Dr. Eades has an excellent analysis of two diet studies on his blog today.  A lot of it repeats what I’ve said about low-carb, weight loss, and cholesterol; but he has put it in handy, easy-to-read charts.

Read more »

Jason wrote a very good article on being fat and losing weight, so that brings up something I’ve been meaning to talk about for a while.

I’m continuing to low-carb, but I haven’t been very strict about it lately.  I haven’t had any more carb pig-outs like I wrote about the other day, but it’s remarkably easy for too many carbs to slip into your diet when you aren’t careful.  Some low-carb cheesecake here, some breaded fried chicken there, some sweet potatoes over here on the side, and suddenly I’m often close to double my daily limit of 30 grams of carbohydrate a day—even though I’m sticking to foods that can be okay on a low-carb diet if the portions are small enough and you count everything.  Not surprisingly, my weight loss has stalled. Read more »

Sometimes I wonder about my brain, if I burned out too many cells back in my drinking days.

I’ve been doing this low-carb thing for several years now, and I know exactly what I should and shouldn’t eat. I’ve read all the books, discussed it ad nauseam online, and written enough about it to add a couple more books to the pile if I were organized enough to put the words in manuscript form. I got a blood glucose tester and used it regularly for a while, so I could see exactly what different foods were doing to me. I’ve seen my blood sugar shoot up to 160 after a bowl of ice cream, or 180 after potato sticks. (Beta cell damage starts at 140, or 120 according to some people.) I lost 60 pounds by eating the right things, gained back 30 by getting sloppy, and have re-lost 20 so far by eating right again. I know exactly what to do.

I even like low-carb foods! I like steak, burgers, pork chops, brats, cheese, nuts, eggs, broccoli, green beans, Swiss chard, spinach, mushrooms, sunflower seeds, fish, chicken, and pretty much any other low-carb food except green peppers. This should be easy. Yet every once in a while I get a major hankering for something poisonous. Usually it happens soon after I strayed off the plan just a little, which is why people shouldn’t say, “Oh, surely one small piece wouldn’t hurt you.” I had a piece of my mom’s cherry pie over a week ago, and ever since then I’ve been looking for an excuse to binge on something carb-filled. One day, the only reason I didn’t was that I’d forgotten to carry any cash while I was out walking the dog.

Yesterday I caved and stopped at Long John Silvers while I was out. Now, if I wanted fish, I could have gotten fish at the grocery store and fried it myself, or gotten grilled fish without breading. But no, I had to have the breaded kind—and the fries too, and even those nasty bread-ball things. I know it’s all horrible stuff, probably fish caught in China by political prisoners and fried in hydrogenated soybean oil, but I’ve always loved the taste of their stuff, and when I get one of these craving fits, LJS calls to me.

After I ate it, I didn’t feel too bad at first. A little wired and spacey with some heartburn, but I was still functioning. A few hours later, I seriously needed a nap, but my mind was racing too hard to sleep, so I tried to read. After a while, I realized I was getting too shaky and dizzy to absorb the words and my vision was getting kind of weird, so I thought I’d check my blood sugar. It was 37, which is well below the normal range of 70-100. Seizures start being a possibility below 40, so I checked the other hand, and it was 41. Either way that’s dangerously low, so I quickly drank some cream and ate some meat and cheese to help stabilize it. Today I’m feeling mostly normal again, but still a little spaced-out at times.

Funny thing is, one myth about low-carbing is that, if you don’t eat enough carbs, your blood sugar will get dangerously low. That’s simply not true, unless you’re taking insulin or some drug that artificially lowers it. Your body will remove glycogen from storage or convert protein and fat to sugar to maintain the very small amount of sugar (about a teaspoon) it needs in the blood stream when you aren’t eating that much.

But high-carb eating can cause dangerously low blood sugar in people without solid blood sugar control, as I demonstrated yesterday. (For people with great blood sugar control, it doesn’t matter what they eat; they’ll always make just enough insulin to maintain the right blood sugar levels. Until their pancreas wears down from the constant stress of high-carb eating, anyway.) From past experience, I’d guess mine shot up to 200 or so right after lunch yesterday, and then dropped to 40 within 3-4 hours. If I ate carbs regularly, I’d be on that roller-coaster every day, burning up the beta cells in my pancreas for a couple hours after each meal, followed by shakiness, headaches, and mood swings a couple hours later. No thanks.

