To Lose Weight Just Eat "Food"

A tricky statement to start with but it is a good idea. Below is a posting from "The Modern Forager," a blog I frequent. I have been trying to put something together like this for a while now but he did it just right. The rest of this post is a copy/paste from his website. Thanks!

Recently, I was having a conversation with some random girl and when I mentioned that I was into nutrition, she asked me to give her my five rules of nutrition, the five things she needed to know to eat right. I managed to come up with three off the top of my head and told her that basically covered it, then later realized that one rule is all that’s needed. You must follow this one simple rule to put yourself on the road to top-notch health.

Ready for an epiphany? It’s…

Eat real food.

Now, I’m not a genius that just broke the code of the universe. Jack Lalanne said, “If man made it, don’t eat it.” Michael Pollan broke it down to “Eat food. Mostly plants. Not too much.” It really is that simple. So many nutritionists want to make it difficult; confusion keeps them employed. Look at the Food Pyramid, which was at least an attempt to get people eating right. Too many rules, too many gray areas. We can argue that the Food Pyramid is a convoluted mess of ill health, but the pertinent fact is that it’s too difficult to figure out, even if it was any good. What exactly is a serving? And how do I decide if I need 6 or 11 servings of grains? Is that pork chop “lean”? And then there are all of the rules about saturated fat, cholesterol, calories, total fat, sodium, and sugar intake. How can you make heads or tails of anything this complex?

We can argue about low carb, low fat, The Zone, Ornish, Atkins, and Weight Watchers until we’re blue in the face. But civilizations have thrived on diets of varying macronutrient proportions throughout history. The Inuit ate a diet of almost no carbs and mostly fat with no ill effects. The Masai drank cow blood and milk and ate meat like it was going out of style. As the nutritionists gasp, I’ll mention that the Masai achieved prime health too. The diet on the island of Okinawa is heavily weighted towards vegetables and rice with some fish and little meat, high in carbs, low in fat. Again, very good health; Okinawans have excellent longevity.

So it’s not so much about the macronutrients, as long as you’re getting enough protein and fat to allow the body to function properly. It’s about the types of food being consumed. Dr. Weston Price noted that traditional civilizations thrived until they were introduced to processed grains and sugars, at which point, health declined markedly. We all know someone that follows a low-fat diet or low-carb diet by eating every processed product in the store that excludes their chosen macronutrient (”Angel Food Cake is a fat-free food!”). They rarely make the progress they’d like to. Why? Because before you can worry about macronutrients, you need to focus on food. You don’t eat nutrients. You eat food.

Let’s keep it simple: Eat real foods, preferably in their natural state. I think it’s pretty easy to figure out what is “food” and what isn’t. A few things to remember:

• Food grows and dies. It isn’t created.
• Food rots, wilts, and becomes generally unappetizing, typically rather quickly.
• Food doesn’t need an ingredient label (and probably isn’t in a package either).
• Food doesn’t have celebrity endorsements.
• Food doesn’t make health claims.

Let’s give some foods this simple test and see if we should eat them:

• Broccoli - Most certainly a real food
• Steak - Deliciously real food, straight off the cow
• Oreo cookies - Hold while I read the ingredients. Are you serious?
• Eggs - Bingo
• Walnuts - Check
• Spaghetti - I don’t recall seeing a spaghetti tree on my last hike
• Pop-Tarts - Just seeing if you’re paying attention
• Pasteurized/Homogenized Milk - Nope, not in its natural state
• Raw Milk - Yep, real food, naturally

Sure, there are still a few gray areas. That’s the life of an omnivore. For instance, what about oatmeal and other whole grains? Those are things you will have to decide for yourself. My guidance is to keep grains to a minimum, if included at all. Cheddar cheese from raw milk? Probably okay. Velveeta? Not so much. Lard? For sure. Olive oil? I say yes, though it could be argued both ways. Crisco and margarine? Not a chance.

What you notice is that few of these foods, with the exception of cooking oils, come from a factory. They just exist. There’s no secret formula to create them. Even olive, coconut, and palm oils, while requiring extraction, require no special knowledge. Just press really hard and you get oil. Nobody has a patent on the flavor of an apple. The ingredients in zucchini can’t be tweaked to ride the current nutrition wave.

Eating real foods virtually eliminates one of the hardest parts of maintaining your weight: counting calories (or carbs or fat). Real foods have a built-in feedback mechanism to keep you from overeating. Protein and fat stimulate appetite-suppressing hormones. Fruits and vegetables tend to be bulky for their caloric content. Some may want to argue about Glycemic Indexes and other fun things, but no one gets fat by eating carrots. People get fat by eating fake foods. Just eat real ones and I guarantee that you’ll shed fat and feel better.

That’s not to say that there’s no place for managing your carb, fat, and protein intake. But before embarking on any road that gives you a set number of carbs or fat to eat, you must decide to eat real food. Until you start with real food, you will struggle. Once you start down the path, you may need to tweak if you’re going to try to build muscle or compete in marathons, but for health, just eat real food! Your body, which is significantly smarter than your mind, knows what it needs and if you feed it real food and then pay attention, it will give you feedback.

Fortune 500 Companies and Why You Should Hate Some of Them

Fortune Magazine has released it's top 500 companies from 2007. A look at them can tell us a few things about the world we live in and why we need to make a few changes. I will admit that this area is not me specialty but this blog is a place for me to rant and rave, not necessarily be accurate... Though I do research my comments as best I can and try to cite my sources as often as possible. This entry is mostly a knee jerk reaction the the Yahoo article about the Fortune 500 article.

