I’m back from the woods. I’ve barely looked at my pictures as I had work waiting for me at home. Here’s a quick log of what I did.
- 5/5/2010 – Got to the parking lot at TN91 at 5:30pm and hiked to Iron Mountain Shelter (4.1 miles)
- 5/6/2010 – Hiked from Iron Mountain Shelter to a campsite on Laurel Fork about .5 miles north of the falls (22.7 miles)
- 5/7/2010 – Hiked to Mountaineer Shelter (17.5 miles)
- 5/8/2010 – Hiked to US 19E (8.8 miles)
- 5/9/2010 – Hiked from Carver Gap to Overmountain Shelter (5 miles)
- 5/10/2010 – Hiked from Overmountain Shelter to US 19E (8.8 miles)
That really long day tore up my feet a bit, and I was out there for sightseeing since I had done the section before. I decided to take it easy over the last bit so that I wouldn’t be wrecked for days after I got home.
I met dozens of thru-hikers. I’m going to throw some names out in no particular order: Bimbo, Snack Attack, H2, Lift and Step, Nature’s Own, G-Hippie, Miles (Two of those), Salty, Achilles the Red, Sideshow, Country Gold, Ripple, Gypsy Lulu, Trashman, Dumpster Bear, Mountain Tattoo, Carvin, Tiny Dancer, Ugly Tuna, Wingin’ It, Lowrider, Squirrel, Sly. There’s a bunch more – maybe I’ll remember more names, and maybe I won’t.
Well, I didn’t get my actual menu items up, and it’s not going to happen before I go hiking. Work has been taking up my time that I would normally use for blogging. We all have to work some time!
Anyway, I’m not sure what the legality of this is, honestly, but this magazine is off the news stands, their website has absolutely no content from the magazine, and this is not the kind of thing you find on microfiche at the library!
The small images link to large ones.
After the yelling fest that happened at Free The Animal over white potatoes, I’m really hesitant to even refer to my diet as “Paleo-ish”. If there’s a nice, tidy word for not eating grains and legumes, I’m that. I suppose primal would cut it. At the moment, I’m not eating white potatoes and nut/seed oils. I eat a piece of gluten-free bread, a bit of rice or a gluten-free tortilla once in a while, but I stick to my rules about 95% of the time. Certainly, these rules make my diet weird to other people, but since I consume rather a lot of dairy, I cannot say that I’m following a Paleo Diet (note capital letters).
Anyway, I’ve done some analysis on my diet for April 18-24.
I have mixed feelings about logging what I eat into Fitday. I find that I do need to do it if I’m trying to do an under eating day, but otherwise, it seems to psych me out. If I’m not deliberately under eating, I just write down everything I eat. As it turns out, this week, I wrote down all five days I ate a normal amount. I swear, I did not fake this. It really is a coincidence!
Here are the individual days so you can see what I mean.
I really thought I ate more than an average of 2,000 calories a day. If you’d asked me, I’d have said it was closer to 2,200 or even 2,400, but I guess the “down days” really knock down the average.
Why the under-eating days? Basically, I spent about a month in St. Louis doing a lot of socializing and eating out at many different restaurants. In Virginia, I have a system to “eat clean” at every restaurant we routinely visit. Since I have celiac and Tino is a vegetarian, we don’t eat just anywhere, and I wind up asking a lot of questions or reading a lot of info on line. Anyway, long-story-short: I ate a lot of deep fried white potatoes, and I drank a lot of booze. I average out to about a glass of wine or one cocktail a day at home, but in St. Louis? I average out to more like double that, and most of it is not wine. Since I’ve been home, I’ve been doing kind of a bang-bang thing where if I’m over the trend, I eat very lightly that day. This has been averaging about twice a week, and I shoot for 1,250 calories on those days. I cut back across the board, but a lot of the cut comes from fats.
While I think it’s interesting to see a shopping list for someone who eats like this if you’re new at it, I was also really curious to see what my market order would look like for a week. I didn’t actually buy all of this in preparation for last week, this is what I actually ate according to what I put into Fitday. When I ate out, what I ate was easily reproducible in my own kitchen, so I added it to the order. I’ll cover my strategy for eating out some other time. I estimate the cost for this list between $60 and $75, and I do watch my grocery costs very closely, so I’m probably quite close on that number.
So, here’s the list. (This will pop-up a new window!)
