You are here: Home / 2012 / Archives for July 2012

Archives for July 2012

I’m Outta Here—Hang Gliding

45 Comments

I half heartedly considered putting up something on the blog last night.

Went nowhere. Beatrice took me out for sushi instead.

I had just put version 2.0 of the book to bed—off to the editor—and we’ll see what comes of it. I ended up working far more on V2 than V1. It’s done for me, now. Still simple, designed for beginners, but: tons more info, more options, more ideas and more motivation.

…In other news, for the first time since the last Troll Virus months ago (and only one or two prior, ever), I’ve had to ban a girl who didn’t seem too trollish at first, but turned out to be…and then proved herself a troll in competently going around the ban—which is great because that proves she doesn’t respect the property of others (i.e., classic troll). As I write, she’s busily unplugging and plugging back in her dynamic IP modem to grab another IP, using different screen names, different email addresses…all in order to get comments through. But, you get to judge for yourself, as always. I gave her the benefit of dozens of comments, replying civilly to almost every one. But now she’s butthurt because she doesn’t, apparently, get to own my blog and I won’t let her own it. I’m so ashamed.

…Oh, and if you like animal fat, you’re contributing to the destruction of the planet. Y’know, just so you know. I certainly didn’t want any of you to take it non-seriously. Indeed: those links? The survival of the planet and the human race? Yep. At stake. So there you go.

I’m gonna go off and fly my ass off for the better part of a week. Same wing as last year. I’m going to go use global warming to my advantage, if I’m lucky, because hang gliders have two sources of power: gravity and solar (I’ll defer to the aeronautical engineers to explain why). Here’s some recycled photos from last year, ’round this time.

1000000033
Human Wings
1000000036
Bird Like
1000000034
A Far Cry from the Drilled Tubing & Hose Clamps of the 70s

Everyone always asks and so yea, we wear reserve parachutes, repacked once per year.

1000000037
Never Used

Oh, and did I mention? This one has sprogs in lieu of luff lines for reflex protection. Aren’t you glad?

1000000035
Negative G Protection

And it arrives on the top of the car, and after taking you a few thousand feet over launch and keeping you there for as long as solar power will allow—which is usaually a few hours or until you tire—you pack it up, toss it top the car and haul it off to the next mountain to do all over again.

1000000038
Portable

Now isn’t that fucking cool? Really.

I’ll try to report on-scene, as events and circumstances develop. There might even be the most amazing camping cooking you’ve ever seen. We’ll see. No guarantees, and I still have no idea what’s on the menu for my duty night. But it’s pretty much camping, cooking real and damn good, and hang gliding for the next week…upon which it becomes all about #AHS12.

So stick around, will’ya? (all except that troll, of course).

