Book Review: Sweet & Savory Fat Bombs

    

Like I said in the title of my review of this book on Amazon, Martina Slajerova has outdone herself! Her first book, The KetoDiet Cookbook (which I reviewed on the blog a while back) is a great addition to any low-carb kitchen, but with Sweet and Savory Fat Bombs, she’s knocked it out of the park. I’m not kidding, kids. This one’s a keeper!

(Before I go on, in the interest of full disclosure: I received a courtesy copy of this book. Take that for what you will.)

Whether you prefer sweet or salty, chocolatey or fruity, this book delivers. Even if you have a nut allergy or dairy sensitivity, there are plenty of delicious fat bombs here for you to enjoy. It goes way beyond the usual fat bomb recipes: peanut butter, chocolate, coconut. (Not that there’s anything wrong with those!) There’s orange creamsicle, dulce de leche, green tea & lemon, gingerbread, pistachio, strawberry basil. A huge variety of out-of-the-ordinary flavors and textures to keep you going back to this book again and again.

Blast from the Past: Mardi Gras, a.k.a. Fat Tuesday!

Hey Everyone!

I’m falling a little behind in my blogging, but rather than keep you waiting for something new from the dark recesses of my mind, I thought it was time to resurrect a post from the past. An oldie but a goodie, as they say. This was originally posted November 6, 2012, making it one of my earliest posts, back when really, truly, no one was reading my blog. (All I've done is add some links to posts I've done since then.) I joke about having no readers now, but, based on page views these days compared to back in 2012, things have come a long way since those early days. I still have a [relatively] small audience, but I know you’re out there, and I am grateful for you! I tell people I have a small but loyal following. And, in my humble opinion, most of you are of above average intelligence. [Maybe you’re from Lake Wobegon? Any American who gets that reference, I am even more grateful for you, haha!] Frankly, I’d rather have a smaller audience of…how shall I say…”choice individuals,” versus catering to the great unwashed masses. ;D  I try to remind myself of that and be grateful for the few but meaningful comments my posts garner, as opposed to the flame wars, irrationally angry comments, and utter stupidity that abound on sites with a bigger reach. We’re a small, tight-knit group here, and I kinda like it that way.

I’ll try not to do these repeat posts very often. Right now, though, I’ve got nothing in the hopper, so I need to get crackin’ on some new posts. I think I’ve got a couple more to tack on to the insulin series, and yes, dear ones, I will be getting back to the cancer series. (Eventually.) I also have some epic-ish rants coming.

Okay, enough blathering. On with the show!

Mardi Gras! It means different things depending on where you live and what you believe. It could be a period of uninhibited eating, drinking, and general debauchery preceding Lent. Could be a time to make funny masks, eat traditional King cakes, and do…um…certain things to get lots of beaded necklaces.

On this blog, however, I’m gonna stick with the English translation: Fat Tuesday! What’s not to love about those two things? Fat is delicious and good for you (no, really, it is!), and Tuesday…well, it ain’t Friday, but it’s better than Monday! (And everyone knows Mondays suck. Disagree? Obviously you haven’t seen Office Space. And if that’s the case I have two questions for you:  what are you waiting for, and how big is the rock you’ve been living under?)   

So, Fat Tuesday. What’s that about? Where am I going with this?

Food for Thought Friday: Food Prudes & the Low Carb Backlash

You know the phrase, folks:  Everything old is new again.

Dr. Robert Atkins was practically driven out of professional medicine by an angry mob wielding knives and pitchforks. How dare he suggest that obese people might have success in losing weight by reducing the amount of carbohydrate they consume? And worse—far worse!—how dare he tell people it was okay to eat butter, cheese, and red meat? Sure, people could lose weight by cutting back on starch, but didn’t Atkins know that the high-fat foods he recommended (especially the ones from—gasp!—animals!) would clog people’s arteries? (Um, no, he did not know that, because it’s not true. Also, by the way, Dr. Atkins was a cardiologist, so one would assume he would not have put thousands of his patients on a diet that could have had him indicted for malpractice, but I digress.)

From the publishing of Dr. Atkins’ first diet book in 1972, through its newer editions during the 1990s, it seemed like the more people that were successful on the Atkins diet, the louder, more strident, and more vitriolic the backlash became.