I knew I ate a lot of produce, but wow, seeing them all on this list … the quantity really surprised me.
The asparagus and spring onions were from the Freight Station Farmer’s Market in Winchester, VA. I think that’s going to be our way of getting local veggies this year since we did not join a CSA. We are going there again today and will probably buy more from the farmer I bought from last time. As it turns out, she gets raw milk from Pine Grove Farm, and my dairy farmer had nice things to say about her. I was shocked to found out that West Virginia is one of those states where raw milk is illegal, like Maryland.
I had some help eating the pineapple, but it’s much cheaper to buy a fresh one if you want fresh pineapple at all. They were on sale for $3 at Wal-Mart. The bok-choy was similarly on sale at Wal-Mart for $1. Lemons and limes are consistently cheaper there, and often avocadoes are too. Yes, I buy stuff at Wal-Mart, and I even eat at McDonald’s (again, ingredient lists yield a strategy for this).
Here’s a quote from Ray Audette himself from this interview:
Q: Unfortunately the palaeo way can be an expensive one…..those who promote it are often seem to be affluent professionals with big incomes, able to afford lots of meat and organic vegetables. Do you have anything to share in terms of eating a healthy, paleo diet on a budget? How would the unemployed or student cope? Can we avoid being forced onto cheap carbs to survive?
A: I am very poor. I shop at Walmart and other supermarkets. I often eat at McDonalds. I don’t buy into the whole “organic” thing. I don’t find my diet to be a financial burden.
I’ve always seen organic as a big business, just based on how agriculture works in the United States. Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma just confirmed all my suspicions. Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods are not your friends – they are in it to make a buck, and organic certifications are what they are. At some point, I will discuss how I think organic has become a special kind of bullshit. Local and Biodynamic farms (like Polyface or the farm where I get my eggs, milk and now chicken) ALWAYS trump organic. Talking to the farmer is way more important than an organic certification.
I get a dozen eggs and a 1/2 gallon of raw milk every week from the same farm. The half and half is the first I’ve had in a while – I found a reasonable source for local, grass-fed half & half that is pasteurized in the normal way, unhomogenized and contains nothing but milk and cream. The net cost on the milk is $6 a week, the eggs cost $3 a dozen and the cream was $4 a quart.
The chicken breast and steaks were out of my freezer, and both were from Costco. I’ve used up all the chicken, and I’ve now replaced it with cut-up pastured broiler from the farm where I get my milk and eggs. Pastured chicken is not available consistently at a reasonable price, so I do sometimes buy antibiotic and hormone-free from the grocery store. My grocery store carries no ground beef that I’m willing to buy, so if I can’t make it to the butcher to get local, grass-fed ground beef, I buy ground bison. The ham was the last bit left from Easter. The summer sausage is locally produced by my trusted butcher who sells only local humanely-raised and slaughtered meat. She can always tell me about the farm and the farmer.
I am using Tamari again after not touching any soy (knowingly, anyway) for about 9 months. It doesn’t seem to be an issue for me, and it’s a really useful ingredient. I think that’s all I have to say for now. I will work on explaining *how* I ate all of this in my next post, but I really need to do some work for, you know, MONEY, so this is it for now.
In another post, a commenter said they were having a hard time figuring out what people following Paleo or Primal diet were actually eating on a day to day basis. They also expressed interest in what I was going to eat while backpacking, and I will get to that in a moment.
Since I see photos of Paleo and Primal meals all over the web, I have to assume the commenter has looked hard enough to find that stuff. What I actually think *is* lacking, and maybe this is what they mean, is meal plans. With a meal plan, you can develop a shopping list. With a few photos of food, you can only really get the most basic ideas. Maybe you’d be presented with a way you hadn’t thought of using a vegetable or meat, but for the most part, the more mundane stuff is missing.
It’s not that I think this way of eating is boring, but what people post on their blog in terms of photos and recipes doesn’t really cover the day to day patterns of eating. It also doesn’t explain how to shop efficiently and get the most out of your groceries. What’s the weekly cycle of shopping for fresh meat, vegetables and fruit and then eating down the fridge? Added to that is an issue I’ve mentioned before: a lot of Paleo/Primal recipes are imitations of neolithic foods. I didn’t eat pancakes before, so why would I want them now?
Grocery lists and meal plans for a low-budget whole foods diet free of grains and legumes have long been on my list of things to do. Maybe it will bubble up to the top, but not today. This is a digression from my topic for today though: what I’m eating while backpacking.
