Mary Dan Eades, M.D.

Forgive my lengthy absence from the blog desk. As those of you who also read Mike’s blog know, I’ve been up to my eyeballs for the last month finishing a couple of major business projects and wearing my SB Choral Society President and soprano-in-the-chorus hats getting our Verdi Requiem behind us (which, as he’s already blogged about, was a smashing critical success, thank you very much) and as such all work on my blog got pushed to the back burner. Mea culpa!

Then before you could turn around and catch a breath, we were off on this trip to China.

We’ve never traveled in the East before and it has been something we were looking forward to doing, particularly as it involves food and nutrition. One big surprise has been the food. I came expecting rice and noodles and vegetables and not much in the way of protein and boy was I wrong.

I would have to say that rice or noodles have been a side dish, not a main dish, at most of our meals here. And there has been plenty of fish, poultry, beef, and pork…often all four at one meal.

For instance, the day we were in Jiang Men, we were treated to lunch at a Dim Sum restaurant. I was concerned that it would be all rice and dumplings with little tidbits of meat here and there.

The meal began with steamed stuff clams and fish cakes. Followed by a couple of dumplings

Pork Dumplings

Shrimp Dumplings

And the food just kept on coming.

Most of the food appeared in plates to be shared, placed on the giant lazy Susan always found in the center of a Chinese dining table. But everybody got his or her own ‘main dish’ which at this lunch was steak.

Steak with a brown sauce and fries

You’ll notice that there are a few fries artfully arranged (practically into a Chinese character) on the plate. That’s how many came with the steak. There were eight or nine (both lucky numbers in China–eight for wealth and nine for long life) fries about an inch and a half long on the plate. That’s it. Contrast that with the mountain of fries you’d get with a ’steak frite’ in the West.

Then a shared chicken dish that was just yummy…

Chicken with mushrooms and fresh cukes and tomatoes

and one of scallops and broccoli…

Scallops and Broccoli

…and a shared plate of corn and a purple sweet potato that is a locally grown specialty. I don’t eat much corn (though I love it) so I passed on the corn on the cob, but I tried a little of the purple sweet potato. Its consistency and taste is pretty much just like an orange one, but purple through and through, like a beet.

Corn and Purple Sweet Potatoes

And finally some little sweets, which I admit to having a taste of, just to try. They were actually quite hard to get into. The outer sticky rice ‘bread’ is soft and cold and really stretchy, a lot like the Ethiopian bread, called Injera, if you’ve ever had that. It was a struggle to get the thing open, but we weren’t alone; the locals struggled a bit, too. Inside was lightly sweet cream and bits of different kinds of fresh fruit, including watermelon.

Snowballs - Steamed Sticky Rice Sweets

Quite a feast…and for lunch, no less! Wait until Mike blogs about dinner that night. Sakes alive, what a meal!

Off to London this afternoon. Will be dining at The Fat Duck, so be prepared for a blow-by-blow on that experience.

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We’re in Dallas with the Grandangels, who have kept me so busy that I haven’t had time to even think about blogging. Our youngest grandson, who is now 5, loves to help ‘Granny’ cook, so we busied ourselves two days before Christmas making sugar cookie dough. A half-recipe’s worth from Mark Bittman’s fabulous (must have) cookbook, How To Cook Everything.

Yes, it was the real thing, not a low-carb adaptation. It’s Christmas, after all, and only comes once a year! What better time for a little stumble into the honey tree, I ask you?

Then we painted them, as has been my family’s custom for many, many years, with slightly thinned, tinted buttercream frosting.

Yes, it was real, too.

Will, the grandangel, painted the base coat of frosting on every cookie but one (his brother did that one, under duress to quit watching Frosty the Snowman long enough to at least do one cookie to give to Santa). Granny (that would be moi) painted the details and a bit of ‘repair work’.

And we put them out on our DIL’s family Christmas plate and saved them for Christmas Eve.

I figure if you’re going to eat the real thing, the rules (for me at least) are to use top quality ingredients, to make a limited number of cookies, to wait until the evening’s celebration to start eating them, and to share them with a lot of people. That way you can’t do yourself too much damage.

We’ll be here for another few days, during which I expect to be kept equally busy, and then back home, where we’re planning the Eades’ New Year’s Eve dinner. I’ll post on the big dinner, complete with photos, January 1st…or 2nd.

In the meantime, have a safe, happy, healthy and pleasurable New Year!

