Pain, Pain, Go Away!

" 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

Someone didn't get the memo that all the fuss about saturated fats is based on a bunch of debunked junk science. 23 and Me, the company that provides genetic information from a saliva sample, sent me this message: People with your genetic result tend to have a similar  BMI  on diets with greater or less than 22 grams of saturated fat per day, as long as they consume the same number of total calories. However, diets high in saturated fat have been associated with increased LDL (“bad”) cholesterol, which is a risk factor for heart disease. Limit your saturated fat intake. It may not have a large effect on your weight, but it’s important for reducing your risk of heart disease. Fats are an important part of a healthy diet: they give you energy, help build your  cells , and help you absorb certain vitamins. There are three main types of fats, but not all types are equally healthy. Saturated fats: Found primarily in red meat and dairy products, saturated fat has been linked

If I'm ever in a trench defending my homeland from barbarians, I want Linda Wells, Editor-in-Chief of Allure magazine, next to me. She's spent her last couple of vacations at a boot camp eating vegan food, sans booze, caffeine, gluten and sugar and going on five-hour hikes, getting blisters along the way. She doesn't feel (or sound) self-righteous. She's lost eight pounds, but says she's ready to "re-tox." The same issue of the magazine describes the program of a weight loss clinic called Medi-Weightloss: 500 to 800 calories a day of protein (around 125g to 200g), supplements, laxatives, and a prescription appetite suppressant called phendimetrazine. Jesus wept. Starvation diets--and this diet is well into starvation territory--have been well studied. They're known to cause weakness, fatigue, loss of libido and psychosis . Low-fat diets can cause depression, among other problems . And what's with the heaping helping of protein? Plugging in th

"One of the five worst scientists I've ever met." That's how Gary Taubes described a doctor he talked to several years ago--a doctor who took credit for getting Americans to eat less fat and consume fewer eggs. And poor science, said Taubes, is typical of the field of nutrition. Gary Taubes, author of Good Calories, Bad Calories, gave a talk at the Tattered Cover book store last night on his new book, Why We Get Fat. Taubes, whose education is in engineering and physics, is a science writer who has, as he put it, "recreated [or compiled] the history of obesity" through his research. His talk mostly covered what's in Why We Get Fat, an accessible book. Having only 45 minutes, he covered mostly why we don't get fat; he said he'd never given a 45-minute lecture in his life. For those who favor brevity, here's a highly condensed version of Taubes's message. Why we get fat: too many carbs. Why we don't get fat: too much fat, too little e

Dear Trolls, I can't thank you enough for trying to set me and my poor, misguided low-carb and paleo friends on the right path. It must be painful for you to read blogs and articles about eating things like bacon-wrapped shrimp , coconut chocolate tart , juicy barbecued ribs, and full-fat lemon ice cream . Nevertheless, you soldiered on to show us the way to vegan/low-fat/CICO/food reward/MMEL enlightenment. Your kindness and time and effort you've shown are appreciated. But I do have two things to say. First, you're wrong. Not to put too fine a point on it, but there it is. Nearly all of us have already tried eating less and moving more, or reducing calories and fat, and the community is full of former vegetarians. In fact, hunger and fat accumulation are driven by hormones. This isn't the gospel according to Gary Taubes, it's in endocrinology textbooks (see this and this ). High-carb diets aren't the answer to diabetes, a disease of carbohydrate intoler

It may not be fashionable in the low-carb world, but I like to snack. I feel better when I snack. I don't feel good when I eat big meals and don't know how people put away three-egg bacon-cheese omelets with a bullet-proof coffee. The good thing about low-carb snacking is that by definition, you avoid eating junk like potato chips and fruit pies. The bad news is that low-carb snacks from the convenience store are expensive. Time was when the only two kinds of coffee I drank were free and home-brewed. When I realized cream gave me problems, I started taking it black and then realized that the office coffee was terrible. But the little shop on the first floor made a wonderful cup for $2.11. An equally wonderful home-brewed cup is about 12 cents. Sleeping in an extra ten minutes, the time it takes to brew a 12-cent cup of coffee, is costing me almost $500 a year. I've set my alarm earlier. The convenience store sells Kind bars for around $2.50 and large diet Dr. Pepper fo

I love vegetables. There are so many foods that I can't eat that meals would be boring without them. In fact, I like them so much that I planted five kinds of lettuce and two kinds of tomatoes in my garden today. All the same, stuffing yourself with vegetables (or anything else) isn't good. 1. Fibrous vegetables can drive up your blood sugar if you eat enough of them. In one of his books, Dr. Richard Bernstein discussed a patient who ended up with a very high blood sugar after eating a head of lettuce. There are stretch receptors in your intestines that, when they sense you've eaten a big meal, release hormones that can end up raising your blood sugar. Bernstein calls this the Chinese Restaurant Effect. 2. All food is inflammatory. As Michael Eades put i t, Eating is an inflammatory process. A number of scientific studies have shown that eating a meal, regardless of the macronutrient composition, causes acute inflammation, which makes sense when you think about it. F

