Archives for February 2010

Well, I saw Crazy Heart yesterday and was left a bit wanting. I dunno. I like the title track enough — got it in the library now — but I could just think of so many western ballads that are so much better. Plus, Jeffie boy just couldn’t muster that much sympathy with me. Glad he got it together, though. On the bright side, if he can get chicks looking like that….

So hey, here’s a better country ballad, by Willie Nelson, with a little latin salsa thrown in for spice. Bet you listen twice. Its that good.

This is from Willie’s album — his best in my view — Teatro. And that’s Emmylou Harris singing close backup harmony. Pure gold. It’s very rare when I like virtually ever track on an album, but I sure do with this one.

~ You’ll recall John Durant’s performance on The Colbert Report, but did you see the backstage showdown with a vegan?

~ Many were appalled at the state of school lunches highlighted in my post of a couple of days ago. Could the sorry state of school lunches be what’s partially behind something like this: The cigarettes, crisps and creme egg diet?

~ Were ancient Egyptian priests killed by saturated fat in their food? You be the judge.

~ Chalk one up for the paleo / evolutionary method of exercise: brief & intense.

~ It’s nice to be able to applaud a dietitian for a change: The truth is that saturated fats may not be the enemy. Thank you, Jennifer Sygo.

~ And here’s the obese, "official dietitian" for WebMD, Elaine Magee, MPH, RD. Check out how this fatass vomits "low-fat" over and over and over. What a fucking moron. She’s a menace to society. …On the plus side, she seems to be following her own stupid and ignorant advice to the tee.

OK, it was salmon the other night, sous vide method.

I got hold of wild caught sockeye. Beautiful color. Alongside was fresh asparagus done by tossing them in olive oil & onto the cookie sheet in a 350F oven for about 20 minutes or until the tops brown.

Then I made a tomato, yellow onion and anchovy salad tossed with my vinaigrette of dijon mustard, olive oil and vinegar.

The salmon was brined in a solution that’s 5 tbsp per quart of water for 10-15 minutes, dried, sprinkled with dill and then sealed in the bags with a good pat of butter and a tsp of fresh lemon juice. 120F in the Sous-Vide Supreme for 40 minutes. Just empty the bags, butter & all, right onto the plate. You’ll note that the butter is perfectly yellow & clear. All the juices remain in the fish, which you can observe by clicking this photo forfor the high res shot.

Sockeye Salmon, Sous Vide

Well I think this is the best of the lot, so far. While I don’t like the "cavemen" moniker at all and still some aspects seem goofy or obsessed in the way they’re portrayed, the article greatly makes up for that by touching of the science from a number of sources and also the author, Katie Engelhart, shares her own personal exposure to paleo by means of her dad’s paleoesque practices.

That gives it a lot more credibility in my book.

Good job, Katie. Thanks for including me. Here’s the link again, folks. Go have a look. Comments, supportive or critical are welcome. Oh, and if you’ve got a story to tell the article itself accepts comments. Tell your story.

From my post yesterday at the never-ending Amazon discussion forum focussing just now on The China Study author, Dr. T. Colin Campbell, and his insistence that we need to at least try his no-added-fat plant-based diet.

…Never tried it, and I stated so long ago, back around the last time these discussions heated up. And I never would and, of course, why would I? I’ve achieved marvelous results as I’ve pointed out too many times.

Look, I’m not going to question that Dr. Campbell’s chosen foods work well for him. I believe it. I believe it can be workable, perhaps ideal for others. I’m not in the least threatened by that. But Dr. Campbell seems threatened by the notion that a WHOLE FOODS eater that includes lots of meat (and sauces from marrow bone & chicken broth I make myself) is just as health and well-being promoting. He doesn’t seem to get that the most likely explanation that his diet, Ornish’s and mine can prevent and reverse heart disease (see Dr. William Davis’ Track Your Plaque website) is because they all have one thing in common: elimination of modern processed foods.

I wholeheartedly agree with the Doc on that point, and we really ought to get on that focus. It’s just like Pollan. I respect him immensely for the education work he does. But mostly plants? Nope. Mostly meat for me. It’s the crap, folks. It’s that crap "food" of modernity, and even the Chinese eat it. Hell, I lived in Japan for 5 years in the latter half of the 80s and they too were already very big into junk. I used to joke (but it’s true) that you could sit at the window in a McDs in Tokyo and see 1-2 other McDs down the avenues.

