Astrogirl » Ray Audette

What I Eat (At Home)

Nicole — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 13:03:23 +0000

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.

Paleolithic Diets and Fruit

Nicole — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 16:20:33 +0000

A lot of people talking about primal and paleo diets are really hatin’ on fruit and are big believers in long-term ketogenic diets. Fruit (except for berries and usually tomatoes) is criticized as being just being “candy from a tree” or a fructose bomb. Some folks also lump all root vegetables (yams, rutabaga, turnips, parsips, carrots) into a bucket of things that are simply too high in carbs and avoid those as well. These ideas are not just being pushed for weight loss, but life-time consumption.

First of all, there’s certainly evidence that some hunter/gatherers do eat a diet high in carbohydrate. I’ll start with Kitava, though most people who’ve studied HG diets have seen the material. The best writing I’ve seen is about the diet on Kitava can be found at Nutrition and Physical Regeneration. The original is from Whole Health Source and was written by Dr. Stephan Guyenet. It’s easier to follow the whole piece via the “diet on Kitava” link, however. Long story short: residents of the island of Kitava in Papua New Guinea do not eat grains, refined sugars, processed foods or vegetable oils and get about 70% of their calories from carbohydrate. They eat mostly root vegetables like yam and cassava, fruit, vegetables, coconut and fish. They are not especially active. If they make it to age 50 (keep in mind they have almost no access to modern medicine) their life expectancy is 75, in spite of the fact that 70% of the population smoke cigarettes.

That old Kitavan guy there practically has washboard abs, and he’s standing there in a sarong, holding a machete and smoking a cigarette. I just love this picture, and in case you don’t read Stephen’s piece at Michael’s site, I wanted to make sure y’all saw it. Anyway, moving on.

Infant mortality numbers tend to pull down the average life expectancy of any hunter/gatherer group now or in the past. This is part of the reason for the “nasty, brutish and short” meme one sees in criticisms of the emulation of an HG diet from the purveyors of conventional wisdom. One has to remember to separate the *diet* from the lack of access to emergency care, reliable birth control, pre-natal and neo-natal care and antibiotics. I don’t see any paleos suggesting that one should pass up on the best that allopathic medicine has to offer.

Here’s an interesting piece about the !Kung Diet which is partially a review of The Old Way by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas. The quote below is from her, but read the piece if you haven’t seen it because Don Matesz does discuss it more thoroughly.

“By far the most important staple foods of the Ju/wasi were roots––the twenty-five kinds of bulbs, rhizomes, corms, and tubers. The other foods were either small, such as berries, or scarce, such as truffles, or seasonal, such as certain fruits or the spinachlike leaves. Roots were the everyday meal, and even in some cases were sources of water…For the Ju/wasi as for the people of the past, roots were excellent nutrition, and best of all, unlike fruits or berries, could be noted in one season and gathered in another, as few other creatures were competing for them.”

What the !Kung and Kitavans don’t eat is grains, vegetable fats and processed foods. I’m afraid that in the low-carb uproar, the forest is being missed for the trees.

The two primary texts that recommend a modern version of the paleolithic diet (at least in my mind) are Dr. Loren Cordain’s The Paleo Diet (2002) and Ray Audette’s Neanderthin (2000). Both of these texts recommend fruit. I ran the numbers on some sample food journals from Neanderthin (post here), and while Audette’s diet is 525-658 (12-13%) calories from carb, it does include fruit. One day he has fresh squeezed orange juice, a plum and an apple. Another day he has apple juice (!), two whole tomatoes and a cup of strawberries.

Here’s one of Cordain’s suggested menus from his “Maximal Weight Loss” menu:

Breakfast:

Bowl of diced apples, shredded carrots, and raisins with cinnamon
Poached eggs
cup of decaf

Lunch:

Tuna Salad
handful of walnuts
mineral water

Dinner:

Peel-and-eat shrimp
tossed green salad
baked salmon
steamed asparagus with fresh lemon juice
sliced kiwi fruit and strawberries
diet soda (uh, just WOW on that one)

Snack: cold lean beef slices and celery sticks

The very first thing on his list of “Paleo Snacks” is “Fresh fruit of any kind.” Nuts are on there (limit to 4 ounces a day if you’re trying to lose weight) and dried fruit (limit to 2 ounces a day). Cold meats, raw vegetables, avocado and/or tomato slices, homemade salmon and beef jerky, hard boiled egg (limit to six a week – he’s not a big fan of eggs) and unsalted sunflower seeds (limit to 4 ounces a day) are all on there.

