On the heels of that, they published a real stinker in February. It starts [...]]]> In January, Men’s Journal had a terrific article about fitness by Daniel Duane. The gist of it is that you should pass on the treadmill and elliptical and lift heavy. If this is news to you, go read it.

On the heels of that, they published a real stinker in February. It starts out well. The #1 rule is “Don’t go on a diet, change your diet.” Daniel Duane starts out by quoting Gary Taubes theory of Why We Get Fat. I mostly agree with Gary. Mostly, but not entirely. That’s a subject for another time, however. The #2 rule is to shop the periphery of the supermarket:

If you want to live by one rule instead of 10, this is it, not least because it’s the easiest to follow. Shop only the periphery of the supermarket, choosing whole fruits, vegetables, meats, fish, and dairy products…

Again, agreement here. After this, Mr. Duane presents a food pyramid (god save us all from food pyramids!) that goes like this:

Never Eat: refined carbs, simple sugar
Eat as a treat: whole fruit
Eat these less often: whole dairy, whole grains
Eat these every day: nuts, seeds, legumes, tofu, extra-virgin olive oil, canola oil, avocado
Eat these every meal: leafy, cruciferous, brightly colored vegetables, meat, poultry, fish, game, eggs

Whole grains are NOT found on the periphery, and it’s suggested here that one should eat more whole grains than fruit. Tofu is also a processed food and should be on the “do not eat” list, but here it is presented as something it’s ok to eat every day. Canola oil is heavily processed. You’d be better off using coconut oil or ghee for higher heat cooking.

It’s abundantly clear that Mr. Duane is leery of saturated fats. He quotes this:

Many major research institutions, including the Harvard School of Public Health, no longer believe that dietary fat, even saturated — found in red meat, pork, butter, and cream — is bad for heart health. What’s more, a study published last year in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found no link between saturated-fat consumption and incidence of heart attacks.

But then says this in the next paragraph:

This rethinking of dietary fat doesn’t mean you can consume all the steak and eggs you want. While it’s best to eat a little protein at every meal, you should vary the type you consume by rotating through beef, poultry, fish, game, and pork, in addition to eggs and plant-based protein like soybeans.

Again with the damn soybeans!

He later concedes that butter made from organic cream might be OK, but his meal plans contain this oh so appetizing breakfast: Oat-bran toast with extra-virgin olive oil; scrambled egg.

Wow. Sounds delicious! Here’s the breakdown on this meal assuming 2 slices of toast, one scrambled egg and 1 teaspoon of olive oil:

This is not a low-carb meal, it doesn’t contain enough protein, and 266 calories *might* keep a child satisfied until lunch time, but a grown human? I really doubt it with that level of protein and fat, the two most satisfying macronutrients. If you subbed egg whites (keeping one whole egg) and vegetables instead of the toast, you could get the same amount of calories and a *filling* breakfast.

His third rule is to not count calories. I’m fine with that one – it seems to psych people out, make them feel deprived and make them stressed. Four out of seven of his breakfast meals are distinctly NOT low-carb and sound pretty calorie restricted to me. On Monday and Saturday his breakfast includes meat and eggs, and are pretty normal for an adult.

Monday: Mixed-herb omelet with applewood-smoked bacon; side of sauteed spinach
Saturday: Scrambled eggs with bacon at your neighborhood diner; swap cottage cheese with hash browns

Both of those sound good to me, and they are actually low in carbs. They appear to contain sufficient protein as well. Good luck finding cottage cheese to sub for potatoes – this is something I try to do sometimes, so I do actually know about it. At least half of the breakfast places I eat don’t have it at all, and the ones that do charge you for substitutions. Most will charge you the normal price to leave off the hash browns (or anything else) and then charge you for a side of cottage cheese. It’s annoying. Anyway, on to the other days.

