Pain, Pain, Go Away!

What more could you possibly want to hear about the pandemic, you might be wondering. I had my doubts, too, but I finally ended up buying Pandemia because Alex Berenson's spicy takes have been more entertaining than anything I've read in a long time. I'm glad I got the book. I'm still in the middle of listening to it on my long commute, but I'm recommending it now because the Kindle version is on sale. Get this book! It's informative, it's well-researched, it's engrossing, you'll say, "I remember when that happened!" It has information that even I hadn't come across.  Having covered the pharmaceutical industry long before the pandemic, Berenson was scooping the rest of the media by months in his reporting on the vaccines. He was ultimately banned from Twitter for saying that COVID vaccines didn't prevent infection or transmission--facts repeated yesterday by Anthony Fauci and others a few days ago in the New England Journal of Medic...

Over the past few months, my stomach is feeling a lot better and I think it's thanks to low-carb lattes I've been having for breakfast. Plus a lot of Pepto-Bismol. Doing a little research, it turns out that all the ingredients in the latte (coconut milk, cocoa powder, peppermint extract, and even coffee) are antibacterial. So is Pepto-Bismol. I've also been avoiding high-FODMAPS foods that cause bloating. So I think my problem was SIBO (small intestinal bacterial overgrowth) after taking too many probiotics...and maybe some carb creep. Something felt off. I was tired, I'd gained a few pounds, and felt puffy. I got a new blood glucose meter and tested my fasting and post breakfast levels (breakfast being bacon, eggs, two lattes and some dried seasoned tomatoes). That was about 18 grams of carbohydrate. My blood sugar went from 91 to 146. Not good! After two hours, it went to 109 and stayed around there for the next four and a half hours, when I stopped taking readings...

Some years ago, I wrote a blog post on fibromyalgia relief. I don't suffer from it myself, but hoped a friend could benefit from it. The post referenced a book by Dr. Jean Seignalet, who recommended a mostly raw, mostly paleo diet. Really--don't knock s teak tartar and a salad on a hot summer day until you've tried it. Anyway, Dr. Seignalet's book has been translated into English and it's available on Kindle for only $2.99. The description says you can prevent and reverse 100 diseases "the French way." I haven't read it, but will get it to see if I can avoid ENT infections. (If anything like the Spanish flu ever made a comeback, I'm sure it would kill me. Three dollars and a few hours seems like a reasonable investment to avoid that outcome.)

I'll admit it: even though my dietary requirements include organ meat, it was a chore to eat it...and you know what happens when that's the case. I ended up eating Atkins bars instead of liver. Partly, I've been too busy the past few weeks to eat many home-cooked meals, but mostly, there are a lot of things--even on Atkins induction--that I'd rather eat than liver. Last Saturday, needing some wind in my sails after a few weeks of family emergencies, uncluttering my parents' house with a room temperature of 85 degrees, and being too wound up to get much sleep, I checked out a book called Freakin' Fabulous by Clinton Kelly from  What Not to Wear and The Chew. Just looking at the pictures at red lights on the drive home inspired me to stop at the store--the grocery store. I knew Kelly was a stylist, but didn't know he could cook, too. He's quite the meat eater--his good looks attest to that. That, and it sounds like he eats little or no junk food. I ...

Do Calories Matter on Atkins? As the saying goes, just because you're not counting calories doesn't mean that calories don't count. Dr. Atkins wrote in Dr. Atkins' Diet Revolution that you'll lose weight faster on fewer calories, but you won't necessarily have a sense of well-being. Most readers knows what he means: low mood and flagging energy. Lack of Energy, Low Mood This was how I felt Sunday afternoon and Monday. Part of my low mood was from having to fill out an application for Medicaid for both my parents, mostly so that my father can go live in a nursing home. It's too hard for my mother to take care of him and I can't be with them enough to help day-to-day. I was thinking about my parents during yoga that evening and fighting tears. I didn't have a physical sense of well-being, either. The climb from the train station up to the street took more energy than it should have; so did the yoga class. I went back to the book for advice and r...