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I just got an email from our good friend, Jonny Bowden, with a link to his latest exchange in an ongoing ‘dialog’ with Big Soda about the inherent health detriment of pushing diet sodas on the public as if they were health food.

Some of you may be familiar with Jonny and may thus have seen it, but others may not have, so here it is for all.

His point, which I think the representative from Big Soda totally misses, is that humans through the millennia had no access to nor were we ever designed to consume large amounts of high intensity sweet on a regular basis and that doing so potentially carries consequences to long term health with it. Bombarding the taste buds throughout the day, day in and day out, year after year with ever increasing amounts of sweetness, whether from natural sources or from artificial sources, bumfuzzles (Now there’s a complex medical term for you!) the digestive and metabolic system.

There’s no doubt that digestive physiology is set into motion when an intensely sweet stimulus hits the sweet receptors on the anterior two thirds of the tongue. The body has to at least begin to prepare for what the taste buds tell it will be a whopping slug of carbohydrate to deal with and then the slug never comes. It would seem logical that there would be a consequence to that false signal and indeed there’s at least some research (as we wrote about in The Protein Power LifePlan) to suggest that to be the case,

whatever Big Soda thinks to the contrary.

Is the diet version of a given beverage better than an equivalent amount of HFCS-sweetened-flavored-carbonated beverage? Probably so. But, as with most things food related, quantity matters. A diet soda here and there probably isn’t going to hurt anyone, but a steady diet of 32-ounce mega cup after 32-ounce mega cup of it might be.

A better drink option, to our way of thinking, for rehabilitation of the besieged sweet receptors and metabolism (and I’m sure Jonny would agree) is a nice cup of tea, or a glass of slightly alkaline mineral water or even just plain, old, clean, filtered tap water.

Or a bottle of wine….

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For those of you who enjoy our PBS television cooking/nutrition show, Low Carb CookwoRx, we just got a piece of good news.

The show has been picked up to air for another year by network PBS HD and given a regular time slot beginning in January 2007. We’ll be on air cooking, canoodling, and commenting Monday through Friday at 5:30 pm and 2:30 am Eastern time. What we haven’t heard, yet, is whether the programming will go out as a single feed or dual feed (which makes a difference in time slot on the West Coast stations–i.e., will it feed across the country at once, showing at 4:30 pm and 1:30 am in Central time, 3:30 pm and 12:30 am in Mountain time, and be 2:30 pm and 11:30 pm in Pacific time or will it be refed to show on the west coast in the same time slots as Eastern time.) We’re working to find that out now and will let you know by blog when we do, but rest assured that the show will be back on next year in a stable time slot.

Also, we’ve just learned that CookwoRx also got picked up by the new Create TV Network, a public tv for cable channel, which by federal mandate must be offered on basic cable packages by every cable provider in the country beginning in 2007. Our Create TV time slots are also regular: four times a day on Wednesdays and Sundays at 1:30 am, 7:30 am, 1:30 pm, and 7:30 pm beginning December 3, 2006.

The Create TV deal is great news for us, personally, since the show isn’t currently carried by either of the cable providers where we live, so we, ourselves, haven’t seen most of the completed shows on tv.

We hope that now most of you will be able to get the series and will enjoy and profit from it. And if you do, call, write, or hop online to tell your cable provider or PBS affiliate station!

If you don’t like the show, just quietly change the channel! ;D

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Not a week goes by that I don’t get a handful of emails through the website from readers who had bought and used the original Protein Power Plan kit that was marketed on tv between 1997 and about 2000 to 2001. I just received two more today. Invariably, the person writing to us had used the plan and had since lost–almost always–either the Phase I booklet or the Cookbook. Stands to reason, since for most folks these two would have been the ones most used and therefore most likely to disappear with moving or spring cleaning or whatever. Because the question has come up so often, I figured it might behoove me to answer the question here for all, so that I don’t have to keep answering it over and over for each person.

As every long time reader of this blog knows, when we were finally able to get the Protein Power website up and running again back last spring, one of our first official acts was to offer our entire remaining inventory of the original Protein Power Plan kits that sold on tv and a newer version of it called the Protein Power Pyramid kit (of which we only had a few left) together at a very deep discount in preparation to move our warehouse at the end of May.

Anyone interested in replacement Protein Power Plan kit materials, please read the following important announcement:

We shipped out all of the remaining old inventory of old and revised kits before the warehouse move; there are no more kits or any components of old kits left.

