A little over two years ago I wrote a couple of posts arguing that we cut our ancestral teeth on meat, and that contrary to all the vegetarian blather about colon length, tooth structure, etc., the archeological and anthropological convincingly demonstrates we were descended from meat eaters, not vegetarians.  (Click here and here for those posts.) A couple of recent developments have now inspired me to write a third.

First, I noticed in both talking with people at the Ancestral Health Symposium last August and attending a number of the talks that many followers of their own version of the ancestral diet are dismayingly including more and more carbohydrates.  And recommending more to their followers.

When MD and I wrote Protein Power in the mid 1990s, we used the Paleolithic diet as an argument for the efficacy of the low-carb diet.  If pre-agricultural man evolved in a milieu devoid of carbohydrate-dense foods, we posited, then natural selection should have culled those who didn’t thrive on such fare, leaving us, the descendants, powered by metabolic processes that performed better on protein and fat substrates.  If the rampant obesity and diabetes (we just thought it was rampant then) was a consequence of a diet we weren’t designed for, then switching to one that better suited us metabolically should produce substantial changes to the good.  Which it undeniably does.

Read more »

As anyone who has done it knows, getting started on a low-carb diet can be a little rough.  Not for everyone, but for some.  All too often these little front-end bumps in the road–coupled with the spirit of the times in which the well-intentioned but ignorant friends and relatives of low-carb dieters tell them their diet is going to croak their kidneys, clog their arteries and weaken their bones–can be enough to make many people abandon the most sincere efforts.  Drawing on my almost 30 years of experience treating patients using the low-carb diet, I can give some tips and tricks for dealing with these difficult early days.

Listen to your body?

Read more »

HAND FOR THE HOG

Well they tell me, but I can’t be sure
that a man’s best friend is a mangy cur.
I kinda favor the hog myself;
how about a hand for the hog.
Ya say a hog ain’t nothin’ but a porky thing,
little forked feet with a nosey ring,
Pickle them feet, folks,
how about a hand for the hog.

From Big River written by Roger Miller

“Okay,” said the lady with the soft Teutonic accent.  “Who’s going to kill the next one?”

Read more »

While on a recent whirlwind trip that included a stop in Seattle, I purchased a copy of Meatpaper at my favorite newsstand hard by the Pike Place market.  I always grab a copy of this magazine whenever I’m in Seattle because I can never find it anywhere else. Today I finally broke down and subscribed.

The quarterly Meatpaper was founded by a couple of vegetarians who made the conversion to meat eating a few years back.  (The founders say that when vegetarians cross over to the meat-eating dark side, bacon is the most common conversion food.)  It’s a difficult magazine to pigeonhole.  One would think it would revel in meat eating, and, in a way, it does.  But it does it in a daredevil sort of way, much in the way a magazine on skydiving might portray the thrill of that sport while still noting that certain death is only a chute failure away.  My take is that the writers and editors believe that meat-eating is a perilous undertaking, but one that many people choose for the taste despite the risks involved.  As anyone who had read this blog for anytime knows, my beliefs don’t quite fall that way.

The most recent issue contains a couple of articles I want to tantalize you with.  One that describes an almost unbelievably scrumptious food that I’ve yet to eat, at least knowingly, and another article I find deeply disturbing.

Read more »

Last Thursday was Thanksgiving, and in the words of Arlo Guthrie, we had “a Thansgivin’ dinner that couldn’t be beat.”  Along with all the traditional Thanksgiving fare at Casa Eades, we had dueling turkeys: one cooked the traditional way and one cooked sous vide.  And let me tell you, there was no comparison.  I’m not saying this just because we’ve got a sous vide cooker for sale, either.  I’ve never had turkey that tasted so good.  Because I’m not really a big fan of turkey, I eat turkey on Thanksgiving, and Thanksgiving only.  I found our sous vide turkey to be so good, because it didn’t really taste like turkey.  At least not turkey cooked in the traditional way that I’m used to tasting.  It was like a different meat entirely.

MD has posted on how she cooked both turkeys on her blog and on the Sous Vide Supreme blog, giving precise recipes for both.  As you can see when you read the posts, cooking a turkey the traditional way is a major pain (both figuratively and literally).  It’s just not worth it when the taste and texture outcome is so much better using sous vide.  Especially since the sous vide method is so much easier and less time consuming. Vastly easier, in fact.

Lest you think this is another post cleverly designed to promote and sell the Sous Vide Supreme, let me disabuse you of that notion.  I’m going to show you how you can try the sous vide method at home without having to purchase a machine to see if it’s really for you.

Read more »