Most of us know the challenge of avoiding wheat, dairy, grains, potatoes, and high-carb foods in general, and a lot of people find it tough, especially at the beginning. But to avoid all added sugar in food--I hadn't guessed how hard it would be until I started reading A Year of No Sugar by Eve O. Schaub. Specifically, Schaub and her husband and two young daughters avoided all added fructose and most artificial sweeteners (fruit was OK), making a few exceptions: one dessert with added sugar per month, one personal exception with a bit of sweetener (such as ketchup or diet soda), and for the kids, they could choose for themselves whether to indulge at school, parties, etc. I can relate to the difficult transition to a non-whatever diet. Back in the 90s, I found out that almost everything contains wheat--not just bread and noodles, but almost anything in a box or a can. Same for sugar--salad dressing, most sausage, bacon, yogurt, cereal, pasta sauce--it's in there. Put on a...

T. Colin Campbell, author of The China Study, has written a new book (more of a report at 57 pages) called The Low-Carb Fraud. Let's start with what Dr. Campbell gets right: There are different kinds of carbohydrates. Most carbohydrates are broken down into glucose in the intestine. Refined carbohydrates are bad.  Low carb diets are fun! (I swear I'm not making this up) Calories don't matter unless you're going to extremes. People lose weight on low carbohydrate diets. People lower their insulin levels on low carbohydrate diets. That's about it. Mostly, he slanders low-carb proponents and he lies, lies again, and lies some more. He lies when he doesn't need to lie. To wit:  " Dr. Atkins' Diet Revolution ...had not been especially successful in the marketplace." According to Dr. Atkins' obituary in The New York Times, " its various editions sold more than 15 million copies, making it one of the best selling books ever....

I'm getting the sense that human ancestors were serious meat eaters. I'm reading The Wisdom of the Bones by Alan Walker and Pat Shipman, a contemporaries and colleagues of Richard Leakey. They discuss evidence that humans moved up in the food chain: increased sociality, territorial expansion and decreased population density, and smaller GI tracts. Sociality As Leakey noted in one of his books, if you live on raw vegetation, you can just grab a leaf or a piece of fruit and eat it. You don't need a tribe to do so; in fact, you might want to hide your booty from everyone else so they don't bug you to share it. Hunting big game, on the other hand, requires cooperation. Richard Wrangham says in Catching Fire that some hunter-gatherers have strict rules about women sharing their vegetables only with immediate family members, while men are supposed to share their meat (hunted cooperatively) with the group ( Catching Fire, page 163-164). He who eats alone is an orangu...

Much more endnoting is needed! -Cindy Hoffman, one of my high school English teachers It's a shame that vegan activist Dr. Neal Barnard didn't learn English composition from Mrs. Hoffman: maybe we could see where he got the numerous pro-vegetarian quotes from paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey--enough to fill half a chapter in The Power of Your Plate . Leakey, according to Barnard, says that hunting in modern times isn't very important except as a macho male thing (page 175), that meat accounted for a small part of the diet on the African savannah (page 174), that the "excess of meat" from domesticated livestock is unusual (page 174), and that we wouldn't have had the teeth to deal with tearing flesh and hide (page 171). These statements are attributed to the same Richard Leakey who said, just two years before The Power of Your Plate came out in 1995, The expansion [of diet] involved making meat an important food source, not just an occasional items...

Richard Leakey with skull of Australopithecus (left) and Homo habilis (right). Photo from fotosimagenes.org Let me start with this: if you're a vegetarian, and enjoy good health on your diet, that's fine with me. Everybody should have a diet that works for them, and if you've found it, I won't discourage you from following it.  That said, evolution doesn't support human vegetarianism--unless you go back to Australopithecus (see photo). While doing a bit of research, I came across an odd quote attributed to paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey: "[y]ou can’t tear flesh by hand, you can’t tear hide by hand … We wouldn’t have been able to deal with food source that required those large canines” (although we have teeth that are called “canines,” they bear little resemblance to the canines of carnivores). It shows up on several vegan and vegetarian websites and articles, but with no source cited. I call it an odd quote because from what I'...