Well, in case you haven’t noticed, we are smack-dab in the middle of another round of low carb hatred. I suspect it’s due to the wild popularity not just of the low-carb approach, but also to the exponential increase in interest in Paleo, Primal, and low-allergen diets. (None of these is low carb by definition, but they tend to be significantly lowER in carbs than the standard American diet.) Moreover, even mainstream nutrition and medical organizations have basically rescinded the last 3-4 decades’ worth of recommendations to avoid every single molecule of saturated fat, sodium, and cholesterol.

The powers that be can see the writing on the wall, and they do not like it.

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.

Alzheimer's Follow-up: Q&A (a.k.a. World's Longest Blog Post)

WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS MAJOR RANTS AND HARSH LANGUAGE. Read at your own risk.

Anyone out there watch Ancient Aliens? If so, you are probably cracking up right now. If not, you’re scratching your head, because you have no idea why this is funny. (Trust me, though, it’s hilarious.)

Seriously, though, the answer is not aliens. I might not know for sure what the answers are, but I’ll provide my best guesses/hunches.

What are the questions? Here goes:

It’s no secret that I am trying to get the word out about Alzheimer’s disease as a “disease of civilization” – that is, a condition that results from the mismatch between our physiology and the modern Western diet (refined carbohydrate-heavy, vegetable oil-heavy, low in micronutrients), and the modern Western lifestyle (inadequate sleep, inadequate physical movement, too much psychological stress, loss of human emotional connections). As of 1/18/2015, the post I wrote pointing folks toward the article I wrote for the Weston A. Price Foundation, has 1470 views. Not all that many, considering the one on Vitamin J has 13,512. (If I could get Mark Sisson to include the Alzheimer’s post in one of his Sunday Weekend Link Loves, maybe it would have more, since, thanks to a reader and friend who alerted the MDA people to it, that is where the vast majority of hits came from on Vitamin J.)

But word is spreading, if slowly. (In fact, someone is launching a Kickstarter campaign to fund a documentary about preventing Alzheimer’s, called Bread Head.) More people here and there are stumbling onto my blog, and finding the Alzheimer’s article, which is nice. One such newcomer left some very good questions in the comments section. They were good enough—and my answers complex enough—that I thought it would benefit more people if I answered in the form of a blog post, where everyone would see it, versus responding in the comments section, where almost no one would.

Fat Tuesday: World's Simplest Tallow

If you’ve been reading my blog for any length of time, you’ve probably realized by now that there are few things I like talking about more than fat. Especially delicious animal fat, and even more especially, that of ruminant animals, such as cows and sheep. These fats are predominantly saturated and monounsaturated, which makes them stable for high-heat cooking, and of course, there’s the most important point: they’re delicious!

I have written in detail about beef tallow before. To people who are new to the traditional food scene—and sometimes even to us old hands—rendering tallow and lard at home can seem like a daunting prospect. The good news is, you don’t have to do it all that often to get a supply that will last you a while. If you make a big batch of stock, depending on the types of bones you use, you could end up with lots and lots of tallow, which you can store in the freezer for a long time. (In addition to the “boney bones,” you’ll want some meaty bits, too. They’ll give the stock more flavor, and if you choose fatty shanks, maybe some short ribs, and other fatty pieces, all that gorgeous fat will render out during the simmering process and you’ll be left with lots of golden delicious fat. And you thought that phrase was only for apples!)

And the even better news is, if you’re not of a mind to do it yourself, more and more small, family-owned, grass-based farms are selling lard and tallow on the farmstead and also at farmers’ markets. (With more and more people getting into this kind of thing these days, you can even order the good stuff online now.) So being skittish about the DIY process is no excuse to keep cooking with soybean or corn oil.

But here’s the best news of all: getting your hands on good ruminant tallow is as simple as cooking some gound beef or lamb in a skillet, and reserving the fat in a separate container, rather than throwing it away, the way fifty years of “fat-is-bad” propaganda have conditioned us to do. (Remember: fat isn’t bat. Not even saturated fat.)

I’m not kidding! It really is that simple. Here’s how it works:

Book Review: The Big Fat Surprise

“It would be hard to imagine a greater set of unintended consequences than those resulting from the vast, uncontrolled experiment that the United States and the entire Western world have undergone by adopting a low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet over the past half-century.” (p.333)

“Measured just by death and disease, and not including the millions of lives derailed by excess weight and obesity, it’s very possible that the course of nutrition advice over the past sixty years has taken an unparalleled toll on human history.” (p.330)

“It now appears that since 1961, the entire American population has…been subjected to a mass experiment, and the results have clearly been a failure.” (p.330)

  

Since the earliest days of this blog (back when I had just three readers, as opposed to the five I have now), I have been talking about dietary fat. Specifically, I have been trying to shed some light on the chemistry of fats and oils, so that we, as buyers, home cooks, and maybe most important—eaters—of these things, can make informed choices.

