Depression and carbs

I want to cry today. My kids drive me crazy. My husband is all kinds of things bad. My mother-in-law's cooking sucks and my Crossfit coach is an ass. Right, none of this is real. I've learned to recognize the depression that invariably follows a high-carb diet.

You are not depressed despite your favorite pasta dishes? If you've never tried it, give Paleo a try for two weeks. I wonder if you look back like I did, and realize what joy and happiness feel like. Having been on Paleo for about four months, I have a reference point: the way I had felt in the year or two previously. Whenever I feel overwhelmed, sad, frustrated and anxious, the first question on my mind is: did I eat right this week? The answer, without exception, has been NO. (Yes, this means, there has not been a single instance when my depression was caused by any factors other than the carbs in my diet!) I've been too busy, too lazy, and eventually, too depressed to take care of eating properly. Today marks the lowest point in a couple of months.  Here is what I am going to do to fix it: I will spend the afternoon cooking!

1. This evening, I have invited my husband to have a cooking date-night, making a Paleo quiche. I hope he accepts.
2. I would like to make a Kitchen Sink Soup that I have loved previously, possibly using the incredibly rich soup stock I prepared and froze a while back. (The fat seriously helps when I am on a carb-depression)
3. Devilled eggs! Haven't made them in years.  Should be a wonderful snack/side for a meal.
4. I will probably run out to Costco to get a ham and bake my holiday ham creation. It's one of the easiest recipes I have and it lasts two weeks in various forms!

That's it for now. I hope to be in better spirits to blog about the results!

Trust your doctor?

Do you usually do what your doctor says? Chances are, if you are seeing a very narrow specialist, you usually listen: who really argues when a heart surgeon suggests you have an open-heart surgery? Or a urologist who suggests a treatment for prostate problems?

However, what do you say when your pediatrician insists on proper disciplinary approaches with your kids? Or recommends a sleep-training regiment that you know you could not live with as a mother? How about dietary advice? My best guess is that the vast majority of people feel that their doctor does know what's best, but find that they fail to live up to the standards necessary to comply. So they go and eat bacon when the doctor insists on brown rice; they have their toddler sleep in their bed because the alternative is too hard emotionally; they know they should punish their kids but continue acting out of intuitive kindness, then hide the fact from the pediatrician.

"Doctors have been saying this for years," said my mother-in-law in a recent conversation about something or another.
"Yes, I know. But I believe they are wrong," was my firm response.
"What reason do you have to say that?"
"Well, there are several. First, it has become obvious to me that the medical profession as a whole is largely incompetent and I have been spot-checking their advice for years. I have been pushed toward a back surgery which didn't help and was only effective in slightly over 50% of patients, as I learned later. I have suffered from constant yeast infections because of a never-ending stream of antibiotics I received to treat bladder infections when the right solution I discovered later was a dramatic increase in fluid consumption. I could go on for hours.  I am not bitter - just learned to be wary of medical advice.
"Second, because I did find a doctor I trust completely. Every answer he gives me contains facts, percentages, references to studies and words like 'proof' and 'evidence'. Yet his most common answer to anything that comes from 'well-established scientific knowledge' is: 'that's just bad science' or 'there is absolutely no proof that this condition even exists or that the treatment makes any difference' or 'this theory came out of an incident in the 70's and has stuck around as truth.'
"Third, because I have recently poked around for what passes as modern science. Research papers that would not be passed by my college professors show up in medical journals and are pumped by the media. Correlations are confused with causality; statistics are abused beyond what is forgivable for inexperienced researches, but suggest willful corruption; key indicators thrown out as irrelevant; experimental controls weak or non-existent.
"Finally, because I learned of and experienced approaches that contradict predominant doctors' recommendations, make more sense and make me feel better!"

When you can trust your doctor in the age of Universal Health Care, corrupt science, bureaucratic insurance policies and a culture that does not believe, ideas matter - you have found a jewel you should nurture and treasure. Me? Oh, I just drive an hour and a half for every prenatal visit and pray that I don't give birth in the car. Similarly, my husband drives across LA to see his cardiologist and I imagine, will continue doing so when our upcoming move will make the trip last over two hours. Thankfully, both of our doctors take phone calls. What would we do without them? Oh, I guess the same thing we did before we found them: be unheard, misdiagnosed, over-medicated and under-treated.