It’s the crap, not WHOLE FOOD animal products.

Here’s real food. First, you take care and prepare it yourself.

Lamb Chops

A little seasoning, rosemary, and you’re on your way. Gather some veggies and cook them up in high quality pastured butter for Christ’s sake. I kinda got carried away with the reduction  of the bone marrow stock on this one, a bit too thick but tasty and densely nutritious nonetheless. I did these sous vide, but unfortunately it was a while back and I can’t recall what temperature and time I used.

Lamb Chops Sous Vide

Now I ask you, is this really the sort of thing that’s destroying America’s health, or, is it more likely something like this?

And have you seen the blog by the school teacher who’s eating the school "lunches" every day for a year and photographing the "meals?" Go check out Fed Up With School Lunch, but you’d better not have recently eaten. And hey, if ever you’re fasting, get hungry and need a helping hand to completely lose your appetite, just keep that site bookmarked. Here’s a sampling of school lunch "food."

School Lunch Frankenfood

That crapshit makes airline food look gourmet. You know, when I was in grade school I did my time in the kitchen, and it was a real kitchen with real laddies cooking hot meals each and every day. There was always real meat, real vegetables, and so on. It was served from the lunch line onto plates with spoons, forks & tongs, not in sealed containers. Disgusting. And look how we generally fare in comparison to school lunches from around the world. Or, how about this one, from France.

School Lunch in France

As the author of the article where I nabbed this photo identifies, "In France, schoolchildren are served guinea fowl instead of chicken nuggets." And she goes onto describe her experience.

At one school, students were served a choice of salads — mâche with smoked duck and fava beans, or mâche with smoked salmon and asparagus — followed by guinea fowl with roasted potatoes and carrots and steamed broccoli. For dessert, there was a choice of ripe, red-throughout strawberries or clafoutis. A pungent washed-rind cheese was offered, along with French bread and water. Yes, the kids took and ate the cheese. […]

In addition to the goodness of the food, there were other good things about these school lunches. First of all, they weren’t rushed. About two hours are given for lunch, a portion of which is used for very loud and active exercise. Second, they were civilized. Food was served on heated plates; real silverware and glasses — not plastic — were used; and the lunchrooms were pretty and comfortable for the kids. […]

What impressed me most of all about the French school lunch was not just the deliciousness of the food, but that everything about it — the brightly decorated lunchrooms, the gorgeous kitchens, the lunch moms, the chefs — sent such a deep message of caring. To my ears it fairly screamed, “We care about and love our children. They are us, after all, and we want them to eat well and be nourished.”

Unfortunately, that is about the last message American school lunch sends to our children. Instead, we’re saying, “We have to feed you something; it’s gotta be cheap, and we don’t really care about it or you.” This doesn’t mean that those who put the meals out feel that way, but they are mostly given nothing to work with, be it pots and pans or the knowledge about how to do things, like ripen fruit so that it tastes good when it’s offered.

Shameful, isn’t it? …and by that I mean just doing an all-around crappy, not even half-assed job. You know what I think about the state, in general, but everyone with anything to do with this disgraceful mess ought to be made to eat this school lunch crap 365×3 until they clean up their act.

Sticking with France for a bit — since I lived there and understand very well the French relationship with food — I was happy to have been sent this article in Time by a reader: School Lunches in France: Nursery-School Gourmets.

"The food is very good, Madame. The meat is 100% French," the official said, picking up a brochure from her desk. I knew this brochure well, having e-mailed it to friends in the U.S. last year as a this-could-only-happen-in-France conversation piece. It lists in great detail the lunch menu for each school day over a two-month period. On Mondays, the menus are also posted on the wall outside every school in the country. The variety on the menus is astonishing: no single meal is repeated over the 32 school days in the period, and every meal includes an hors d’oeuvre, salad, main course, cheese plate and dessert. […]

I finally saw the system in action earlier this month. Caught short by a sick nanny, my son, who was accustomed to eating leftovers from the refrigerator, sat in silence with his 25 classmates at tables in the nursery-school cafeteria, while city workers served a leisurely, five-course meal. One day, when I arrived to collect him, a server whispered for me to wait until the dessert course was over. Out in the hall, one of the staff shouted for "total quiet" to a crowd of 4-year-olds awaiting the next lunch seating. "I will now read you today’s menu," he told them. "First, you will begin with a salad."

