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January 30, 2006
Soy What?
Well, well, well. I was most amused to see the recent JAMA report that the much-touted benefits of soy isoflavones were...hmmmmm, how shall we put it gently...overblown. It shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that meat eaters should eat meat, for crying out loud. We wrote about the potential health dangers of soy in The Protein Power LifePlan
Now, what to do with all that soy? I think ADM needs to convert all those rippling green fields of soybeans they've been marketing to us as healthy into Earth-friendly, carbon-neutral, All-American biodiesel to help free us from dependence on Arab oil. Now THAT would be a worthy use for a soybean.
Posted by mdeades at 03:01 PM | Comments (8)
January 18, 2006
Revenge of the Machines
This post has nothing to do with food, nutrition, or low carb. Rather it addresses a technological problem that recently blipped on our own radar screens and that, it occurred to me, might be blipping on others' screens as well. What in the world do you do with an old computer? Or three?
As regular readers of my blog will know, Mike and I recently divested ourselves of two part time residences, consolidating their contents into a single third space. (Well, that and 3 large self-storage units.) All three houses were fully furnished, including all three home offices. Since what we mainly do now is write and research and we can do that anywhere we have a computer and an internet connection, it seemed to make sense at the time to have everything we needed wherever we landed. Now, recently awash in used electronics, I'm not so sure.
When the great possession migration occurred, we were suddenly way overstocked with machines. Multiple desktop computers, spare laptops, extra fax machines and printers. I felt like Dorothy and friends in the Cowardly Lion's forest: Computers and faxes and printers, oh my!
One of them, an ancient clunky Businessland laptop that weighs about 12 pounds, actually uses DOS commands. Amazingly, we were able to plug it in, boot it up, issue it a few commands, and lo and behold, still stored there were early iterations of what became Protein Power. (That and a saved copy of a scorchingly hot letter Mike wrote--but thankfully never sent--to the GM of the Chicago Bears about the pitiful performance by Jim McMahon the previous Sunday should tell the savvy reader how old this relic of a machine is.) Heaven help us if such important documents should fall into the wrong hands; we quickly realized we'd better harvest these dusty gems and wipe the disk.
We've had to sort out which machines will work best in this home office and have found good homes for the working spares, but some--like the clunker--are so old and out of date that they just need to be wiped clean and put out to pasture.
But how? You can't just throw a computer in the trash heap.
Just as I was puzzling over this dilemma, an article appeared in the local paper entitled "What should you do with that old and slow computer?" Eureka, said I! Problem solved.
The author, J.D. Biersdorfer of the New York Times, provided a whole laundry list of options, from reusing to recycling to returning. I attempted to find a link to the article from several press archives, but to no avail. With apologies, and proper credit, I'll reprint his answer here:
Q: Is there a proper way to dispose of an old computer?A: The average computer system contains a variety of recyclable material and some of it can be reused. But computers and other electronic equipment can also contain toxic chemicals that can damage the environment if dumped in a landfill.
Reusing, recycling and returning old computers are three options that are more environmentally friendly than putting a PC out with the trash. If the machine still works, you could donate it to a charitable organization for reuse. The National Cristina Foundation www.cristina.org, for example, finds new homes for old computer equipment throughout its nationwide network of schools, public agencies and nonprofit organizations.
Another nonprofit organization, Share the Technology (www.sharetechnology.org) has a database of listings for people wishing to donate used equipment, as well as a page of Web links devoted to recycling resources.
If your computer is dead or dying, returning it to the manufacturer or a qualified company to salvage the recyclable materials and dispose of the rest is another option. Many computer companies have their own environmental policies and recycling services posted on their Web sites.
If you find yourself in a similar circumstance, with an old computer collecting dust on the office shelf, you can donate it or contact the manufacturer to see if they recycle the reusable parts of their old machines. You can clear out some space, unclutter your life, and do some good in the bargain. Just remember to harvest your data first.