Man Alive! Chapter 9: The High Cost of Mindlessness

30 Comments

Here’s the post that kicked it all off. This is chapter 9 of 12, to give interested readers the chance to take on the free ebook chapter by chapter over the weekend, debate it amongst themselves, or even challenge the author who’s keeping tabs.

~~~

From: Man Alive! A survival manual for the human mind.

by Greg Swann

Chapter 9. The high cost of mindlessness.

When you are not thinking carefully, you are not not-thinking. If you are not asleep and not unconscious, you are always thinking – always sustaining an uninterruptible mental “dialogue” with yourself in Fathertongue. But if you are not thinking carefully – thinking mindfully – then you are thinking carelessly – mindlessly. Most of the academic nonsense I have mocked in this book consists of a scrupulous cataloging of the processes and consequences of human mindlessness – which is misrepresented by the professoriat as being the normal state of human consciousness.

The existence and substance of mindlessness are not what the researchers intend to document. Their work is simply a reflection of the fact that, for each one of us, the world we see outside the mind is the one we are looking for from inside the mind. If you want to be excluded entirely from any academic “study,” all you have to do is question the premises – the prejudices – undergirding the “research.” It suits the professorial temperament to insist that your purposive behavior must be the end-consequence of some type of mindlessness – genetics or physical-, psychological- or behavioral-determinism or brain chemistry or vestigial animality or social dynamics or anything except rationally-conceptual volitionality – free will. Accordingly, if you should dare to peek behind the curtain it will turn out that you are not an appropriate test-subject. If the territory does not correspond to the map, by all means dispose of the territory.

…

Read More

Dr. Garth Davis, Surgeon: I Warned You….

23 Comments

Dr. Garth Davis, after having—probably blissfully confident—posted comments in the original Forks Over Knives thread I blogged about (Doctor FAIL: Garth Davis, Bariatric Surgeon (and China Study Balderdash)) basically did the same blissfully confident, dismissive commenting on that post. Such as this:

This is one of the funniest yet saddest commentaries I have ever seen. You guys are ridiculous. Actually I started as a big time meat eater. I wrote a book in 2007 called “The Experts Guide To Weigh Loss”. In that book I actually wrote a section on diet that basically supported a zone diet. My thought was patients need as high protein as possible. My diet for patients was eggs for breakfast. Turkey and veggies for lunch. Chicken and veggies for dinner. Problem was after reviewing thousands of patients I was finding problems with cholesterol levels and weight gain over time…. [it goes on, devoid of proper paragraph breaks]

“Funniest.” Nice, lazy dismissal. Well, we’ll just see who brought it and who didn’t. Read on, if you want to see pure, unadulterated doctor/surgeon impotence.

….Oh, “as high protein as possible?” Wow. And you wrote a book recommending that? Hmm. He goes on in his comment to basically use the old “been there done that” shtick, without being willing to explain himself or qualify (Campbell does similarly…grew up on a dairy farm…where I guess dairy famers and their children drop like flies). For example, he conflates Blue Zones with 7th Day Adventists—not even conceding that one of the longest living Blue Zone populations—the Okinawans—eat more meat than the traditional Japanese…which would be pork, and that their traditional cooking fat is lard.

…One commenter even felt sorry for him over my treatment in the post. But she proved to be irredeemably irredeemable, in spite of all efforts. The thing is, comments on my blog are both devastating and fucking brutal if you don’t have your shit strait, or can’t defend your ideas. Intentional. No place in the Paleosphere even comes close. We put Socrates to shame and Hegel in short pants, here. There’s no catechismal dispensation here on Free the Animal. You put up, or…

“This is one of the funniest yet saddest commentaries I have ever seen. You guys are ridiculous.”

And why, exactly, are we ridiculous?

“Unlike you guys who get your science from blogs I go to the source sitting through lectures and reading journals.”

Ah yes, the whole tired old bloggers don’t know real science and mathematics schtick. Because no paleo-type bloggers have ever read or wrote about any scientific papers or understand that correlation does not equal causation, or have any sort of inkling of what real Science is, right Doc?

“I will never be set in my ways. If there is some ground breaking science that shows me there is a different way then so be it.”

I find your self assessment of open-mindedness pretty difficult to take seriously, coming from someone who repeatedly uses appeal to authority as an argument.

Dr. Doug McGuff (stating the facts, and only the facts, ma’am):

“Taking a statistics course does not make you a statistician” – ad hominem attack

“The actual china study was printed in Nature, one of the premier scientific journals….” – argument from authority

“Her opinions were published on her blog, not a journal” – argument from authority

“The problem is that lay people just cannot understand the difficulty of statistical significance and therefore will believe anything anybody tells them.” – Nice combo of argument from authority and slippery slope analogy.

“The Weston Price Foundation is one of the least scientific organizations I have studied.” – Unsubstantiated, narcissistic ad hominem attack.

“Why would people believe Minger over physicians and epidemiologists?” – Oh, the same people that gave us heart healthy margarin? – argument from authority.

“You cannot take raw data and make conclusions like she does.” – But you can use the raw data to show how epidemiologists are manipulating statistics to support their pre-determined beliefs. The entire basis of evidence based medicine is an emphasis on raw data as opposed to statistically derived data.

There’s tons there, 115 Comments as of now. After a bit, I began pounding him, including his incomplete and false information about the Masai, not to mention cholesterol and other stuff, including the Okinawans.

While he didn’t address anything I wrote, he did come in with another comment.

I can’t believe all the inflammatory words. You guys are an angry bunch. Doug I can’t believe your comments especially. What kind of doctor are you? I spend my whole life studying diet. I run a very big weight management clinic where we do medical and surgical weight loss and research into the cause and treatment of disease. Denise may be intelligent but any scientist who reads her work can tell she does not know how to analyze data properly. She made huge errors in her critique that even a junior med student should notice….