In case you are in Southern California, do look up Dr. Patrick Sutton, an ob/gyn in Pasadena and Dr. Michael Dougherty, a cardiologist in Brea. Do you have a favorite doctor you really trust?

Glucose tolerance test shaky

Every pregnant woman has gone through this: you go to the lab, they pipe you full of this sickly sweet solution, you spend an hour feeling nauseated in the waiting room and they draw blood to see if your body was successfully able to cope with the sugar attack.

I've been hesitant to do this test with my current, third pregnancy. First, I've had very healthy pregnancies. How likely is it, really, that this time around, with a much healthier lifestyle and feeling orders of magnitude better, I am going to suddenly develop gestational diabetes? But that's not the big problem: I guess I can put up with the waiting room. I hate having to the substance I am trying to avoid like the plague to have a healthy lifestyle generally and a healthy pregnancy, specifically, being injected into my body in near-dangerous amounts?

Now I have a whole new reason to mistrust and fear this procedure. Rob Wolff (the well-known paleo fitness advocate) has just published an article on gestational diabetes and glucose tolerance test. The article is rather long, but here is the gist. People like me, have invested a lot into transitioning our bodies from a sugar-burning to a fat-burning system. My body does not encounter sugar very frequently and when it does, it does not count on it as the main source of energy, deprioritizing its metabolism. I do not become sugar-starved or hypoglycemic if I skip meals because my system has a healthy amount of slow-burning high-octane fuel that it takes multiple days to deplete.

Bottom line, if I take the glucose test, I may not do as well as a woman eating twinkies for breakfast, lunch and dinner - training her body to process glucose as fast as humanly possible.  I will grant that eventually, this woman will develop insulin resistance which will turn up in the glucose test and correctly diagnosed as gestational diabetes.

Should I be undergoing the extremely annoying, unhealthy, not to mention long-and-boring procedure just so I can risk being misdiagnosed with the very disease that I avoid when I give up the twinkies?

In my case, the decision is actually easier: I have a wonderful OBGYN who will figure out the right answer if the test comes back positive - I have that much faith in him. However,  I don't even want to imagine the conversation I would be having with a regular doctor:

"You have gestational diabetes!"
"Why do you say so?"
"Your body was not able to process the deathly amount of glucose in the hour provided by the laboratory schedule"
"Oh, that's because it's not used to receiving the deathly amount. Trust me - it won't happen again."
"No, no, this is just a test.  However, you have to eat every 2-3 hours or you may become hypoglycemic and lose consciousness or even die."
"I do not get hypoglycemic. This is because I eat a high-protein high-fat diet that avoids major shifts in blood sugar leading to hypoglycemia."
"Fat is bad for you!  GROWL!"
"I used to think so too. Now I think, large amounts of glucose in a bottle are bad for me as your blood test just showed!"

OK, this dialogue is going to be an endless source of creative amusement for me. Hell, I'll probably do the test. But I am going to talk to my doctor at length about this idea before I sign off my soul there!

Junk food takes its toll

This weekend we went on a wonderful vacation rather modern caveman-style: RV camp & nude resort.  Sounds daring? Well, we decided, it was time to educate our cave babies about proper attitudes toward their bodies. This came on the heels of a neighbor threatening to call the police next time our kids (two and four!) ran out of the house naked. While they are comfortable in and out of their clothing at home, they know to get dressed before leaving the door - but accidents can happen.

After some consideration, I chose not to moon Steve, the neighbor, and made reservations for a long-promised trip to the "naked place" instead. The trip was wonderful with one caveat: food.

I am now six weeks pregnant and up until this point, have felt better than during either one of my other pregnancies: no nausea, not starving, no exhaustion or any of the other unpleasantries associated with being pregnant. This time, though, I failed to plan.  I was all out of beef jerky (never leave home without it!) and burnt the chicken that was intended for lunch.  We stopped at Wiener Schnitzel and I chose to make an exception, ordering my favorite craut dog on a bun.  In the final analysis it wasn't that great and by the time we got to our vacation spot, I felt horrible.  We went to the local restaurant where I was able to order a steak (4oz meat, a mountain of veggies). Not exactly what I needed at the end of a hungry day.  But it was decidedly better than nothing.