Posted by mdeades at 10:46 AM | Comments (0)
January 17, 2006
Same Old Same Old
This morning's newspaper contained a brief article by Barbara Quinn (Knight Ridder News Service) outlining nine of the American Heart Association's general tips for feeding kids right. In our paper, at least, it was set under the headline "New data for feeding kids". New? As far as I can tell, it's the same old same old thing, some of which I can get on board with, some of which is downright hogwash. And the same old same old hogwash at that. To wit:
Save fat free milk for youngsters 2 years and older.
As far as I'm concerned, you can save fat free milk for some purpose other than human consumption. Or, if humans must drink it, perhaps save it for mixing with heavy cream. I recall my mother years ago when the low fat nonsense first began gaining traction trying to foist skim milk off on my dad, who called it "blue john" and wouldn't touch it.
I do applaud the AHA for at least recognizing that developing infants and toddlers need the fat and that it's not good for them to go fat free. Course, it's not really good for any of us to go fat free. Admittedly, however, my love of dairy fat isn't without a cautionary note, and that is this: Remember that any toxins, pesticides, hormones, antibiotics, and heavy metals will be stored in the fat of the animal and this includes the fat in the milk. Organic dairy is a good place to spend a little extra in your food budget.
Delete extra juice from your child's diet.
I agree with this directive, but what's extra? Most fruit juice really is nothing more than soda in disguise with a few vitamins and mineral thrown in. Our daughters-in-law dilute fruit juice about 1 part to 4 or 5 parts water for the grandangels, both to limit their intake of it and to stealthily encourage water consumption. And why not just offer the fruit?
Add several bites of fruit and vegetable to each meal.
I'm on board with that one. Kids need to be exposed again and again to a variety of these foods at a young age to allow their palates to develop, if not for the sake of the vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants they contain, then at least to make it easier for them when they are thrust into social situations--say dinner at a friend's house--where such exotics as carrots and green beans might appear on the plate.
The grandangels have their favorites: Peas for #2; blueberries and raspberries for #3; and when #1 was a year old, he reached over his birthday cake slice to get to his ham and green beans and would corral handfuls of grapes and blueberries from his dinner tray like a croupier gathering in the chips.
Download some healthy fats into your child's diet, ...
Okay, I'm with this. Kid's brains need good fat, their immune systems need good fat, their cells need good fat, their endocrine systems need good fat. (Just like adults, only more so.) Our fats of choice are the fats found in good quality natural meats, poultry, and small cold water fish, purified sources of DHA/EPA, organic dairy, olive oil, nuts/nut butters, organic lard, and coconut oil. But then the AHA recs spoil this momentary meeting of the minds with...
...such sources as monounsaturated [okay] and polyunsaturated [uh-oh] fats found in fish [okay, as long as it's not full of mercury], nuts [okay], and vegetable oils. [Eeeeeek!]
See, I told you, same old same old stuff.
The last few items relate to what the author calls upgrading your feeding skills, and most of it is good advice, as long as you don't follow the dietary advice that precedes it.
Parents, you decide what foods are appropriate, when it's time for a snack and where dinner is eaten. Kids decide whether they will eat and how much they eat.
Can't argue with this. Too often, especially with toddlers, parents stress mightily over whether a child eats "enough" to suit them. It's a fruitless and counterproductive to force a child to eat a particular food or a certain amount of a food. All it can do is draw the battle lines. What parents can and should do, however, is to gently say such something along the lines of "Little boys/girls who choose not to eat their supper may not have a sweet treat afterwards. It's up to you." This lets the child have some control, which--let's be frank here--even an infant already has when it comes to putting food into the mouth, chewing, and swallowing.
Back up your words with actions
.
This is the grandaddy of all advice related to getting your children to do (fill in the blank). Children learn by example. The old "do as I say, not as I do" excuse won't fly and nowhere is this more evident than in eating habits. If you expect your kids to eat a health diet, rich in good quality protein, healthy fats, fresh low-starch veggies and low sugar fruits, you'd be well advised to be eating that diet yourself.
