Low Carb Cooking Class! (LC3) -- Bulk & Advance Cooking

Welcome back to class!

As I’ve been saying all along, I find it hard to wrap my head around the idea that people “don’t know what to cook,” or that they end up eating off-plan because they were hungry and there was “nothing” suitable for them to eat. I’m sorry, but this is a total copout. I can’t speak for how things are in other countries, but if you live in the U.S., you are probably only about 10 minutes from the nearest gas station or convenience store, and in the absolute worst case scenario, you can walk or drive there and get hard boiled eggs, cheese sticks, nuts, beef jerky, pork rinds, pepperoni, or choose from plenty of other low carb offerings. Sure, this stuff might not be the best quality and provenance, but if your primary goal is to stay low carb and you don't especially care much about the purity of the food, then there is approximately zero excuse for eating carby junk when you’re in a pinch.

I do realize, of course, that there are plenty of people who don’t live ten minutes from a convenience store. The folks out in rural and/or isolated places might have it a little harder than the suburbanites and city dwellers, but frankly, if they heed some of my tips from the previous post, then their very own kitchen can be the convenience store, know what I mean?

Between the previous post’s tips for stocking your fridge, freezer, and pantry, and what’s to come today, there’s no reason you can’t put together a perfectly appropriate low carb meal or snack. So if you do choose to eat something off-plan, then it is just that: your choice. And, as a grown adult, you are free to choose to eat whatever your grown adult heart desires. But if you do that, take ownership for your choice, and don’t pretend you did it because there was “nothing” else you could eat, capice?  Honestly, I feel like that’s the whole point of this series: to make this low carb thing so easy, so convenient, and so utterly do-able, that at some point, not sticking to it becomes harder than sticking to it.

(And with that being said, even we kinda-sorta professionals occasionally dive head-first off the wagon. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I’m a nutritionist, not a saint. But it was always well within my power to not do that. Not once did it ever occur because I felt like there were no other options.)

Many of you have no need for any of these tips. You read the Atkins book, or Protein Power, or Primal Body, Primal Mind, and you were off to the races. If so, I’d be surprised if you’re even reading this. But for those of you who do struggle, for those of you who stand in the middle of your kitchen looking around like a deer in headlights, this is for you.

Label Madness Monday: Cricket Flour Bars

It’s been a while since we tore apart—figuratively, not literally—a food label. So here goes. A little something light to start your week.

Up today: Exo bars. To be specific, Exo bars that are marketed as protein bars.

Now, I’m not here to bash these things. On the contrary, if you like to keep something semi-wholesome, with ingredients you can understand and pronounce, in your handbag, gym bag, or desk drawer at the office, you could do a whole lot worse than these. However, if what you are actually looking for is protein, then these “protein” bars may not exactly be the way to go. Let’s see why.

Idea! -- What Not to Eat

If you are not familiar with the American TV show What Not to Wear (which was based on the British version), you might want to skip this post. Without a thorough steeping in the ins and outs of that show, this post will not make any sense to you. I could take time (and several hundred words) to explain it, but honestly, if I do that, I guarantee the magic of the show will lose something in translation. So if you’ve never seen WNTW, no worries. Just sit tight and wait until I post something else. (If you were hoping to kill some time with one of my super-long posts, take a few seconds and go check out the book Growing Tomorrow, by the author of Gaining Ground, which I reviewed here. Hard to say which one I like more. (Actually, no. It's Gaining Ground.) Frankly, this guy is a friggin’ dynamite writer [and farmer!], and both books are excellent. Growing Tomorrow review coming soon!)

For the rest of you, if you have seen WNTW, I think you’ll agree that I have a million dollar idea here.

Food for Thought Friday: Pay the Farmer Now, or Pay the Doctor ... When, Exactly?

