Pain, Pain, Go Away!

I've recently been on vacation. Some wonderful things from my trip: I bought a pound of hot Italian sausage from Royer Farms , Indiana, purchased at the Broad Ripple Farmers Market in Indianapolis. Tasty, tender and pasture raised, but hot? Not even mild by Denver standards. I'm enjoying the Canterbury tea made of black tea, mango and flowers from a store called Tea Pots 4 U , who blends it for the Canterbury Hotel in downtown Indianapolis. (Call the store if you want to order it.)  Near Tea Pots 4 U in Indianapolis ***** Lincoln Park, Chicago. Possibly North Cleveland Avenue. My best friend and I took the Megabus to Chicago and stayed in Lincoln Park. Back in Indianapolis, I downloaded from a book from the Denver Public Library to my Kindle called City Walks: Chicago by Christina Henry deTessan. We walked the Lincoln Park Architecture tour in the rain. I got cold and wet with no coat, and her feet hurt, but the beauty of the area made it worth it. I'v

The Geneva Convention prohibits the killing of our taste buds. -Hawkeye Pierce, M*A*S*H School lunches have never been known for being appetizing, but under the new Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, they're so bad that students are organizing protests. Some critics of the protests say that an 850-calorie limit should be enough, and if the kids don't like it, they should bring their own lunches. First, the calories. They're poor quality sugar and starch that's like Chinese food without the flavor and texture: it leaves you hungry an hour later--or a minute later for some kids. Google school lunch images : it's a beige sea of bread, breading and potatoes. The new guidelines call for more fruits and vegetables--which the kids have to put on their trays--but (1) fruit is mostly sugar, (2) it's hard to eat certain fruits and veg if you wear braces, (3) fruit and veg aren't filling , and (4) the fruit and veg are going in the trash anyway. Those whole g

Since injuring my teeth, I haven't been eating as much vegetable food as I used to. (I'd already given up fruit, since it's one of the worst things for giving me acid reflux.) Why? I have a hard time chewing them--just like my mother, who has several bad teeth and a partial. Bad teeth are a sign of bad health and are associated with diabetes and low socioeconomic status. And they make it hard to chew certain foods. Sure, you can go to the trouble and expense of juicing, but people who do that are outliers who are probably doing several good things for their health. And V-8 is a bit like oatmeal for most people: the only reason they consume it is because they think it's good for them. For most people with bad teeth, it's just easier to eat tuna casserole and mashed potatoes or a hamburger and fries. Someone who's being funny might look at my case and say, "Aha! She became tired and weak and had several medical appointments around the time she stopped ea

Want to be like cardiobunny Mom and bounce around like it's 1989? Have some healthy whole grain waffles. Gotta carb up so you can work out, and you gotta work out so you can burn off those carbs! Since all those lovely whole grains and complex carbohydrates break down into sugar , the kids will soon be bouncing off the walls, too . Want to relax and act like a normal person? Eat some sausage instead.

Never again do I want to hear how hard it is to do an elimination diet. If you think you have a natural right to happy and content and eat whatever you want without consequence, of course it will be hard. If you see life as a series of challenges to be met, and see that every food has consequences, it will be easier. And in fact, I find eliminating certain foods easier than eating them in moderation. My recent bike accident has left me unable to chew and with limited use of my right arm. (I'm right handed.) I can't eat wheat or carrageenan, can't tolerate more than a little dairy, and can't tolerate a high-carb diet. That leaves me with a low-carb, high fat (LCHF) diet of soft foods. So far, it's been a minor challenge. No, that's not an understatement, and no, I haven't had any protein shakes. I'm snooty as a Frenchman about food. To live on a soft LCHF diet of real food, you'll need a food processor with a motor powerful enough to puree meat.

Ice cream that's good for you? Yes--when there's good fats (MCTs), eggs, and no added sugar. What a shame I couldn't persuade a vegetarian acquaintance that this is a perfectly good food! Hat tip to Mark Sisson's Primal Blueprint Cookbook for the basic recipe and Nick Stellino's Mediterranean Flavors for the flavor inspiration. 2 cans coconut milk (13.5 oz each) (full fat, not light) 2 eggs 1/2 c Splenda 6 T lemon juice 1 t vanilla extract (required) Chopped pistachios (optional) Whisk the eggs in a bowl for a minute or two until they're fluffy. Whisk in the coconut milk, Splenda, lemon juice and vanilla extract until it's well blended. Churn it in an ice cream maker for 30 minutes Add pistachios if desired and enjoy. This ice cream becomes very solid when it's been in the freezer for several hours. If it's completely frozen, take it out and let it sit at room temperature for 30 minutes before serving. Fat fast info: 1/8 batch has 193