Tuesday: Steel-cut oatmeal with organic raspberries and sliced almonds

Wednesday: Sprouted-grain toast with almond or peanut butter; whole orange

Thursday: (oat-bran deal mentioned above)

Friday: Steel-cut oatmeal with halved, raw walnuts and fresh blueberries

Sunday: Time to cheat again: banana pancakes with melted butter and maple syrup

Since he acknowledges that Sunday is a “cheat” (I hate that term), I didn’t bother to run the numbers on it. On a typical day, breakfast averages out to 350 calories, 15g of protein and 50g of carbs. That is a recipe for failure. I’m too lazy to analyze all the meals (and let’s face it, reader’s eyes would glaze over), but this is a lot of cooking for not enough calories. He later quotes Gary Taubes’ rules for weight loss, and the first one is to eat 20g or fewer carbohydrates a day. This meal plan is moderate in carbs, but it’s nowhere near 20g! He’s big on the glycemic index, but it does not take into account the total carb count, just the way a food causes a diabetic’s blood sugar to react. A low-GI food can be very high in fructose, and eating fructose is no way to lose weight. I’ve complained about the glycemic index before, of course.

His plan doesn’t include snacks, but he knows people will eat them – I know I’d be starving at 10:30 with most of those breakfasts. Here are his snack suggestions:

Stay stocked up on healthy, low-GI foods like nuts, beef jerky, cheese, plain yogurt; low-sugar fruit like berries and apples; and even energy bars made from only whole ingredients, like Lärabar, Raw Revolution, and Clif Nectar. In the store, reach for natural nut butters like Justin’s Classic Almond Butter or plain organic yogurt from Stonyfield. Pair a stick of Golden Valley Natural organic beef jerky with cheese sticks from Horizon Organic, or indulge in a low-sugar treat by looking for dark chocolate with a cacao content of greater than 70 percent.

Craving something salty? Avoid pretzels, potato chips, and rice cakes, and reach for a bag of mixed nuts or pop your own popcorn and flavor it with extra-virgin olive oil. If you like crackers, choose RyKrisp, Ryvita, or Wasa instead of Saltines, Ritz, Melba Toast, Wheat Thins, or others made from enriched wheat flour. Sweet-potato chips and even protein-packed pork rinds can be healthy snacks when consumed in moderate amounts.

Larabars and Clif Nectar bars are made of dried fruit with some nuts and are mostly carbohydrate. If you’re going to eat popcorn, why avoid rice cakes? Their nutritional profiles are very similar. And as for flavoring popcorn with olive oil…I sure hope people don’t pop the stuff in extra-virgin olive oil (oxidized fats, anyone?), so I’m assuming he suggests you should use that instead of butter. Ew!

After the awesome article on fitness, I’m really disappointed in this one. Most of Gary Taubes diet advice is taken straight from Dr. Atkins, but this reads more like a Dr. Oz diet than anything Dr. Atkins would recommend. I feel like this is an opportunity missed after the goodwill engendered by pointing out that cardio is a waste of time. You’d do a lot better following the Tim Feriss slow carb diet.

First of all, they don’t eat there and take pride in that fact. Second, McDonald’s menu and marketing is not aimed at them, so complaining that the menu isn’t what they want is utterly [...]]]> It really drives me nuts when elite food writers complain about the McDonald’s Menu or, really, complain about McDonald’s at all.

First of all, they don’t eat there and take pride in that fact. Second, McDonald’s menu and marketing is not aimed at them, so complaining that the menu isn’t what they want is utterly pointless. It just comes off as elitism, and the food writing world does not need more of that.

The article I’m about to complain about can be read here and is titled “How to Make Oatmeal…Wrong.”

From a marketing perspective, they can do almost nothing wrong; from a nutritional perspective, they can do almost nothing right, as the oatmeal fiasco demonstrates.

Yes, Mark Bittman feels that the Fruit and Maple Oatmeal reaches the level of a “fiasco.”

First, he complains that the Oatmeal has too many ingredients:

Real oatmeal contains no ingredients; rather, it is an ingredient. As such, it’s a promising lifesaver: oats are easy to grow in almost any non-extreme climate and, minimally processed, they’re profoundly nourishing, inexpensive and ridiculously easy to cook.

If people wanted to cook at home at all, they wouldn’t be at McDonald’s. No matter how easy it is, they’ve washed up at a fast food joint. I take serious issue with calling oatmeal “profoundly nourishing.” Mr. Bittman consistently compares the McDonald’s product to rolled oats. First is the USDA Nutrition facts for regular oatmeal, second is the USDA Nutrition Facts for a medium sweet potato.