Offer your kids good food at home, recognizing that they may stray from the fold when they're out on their own with their peers. Still, lessons learned at home, especially those learned early, will finally resurface as they mature. Recognize, too, that although kids like kid friendly foods, as a parent you can appeal both to their tastes and make it healthy fare with a little ingenuity. Toward that end, we included a chapter of recipes, called Kid Stuff, in our latest cookbook
Posted by mdeades at 10:02 AM | Comments (2)
January 16, 2006
No Splenda? No Problem
A recent commenter on my previous post about using Splenda requested some guidance for those people who don't want to use Splenda, but would like to make some of our recipes. Because of the potential wider interest in how to make such substitutions, I decided to post the response both in the comments for that blog and here.
For those people who cannot tolerate Splenda or wish not to use it, we'd recommend substituting another low-calorie or calorie-free sweetening agent in an amount that will give the sweetening power required for the recipe. For instance if a regular high carb recipe calls for 1 cup of sugar, we might modify it to use 1 cup of granular Splenda or if we wanted to keep the carbs a little lower still, we could use 24 packets of splenda and something to add the bulk of 1 cup of sugar (for instance some ThickenThin notSugar fiber product). Those not wanting to eat Splenda could instead use xylitol or erythritol in an amount to replace the sweetness of 1 cup of sugar or could use the sweetening power of saccharine or stevia along with ThickenThin notSugar or some other fiber bulking agent to replace the volume. (Because xylitol and erythritol have some bulk of their own, you probably wouldn't need any fiber volume replacer with these.)
In general, to modify one of our recipes that uses Splenda to one using some other sweetener, use the following conversions based on the fact that 1 packet of Splenda sweetens like 2 teaspoons of sugar. Therefore:
1 packet = 2 teaspoons of sugar
12 packets = 1/2 cup sugar
24 packets = 1 cups of sugar
By determining how many packets we used of Splenda, you can determine how much sugar sweetness we were trying to replace and by extension how much of some other sweetener to use based on what its label says--ie, how that sweetener compares to the sweetening power of 1 tsp of sugar. Here's how some common sugar substitutes compare in sweetness to sugar:
Sorbitol is 0.5x (or half) as sweet
Erythritol is 0.7x (about three quarters) as sweet
Xylitol is 1x (or equally) as sweet
Cyclamate is 30x as sweet
AcesulfameK is 200x as sweet
Stevia is 200-300x as sweet
Saccharin is 300-600x as sweet
Sucralose (Splenda) is 400-800x as sweet
Easy to see that with the last 4 sweeteners, you don't need much to get the job done. Considering that a cup of sugar has 48 teaspoons, which for ease of calculation we could call 50, that means that it would take 1/4 teaspoon of pure acesulfame K or stevia, about 1/8 teaspoon of pure saccharin, or about 1/16th of a teaspoon of pure sucralose to sweeten like a cup of sugar. Remember though, that even in packet form, the bulk of what's in the packet is something besides the sweetener. Usually it's maltodextrin. This means that for whatever sweetening product you elect to use, you must read the label for information about how much of that specific product to use to replace the sweetness of sugar and calculate accordingly.
If in some recipe we used granular Splenda, which has bulk like sugar, you'd need to add a fiber bulking agent to replace the volume of 1 cup of sugar as well as the requisite number of packets of your preferred sweetener needed to replace the sweetness.
Granted, the sweetener modification process will demand your patience and persistence to perfect, just as it did for us to modify from the full carb version in the first place, but for those of you who can't or won't use Splenda, your reward will be a sweet recipe you can enjoy.
One last word to the wise: When making any substitutions from Splenda to some other sweetener, remember that some of them (the sugar alcohols, for instance) are at least partly absorbable and therefore do have some carb or caloric consequences...and in too great an amount can have other less socially acceptable consequences as well.
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Posted by mdeades at 10:51 AM | Comments (1)
January 10, 2006
GI Wish They'd Buy a Clue
The front page of the Life section of my local paper featured an article by Janet Helm of the Chicago Tribune, complete with a nearly full-page photo of a crusty baguette and the headline "How Sweet it is: Diet Craze is Based on Glycemic Index". The net effect clearly implying that bread is back and good for your weight loss. The first line of the article reads:
Following the low-carb flameout, the glycemic index may be poised to be the next big dieting trend.
