Ex Navy Officer. Owner of Businesses. Digital Entrepreneur. Expat Living in Thailand. 5,000 Biting Blog Post on Everything since 2003.
Well; we're in the snow. Our very dear friends, Alessandro, and his longtime partner Robert (the two doctors — one a chemist – foreground – Italian immigrant who speaks better English than most — the other a psychiatrist — home grown) just emailed me from Rio.
My dad-in law made soup this afternoon. First generation out of Mexico, he has never forgotten his heritage, and at now 80+ in age, he gets around no differently than when I first met him a dozen years ago. A true inspiration.
Hey, maybe this has something to do with it.
I didn't do any corn. What I did do was to put it on a plate instead of a bowl, and eat with my hands.
Who do you think got the two useable pieces of bone marrow?
That only wet my appetite. Tomorrow, I'm headed out to the butcher to see if I can get a bunch of marrow bones. Tell you what. I'll get his recipe tomorrow and toss it up.
Deal?
What a day. I promised a dozen posts, and got the last one up at 11:59 PST. Could have had it up 30 minutes earlier, but was trying to be choosy in a music choice that turned out to be limited to one — as I had my mind set on a particular song I've been enjoying lately.
So, for reference, here are the posts in chronological order.
There you are. Oh, but wait!. Do you know how to cook bacon properly? It's an essential skill. Frankly, I like the fatty bits, and I never put the bacon on paper towels or pat off the drippings. It goes straight onto the plate, fingers get involved, and the fat ends up in my mouth.
But here's what's essential about that: low heat. Patience. Forget the form of the bacon, it just tastes way better and that's plenty. I always cook on low heart, plus just a touch clockwise.
Can I?
This is number twelveroonie, just as promised (though I've got a baker's dozen followup in the batter's box already). I'm coming up to 18 hours pretty much straight at this endeavor, with the exception of a time-out for breakfast – cooked up by the wife & mom-in-law — a quick tripette to the market, and in the last couple of hours, refills of my tumbler (scotch).
I often tell people that Rush (and herbs) got me through college. We smoked dope and listened to them constantly. What days. I was a 4.0 in high school, but in a sheltered environment. College was a candy store in every way (every. way.). And I was a very poor student as a result. But thanks to Rush & marijuana, I pulled a 3.8 GPA in my most stoned semester (study stoned; test stoned), advanced quantitative economics, business, and accounting. I can still read a complex balance sheet competently; P&Ls are child's play. Go figure.
Kids: take note & smoke some dope if you like, and forget about the ignorant fear. Get it over with, or carry on, as you prefer. Hyped o-m-god paranoia is inversely proportional to … "authotity." See, it's about nothing but making sure you're set up with some authority to follow. Tell 'em to Fuck That! With attitude. Parents: get the fuck over it. They'll do what they want, and your only real hope is if they have some brains, anyway. And, how about you? What did you do to make sure they had some independent-minded smarts? Or, did you just count on them being sheep, making your life easy? Did you lead them every step of the way rather than show them the way of independence and autonomy? Did you fear that?
Anyway, 10 minutes to deadline, so here it is. It's not as good as the studio version on the Fly By Night Album, but it's not bad.
I can see
What you mean
It just takes me longer
And here's a bonus old favorite, La Villa Stranagioto, Alex Lifeson doing mind-blowing ghost bends, which as I've learned, is bending the string before the strike. Think about that.
Ha!
Anyone ever heard of Owsley Stanley? In paleo circles, he's known as "The Bear" — a complete carnivore – in his 70s, now, who thinks all plant matter is toxic (it is, to a degree, but we're evolutionarily adapted to most of it — grains and legumes excluded — which is a good reason to mix up what you eat vegetable / fruit / nut wise and employ intermittency to simulate seasonal availability). All plant matter naturally contains anti-nutrients & toxins per the logic of natural selection; It couldn't be any other way, but it's a pet peeve of mine when certain folks essentially anthropomorphize plants as an explanation for the phenomenon. I'll save that for a future post.
Anyway, his fame is that he cooked the best lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) in history. A half a kilo. A. Lot. Tiny micrograms will blow your mind, though, I've yet to experience it personally. Perhaps; one day. He was also the sound man for The Grateful Dead throughout their long tenure.
But let's get back to chicken. At this point, I'm loath to look up the link, but he's notorious on the high-fat carnivore forums, when he explained himself at length a couple of years ago. I read the whole ordeal, and one of the things I took note of was his chicken recipe.
