut oil.

Frozen blueberries with Thai Kitchen coconut milk. When you put the coconut milk on top of the frozen fruit and stir them together a bit, the coconut milk freezes, creating a texture I enjoy.

Lunch

Same beef (larger portion), a whole avocado with salsa, same vegetables, an apple, and an orange.

Nutrition Analysis

I don't do this very often on my own meals.  Here's the breakfast food list and macronutrient totals:

This gives the macronutrient ratios for breakfast in pie chart form:

 This has the entire food list for the day:

This gives the pie chart representation of the macronutrient ratios along with fatty acid analysis (SFA, PUFA, MUFA), cholesterol content, and fiber content:

You can see that this menu supplied 59% of calories as fat, 26% as protein, and 16% as carbohydrate, with 35 grams of fiber.  This program calculated that saturated and monounsaturated fat each supplied 24% of calories (48% total), and polyunsaturated only 4%, but I suspect these may not be correct because the grass-fed meat and omega-3 eggs I used probably have proportions of fatty acids different from the items in the database.   On the days I eat walnuts instead of coconut it will vary with a higher proportion of polyunsaturated fats.

This gives the micronutrient analysis in tabular form with quantification:

This one depicts the nutrient contents in percents of the RDA in graphic form:

These meals fell slightly short of the 150g/d carbohydrate recommendation but this does not concern me since carbohydrate is not a required nutrient.  Vitamin D I get from sun and a supplement, and fish on the days I consume it, so it does not concern me either. 

Calcium fell short of the RDA about which we have a debate.  Recent research by USDA scientists indicates that that people may require only ~750mg of calcium daily (See Hunt and Johnson, full text here), rather than the 1000 mg RDA used by the FitDay calculator.  My food still fell short of that by about 300mg.  On the other hand, compared to other species on a pound for pound basis, we would predict humans requiring more like 2000mg daily; obviously these meals fell far short of that.

These meals also fell short of the RDA for magnesium by 30%, and 21% short of the RDA for thiamin.

I already knew that my meals do not typically meet the RDA for calcium or magnesium. Since I don't always eat fish bones or use bone broth daily, I currently take a calcium-magnesium supplement daily (in addition to vitamin D).  The thiamin level does not concern me because it fluctuates according to my food selections.

I might do another of these on a day that I eat less coconut and more walnuts to see what comes up.