He doesn’t give amounts on his menus, so I didn’t stick them into a nutrition calculator, but this is not what most people consider a low-carb menu. It’s pretty moderate in carbs, but considering that Cordain was, at this point, very anti-saturated fat, the percentages would come up higher for carbs than Audette’s journal that includes fatty meats. Ray Audette is showing 150g of carbs per day and I bet Cordain’s weight loss menu is at 75-100g. These are *not* ketogenic diets, obviously, but they still work. In a diet that eliminates many classes of foods, why eliminate even *more*…forever?

Ah…crud. I still didn’t get to the metabolic issues from low-carb diets, and this is already almost 1,000 words.

Terror of carbohydrates from real foods like fruit are really misplaced. Tropical HGs that eat fruit all the time do fine on that diet and don’t get fat. Fruit is one of the few foods that doesn’t have chemicals to make it unpleasant to eat in some way. It’s brightly colored, and it smells fantastic, and the blossoms do in the spring too – allowing you to find a grove of fruit trees and go back when the fruit is ripe. Most importantly, fruit (not just berries) is real food and you shouldn’t shut it out of your life.

And for pity’s sake, a few carrots won’t kill you either.

I swear I’ll get to the metabolic stuff in the next one.

Low-Carb Diets and Metabolism

Nicole — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 21:30:17 +0000

I’ve been seeing reasoned debate about the effect of long-term low-carb diets for a while now, but this last week, things kind of exploded into a yelling fest.

Within what I can only describe a mean-spirited and pointlessly rude blog post from Matt Stone, there’s one interesting nugget of possible truth:

“…remember that prolonged dieting (this one, low-fat, low-calorie, or a combination) tends to shut down thyroid function. This is usually not a problem with the thyroid gland (therefore blood tests are likely to be normal) but with the liver, which fails to convert T4 into the more active thyroid principle, T3. The diagnosis is made on clinical ground with the presence of fatigue, sluggishness, dry skin, coarse or falling hair, an elevation in cholesterol, or a low body temperature. I ask my patients to take four temperature readings daily before the three meals and near bedtime. If the average of all these temperatures, taken for at least three days, is below 97.8 degrees F (36.5 C), that is usually low enough to point to this form of thyroid problem; lower readings than that are even more convincing. It may be appropriate for those of you who fit these criteria to be prescribed thyroid by your doctor, and if so, a natural form of the hormone, which contains T3, is far superior to the most popular form of prescription thyroid, synthetic T4.”

-Robert C. Atkins

Google books says it comes from The Complete Dr. Atkins. Since I don’t own that, and I’ve never read it, that would explain why I’ve never seen this quote.

Jimmy Moore responded in the comment section of Matt’s site as well as on one of his blogs. Richard Nikoley of Free The Animal leapt to Jimmy’s defense. Matt has also previously said disparaging things about Richard.

My concern about all of this is that vital information might be missed. A lot of former low carbers or current paleo dieters *do* seem to have thyroid or metabolic issues of some kind.

Jenny, who runs diabetes update, talked about why low-carb stopped working for her. The whole piece is worth reading, but here’s the introduction:

The enthusiasm for the low carb diet as a weight loss diet arises in the first few weeks and months when most people experience dramatic weight loss.

What rarely gets mentioned–especially in the miracle weight loss books–is that very few low carb dieters ever get to their weight loss goal, especially those who start out with a lot of weight to lose.

I am enthusiastic about the power of carb restriction to lower blood sugar to normal or near normal levels. I am not as enthusiastic about low carbohydrate dieting as the solution to tough weight loss problems.