Jennifer McLagan's recipe in The Odd Bits inspired this recipe. Since I can't get blood off the shelf in the U.S., I pour the blood from liver packages into a tightly sealed container in the freezer. The cinnamon keeps the sanguinaccio from tasting like liver. 3/4 cup Splenda 1/3 c Dutch processed cocoa 2 big pinches xanthan gum Pinch of sea salt 1 c coconut milk (full fat, not light) 1/2 c blood 1-1/2 t cinnamon Place the Splenda, cocoa, salt and xanthan gum in a bowl and mix will. Stir in the coconut milk until the mixture is smooth. Pour in the blood through a mesh filter and stir well. Pour the mixture into a saucepan over medium heat and cook, stirring constantly, until it thickens and begins to bubble. Remove from heat. Refrigerate, serve cold. Optional: churn the mixture in an ice cream maker once it's cold. ETA: This may be the most filling food I've ever had. One cup of it for dinner--after no lunch today--and I'm full.

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

A few years ago when I started a low carb diet and started eating sausage again, I found some sausages gave me a headache, but others didn't. At first, eating them was a crap shoot, but I soon found some I couldn't eat (Applegate Farms Organic & Natural Meats) and some I could (McDonald's Restaurants and Ranch Foods Direct, a local pastured meat company). Some of Applegate Farms' products contain carrageenan (a highly processed, seaweed-based food additive used to induce pain and inflammation in research animals). McDonald's and Ranch Foods Direct sausage doesn't contain it. Why put carrageenan in sausage? According to Applegate Farms' website , Carrageenan, which is derived from red seaweed (Chondrus Crispus), activates extracted protein in the meat to help it bind together when formed. As the meat cooks, the heat forms a gel network, increasing moisture retention and improving the sliceability of the product. Without the addition of carrageenan

Readers interested in the raw paleo+supplement diet that I've proposed for fibromyalgia might be wondering how to put this into practice. There's a lot to read--you can skip parts if you want to--but the better you understand how this works, and the more lousy conventional wisdom you dispense with, the more likely you are to stick with it and fine-tune it to your needs. The basic ideas: Fix any leaks in the gut. A strict paleo diet eliminates foods like grains, potatoes and legumes that can cause this problem, allowing the gut to heal. (UPDATE 6/27/2012: Avoid an additive called carrageenan . It's a neolithic food and an inflammatory.) This may also help with autoimmune diseases. Stop ingesting antinutrients that interfere with magnesium absorption. Grains and legumes have antinutrients (search for "phytate" at Google Scholar if you're interested). Antacids keep you from absorbing magnesium (and calcium, zinc and iron) and interfere with protein digest

The past few days at the office have seen boxes of pizza, pastries, cupcakes, Chinese food, and wraps for meetings. Temptation? No--except for the wraps made of turkey and spinach, which I ate without the wrapper, of course. This wasn't any great feat of willpower: after over two years of eating little or no wheat, pizza or Chinese, these didn't even look like food to me. The Chinese food was overcooked (broccoli is supposed to be bright green, not dull chartreuse) and the pizza smelled like a wet dog. I think I understand why the French avoid junk food much more than Americans: they just don't like the stuff because they eat real food. Here's the problem with a frequent cheat day: it keeps your taste for junk food alive. If a friend were trying to quit smoking, would you recommend a weekly smoking day?

Regular readers may know that I have dessert for breakfast (and sometimes dip for dinner). But the past few weeks saw me working long hours at ramming speed. Something had to give: it was my almond meal chocolate cookies and Dr. William Davis's low-carb brownies, both made with nut flour. This had a happy result (besides the good paychecks): the five pounds I put on a few months ago when I discovered these is leaving my midriff. It isn't the lack of sweetness at breakfast, since I've been having low carb, dairy-free chocolate custard for breakfast instead--two big pieces of it, along with coffee with coconut oil. I haven't completely given up nuts, I just don't have them every day, and when I do, I eat a handful of pistachios. With all due respect to Dr. Davis, I can't eat unlimited nuts and keep a flat belly. Dr. Richard Bernstein is on to nuts raising blood sugar,(1) and therefore, for some of us, causing weight gain: Nuts Although all nuts contain c

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

It's been a year since I started the cavity healing diet. Last week, I went back to the dentist for a routine cleaning and exam. Results: Dr. Michelangelo (not his real name) still wanted to fill the small cavities he found last year. I had this done today. I don't think the fillings will hurt anything, and having them should prevent crud from finding a place to settle for the day. And I don't think he's given to drilling and filling for the sake of it: he never gave my best friend a filling while he was her dentist, and back in February when one of my wisdom teeth hurt, he said the tooth was fine and diagnosed a sinus infection. (Infection can raise your blood sugar, which probably didn't help my teeth over the last six months.) After he was finished, Dr. Michelangelo said the cavity had probably been forming for years.I know the groove on my lower tooth was there for years. He remarked that how white my teeth were, down to the roots (he used A2 colored fillin