For my last trip (June of 2009), I hiked down the Appalachian Trail from Gettysburg, PA to Harper’s Ferry, WV. The day I hiked into HF turned out to be one of the hottest days we saw all summer, and during the last bit of it, while I was walking through town among tourists eating drippy food (it was a Saturday) was absolutely miserable. The rest of the trip was nice, if a bit too warm, especially at night. I did one thing I’d never done before: I did not bring a stove.
I made the decision at the last minute. Every hike I run across at least one person (or couple) that don’t cook while backpacking, even people who thruhike the 2,100 miles of the Appalachian Trail mostly without cooking. I was trying to use a different backpack, and the rigidity of the pot and stove just made it impossible for me to fit my food and gear into that pack. This was all about volume and not weight, but I really wanted to use that pack, so I decided to go without the pot and the stove.
It worked out really well, and not because the weather was warm. I just cannot believe how much time I was spending farting around with the whole cooking process. Mostly, however, it took me an eternity to get GOING in the morning. I would delay doing my final packing because as long as I *could* have it, I’d think that I did want some hot tea (or coffee, but mostly I do tea on the trail). Knowing that my breakfast was ready to eat and that’s all there was did not depress me at all – it got me going a lot earlier. As far as lunch and dinner went, I had already gotten into a thing where I’d do my cooking at lunch or I would stop and cook dinner early so that I could hike nearly until dark and not have to mess with boiling water and waiting for stuff to cook while it was actually dark.
The reason I like to hike later in the day is that I have, for whatever reason, a lot more energy from 3pm to 8pm (roughly) than at any other time to day. It allowed me to take advantage of that, and it helped me get going in the morning – both things that are quite desirable.
It’s going to be colder hiking in May at high elevations, so I am bringing a cooking pot and some tea bags. I’m also bringing some instant coffee because I can make that with cold water, but if there’s a fire going, I can boil some water. Due to the way woodland water sources work, a pot is often very handy for dipping water out of a stream anyway, so even if I never boil water in it, it’s still useful. I’m also going to use my larger capacity pack which is actually also lighter than the smaller capacity pack I took in June.
As far as weight goes, my no-cook food weighs about 1.5 lbs. per day. This is about what my previous mix of cooked and no-cooked foods weighed. I really thought I had been gaining an advantage by carrying dehydrated stuff, but apparently not. Here’s what I’m planning to carry for each day:
And here’s a macronutrient breakdown:
And here are the RDAs, not that they necessarily apply if you’re not eating grains:
I put a Clif Nectar bar into Fitday, but I’m actually carrying a mix of LaraBars and Clif Nectar bars. Clif Nectars are no longer made, but they were very similar to LaraBars. They are 100% organic, gluten-free and contain five or fewer all natural ingredients. Both are just smashed up fruits and nuts with spices or cocoa powder added. The only Clif Nectar I’m sad to see go is the one that had cocoa and coffee in it. Those were awesome.
The powdered coconut milk is from Wilderness Family Naturals. It does not like to dissolve in cold water, but I mixed some up at home by shaking the hell out of it (in very light plastic bottle I’m bringing for that purpose), and it was good enough to drink. Not perfect, but I really like coconut milk, so definitely good enough for me.
I dehydrated shredded carrots, and they are part of a salad-y thing that can be rehydrated in cold water with the pineapple. I have crystallized lemon (TrueLemon) and honey packets to make a dressing for it. I don’t really go in for honey at home, but considering the incredible work I’m doing out there, the larger amount of sugars I’m eating are just fine. I don’t eat much dried fruit at home, and I rarely eat food bars either.
The salmon is in foil packets. The 5 oz. of beef is actually 2 oz. of homemade jerky. The summer sausage is ordinary summer sausage. I have some fantastic local summer sausage that I wanted to use, but it’s got cheese and herbs and all kinds of stuff in it, and I’m not sure it will hold up for five days in my pack. I know the ordinary grocery store kind holds up just fine. So does cheddar cheese and butter, but I decided to carry no dairy on this trip. Coconut cream is something I can eat all on it’s own, and I can’t really do that with butter.
I’ll have a few extra things in case I need them, probably some more Clif Nectar/LaraBars. I will also have a few tea bags and some instant coffee, but as far as extra food goes…there’s a steak house (that’s hiker friendly) .3 miles off the trail right in the middle of my hike. I think it’s unlikely that I will pass it by, and there are other opportunities to eat food that I’m not carrying, so I will ultimately finish with some food left.