Maybe I just need to do this to myself a couple times a year to remind myself why I’m eating this way: why I have to disappoint my mom when she makes my favorite pie; why I can’t just grab a sandwich and fries from the nearest fast-food joint anymore. Maybe I have a fear of success, and I’m afraid of how people will see me differently when I’m lean and mean. Or maybe I’ve got a little devil on my shoulder that’s trying to kill me. Whatever the reason, I sure hope I learned my lesson this time.

I love the nuts in the shell that the stores start putting out this time of year. Some places have them year round now, but I like to save them for winter like we did when I was a kid. Since they’re still in the shell, they’re about as fresh as can be, and not roasted in nasty hydrogenated oil or coated with sugar or any of that nonsense. The pecans at County Market are even fairly local, coming from somewhere in Missouri. Cracking them open slows me down, so I can’t gorge myself on them until I’m sick like I can with canned nuts.

The only downside is the nutshells. It’s impossible to crack these things without pieces of shell occasionally flying away. It’s just a given that we’re going to sweep some up this time of year, and eating them in bed is a very bad idea. They’re worth putting up with the shells, though. I like them all, even the Brazil nuts, which can be a bear to crack open. Sort of takes me back to those childhood Christmas mornings when we woke up to find presents under the tree—and nuts, malted milk balls, hard candy, and my mom’s peanut brittle in bowls on the table. I can’t really eat the other stuff now, but I can still have the nuts. They were always my favorite anyway.

To me, the best tasting ones are black walnuts, which we harvest at least every other year, but for those you need more than a standard one-handed nutcracker. For those, you need a hammer, a brick, or an industrial-sized cracker. Then the pieces of shell are really flying. They sure taste great, though, and they’re full of nutrition. I need to try to work some into a low-carb cheesecake somehow; that’s sounding very good right now.

(I’m totally beat tonight, but I promised myself I’d post at least once a day, so here’s a short one.)

I wrote a while back about making sauerkraut. Well, it’s been over a month since I made it, so I decided to try it and see how it was coming along.

I got out a package of Cajun bratwurst from Kabricks’ that I had thawed out. They are excellent, by the way: nice heat but not too much and plenty of flavor. I simmered them in a little lard until they were browned and crisping up a little on the outside. Then I dumped a serving of kraut over top of them, put a lid on it, and let it simmer for a while. I stirred it once or twice, to make sure it didn’t run out of liquid, and to let the kraut pick up the spices from the brats. Once the brats were 160° inside, I was ready to eat.

The kraut tasted excellent, but it was still pretty crunchy. It really needs another month or two before it will have the softer consistency I like. Since I only made two quarts, it may not last that long! It goes extremely well with spicy brats, picking up a little of their heat but also balancing it.

All the recipes I post here will be low-carb, so I looked up the nutritional info. I probably had a cup of kraut, which has 6 grams of carb, 4 of which are fiber, so it was a very low-carb meal: two grams from the kraut and maybe one from the seasoning in the brats. Since this is homemade kraut, it wasn’t pasteurized or irradiated or any of that nonsense, so it’s full of probiotics and other goodness. And the brats were from my dad’s hogs, which are raised outdoors pretty healthily. Great stuff.

I wanted to blog regularly about our garden this year, with pictures and updates on how things were growing, what we were planting or harvesting each week, and so on. Clearly this did not happen. Oh well, something to do better on next year. I thought I’d write up a little recap, though, and maybe I’ll remember to look back at this next year to remind me of a few things.