The oatmeal has a wee bit of fat and a little protein, but it’s basically a pure carbohydrate. Compare that to the mighty sweet potato. Oatmeal pales in comparison in terms of nutrition, and the sweet potato does it with 50% fewer calories. I would not call either profoundly nourishing, but among starches, the sweet potato kicks oatmeal’s ass.

The oatmeal and McDonald’s story broke late last year, when Mickey D’s, in its ongoing effort to tell us that it’s offering “a selection of balanced choices” (and to keep in step with arch-rival Starbucks) began to sell the cereal.

By balanced choices, McDonald’s means much lower fat than their other breakfast offerings. End of story there – it certainly meets that criteria.

I’m sure that Starbucks would be both surprised and offended to find that McDonald’s is its “arch rival.” Seriously, WTF? I don’t think Mr. Bittman patronizes Starbucks either. Certainly, they don’t compete in the same market. McDonald’s offers no pastries, and Starbucks has only microwaved sandwiches which cannot be customized in any way. McDonald’s will sell you any combination of breakfast components and they are cooked to order.

Yet in typical McDonald’s fashion, the company is doing everything it can to turn oatmeal into yet another bad choice. (Not only that, they’ve made it more expensive than a double-cheeseburger: $2.38 per serving in New York.)

Newsflash: you can’t choose between oatmeal and and a double-cheeseburger as they are not on the menu at the same time. I call apples-to-oranges on this one.

“Cream” (which contains seven ingredients, two of them actual dairy) is automatically added;

Again, Mr. Bittman is wildly out of touch here. “Cream”, as it is sold in a typical grocery store also contains similar bullshit ingredients. The only way I can get cream that’s really just cream is to drive 100 miles round trip to a Whole Foods or to make a special trip to a local store that carries local farm direct products. As cream with garbage in it is a personal annoyance of mine, I buy the locavore stuff, but it does cost three times as much and the hours are very limited. Sometimes it’s short dated, and sometimes they run out. Most people simply won’t bother. Here’s a picture I took this morning of an ordinary store brand light cream:

Five ingredients, and only two of them are dairy.

A more accurate description than “100 percent natural whole-grain oats,” “plump raisins,” “sweet cranberries” and “crisp fresh apples” would be “oats, sugar, sweetened dried fruit, cream and 11 weird ingredients you would never keep in your kitchen.”

Again, he apparently doesn’t keep soy milk in his kitchen. It also contains some of the same weird fillers and stabilizers. Most people have a fridge full of dairy products containing this stuff, even the ones who never eat at McDonald’s and think they eat very healthily. In fact, the more fat that has been sucked out of a dairy product, the more weird fillers, emulsifiers and stabilizers it contains. And we know that lipophobes think they eat very healthily.

Since we know there are barely any rules governing promotion of foods, one might wonder how this compares to real oatmeal, besides being 10 times as expensive. Some will say that it tastes better, but that’s because they’re addicted to sickly sweet foods, which is what this bowlful of wholesome is.

Dude, all restaurant food is much more expensive. A 10x markup isn’t especially high. I’ll get to the sweet part in just a moment.

If you don’t want to bother with the stove at all, you could put some rolled oats (instant not necessary) in a glass or bowl, along with a teeny pinch of salt, sugar or maple syrup or honey, maybe some dried fruit. Add milk and let stand for a minute (or 10). Eat. Eat while you’re walking around getting dressed. And then talk to me about convenience.

Yum! Cold oatmeal! Besides, if you add sweetener and dried fruit, you’ll get right up to the sugar level of the McDonald’s product: 57g of carbohydrate. If you make a one cup serving of old fashioned oats and add two tablespoons of raisins and one tablespoon of honey (those are all the default serving sizes of each thing, per the USDA), your cereal will have, drumroll please, 57g of carbohydrate!

I asked them this, via e-mail: “Why could you not make oatmeal with nothing more than real oats and plain water, and offer customers a sweetener or two (honey, the only food on earth that doesn’t spoil, would seem a natural fit for this purpose), a packet of mixed dried fruit, and half-and-half or — even better — skim milk?”