The first line clearly laid bare the author's bias and got my hackles up. Low-carb flameout? I would agree there was an unfortunate Roman candle trajectory for low-carb manufacturers of convenience and pre-packaged foods: a meteoric rise followed by a flameout that destroyed the good along with the bad and the ugly. But as far as I can see, there are still millions and millions of people devoted to the lower carb way of life; they're just back to basics--meat, fish, poultry, eggs, cheese, greens, low-starch veggies, low-sugar fruits. You know the drill; we lived without pre-packaged convenience for decades and, for the most part, will do so happily again.
Which brings me back to the thrust of the article, which was not to malign low carb per se, but to examine what Ms. Helm refers to as potentially the "next big dieting trend": The Glycemic Index.
The piece is actually pretty balanced in pro-ing and con-ing the notion of GI, for which I was grateful. For instance, she rightly points out that everyone doesn't view the GI in the same favorable light and that even its developers never intended that this research tool be used as a weight loss gimmick. In fact, Ms. Helm quotes Dr. Susan Raatz's October 2005 research study that compared weight loss between a standard low calorie diet and an isocaloric low calorie low GI diet and found no significant difference between the groups. In other words, eating low or high on the GI scale didn't seem to matter if you ate little. (Perhaps they'd have found that it would matter more if you ate a lot of calories, but this study didn't address that issue.)
We've always held that while there's little inherently wrong with the general concept of eating whole foods that fall lower on the glycemic index versus ones that fall higher, there are some potholes one can fall into that will subvert the theoretical benefits of low GI dieting. For instance, if all you do is adhere to the dictum that low GI is good, whatever the food, that opens the door for the guiltless consumption of foods containing a fair amount of fructose--jelly beans, for instance--since compared to glucose, fructose falls much lower on the GI scale.
Fructose, about which we wrote extensively in our book
In the long run, a low GI diet--regardless of what you call it--will only work for weight loss if it's also a low carb or low calorie one. No one will lose weight on an excess of low glycemic calories, just as no one will lose weight on an excess of low carb calories or low fat calories.
When queried in the past about the GI, we've always maintained is that if you keep your carbs low, it probably doesn't really matter whether a food is low GI or not. If you don't have many glycimes, their index rank means a whole lot less. After all, 5 grams of carb eaten as rice doesn't do a whole lot more to blood sugar than 5 grams as broccoli. The difference is that 5 grams of rice is about a teaspoon and a half and 5 grams of broccoli is over a cup. For most people, that volume disparity alone will encourage a better glycemic choice. And to us, that's the name of the glycemic game, learning to spend your carbs wisely, on foods packed with micronutrient density, but light in starch or sugar. It's when you raise up the number of carbs per meal or snack that the GI effect may play more of a role--i.e., not in weight loss or correction, but in weight and health maintenance.
That said, however, in our experience, it's more the amount of carb at a sitting that determines the metabolic effect, not the GI of the carb. In the corrective phases of dieting--during weight loss or while trying to regain control of blood sugar, blood pressure, blood lipids, or reverse GERD--keeping carbs at 7 to 10 grams of effective (net) carb a meal will do the trick. Our method of accounting for (subtracting) the fiber content in arriving at effective grams of carb does pretty much the same thing as the glycemic index in steering the user toward a more nutritious class of foods, but wouldn't let the higher carb, low GI things like jelly beans slip through--at least not many of them at a time.
So our advice is, as it has always been, that you surround your meat, fish, poultry, eggs, nuts, seeds, and dairy with controlled portions of lower-starch, lower-sugar, higher-fiber, micronutrient-denser fruits and veggies and call it by whatever name melts your butter.
Posted by mdeades at 12:09 PM | Comments (1)
January 06, 2006
Confession Good for the Soul?
I confess!! I confess!! That's what the poor data must have said when the authors of a recent study reported yesterday in the Journal of the American Medical Association finally figured out a way to spin their pitiful results. Just as Mike predicted about this in his blog on January 3, 2006 (Brace yourself for more low fat buncombe) the bit got picked up quickly by the press. Our local paper picked up an AP article by Carla K. Johnson and set the headline large and bold with this title: Low-fat, high-carb diet leads to moderate weight loss. Study discouraging but refutes claims by Atkins promoters.
