Thanksgiving Stupor: It's Not the Turkey OR the Fat

An article on the Mental Floss magazine website blamed the stupor people usually feel after a Thanksgiving meal on (what else besides turkey?) the fat--229 grams of it in an "average Thanksgiving meal," according to the article.

The urge to snooze is more the fault of the average Thanksgiving meal and all the food and booze that go with it. Here are a few things that play into the nap factor: Fats — That turkey skin is delicious, but fats take a lot of energy to digest, so the body redirects blood to the digestive system. Reduced blood flow in the rest of the body means reduced energy.

My response:

Say what? First of all, even if you ate all the skin from half a turkey plus a whole stick of butter, that would be only 190 g of fat. (source: nutritiondata.com) Thanksgiving is mostly a carbohydrate fest: potatoes, yams, desserts and most snack foods are mainly sugar and starch. Second, I'd like to see the evidence that a high-fat meal "reduces blood flow to the rest of the body" any more than a high-carb or high-protein meal. When I started a low-carb, high fat diet a few years ago, one of the first things I noticed was how much *less* sleep I needed, and I've heard many others say the same thing. I'll be enjoying a low-carb Thanksgiving without any calorie counting, weight gain or Tums.

Comments

tess said…

no kidding! i get so tired of the negative effects of sugar orgies that get blamed on fats....

November 20, 2012

Lori Miller said…

That, and people who get their data from five seconds of Googling. To get to almost 3000 calories that included around 229g of fat, you'd have to eat, for instance, the skin of half a turkey, 2 cups of mashed potatoes with a stick of butter, and 2 cups of cooked dark meat turkey. This is an "average" Thanksgiving meal, as in, half of us are eating even more than that? "Somethin' here just doesn't add up, somethin' here just doesn't seem right."

November 21, 2012

30-second Fix for a Cracked Stick Blender

Use Mighty Fixit (if you still have some from 2012) or Rescue Tape (which looks like a similar product) to fix a cracked stick blender. After I fixed the attachment, I washed it in the sink and the tape held up. I also wrapped a knife handle several years ago, and it's been through thousands of washings.

Moving on to YouTube

Remember when the blogosphere was a wild ride? Doctors, writers and researchers dove into research, picked apart studies and stood up to official advice and conventional wisdom that didn't work. We found each other in the comments and made a community. Along the way, Dr. T. Colin Campbell's research got exposed as shoddy by an English major, Tom Naughton made us laugh, "safe starch" fads made us scratch our heads, "Diabetes Warrior" Steve Cooksey almost went to jail, CarbSane trolled everyone who was anyone, and CarbSaneR trolled the troll. Now it's very quiet. Blogs don't come up in Google search results anymore and even if they did, most of the bloggers have stopped writing. That's why I've moved on to YouTube. Videos do come up in search results and my shorts--which are mostly what I make--get pushed out to hundreds of people or more. My videos are on food and health (biohacking), but also on growing things and fixing things. If you...

Holiday Dinner Tip from Restaurant Pros: Limit the Menu

After watching some people online getting freaked out about trying to put on holiday dinners and getting overwhelmed to the point that they're thinking about canceling the whole thing, I thought I'd put out a restaurant tip that will help people put on a dinner with less aggravation. A big complaint among the frustrated home cooks I've seen is that family members are not contributing to the dinner. But a bigger problem I see is that their menu is just too big. One lady's family is having her make 12 dishes all by herself, and some of these dishes look pretty complicated. Watch the video here or read on. The reason this is aggravating is that more dishes mean more shopping, more prep, and more cleanup. It's hard to make several dishes that will all be ready at the same time. Even though I used to be a prep cook at a restaurant, I've put on Thanksgiving dinners myself, and I cook from scratch almost every day, there's no way I'd try to make a 12-course di...

The Inner Circle Site is a Maze!

If you're a member of Dr. Davis's Inner Circle site, you know how hard it is to navigate. But I have a YouTube Playlist of videos I've created on using the site--finding yogurt recipes, using the search function, uploading lab tests, finding which lab tests you should take, and more. All videos are under 11 minutes, the longer ones have chapters and time stamps in the description, and in about 30 minutes, you'll be navigating the site like techno-boss. Link here .

Results of my Carrageenan-Free Diet

Certain things should be left in the aquarium. Readers may recall my ordeal last Saturday with a migraine headache and a trip by ambulance back to my parents' house. Thanks to one of the paramedics jogging my memory, I researched the almond milk I'd started drinking around the time I quit dairy. One of the ingredients was carrageenan, a substance used to induce inflammation, sensitivity to pain and other problems in laboratory animals. Supposedly, the "undegraded" form is safe for human consumption, but undegraded carrageenan has been found to be contaminated with degraded carrageenan, and there are ways that the digestive system could degrade carrageenan itself. For the past few months, I've felt a little bloated, and was starting to have some mild pain in my lower stomach. I thought it might have been the effects of the antibiotics, oral steroids or decongestant (which gave me an allergic reaction) from back in February. I didn't connect it to the sev...

Pain, Pain, Go Away!

Search This Blog