Their answer, via e-mail and through a spokesperson (FMO is “fruit and maple oatmeal”): “Customers can order FMO with or without the light cream, brown sugar and the fruit. Our menu is entirely customizable by request with our ‘Made for You’ platform that has been in place since the late 90s.”

Ah yes, skim milk. Sooo delicious with oatmeal. Jesus Christ. Grim. Meathook. Future.

Anyway, McDonald’s has packets of honey, but since he doesn’t eat there, I wouldn’t expect him to know that. I can’t figure out why anyone would want oatmeal with NOTHING in it, nor can I figure out what Mr. Vegan-Until-6pm has against the dried cranberries and diced apples McDonald’s puts in the FMO.

Here’s what it is: Diced Apples (Apples, calcium ascorbate [a blend of calcium and vitamin C to maintain freshness and color]), Cranberry Raisin Blend (Dried sweetened cranberries (sugar, cranberries), California raisins, golden raisins, sunflower oil, sulfur dioxide (preservative)).

He has apparently never read the ingredients in a package of dried cranberries that might be purchased by the typical member of the proletariat.

I would never eat this oatmeal and not just because it contains gluten (barley malt – tasty stuff, as I’m sure you know if you drink beer or scotch). I would never eat a 57g serving of carbs and call it breakfast whether I made it myself or someone else made it for me. I need protein in all my meals, and I much prefer some fat in my food as well.

Whether Bittman knows it or not, the nutritional profile of the McDonald’s oatmeal is damned close to what he’d make in his own kitchen. I know he’s not the only one that thinks that is an appropriate breakfast, so for those that do, you can now get it at McDonald’s.

I already have a Level-1 CrossFit certification, but liability insurance companies do not [...]]]> At present, my blogging has been very thin because I’ve got a lot of other things going on. Sadly, these things are not paid work, but the primary distraction from keeping up my blog has been studying for a personal trainer certification.

I already have a Level-1 CrossFit certification, but liability insurance companies do not recognize that as a mainstream certification and thus charge more for insurance. If I get a mainstream certification, I get an annual insurance discount that covers the certification in the first year. Seems like a no-brainer here, but there’s 310 pages of material that I need to absorb.

A lot of it has been interesting – I had forgotten a fair amount of biology (big shock, I last studied that in high school – all my college science was physics), and the biomechanics chapters were interesting on their own.

Of course there are 30 pages on nutrition. Of course it’s all conventional wisdom. On the second page, I encountered this:

For athletes and physically active adults, each meal should consist of 60-65% of the calories from carbohydrates, specifically complex carbohydrates, 15% from lean protein and 10% from fat. Carbohydrates, which are converted to the forms glucose and glycogen, are the body’s primary source of instant energy and longer term energy storage, respectively. Additionally, carbohydrates are required to burn fat; without a sufficient quantity of carbohydrates, a person will not effectively lose body fat. Protein is required to build and repair body tissues and structures. It is also used in the process of synthesizing hormones and is also used in the process of synthesizing hormones and hemoglobin, and is the body’s alternative source of energy if there is an insufficient source of carbohydrates.

That ought to come as a shock to anyone who has lost weight on Atkins Induction.

While protein can be turned into glucose, that process does not require carbohydrates. Furthermore, they seem to have not considered ketones that are created out of your own fat, and your brain can certainly run on ketones.

I think there’s a lot [...]]]> After years of long study of nutrition and diet, I seem to be coming around to the idea that you can either have carbs or fat along with your protein, but not both. When I saw that this appeared to be Zoe Harcombe’s thing, I bought her book right away.

I think there’s a lot of great information in there, particularly the folly of counting calories. Her basic rules are good ones, but her explanations of what is a carb meal and what is a fat meal bother me. First, here are her three rules:

1. Don’t eat processed foods;
2. Don’t eat fats and carbohydrates at the same meal;
3. Don’t eat foods that cause your cravings.

Personally, I don’t really have food cravings. All my compliance issues with diets are usually about eating too much generally, but anyway, these are sound, yes?