Because even the online low carb community tends to believe that people who stall out are “not doing the diet right” and respond to stall posts with that assumption, most people who do stall out long term leave the discussion boards, leaving only those who have succeeded to greet the newbies.

I’d like to point out that “not doing it right” is *exactly* what the purveyors of conventional wisdom spew at fat people trying to lose weight. If eating less and exercise is not working, then clearly, you aren’t doing it right. Or you’re lying about what you’re eating and your workout schedule. I think these amount to the same thing, but “you aren’t doing it right” is a lot nicer than “you’re a liar”.

I’ve seen many of the same complaints on BBSes like Low Carb Friends and Active Low-Carbers and even on Atkins Diet Bulletin Board. People will complain (almost exclusively women, though this may be a function of the boards themselves rather than an indication that all the people having the problem are women) that they can’t lose weight unless they cut calories to 1,400 or even lower, and generally, they do this by eating very low carb because they aren’t (as) hungry that way. This does not seem to get them anywhere either, and most low carb books I’ve read (and I’ve read a lot of them) indicate that counting calories is a bad idea. While they admit that it’s possible to eat too much, they recommend you don’t count calories, but because almost everyone tracks their carbs in something like Fitday, they always know what the calorie count is.

Atkins says that if you have a lot of weight to lose, it’s OK to stay on induction a long time. So, people stay on induction a long time because, in their minds, they have a lot of weight to lose. At some point, their weight loss becomes negligible. They either add a lot of cardio at this point, or get very strict about what they are eating. The Atkins book says that after induction, you should be adding carbs back at the rate of 5g per week until you don’t lose weight any more, then back off a little. There’s a “carb ladder” that indicates the order. The ADBB folks who have made goal by following the instructions in the book always push for this, but I think it scares people to think they will stop losing weight, gain weight or even go on a carb binge, so they don’t do it.

In Lyle McDonald’s The Ketogenic Diet he has a section on hypothyroid and euthyroid stress syndrome that contains this sentence: “The decrease in T3 due to hypothyroidism must be contrasted to the decrease seen during dieting or carbohydrate restriction.” Basically, that the decrease in T3 is a known issue with ketogenic diets (Atkins is a ketogenic diet).

Any diet of sufficient length and restriction will slow the metabolism. It seems to take longer on a low-carb diet than a straight-up low-calorie diet, and it’s possible that alternate day diets or calorie cycling might be an even better option, but I think what a lot of low-carbers (Atkins and lwo-carb Paleo Dieters alike) are experiencing is an evolutionary adaptation that makes complete sense once you see it from the right angle. I think that it handily explains the idea of the Atkins “One Golden Shot”.

In my next blog post, I’ll try to give the right angle.

Have I talked about this before?

Nicole — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 23:45:24 +0000

Paleolithic-style diets have gotten a lot of press of late. The articles mostly take this form:

1) Hipster discusses their caveman diet and explains that all their problems with digestion, allergies, obesity, blood sugar, athletic performance or what-have-you are gone.

2) Reporter says “isn’t that nice” and proceeds to quote sources of conventional wisdom saying that somehow, a diet based on whole, natural foods is actually unhealthy, mostly because it’s lacking in whole grains. There’s also the same spew about how paleolithic people’s lives were “nasty, brutish and short”, so why would anyone want to emulate *that*?

There were two main tomes on this diet: Dr. Loren Cordain’s The Paleo Diet (2002) and Ray Audette’s Neanderthin (2000) and, more recently, there’s Mark Sisson’s The Primal Blueprint (2009). Good luck finding a reasonably priced copy of Audette’s book – they seem to be going for $70 used. I found one for $13 and snapped it up.

The gist of the diet is this: Eat only meat, poultry, eggs, fish, vegetables, fruits, nuts and seeds. Don’t eat grains, legumes, dairy, potatoes or sugar or anything that’s not on the first list. Honey and maple syrup, though they are “sugar” are technically OK since they can be acquired without technology, but they should be rare in the diet as they would be in nature. Potatoes does not mean yams – sweet potatoes or yams are allowed. Peanuts are a legume, in case you didn’t know, and are thus forbidden. Everything else is pretty obvious. Any modern non-foods (like artificial sweeteners) are not allowed. Salt is strongly discouraged, though other spices are welcomed.