The next morning's breakfast was a delight but not a very good day overall.  And, of course, when we got back, I was too lazy to figure out what to defrost to have a real meal.  In the end, I averaged less than one good meal per day for three days running.  Boy, do I feel pregnant. Ready to throw up and all! (Yeah, I do remember feeling something like this with my other pregnancies!)


Today is a fix-it day. Super-yummy yogurt breakfast followed by a baked chicken with artichoke. I hope to get to take some pictures and blog about it. It's nice to be at my cave with Trader Joe's down the street, a nice electrical oven and great internet access! Grok would be so jealous...

Trans fats: not entirely unnatural

Trans fats have received a tremendous amount of bad press and it is well-deserved.  Unlike regular-old fats they clog our system, which is unable to adequately process or eliminate them effectively. They stick around for a very long time in the blood stream, envelope our organs, preventing proper function, are more prone to clogging arteries and cause the obvious problems: obesity, cardiovascular and heart diseases and, even perhaps diabetes. But, of course, I am not telling you anything new, I am sure.

Today I was taken aback to learn that there is such a thing as natural trans fats. Seriously? I had thought trans fats equalled hydrogenated oils - vegetable oils - and as long as you stuck to eating cow & duck, you were safe.


Turns out, I was dead-wrong.  From wikipedia: "A type of trans fat occurs naturally in the milk and body fat of ruminants (such as cattle and sheep) at a level of 2–5% of total fat." Oy.  Now where do I hide? I suppose, I could stick with fish and bird - but I love my iron!

Turns out, this isn't as bad as it sounds.  Continuing with the wikipedia article: "Animal-based fats were once the only trans fats consumed, but by far the largest amount of trans fat consumed today is created by the processed food industry as a side effect of partially hydrogenating unsaturated plant fats (generally vegetable oils). These partially-hydrogenated fats have displaced natural solid fats and liquid oils in many areas, the most notable ones being in the fast food, snack food, fried food, and baked goods industries."

 Furthermore, there are some studies that suggest actual health benefits to natural trans fats:

A university of Alberta study found that a diet with enriched levels of trans vaccenic acid (VA) -- a natural animal fat found in dairy and beef products -- can reduce risk factors associated with heart disease, diabetes and obesity. It turns out, a natural trans fat called trans vaccenic acid, is able to  reduce the production of chylomicrons -- particles of fat and cholesterol that form in the small intestine following a meal and are rapidly processed throughout the body.

Another study suggested that the same trans vaccenic acid may protect us from atherosclerosis.

Furthermore, conjugated linoleic acid (CLA), part of the family of naturally occurring trans fats, has well-known health benefits and is marketed as a dietary supplement. Here is a quick look at WebMD:

Conjugated linoleic acid is used for cancer, “hardening of the arteries” (atherosclerosis), obesity, weight loss caused by chronic disease, bodybuilding, and limiting food allergy reactions.

So bottom line is: trans fats are not an invention of the modern food industry. However, as it happens so often in chemistry, things that look alike don't always act alike. Skip your french fries, enjoy the cow, and you'll do fine.

School lunch

I've been having such a hard time figuring out how to balance my comfort with kids' nutrition, peace and harmony at meal times and a fundamentally unhealthy diet other adult members of our family follow. Really, how do I raise healthy kids when bagels, candy, cakes and pasta are considered reasonable staple by those they love?

Little steps, I have decided! My goal for this year is to expand their taste palates to include lots of meat and paleo-friendly carbs over the course of this year, learn to cook and plan for a transition to proper nutrition perhaps starting in the fall of 2011.

My son is starting the new year of pre-school tomorrow.  I need to have a plan for what he will eat for lunch if I have any hope of feeding him what I believe is right.  I have located a list of wonderful ideas at Everyday Paleo.