When well-meaning acquaintances mock us for spending more money than they do for food, those of us who take pride in buying, cooking, and eating whole, unprocessed, real foods are fond of saying, “Pay the farmer now, or pay the doctor later.” Meaning, if people don’t pony up a little extra cash for better quality food now, they’ll end up paying even more in the future, in the form of medical bills. But is this actually true? If people spend decades putting garbage down their pieholes and end up with some of the “diseases of civilization,” do they really end up all that much worse off, financially?

For the sake of keeping this post to a somewhat reasonable length, let’s stick solely to the financial burden of diet- and lifestyle-induced illness, and we’ll table the “cost” of missed work time, fatigue, illness, chronic pain, and overall reduced quality of life for another time. (But let’s go ahead and acknowledge that these other issues are arguably more important than one’s bank account balance.)

Book Review: The Ketogenic Cookbook

As promised last time, here it is, a review of the recently released, hot-off-the-press, new cookbook by the Livin’ la Vida Low Carb man, himself, Jimmy Moore, and wildly successful low-carb & keto diet coach, Maria Emmerich.

If you’ve become bored with your same-old, go-to, low-carb and ketogenic meal repertoire, and are looking to rekindle your passion for this way of eating, this book is for you. If you can’t stomach the thought of another plate of eggs & bacon for breakfast (that is, if you’re a breakfast eater at all), or if you think you’ll scream if you have to choke down another bunless cheeseburger, consider this book to be the inspiration you’ve been waiting for. (Although, if you ask me, bacon, eggs, and bunless burgers never get old!)

The book is called The Ketogenic Cookbook: Nutritious Low-Carb, High-Fat Paleo Meals to Heal Your Body.

Label Madness Monday: Buttery Spreads, Take 2

It’s that time again, kids. The start of another work week, and a new adventure in food label land. A couple posts back, we looked at a buttery spread whose very name implies it is “Simply Delicious,” even though we made mincemeat out of that claim pretty easily. I left off at the end of that post saying we’d come back and take a look at some even wackier imitation butter spreads, and I’m making good on that today.

First up: Smart Balance “dairy free butter” with omega-3s.

Stop Saying "Ketogenic" When You Mean Low Carb

I’ve received a spate of inquiries from prospective clients recently that start off something like this:

“Hi, Amy, I’m interested in starting a ketogenic diet. Please let me know when we can set up an appointment.”

My initial response to these inquiries is:

“Hi ______,

Thanks for getting in touch. Do you mind if I ask why you’re interested in a ketogenic diet? Do you have a specific medical condition you’re looking to improve? Or if this is for weight loss, what is your current weight, and how much are you looking to lose?”

Once in a while, it’s someone with an autoimmune condition, and I’ve had a couple of inquiries about cancer, but the majority of people I hear from do not require a ketogenic diet. That is, not a classical ketogenic diet.

Alzheimer’s, Ketones, and Kidding Ourselves (Pt.3/3)

I concluded the previous post by introducing the idea that, when it comes to a body and brain being fueled by ketones, the absolute concentration of ketone bodies in the blood might be less important than the body’s ability to use those ketones. I expressed concern that placing the sum total of our faith in high β-OHB levels might take our eyes off the marker we should probably be more interested in: how well an AD patient is functioning. Maybe some AD patients do require ketones at upwards of 4-5mM. But maybe some others would do just great at lower levels.

Here’s my thinking on this...

Alzheimer’s, Ketones, and Kidding Ourselves (Pt.2/3)

I ended the previous post by introducing the idea of using exogenous ketones for improving the signs and symptoms of Alzheimer’s, while not requiring the afflicted individual to make any dietary changes. (Recall that, according to researchers, a very low carb diet is “inconvenient” to prepare and consume.) Is there a place for exogenous ketones in AD therapy? Yes. I believe there is. It depends on the person’s age and severity of illness, but I absolutely acknowledge that exogenous ketones can improve quality of life. BUT: with the exception of some very specific cases, which I’ll mention in a bit, I cannot support them being used as the sole intervention. It’s as bad as telling a type-2 diabetic to use insulin and do nothing else to influence the way their body handles glucose, or, really, insulin, itself.  