Here goes. We need more than just chicken, so for that, I rely upon my neighbor Julie's method. Olive oil, on a baking sheet, in the oven until the tips get brown and crunchy. You can do it ahead ot time. It's just as delicious cold; same stinky pee.
…
Since I'm on a deadline to get a dozen reasonably substantive posts out out today (2 1/2 hours to go PST), I'm grateful to dad (22 or so pounds lost & counting), who took it upon himself to make Keith's baked eggs.
Voilà:
Dad says:
I changed the ingriedients a little because I didn't have some of them. I started out with olive oil and a little bacon dripping, with bacon on the bottom, followed with onion and green peppers, then sharp chedder with two eggs on top. I had to bake it a little longer, probably because I used a crock and should have pre-heated it.
This is a huge presentation from GrassrootsHealth: Dose-Response of Vitamin D and a Mechanism for Prevention of Cancer, by Cedric F. Garland, Dr.P.H., Edward D. Gorham, M.P.H., Ph.D., Sharif B. Mohr, M.P.H., and Frank C. Garland, Ph.D.
There are a ton of slides here, so I’ll highlight a few of what I consider the most notable. First up, placebo vs. intervention. I’d call that significant.
…
As per the last post, this is courtesy of GrassrootsHealth. The particular presentation I'm highlighting is Skin Cancer / Sunscreen — the Dilema, by Edward D. Gorham, Ph.D., Frank C. Garland, Ph.D., Cedric F. Garland, Dr.P.H.
and Sharif B. Mohr, M.P.H.
Let's jump right in with some graphical highlights.
Melanoma has been getting worse and worse, where? Indonesia? Brazil? Cuba? How about Tunisia — all places pretty close to the equator where the sun is powerful all the year long. Bzzzzt. Norway.
…
Well, via a nice Google alert for vitamin D, I stumbled upon a treasure trove, yesterday. At first, it was just one of the more common news articles I cite. In this case, however, there was this bit towards the end.
Carole Baggerly started a group called GrassrootsHealth last year in California, which focuses solely on promoting information about vitamin D. She started it after a bout with breast cancer that was followed by a diagnosis of osteoporosis. She learned she was vitamin D deficient.
This led to a whole list of discoveries about vitamin D. She read research that suggested raising vitamin D levels may prevent up to half of all breast cancer and two-thirds of colorectal cancer cases in the United States. She read a study showing women with the lowest levels of vitamin D had nearly double the risk of their breast cancer progressing, and a 73 percent greater risk of death compared to women with adequate vitamin D. She found out that the first study linking colorectal cancer and vitamin D was published in 1941.
You know, I'm seeing this more and more, and I don't blog or link even a 10th of the stuff I read. Increasingly, I'm seeing references to associations discovered in the early 1900s that should have been paid attention to, weren't, and we're suffering the consequences. It's rotten fruit, vegetable and eggs time (to be tossed at some of these "experts" and "authorities").
Moving on, I quickly located GrasstootsHealth and then this page. which just happens to be the pot of gold. Those links are to various presentations by doctors and other researchers that are chock full of associative revelations I find riveting, mind-blowing, shocking, you name it.
Let's begin with vitamin D deficiency in association with type 1 diabetes, by Frank Garland, PhD.
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Stephan went to a lot of work to compile this post and it's pretty revealing. Best you read it over there, but here's just a taste. First, everyone's getting fatter.
Second, it's not the animal fat.
Go check out his post for the rest. Here's a graph I just found on my desktop, but I don't recall where I stole it from, but thanks to whoever put it together. It's not the butter, either.
Well, that's settled. I believe I'll never again do a tri-tip roast on the grill, except when camping. Here was last evening's dinner preparation before heading off to the oven.
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I have found over the last year that my absolute favorite time to fast is while traveling, either by car or through those awful airports.
For one — especially when on a long drive — you eliminate any sort of discomfort from whatever food might do to you gastrointsestinaly. For another, it just makes the trip easier, as you don't have to worry about when and where to eat, like, damn, wish we'd have gone there, at that exit back there. And most applicable to driving, it really shortens the trip when you don't have to stop for an hour to sit down at a restaurant to eat — since I almost never do fast food joints, even the healthier choices some now offer.
Here's a photo I snapped the other day at a refueling pit stop.
That's the line at the Subway sandwich shop inside the gas station. I note that's the big thing, now: fast food joints at all the major gas stations. You'll be better off with some nuts, jerky, or even pork rinds.