I've never understood the appeal of pancakes: they're dry and tasteless. If you put syrup on them, they're sweet and soggy. Being mostly flour and sugar (if you put syrup on them), they really should be considered a dessert. Crepes are a different animal: they're light and fluffy and moist if you put some butter on them. They're not too eggy-tasting. If you make them with coconut flour and don't drench them in syrup, they shouldn't jack up your blood sugar. In other words, they're real food, not dessert. The recipe is from Cooking with Coconut Flour by Bruce Fife. It took 15 minutes to make these.

Four More Weeks My orthodontist wants to wait four more weeks to take my braces off so that I can get a new crown. Meantime, my insurance is actually considering paying for some of this expensive dental work. Hot dog. Acid reflux, acne, and upset stomach down to flavored coffee I just tried to expand my food horizons and once again, ended up with problems. It took a few months to figure out it was flavored coffee. It's not the caffeine or the acid, since regular coffee and tea doesn't bother me, or anything I put in it (I take it black). It's not any natural flavors, since nuts, vanilla and cocoa don't bother me. It's the chemicals. According to enotes.com , Flavoring oils are combinations of natural and synthetic flavor chemicals which are compounded by professional flavor chemists. Natural oils used in flavored coffees are extracted from a variety of sources, such as vanilla beans, cocoa beans, and various nuts and berries. Cinnamon, clove, and chicory...

Long-time readers may recall my sinus infection that just wouldn't die. Over six months, I took antibiotics, long naps, a decongestant that gave me an allergic reaction so bad I stopped to wonder if I'd wake up the next morning . It finally ended when I came up with SWAMP and took megadoses of vitamin D, Mucinex and salt. It's February and once again, I've been fighting off a cold for a few weeks. While SWAMP consists of taking 50,000 IU of vitamin D for two days, I've had to take 40,000 IU for the past several days to keep my cough from getting worse. I'm not the only one who's taken large doses like this long term. Jeff T. Bowles, a layman, wrote and self-published a book called THE MIRACULOUS RESULTS OF EXTREMELY HIGH DOSES OF THE SUNSHINE HORMONE VITAMIN D3 MY EXPERIMENT WITH HUGE DOSES OF D3 FROM 25,000 to 50,000 to 100,000 IU A Day OVER A 1 YEAR PERIOD (caps in original) about his research and experiences. Bowles is a little crazy, and his problems...

I've been on a reading jag about evolution: The Greatest Show on Earth  by Richard Dawkins and Why Evolution is True  by Jerry A. Coyne. I also threw in Dawkins' 1991 Christmas Lectures titled "Growing up in the Universe."   (Link goes to online videos.) A few things worth knowing (among many others): Evolution hasn't made our bodies perfect. The earliest life was bacteria, and all life forms have changed by tiny increments ever since. There was no going back to the drawing board and starting a new, more logical design. For instance, our maxillary sinuses draining at the top is a trait we inherited from ancestors who walked on all fours (their sinuses drain at the front).(1) Both books have an entire chapter on parts that have evolved badly. Good fuel helps a lot, but it won't fix a bad design. Natural selection can occur rapidly. We're all familiar with bacteria evolving resistance to antibiotics. But natural (or artificial) selection has been observ...

Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world. -Archimedes By conventional wisdom, I should be a fat, lazy slob. I eat at McDonald's, play a lot of video games and watch violent cartoons when I get home. I haven't exercised in months, not since my accident in late July. I have my reasons for these things, but they're not important here. What's important is that these things haven't turned me into anything. I'm still slim and trim (though I've lost some muscle tone), still thinking critically, and my coworkers and creditors can still depend on me. Today I even downloaded a book on salt--400 pages written by an engineer in 1898.* It's unlikely to be light reading. My point is the difference between what matters and what doesn't. The endless worries about fat and salt and dietary cholesterol don't matter. Chronic cardio--exercise that's supposed to make you lose weight--doesn't matter (unless...