Please tell me someone out there is on the same page as me here.

“Alzheimer's disease patients frequently undergo changes in food preference toward sweet, carbohydrate-rich foods, which would make compliance to a ketogenic diet difficult.” (Henderson et al., 2009)

Really? Do they undergo changes in food preference toward sweet, carbohydrate-rich foods after they develop Alzheimer’s disease, or are sugar addicts more likely to develop AD? Which is the chicken, and which is the Cadbury Crème Egg?

Now, here’s where things get deep.

The Dietetics Organization Joins the 21st Century (Kind Of...)

If you’ve been living under a rock for the past few weeks, or, unlike me, you have an actual life, which precludes you from reading as many nutrition articles, blogs, and papers as I do, you might have missed the comments from the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics (AND) in response to the Scientific Report of the 2015 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee. (The AND was formerly the ADA—the American Dietetic Association—the body that oversees the registered dietitian credential [RD].)

This thing has been making the rounds in the low-carb, Paleo, Primal and real food circles, mostly because it is a refreshing—and we might even say downright shocking—reversal of course by this supremely mainstream organization regarding some of the nutrients that have been public outlaws for the past few decades. While the AND has certainly not come out and directly endorsed higher-fat, low-carbohydrate diets, here a few general points they made about the recommendations by the 2015 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee (DGAC), some of which agree with the committee’s findings, and some of which don’t: 

• Very low sodium diets are not appropriate for everyone, and may, in fact, be harmful for some populations. 
• There is no correlation between dietary cholesterol intake and serum cholesterol levels.
• Since the studies on saturated fat, cholesterol, and heart disease over the years have been so terribly conducted and interpreted, “the Academy suggests that HHS and USDA support a similar revision [for that of cholesterol] deemphasizing saturated fat as a nutrient of concern.”
• Carbohydrate intake is a much stronger predictor for cardiovascular disease risk than is saturated fat, and it might not be such a bad idea to replace some amount of dietary carbohydrate with fat. 

As you can see, these points mark a huge step forward for this organization, which in the past, has been tepid, conventional, and by-the-book all the way. It’s a gutsy move, and I’m thrilled to see it happen. I applaud the AND for joining the rest of us in the 21^st Century with regard to basic science about food and human health. Since I have ragged pretty hard on the AND in the past, I’m happy to be able to give credit where credit is due.

That being said, this wouldn’t be all that interesting a post if all I did was sing the praises of this document. Naturally, there are a few points of contention. So let’s look at things little more closely, celebrate the good stuff, and bring to light the not-so-good stuff. We’ll start with the not-so-good stuff and then move to the good stuff, so that we end on a positive note.

Food for Thought Friday: Sandwiches are Stupid

It’s true. They are.

But let’s not even address this from the perspective of low carb eating. Grain flour that’s been baked into some sort of spongy, edible “thing” is a completely unnecessary element in the human diet. Bread, rolls, buns, pita, naan, bagels, panini – carbohydrate, insulin, blah, blah, blah. Old news. It’s Friday, and since I like to have a little more fun with these posts than I tend to let slip in things like the cancer series or the fuel partitioning series, let’s look at the ridiculousness of sandwiches from a perspective that has nothing to do with aspects of carbohydrate that we’ve all heard about a million times over.

How about we tackle the sandwich from a functional and socio-cultural perspective?  

Label Madness Monday: Et tu, BBQ? (Or: How to Eat at a BBQ Joint Without Wrecking Yourself)

I love me some good BBQ!

Set before me some nice sliced brisket or a pile of pulled pork and I’m in hog heaven. (Pun intended.) However, depending on what you order, barbecue joints can be a low-carb/Paleo paradise, or they can be a total blood sugar nightmare.

If you’re watching your carbohydrate intake, you already know to steer clear of the cornbread, baked beans, mac & cheese, and the cheap-o bread they usually stick under whatever meat you order in order to sop up the juices. (Confession: Sometimes I eat this bread, ‘cuz, really, what a waste of yummy meat drippings! I also eat the cornbread sometimes, ‘cuz…well, it’s a bit of a weakness.)