Salt, like many other foods, has been demonized by what we believe to be current science. It’s one of those things that “everybody knows”, so they accept that something they like is something they should eat less of.
The thing is that there’s no connection between blood pressure and salt. It’s never been proven. Gary Taubes has an article about it that you can read on line called “The (Political) Science of Salt.”
You really should read it, so I’m not going to reprint, summarize and quote too much of it here. It’s so much worse than I thought. It’s worse than the cholesterol “studies.”1 The so-called science behind the blood pressure/salt relationship is even more lacking.
Through the early 1980s, the scientific discord over salt reduction was buried beneath the public attention given to the benefits of avoiding salt. The NHBPEP had decreed since its inception in 1972 that salt was an unnecessary evil, a conclusion reached as well by a host of medical organizations, not to mention the National Academy of Sciences and the Surgeon General. By 1978, the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a consumer advocacy group, was describing salt as “the deadly white powder you already snort” and lobbying Congress to require food labeling on high-salt foods. In 1981, the FDA launched a series of “sodium initiatives” aimed at reducing the nation’s salt intake.
Not until after these campaigns were well under way, however, did researchers set out to do studies that might be powerful enough to resolve the underlying controversy. The first was the Scottish Heart Health Study, launched in 1984 by epidemiologist Hugh Tunstall-Pedoe and colleagues at the Ninewells Hospital and Medical School in Dundee, Scotland. The researchers used questionnaires, physical exams, and 24-hour urine samples to establish the risk factors for cardiovascular disease in 7300 Scottish men. This was an order of magnitude larger than any intrapopulation study ever done with 24-hour urine samples. The BMJ published the results in 1988: Potassium, which is in fruits and vegetables, seemed to have a beneficial effect on blood pressure. Sodium had no effect.
With this result, the Scottish study vanished from the debate.
Like the saturated fat demonization and the pushing of low-fat, high-carb, low-calorie diets, the established elements desperately want it to be true. They just *know* that salt is bad for you, but they can’t prove it. Like the other two, they keep running studies to try, yet again, to prove it.
Settled science does not need more studies to prove it’s hypotheses.
The demonization of salt is something I’ve mostly been ignoring because I don’t eat that much processed food. Most of the processed stuff I eat is in restaurants, and even then, I’m always trying to get that as close to simply prepared meat, green veg and fruit, since that’s what I actually eat at home. I don’t even eat salad dressing in restaurants any more, so pulling salt out of things doesn’t affect me that much.
Unfortunately, the FDA, having solved all other problems, wants to meddle with food even more.
But proponents of mandatory salt reduction say lowering salt to more reasonable levels could reduce high blood pressure, improve health in other ways, and save 100,000 lives a year in the U.S.
If you read Taubes paper above, you know that claim has no basis in reality. None whatsoever. Worse than that:
- your tax money is being spent over and over to try to prove this
- pulling salt out of foods, like pulling out fat, will cause manufacturers to add something else to make the item palatable
- what they choose to add might be something we have NOT been eating for thousands of years
- what they choose to add might cause other deficiencies or imbalances and would constitute a vast, uncontrolled science experiment performed on the American public
- what business is it of theirs anyway?
- I don’t have high blood pressure, and you probably don’t either!
It’s only a matter of time before these jokers try to ban something Paleo/Primal types actually eat. Even if you eat little salt, you want to stay on top of this particular stupid idea.
1You’d expect that cholesterol levels of people who have just had a heart would indicate excess cholesterol is the cause. They don’t. To sum it up: That study shows that the mean LDL on heart attack hospital admissions was 104.9, mean HDL was 39.7. You were expecting those two to add up to something over 200? Wrong. Triglyceride is another story, but you never hear about that, partially because excess sugar definitely causes it to go up. Whoops! No more Snackwells for you, fattie! You can find many books that explain how statins are worthless (because the cholesterol numbers predict nothing). My favorite is Dr. Malcolm Kendrick’s The Great Cholesterol Con.