Americans struggling with obesity epidemics have for years wondered how the so-called French paradox works: How does a nation that ingests huge quantities of butter, beef and cakes keep trim and have such long lives? It could be the red wine, as some believe. But another reason has to be this: in a country where con artists and adulterers are tolerated, the laws governing meals are sacrosanct and are drummed into children before they can even hold a knife. The French don’t need their First Lady to plant a vegetable garden at the Élysée Palace to encourage good eating habits. They already know the rules: sit down and take your time, because food is serious business.

And that’s it folks. Food is serious business. It’s your first line of "pharmaceuticals" and the way we’re doing it here is about like feeding kids the equivalent of crack, by comparison.

Hey, Anthony: Go Fuck Yourself. And take that Sacramento Band of Fuckwads right along with you.

Californians had better start watching their mouths.

Try me, asshole.

And as for that petty, prudish, insolent little shit, McKay Hatch, well, a good ass-paddling before sending him off to bed without any dinner seems about right. …But I’m sure he’ll make an excellent installation to the ranks of the Nomenklatura when the time comes.

Well, other than T. Colin Campbell’s response to my post of yesterday, recommending a vegan diet to…"prevent erectile dysfunction," that is. I’m working up something kinda unique and creative in response to that and if it works out, should be amusing. Oh, wow, just in. Even more material.

Two readers sent me links to this bit of stupid nonsense apparently from the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition and some dingy Dr. Teri L. Hernandez of the University of Colorado at Denver. Now, beyond the opening where you’ll see that the whole piece rests on a faulty premise — that cholesterol should be lowered — I’ll just quote this one bit of astounding lunacy.

The low-carb group also showed greater increases in their levels of free fatty acids, which are released into the blood when the body breaks down stored fat. High levels of free fatty acids make it more difficult for the liver to store glucose, which in turn ups sugar levels in the blood. Consistently high sugar levels define diabetes.

Mind numbing. Of course, the reason the FFA in the high-fat, low-carb group is higher than the sugar-gobbler — and I presume calorie restricted — group in spite of both groups losing 13 pounds is of course because they are both high-fat diets as are all weight loss diets. It’s just that the low-carbers were higher in fat.

I wonder if they questioned the subjects on which group enjoyed those six weeks of losing 13 pounds the most.

This sort of thing is probably my favorite meal. This time, I pan fried the filets in cast iron with ghee. Brown all over, then cover for a couple of minutes per side, then keep turning & browning until your desired doneness is reached. These thick ones take a while, but they’re also pretty forgiving. Notice how the butter from the vegetables loves the sauce reduction and vice versa. Animal fats are such nice & loving people. And we love them too around here.

Filet & Veggies

Veggies were fresh, put in a covered sausepan with a hunk of butter on low until soft. Simple pimple. Sauce was beef stock reduced, couple tbsps of butter, sprig of fresh rosemary, clove of crushed garlic & a few crushed blackberries. Once under boil for a while, strain, reduce, and thicken with a dash or two of potato starch if needed.

Oh, almost forgot dessert.

Eggs & Butter

[Just a quick off-topic aside. Darya Pino at Summer Tomato did a mildly critical but fair & balanced post on paleo dieting. Go take a look and drop a comment about your own experience if it suits you. From my perspective, we out to be able to take fair criticism to refine & strengthen our message.]

This is just a rather quick hit & run with some excerpts and commentary that I wanted to post because it’s nice to finally see something in the mainstream news that echos what I and my fellow bloggers have been saying all along, for nearly three years in my case. From MSNBC:

Bad cholesterol: It’s not what you think

Yea, no shit. And it never was. And there was little justification to ever create the "tidy narrative" in the first place.

For decades, a tidy narrative about the relationship between LDL cholesterol and heart disease has affected everything from the food we eat to the drugs we take to the test results we track and the worries we harbor. This oversimplified view of cholesterol — that all LDL is the same and that all LDL is bad — has enabled the adoption of an accompanying oversimplified dietary belief, that all saturated-fat consumption raises your risk of heart disease.