Our garden consisted of two 4′x8′ raised beds in the back yard, with about 5-6 hours of sunlight.  The raised beds were a blessing this year, since we got tons of rain for once.  Other people had plants drowning, while ours could drain and maintain the right moisture for most things.  We never had to water at all, which was very nice.  So, on to the individual plants:

Lettuce: It’s always the same story with me and lettuce.  I get excited about all the varieties and plant half a dozen different kinds, and then end up only picking it 3-4 times before it all bolts.  We really only need 2-3 plants for the amount of lettuce we’re actually going to use; but in March, salads sound really, really good.  This year was the same: planted too much, didn’t thin it enough, and it got tall and spindly and bolted.  While it lasted, we ate as much as we wanted, though.

Peas did very well.  We had an edible-podded snap pea variety, the name of which I don’t recall, and Little Marvel and Alaska for shell peas.  Little Marvels really can’t be beat.  The Alaskas were nearly a week early, but the Little Marvels drastically out-produced them.  After opening a few dozen Alaska pods with only 1-2 peas in them, I knew why my mom sticks with Little Marvels.  The edible-podded ones grew to the top of a 3′ fence and back down to the ground again.  They did great, but all the peas got a rust or mildew from the wet weather, and died off a little sooner than they really should have.

Radishes did well, but I didn’t replant them after the first batch, so I just got one big helping.  The wet weather was good for them.

Carrots were a complete loss, as they usually are for me.  I’ve never grown a decent crop of carrots, and I don’t know why I keep trying.  I don’t even like them much, except for a little flavor in soups and stocks.  Our soil was too nitrogen-rich and wet for them, and they mostly just grew tops.

Onions were also almost a complete loss.  They really didn’t like the rich, compost-heavy soil or the moisture, and they grew maybe twice the size of the original sets.  I cleaned up 50 or so of them, and they all fit in a half-gallon freezer bag.  I’m tossing them into stocks and crock-pot recipes a half-dozen at a time, so they won’t last much longer.  We probably shouldn’t try onions or carrots in these gardens again, unless we mix some sand into a corner to make the soil drier.

Swiss chard was awesome as usual.  I’d never grown the Bright Lights variety before, and the colors are very pretty, but the taste is a little bitter or something, not as good as the old standard Fordhook.  It’s still going strong now, just a little droopy from the recent frosts.

Green beans (Blue Lake bush variety) did great as usual, but we could have used more of them.  By the time we planted them we were running out of space, so we just ended up with about four square feet of them.  We managed to freeze a few quarts, though, after eating plenty of them fresh.

Tomatoes did great, which was unusual around here this year, from what we heard.  Four Roma plants produced enough for a few salads, five pints of diced tomatoes, a couple batches of sun-dried ones, and a few quarts of sauce.

That was it for our little backyard gardens.  We also tried some new varieties of squash and melon in a plot over at the community garden, but that didn’t go so well.  Several different people grew squash, and when the squash bugs got started, they wiped out all the vining plants in a hurry.  Our plants melted in a little over a week.  We did manage to harvest a couple dozen white scalloped squash before the invasion, though.  The downside to those is that they need to be picked small or they get tough and tasteless, so going across town once a week to check them really isn’t often enough.  We learned that, for us, a garden needs to be close by, preferably where you see it every time you go outside.

Next year, we may add another 4×8 bed, but we haven’t decided that yet.  If we cut back on the lettuce, carrots, and onions, leave out the colored Swiss chard, and add more green beans, we should be in good shape, even with our small plots.

I never liked sauerkraut as a kid; but somewhere along the line my taste buds grew up, and I started liking a lot of those things that used to seem too strong, like kraut, mustard, or sharp cheeses. Like most things, however, kraut is better when you make it yourself. We didn’t grow any cabbages this year, but I decided to make some anyway. Call it practice for next year.

It’s extremely simple to do. All you need is cabbage, a good quality salt (preferably sea salt), and canning jars. The canning jars make it much easier than the old crock method. Caraway seeds are common, but optional.

Chop the cabbage with a cole slaw cutter or food processor. Some people like larger chunks and some like a finer texture, so use your own judgment. Put the shredded cabbage in a large bowl, with enough extra room to toss it a bit with your hands. Add two teaspoons of salt for every pound of cabbage. Optionally, add a teaspoon of caraway seeds per pound of cabbage. Stir this all up, then pack it tightly into canning jars, leaving at least an inch of head-space at the top. Pack it down with a wooden spoon or something, to remove most of the air space.