I’m currently planning a backpacking trip for early May. I’m repeating a section of the Appalachian Trail that I really liked. Once piece of that is described by the guide book as follows:
This section traverses the high balds of Hump Mountain, Yellow Mountain, and the eastern portion of Roan Mountain. The Trail passes over five summits more than 5,400 feet above sea level and skirts the shoulders of Big Yellow Mountain and Grassy Ridge. Several of the finest remaining southern Appalachian balds, with their open, grassy summits, are found in this section.
It also includes my favorite shelter (so far) on the whole of the A.T.
There it is, lookin’ all tiny from the mountain to the north. It’s an old barn, and it’s drafty, but the setting is so, so nice.
I can’t resist the Appalachians in the springtime, and I can’t hike new-to-me trail in the spring since it’s mud season in New England.
After a discussion that came up in my blog comments, I decided to try making mayonnaise again. I find it to be very easy, but I haven’t really liked the results in the past, and the recipes always make a lot of mayonnaise. The other recipe, the salad dressing, I’ve been using a lot lately. I love it.
I make both of these with an immersion blender (Cuisinart Smart Stick). I’ve had it for a long time, but I didn’t start using it all the time until I stumbled across the plastic measuring/mixing beaker recently. Not having to find something to mix in is nice, and the measuring markings on the thing also allow me to not dirty up an additional measuring cup.
Here’s the first recipe, Mustardy Mayonnaise:
1/2 cup Extra Virgin Olive Oil
1/2 cup Extra Light Olive Oil
1/4 cup White Wine Vinegar
1 T Gulden’s Spicy Brown Mustard
1/2 t. sea salt (or to taste)
1 egg
Blend vinegar, egg, mustard and salt until thoroughly mixed. With immersion blender running, add olive oils in a thin stream until completely blended.
It took longer to assemble the ingredients than to mix the mayonnaise. I think it could have used either more acid or more salt, I’m not sure which. If you’d prefer, Dijon mustard is also good in there. This mustard is mostly for making meat/fish salad mixtures or adding to a vinaigrette to improve the emulsification process.
The second recipe is for a Green Goddess Dressing. I started with a recipe from a raw foods cookbook, made some changes, and wound up with something more like a Guacamole Dressing. It’s fantastic on greens with grilled chicken or steak.
So here it is, Guacamole Green Goddess Dressing:
1/4 cup water
1/2 ripe California avocado
1/2 t. sea salt
juice of half a lime (you can use lemon if that’s all you’ve got, but lime is better)
2-3 T. chopped onion
1 minced garlic clove
1/4 t. cumin
1/2 t. chili powder
I also added a squirt of Sriracha sauce, but it is pretty spicy already.
Put everything in the beaker for the immersion blender except the avocado. Thoroughly blend up the chopped onion and garlic and everything else. Add the avocado and blend until smooth. This will dress two Big Ass Salads generously.
First: from here on out if I say PUFA, that means Polyunsaturated Fatty Acids.
For many years, I bought into the whole idea of Omega-3=good and Omega-6=bad for a a long time. I didn’t worry a lot about how much Omega-6 was in my diet (mostly from high PUFA nuts, seeds and their oils) and instead tried to balance it out with fish oil.
About a year ago, I read what Brian Peskin had to say about fish oil. He feels that the problem is not that we have too much Omega-6 but that we have too much crap Omega-6 and that fish oil supplements are mostly junk wearing a healthy halo.
Fish have no oil glands so in order to get the oil fish have to be “juiced.” Imagine putting rejected fish (those not used to sell in restaurants and supermarkets) into a blender, sifting out all the fleshy bits and bones, then encapsulating the “juice.” Not only is this just disgusting to imagine, but fish oil in such concentrations is the worst way to get your EFAs.
While this description seems hyperbolic, I had never really thought about how fish oil was produced. Generally, any industrial processing is far worse than one might imagine. In general, I’ve found people don’t really think about it at all. How many people who eat hot dogs, for instance, want to think about how they are made?
His other articles are about how saturated fats don’t cause heart disease and how being in ketosis is not dangerous and is not the same as ketoacidosis. I certainly had heard before that most of the Omega-6 and -3 in oils or nuts are already oxidized or rancid and therefore really bad for you. It’s not much of a leap to believe that fish oil is similarly oxidized during processing and could be heavily damaged by the time it gets to you. He seems to otherwise have it together, but his idea that we need to supplement Omega-6 really left me cold. Instead of dismissing fish oil, I sought out better fish oil and tried to eat more wild-caught fish. I filed his data point away.