I had explained to him that Denise did exactly what Campbell did in The China Study in terms of isolated variables (to be more accessible), but that her formal critique included all the multivariate analysis she’d already done from the outset.

“The ridiculous commentary by the Minger is laughable to anybody who understands statistics. You cannot look at raw data and make conclusions, as Denise did, without controlling for confounding variables.”

She addressed this. She actually did numerous MV regressions before publishing her first critique, but wanted to keep it simple and basic for readers (just as in The China Study book). In her formal critique of 30 pages or so, she includes the MV analysis.

http://rawfoodsos.com/2010/08/06/final-china-study-response-html/

Also, it’s as though you didn’t read this post you’re commenting on. I included a number of links to Ned Kock, a statistician who performed a number of MV regressions on the same and different data sets (China Study II) and came to the same findings as Minger.

Alright, as I said, there’s a lot there and I wish I had space to highlight all commenters who added value. But as I said in the title, I warned him. Indeed I did.

Memo to Dr. Garth Davis:

Cat still got your tongue, sir? Well, here. Find me a study that contradicts any of this and factors in the nutritional cost of avoiding or eliminating whole animal foods from the diet.

Grains, Vegetarians, Vegans and Nutritional Density

An excerpt:

Again, look at the numbers at the tops of the bars that are off the chart in order to judge the real relative comparison. As with our other nutritional comparisons, here’s how these meals stack up:

  • 850 Cal (5 pounds) Mixed Raw Fruit: 127% USRDA (4 of 21 nutrients over 100%)
  • 850 Cal (about 8-10 oz) Omivorous Meal: 440% USRDA (12 of 21 nutrients over 100%)

Yes, indeed, in the fruit meal there are only 4 of the 21 nutrients that provide 100% or more of the RDA, but 3 of those 4, just barely (vitamin C being the only one off the scale). So in essence, a single nutrient at 1,500% of the RDA skews the whole analysis pretty badly. If we were to take vitamin C out of the equation and just average the other 20 nutrients, the fruit meal provides only 57% of the RDA. As you can see, however, we do not have nearly this same problem with the omnivorous meal, because 12 of the 21 nutrients are over 100% and of those, 5 are off the scale. Just removing vitamin C as we did in the fruit meal changes nothing at all, because the general nutrition is excellent and widespread.

No response, as we had already been accustomed to for days. My notice to him:

Dr. Garth. Well, what do you think? Inn’t interesting that pure layman are quoting studies to you? You’ve yet to respond to mine, or any of the others.

You stepped in shit. Didn’t you? You should very well know that I am going to blog your comments and your total failure to respond to valid responses if you don’t—and when I do, it’ll be far more Googlishly devastating than this post. I take no prisoners, but I’m a sucker for redemption.

…Yep. You did. You thought everyone would run and hide because you read studies all the time (but have yet to cite one—perhaps you’re afraid of how we’ll tear it to shreds?). We do too (and a number have been cited by myself and others).

Isn’t it wonderful? You have zero power. You have to earn your respect and you know what? You suck in this thread, compared to what others have posted….and everybody knows it. This blog gets over 100,000 visits per month. Thousands of people over years who are curious enough to look at comments are going to see who you relly are. Authoritarian. That’s about it.

And here’s another thing. OK, I can accept that a surgeon with an interest in nutrition eventually tires of the debate. But that’s only because there’s no real debate. This is clearly not the case, here. Very clearly. You have been challenged by your own standards, and you are silent, which of course speaks volumes.

At a point, I debated with myself whether my treatment of you in this post was justified.

Now I know that it was. I’ve been at this for a long time. My judgment of character is pretty spot on.

I remain a sucker for redemption.

Nothing.

Alright, so I kinda had let my warning to to the good Doktor slide; back of my mind and…back of my mind. Enter Stabby! Long time commenter, always keeping me honest, but always being honest himself. Comment from him last night.

Hey Richard, haven’t seen you in a while, just dropping in.

I can’t believe he would reference the EPIC trial. The other trials he cited are inane too, but the EPIC trial didn’t even show that vegetarians lived longer. They had a moderately lower risk of cardiovascular disease, although correlation isn’t causation. But there was no difference in all-cause mortality.

So yes he is a moron about The China Study but he is also a moron about the EPIC trial. And even if vegetarians were significantly healthier than omnivores, that wouldn’t mean much because then we would have to discuss the potential reasons why—and it wouldn’t look pretty for the “meat kills you” side. But oh no, let’s just cherry-pick epidemiology instead of having a real conversation. We just want a “gotcha”…hey, my correlation says this.

And if he’s going to cherry-pick like a knave he should at least learn how to be a good knave.

So there you go. Thanks for the resurrection and motivation, Stabby.

Coming Full Circle

24 Comments

I’ve tried a lot of stuff over the years. It’s so easy initially, because when you switch to real food in place of processed and fast, there’s a spontaneous reduction in caloric intake for nearly everyone. That’s why both paleo and LC work so well initially for the fat people out there. Amazing how switching out processed crap for real food nourishes and satiates you better, and you naturally return to some measure of the real animal you were supposed to be in the first place.

But it’s a double edged-sword. It’s so easy for so many—so long as you resist the temptation to indulge too often—that an almost mysterious or magical element can seep in and some of us—me included—take (or took) some delight in believing we could just eat as much as we desired, so long as keeping it Real™.

Alas, it’s individual, too. Whether it’s because of just the right macro-ratios anyone happens to get right for them, their ability to keep reducing that intake as they lose weight and their base metabolic rate (BMR) comes down, age factors, gender factors… I don’t know. I have a hard enough time figuring it out for myself, much less advising anyone else beyond the basic principles to be applied…and then you’re on your own. Thankfully, I suppose, basic principles are so effed in general that just those alone make profound differences for many.

In the last 8-10 weeks I’ve been simply getting back to basics. What?