It's really mind altering, this Paelo way. It seems to far off, now, to be obsessed about food all the time. No sooner would a meal be complete and I was thinking of the next one.
This is the first of what may turn out to be two or more posts on Vitamin D today, and the focus is epidemiology. The next one will be a doozie, but this is an excellent set up.
I had not known the background of Dr. John Cannell of the excellent resource, the Vitamin D Council until I stumbled upon this amazing account over the weekend.
You’re best off reading that, which might require 15 minutes of your time, but here’s a few excepts to wet your appetite.
In early April of 2005, after a particularly rainy spring, an influenza epidemic (epi: upon, demic: people) exploded through the maximum-security hospital for the criminally insane where I have worked for the last ten years. It was not the pandemic (pan: all, demic: people) we all fear, just an epidemic. The world is waiting and governments are preparing for the next pandemic. A severe influenza pandemic will kill many more Americans than died in the World Trade Centers, the Iraq war, the Vietnam War, and Hurricane Katrina combined, perhaps a million people in the USA alone. Such a disaster would tear the fabric of American society. Our entire country might resemble the Superdome or Bourbon Street after Hurricane Katrina.
It’s only a question of when a pandemic will come, not if it will come. Influenza A pandemics come every 30 years or so, severe ones every hundred years or so. The last pandemic, the Hong Kong flu, occurred in 1968 – killing 34,000 Americans. In 1918, the Great Flu Epidemic killed more than 500,000 Americans. So many millions died in other countries, they couldn’t bury the bodies. Young healthy adults, in the prime of their lives in the morning, drowning in their own inflammation by noon, grossly discolored by sunset, were dead at midnight. Their body’s own broad-spectrum natural antibiotics, called antimicrobial peptides, seemed nowhere to be found. An overwhelming immune response to the influenza virus – white blood cells releasing large amounts of inflammatory agents called cytokines and chemokines into the lungs of the doomed – resulted in millions of deaths in 1918.
I had not known this. It’s not the influenza that actually kills you, but your own immune system’s overblown response to it. So what happened in 2005 in Cannell’s ward in the hospital?
…
I think this angers me more than anything else. I want to slap parents silly when I see kids constantly chowing down on cereals, drinking those poisonous "fruit juices" in boxes marketed to imbecile parents as "healthy,' cookies, sweets non-stop, and then, when it's time for a meal — even if it's a remotely healthy meal — the kids either don't want to eat, or they want mac & cheese, pizza, or some other awful crap.
Just go to a local mall sometime, and any mall in America will do. You'll see it: the lines at Jamba Juice (don't be a moron: that garbage isn't remotely healthy), Cinnabon, cookie stands, Cold Stone, you name it.
Karen gets it. As does Dr. Mercola.
Some breakfast cereals currently being marketed to U.S. children are more than half sugar by weight, according to Consumer Reports.
A single serving of 11 popular cereals, including Kellogg's Honey Smacks, can carry as much sugar as a glazed doughnut. And some brands have even more sugar and sodium when formulated for the U.S. market than the same brands have when sold in other countries.
Post's Golden Crisp and Kellogg's Honey Smacks are both more than 50 percent sugar by weight, while nine brands are at least 40 percent sugar.
Reader Jim sent me this video this morning.
It was bad enough when it wasn't so bad that most kids weren't getting fat already — they were only being set up for it in future life by destroying their insulin sensitivity, in addition to being ushered by their own parents and grandparents into the sugar crack house so they'll have a lifelong addiction to the stuff and will eventually get fat. But now, kids are getting fat early, visibly so, and their parents are doing nothing.
I can only conclude that parents don't care, and, I think a lot of the fat ones want their kids to join them in their misery.
Holiday whatevers: A dozen posts, tomorrow — to you. I’ll do my best, which means, I intend to deliver quality, not cheap. A few might be only peripherally related to our subject matter, here.
I’ll save explanations for tomorrow, but I have become born again in music over the last couple of months, and it is precisely tied to the diet (oh, man, had I know about this in the college dorm… where the midnight pizzas put me to sleep). Alright, though I feel like expounding, I shall resist, and instead, give you this.
That’s Kenny Wayne Sheperd, Blue on Black, in acoustic. In general, if I love something in accoustic, I’m going to love it even more with electricity applied to the project.
Get a load of the words. It’s a song about futility, near as I can tell. This is one of a few tracks I’ve taken notice of lately and added to my library. Anyway, I have finally stopped hauling around my 200 or so CDs and am most of the way through burning them into iTunes. It is quite an experience, allow me to assure you, to rediscover your 20-something college youth in both feeling and energy, staying up until 1 or 2, alone,doing nothing but listening to music you haven’t listened to in 20 years.