A "sensible diet" must be the one of the hardest things to figure out, even for a sensible person. There's always been conflicting advice, but with medical studies in respected journals being retracted and authorities admitting they were wrong about fat, and various laymen flip-flopping on dietary advice, we're living in confusing times. This post is to help readers sort it out for themselves. First, what is "sensible," or more to the point, what is the truth? I think it's something that meets one or more of these criteria: Something observable, directly or indirectly Something that stands up to scrutiny (i.e., it's not a trick) Something that fits with everything else you know Something that can be used to reliably predict other things Note that something sensible or truthful isn't necessarily balanced, it doesn't matter who does or doesn't believe in it, or how long it's been around. It's independent of all those t

I don't know much about inflammation. What I do know is that immune cells can run amok, mistaking your own tissue for invaders, damaging it and inflaming it. It's also called autoimmune reaction and it can be systemic, throughout your body. And it's miserable. Food, especially wheat and dairy, is a major cause of inflammation for some people. We focus on carbs around here, but it's funny proteins that cause problems from paranoia to arthritis: gluten, gliadin, whey and casein, for instance. The proteins can also come from your own body: serious injury can cause a release of the DNA from your mitochondria, tiny organelles in your cells, but with their own DNA separate from yours.( 1 ) Interleukin-6 is an inflammatory protein your body makes ; homocysteine (another protein) may cause inflammation when there's too much of it. How do we get these rogue proteins under control? Tess wrote a post on systemic enzymes , calling them THE BEST anti-inflammatory supplement

My last post discussed the book It Starts with Food and the principles it's based on. Going over the post, I realized that the part about hormones raised some questions. How do cells become insulin resistant? How can too much insulin lead to weight gain? Does too much carbohydrate cause leptin resistance? I'm looking again at the book Endocrinology: Basic and Clinical Principles by Shlomo Melmed and P. Michael Conn from 2005. The book says it isn't clear how insulin resistance develops, but says that it is a "key feature of the prediabetic 'metabolic syndrome' (central obesity, hypertension, insulin resistance, and dyslipidemia)" (page 318). It doesn't say how to reverse it. The book does say that insulin promotes fat formation and inhibits fat burning: Insulin promotes lipid synthesis and inhibits lipid degradation. Before insulin became available for treatment of type 1 diabetes, patients with this disease were invariably thin, reflecting

What happens when you go two months without exercising? Conventional wisdom says you gain weight (unless you restrict calories). Does it work out that way in real life? Around January 10 this year, I strained my neck and stopped lifting weights to let it heal and avoid injuring it further. Although it was completely healed after three weeks, I didn't do any resistance training for two months (and I stopped doing cardio workouts over a year ago). It was pure laziness. (As for the cardio, I decided last year it was just a waste of valuable dance time .) How did this affect my health and fitness? At January 10, my weight was 118 pounds. Today, March 7, it was...118 pounds. My pants (all tailored, no elastic waists) fit just as they did in January. No, I'm not the type who can eat anything without gaining weight: last year at this time, I was in the middle of losing 20 pounds , going from a high-carb, low-fat diet to a low-carb, high-fat diet. This bears out the research I've

It looks like Big Sugar hasn't corrupted the local government around here. The Tri-County Health Dept.  here has a public service message at a bus stop: I don't agree with the message on the CDC's rethink your drink site that weight is all about the calories. But if you think it is, why not cut out the most nutritionally empty calories? Soda, juice, energy drinks--they're liquid candy bars. 

A commenter on another blog said, "Calories count: ask any woman over 40. Oh wait, you notice LCHF never mentions them or shows their success stories." I'm not sure where this person got that idea. Maybe he's new to LCHF; it seems to me like there's a lot of us out there who eat this way without counting calories. Three years ago, at age 41, 20 pounds fell off when I whacked back the carbs. I've kept it off and stayed pretty close to what I weighed in high school. Amy Alkon , Mary Dan Eades and Jackie Eberstein come to mind as LC ladies of a certain age; I'm sure I'm forgetting dozens more. Here's a photo of me taken June 3, 2013, age 44. (I wanted to show my best friend what I wore to see Alice Cooper and Marilyn Manson, since she pictured me in a lavender shirt, white linen pants, and starchy bag with a bottle of Perrier.)