That’s the obvious stuff, though. What about things that are harder to avoid at a BBQ place, like the delicious sauces they use to marinate, baste, and slather your food with before serving it to you? BBQ sauce is a sneaky source of large amounts of sugar. (And by “sugar,” I mean cane sugar, molasses, honey, corn syrup, corn starch, and more.) Let’s take a look at a couple of examples from a popular restaurant chain, Famous Dave’s®. (I am a big fan of this place, and am absolutely not writing this to bash it. I only want to point out the ingredients in the sauces and help us make informed choices, wherever we eat.)

Label Madness Monday: This is Nuts!

Welcome to the latest installment in our ongoing series of food label exposés! (It’s dirty work, but somebody’s gotta do it.)

On the menu today: dry roasted peanuts.

Sounds simple enough, right? Dry. Roasted. Peanuts. To me, this means two things: peanuts, and a heat source. (The “dry roasting” implies, at least to me, that no oil is added. You’ll sometimes see “peanuts and peanut oil” or “peanuts and cottonseed and/or canola and/or peanut oil” in the ingredient list of roasted peanuts that are not “dry” roasted.)

Okay, here goes.

Label Madness Monday: It's So Simple...

It’s time for another round of food label smackdown, folks!

If you’re on the edge of your seat waiting for the next post in the cancer series, get a bigger seat and scoot back for a bit. I’ve been working on a big project and am falling a little behind on those cancer deep-dives. But fear not; I definitely haven’t forgotten about them and there will be more...eventually. In the meantime, let’s take a look at something as “simple” as the vegetable oil spreads that have been masquerading as butter for the past few decades.

First up: “Deliciously Simple,” by the food chemists who bring you I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter!® (The company employing these food chemists is Unilever, the same company that brings you all these other non-foods and edible food-like products.

Let’s see just how “simple” this product is:

Taste Test: Primal Mayo

I have never made any secret of the fact that I’m not perfect when it comes to diet. In fact, with regard to eating not-so-nutritious things, I have a fair bit of experience. Most of the time, though, I do pretty well. If not by my own standards, then at least compared to the average soda-swilling, bagel-munching guy or gal on the street. I’ve been at this low-carb real food “thing” long enough that I’ve never found myself at a restaurant or dinner at a friend’s home and felt like there was nothing I could eat. I’ve learned to make my own no-sugar or lower carb versions of certain foods, and learned to make appropriate substitutions when necessary.

One thing I haven’t been able to replicate in a wholesome version is mayonnaise. Being pretty much just oil, eggs, vinegar, and maybe some salt and lemon juice, mayo is about as low carb as it gets. The problem with mayo isn’t the carb content; it’s the type of oil typically used in commercial brands. I’m not ashamed to say I’m a Hellmann’s gal. (That’s Best Foods to those of you west of the Rockies.) When Ina Garten, one of my favorite Food Network “celebuchefs” uses mayonnaise, she always says “Use a good mayonnaise,” and even though the network isn’t allowed to show the brand label on the front of the jar, you can clearly tell it’s Hellmann’s.

I have tried other brands. I’ve tried Duke’s, Kraft, and the store brands from Safeway, Giant, Trader Joe’s, and Whole Foods. I’ve tried mayo made with canola oil (gasp!). None of them even came close. A couple of those were okay; others were downright dreadful. I never bothered trying the olive oil mayonnaises. If you look at the labels, you’ll see that while they do contain a little olive oil, so the manufacturer can write OLIVE OIL in big letters on the front of the jar, they are still predominantly soybean oil. (Thanks to our generous tax subsidies, soy is super cheap for food manufacturers to use in their products.)

I’ve even tried making it from scratch a time or two. Let’s just say the results made me want to reach for the Hellmann’s even more. And frankly, considering my lack of dietary sainthood—and lack of desire to attain it—while I generally advise against consumption of large amounts of soy oil, if mayonnaise and the occasional blue cheese salad dressing are pretty much my only sources of it, I’m comfortable with that. (Let me pause while the gasps of horror subside and the whooshing sound in the wake of the purists getting up to leave quiets down.)