More recently, while looking into subclinical (as defined solely by blood tests) hypothyroidism and how hard it is to get a proper diagnosis and treatment for hypothyroidism generally, I wound up reading a lot of work by Ray Peat, PhD, Dr. Broda Barnes, Dr. Bruce Rind and even more recently, a little of Dr. Mark Starr’s work. Starr’s book hasn’t shown up yet, but there’s bits salted around the web. What all these people have in common is a dislike of the current medical tests for hypothyroidism. They think they are very inaccurate, and that the net result is that people with real metabolic problems can’t get treatment. Ray Peat also has a lot of information about curing estrogen dominance and it’s inter-relationship with everything else, including hypothyroidism. He feels that PUFAs are involved with low progesterone and low thyroid conditions, and this was very interesting to me as I have very real symptoms of both.
So, eventually, I found myself reading this article at Ray Peat’s site.
In declaring EPA and DHA to be safe, the FDA neglected to evaluate their antithyroid, immunosuppressive, lipid peroxidative (Song et al., 2000), light sensitizing, and antimitochondrial effects, their depression of glucose oxidation (Delarue et al., 2003), and their contribution to metastatic cancer (Klieveri, et al., 2000), lipofuscinosis and liver damage, among other problems.
Hey, tell us what you really think!
Peat also doesn’t believe that the so-called “Essential Fatty Acids” are at all essential. He recommends getting as much of your fats as possible from saturated sources like butter, cream and coconut oil. I used to take for granted the idea of EFAs, but I recently read Peat’s dissection of one of the core rat studies (Burr and Burr, 1929).
Over the last thirty years I have asked several prominent oil researchers what the evidence is that there is such a thing as an “essential fatty acid.” One professor cited a single publication about a solitary sick person who recovered from some sickness after being given some unsaturated fat. (If he had known of any better evidence, wouldn’t he have mentioned it?) The others (if they answered at all) cited “Burr and Burr, 1929.” The surprising thing about that answer is that these people can consider any nutritional research from 1929 to be definitive. It’s very much like quoting a 1929 opinion of a physicist regarding the procedure for making a hydrogen bomb. What was known about nutrition in 1929? Most of the B vitamins weren’t even suspected, and it had been only two or three years since “vitamin B” had been subdivided into two factors, the “antineuritic factor,” B1, and the “growth factor,” B2. Burr had no way of really understanding what deficiencies or toxicities were present in his experimental diet.
He goes on to say:
Several publications between 1936 and 1944 made it very clear that Burr’s basic animal diet was deficient in various nutrients, especially vitamin B6. The disease that appeared in Burr’s animals could be cured by fat free B-vitamin preparations, or by purified vitamin B6 when it became available. A zinc deficiency produces similar symptoms, and at the time Burr did his experiments, there was no information on the effects of fats on mineral absorption.
We all know what happened next: margarine was born.
But around that time, the seed oil industry was in crisis because the use of those oils in paints and plastics was being displaced by new compounds made from petroleum. The industry needed new markets, and discovered ways to convince the public that seed oils were better than animal fats. They were called the “heart protective oils,” though human studies soon showed the same results that the animal studies had, namely, that they were toxic to the heart and increased the incidence of cancer.
Before the supposed essentiality and heart-healthiness of PUFAs were “discovered”, they were primarily used in paints and varnishes. When they oxidize they are very sticky. You may have noticed that when vegetable oil drips on something, it gets very tacky. Its unique ability to oxidize quickly made it useful in paints and varnishes. You might also note that coconut oil and olive oil do not do this. If you drip olive oil on the *outside* of the bottle accidentally, it will remain very slippery until you wash it off there. Not so with sesame and peanut oils. I’ve always found peanut butter to be disgustingly sticky.
Since I brought up healthy halos1, what about linseed oil?
Linseed oil can polymerize and the reaction is exothermic, and rags soaked in it can ignite spontaneously. Due to its polymer-like properties linseed oil is used on its own or blended with other oils, resins and solvents as an impregnator and varnish in wood finishing, as a pigment binder in oil paints, as a plasticizer and hardener in putty and in the manufacture of linoleum. The use of linseed oil has declined over the past several decades with the increased use of alkyd resins, which are similar but partially synthetic materials that resist yellowing.
Linseed oil is *flaxseed* oil. Sounds tasty, right?