So here is my tentative meal plan (not all of this can be packed to go to school - but great for after-school snack):

Ingredients	Meal options
Yogurt Whipped Cream Berries Peaches Palm Sugar Cashews Dried blueberries Dried cranberries Carrots, cauliflower, celery Veggie dip Chicken nuggets Cubed meat Cubed cheese Cabbage/lettuce Bell peppers Hot dogs Meatloaf Bananas	Whipped cream & berries Healthy fruity yogurt (frozen?) Berries mix Healthy Trail mix Crunch Veggies with dip Chicken nuggets w/ketchup Chef-style salad O'derves luncheon Meatloaf pieces with ketchup Boiled eggs Nutty muffins

I have purchased little sauce cups of the sort you find in Mexican restaurants and they work great for ketchup and other dips. This is still work in progress, but here you go.  Any other ideas?

[UPDATE] I would like to try these baked sweet potato chips, too!
[ONE MORE THING] Found an interesting snack: almond cucumbers I have to try.

Healthy fruity yogurt

Have you ever looked at the sugar content of any flavored yogurt?  What about kids' yogurt?  And the winner of all - gogurt!  Knowing that parents will be all about the "healthy" association with anything that has yogurt in it - food companies create little sugar addicts by making the health food a nutritionally inferior option to jelly sandwiches.

We have invented our own kid-friendly yogurt!

Ingredients:

High-fat unsweetened yogurt (I buy Greek or Creamline Village brand at Trader Joe's)

Palm sugar (with its low glycemic index and facintating texture, it's a big win)

Sliced peaches or berries

Shredded coconut, sweetened & roasted

This wins high awards as breakfast, snack or desert. It has sufficient calories and nutritional content to be a small meal and it's sweetened to taste, which, not surprisingly requires so much less!

'Poo-less hair

No shampoo? Sounded crazy to me when I first read about the idea at Mark's Daily Apple. Still, some of the commenters called me to action when they said, they could grow longer hair, got rid of dandruff and found their hair healthier than before. I have given up on having long hair years ago, having become frustrated with the spider web-like texture it obtained once it got to my shoulder blades.


I took the plunge and it is finally time to tell my story.

The method:  I wash my hair with plain water in the shower.  At the end, I rinse it with cold water only.  I do not know whether this second step is necessary, but it feels so good afterward! My scalp awake and tingling. Occasionally, I rub a teaspoon or so of baking soda all around and rinse it off to eliminate any potential smells.

Weeks 1-2.  My hair turned super-oily. Though contrary to expectations, I liked it.  Because it was short, it held its shape so much better than before. There seemed to be no dandruff. I was excited!

Weeks 3-4. The oiliness let up slightly. Hair would have looked fabulous if its newly strengthened body did not accentuate the horrible Fantastic Sam's haircut! It was clear, I was on the right track. Even my husband, who was understandably skeptical about the whole adventure, was surprised.

Month 2.  I was disappointed. My hair went back to exactly the way it was! No longer oily, it didn't have the super-body I observed earlier and the dandruff was back! Still, there was no reason to give up yet. Looking back to the poo-less resources, I learned that Apple Cider Vinegar is good for dandruff and purchased a bottle.

Month 3.  Results! There is nothing special about my hair any more. It has a normal amount of moisture, looks healthy and strong, and the dandruff is gone.  I never opened the Apple Cider Vinegar. The nasty dandruff that I have been living with since early childhood, torturing my hair with all kinds of horrid chemicals, always itching, always snowy nevertheless - just disappeared! I love the waves and curls that are now part of my hairdo maintained by the stronger strands of hair.

I am now looking forward to having long hair for the first time since the year 2000. My kids were thrilled to switch away from the irritating shampoo process, too. I think, I see a difference in their hair as well - it just stays looking clean and healthy even when we go several days between washes.  The process is so simple, I recommend it to any parent of a bath-resistant toddler. The clear water doesn't bother or scare them like shampoo did.  And they love rubbing the baking soda - I use it more often on their hair than I do on my own - because they are always asking for it!  After years of hair-washing tears, we have peace at bath time.


So how does it work?