Book Review - Extra Virginity

Olive oil has a bit of a unique place in nutrition science. It’s one of the only single foods all the warring factions agree is good for us: Paleos, vegans, vegetarians, low-carbers -- we've all got a bottle of it in the kitchen. It’s lower in saturated fatty acids than most animal fats, which pleases the veg-heads (and the ignoramuses who think saturated fat is “bad” for us), and it’s loaded with monounsaturated fatty acids, which seems to please everyone else—doctors, nutritionists, chefs, and newspaper journalists who think they know anything about biochemistry. Olive oil has been anointed (pun intended) with the magical powers to do just about everything from preventing heart disease to making your salad delicious. (The latter, I agree with; the former, I don’t think we can say for sure. Prevent heart disease, maybe, maybe not. But biochemically and physiologically speaking, it’s sure less likely to cause cardiovascular problems than, say, soybean and cottonseed oils.)

I love reading about the science of nutrition, but I also love reading about cooking, culinary culture, and, if I’m especially enamored with something, individual ingredients. Since olive oil figures heavily into my diet—and probably yours, too—when I heard there was a book called Extra Virginity, which covers some of the historical, cultural, gastronomic, and economic significance of this palate- and health-pleasing oil, I got my keister to the bookstore to get a copy. And with a subtitle like, “The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil,” I knew I’d be in for some serious eye-opening.

Better than 80/20 - Diet, Pt.1

(Warning: That pledge I made to write shorter posts? Yeah, not happening today. Not happening for the next 2-3 posts, in fact. But once we get past me talking about my food & exercise, I really am going to try to keep things more succinct and reader-friendly. Just don’t hold it against me if that doesn’t occur.)

Well, here we are. The post you may or may not have been waiting for, but here it is nonetheless. Today I’ll give you the rundown on what I’m doing with my diet that I think is helping me feel (and maybe look) better than I did a few months ago, when I posted about feeling like a fraud. To bring you up to speed, last time, I covered my supplements. And assuming at least some of the page hits on that one are legitimate and not all of them are coming from automated search engines in Russia and China (although there is a freakish amount of those), there are a couple of people out there who are curious about what I’m doing these days. Oddly enough, my posts about beef shanks and beef hearts have way more hits, but on the off chance that someone out there finds something new or interesting here, I’ll yammer on for a bit about what I’m eating.

It’s hard for me to imagine that anyone really wants to know what I put down my piehole, but I said I would share, and I don’t want to renege on that. I’m no rock star, but people seem to be fairly curious about what nutrition and health-minded professionals eat. Since I am technically in that latter category, even though my influence is small at the moment, it couldn’t hurt to give you a glimpse into what’s on my plate and in my fridge.

So I’ll talk about my chow for a post or two, then my exercise habits, and then we’ll get back to the blog’s regularly scheduled programming. (For a look at what’s coming up, see this post.)

Better than 80/20 -- Update!

Me, circa 10/2014.

I am not actually this slender.

My housemate took the photo at an 
odd angle, and I look “longer” than I am. 

That being said, not too shabby!

Remember a few months ago, when I announced to the world (or, rather, the teeny tiny portion of it that reads this blog) that I felt like a fraud because my dietary off-roading was becoming the rule, rather than the exception? Well, I’m happy to report that I’m doing much better these days—and more than that—I feel fantastic.