If you’re interested in avoiding PUFAs, I have provided some tables below. I don’t worry too much about PUFAs in meat since those are locked up with other fats and keeping meat fresh specifically involves avoiding spoilage, and fats are the first thing to spoil. I do try not to rely on chicken too much (I love chicken broth made from bones and the carcass), and I only eat turkey on holidays anyway.
I’ve moved towards only using coconut oil, ghee and olive oil for cooking. There’s no commercial salad dressing or mayonnaise that isn’t full of PUFAs (unless it’s fat-free, then it’s full of HFCS). The same is true of anything found in a restaurant fryer. With the exception of white potatoes (and I’m not eating those at present), there’s really nothing coming out of a restaurant fryer that tempts me. Salad dressing is a snap to make from extra virgin olive oil, but I still haven’t come up with mayonnaise I like from olive oil, coconut oil and/or bacon fat, so I have not had mayo in quite a while. I know baconnaise sounds like it would be awesome, but I didn’t like it.
I now mostly stick to cashews, macadamia nuts and coconut products. I do eat almonds once in a while, and I would eat hazelnuts, but since I’m not eating mixed nuts right now, and I don’t like them enough to seek them out, they are not present in my diet. If I get sick of cashews and macs, maybe I’ll buy a pound of them.
1I will NOT go off on a tangent about agave nectar…must not go off on a tangent about agave nectar.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with Intermittent Fasting. I certainly see how it fits into the whole idea of eating as we evolved to eat, and that probably isn’t five (or six, in some cases) meals a day. Skipping meals seems to work for people when it comes to a leaning out stage where, say, a man is looking to go from 15% body fat to below 10%. Based on what I’ve seen by hanging around in the on-line nutrition and diet communities for the last few years, I’d say that IF is a useful tool in the final stage of becoming a real evolutionary bad ass. As far as using it as part of a weight loss program where you still need to lose 10% or more of your body fat? I’m not so sure about that.
Obviously, I’m not a biochemist, but let’s look at the evolutionary logic here. It’s a great strategy for us, as an animal in a state of nature, to be able to hunt hungry without hypoglycemia making us dumb and shaky and to be able to live on meat and a little bit of green forage nearly forever. At some point, however, the game is up, and the interaction of your genes and your hormones will decide that you’ve now optimized for your particular situation. For a lot of people, this means that they are still carrying around some fat they would rather not be.
I’ve noticed that a lot of people who are very successful on low-carb and paleo diets seem to get to a point where they can’t lose any more fat. Many of these people have lost quite a lot of weight, but they cannot get the last bit off. If they’ve lost 80-100 pounds, it’s the last 25. If they’ve lost 30-50 lbs, it’s the last 10-15. Some percentage of their excess weight just does not want to come off, even though their diets have worked a treat up to that point. The advice I generally see is to go lower in carbs and “add some intermittent fasting.” In low-carb circles (where they are not into skipping meals), people are generally told to go lower in carbs and control calories. Both of these things seem to be exactly the wrong advice, based on our evolutionary adaptations.
To be honest, I *hate* IF. I know people report feeling good while fasting, but I am just not one of those people. I can actually work out fasted without a blood sugar crash. I start at a blood glucose reading of 85 and after exercising, I’m closer to 105 through the magic of gluconeogenesis. This is what people who *like* intermittent fasting report, so I do not claim that I’m special or that I’m an exception to some biochemical rule.
To be perfectly clear: I’m defining a fast as no calories consumed. I don’t mean a juice fast or an egg fast, I mean no food, liquid or solid. Black coffee and tea have a few calories, but they count as non-caloric beverages for the sake of a fast.
Ultimately, what I am saying is that I sincerely doubt skipping three meals in row on a regular basis is an effective strategy to get off a weight loss plateau. If you’re already very close to your goal of being an Art DeVany type bad-ass? Then absolutely, yes.
Here’s what I see on comment boards fairly often:
Someone has been eating a low-carb Paleolithic or Primal-style diet, and has lost a bunch of excess fat and has become keto-adapted. Most people feel quite good in this state, and don’t experience any excess hunger. This is certainly a win-win for the dieter.
Women of child-bearing age may get to this state even earlier than men as their hormones are still thinking about the idea that they might get pregnant. They are eating what they think is good food, and certainly vegetables and high-quality meats can fuel you indefinitely, but it’s not a state that is conducive to weight loss. For some, it can apparently set the stage for infertility. If you read this epic comment thread on Free The Animal, you’ll find a lot of women wind that their cycles get wonky way before they look too skinny.