Oversimplified view of cholesterol –> oversimplified view of diet –> complex and dangerous drugs –> obesity –> diabetes –> more complex and dangerous drugs –> lots of drug company profits –> lots of assholes still out needlessly scaring people to death.

The LDL hypothesis has also encouraged many of us to swallow the most-prescribed class of drugs in recent history. Americans spent more than $14 billion on LDL-lowering medications in 2008. Whether that money came out of their own pockets — straight up, or through ever-escalating co-pays — or out of the hemorrhaging U.S. health-insurance system known as Medicare, it’s a huge expenditure. Twenty-four million Americans take statins, and the latest health directives suggest that those numbers should be higher. And why stop at grown-ups? Some pediatricians want to start feeding Lipitor (and the like) to kids.

$14 billion for something with tons of side-effects and of dubious, nonexistent value for all but a small subset: men under 65 who’ve already had a coronary event. Sure, if you’ve had a heart attack already, go right ahead and "trust your heart to Lipitor."

LDL comes in four basic forms: a big, fluffy form known as large LDL, and three increasingly dense forms known as medium, small, and very small LDL. A diet high in saturated fat mainly boosts the numbers of large-LDL particles, while a low-fat diet high in carbohydrates propagates the smaller forms. The big, fluffy particles are largely benign, while the small, dense versions keep lipid-science researchers awake at night.

But here’s the problem: The typical LDL test doesn’t distinguish between large and small LDL particles — it can’t even spot the difference. And people can have mostly large LDL or mostly small LDL in their overall LDL, depending upon a host of genetic, lifestyle, and environmental factors. Your own personal mix may make all the difference between living to a heart-healthy old age and becoming a Monday-morning casualty at your desk.

Right. And Americans are spending $14 billion per year on statins and it’s based on irrational, uncorrelated, unproven associations with a measurement technology that "can’t even spot the difference." I’ll bet the drug companies are all over getting this new measurement technology into wide usage. Yea, right.

Now, to heap even more outrage on the deal, how long back has it been since it was known that the small-dense sub-particles associated and reasonably predicted heart disease risk? 1976, almost 35 years ago. Dr Krauss recounts:

The heart-disease community was not impressed. "It took me 4 years to publish that paper," he says, recalling his early work on sub-particles in the late 1970s. "That’s beginning to tell you some of the obstacles I was going to face."

Big surprise, eh? There’s more.

But during experiments, Dr. Krauss discovered that while a diet high in saturated fat from dairy products would indeed make your LDL levels rise, "saturated fat intake results in an increase of larger LDL rather than smaller LDL particles," as he wrote in an American Journal of Clinical Nutrition review he co-authored in 2006. A diet heavy in full-fat cheese and butter — but not overloaded in calories — triggered the relatively harmless health profile described as pattern A. […]

Not only is dairy fat unlikely to increase heart-disease risk, Dr. Krauss and others have learned, but reducing saturated fat in a way that increases carbohydrates in a diet can shift a person’s LDL profile from safe to dangerous. That’s pretty much what happens whenever some well-meaning person with "high LDL" starts eating "low-fat" frozen dinners filled out with corn-derived additives, all the while engaging in the customary ravaging of a basket filled with dinner rolls.

Well that should do it. You might want to check out the inane comment from Dean "Chubby Faced Diet" Ornish.

Right off the bat I have to thank Dr. kurt harris for alerting me to this simple — and therefore — elegant and powerful idea.

What do all diets have in common and is that which also serves to differentiate all of them from paleo, primal, evfit? Whether you’re low fat, low carb, Mediterranean, South Beach, Ornish, Weight Watchers, or what have you, you will be engaging in Seeking Behavior. That is to say, you seek to eat things the diet prescribes and hence, you end up with low-calorie, low-fat, low-carb, or some "exchange" level foods that can be composed of almost anything and everything, with some exceptions. Eat whatever, so long as it falls within the range of calories, fat, carb, or protein you seek. Some are purer than others, of course.

And Paleolithic man also engaged in seeking behavior. As a rule, eat anything and everything edible that satisfies hunger.

Then agriculture happened, followed by chemistry and industrial technology, and we have the emergence of all sorts of "foods," chemicals and synthetics paleolithic man never experienced. Those of us who practice a paleo-like diet do so implicitly or explicitly on the basis of a precautionary principle: foodstuffs that weren’t around during the vast majority of our evolution might be less nutritious, less optimal, even harmful. On a practical level, most of us follow paleo because we’ve seen our own results with our own eyes and we know how we feel.