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

Inflamed: this is how my nasal passages felt yesterday evening after a few days of sinus congestion. Even though I was well enough that day to take part in a round table discussion on where morality comes from (where I mentioned the story of 1808, a Homo erectus who was taken care of for months or weeks through an illness ), and walk to the grocery store and back, by bedtime, I felt like I was going to drown in mucus. It was 9:30 a.m. before I could rouse myself from bed to call in sick. I already have way of dealing with sinus infections: SWAMP (sinuses with a mucus problem). I take 100,000 IU of vitamin D, Mucinex, and salt as needed. But last summer, I had such good results getting rid of gastritis with the fat fast that I've decided to add that. The fat fast (book here ) involves eating 1,000 calories per day, with 90% of the calories coming from fat. (My lack of appetite is helping me stick to it.) So far, I've eaten some dark chocolate, a cup of broth with a bit of

A few people have asked me how it is that carbohydrates can cause weight gain, but eating fat doesn't tend to do so. The thing is, "calories in, calories out" is a myth. Unlike a car that simply burns gas, our bodies respond differently to different fuels. There are a few reasons that carbohydrates, more so than fat or protein, can cause weight gain: It's easy to overeat carbohydrates. Most carbs aren't very filling. Everyone who has ever eaten half a box of cereal, a bag of chips or box of cookies in one sitting, raise your hand. Ever eaten a stick of butter or a whole jar of mayonnaise at once? I didn't think so. Carbs are addictive for some people. Dr. William Davis, a cardiologist, recommends a low-carb, wheat-free diet to all his patients. He reports that 30% of them go through wheat withdrawal . Carbs can make you hungry. Eating carbohydrates raises your blood sugar, which causes your body to release insulin into the bloodstream. In some people, this is

The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics has officially acknowledged well-founded scientific findings(1).  Specifically, Saturated fat is fine. Cholesterol is fine. Red meat has important nutrients, such as protein and iron. They call red meat an "important source of shortfall nutrients, such as iron." They add, "The Academy did not interpret that recommendation as impugning the healthfulness of red meat or its place in recommended meal patterns as a protein..." Hooray! The fifty pounds of angus beef in my freezer has their blessing! They even called it healthful! But wait--don't eat too much of it: "...red meat consumption [at an average of 20 ounces per week] exceeds [our] recommendations for most subgroups and...a greater share of recommended protein consumption should be met by seafood, legumes and nuts." Let's break this down: red meat is entirely, or almost entirely, fat and protein. If protein is good, and saturated and monounsa

Falling off a bike, falling on your face, fracturing and spraining an arm, breaking a tooth and knocking two others loose sounds terribly painful. I certainly looked bad afterward: a lot of strangers in stores, on the bus and even on the street saw my black and blue face and arm in a sling and asked me what happened. At the urgent care center; I rated my pain a 4 out of 10 as long as I held my arm still. But 4 out of 10 isn't horrible pain. The bottle of Vicodin I got that day is still in the bag, unopened. My arm wasn't that badly injured--not as bad as my cousin's when she tripped over her dachshund and broke both of her wrists. And my jaw, despite landing on it and still having a bump on my chin, wasn't fractured or broken. Could be I'm a tough old bird--I'm descended from bull riders, homesteaders and blacksmiths. But I think diet has helped. I know that changing my diet to low-carb, taking vitamin D and later adopting the cavity healing diet made my t

Over the years, I've read some strange ideas about what the Atkins diet is: All meat A crash diet Not low-carb, high fat High protein An eating plan where you gorge yourself Wrong on all counts. A friend of mine was curious a few weeks ago about what it really was. I described it to her, and she can't stop raving about it now: Friend: What do you eat? Me: Meat, eggs, cheese, non-starchy vegetables, and fats like olive oil, mayonnaise, lard and butter. Friend: How much do you eat? Me: You eat until you're full. Friend: When do you eat? Me: Whenever you're hungry. You should also take some vitamins. There are more details, of course, but that's it in a nutshell. How does such a simple diet get so convoluted in people's minds? I blame fads in eating and thought. A trend now is to eat vegetables by the pound --no exaggeration. Dr. Atkins' Diet Revolution specifically says not to fill yourself with vegetables--that's a tactic of tradi

Do you take vitamins and minerals? I do, and I can see a difference when I take them. When I don't, my skin breaks out and generally doesn't look up to par. I had nosebleeds before taking a big dose of zinc every day, and was mildly anemic before taking iron. But I said to myself, I eat a healthy diet. I don't smoke or drink much alcohol. Why don't I absorb more of the vitamins and minerals I eat? Vitamin and mineral absorption is the problem I'm going to address in this post. There are a lot of everyday foods, drinks, diets and medicines that can make vitamins and minerals pass right through you. I don't want you to give up all your favorite foods and beverages, but consider making some small changes to make the most of your vitamins. Coffee and Tea. I wrote in my last post that coffee and tea interfere with iron absorption. (By "tea," I'm sure that means camellia sinensis , like black tea or green tea or white tea, not apple-cinnamon-vanilla o