More than just fats and oils overall, I have been trying to provide a little non-scary education regarding saturated fats, in particular, because while we have been generally advised to follow a diet that’s low in total fat from all sources, saturated fats, specifically, have been targeted as being especially detrimental to good health.

Fat Tuesday: The Big Fat Surprise Preview

I’m going to do something I’ve never done before. I’m going to recommend a book I haven’t even read yet. The reason I feel confident recommending this book is because it has received out-freaking standing reviews from several people whose opinions I highly respect and trust when it comes to nutrition. And not just “nutrition” with a little n, but rather the big, bad, mamma-jamma, capital-N, Nutrition. The kind of nutrition that isn’t only about what we should and shouldn’t eat, but that also includes the politics and economics behind how and why the U.S. government (and, by proxy—and to their great detriment—many other governments of the “industrialized world”) and our most respected medical and dietetics organizations came to recommend diets that are low in cholesterol, total fat, and saturated fat in particular, while encouraging everyone, across the board—whether young or old, healthy or chronically ill, active or sedentary, insulin resistant or not—to consume the majority of their total calories from grains and other starchy carbohydrates. And what little, teeny tiny, scant bits of fat we do allow ourselves should come from vegetable and seed oils. (Remember what I said about those? It wasn't positive. Check out here and here for a refresher.)

When a book is called The Big Fat Surprise, and has the subtitle Why Butter, Meat & Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet, you know this is a book I've gotta read.

And when the following three people say something, I sit up and take notice.

Fat Tuesday: Eat the Yolks Preview

“Margarine is the greatest culinary and dietary atrocity ever to be inflicted upon our society.”

You’ve got to love a book with a line like that!

I’m almost done with Eat the Yolks, a brand-spankin’ new book by Liz Wolfe, the non-Diane half of the Balanced Bites podcast and the gal behind the RealFoodLiz site (formerly CaveGirlEats). I’ll post a full review of the book soon, but in the meantime, I couldn’t help wanting to share some of the great quotes about fat. It is Tuesday, after all, and you know what that means...

  

Fat Tuesday: More Saturated Fat Vindication Fun!

  





Hey Everyone! After my last post was mostly a linkfest, I’m hesitant to do something similar right away, but I found something the other day that I think is worth passing along. If you’ve been following me for any length of time (and I know there are at least two of you out there who have, hehheh), then it won’t surprise you when I say that a significant amount of the dietary and nutritional advice we’ve been given by the mainstream medical establishment (not to mention the supermarket tabloids, but I’m pretty sure all of us put more stock in the former than the latter) for the last sixty years is wrong. Not merely misguided, or a little off the mark, but straight-up, flat-out wrong. Now, it’s bad enough when, say, your mechanic gets something wrong. Maybe the tires get misaligned just a bit and your car pulls to the left or right. Or he thinks he’s fixed the problem, but that pesky check engine light comes back on the next day. But when doctors, nurses, dietitians, and nutritionists get it wrong, people die. Maybe not right away, but certainly over time. Remember: just because something doesn’t kill you immediately doesn’t mean it isn’t poisonous. (Lead, anyone? Arsenic? Too much sugar? Too much soybean oil? Ah, but I’m getting ahead of myself...)

Fat Tuesday: Tall-ow Tales

Welcome to another installment of Fat Tuesday, the series where I drop some knowledge bombs about fats and oils. In previous posts, I’ve mentioned beef tallow. If you’re confused about tallow, what it is, where to get it, and, most important of all, what to do with it and how to use it to make some seriously delicious eats, wait no more. It's time to bring this traditional, favorite fat back into the American kitchen!

Saturated Fat Vindicated: Confounders

It’s that day of the week again, y’all! (Sorry, all this talk about saturated fat and butter has me channeling Paula Deen and her southern accent.) It’s Tuesday, and you know what that means:  a new post that drops a couple more knowledge bombs on the war zone that is the last sixty years of official government and medical community recommendations about dietary fats. Last week I introduced you to a paper whose author—a PhD professor of chemistry and biochemistry—concluded that maybe, perhaps, the fear mongering about saturated fat has been misguided, and heart disease might be caused by things other than butter, bacon, red meat, cheese, and similar delicious morsels.