Perhaps it’s in poor taste for me to talk about how good I feel and how well things are going, considering the recent passing of my mother. But if anything, I am now more determined than ever to start enjoying my life, and that wasn’t really a promising proposition until I made some of the changes I’ll talk about in the next few posts. Having more experience than I care to admit with feeling bad about myself, I know that having a positive outlook and feeling like the glass is half full is not as easy as just “faking it ‘til you make it.” When you’re stuck in a gloomy, gray box—self-imposed though it may be—it can be darn near impossible to find the lid and climb out. You can’t fake it. I know. I tried. For years. While you are capable of acknowledging that you have things to be grateful for, and that, in many ways, you have a pretty easy, charmed life, your spirit’s response is, “So what?” It doesn’t matter if the glass is half-full when you’re not even thirsty. Recognizing that you are blessed doesn’t always translate into actually feeling good about anything.

Sometimes we need a little help there. And there’s nothing wrong with that. I only regret that it took me so long to find the combination of things that is working so well right now. Will it continue to work in the long-term? I don’t know. But I’m thrilled with things at the moment, and if a time comes when I’m feeling not-so-thrilled, I’ll reassess and retool.

So what’s going on?

Armchair Experts

 

With so many people visiting to pay their respects during the shiva period following my mother’s death, I had the opportunity to overhear many conversations about diet, food, and health. It is amazing what passes for knowledge about these topics these days—and not in a good way.

If you have ever paid a shiva call, then you know that pretty much everyone who walks through the door comes bearing some kind of cake, platter of cookies, fruit basket, or some other food offering, intended to comfort the mourners. Well, the dining room table at my sister’s house was a testament to this outpouring of love and support via sugar and baked goods. For a week straight, it was covered in chocolates, cheesecake, seven-layer cookies, danishes, banana bread, brownies, muffins, bagels, and Edible Arrangements (with pineapples, melon, grapes, and strawberries artfully cut to look like flowers). (Click here for coupons, if you are so inclined!) Not to mention what was in the fridge: about a hundred years’ worth of “real food,” courtesy of many out-of-town friends flooding the local kosher deli with orders to be delivered. (Traditional Jewish-type foods, like whitefish and herring, lox and smoked sable, about eight zillion pounds of cream cheese for the eight zillion bagels out on the table, roast chicken, mushrooms & barley, and a few kasha knishes for good measure.)

As visitors made their way through the offerings, I overheard quite a few explanations and justifications for why people were picking and choosing this or that, and staying away from certain things and reaching for seconds of others. Most of this, as you might imagine, given that I have been driven to write a blog post about it, was total nonsense. (One guy even asked if we had any low-fat cream cheese. *Facepalm.*)

Most of what I overheard had nothing to do with anyone’s individual metabolic or physiologic needs. No one said anything about skipping the bagels because of a gluten issue, or avoiding the cakes because they were diabetic. (The people, not the cakes, hehheh.) Most of it was more along the lines of, “…all that cholesterol is no good for you,” or, “The brown rice is better because it’s a whole grain.” Moreover, these things were said with complete confidence. They were declarative sentences, not questions. These people honestly believed that what they were saying was factual. That they were ironclad truths. And the situation being what it was, I just didn’t have the inclination to call anyone on it. I didn’t want to stir up trouble by asking how someone “knew” that eating a lot of cholesterol is bad for them, or why they said, with complete confidence, that brown rice being a whole grain makes it a better choice. (Better than what? And for whom?)

All I did was sit back and listen, and come to the unsettling conclusion that, when it comes to nutrition, there are enough armchair experts to fill every last chair in every furniture warehouse in America.

And this got me thinking.

Once Upon a Time...

Hey Everyone,

The four or five consistent readers of this blog may have noticed that it’s been a while since I’ve posted anything. There’s a reason for that. How about I share it with you in story form? It starts with “Once upon a time,” but I’m afraid the ending is a bit different from “happily ever after,” at least, for now. I do believe that will be the ending, eventually.

Before I start, let me say that I am telling this story for two reasons, one selfish and one altruistic. First the story, then the reasons.

Warning: as per my usual, this post is long. Really long. (Cut me some slack this time; I’ve got over two weeks of absence to make up for.) Read it in pieces if need be.  Go get yourself a cup of coffee halfway through and come back. If you’re a cubicle-dweller and I’ve given you a way to kill some time at work, you’re welcome.  ;-)