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.