Every Paleo kitchen needs the following items to give an extra helping hand.

1. Crock Pot

How else are you going to create that lovely batch of bone broth to heal your gut? Crock Pots are definitely making a come back in the kitchen especially with those eating Paleo. We consume large chunks of meat and slurp up bone broths but you can cook other items in there as well.

I personally own the Hamilton Beach 6-Quart.  It's programmable and comes with a meat thermometer (which I rarely use)

2. Cast Iron Skillet

A well seasoned Iron Skillet is probably the most essential item used in the kitchen, at least for me. I cook pretty much everything in it. I tossed out my various teflon, calphalon, whatever other kind of -on coated cooking materials in favor of stainless and cast iron. It takes a little skill and care to get used to cooking on cast iron but is well worth it for the flavor imbued and the avoidance of harmful chemicals flaking off into your food. You also get the added bonus of adding iron to your meals.

I prefer Lodge as that was what we always used in my time as a Boy Scout.  I now own and use for everything, the Deep 10.25" variety.

There's a certain misconception around that fat equals fat on the body.  The notion, upon closer examination, is illogical ,however; I was certainly under this spell for the longest time of my life.  Eating fat does not equal fat.  Growing up in the 80's everything was low fat and Jazzercise or aerobics with colorful leg warmers was the way to fitness godliness.  As I have learned, both couldn't be further from the truth.

Further hang ups tend be with the types of fats.  Everyone knows that we need more Omega 3's and less Omega 6's but at the same time we're told to use "healthy" fats and oils like vegetable oil which is loaded with polyunsaturated fatty acids and Omega 6.  So, if you take away nothing else from this then understand that you need to dispose of all those corn, canola, peanut, soy, and grape seed oils.  Yeah I thought grape seed was ok too for a while but it's no better than the others.  Canola is used so heavily now it is disconcerting.  Canola was originally designed as an industrial lubricant and even a lot of olive oils sneak in a portion of canola to round out the rest of the bottle and cut the cost.  Canola is, as I understand, a product of Rapeseed and not exactly good for our systems.  Another terrible "fat" is the alternative butters.  Margarine is one molecule away from being plastic not to mention all the other so-called butters which are nothing more than chemical compounds made to taste like butter.  Thanks, but I'll take my chances with something natural and something my body knows how to process. So, toss them out and don't look back.  If you're serious about reversing your health, start here.

I'm sure the first few questions in mind are: What is the Paleo diet? Why should I pursue such a thing? The USDA outlines a solid diet, why should I change that?

The Paleo diet is eating as closely to what paleolithic man consumed but taking into consideration modern life. This includes the removal of the following items from your daily life:

• All Processed Foods
• All Grains (gluten especially)
• Legumes (including peanuts)
• Most dairy products (ghee, clarified butter, and some hard cheese are ok in moderation)
• Processed sweeteners (refined sugar, high fructose corn syrup etc.)
• Soy (it is a neurotoxin)
• Unsafe Oils (canola, peanut, or most plant based refined oils)

You would replace those items with whole foods (fresh vegetables), quality meats (grass fed and finished and/or pastured), animal fats, limited fruit and nuts.

The USDA pyramid should be banished and drawn up from scratch according to what our body needs and not mostly derived from grains and cereals or dairy.  Grains have been shown over and over to cause numerous issues within the body so why should that be the major category from which we get nutrients?  It shouldn't.  Any doctor that tells you that whole grains are highly nutritious should be ignored.  They obviously know little about how our body handles grains or the bio-availability of these nutrients.  Food should be our gateway to health and most doctors only have about 6 months of their entire time in medical school dedicated to nutrition.  Even so, the nutrition that they're given is the same tripe we've been handed for the past 50+ years.  We need to re-program not only ourselves but our medical professionals.