The problem is this: she defines anything containing a food that had a face to be a “fat” meal, which means that fish and lean meat cannot be eaten with a high carb meal. Carb meals may contain tofu, quorn, milk, cottage cheese or high quality yogurt. Skinless chicken breast and fish aren’t OK, but coconut milk is OK? She has a recipe for a delicious sounding butternut squash curry that contains 25g of creamed coconut per serving. That’s 195 calories and 16.9g of fat. It’s all healthy fat, but it’s still fat. For 6g of fat and 150 calories, you could have a 1/3 lb. pork chop, so why is the prohibition on meat instead of fat?

Why allow tofu at all? Soy can’t be eaten by humans if not processed, so I’m not really clear why it’s allowed at all. It causes problems for *so* many people, and if they can’t eat dairy, what’s left? Quorn? I still can’t actually figure out what that stuff is. The wiki entry for mycoprotein sounds kind of…creepy somehow. “The fungus can double its mass every five hours.” Ewww…

I think she’s really on to something here, but the arbitrary nature of how she defines a fat meal and a carb meal really leaves me cold. I know a lot of people find fat to be the most satisfying macronutrient, but for me, it’s definitely protein. There’s an experiment in my future, but done my own way.

Like any diet that’s ad libitum, I don’t think I’d lose weight on it, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a healthy way to eat. I am leery of the fact that the non-mixing of carbs and fat just “sounds right” to me, but I think it’s worth a try for maintaining weight while eating some high carbohydrate meals. Sometimes, the hunting wasn’t good.

His basic rules for eating are much more tight with the fat than what I know a lot of Primal/Paleo types eat. I have to say that, to be honest, I cannot free-eat Paleo [...]]]> I’m currently reading Art DeVany’s new book (The New Evolution Diet) – only the Kindle version is out at the moment.

His basic rules for eating are much more tight with the fat than what I know a lot of Primal/Paleo types eat. I have to say that, to be honest, I cannot free-eat Paleo with unlimited fat and expect to lose weight. I don’t *gain* weight, but don’t lose any either. He does allow for cheese as a flavoring – just not much of it – so that sets him apart from Cordain (Loren Cordain, The Paleo Diet). He also recommends no dried fruit at all and limited nuts. Cordain is pretty generous with both.

I do say that I share some of the paleosphere’s confusion on the canola oil thing. Why allow ANY OF IT at all? Cordain has changed his mind about it, and I think he’s right. If you need cooking oil, use light olive oil or 100% olive oil (these are more refined than extra-virgin and don’t burn anywhere near so readily).

I’m just getting to the bit on fitness, something I’m very interested to see.

Eventually, I’ll put up a proper review.

I’m not willing to carry the paleo placard in lieu of common sense. No, we don’t eat grains, legumes, or sugar. Yes, we eat plenty of grass fed meats, saturated fats, and [...]]]> I’m going to start out plugging this blog entry at Tribe of Five, because it echoes a lot of my feelings on this subject.

I’m not willing to carry the paleo placard in lieu of common sense. No, we don’t eat grains, legumes, or sugar. Yes, we eat plenty of grass fed meats, saturated fats, and fermented foods. But, so what? I’m not going to Trader Joes, picking up a pack of “free range” eggs and a jar of coconut oil and smugly walking out, feeling like I’m doing my part for the paleo party. We need to be connected to our food, to our farmers, to our land, and to ourselves in order to really understand how our ancestors walked this earth. That’s the only way we can make a difference of significance.

You should read the whole entry – it’s worth the few minutes it will take.

I’ve been trying to write something about this without sounding like a complete bitch. You don’t win friends by beating people over the head with your ideas. These entries at Honest Meat have been kicking around in my brain since they were written.

• So You Say You Want A Food Revolution?
• So You Say You Want a Food Revolution? Part Dos
• The End of our Farm

The following is the most relevant bit to me, but if you want to know more about the trials and tribulations of running a small biodynamic farm, read the entries above:

We certainly have some amazing customers, some who have been with us since the beginning, others who have loaned us money, and many who put faith in us when purchasing an egg share. We get the occasional compliment like “your eggs changed my life” or “I feel comfortable eating meat again when it is from you”. Yet we have other customers who want our products to be cheaper, for us to stop using organic feed, or for us to lower our standards in other ways. There are people who want us to use a soy-free feed, but yet are not willing to pay the added price that a non soy feed will cost (it takes longer to grow out an animal without soy and laying hens produce fewer eggs when not on soy). Many customers, in fact, will choose to get eggs from several states away from a farm they have never seen in order to get a soy-free egg or they will buy bacon or sausage that is sugar-free but happens to come from some nameless farmer in Iowa. Many people prioritize their personal dietary preferences du jour (I say “du jour” because these preferences change often over time) over supporting an actual local farmer or perhaps over humane animal care, environmental sustainability, etc. I encourage you all to look at the bigger picture and think about what values you want to support.