I promised I would devote a couple of Mardi Gras/Fat Tuesday posts to dissecting the paper in more detail, so here goes.

Recipe: Compound Butter

So now that we’ve established that saturated fat is not the root of all evil (and, in fact, might be the root of all good), I thought it would be nice to post a recipe that celebrates the beauty of butter. Actually, it’s not so much a recipe as a guide, because even though there are “recipes” for different compound butters, my philosophy when it comes to things like this is, “Everything to taste.” This kind of cooking drives some people crazy, since it completely omits measuring. No exact number of teaspoons, grams, or ounces. But you know what they say: baking is a science; cooking is an art. Exact measurements are more important when it comes to baked goods rising, staying moist, or otherwise turning out the way they’re supposed to. To steal a line from a novel I sort of finished writing a few years ago, “A cook’s best tools are clean hands and a sense of adventure.” The sense of adventure comes in handy with recipes like this, where you just have to trust your eyes, your nose, and your taste buds.

Saturated Fat Vindicated! (...Yet Again!)

“This idea that the saturated fats are going to be bad for you never had any real validity.”

                                                -Dr. Glen Lawrence, Superhuman Radio Show, 5/22/2013

Y’know how I’m always saying wacky things that could get me excommunicated from mainstream NutritionLand, such as, saturated fats are good for you, cholesterol in our food doesn’t automatically lodge itself inside our arteries, and the newfangled, highly processed vegetable oils are far more damaging to our health than the good ol’, natural, chemically stable saturated fats? (You know…the ones found in such delicious things as butter, beef, cheese, coconut oil, and bacon?) Well, lookey lookey, Glen Lawrence, PhD, Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Long Island University, agrees with me.

He published a paper last month titled Dietary Fats and Health: Dietary Recommendations in the Context of Scientific Evidence, in the journal Advances in Nutrition, and boy, am I glad he did! There was so much great stuff in the paper that I knew it would make a fantastic addition to my Fat Tuesday posts. (I know, you’ve all been on the edge of your seats waiting for me to resurrect this series, amiright?)

There’s a lot to digest here—no pun intended—so let’s get to it.

It's Official! Red Meat & Lard are Heart Healthy!!

Hey folks,


Just a quick link to start your week off right.

The Nutrition Diva's Quick & Dirty Tips: 5 Most Surprising Heart Healthy Foods

It's official -- steak and lard are good for your heart! And finally, other nutritionists are coming right out and saying so. And no, they're not joking.

I know -- when I first suggested that lard, beef tallow, and other animal fats aren't the "artery clogging" spawn-of-Satan we've been led to believe, some of you probably thought I'd lost my mind. (Either that, or maybe I was putting all my retirement funds into the stocks of companies who manufacture statin drugs, defibrillators, and liposuction machines.) No, I assure you, the facts about fat are starting to come to light and the delicious, heart-healthy animal fats and proteins that kept people physically healthy and psychologically and emotionally balanced for centuries are reclaiming their proper place in the kitchen. (Now if only nutrition textbooks and articles in women's magazines would follow suit...)

Want to take care of your ticker? Ditch the highly processed, rancid, and just plain nasty vegetable oils (soybean, canola, corn, & cottonseed) and eat the stuff you know tastes better anyway. (Nifty factoid: Back in the day, McDonald's used to fry their french fries in beef tallow! They switched to vegetable oil [super-high in omega-6 and probably also hydrogenated] after vegetarians found out they were unknowingly consuming fat from a dead animal...  And y'know what? The fries used to taste better! And I'm not saying Mickey-D's fries would be a health food if they went back to that, but I could certainly make a case for them being better for us than they are now.)

Before I go, I'll also point out that Ms. Reinagel has a podcast you can listen to for free on iTunes. I haven't always agreed with her, but for the most part, she knows what she's talking about. And the podcasts are usually pretty short -- under 10 minutes in most cases. A good way to get a dose of good info during your commute, workout, or whenever else you might listen to podcasts. And she's covered just about every topic under the sun. I recommend going to iTunes and checking out her archived episodes and seeing what sounds interesting to you. Free education! Way better than student loans! (I speak from experience. Still paying mine off...)

Now go do your heart -- and taste buds -- a favor: eat a bacon-wrapped filet mignon with a potato on the side and wash it all down with a beer. Coffee for dessert!

WOOHOO!

Fat Tuesday Part 6 - What does it all MEAN?