Within the world of paleo eaters (and I really need to come up with a set of links at some point), there are differences. Sisson is OK with a little dairy and with an 80/20 approach in general. Cordain allows something called “cheat meals” that you hear discussed often on Robb Wolf’s podcasts (which are quite interesting, at least to me). Ray Audette’s book comes off as more absolutist. Actual practice encompasses all of these camps.

There are some oddities within the books. Some people don’t eat cashew nuts as Audette claims their poisonous shell would have kept cavemen out. I recently found out that people who work in cashew shelling factories actually become immune to urushiol coating on the shells. We’ve all eaten cashews – they are delicious, and I’m think that our ancestors were maybe a bit more clever than Audette thinks. In any case, I’m not going to worry about that too much.

Certainly, there are a lot of valid arguments against consuming another animal’s milk, but I’ve been a big milk consumer my whole life, and except for when I was still eating gluten, I’ve never had problems consuming dairy. I tolerate it well, so I’m not interested in cutting it out.

At the moment, it seems like most of the Paleo types I read stick to very low carb diets. I’ve found that this actually causes more fluctuation in my blood sugar than if I eat fruit. I have *better* post-prandial numbers if I finish my meal with fruit than if I don’t. I have more stable numbers throughout the day this way as well, and with the amount of fruit I eat, it’s not that much sugar anyway.

The studies I’ve seen based on Cordain’s book include fruit and daily honey, and they still produced weight loss and improvements in fasting glucose and blood lipids. I could go on more about this, but Dr. Stephan Guyenet has done this exhaustively, and if you want the science, read his posts on paleolithic diets.

The only thing I ate from my banned list yesterday was tofu shirataki noodles. It’s not much soy, but since that might be like saying it’s only a little poison, I won’t be doing that again as I’ve used them all up.

Oh, and here’s a statement summing up the argument against the “nasty, brutish and short” meme.

Neanderthin

Nicole — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 21:30:45 +0000

It took me ages to find a copy of Ray Audette’s Neanderthin at a price I was willing to pay ($12 + shipping, as it turned out). I read it, of course, and just for the heck of it, I ran the numbers on two days of his menu suggestions.

There’s a lot of good information in the book, and while the fitness section is a lot more detailed than this, the food advice boils down to this quote from page 17:

My definition of nature is the absence of technology. Technology-dependent foods would never be ingested by a human being in nature. I determined, therefore, to eat only those foods that would be available to me if I were naked of all technology save that of a convenient sharp stick or stone.

So, on to the numbers. Click on the images to see a full-size version. The first day is 4,556 calories, a lot of it from nuts:

Day Two is 4,992 calories. The suet/jerky on here is my approximation of 1/2 cup of pemmican.:

Wow, that’s a lot of salt, but he’s making his own jerky, and the USDA database that Fitday uses has a commercial version and that’s likely the source of the salt. He may also be using low-sodium bacon. I can tell you that knocks your sodium *way* down if you eat bacon often, as I do. The Costco (Kirkland brand) low-sodium bacon is also sugar-free and a great deal.

Anyway, I wonder if, rather than having my imaginary great-great grandmother judge if something is food, I should use an imaginary Paleolithic person?

I don’t think I could actually eat that much of those particular foods unless I was out in the snow running a trap line or being a lumberjack or something. Here’s my averages for a four week period:

And here it is as a Nutrition Facts label because I think it’s humorous. Obviously, I’m not terribly concerned about diet orthodoxy re: fat and cholesterol. Fitday’s selenium thingy is broken, but I do get enough of it on their other charts. The vitamin numbers aren’t quite right anyway because I supplement some stuff.

This is a semi-typical day. I’d say totally typical, but I don’t drink every day. Also, I’ve been weighing everything this week instead of using cup measures for stuff like salad and sunflower seeds. This is also not in any particular order. Obviously, I didn’t have wine for breakfast.

(If you’re interested in modern Hunter-Gatherer tribes, check out this lovely piece from National Geographic on the Hadza of Tanzania.)