Pain, Pain, Go Away!

Pity the proponents of high-carb diets and calorie restriction. They've had the roughest week since Denise Minger dismantled the China Study. First, Jimmy Moore of the Livin' la Vida Low Carb blog dropped the bombshel l that a member of the 2010 Dietary Guidelines Committee (U.S.) publicly stated that there was no scientific basis for the U.S. dietary guidelines. Excerpt below--see Jimmy's blog for the whole jaw-dropping scoop. Joanne Slavin, PhD, RD, professor of Food Science and Nutrition at the University of Minnesota, was the head of the Carbohydrate Committee and on the Protein sub-committee for the 2010 Dietary Guidelines Scientific Advisory Committee. She was invited to be one of the guest speakers at The 9th Conference on Preventative Nutrition in Tel Aviv, Israel on May 18, 2011. Perhaps Ms. Slavin felt more at liberty to express her true feelings about the final version of the 2010 Dietary Guidelines being overseas and didn’t realize that I’d have eyes and ears l...

" Could yogurt be a key to staying slim?" asks the Washington Post . They look to Harvard for answers. But instead of looking to the priests of nutrition, let's see if we can answer this for ourselves. What is yogurt? According to this fact sheet from Dannon, The basic yogurt recipe is simply fresh milk, sweeteners, cultures and flavors or fruit. Plus acesulfame K , Aspartame, cornstarch, fructose, gelatin, malic acid, pectin and/or phosphates. According to this site , 4 oz (half of cup) of Dannon Activia yogurt contains 110 calories and 19 grams of carbohydrate, 17 of which are sugar, none of which are fiber. Compare the yogurt to 4 oz of ready-to-eat chocolate pudding : 153 calories and 25 grams of carb, 19 of which are sugar. Except for a few extra calories (think two bites), these products are comparable. While I'm loathe to quote doctors, one of them told me that I should take lactinex (a probiotic) while on antibiotics, and that the quantity in yogurt wasn't...

It's hard to believe that last Monday, it was so cold and rainy I wore my winter coat. Today, it's 96 degrees outside, and 79 degrees in my house. There's no central central air conditioning to crank up, just a very slow-growing shade tree on the west side of the house, a medium sized catalpa tree on the south, and three ceiling fans. Need I say I don't want light the oven? If you want to avoid heating up your home in the summer, low-carb is great: there's no pasta to boil, no potatoes to roast, and not much bread, cookies, cake or other baked goods to bake. So what's for dinner? Deli meats, kippers, salad, olives, tomatoes, liverwurst on celery, cheese, dip (just add Mrs. Dash to sour cream) and some tasty parmesan chips I just discovered at Whole Foods. Some of these are prepared foods that are pricey. If you want to save by cooking your own meat, cut it into small pieces or make a thin patty if it's ground so that it cooks faster. Consider using a pressur...

Tonight at the wine club meetup I attended, a waiter brought out an appetizer tray of cheese, olives, berries, pate, fatty deli meats, olives and dense white bread. A Swiss member who arrived in the U.S. two weeks ago told me that was typical fare in Switzerland. (In fact, it was typical of what my best friend and I ate on vacation .) I'm not a fan of bread, but overall, the appetizers were real, traditional foods with natural fats and a moderate amount of carbohydrates. Perhaps eating this kind of food is why the Swiss enjoy one of the lowest rates of obesity.

Have you seen the new government food plate? What do you think? Here's my food plate. It's pretty typical of what my best friend and I ate during our vacation of biking, dancing, clubbing, shopping, and generally running around . (Full disclosure: she ate quite a bit more carb than I did.) Clockwise from the top, we have the fatty meat group (pepperoni), the full-fat dairy group (the caramel colored food is a bit of sweet Norwegian cheese), the fatty vegetable group (olives), and the carby vegetable group (tomatoes). To the right is the wine group (Sterling syrah from California's central coast; we also loved Bicyclette from southern France). My weight gain on the vacation: nada. Except for the wine, this is how I normally eat; I just upgraded for my best friend's visit. How it works: carbs aren't the only source of energy for your body. It can run on dietary fat, too. (In fact, your body needs dietary fat for maintenance and repairs. Unless your blood sugar is cras...