(However, all is not lost. Keep on reading to find out where you can get the information that was in them.)

If you had that original kit and have lost one or more of your phase booklets or your cookbook, take heart! Once the tv promotional campaign ended (and with it our association with the company who had marketed the kits on tv) we wove most of the booklet information into two books, published by John Wiley and Sons in 2003 and 2005. Phase I mealplans and virtually all the recipes are in The 30 Day Low Carb Diet Solution and the transition and maintenance information (plus a whole lot more) is in our book Staying Power: Maintaining Your Low Carb Weight Loss for Good. Both books are available through booksellers nationwide and through online book retailers, such as amazon.com. You can go directly to their descriptive pages on the Amazon website, if you’d like to learn a little more about them; simply go back to our website homepage, scroll down to the bottom, and click on the photo thumbnail of the book you’re interested in. The books displayed there rotate (since we’ve written a few) so if you don’t see the one you’re looking for, refresh the page a time or two and it should ultimately pop up. If it doesn’t, just click on any book there and it will instantly whisk you to amazon, where you can hop around a bit and find it.

Unfortunately those of you who have written requesting replacements of the audio tapes from the old kits are out of luck. We do have the masters (or at least we were told they were in the pile of information ultimately returned to us after the tv campaign ended) and perhaps at some future time, we’ll redub those onto tape or CD. If we do, you’ll hear about it right here.

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As promised, albeit after several false starts, multiple personnel substitutions, a couple of coaching changes, and delay of game penalties, we’ve finally kicked off. Our new webmaster has succeeded where others failed in getting the online store open and working at last. When you’ve got a moment, click onto the ‘Products’ tab on the homepage and it will whisk you like magic to the online store, where you can browse around and get a look at what’s there so far.

The shelves aren’t fully stocked yet even with what we already have in inventory, but we’re working our way through that process and making good headway. Plus, we’re planning to add new products as we find ones we feel strongly about, so keep checking in.

Those of you–and you are many–who have written about our old (very tasty) protein powder, we’re looking into reformulating it and hope to offer it again before too long. We’ll keep you apprised of our progress on that front. If you have suggestions for interesting products you’d like to see offered, drop us a line and we’ll put them on our list for consideration.

Thanks for being patient with us during this process of reconstruction and renovation; we hope you continue to enjoy and profit from the site.

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This coming Tuesday, August 29, 2006, is the national Restaurants for Relief2 dine out evening. Across the country, participating restaurants will donate a portion of their proceeds to Share Our Strength’s Hurricane Katrina relief fund.

It’s hard to imagine that a full year later, recovery from the devastation Katrina (and Rita) wrought across the Gulf Coast is far from complete. In some of the hardest hit areas, it’s hardly begun. But when you consider the scale of the disaster–an area bigger than Great Britain demolished–it’s clear just how much work must be done to rebuild (and more importantly revitalize) the coastal communities.

Although we’re big proponents of the notion that one of the best things you can do for your health is to spend more time in your own kitchen, we also love to eat out; we relish the luxury of being served; we appreciate the change of venue. Still, more evenings than not, we prefer to eat in. This Tuesday, however, is one time that spending a little time out of your own kitchen can really be beneficial, particularly for others still in need. Choose wisely from what’s offered and it can be a healthy win-win for all.

If just by dining out August 29, we can do a little more to help and have a good time and a good meal to boot, why not do it?

Click here to find a Restaurants for Relief2 participating restaurant in your area.

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Summertime is melon time and it’s lucky for us low-carbing crowd that melons, by and large, are on the A-list of carb friendly fruits. With the stalls of our farmers’ market groaning with melons this time of year, Mike and I have been indulging our melon Jones.

One of our favorite ways to eat melon–aside from just sprinkling a slice with salt and eating it with our hands–is with proscuitto. I cannot imagine how many orders of proscuitto e melone Mike and I have put away when travelling in Italy, particularly in the north, where the proscuitto reigns supreme. Mamma mia that’s good eats.

We love most every imaginable sort of melon, from the everyday cantaloupe, watermelon, or honeydew to some of the slightly less common varieties, such as Cranshaw and Sharlyn.

If you’re unfamiliar with this variety, it looks a lot like a mutant cantaloupe, the skin a slightly darker shade of beige to almost green beneath a prominent surface netting, the flesh usually creamy pale green to pale ivory-gold. And the flavor is sweeter and muskier, sort of a cross between a cantaloupe and a honeydew. The slightly exotic sweetness works really well against the salty proscuitto, so it’s become a favorite of ours for this purpose.