Liver is Mother Nature's multi-vitamin, and at two dollars and change a pound, it's an inexpensive meal. The challenge is eating it if you don't like it. How about giving yourself a reward while you eat it: gravy! Chicken Fried Liver 1/4 pound chicken livers 3 T coconut flour 1 egg, beaten 3 T almond meal Pinch salt Few dashes of savory spice mix (herbes fines, jerk spice, Mrs. Dash, etc.) 2 T lard or coconut oil Heat the lard or coconut oil over a medium-low flame. In a small bowl, mix the salt and spices with the almond meal. Roll the liver in coconut flour, then egg, then the almond meal mix and put on a separate plate. When all the livers are ready, put them in the pan, using tongs and an oven mitt for safety's sake. Gently turn them after one minute. Let them cook for five to ten minutes until they're no longer bloody. Place them on a clean plate. Gravy Pan drippings from the liver 2 large chopped button mushrooms 1/2 c chicken or other m

Mary Newport M.D. discusses reversing her husband's Alzheimer's disease with coconut oil. Meantime, A team of biochemists at England's Oxford University have developed a ketone ester. It makes quite considerably higher levels. You can get whatever levels you want, depending on how much you drink. The problem is they need millions of dollars to mass produce it. It is very expensive, and so we can't make very much of it ourselves. What we would like is funding so we could actually scale up and make it. Of course, there is no real profit in manufacturing stuff like that. Dr. Newport states that Alzheimer's is becoming known as diabetes 3--diabetes of the brain. Brain cells become insulin resistant and cannot accept glucose--one of their fuels. Without fuel, the brain cells die. Enter ketones, the brain cells' alternate fuel. You could spend millions of dollars researching a ketone ester, but why not make your own ketones? All you have to do is follow a low

I've been reading about kids' lunches having to pass inspection here in the U.S. Not lunches that the schools serve, but lunches that kids bring from home. Others have stated the stupidity of both the policy and the standards and have criticized the erosion of our freedoms better than I could put it. But I haven't seen anyone address the question of what to do if your kid can't drink milk or eat grains--commonly intolerated foods that the standards require. You could put the foods in the lunch with instructions not to eat them. If your child has serious reactions to these foods, this could be a bad idea since kids don't always do as they're told. You could go to a doctor and get a waiver for your child, but I hate this idea. A grown man or woman shouldn't need a permission slip to pack a lunch without food that will make their child sick. A trip to the doctor costs money and for many parents, time off from work. And what if your kid doesn't have a dia

Here's my tasty ranch dressing to go with fish cakes, salad, or raw vegetables. 1 c homemade mayonnaise 2 c coconut milk 1/2 English cucumber, peeled and pureed 2 garlic cloves, minced 1 T Dijon mustard 2 T lemon juice 1 t dried dill 1 t dried parsley salt and pepper Mix all ingredients well. Serve.

Edited to add: I made a mistake in counting the carbs in these cookies: they actually have 2.5 net grams of carb, not one, and five grams of protein. I apologize for the error. By popular demand, my recipe for low carb almond meal chocolate cookies. (Recipe adapted from this one at The Naked Kitchen.) Each of these cookies has a scant 2.5g net carbohydrate and 5g of protein. Why almond flour instead of wheat flour? Cardiologist William Davis wrote a whole book called Wheat Belly on wheat's being one of the worst foods you can put into your mouth. (Wheat elimination is part of his program for reversing heart disease.) Wheat is an appetite stimulant; it can send your blood sugar over the moon, leading to insulin resistance and advanced glycation end products (AGEs) that, well, age you; it can cause autoimmune disorders. Even in you've had a negative test for celiac, you might be wheat sensitive. I can attest to the last part. I'm not celiac, but once I eliminated wh

To those who are bored with low-carb fare, may I gently suggest getting out of your rut with some different styles of cooking. Bacon-wrapped shrimp and salad of mustard and turnip greens, cucumber, bell peppers, olive oil and balsamic vinegar. Prep time: about 20 minutes. Roast beef in wine sauce with green beans and roasted peppers and mushrooms. Hands-on prep time: under half an hour. These recipes are adapted from Firecracker Shrimp and Filletto di Bue alla Contadina in More Cooking Secrets of the CIA  (Culinary Institute of America). The trout and pork chop recipes are among many other outstanding dishes in the book. It's only $4 on Amazon.