I know a lot of paleo peeps on the web would not approve of the beef I buy from the farm where I get my eggs and raw milk. Some of the meat they sell was grain finished for the last 30 days, but I care a lot more about the fact that I might have seen that beef out walking around and eating grass for the other part of it’s life. Some of the hamburger I’ve been eating for the last few months actually came from a former dairy cow, so it’s the final product of raw milk production. That cow ate grass for probably six years. The meat is a bit different than a steer that’s raised in a short window solely for meat, but it’s still quite good. I think it’s a great deal at $3.89 per pound.

The pork I buy is out in a pasture where the pigs can do as they like. They do root and dig, but they also get a corn and soy feed. What I care about is the fact that when I go to pick up my meat share once a month, my future meat is out there living a normal piggy life. They never use farrowing crates for piglets. It does not really matter to me if their feed is organic or contains soy. I care more about Haskins Family Farm staying in business. He makes most of his money on bacon, and you need fatty pigs for that. The realities of the marketplace are that people want particular cuts from an animal, and are not interested in many of the others. Corn and soy make for more pork belly. You have to pick and choose what’s important to you.

Speaking of Haskin’s Family Farm, a while back I wrote about stewing hens. That bird came from their farm, and that hen laid (I’m sure) many tasty eggs while she ate bugs and was fed a grain supplement and was protected from predators (foxes are a real problem – they have a dog out at night when foxes hunt and the chickens are in their coop). Again, it’s the end product of your breakfast eggs – it’s worth learning to work with it, especially if you like schmaltz.

Small scale farming will not make you a millionaire – the only reason to do it is because you want better food for yourself and your family, and you make that work by selling in what is a difficult marketplace. Part of the issue is slaughter.

This is from Honest Meat:

This topic warrants a much longer post, but basically California has only a handful of USDA-inspected slaughter and butcher facilities. Because there are only a few, it is hard to even get an appointment to bring your animals in (one place we called had a 7 month waiting list!). Also, because these abattoirs don’t have much competition, they don’t have to provide high-quality customer service to ranchers. They can charge what they want, they can choose not to follow your detailed butchering instructions (for example, put nitrates in the hams that you asked for “nitrate-free”, cut all the fat off your pork chops when you asked for 2 inches of fat on them, etc.). These abattoirs charge you by the carcass weight of your animal and then sometime they won’t even give you the whole animal back that you paid for, such as taking the head, the organ meats, the feet, etc.

The situation in Virginia is much the same. The Haskins Family can’t seem to get necks and organs back from their chicken processor. I’m not really clear on whether it’s not allowed for that processor or if it’s more of a demand issue where the processor just doesn’t have to care much what the customer wants. Their pigs are taken to True and Essential Meats in Harrisonburg, which was resurrected through the efforts Joel Salatin of Polyface Farm. Without them, they have few options.

What this all boils down to for me is that buying meat at Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s is no different than buying at a conventional supermarket. I know just as little about the meat either way. Most of TJ’s and WF’s products come from industrial farms that have jumped through the hoops to get that organic label. If you read the Omnivore’s Dilemma, you know that’s worth the paper it’s printed on and nothing more. Small farms often can’t manage that, but the meat is more honest and lives a normal life, even if it’s getting a grain or soy supplement. These people are barely making this work – support them instead of buying what is, let’s face it, mystery meat from supermarkets, even organic ones.

If you join a meat CSA, you might get cuts you have no clue what to do with, but it’s worth it. Ask the farmer what to do with it – they always have ideas. Branch out from the premium cuts – your grandmothers and great-grandmothers did. Look at old cookbooks for more ideas. It’s more economical, and you’ll eat more variety this way and support people who are worth the effort.