  • Real food (meat, fish, fowl, vegetables—including starchy ones—fruits, a few nuts now and then, a little dairy…mostly the fat).
  • Reduce drinking calories (including booze).
  • Intermittent hunger or fasting. Just don’t worry about being hungry. Do something instead.
  • No serious weighing or counting, but just a general sense of intake, ensuring it’s less than what you need to maintain body fat levels. Easy to do and your hunger can be your guide to that.
  • Choose very nutritious foods, i.e., eggs, liver, shellfish—including oysters, clams, mussels, and so on.

And fat begins melting away again.

What about the gym and the cold therapy? I tend to go to the gym spontaneously, when I feel I need to get that workout; but when I do, I mean it. I generally do 2 types of sessions, now: (1) DL and leg presses, both heavy, but also light enough to do 2-3 sets in a 6-8 rep range. (2) standing presses, bench or chest presses, and weighted chin-ups or pull-ups. That’s about it. Other than than, it’s play in the backyard with kettlebells.

As to CT, it’s just fun and invigorating, and so I do it, as well as time in the pool. I’m not convinced it has any effect that will overcome bad habits elsewhere. I have a new experiment along the lines of CT, more isolated…I’m still evaluating that. But, I’ve just got to say it: whatever you think you want to try, great. Try it. But I think that a solid diet and discipline in the amount you consume—with excellent, nutritious food choices making it the easiest possible—far outweighs anything else you can do, even solid exercise.

So just a short post, to make it simple. Simple is good.

My Current Paleo Anarchist Landscape; The Ancestral Health Symposium 2012 and the 21 Convention

81 Comments

Yea, I maybe want to blog more about fat bread and applications, including mayonnaise making, tuna salad and all sorts of cool such things which, quite to the contrary of motivating me to go hog wild with neolithic foods, has had quite the opposite effect. More on that later.

I’m dashing to finish up V2.0 of the book, now with plenty of pressure to get ‘er done. But I kinda blew myself out a couple of days ago with it and have dreaded getting back to it. I’ll get it done, but my mind is so elsewhere at the moment. Some bullets:

  • After just shy of 20 years at it, I have decided to close the company I started in a bedroom in 1993 with a coupla hundred bucks to my name (definitive decision Tuesday last). I grew it to a few dozen employees. I’ve hated it for years. Why do something you hate? For money?
  • I have not only four other books in the works with Hyperink, but I spent all afternoon up in their offices Wednesday shooting video for a beginner’s course on Paleo. This, I love. …Though I didn’t love the 2-hr drive back down to the South Bay in “rush” hour traffic.
  • I have two other primary initiatives, one as an adjunct to the business I’m shutting down—the part I like—and one as very paleo related. More later.

What this means is that I’m going to move more and more into this landscape as a livelihood…because I love it, because I likely can, and because I really have a sense of how to do it far different than others—which is perhaps the most passionate aspect of it. And let’s face it. All the blog posts I’ve done are here. There’s a ton of them. In essence, every time I write a new one, it’s like competing with myself. How can someone make it truly better, in perpetuity? The reality is that it’s not possible in an ever increasing sense, and so you have to figure out different channels, new subjects, and so on. Look: how many times can I call dietitian morons fuckheads, and have you laugh?

Yawn. See?

So in less than a week I head up to Hat Creek to fly hang gliders for a few days. Videos of all that here on YouTube, the 4th, 5th and 6th on the list. This will I be my 15th or 16th consecutive year of flying that amazing site. I’ve lost count.

The day after I get back, it’s off to Boston and the Ancestral Health Symposium: #AHS12. Did you see the posts I did about last year’s event?

I actually just surprised myself at how much that event meant to me, realizing how much I blogged it. My presentation is going to be unique amongst all other presentations…I hope. I intend to demonstrate that diet and nutrition aren’t the only thing grains and agriculture fucked up beyond reason and recognition. Mine is: paleo Epistemology and Sociology. Looks like the schedule has Ron Rosedale, MD and I at 20 minutes each, going up against Terry Wahls, MD, with a 40-minute presentation.

When I get back, it’s but a few days until I head off to Austin for The 21 Convention. I’m basically delivering the same presentation, only far more detailed, an hour vs. the 20 minutes I have at AHS. Other speakers include Keith Norris, Skyler Tanner, Doug McGuff, and Dave Asprey. Robb Wolf was on the schedule as well, but at last I heard he had to cancel. Greg Swann, the guy I’ve been featuring chapter-by-chapter for his book Man Alive! got a gig speaking there too, as a direct result of that series. He goes up right before I do.

Well that’s it for now. Sorry that my blogging has so sucked rancid dog semen this week. I ate something that didn’t quite sit right a couple of days ago and am just getting back to feeling human again.

Blogging to Resume Shortly

4 Comments

Well, I’m two chapters away from completing version 2.0 of Free the Animal: How to lose weight and fat on The paleo diet. It’s actually been a lot more work than version 1 for me, for various reasons but mostly because I really want to improve it a lot. Anyway, that’s what’s been taking up my time.

In other news, my publisher has begun putting up excerpts on Amazon that cover various topis, 5 in all, so far:

  • Natural Disease Prevention and other excerpts from Free The Animal
  • Eat Like A Caveman and other excerpts from Free The Animal
  • The paleo, Primal, Ancestral Lifestyle and other excerpts from Free The Animal
  • A Primal Weight Loss Plan and other excerpts from Free The Animal
  • The Cholesterol Con and other excerpts from Free The Animal

They’re 99 cents each.

Now, I’m off to San Francisco to the publisher’s office where he’s arranged for a videographer and an interviewer to do about 90 minutes of footage about the paleo diet. More on that later. It’ll probably be something like a beginner’s instructional guide in 5-10 minute chunks.

Here’s a couple of photos I took while Beatrice and I were in Santa Cruz Monday. It’s a juxtaposition, needing no explanation other than that in the second photo, it’s what we actually ate, and that was after splitting and finishing off a whole dungeness.

IMG 1063
A picture worth a thousand words.
IMG 1064
 

Later.

Man Alive! Chapter 8: The Integrity of Art

39 Comments

Here’s the post that kicked it all off. This is chapter 8 of 12, to give interested readers the chance to take on the free ebook chapter by chapter over the weekend, debate it amongst themselves, or even challenge the author who’s keeping tabs.