I picked up a ready-to-eat Sharlyn at the market the other day that we enjoyed two days running, draped with proscuitto di Parma, as an appetizer before dinner one night, then for a light lunch the next day. Once these babies are ripe, they won’t hang around long, so you have to make haste when you’ve got one home.

Or at least that’s my story and I’m sticking to it!

Picking a good melon can sometimes be a challenge. You thump; you sniff; you weigh hand to hand. And still, sometimes, you reap the disappointment of slicing up what appears to be a cantaloupe and getting an orange-colored sliver of cardboard. A fool’s melon: looks like a melon; quacks like a melon; but it ain’t no melon.

That’s why a little brief in today’s LA Times Food section caught my eye: Know your melons, then pick a winner. Written by cookbook author, food critic, and veteran food editor Russ Parsons, I figured it would help demystify the melon pickery magic.

And it did.

According to Mr. Parsons, we need remember that melons come in two types: the netted-skin varieties (cantaloupe, Sharlyn, muskmelon, etc.) and the smooth skinned ones (honeydew, watermelon, etc). If you’re looking for ripeness, pick the netted ones by smell and look for raised ‘nets’ on the surface. Pick the sleek ones (which don’t smell, so don’t bother) by color and thump.

Once you’ve selected a winner, take it home, split it, seed it, slice it, salt it (just a little and grind on a little black pepper if you must) and serve it…with our without proscuitto.

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In Arkansas, where in July and August you can have weeks running of days in the 90s and 100s–that’s when it’s 90% humidity (or feels like it) and 100 degrees or more–there is absolutely no tall cool libation that hits the spot like an icy cold gin and tonic. Okay, some would argue that an ice cold beer ranks up there, but when this Southern Magnolia wilts in the heat, it’s a G&T for li’l ole me. Diet, of course, the tonic, I mean, not the gin…lots of crystal clear ice…big squeeze of lime.

When we lived in Arkansas, we counted the arrival of summer as the first day it seemed warm enough to need a G&T to cool off, whatever the calendar said. Throughout the next few months of heat and humidity, especially in the dog days of August, we downed a prodigious number of them, made traditionally (at our house, anyway) with Bombay Sapphire gin and Canada Dry or Schwepp’s Diet Tonic. (Artificial sweetener avoiders take note: diet tonic has always been made with saccharine. For reasons for which I can offer no illumination, diet tonic somehow escaped the rush to aspartame that overtook most of the diet beverage industry and if there’s a brand of it out there made with Splenda, I’ve never seen it.)

When we left Arkansas and moved west to cooler, drier climes, we discovered that a fair amount of the joy in drinking a gin and tonic depends on being where it’s blisteringly hot and humid; in Santa Fe, Boulder, or Santa Barbara, we found that we rarely if ever felt moved to drink them anymore.

But this summer, it’s been relatively hot up where we live on Lake Tahoe (nothing like some parts of the country, but a bit hotter and more humid than usual) and something about the combination of sun and water has rekindled our taste buds for G&T. Perhaps the association of heat and humidity with gin and tonic runs deep in those of us who possess some degree of British ancestry, since the whole concept of the drink arose to make the quinine tonic, needed to stave off malaria in India and other steamy corners of the erstwhile Empire upon which the sun never set, palatable by adding gin to it.

And make it palatable it does…especially with a wedge of fresh lime squeezed in.

Our long-time favorite brand of gin for this purpose, because of its aromatic herbal nose, was Bombay Sapphire. Better than plain Bombay, better than Boodles, better than regular Tanqueray, better than any other gin…or so we thought. A recent article by Eric Felton in the Wall Street Journal (sorry, available online only to WSJ subscribers, but a free trial is ongoing right now) espoused the perfection of a gin and tonic made with Tanqueray 10. Writes Mr. Felton:

What about the gin? As I did with Martinis last year, I tasted a dozen examples, this time to see which made the best Gin and Tonic. I found that the gins that make the best Martinis — I preferred Hendricks and Plymouth — aren’t the same ones to use when mixing with quinine water. But in all cases, I like gin that is unapologetically gin. Some of the boutique gins to hit the market in the last few years have done their best to resemble the nothingness of vodka. Stick your beezer in a glass of South, a new gin from New Zealand, and you’d be hard-pressed to find the slightest hint of anything gin-like. By contrast, open a bottle of the wonderfully hide-bound British gin Boodles and juniper perfumes the room. South made for a lousy Gin and Tonic; Boodles made for a classic.