Actually, I feel better than I did when 20, and more energetic.
At 47, I have finally discovered REAL LIFE.
Totally (Trust me: WAY totally) apart from politics, this may be the leanest & buffed President ever.
Not bad at all, with a bit of "guns" on — uh, oh. Certainly a lower BF% than I'm currently sporting, but I could take you in an arm wrestle (or leg or bench press), any day. The reportage claims you do cardio and weights 45 minutes ever day.
Too much. And dump the cardio, sir. Walk, instead (do it with your staff, until they're panting and need a nap for the rest of the day). And bump up the intensity of the weights, Mister President. I take it back. …On second thought, perhaps it would be better if you spend about 18 hours in the gym every day… And don't forget: sleep is very important…
(That should not be construed as supportive of anything but leaving me the eff alone — R, D, or any other political, opportunist organism.)
* De Vany
** Ballantine
*** Norris
I told you the next week would be a firestorm of posts. Starts today.
In addition to the specific links to specific posts I assemble regularly, there are some out there whose regular content is so good that they earn a permanent spot here in the "Blogroll," which I actually call "Other Resources," as they are outside this blog, and some are not blogs but reference sites.
I've just added three new sites.
At Darwin's Table
Really a great blog by Dr. Dan Bassett, a PhD marine biologist out of New Zealand. Here's a great quote from his profile:
The research I undertake is feeding physiology / behavior / ecology / evolution of fish. It was this reason that the paleo diet really appealed to me. I'm so used to looking at the evolutionary basis for why fish feed the way they do, and the paleo diet really applied this reasoning to humans, and so I could back it wholeheartedly. Essentially fish are not so different than us, if you put them on an artificial diet they get sick and fat. Millions of dollars have been spent trying to do this and it just never works as well as if you have fish feeding on what they evolved to eat.
Dan practices a paleo diet himself, and has racked up some real progress with photos to prove it. He also does some marvelous food preparations with plenty of food porn photos.
Animal Pharm (link removed)
Dr. B.G. is a pharmacologist who works with Dr. William Davis of the Track Your Plaque program. Very high level blog in terms of technicality. I thought I was doing real good in understanding a lot of the medical, biological, and pharmacological jargon and terminology out there until she came along.
She always tells me that my "HDLs ROCK!," so that alone gets her a spot. But seriously, the more you try to follow along, the more you actually will, because the more you'll learn.
What can I say? Keith Norris, at age 44, is absolutely ripped (more here), and in a very healthful, lean and not puffy way. Unlike body builders, he looks that way on his days off, too. He writes a lot of really good stuff about workouts — a big deficiency over here, and of course, he has is own results to prove the effectiveness of them. He has written up an nice brief overview, or precepts of the paleo life way. Finally, he cooks and does good food porn. I'm going to be trying his baked eggs sometime this week.
~~~
Great job, all of you.
I recently added custom CSS code to have blockquotes show up with the border and background color. This is what I'm talking about:
Here is the code I'm using:
blockquote { border-left: 5px solid #CCCCCC; padding: 10px; background-color: #D6E6E5; }
Since then, I have received a few emails from people using Internet Explorer that some of the center column is getting truncated on one side or the other, and while I would like to admonish everyone in the world to dump Gates and his software and to use Firefox, or even Apple's Safari for Windows, I know people just aren't going to do it. I'll try to track down what the issue is, however, and it might help to get an idea of how widespread it is if anyone having such issues would kindly drop a comment.
If you do, please tell me what version of Internet Explorer you are using (From the menu bar: Help | About Internet Explorer). I have been unable to duplicate the issue on my PC at the office, running 7.0.x. If any of you CSS experts see anything wrong with that code, please let me know, or maybe suggest an alternative.
Later: Looks like the issue may be isolated to those using Internet Explorer 6, and perhaps below. IE 7 works fine, so, if you can upgrade to IE 7, that should take care of it.
This is a brief diversion.
We arrived a couple of hours ago at our vacation home, cabin, chalet – whatever — and I've got snow on the brain; since I had to dig and dig and dig, just to clear the stairs up to the thing, a clerestory style of construction, and then I had to dig and shovel more just to get to the water access.
