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.

Normally, I love diet books [...]]]> I’ve been reading chapters of Good Calories, Bad Calories again, and I was finally moved to look for Dr. Yudkin’s books on Amazon. His books Pure White and Deadly and Sweet and Dangerous cost way too much, but I did buy a copy of Eat Well, Slim Well.

Normally, I love diet books that are all about the meal plans, as this one is, but the recipes and meal plans were pretty disappointing. I think, for my taste, the original Atkins book (1972) is better.

Anyway, the introduction *was* interesting, and I’ve put up a PDF of it.

Here is a list of “unrestricted” foods: those, that is, which you don’t have to limit but which limit themselves. They are meat, poultry, fish, eggs, butter, margarine, cream, leafy vegetables. In addition, you should take between half and one pint of milk a day, up to half a pound of fruit, and up to two ounces of cheese.

The margarine is not something anyone recommends now, but in 1982 (the copyright date), people were a lot more warm and fuzzy about it.

Anyway, I’m keeping an eye out for a cheap copy of Pure White and Deadly.

I’m still trying to sort it out, but if I look at my food journals and the timing of large, sudden weight gains, a pattern emerges. I think that [...]]]> I don’t think I can call the Dr. Gundry plan a success as I have gained three pounds in a little over a week.

I’m still trying to sort it out, but if I look at my food journals and the timing of large, sudden weight gains, a pattern emerges. I think that broccoli causes me to bloat like mad, retain water and therefore gain weight. The morning after the days I was *out* of broccoli, I had weight losses, so I feel like there’s some confirmation there. I’m sure some people would love to say that they have “broccoli intolerance”, but I recently re-discovered that I like it. It’s not something I’ve eaten much in the last few years; maybe a couple of bits off a veggie platter at a party, and that’s all. Back in my single (and broke) days, I used to eat pasta mixed with carrots, broccoli, onions and parmesan for many dinners. If I was super broke, the pasta was ramen, but the basic ingredients were the same. I never ate broccoli on Atkins either – I had cauliflower fairly often, but again, I haven’t eaten that for a long time either.

As a correction, I’m only eating animal products today. In particular, I want my system to recover from the ridiculous amount of fiber this plan entails due to the ad libitum consumption of green vegetables and the large-ish quantity of nuts. Since the protein is pretty limited and the fruit allowed is only two servings per day, I’ve really been loading up on the green vegetables. I don’t think the fruit is an issue for me at all as there’s no pattern with that and weight gain. I also don’t have a problem with the sugar. I can, for instance, eat a banana all by itself, and my blood glucose is 83 an hour later. I do equally well with apples.

But what animal products do *not* contain is fiber. I’ve generally found that fat, not fiber, is required for proper digestion. I’m not the only one who thinks fiber isn’t really important – fiber gets its bowel-moving reputation by creating mucous that is an response to *irritation* in the digestive system. There’s an entire (very informative) chapter on fiber in Good Calories, Bad Calories that explains how it came to be worshipped by the food nannies as desperately important.

I’m just glad I gained the weight and had the problems when I was completely out of cabbage. I love cabbage, though only cooked, fermented (sauerkraut) or in vinegar and oil slaw (dressing is dumped on when very hot, so it’s a little cooked). In fact, I don’t care for most cruciferous veggies raw (watercress and arugula are the exceptions), so all the broccoli I ate was well cooked. Hopefully, kale is not a problem, but when I try it again, I’ll make sure I have only known-good veggies that day. At this point, the only green vegetable I’m willing to try right away is lettuce, and what I eat tomorrow really depends on whether my plan today causes me to shed some of this bloat.

———

I wrote that last night. I lost 1.8 pounds after doing my all animal products day. I’ll probably add back in some plants today. Probably.

The way I see people talking about the GI of foods seems to indicate [...]]]> While I want to make it clear that I’m not denying the importance of insulin, I think that the importance of the GI of foods is nowhere near as useful to non-diabetics as it’s made out to be.

The way I see people talking about the GI of foods seems to indicate that they think a low GI gives them a free pass. What really ticks me off in particular is agave syrup. A food having a low GI can mean either that it’s digested slowly because it contains fiber, fat or protein. It can also mean, as it does in the case of agave syrup, that it’s almost entirely fructose. Fructose is metabolised in the liver and turned into fatty acids (raising your cholesterol and, more importantly, your triglycerides). Your body then uses it as energy or stores it as fat. Glucose is hits your bloodstream more directly and raises blood sugar. Your body either uses it or turns it in to fat to store for later.