If you’ve got nothing available but meat and maybe some greens, your best bet for survival is to make glucose out of protein, and that’s what you’re doing. Your hormones have decided that there’s no fruit or tubers in their immediate future, so the best strategy is to hang on to that bit of fat just in case things get worse. Any fat-loss diet is about convincing your body to burn fat. In order to get it to do that, it has to be creatively starved.
And here’s something I’ve never really seen considered: what about all the foods that you’re putting off limits that you can see and smell? Might the psychology of denial have something to do with your body being unwilling to continue shedding fat? Grok wouldn’t be hunting hungry if he had food readily available, now would he?
Let’s say that our mythical person then stumbles on to a Paleo advice board and gets advice to try IF and to cut carbs lower. If it does work, then YIPPEE! you’re now adapted to eating even less. When you try to normalize your diet to that of a healthy eater that’s not consciously dieting, you have a higher chance of gaining back weight. If it doesn’t work, you’ve just put your body under more stress, possibly provoking problems with cortisol or your thyroid, and you are now worse off. None of this causes a problem for Grok, but you want to look good in a bikini, so it’s a problem for you.
I like meat and salads – really I do, but I’m not interested in living on that and nothing else. I do see a lot of hard-ass for the sake of hard-ass in Paleo/Primal circles. Intermittent Fasting and very low or zero carb diets are often the form that takes. Just because you can do that and feel good doing it does not mean that you will shed fat that way. Think about the signals you are sending your body. Do you want to work on being evolutionarily, optimally fit, or would you rather lose more fat first?
Consider just picking one of those if you’ve hit a plateau. A lot of folks seem unable to do both at the same time.
I’m not a pure paleo, nor will I ever be one. I just want to eat real food, and I’ve found that mostly sticking to paleolithic foods helps me feel better and control my weight. In the last couple of weeks, I’ve been adhering more closely than I have for a while, but one place that I do not adhere is dairy. While I agree that there’s no way to justify dairy as a paleolithic food, I still eat it. I do impose limits, however.
I have gone off all pasteurized fluid milk products (I have a raw milk share), and I only eat real cheese. If it contains anything other than milk and cream, culture or enzymes and herbs, spices or annatto, it’s not real. This means that I mostly don’t eat cheese away from home, and if my budget allowed for it, I’d only eat raw milk cheeses. There are a some places I eat that I’m confident serve actual provolone, swiss, cheddar or mozzarella cheese, but I don’t just indiscriminately eat something simply referred to as “cheese.” Generally, that’s processed American cheese, which won’t qualify.
Sour cream is another place where all manner of crap can be added – even in a product that you’d consider “real” sour cream. At this point, I only buy Daisy brand because it’s the only brand I can find locally that contains nothing but cultured Grade A cream.
Seriously, check out the labels – you’d be surprised how much crap is in typical cream cheese or even sour cream. At a minimum, they typically contain vegetable gums (yes, even full fat products). Many contain skim milk that may have been powdered and probably contains oxidized cholesterol (added for body). I used to think stuff like carrageenan and polysorbate-80 were harmless, but my digestive system seems to think otherwise.
Those gums are part of the problem with cream. Believe it or not, it’s become almost impossible to purchase non-UHT, vegetable gum and preservative-free cream in a supermarket. All the organic stuff is UHT, and all the non-organic that isn’t UHT has a bunch of crap in it.
Since Whole Foods is a 100 mile round trip, and I don’t want cream badly enough to pay $4 per pint for it from a local butcher shop that can order it for me, I mostly do without. There’s some on my raw milk share, of course, sometimes a lot, but in the interest of not having a bunch of skimmed milk I don’t want, I consume it with the milk now. I found some fabulous coconut milk for coffee, something I mentioned a short while ago.
It’s not that I think the $4 is too much for this particular cream, but having to order it ahead and pick it up during a narrow window of hours at a shop that’s off the beaten path? All of that means the price is too high. If I could buy it in the supermarket, I would not hesitate to pay $4 a pint for local, grass-fed, regular-temp pasteurized cream.
This is kind of a jumping off point for more posts on my deviations from paleo. I started with this one because I think that while I differ on this issue, the pure Paleo eaters are right – it’s a Neolithic food. The other two points of contention I have, Intermittent Fasting and Omega-3 supplementation, I feel more justified in bitching about.
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