Have you ever changed the frequency with which you wash your hair?  Gone from daily to 2-3 times a week or vice versa?  Note what happens.  On a daily regime your hair becomes oily and demands a wash on the second day.  If you switch to going longer between washes, it protests at first, but overtime adjusts to the new schedule. I guess, it is just that simple. Natural hair oils will act to restore the balance upset by the environment or hair products. Daily shampooing dries the hair out so profoundly, natural oils rush to rescue what is left of the moisture on your poor dried out scalp in a way that it would if you were walking through the desert. By day two, another "desert" treatment, complements of Protein ProV is necessary to combat the overflowing oils. Stop shampooing and the hair slowly learns the new chemical equation - the one evolution had taught it to work with. It will produce more oils when the air is dry, fewer in humid weather and rush to offer special defenses after a chemical attack of a chlorinated pool.  Fresh water serves as a catalyst to start the process and the rest is evolutionary history.  :-)

If you would like to try this, please read through Going poo-less article in Mark's daily apple including all the comments.  It's a good overview of why, how and use-cases.  I wish you the best of luck.  Enjoy your beautiful hair!  And tell me how it goes.  Please!

Nutty banana nut muffins

I wrote a few days ago about good-looking paleo muffins I wanted to try. I was extremely nervous, as always, experimenting with substitution recipes. Will anyone like them? 

The muffins turned out unbelievably delicious.  I enjoy muffins - but these were the next level. They stayed fresher than their flour counterparts and my whole family admitted, they were a wonderful treat.  They are now a permanent part of our family recipe collection.

Here is the recipe I wound up with:

1 1/2 cups almond flour
3/4 cup bananas pureed with a fork
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
3 eggs
1/3 cup maple syrup
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/8 tsp salt
1/2 cup chopped walnuts

Blend eggs separately, breaking the yolk.  Mix together all the ingredients (including the blended eggs) except for the walnuts until smooth. Fold in the nuts.

Spoon batter into 6-12 greased or paper-lined muffin cups (I used muffin paper cups and filled each 1/3 of the way, making 12 perfect muffins). Cook 20-25 minutes at 350 F until the top is golden-brown and a toothpick comes out clean.

These are very soft and cakey muffins. I think that cutting them in half and toasting them is very nice since it gives it little crisp edges.

They were very sweet for my palate - but I have dramatically reduced sugar intake.  Everything tastes sweet to me.  Next time, I'd like to try reducing maple syrup to 1/4 cup and sprinkling palm sugar on top.

My mother-in-law, my 2- and 4- year-olds thought they were delicious, even my husband!  I made half without the nuts for texture-sensitive palates, but in the end, all muffins were gone, nuts and all!

I was surprised that there was no grittiness associated with almond flour. Muffins were soft, fluffy and acted like they were what mother-nature intended.  :-)

We are going to try the pumpkin variation at Halloween time.

Paleo muffins

I've been excited for months to make these good-looking paleo muffins that I found on Caveman Food blog.  Muffins used to be among our favorites: blueberry, orange, even cornbread muffins won a lot of cheers at breakfast.  Will my darling family like these? (I am planning on making the banana nut variation ,not the cranberry pumpkin pictured.  The latter might come at Halloween time!)

For whatever reason, I keep running into trouble: when I have almond flour, I am missing chopped walnuts. When those finally arrive, there are no bananas. Today I thought I was finally ready - no baking powder!

This is it! I am going to find a way to acquire baking powder by lunch time, before we eat the bananas!

UPDATE: I did, and here is the recipe: Nutty Banana Muffins.  This turned out to be the mother of all muffins: soft, flakey, and the best part - they do not go stale for days, unlike their flour-based counterparts.

Are artificial sweeteners the enemy?

There is no question, the word in the street is - stay away from artificial sweeteners.  Kurt Harris, a leading paleo source writes: " Artificial sweeteners, I believe, condition you to crave sweets. I have only personal and anecdotal clinical experience to support this, but it seems reasonable."

Really? That sounded strange to me. This is one of the most studied topic of the last fifty years - it seems so unlikely we wouldn't be able to have a way to measure the sweeteners effect on hunger.  So I went looking.