Either way, it winds up as fat attached to your backside.

You’re better off considering the actual carbohydrate and caloric content (though you don’t have to count fiber) than you are the glycemic index. Coca-Cola has a GI of 63 (medium), and Cantaloupe has a GI of 65. Which one is better for you? Coke has 33g of sugar in a 12oz can. One-quarter of a cantaloupe has 16g of sugar, yet Cantaloupe’s GI is a little higher than Coke’s. Which is more fattening?

Let’s pretend you don’t care about your waistline. This is from a 2005 paper called “Fructose, insulin resistance, and metabolic dyslipidemia”.

These metabolic disturbances appear to underlie the induction of insulin resistance commonly observed with high fructose feeding in both humans and animal models. Fructose-induced insulin resistant states are commonly characterized by a profound metabolic dyslipidemia, which appears to result from hepatic and intestinal overproduction of atherogenic lipoprotein particles. Thus, emerging evidence from recent epidemiological and biochemical studies clearly suggests that the high dietary intake of fructose has rapidly become an important causative factor in the development of the metabolic syndrome.

Not generic “sugar” but specifically fructose: the sugar that doesn’t raise GI too much. It still messes you up. This is from the same paper:

Fructose is readily absorbed and rapidly metabolized by human liver. For thousands of years humans consumed fructose amounting to 16–20 grams per day, largely from fresh fruits. Westernization of diets has resulted in significant increases in added fructose, leading to typical daily consumptions amounting to 85–100 grams of fructose per day. The exposure of the liver to such large quantities of fructose leads to rapid stimulation of lipogenesis and TG [triglyceride] accumulation, which in turn contributes to reduced insulin sensitivity and hepatic insulin resistance/glucose intolerance.

So, no help there. Honey and Agave Syrup both have about 60 calories per tablespoon. Agave is mostly fructose, and honey about half fructose and half glucose. Table sugar actually has fewer calories per tablespoon (48), and it’s all sucrose. Maple syrup is mostly sucrose with a tiny amount of fructose and a little glucose and has 52 calories per tablespoon.

What matters with sweeteners is how much of them you use. They are 99-100% sugar, so it’s really just a matter of which one you like best. There’s nothing special about any new-fangled sweetener like agave syrup or brown rice syrup (GI 25). A low GI is not going to save you from any one of the calories from sugar that it contains, and high-fructose sweeteners might be even worse than other sugars.

And, my final point: You shouldn’t cut yourself a break on Agave syrup. People seem to think it’s more natural, but that’s just not so. It can’t compete with maple syrup or honey on that score.

“If fructose were natural, I would be able to go out to corn field and get a bucket of sweetener. I can go to a beehive and get honey that I can eat without processing it. I can go to an apple tree and pick an apple and eat it. I cannot go out into a cornfield, squeeze corn, and get fructose syrup, and I cannot go into an agave field, and get the product sold on retail shelves, as agave syrup. Falsely labeled agave fructose and high fructose corn syrup are both products of advanced chemistry and extensive food processing technology.”

Later in the same article:

“The simple answer tends to be the correct one. There is no land of milk and agave. Milk comes from goats, cows, humans, etc., and honey comes from bees. What I want people to understand is that mislabeling a sweetener like agave syrup is about money and profit, to the real determent of your health. The unethical factor is that the natural health food business has gone to great lengths in the case of agave to defraud consumers, by deceiving and lying to those who are trying to seek better health. There is something ethically worse about a company pretending to sell something all natural to people seeking health, than a mainstream company not pretending that their food is healthier. For example, nobody selling fast and junk foods is advocating it is health food. When you are in a natural health food store, you expect to pay extra money for something that is good for you. We have con artists here, pretending to deliver better health at a higher cost, when in reality it is equal to, or much worse than the many other sweeteners or harmful junk food. People are expecting to receive health, and are intentionally being defrauded for profit.”

Caveat emptor!

(Both quotes above are from Russ Bianchi, Managing Director and CEO of Adept Solutions, Inc., a global food and beverage development company.)