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Have you heard the latest scare tactic against wheat-free eating? A wheat free diet will give you vitamin B deficiencies. Since wheat flour is fortified with B vitamins, substituting wheat-free food will make you sick because wheat-free flour isn't fortified, and bread and cereals are such a major source of B vitamins, says Holly Strawbridge, Executive Editor of Harvard Health Letter . Dietitian Kristi King over at the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics agrees . Are they right? Let's look at the evidence. How much vitamin B is in, say, a slice of wheat bread? The yellow row in the table has the answer; the top row is the recommended daily intake of the vitamins. (Click the lower right corner to enlarge) B vitamin table from Lori Miller There's NO vitamin B6 or B12 in the bread, and compared to the recommended daily intake levels, there's only a little bit of the other vitamins.  Fortified cereals have more vitamins, but (as with bread) the B vitamins are ad

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

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

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

Once again , the Wall Street Journal has run a (sort of) helpful article(1) on digestive issues--this time, on gluten intolerance, or what they should have called "wheat intolerance": You've got abdominal pains, bloating, fatigue and foggy thinking. You feel worse after eating wheat or other foods with gluten, and better when you avoid them. Add weight gain and rampant appetite to that, and that was me before I cut out wheat a few years ago, even though a previous medical test showed no signs of celiac. I stopped eating wheat to lose the 20 pounds I'd put on within a few years after I went back to eating the stuff. Indeed, I started slowly losing weight and feeling better. Wheat is an appetite stimulant. Later, I found out that humans have gone practically our entire existence without eating grains: there's no need in our diet for them. For millions of years, we lived on meat, roots, greens, eggs, fruits and nuts. But don't try this on your own! Accordin

"Price is what you pay, value is what you get." -Warren Buffett EDITED TO ADD: See if you can spot my poor reasoning in this post. That, and $1.75, will get you a plain coffee at Starbucks. Why does low carb food cost more? In general, it's more filling, it's more nutritious, and it has little or no added sugar or refined flour, which are nutrient sinks. Check out the macronutrients in a Starbucks double chocolate brownie (1) compared to a low-carb walnut-mocha brownie (2,3,4) (click for larger image, press ESC to return): I'm not putting down Starbucks--the results would probably be the same for any brownie made of flour, sugar, eggs, chocolate, etc., including homemade brownies like Grandma used to make. My point is that even though the low-carb brownies cost more to make than Grandma's and are less convenient than Starbucks, they're real food. With all natural fats, 14 grams of protein and no added sugar or refined flour, they aren't junk f

Lennox Lewis is gonna win that fight. Nobody's gonna get in the ring with Mike Tyson unless they know they can knock him out. -Bud Miller, my father It was the most hyped boxing match of 2002: Mike Tyson, the boxer who once bit off an opponent's ear in the ring, finagled a boxing license in Tennessee and took on Lennox Lewis. My father called that fight: Mr. Lewis looked serene when he knocked out Mr. Tyson in the eighth round. Mr. Lewis knew both himself and his opponent, something that hardly anyone interested in the fight seemed to consider. And so it's been lately with contenders who spout the healthy whole grains/eat less move more/low fat dogma on the internet in forums that allow responses. The priests of nutrition don't seem to anticipate a bunch of Lennox Lewises, who know every move of their game, climbing into the ring and pounding them. Apparently, the nutritional priests don't talk to each other or pay attention to each other's work, either

A couple of unexpected consequences have occurred with my new, (mostly) lacto-paleo, high-nutrient diet. My TMJ has almost disappeared. Let me tell you how my case of TMJ came about. It was a Sunday night in November 2006. I was on my way to a dance when an SUV came flying out of the Walgreens parking lot and broadsided my car on the driver's side. Once I stopped my car (which was totaled), the teeth on the right side of my mouth felt like they'd shifted from being clenched so hard. A few months later, the pain in my jaw was so bad that it kept me up nights. I couldn't fall asleep on my right side. Splint therapy helped, but as recently as last October after a dance workshop weekend , my jaw was painful for weeks afterward. So, why didn't I just stop clenching my jaw? When I realized I was doing it, I did, as far as I was able. But it's kind of like telling someone to stop having a tension headache. Things like relaxation, pain relievers, massage and a

I'd like to share some really outstanding health-related blogs with you. All of these bloggers struggled with the health problems they write about. All of them go by science and results, not the dogma that is common in some areas of medicine. All of these authors have helped me and my family in some way: Dr. Eades' blog informed me that excess carbs were the cause of my acid reflux; Dr. Davis's blog has been a lifesaver for my diabetic mother; Tom Naughton's blog usually makes me laugh. If you like their messages, most of them have books or movies (in some cases, free e-books and newsletters) for your reference or that of friends and family who aren't on the Internet. Happy reading! Dr. William Davis , a cardiologist, focuses on preventive medicine. He writes quite a bit about diabetes as well. If you'd rather make lifestyle changes than have heart surgery, this blog may interest you. Dr. Michael Eades , co-author of Protein Power, writes about low-carb living.