My brother will be up here tomorrow, staying at his friend's cabin. But he'll be around plenty enough, as I have a bottle of Maker's and one of The Glenlivet (I prefer The McCallan (12; over 18), but 'tis was is). Not that he's a lush, but I'll encourage him, so I can be. It's a vacation, we'll be here a week, and I've been damn good for the last week. I'll be pretty paleo in food (we brought 5 pounds of of tri-tip and 6 of ribs — and there's a great butcher around for the other numerous things I shall require). I will blog food porn, rest assured, but I plan also on enjoying distilled spirits. Yep.
My bro's in South Lake Tahoe at the moment, a mere hour from where we all grew up, in Reno; so we all know the area well. Still, you can't get enough of a view like this, one I've seen a number of times from the same perspective, live. It's from the lookout at Heavenly, the name of the largest ski resort up there, and my favorite.
Button pusher that I am, here was my email reply:
"That's why it's called Heavenly. Enjoy now. That's as good as it gets; in life – or death."
Regular blogging resumes tomorrow. I've got a week of free time and it could be a firestorm of posts — as it has been in the past during these excursions. No guarantee or promise, but I'm looking forward to it.
And now, my glass of The Glenlivet appears to be empty…
How would you react if, instead of asking for a handout, the next bum you see — smelly and dressed in rags — approaches you and offers to be your "success coach" for a fee?
Have you pondered anything quite so absurd in a while?
Coronary heart disease prevention and reversal specialist, Dr. William Davis, wonders why it is, then, that people tolerate the advice of fat and even obese dietitians, who perhaps number in the thousands in hospitals and clinics around the country.
When I go to the hospital, I am continually amazed at some of the hospital staff: 5 ft 4 inch nurses weighing over 200 lbs, etc.
But what I find particularly bothersome are some (not all) hospital dietitians – presumably experts at the day-to-day of healthy eating — who waddle through the halls, easily 40, 50, or more pounds overweight. It is, to say the least, credibility-challenging for an obese dietitian to be providing nutritional advice to men or women recovering after bypass or stent while clearly not in command of nutritional health herself.
I note the same thing in general, both when visiting a hospital and daily around a large medical clinic less that a block from our residence. In fact, it is quite rare to see any lean person going in or out of that building, scrubs or "civvies."
Dr. Davis thinks they're by and large following the standard dietary advice. Perhaps they are, perhaps not, but here's the thing: "frankenfood" manufacturers have become ruthlessly clever, and that goes even beyond the political clout they and grain growers enjoy. Low fat is good? Food manufacturers deliver. They line the shelves with products that are low in fat, but high in sugar. Whole grains are healthy? They line the shelves with appealing — to many — products based on grains, and bonus: low in fat. Butter is bad? They give you margarine, for decades. Oops… Trans fats, now universally recognized as poisson. Alright, so now let's create a whole new line of synthetic "spreads" based on vegetable oils — formerly used as industrial machinery lubricants — extracted by heat and petroleum solvents that have to be deodorized to eat. Perhaps it won't take another four decades to determine that those are as bad or worse than the margarine they replaced. And what will they think of next?
Sadly, the "healthy, whole grain" message also contributes to heart disease via drop in HDL, increased triglycerides, a huge surge in small LDL, rise in blood sugar, increased resistance to insulin, tummy fat, and diabetes. Yes, the diet provided to survivors of heart attack increases risk.
The "healthy, whole grain" message also enjoys apparent "validation" through the enormous proliferation of commercial products cleverly disguised as healthy: Cheerios, Raisin Bran, whole grain bread, whole wheat pasta, etc. The "healthy, whole grain" message, while a health disaster, is undoubtedly a commercial success.
I'll bet that our fat dietitian friend enjoys a breakfast of healthy, whole grains in skim milk, followed by a lunch of low-fat chicken breast on two slices of whole grain bread, and ends her day with a healthy meal of whole wheat pasta. She then ascribes her continually climbing weight and size 16 figure to slow metabolism, lack of exercise, or the once-a-week piece of chocolate.
Wheat has no role in the Track Your Plaque program for coronary plaque control and reversal. In fact, my personal view is that wheat has no role in the human diet whatsoever.
Dr. Davis, a cardiologist who used to make a lot of money doing stents, angioplasties and other lucrative cardiac procedures gave that al up and now partially subsidizes a heroic and revolutionary program to detect, prevent, and even reverse heart disease. You don't have to take his ideas seriously, but you very well may live the consequences of them nonetheless.
He offers a list of relevant posts that I highly recommend reading.
That last link has a bunch of testimonials, so if any of this sounds insane or unbelievable to you, you'll want to have a look at what people who've done it have experienced.