But seeking is the wrong sort of approach in my opinion; or, at best, is less advantageous than the alternative: Avoidance Behavior. You see examples of this everywhere. Those new to this dietary approach often find themselves befuddled and lost because they see "meat, fish, fowl, eggs, natural fats, veggies, fruits & nuts," but then feel like it’s devoid of variety — it’s foreign to them: the Real Food we evolved eating exclusively. Where’s the [insert dietary prescription] pizza, Hot Pockets, sodas, ice cream, fettuccine Alfredo, chicken fried steaks, cakes, cookies, fucking Cinnabon and on and on?

Where’s my damn garbage? And it’s even worse because the collateral casualty of the modern industrial social and health genocide known as processed & fast food is that families don’t eat together and they don’t eat together because they eat outta fuckin’ boxes and packages, for shit sake. How in holy hell did it come to this?

Alternatively, how about, simply, "avoid Neolithic foods;" primarily grains, sugars, and vegetable/seed oils? Avoid anything processed. Everything else is fine and the macronutrient ratios, i.e., high vs. moderate vs. low carb is up to you to determine and so you have far more flexibility and options. High fat or moderate or even low fat is up to you. I’ll go out on a limb and say that high fat, low to moderate carb, and low to moderate protein in ratios sufficient to sustain you is going to end up being the best way to go for most — but admittedly not all. And you’ll learn that it’s not Real Food that’s foreign but garbage that’s foreign, and you’ll also learn or rediscover cooking your food and your familial situation will be the far better for it, I guarantee it. paleo is a health advantage on levels that go beyond diet. It’s going to be good for your marriages & families too — though you might have to introduce things gradually if you don’t get family support. Keep plugging away. Find the Paleolithic foods your family members love. Don’t give up, and don’t give in.

This is what makes paleo unique, even in contrast to a vegan diet which offhand is probably the closest thing other than paleo to avoidance behavior (avoid all animal products and derivatives). vegetarians long ago went the route of seeking behavior and now you can fill a supermarket isle with vegetarian junk food. The vegans are going the same way, in my observation.

And some paleos have also drifted more toward seeking behavior. I’ve been somewhat guilty of it (paleo pizzas, biscuits & gravy, chicken pot pies and maybe a few other things). Don’t get me wrong. Those are all concoctions made from real foods and they’re fine in terms of health. Not especially so for some of the other things I see people doing with massive amounts of almond flour and fruit. But, is it possible that an overemphasis on finding paleo-compliant substitutes for neolithic goodies just perpetuates the cravings for those foods long term?

The very unique thing about paleo is that you really can’t come up with a line of paleo junk. By principle definition, it excludes neolithic agents, and junk food is almost exclusively composed of neolithic agents including all the stuff you see to your left in this low-carb bake mix.

Dr. Kurt Harris, in a post entitled Smoking Candy Cigarettes recently talked about this specific aspect of what he sees out & about on the blogs.

Would it not be better to train your kids, and yourself, to avoid Neolithic food by the simplest expedient there is? So simple a child could manage it?

Something as simple as a simple rule.

A rule like:

Don’t eat anything that looks like Neolithic food, especially Neolithic food.

What is the point of all this? I just don’t get it, and I don’t think it is because I am just too lazy to make this stuff.

It’s easy to make fun of commercial junk in a box like “low carb” pasta, zone and atkins bars, etc. All stuff that may be gluten free or have sawdust in place of of high GI starch, but whose real reason for existence is just to appropriate what should properly be freestanding, honest, real food back into the maw of corporate big-agra commercial interests.

In conclusion, notice that the principle of avoidance behavior can be applied to other aspect of the paleo path.

– Avoid thick or hard soled shoes as opposed to "go barefoot."

– Avoid eating when not hungry as opposed to "go x hours between meals."

– Avoid carrying around enough effing Tupperware for six small meals per day as opposed to "eat x number of meals."

– Avoid excessive risks as opposed to "be safe."

– Avoid chronically stressful situations as opposed to "meditate."

– Avoid staying up too late when you have to get up to early.

Can anyone think of other paleo examples of contrasting avoidance behavior with seeking behavior?