Pumpkin pie in August? Chareva's butternut squash crustless pie ? Is it a meaty cheese or cheesy meat dish? Peanut butter bars? Nope--though all of those are great, save the last one. It's marrow and mushroom custard from The Odd Bits by Jennifer McLagan. Even if you don't require soft food, it's well worth making. I get marrow bones cut about 2" long and steam them for 15 minutes, then extract the marrow with a filleting knife. Boil the bones for a few hours for broth for another dish; save the marrow for custard or making croutons. (Roll them in almond flour and fry them in fat.) McLagan recommends having a sharp-tasting salad with the custard; I had a bit of V-8, a few bowls of lemon ice cream , some nut butter and dark chocolate.

Best conversation yet: Cashier: How did you get hurt? Me: I fell off my bike. Cashier: Are you going to ride a bike again? Me: Nope. Cashier: So you didn't lose your common sense. That was Sunday. It's Friday, and strangers have stopped asking what happened to me since I'm a lot less black and blue now. I'm washing my own hair, putting on makeup and getting through a day at work without exhaustion. I don't do much at home besides cooking and dishes, and out-eating a teenage boy. Two eggs or a quarter pound of beef is a snack; either one used to be a meal. Rebuilding flesh and replenishing blood (I bled for a day when I fell) must take a lot of nutrients. I'm not wearing the extra calories--I've lost weight. The braces are working. My front teeth are straighter than they've been since I was a kid, and I can chew a little bit, very carefully. Since the tooth that broke was narrower than an implant, I'll have to have my top teeth re-aligned t...

The Japanese and other Asians are often held up as models of carb-eating skinnies. Should we adopt a traditional Japanese diet, then? Naomi Moriyama, author of Japanese Women Don't Get Old or Fat (1) thinks so. "There is a land...where forty-year-old women look like they are twenty. It is a land where women enjoy some of the world's most delicious food, yet they have obesity rates of only three percent ...The country is Japan." Moriyama goes on to describe her mother's cooking, which she says helped her and her husband slim down. If you've tried to lose weight on healthy whole grains, good carbs, exercise, and following standard nutritional advice, a traditional Japanese diet won't work for you--because that's what it's all about. In fact, the book specifically says that the diet is similar to USDA guidelines. (And in an unintentionally ironic passage, Moriyama complains that she couldn't exercise off even "an ounce" of the 25 poun...

Long ago, nobody messed with Mother Nature (much). Mostly, nobody knew how, and the traditional ways were common sense. Along came the chemical age, and then the backlash. Some say anything from a lab is harmful; others say Mother Nature alone is not enough. Of course, I'm talking about gardening. In general, gardeners seem to be on one side or the other: chemicals should be avoided entirely, or the only good bug is a dead bug. (Conversion is possible, though: a friend of mine was fervently anti-chemical until her apartment got a bedbug infestation.) Jeff Gillman, a professor of horticulture at the University of Minnesota has chosen a different side: looking at the evidence. His book The Truth About Organic Gardening tips over some of the sacred cows of both camps: For instance, natural pesticides aren't necessarily safer than synthetic ones (good to know if you eat organic fruit, since natural pesticides are used on organically grown fruit). And bug sprays can make an inf...

Last month I blogged about my friend's grandson "James," a ten-year-old binge eater who was nearly 40 pounds overweight. James's grandmother is a force to be reckoned with; I've been whispering in her ear. She's been reading books from my health collection, and then some: Why We Get Fat, The New Atkins for a New You, Heartburn Cured, The Vegetarian Myth, and Slow Burn.  I also mentioned Dr. Atkins' advice for binge eating, which he treated: binge on protein and fat. Disabused of the notion that fat is bad and eating less is good, she's gotten James some snacks like Crystal Light (a no-calorie drink), boiled eggs, celery and peanut butter and apples and yogurt, and labeled them with his name. It seems he's caught on to low-carbing: his grandmother saw that when he fixed a plate for himself, he skipped the hamburger bun and just took meat and salad. She said he played outside all day Sunday (he didn't have that energy before) and looks well. He...