Woohoo! It’s that time again—time for our weekly dose of the truth about dietary fats. As promised last time, this week I’ll finally start taking what we’ve learned so far and connect it to what matters most: what it all means when it comes time to EAT…and shop for food, cook, and all the other things that have to get done before we sit down at the table. (Wouldn’t it be nice if life was like it was on The Jetsons, and we could just pop a pill for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and call it good? No dishes to wash, no time spent peeling and chopping? That would free up a lot of time, but then again, I like cooking, and heaven knows I love the taste of food. So all things considered, I guess I’ll stick with foraging at the grocery store and filling my house with awesome aromas.)

We’ve come a long way since the first post in this series, haven’t we? We’ve learned the differences between saturated and unsaturated fats; we’ve broken down lots of different kinds of fats and oils; we’ve talked about trans fats; and even learned about one type of trans fat that seems to be good for us. Believe it or not, though, we’ve barely even scratched the surface. We have lots more to get to, and we will. But for now, let’s buckle up for a little physiology lesson (uh-oh…) that will give us some idea of what fats and oils actually do inside us.

Fat Tuesday - Part 4

Holy cow…it’s Tuesday again. Did someone hit the fast-forward button on my life when I wasn’t looking? When I finish one of these posts, I think, great, six whole days for me to get my thoughts together for the next one. And then, BAM, it’s upon us again. Oh, well, no problem. ‘Cuz when it comes to fat, there’s only one thing I like more than writing and talking about it, and that’s eating it!

If you’re new here, I should warn you about what you’re getting into. I’m trying to set the record straight on over half a century of misinformation about dietary fat, and I’m taking you along for the ride. If you have the courage to question the “facts,” doubt the “experts,” and generally break all the rules, hop on board; our team needs all the firepower it can get!

Fat Tuesday - Part 3

Yes, kids, it’s that time again…

Fat Tuesday!

Is it just me, or are the weeks flying by? It seems like the minute I get one of these posts up, there’s another Tuesday barreling down the road. But considering how many things I want to get to about fats, I guess that’s a good thing. This is a pretty long post, but hey, you've got a long holiday weekend coming up and maybe a couple extra minutes to read something that just might make you a little smarter (and healthier!) than you were before. 

Fat Tuesday -- Part Deux!

It’s Tuesday, so you know what that means…

It’s Mardi Gras! Or, for the English speakers among us, Fat Tuesday! Yes, it’s back – the weekly series where I don the helmet, the pads, the mouth guard—everything I can manage (except the cup!)—and tackle the toughest thing this side of a 250-pound linebacker:  sixty years of misinformation from health experts and government nutrition authorities regarding dietary fat.

If you’re just tuning in, take a minute to catch up on the first post by clicking here. It’ll bring you up to speed on how every type of fat and oil is a combination of saturated, mono-, and polyunsaturated fatty acids. So when we hear the buzzline about saturated fat being found in animal products (especially…*gasp!*… red meat), and olive oil being so good for heart health because it’s monounsaturated, that’s the truth, but it sure ain’t the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help you God. Olive oil is almost 15% saturated and beef fat is almost 42% monounsaturated. In fact, the fat that’s the most saturated is not an animal fat at all, but coconut oil. Yes, from a plant. EEK! There goes the neighborhood.

Anyway, there’s so much to cover concerning fats that it’s hard to know where to start. In the interest of keeping things simple and trying to organize the zillion-and-one things I want to say about fat into some semblance of logical order and cohesion, the natural place to go after the intro is to talk about the differences between saturated, monounsaturated, and polyunsaturated fats. So much of what I want to get into regarding which fats are best for cooking and which are truly“heart healthy” depends on us understanding these basic facts, so hang on to your hats. Or, rather, your hiking boots and canteens, ‘cuz we’ve got a lot of ground to cover.

MARDI GRAS!

Mardi Gras! It means different things depending on where you live and what you believe. It could be a period of uninhibited eating, drinking, and general debauchery preceding Lent. Could be a time to make funny masks, eat traditional King cakes, and do…um…certain things to get lots of beaded necklaces.

On this blog, however, I’m gonna stick with the English translation: Fat Tuesday! What’s not to love about those two things? Fat is delicious and good for you (no, really, it is!), and Tuesday…well, it ain’t Friday, but it’s better than Monday! (And everyone knows Mondays suck. Disagree? Obviously you haven’t seen Office Space. And if that’s the case I have two questions for you:  what are you waiting for, and how big is the rock you’ve been living under?)   

So, Fat Tuesday. What’s that about? Where am I going with this?