My favorite gin for mixing with tonic, however, turned out to be Tanqueray No. Ten. I didn’t much like Ten when I was stirring Martinis — the bright taste of citrus peel overpowered the drier flavors. But in a Gin and Tonic, Ten is a triumph: With nothing other than gin, tonic and ice in the glass, you’d think that you had already squeezed half a lime into the mix. But go ahead and squeeze plenty of fresh lime juice in anyway, if you would be so kind, and you’ve got a drink worthy of anyone from a president to a chimp.

We decided to do our own blind tasting of Tanqueray No. Ten against our fave, the Sapphire, and T10 won…by a nose. Even more importantly, it softens the bitter edge of the tonic water even better than the Sapphire. Who knew?

Tonic water, of course, is sweetened water (with sugar traditionally, probably with high fructose corn syrup nowadays in the ‘real’ tonic water and saccharine in the ‘diet’ version) flavored with a small amount (about 83 ppm) of quinine. Quinine, which comes from the bitter bark of the South American cinchona tree, has been used for hundreds of years in more potent medicinal doses to prevent and treat malaria, stop nocturnal leg cramps, and treat a host of other maladies, most recently apparantly even including some measured success with prion (read that Mad Cow) diseases. It can bring fever down, reduce inflammation, and combat some infections. Quite a repertoire.

In lesser doses, it makes a mighty fine addition to a long cool summer drink. And though it might not be malaria we fear in America in this day and age, I’m all about warding off leg cramps, fever, inflammation, any other mosquito born diseases and maybe it will help those, too.

And if not, at the very least, it’s refreshing and it tastes REAL good on a hot summer day.

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It’s said that the Eskimo have 29 words for snow to be able to convey the nuances needed to describe exactly what kind of precipitation they mean. It stands to reason that they would need such an expressive set of words, since in the frozen winter wonderland, snow of every conceivable type is pretty much all they see.

A recent article in the New York Times gave me pause, because it detailed the emerging new nuances in our own language for fat.

While a few descriptive fat-phrases have been with us for quite some time: turkey wattle (the double chin) and love handles (the fat at the waist) and pones (the fat on the upper outer hip/thigh area) the origin of this newly-emergent shading of the meaning of a pretty straightforward word–fat–derives from the world of liposuction surgery. According to the NY Times piece, apparantly a need has arisen on the part of plastic surgery patients, young women mainly, to specifically describe the particular offending pooch they want a doctor to suck out.

No longer is it sufficient to say “Doc, get rid of this excess fat on my belly or thighs.” One now must specify the banana fold (fat roll under the buttocks above the thigh) or the wings (the stuff that pooches out over the bra, under the arm) or the doughnut (pooch of fat around the belly button) as well as a whole list of other descriptors detailed in the article. My favorite, occasioned by the recent trend in wearing crack-exposing, hip-hugger jeans: the muffin-top, which by any measure is, indeed, a perfect description of the fat that bulges out over the low-riding tops of jeans, which, if I were in charge, would only, only, only ever be sported by young women with body fat percentages under 20. All others would be cited and fined–or as I often put it, ticketed and towed.

Of course, I’m not in charge, thus the current state of fashion affairs and the reason I spent an entire otherwise lovely dining experience recently staring at the purple thong, crack, tatoo, and rather large muffin top exposed above the “waist” band (archaic term) of a pair of jeans worn by a young woman who really shouldn’t have.

If the Eskimo needed 29 words for what was all around them, what does this spate of ways to describe fat mean for us? Clearly, that we’re a nation awash in a landscape of fat, which isn’t news.

Since for most of us, liposuction to sculpt these areas is out of the financial question (and should be out of the question on grounds, in my mind at least, of medical appropriateness of therapy, since it is not without sequelae, but that’s another blog entirely) perhaps we might be better served to harken back to what it is that makes us develop these unsightly pooches that inspired a legion of new words for fat. Hello out there! It’s what we eat!

Never doubt it: Muffins* beget muffin-tops.

*Traditional high-carb muffin, made with lots of flour and sugar, not to be confused with a low-carb Power Muffin, made with almond meal and artificially sweetened, as detailed in The Low Carb CookwoRx Cookbook or found among the recipes on our lowcarbcookworx.com website.

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