~~~

From: Man Alive! A survival manual for the human mind.

by Greg Swann

Chapter 8. The integrity of art.

The universe is internally self-consistent. This is what we mean when we say it “makes sense” – the laws of nature are comprehensible to us because they are all consistent with each other, all superficially differentiated manifestations of the law of identity. This is actually a matter of controversy right now in theoretical physics, where the self-consistency of the universe and humanity’s seemingly uncanny adaptation to it are held to be evidence – in the mother of all We-Now-Know-We-Know-Nothing theories – that there is not merely one universe, but, the physicists claim, as many as ten to the five-hundredth power universes.

I am not making this up. I’m inclined to think that there can be only one everything-that-exists, and that, where the math does not conform to the observed evidence – where the map does not correspond to the territory – it is probably not the evidence that is incorrect. And doubt you nothing, the theologians are dancing in the streets: No longer are they the only madmen insisting that the cosmos consists of the products of their fevered imaginations. They get to play the Even-Physicists-Agree card over and over again, to the detriment of clear thinking everywhere.

…

Read More

Fat Bread: Third Time’s The Charm. Mission Accomplished!

259 Comments

Here’s the third—and likely final installment for a while—in my quest to make a decent bread…that not only tastes and acts like bread, but excels in terms of Paleo nutrition. Mission accomplished. Future posts will focus on sensible applications of this bread. For those still uninterested in bread, I get it. Why mess with a good thing and anyway, isn’t this kinda like paleo reenactment—like those who seem only ever to be finding ways to make cookies, cupcakes, cakes, brownies and the like into paleo approved versions?

There’s two issues:

  1. The processed food mindset behind it
  2. Nutrition profile (pro-inflammatory polyunsaturated n-6 fat, primarily)

I’ll address #1 at the end of this post. My first post on the topic focused on number 2; specifically, the omega-6 PUFA issue. While I solved that problem, my results weren’t great and I wasn’t sure why. So, in version 2, I got far better results—but I changed three variables: I got a true macadamia nut butter, not a chunky one, I added in 1/2 cup of almond butter per Jeff Nimoy’s original inspiration, and also some coconut flour…in order to add fiber for more stiffness and adhesion when sliced.

With the experience and good results of my second attempt under my belt, I set out on the third try to return to my original inspiration, under the hunch that it was the macadamia butter that was the primary issue. So here’s the final, definitive recipe and instructions:

Ingredients:

  • 5 eggs (medium to large size)
  • 1 cup raw whole macadamia nuts (made into butter per the instructions)
  • 1 cup coconut butter (nuke 20 seconds to get a smooth butter)
  • 1/2 teaspoon sea salt
  • 2 tablespoons lemon juice
  • 1 rounded teaspoon baking soda

Instructions:

Place the macadamias into a typical large home-kitchen food processor and process on high to achieve a part butter, part chunky nut meal. While running on high still, drop one egg down the chute and wait for the sound to stabilize to smooth (about 20-30 seconds), then do the same with the second egg. Once the processor is running smooth again, add the remaining 3 eggs down the chute. You should have a very smooth batter by this point. Shut down the processor and add the remaining ingredients, except for the lemon juice and baking soda. Turn it on low this time, and once everything is all mixed (20 seconds or so), introduce first the lemon juice down the chute, then the baking soda. Mix for a few more seconds.

Place the batter in a standard 8 1/2 bread pan, greased with butter, ghee or coconut oil. Bake at 350F (175-180C) for 35 minutes. Remove from the pan and set on an elevated rack to cool. Total time from start to finish is about 45 minutes (10 for the prep, 35 for the cooking).

IMG 1038
 

This was the most uniform rise yet achieved.

IMG 1040
Adhesion Test

Once cooled—with the end slice I covered in Kerigold butter having escaped to “someplace”—I decided to test its properties in terms of behaving like real bread, i.e., the ability to slice it thinly, and for those thin slices to hold together well, even needing to be pulled apart. The slice is 1/8” thick. To further the experiment, I cut another slice, put two leftover chicken breast slices between them, and it held together to the last bite—just like bread.

Did the same thing yesterday with 1/4″ bread slices, same leftover chicken and some jack cheese. Like I said, holds together to the last bite.

IMG 1041
A lotta sandwich for such thin bread
IMG 1043
A+ Performance

The texture and behavior, as you see, is bread like. Taste is the best yet. It’s quite neutral, not as in my 2nd loaf, a bit nutty (almond butter) as well as a bit, well, whatever that taste coconut flour seems to impart.

So before I address the issue of the paleo Slippery Slope (“PSS”), i.e. the mindset in doing processed foods that are paleo compliant or Paleoish, let’s do another nutritional analysis. Click to open the full size version.

Fat Bread Nutrition
Fat Bread Nutrition (1 loaf)

What you might notice as different from the nutritional profile in part 2, PUFA has gone from 7% to 3%. One bugaboo is that I’m using pastured eggs and I can’t really find much in terms of nutrition information, though I’ve seen it widely claimed that pastured eggs can have up to 9 times the nutrition as that of a factory egg—and of course, who hasn’t seen the side-by-side comparison of yellow yolks (factory) to deep orange (pastured). I’ve also seen claims that the omega 6/3 ratio is more on the order of 2-3:1 instead of 15:1. But who knows, really? …and we’ve already talked in part 1 about the low content of omega-6 in macadamias and coconut. We’re talking 5.7 grams total PUFA in the whole loaf (~16 slices). I do declare: not an issue!