A quick look at the data made me wonder how they came to that conclusion. Here's what Ms. Johnson reported:
The low-fat group lost, on average, 4.8 pounds in the first year, then regained most of that weight. The non-diet group stayed at about the same weight over the seven years.
Let me get this straight. A large group of borderline obese women loses an average of 4.8 pounds in a year and regains most of that meager loss over the next 7 years, winding up losing just over a pound and the research shows "moderate weight loss" and the study "refutes the claims by Atkins promoters" that a high carb diet causes weight gain?? I guess a pound of loss in 7 years is moderate in some camp.
Yep, they found the smoking gun all right.
It seems to me that a more truthful headline would have been "Even with intense behavioral and nutritional coaching, low fat high carb diet proven effective to keep overweight middle aged women overweight."
It beggars belief that the authors would have the chutzpah to trumpet as a positive result the "fact" that their study proved at last that all of us low carb gurus were wrong, that the low fat high carb diet didn't cause weight gain! It's no surprise that replacing cupcakes and candy bars with fruits, veggies, and whole grains would result in a little improvement--albeit, short lived. Heck, all of their participants (average BMI of just under 30) were already pretty fat at the outset and stayed just about the same despite regular professional contact, behavior mod counselling, and explicit dietary instruction to follow a whole grain, fruit and vegetable filled, low fat high carb diet on which they not only gained back most of their early skimpy loss, but according to the study data, actually increased their abdominal girth almost as much as the control group.
It's a sorry state of affairs when that much effort garners no better result than just leaving people alone and letting them eat whatever they wanted. What kind of message can this possibly send to overweight Americans trying to lose? Work really hard trying to follow this "healthy diet" for seven years and if you're lucky you will at least not gain more weight than if you did nothing at all!!??
I can only wish that we (or anyone without a carbs-are-us bias) had had access to the huge amount of research money that it took to run this study and could have used it to instruct a similar number of middle aged overweight women on following a healthy low carb diet. Then we'd have seen a major change. I know; we've seen it first hand in a head to head match up.
Back when we had our clinic in Little Rock, Arkansas, we were involved in the clinical trial of one of the major weight loss prescription drugs currently on the market. Our arm of the study was to test whether this drug would be of use as a weight maintenance tool, i.e., after people had lost weight, would taking this drug every day help them keep it off? Toward that end, the participants in this study had to undertake a 6-month long period of weight loss on a low fat, high carb, calorie restricted "healthy" food pyramid based diet. (The study design dictated the structure of the weight-loss lead-in diet; obviously that structure isn't one we would have chosen to help people lose weight.)
The participants received regular and intense behavior mod and dietary instruction, similar, I would imagine, to that received by the women in this most recent study. Over the course of the 6 months, to be eligible for the drug trial, the participants had to lose at least 4% of their body weight. For a 200 pound person, that amounts to a loss of 8 pounds in 6 months. Not a lot by my standards, but, amazingly, many patients couldn't manage that small degree of loss on the low-fat, high-carb, low-cal diet and had to be dropped from the study group.
But there was another slight complicaton that caused us to lose a few more patients from the study group.
We ran this trial in our weight loss clinic and these study patients sat in the same waiting room with our weight loss patients and of course they chit-chatted. When the study patients, struggling to lose slightly over a pound a month, found out that patients following our Protein Power regimen were losing 2 to 4 pounds a week... Well, you can imagine how eager they were to remain in the study.
But I digress. Back to the low-fat-high-carb-no-weight-loss-but-no- weight-gain miracle study.
Having entered this nutritional debate two decades ago at a time when low-carb dieting was a four letter word, it's an interesting turn of events to see proponents of the low fat, high carb diet puffed up with pride that their diet (at least when carefully monitored and with lots of on-going patient education) didn't make people fatter after all.
Posted by mdeades at 07:42 AM | Comments (2)
January 04, 2006
Doggone It! The Pooch has a Paunch
Rover, Fido, and Fifi are in trouble, or so says a New York Times article by Peter Jaret that got picked up in my local paper this morning. Entitled in our paper's copy "People food leads to people problem. Obesity," the article bemoans the growing overweight crisis among our nation's canines. And the remedy? Our pooches need to (you guessed it) eat less and exercise more. Hmmmm? Where have we heard that before? The less, of course, meaning mainly less fat, but Mr. Jaret's sources also counsel feeding less people food and less food in general.