When you have all the mixture packed into jars, add enough filtered water to cover the cabbage. Clean off the tops and threads of the jars with a wet paper towel or rag, and screw on the tops. Don’t screw them down tightly, so the gases created by the fermentation can escape. Sit the jars in in a tray or some container that’ll catch any liquid which squeezes out. Put them away, preferably somewhere dark and room temperature. Within a few days, it will be fermented and can be eaten, but will keep for months and continue to improve in taste. If anything goes wrong, it’ll get a truly nasty odor; throw it out if that happens.

When you’re ready to use it, one of my favorites is to simmer some Cajun bratwurst slowly until cooked through, and then add a jar of kraut to them and continue cooking while the flavors merge. If I don’t have Cajun brats, I use ordinary brats and add plenty of cayenne pepper to the kraut. Enjoy!

When I first discovered low-carb eating a few years ago and found that I could lose weight and improve my health without eating less or going hungry, I started telling people, “Calories are irrelevant!” I didn’t really believe it, though. The research I was reading, and my own experience, showed that calories weren’t as important as the amount of carbohydrate in the food, but I assumed calories still mattered somehow under the surface. I declared their irrelevance as a conversation starter, as a way to get people to question their assumptions, but I never fully meant it.

After all, we all know that every calorie we consume has to be burned in exercise or stored as fat, right? Has any other assumption been so firmly accepted as fact in modern society? It affects most of the meals we eat; how our food is processed, packaged, and marketed; and how we look at others. The fat guy eating a triple cheeseburger is surely a slob and a glutton; the one who orders a baked potato is conscientious and reliable.

As I’ve learned more about human biology, however, especially fat metabolism, I’ve started to realize I was more on target than I knew. The fat cells are not open cubbyholes on a wall, where extra fat molecules can be tossed and then retrieved later. A fat cell is more like a room with a whole bunch of doors that exit onto the hallway that is the blood stream. Each of these doors has a different type of lock, and the keys that open them are hormones and enzymes. The doors are also very small, and have funny shapes, so even when the right key comes along and opens them, only certain things can get in or out. The doors also only allow traffic to pass in one direction, and which direction is determined by which key is used to open them.

Now to back up a little bit. Fat is stored and transported through the blood stream as a triglyceride. You’ve probably heard of these evil little buggers in relation to cholesterol. A triglyceride is made up of three fatty acid chains attached to a glycerol molecule. This big structure can’t get through the doors of the fat cell, so it has to be broken down into its parts—fatty acids and a glycerol—so the parts can be transferred inside. Once inside, they are put back together for storage. To get them back out—to “burn” fat—they have to be broken down again, passed through the doors, and put back together.

There are several different hormones that act askeys for these doors. The biggest is insulin, which opens the door of fat cells to allow incoming transfers only. When the insulin level in the blood is high, it tells the fat cells to reach out and grab triglycerides, break them apart, pull them through the doors, and put them back together inside. Without insulin to trigger this action, the doors stay closed and fat can’t be stored, which is why Type I diabetics can waste away no matter how much they eat.

Everything in the body has a balancing counterpart, and insulin has several: glucagon, adrenaline, growth hormone, and others. These open the fat cell doors in the opposite direction, outgoing. When these hormones outnumber insulin in the blood, the fat cells start breaking down triglycerides, pushing them through the doors, and putting them back together in the blood stream, where they can be transported to the muscles or organs which use them for fuel.

Notice that none of this has anything to do with how many calories are being eaten. If insulin is dominant, the exit doors on the fat cells will be closed, even if the person is starving. If insulin is low and glucagon is high, the entrance doors will stay locked, no matter how much fat is floating around in the blood looking for a place to go. This is why we all know some people who can eat like horses and not gain weight, and other people who seem to always be dieting and only getting fatter. It’s not that the skinny glutton is secretly bulimic or skipping meals in private, or that the fat guy is secretly stuffing himself or needs to exercise more. It’s because their hormones are telling their fat cells to do different things: in the skinny person, to keep the entrance doors closed; and in the fat person, to cast them wide open.