But let’s be fair and open about this and an least give hearthealthywholegrains™ their say. I used Oroweat 100% whole wheat bread as a surrogate. Here’s the macro breakdown (click for full size).

Wheat Bread Nutrition
Wheat Bread Nutrition (2 slices)

As you can see, the macro picture is almost 180% reverse, fat for carbohydrate, and these are high glycemic index and load carbohydrates (and high gluten protein on that score). In terms of fiber, vitamins and minerals, it was easy enough to get the info for commercial bread because you can analyze by slice. For mine, I had to do some figurin’. My loaf is about 600 grams, while Oroweat is 680 grams. Their loaf comes out to 18 slices, about 37.5 g per slice and at my loaf weight, that’s 16 slices. Based on that, and excluding protein, fat and carbohydrate—and just averaging fiber, vitamins and minerals—2 slices of “fortified” whole wheat bread give you 14% of your RDAs and mine gives you 12%.

So I guess the question comes down to this: nutrition from high glycemic load, “fortified” gluten grains, complete with mineral robbing phytic acid, or nutrition from pastured eggs, macadamia nuts and coconut.

Here’s my argument in support of this sort of food processing, or paleo Reenactment, if you must:

  1. We all process food. Braising short ribs is processing your food. Essentially, from a Pure Paleo™ standpoint, everything that goes beyond eating raw or grilling over an open campfire is “processing.”
  2. Where do you draw the line?
  3. I think the line is best drawn between foods that are meal-like foods vs. those that are treat or indulgence like foods (cakes, cookies, brownies, etc.)
  4. Nutrition is important, and this is very good nutrition from whole sources.
  5. There’s just something about holding meat and veggies together between two pieces of bread.

Alright, from here out I’m going to address various applications. The first, next week, will be about the many wondrous ways to make tuna salad (I have to perfect my mayonnaise making, first. Last evening my high oleic sunflower oil, 2-cup batch, broke—from a wonderful creamy mayonnaise to yellow oil—while introducing the very last 1/4 cup. This post would have been drafted last night, but I was too enraged.)

Update: It was pointed out to me that the shredded coconut meat I used for the nutritional analysis doesn’t have all the fat that coconut butter does (there’s no coconut butter in the database). After thinking about it this makes sense and the process used to dehydrate it probably melts away a lot of the fat. Getting the fat to come out the same as the content on the label of the coconut butter required adding about 8 tablespoons of coconut oil. This boost the fat percentage to 88%. However, the overall micro nutrient profile remains about the same, so I’ll just leave it at that.

