The best ingredients make the best foods and should never be harmful. We believe we have set the highest standard ever established for a grocery store, and we will not compromise our policies for any reason. We know ourselves how difficult it is to constantly scan ingredient labels to find healthy products, so knowing our policies will help save you time and provide assurance that you're browsing the safest products availalbe.
No GMO’s allowed!
GMO stands for Genetically Modified Organism. The science of genetic modification is usually used to create higher yields of various cash crops. Purveyors of these seeds will say that genetic modification (replacing existing genes with new ones) is no different than removing the fuel pump from your car and replacing it with a higher performance fuel pump. The science however, illustrates that this isn’t true and that these GMO foods are harmful and people should stay away from them. There are other socio-political factors that go against GMO foods as well. Many of our products are organic and/or are part of the Non-GMO Verified Project.
No soy, legumes, grains or gluten allowed!
Soy has been lauded as a high-protein and lean wonderfood. 89% (or so) of the soy grown in America is GMO soy. Soy is also highly inflammatory (it contains inflammatory lectins) and it also mimics estrogen, which isn’t good for anybody. Soy is also typically extracted with hexane, a powerful carcinogen that leaves traces in whatever is extracted. Many chocolate products use soy lecithin as an “emulsifier” (which we believe to be unnecessary) and this too, is extracted with hexane. None of our chocolate products contain soy lecithin.
Legumes (like peanuts) have similar inflammatory lectins to those in soy, and in addition legumes often have a high carb load in the form of starches. So we stay away from those as well. Grains were never really a part of paleo/primal human’s diets, and modern grains are nothing like what primal humans would have consumed if they consumed them at all. Modern grains have tremendous carbohydrate loading along with inflammatory lectins. The same holds true for gluten, which is a starchy component in grains. Modern grains also contain more gluten than they did even 100 years ago. It’s said extra gluten was added for the benefit of bakers to make bread more fluffy and voluminous.
No artificial or “natural” flavors allowed!
Real food doesn’t have anything artificial in it or need added flavor. So-called “natural” flavors also don’t belong unless we know the source of said “natural” flavors. Often times these flavors are proprietary and the product makers do not reveal that information so we err on the side of caution. The main thing is, we want to know what’s in every product we sell.
No highly processed ingredients allowed!
What do we mean when we say “highly processed”? Many "so-called" health food store products are sweetened with agave. Like soy, agave nectar is very likely to have been extracted with hexane, which leaves itself places you don’t want carcinogens. Agave also requires lots of energy to produce and is basically fructose, so it triggers similar insulin reactions to sugar. It’s also said to be hard on the liver. So we reject products that contain it. We do not offer products with powdered milk or powdered eggs because of the processes involved in making these ingredients and the resulting degredation of the food.
Our meat offerings are humanely raised!
Our beef and buffalo are grass fed and finished. This ensures high levels of Omega-3s as well as a healthy animal. Turkeys are free-range. None of the animals are raised and kept in feed lots. They are all happy animals!
Our fats and oils
We offer avocado, coconut, olive, and macadamia nut oils in pure unrefined forms. Our products containing these oils also contain unrefined oils. Many products are made with “vegetable” (made up of oils listed below) oils which are often rancid by the time they are used, but are deodorized to mask the rancidness. We offer no products with canola, sunflower, safflower, cottonseed, peanut, or hydrogenated oils of any kind. The reason these oils are bad is because they release free radicals in the body that cause a variety of health problems. So we just steer clear of them.
No unnatural chemicals allowed!
This goes without saying, but if you can’t read it or don’t know what it is, you shouldn’t eat it. One area we stay away from is preservatives. BHT is a classic preservative and also a carcinogen. It is often added “to preserve flavor” or “freshness” and nothing we carry in this store has preservatives. It turns out a lot of real food has a very long shelf life without the aid of preservatives.
Our Seafood
All of our seafood offerings are wild caught from sustainable harvests. We do not allow farmed fish into our inventory because the fish in farms are injected with antibiotics and hormones, which are poison to humans and the fish themselves.
What about Pesticides?
Many “conventional” produce items contain multitudes of pesticides. So we looked to the Environmental Working Group’s list of the worst offenders and have chosen the top 1o as "must-be-organic fruits and vegetables". Apples are the number one offender and many products contain apples, or apple juice (particularly dried cranberries) or apple cider vinegar, and we make sure these products are organic.
What All of This Means
We at Wild Mountain Paleo Market went to great lengths to research our product offerings to find the best products we could find out there. We made sure the ingredients met our stringent standards because everyone deserves to eat delicious, safe food. It was disheartening to find a selected product and then have to reject it because of a natural flavor or a bad oil we missed or what have you. But the end result is the cleanest food available anywhere in one convenient store!