And here you go:

1. "Aspartame has not been found to increase food intake; indeed, both short-term and long-term studies have shown that consumption of aspartame-sweetened foods or drinks is associated with either no change or a reduction in food intake." [here]
2. "The addition of NNS [non-nutritive sweetener] to diets poses no benefit for weight loss or reduced weight gain without energy restriction. There are long-standing and recent concerns that inclusion of NNS in the diet promotes energy intake and contributes to obesity. Most of the purported mechanisms by which this occurs are not supported by the available evidence, although some warrant further consideration." [here]

As I browsed through the variety of studies, I found out that, predictably, consuming  sugary beverages will temporarily make you feel full.  Non-calorie sweeteners will not do that. However, there is little difference between drinking non-sweetened water and artificially-sweetened water when it comes to hunger. In fact, part of the problem with high fructose corn syrup may be that it does not make you feel full like sugar does.

While the internet at-large is filled with vicious propaganda against artificial sweeteners, I failed to find a medical study that confirmed their truth. My thought is that it is reasonable to assume, based on the strong sentiment against artificial sweeteners, there is plenty of motivation to prove these claims. Lack of evidence suggests just that - lack of existing available evidence in reality.

Dispelling the dogma: saturated fats

"Kate, I can't eat like you do. My cardiologist is going to kill me! I can practically feel my arteries getting clogged up with every bite."

Another discussion about fat is getting started between me and my mother-in-law. I sympathize with her. For 40+ years we've been talking about the dangers of saturated fats and the risk of disagreeing with the dogma carries dire consequences.

"We are extremely good at test-tube science," maintains my husband every time I lash out against the establishment. He is right, of course. We really are! We learn so much each day about how to further optimize treatments, how various micro-nutrients impact our bodies, we even figured out that sugar is bad for you. Go us! Yet, when it comes to fats, I can't buy it.

So, I am finally getting off my butt and figuring out what's wrong with the world of nutritional science and how it got to be that way.

I recently blogged in my personal journal about an article published by the Journal of the American Medical Association in which a real-life modern-time western-scientist says, nah... fats are ok (as I learned from this commentary). We've been retarded for all this time. I got very excited, but found that I could not access a copy of this article without paying. I would happily pay $40 to access a study, but this was just commentary. I figured, i'd rather look for something that has numbers.

I dug just a little further, and - voila - The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition is full of studies that overturn the claim that fats cause heart disease.  Unfortunately, I do not have full access to the majority of what's available there (though I think it's time to get my credit card out), here are some points I pulled out of the abstracts:

• "there is no significant evidence for concluding that dietary saturated fat is associated with an increased risk of CHD [coronary heart disease] CVD [cardiovascular disease]" [here]
• "replacement [of saturated fat] with a higher carbohydrate intake, particularly refined carbohydrate, can exacerbate the atherogenic dyslipidemia associated with insulin resistance and obesity that includes increased triglycerides, small LDL particles, and reduced HDL cholesterol. [here]
• Though the same article points out that "Clinical trials that replaced saturated fat with polyunsaturated fat have generally shown a reduction in CVD events".  

Here is how I would summarize findings for today:

There is no significant evidence that saturated fat is bad.  However, you are better off eating polyunsaturated fat (the essential fatty acids).  But whatever you do, don't limit fat and replace it with pasta! Now, that's the one that will clog up your arteries as we speak, mom!  :-)

Stretching going out of vogue?

Get this: Stretching before running does not prevent injury according to a study published at the USA Track & Field website.  However, enthusiasm matters!

The study found a slight increase in "reported" injuries in the non-stretching group. However, "serious" injuries measured by a week or more off practice, did not increase.  Why?

So you are a runner who volunteered to participate. If you were used to stretching, and were randomly assigned to a non-stretching group, you'd be pretty scared, right?  Yeah, so 22% of such people reported an injury to a medical professional.  Only 11% of those who were not used to stretching did.
Bottom line, though it's hard to believe given what we have been hearing since middle school, a warm-up is just that: an increase in your body temperature. Stretching feels good and is a worthwhile exercise in and of itself. However, it is highly optional.





A note of caution: This study used a specific stretch regiment that looks right about what most people do: 10 second hold like this, 20 sec like that, so many reps, so many things.  It does not address yoga-style stretching alternatives and also does not examine long-term effect of stretching (like if you've been doing it for years - are you less likely to be hurt in general? Yeah, probably.)

I love finding these bits and pieces.  Thanks to NY Times article by Tara Pope for bringing this information.