Grains, Vegetarians, Vegans and Nutritional Density

178 Comments

Yesterday I posted about how well it’s going with the book and its 2nd Edition. Here’s an excerpt from Chapter 3 on grains, vegetarianism, veganism and a bunch of nutritional comparisons. This is first draft stuff, so it has yet to go to the editor or proofreading. Those who read the first edition will notice this section as being tremendously expanded.

~~~

Even when not considering the problems with grains in terms of gluten, and other lectins, be aware that they are not very nutritious.

Listen, everyone, and listen closely: if you eat grains as a significant part of your diet, you are getting CRAP nutrition as compared to a Paleo-like diet. It’s simply a fact, the “healthy-whole” fraud notwithstanding. And if that’s not enough to convince you, then ask yourself why virtually all grain products have the word “fortified” stamped on the package. Good nutritional sources need never be “fortified.”

How about a visual representation? What if we compared the nutrition in an average loaf of bread (about 1,400 calories) to say, the same number of calories of beef liver and salmon?

Bread

Screen Shot 2011 09 26 at 2 43 09 PM
 

Beef Liver

Screen Shot 2011 09 26 at 2 43 28 PM
 

Salmon

Screen Shot 2011 09 26 at 2 45 13 PM
 

Don’t look just at the height of the bars, but at the numbers at the top of the bars. A bar at the top means “off the scale.” Examining the numbers gives you an idea of how proportionally off the scale each nutrient is relative to the same nutrient in ”fortified” bread. For most micronutrients, a paleo diet outstrips a standard, grain-based diet by 100–300% in terms of nutritional content. The livers of all animals and fish are nature’s true “multi-vitamin.” For a more thorough look, see my post at Free the Animal that incorporates these images.

Let’s run the actual numbers above, comparing 1,400 calories of bread to the same amount of beef liver for the 21 different nutrients listed. On average, for bread—adding up all the numbers at the tops of the bars— you get average nutrition across the 21 nutrients of 85% (1,777 / 21). That is, if you eat the entire loaf in a day, you’re still 15% under the government’s established recommendations.

Now let’s have some fun with the liver: 2,640%! No, that’s not a typo: Two Thousand Six-Hundred Forty Percent! (55,403 / 21), almost 25 times as much nutrition as the bread. Think of that the next time you hear nonsense about “superfoods”—and it’s always some silly berry, or leaf, or something else that while decent, never holds a candle to animal foods in terms of nutrition. When is that last time you heard of any animal food being referred to as a superfood in any mainstream outlet? Probably never. That’s how backwards everything is and just another example of what you’re up against.

Want another example? How about raw oysters on the half shell, which I happen to love. Thing is, it’ll be tough for you to get 1,400 calories worth. In fact, 24 raw oysters, a large serving indeed, has only 230 calories, 1/6th of that 1,400 calorie loaf of “fortified” bread. But guess what? in that 230 calories you’ll find 400% of the USRDA for those same 21 nutrients in our comparison. So, one-sixth the caloric energy, almost five times the nutrition!

So how about if we compare a relatively nutritious plant food to bread? Potatoes are just such a thing. Sweet potatoes are slightly more nutritious than plain white potatoes, so let’s use those. Another thing about potatoes in general is that they’re gluten free, unlike bread, but—depending on the variety—can have 10—13% protein and it’s a quality amino acid profile; whereas, the tiny protein in bread is virtually all gluten, a big problem for increasing numbers of people. One large sweet potato (excluding any garnishes like butter and not eating the skin) will provide you with 200 calories, one-seventh of that loaf of bread. But the nutrition over those 21 nutrients is 25% of your USRDA. Yes, one potato per day gets you 25% of your nutrition. If you were to eat seven of them—in order to match the caloric energy of the bread—you’d get 175% of your USRDA, or exactly two times the “nutrition” in the loaf of bread. …For centuries, potatoes have been considered a poor man’s food, yet their nutritional density is such that eating only half of an average male’s daily caloric requirements gets you twice your recommended allowance in vitamin and mineral nutrition! Bread is the true poor man’s food.

[…]

What About Vegetarianism and Veganism?

First, it’s important to draw a clear distinction between vegetarianism and veganism: vegetarians traditionally consume nutritionally-dense animal nutrition in the form of eggs and dairy. Vegans do not. Nutritionally, this makes a world of difference. Either you consume animal products or you don’t, and that’s the real distinction to understand.

Some vegetarian societies, such as India, have thrived for millenia, but there has never been any such thing as a vegan society. A fruit-based, raw vegan diet that excludes all animal nutrition is only theoretically possible in narrow, niche environments, such as a rain forest. I say “theoretical,” because even supposed primate herbivores are omnivorous. They eat bugs, worms, grubs and termites, and sometimes turn to actual predation and eating of other primates.

You’re already familiar with the nutritional comparison of bread versus animal nutrition and even potatoes. But how about fruit? While fruit is indeed a paleo food, is it suitable as your only food? Some people think so. So let’s see.

The blog post in question was the result of a live Internet debate I had with a raw fruitarian vegan in April of 2011, with 1,000 people listening in on phone lines and many others streaming live over the internet. During that debate, I issued a challenge to vegans: compare a meal of just fruit to a meal of just beef liver, nutritionally. One vegan took up the challenge and this was the result: Nutrition Density Challenge: Fruit vs. Beef Liver. The comparison took place in two parts. The first part sought to find out how much raw fruit (various, mixed) would be required to roughly equal the vitamin and mineral profile for only 4 ounces of beef liver. The answer is that it took 5 pounds and 850 calories of fruit to roughly equal the nutrition of 4 ounces and 150 calories of beef liver!

But who eats only 150 calories for breakfast? What happens if, in addition to the liver, we add a sweet potato, some eggs, and a little fruit, in order to get up to equivalent 850 calorie meals?

The charts below represent the overall nutrition over 21 nutrients with the vegan, raw fruit meal on top and the omnivorous meal on bottom.

850 Calorie Comparison
850 Calorie Comparison

Again, look at the numbers at the tops of the bars that are off the chart in order to judge the real relative comparison. As with our other nutritional comparisons, here’s how these meals stack up:

  • 850 Cal Mixed Raw Fruit: 127% USRDA (4 of 21 nutrients over 100%)
  • 850 Cal Omivorous Meal: 440% USRDA (12 of 21 nutrients over 100%)

Yes, indeed, in the fruit meal there are only 4 of the 21 nutrients that provide 100% or more of the RDA, but 3 of those 4, just barely (vitamin C being the only one off the scale). So in essence, a single nutrient at 1,500% of the RDA skews the whole analysis pretty badly. If we were to take vitamin C out of the equation and just average the other 20 nutrients, the fruit meal provides only 57% of the RDA. As you can see, however, we do not have nearly this same problem with the omnivorous meal, because 12 of the 21 nutrients are over 100% and of those, 5 are off the scale. Just removing vitamin C as we did in the fruit meal changes nothing at all, because the general nutrition is excellent and widespread.