So, how do we use this? How do we lower our insulin level and raise the level of counterregulatory hormones? The simplest, fastest way is to reduce the amount of carbohydrate we eat. Insulin is created in direct response to carbohydrate, because aside from controlling fat metabolism, it also controls the amount of glucose in the blood stream. Excess sugar in the blood stream is toxic, so keeping glucose levels normal is far more important to the body than whether we gain a pound or two. Eat more carbohydrates, produce more insulin, kick open more entrance doors to the fat cells. Eat fewer carbs, less insulin is needed, the entrance doors on the fat cells stay closed.

Okay, so now we’re on a low-carb diet, keeping insulin at a healthy, stable level. So how can we increase the levels of the counterregulatory hormones, to start kicking the exit doors on the fat cells open? This happens automatically to some extent, which is why people who cut back on sugars and starches (which everyone knew was the way to lose weight until the 1960s) almost always lose weight. Some glucagon is always being produced, but in the high-carbohydrate eater, it’s overwhelmed by the flood of insulin. Getting rid of the insulin surge gives the counter hormones a chance to work.

The production of counters like adrenaline and growth hormone is suppressed by high levels of insulin, so these typically rise when insulin falls. There is some evidence that heavy exercise promotes the secretion of growth hormone, so that may help as well, and may help explain why exercise is enough to spur weight loss in some people. If one’s hormone balance is just barely leaning toward the insulin side, some running or weight lifting could tip that balance back the other way. For people in whom insulin is flooding the system, however, even extreme amounts of exercise may have no effect if insulin levels are not brought down by carbohydrate restriction.

That’s the system in a nutshell—greatly simplified, I admit. It explains why some people struggle with obesity while others gobble their way to thinness; and it shows us what to do about it. I’ve been low-carbing on-and-off for several years now, and one thing I can say for sure about it: It works every time I do it. Unfortunately, I’ve only stuck with it for a few stretches, so I’m not as lean and mean at this point as I could be. I’m back to it now though, so I’ll be writing more about my progress in the future.

References:

• Good Calories, Bad Calories, by Gary Taubes
• The Protein Power Lifeplan, by Drs. Mike and Mary Dan Eades

I know I’ve posted a lot about low-carbing and diet lately, and I don’t want my blog to be all about that, but I ran across another very good article today. This one is all about the cholesterol myth: where it came from, why it has such a stranglehold on us, and why it’s wrong. Money quote:

The MR-FIT trial in the USA was the most determined effort to prove the case. This was a massive study in which over 350,000 men at high risk of heart disease were recruited. In one set of participants, cholesterol consumption was cut by 42 percent, saturated fat consumption by 28 percent and total calories by 21 percent. This should have made a noticeable dent in heart disease rates.

But nothing happened. The originators of the MR-FIT trials refer to the results as ‘disappointing’, and say in their conclusions: ‘The overall results do not show a beneficial effect on Coronary Heart Disease or total mortality from this multifactor intervention.’ [my emphasis]

That’s an enormous study, and there are plenty of others like it, but they go against conventional wisdom and billions of dollars invested in food and health marketing, so they’re ignored. Here’s the link!

It figures. I finally find my camera yesterday, so my DVD player dies on me today. I guess that way the universe is still in balance. It’s not a huge loss, since I paid $30 or so for the thing and used it for a year. Still annoying, though. Maybe it’s time to get a burner for the computer, so I can watch things there and rip them and so on.

By the way, the diet is still going fine. I had a sausage, spinach, mushroom frittata yesterday that was very good. Frittatas are great. Melt some butter in a hot skillet, pour in beaten eggs, then when they’re cooked about halfway through, spread your meat and veggies on top, then sprinkle with some cheese. Put it in the oven on high heat until the cheese bubbles, and you’re all set. Takes a little longer than an omelet, but you don’t have to stand over it the whole time.

I discovered one thing today, though: venison burger isn’t very good with eggs. It’s too dry a flavor somehow; like beef, only worse. I’ll stick with pork sausage or bacon for breakfast from now on, and save the deer meat for chili and casseroles and such.