The author seems rightly appalled by the designer doggie treats that some folks are feeding their canine companions, such edibles as peanut butter waffle cones topped with carob and organic oatmeal biscuits shaped like fire hydrants. The article goes on to quote a clerk at the Barkery at Canine Ranch (a doggie bakery in Manhattan) as saying
Everything we sell here is all-natural, human quality...The humans actually eat them as well as the dogs. They share.
As Dave Barry would say: I am NOT making this up! Puhleeze!
For crying out loud, dogs are not little furry humans; they're basically carnivores--meat eaters, not all that far removed from their wild cousins. At no time during the millennia of their evolution did the pressures of natural selection have them feasting on waffle cones and cookies--even organic "all natural" ones. To feed them this kind of junk is not only damaging to their health, it's patently absurd. (Of course, feeding it to ourselves isn't all that smart either.) And while it's easy to poke fun at bow wow bon bons and canine candy, the actual commercial chow that fills the shelves of grocery and pet stores isn't really much better: a little bit of protein and a whole lotta rice, oats, barley, and soy. Low in fat, high in carb, and scarcely adequate in protein. No wonder dogs are falling victim to obesity and diabetes and congestive heart failure and allergies and asthma. Clearly, dogs don't do any better on this kind of unnatural diet than we do.
If I had a dog--which I do not--I would feed it meat, good quality fresh, natural, hormone-and-antibiotic-free meat, ground up with some good quality fat trimmings to up the calories. Maybe, like some friends of ours in Nevada, who shepherd a beautiful, healthy pair of the glossiest-coated Schnauzers I've ever seen, I'd also throw in a handful of parsley and a clove of garlic. That and some water would be all that crossed my pooch's chops and I would wager a large sum that he would be a svelte and frisky pup.
Good advice for Lassie; good advice for us all as we recover from holiday excesses and indulgences. Meat and salad, anyone?
Posted by mdeades at 12:07 PM | Comments (4)
January 02, 2006
New Year's Eve Bash
Mike and I rang the old year out over dinner at our place with a small group of good friends. We decided to pull out the stops and indulged in a full seven course meal as follows:
Smoked Salmon Blinis; Seared Foie Gras with Caramelized Pears and Sherry Reduction; Cream of Roasted Red Pepper Soup; Balsamic Glazed Roasted Game Hens; Braised Baby Carrots and Flageolet; Epoisses with Parisienne Salad; Cocoa-dusted Truffles and Coffee
Even the casual observer will note that this menu contained several rather carby items. (I confess, but plead that while not strictly low carb, it was not nearly as bad as it might have been and every now and again, it's good for the soul to indulge. As our friend, Robert Crayhon puts it: pleasure is a nutrient.)
Of course the indulgence didn't stop with food, the evening began and ended with champagne and we enjoyed some luscious whites and reds in between, carefully selected for each course only after much consultation with those more knowledgeable about perfect pairings than we. All of us indulging, that is, except the designated driver.
The whole meal turned out well, but the hands-down star of the evening was the seared foie gras, a victory made all the sweeter by the fact that this was the first time I'd attempted it and (if I do say so myself) it came off pretty smashingly.
Mike had gotten me Nancy Oakes' Boulevard Cookbook for Christmas and when I saw her recipe for foie gras, I knew I had to at least try. But under the gun? For eight? Hmmmm. What the heck, I said to myself. Nothing ventured; nothing gained! So I hopped online and ordered a bit of grade A foie from www.chefswarehouse.com , followed Nancy's prep instructions, and was rewarded with victory on the first go.
My mother always said "If you can read, you can cook." Over the years, I have mostly found that to be the case and in this instance, it proved to be true. Granted, it helps to be reading a fabulous recipe from an outstanding chef. The Boulevard Cookbook
Happy New Year. May 2006 prove to be a happy and healthy one for us all.
Posted by mdeades at 10:50 PM | Comments (2)