This is a very, very sad reality for vegans.

Vegans are experimenting with their lives to a profound degree, far beyond just tweaking a variable or two. Rather than eliminating the most egregious neolithic agents, like wheat, sugar and high-omega-6 industrial oils, they eliminate everything our ancestors ate going back more than 4 million years. The vegan diet requires the massive destruction of habitat for “fields of grain,” modern processing techniques, and delivery to markets far far away. Vegans hardly live in the pristine natural paradise they try to sell you on.

Veganism in general, and raw veganism in particular, is a recent human phenomenon that constitutes a mass nutritional experiment with its basis more in ideology, feeling, and myth than in biology, physiology, and nutrition. Vegans begin, as do many Western religions, with their own version of the doctrine of Original Sin.

They try to make you believe that you’re guilty by nature. You love the taste and smell of grilling animal flesh, and that makes you a bad person. Vegans sacrifice their desire to eat flesh in favor of “higher ideals”—as if there was any ideal higher than to live the life of a human animal on Earth as nature has suited.

Those listening to the “experts” or buying into fundamentalist vegan ideals are getting fatter and sicker. If you forget what you’ve learned from the ADA and mainstream nutritionists, self-experiment with the lifestyle you were born to live, and follow your instincts to eat real food, the pounds will start melting away and your health will improve immensely.

Additional Resources

  • The Bible of the vegetarian and vegan zealots is, of course, The China Study, by T. Colin Campbell. For an exhaustive series of critiques of the book using Campbell’s methods to statistically analyze the Actual China Study Monograph data, see Raw Food SOS, blogged by statistics geek Denise Minger.
  • Want more proof that a diet with any significant grain content is nutritionally inferior, and woefully so? See this post at Free the Animal comparing an average day’s nutrition for a SAD eater with that of a Paleo eater.

See also:

The Book, Free The Animal, 2nd Edition (and: Do You Want to Author a Book Yourself, with Help?)

9 Comments

Isn’t it cool that with eBooks, you can go to 2nd Edition only 6 months after publishing the first? I follow Seth Godin’s Domino Project posts on ePublishing and I think he’s dead on.

This is the future, while all the while I see book after paleo book coming to be published in the traditional way. …And because they’re publishing them one on top of the other—don’t get me wrong, these are all excellent books—what happens to the poor authors? Focus shift, that’s what. As soon as the newest one hits the shelves, the authors of the past ones are all on their own. …And don’t even get me started on shelf space, printing economies of scale, and supply chain for dying brick & mortar operations (I looked into all of this very deeply before making my decision).

I have zero of these constraints, and while you can have a dead-tree-version of my book, it’s print on demand; so even that supply is just as endless—albeit more costly—as are the eBook versions (Kindle, Nook, Kobo, iBooks and PDF).

I’ve previously blogged about this revamp for a 2nd Edition and I’d expected it to be finished around the first of this month. Then I dug in. There was so much to rework (editing to shift focus) and add that I’ve kinda gotten caught up in it, much to my general satisfaction—and it doesn’t hurt to have Theresa Noll, an editor who can write in my style, such that I often can’t even tell the difference between who wrote what.

The first edition was a bit quick and to the point. Now, I have the chance to make it much more of what I wanted. I spent all day today just reworking a section in Chapter 3 on nutritional density. I’ll blog about that tomorrow, as a teaser.

Sales. Well, after the initial expected bump because it was new and many had been waiting forever, it settled into a monthly trend downward, as should be expected. But then something interesting happened. It began increasing again. As it stands, an average of 1,500 copies are being sold monthly, and with the deal I have with the publisher, it’s officially real money, even at the $3.99 price for the eBook. So, instead of pulling out all stops to get as many sales in that first 2-4 weeks for dead tree books on limited shelf space, I have a completely open-ended situation here.

And I love it.

But here’s another thing: I’m actually the best selling—or very nearly so—author for Hyperink, my publisher: with hundreds of books published so far. That get’s me a lot of attention, a lot of help—focussed help and attention. And guess what? We’re now mapping out a deal for about 90 minutes of video instruction for paleo, all professionally recorded and edited. I’ll be up at their offices next week to white board the whole thing (sorry, do-nothing bitches). This, in addition to the fact that my second book (unrelated to paleo, but where I’m a 20-yr expert) is in draft, and we have 3 more books planned. The next one related to this bog will be about paleo Society / Anarchism / Philosophy / Atheism / Don’t Fucking Vote / Death by Government / Don’t be a Moron. Ha!!! They’re actually quite excited about that because my blog archives are so damn deep on all those issues (and I have tons more material).

So, are you a blogger or an expert in a field? For the time being, Hyperink has said they’re not going to do a competing paleo book, but how about sub-tpics like fasting, exercise, nutrition, or whatever?

Here’s the page for bloggers to register their interest. To wet your appetite for possible things, here’s a screen clip (click for big).

Hyperink Blog to Book
Hyperink Blog to Book

Recognize anything? Yea, so on this page, I’m featured in my dirty tank top after the last day at NovNat with Hyperink’s other top selling bloggers to book: Brad Feld (Co-founder, Foundry Group; Co-founder, TechStars), MG Siegler (General Partner, CrunchFund; Columnist, TechCrunch), and Lewis DVorkin (Chief Product Officer, Forbes Media; Founder, True/Slant). Quite a lineup. There’s a quote by me about the publishing experience and also a couple of quotes from my commenters about the book. Check it out.

So, who thinks I would have been better off self publishing, or going with a publisher that churns out paleo books one on top of the other? This was published six months ago and things are really just beginning to warm up. Had it been a big hunk of paper, it would mostly be long forgotten. On to the next big chunk of paper.

OK, so what if you’re not a blogger? Well, the royalty deal is different if they have to create a book from interviews with you—as opposed to cull material from your blog that’s already written—so here’s the page for experts. Are you an expert in any niche you can think of?

Remember, this is Amazon’s Long Tail strategy, but without the massive warehouse, employee, and distribution costs. And, since it’s an eBook, you can keep it fresh and new for many years to come at little cost or effort. If it works, you can become enough expert to write another book in a different area, and another and another—until it all adds up to  a steady and important income.

Give it a look if it interests or intrigues you.