The number 1 company is Wal-Mart. Most people who know me know I hate them but for so many more reasons that you would expect. For starters, the simple answer, Wal-Mart puts the little guys out of business and ends the rule of generations of Mom and Pop run stores. They do this by introducing low prices to a community. Americans love a bargain and swarmed there for years, and continue to keep Wal-Mart a hugely successful company. But are low prices what Walmart really brings? Or do they just bring cheaper goods?Cheaper and lower prices are 2 different things. Walmart is so big now that non-cheaper goods are only available at specialty stores and are considered over priced. The brands Walmart has introduced are now the regular, everyday throw away brands we have come to expect.

How about customer service? Have you ever had good customer service in a Wal-Mart? I have been in retail for most of my adult life and most customers and trade magazines report the same thing, there is no good customer service left in America. They bitch about it non stop and yet the store most notoriously linked to poor customer service is the #1 company in America. So do you really care about good customer service or is it really price first? Next time you need something that you can shop around for try rewarding the store that provides the best customer service and not the best price. Why? Do you really think that item cost you that much more at a different store?

What if I told you Wal-Mart was bad for the American economy. Walmart is America's single biggest employer but offers the lowest wages and worst benefits. They are a drain on every community they are in. Walmart management is trained on how to get their employees on state support because they refuse to offer a living wage and affordable medical insurance. And that's to their few "full time" employees, most employees are aren't ever offered the unaffordable benefits because Walmart positions are only part time, even if the employee works an average of 40+ hours. Walmart has had numerous legal problems in this department and has lost a number of class action lawsuits. You would think the largest company in the WORLD could offer decent health care insurance. I have worked for a number of large companies and they all offered good and affordable benefits based on covering hundreds or thousands of people.

I have more but I will be saving some of my anger for the #2 company on the list, Exxon Mobile (Also the most profitable company IN THE WORLD for 2007). But that is another post.

Good News From Sweden

I got this info from a great blog I frequent called The Weight of the Evidence. Apparently a Doctor in Sweden got their National Board of Health and Welfare to agree that a low carb diet is "in accordance with science and well-tried experience for reducing obesity and Type 2 diabetes." This has sparked much discussion with the powers that be in Sweden and their newspapers have picked it up. Part of the conflict is centered on the fact that this Doctor wrote an open letter to schools calling for more healthy fats in the diet of children. The Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet polled their reader as follows:

Vad tror du att barn mår bäst av?
[translation: What do you think that children are better off with?]

Choices:

Fet mjölk och smör
[translation: Fat milk and butter]

Lättmjölk och margarin
[translation: Skim milk and margarine]

As of this writing, 27,836 have cast a vote in the poll and 89.6% have answered the Fat milk and Butter!

So the newspaper readers of Sweden understand the difference between "whole foods" and processed food. Anyone believing that margarine, a completely chemical "Frakenfood," is better for you then butter has a disturbing world view.

Most dairy products are processed unless you are buying "Raw Milk." Info on Raw Milk can be found at http://www.westonaprice.org/. Raw milk has been outlawed in most of the US because 1 person died from a reaction to it. Another case of the government overstepping it's bounds and meddling in our private lives. I guess the raw milk people don't have as much money as big tobacco.

I Can't Even Call it Journalism

I just giggled my way through a newspaper article from the Arizona Republic. Apparently the writer has taken it upon herself to declare that the low-carb diet fad has ended. I have no idea who Karen Fernau is or what dog she has in this fight but she went to two solid experts on the topic, Cynthia Harriman, spokeswoman for the Whole Grain Council in Boston and Wade Moises, chef at Sassi, a high-end Italian eatery in Scottsdale, Ariz. Two people who are intimately familiar with the low-carb lifestyle. Let's see what they had to say.

Cynthia says, "The carb mania finally has subsided." And now she can go back to making money!

Chef Moises says,

"It never made sense to me that people believed that if they stayed away from pasta for more red meat they would be thinner and healthier. Those of us who know the power of pasta survived the attack by realizing that moderation eventually will prevail."

Well, it makes sense to me and plenty of other people who have taken the time to learn about it. It is pretty easy to understand and has been the way humans have eaten for the last few million years, except for the last 10,000 or so (just the blink of an eye on the time line).

What kind of nutritional value do these carbs provide us? Let's see what Karen Fernau tells us:

"Pasta is fortified with folic acid, an essential B vitamin. A half-cup serving contains a mere 99 calories, less than half a gram of fat and less than 5 milligrams of sodium."

So pasta isn't good for us but the folic acid that it is fortified with is good for us. So she thinks a processed food is good for us. Let's think about grains and how edible they are. Oh wait, they aren't edible. First they need to be harvested in huge quantities to give us any usable quantity. Then they need to go through a process to convert the hard waxy kernels into something at least digestible. Next they are stripped of all their fiber and nutrients for shipping and an extended shelf life. Finally, they are ground into a fine powder and bleached. Mmmmmmm, sounds yummy so far. Somewhere in the process the folic acid is added to give the product an once of nutrition.

Calories In and Calories Out

I was just thinking about a good, easy example to show how burning more calories then you eat doesn't result in weight loss. It was difficult because if you do burn more calories and build muscle then you become a more efficient user of energy and usually become a more active person and won't store as much extra sugar as fat. Then I realized that America has tons (sorry about the pun) of fat kids. We all see kids, fat or otherwise, running around and playing and burning all those calories but they are still fat. In addition, these fat kids are burning calories growing taller, but they are still fat. I don't know for sure but I would bet growing uses a LOT of calories. How can kids who are active AND growing get fat if burning more calories then you eat supposedly results in weight loss?

The answer is what I posted on below, weight control is more about chemistry then calories. The fat kids are eating processed carbs and probably TONS of sugar in juice boxes, regular juice, snacks and low fat foods. All processed for a longer shelf life not maximum nutrition. Remember, there are 4 grams of sugar per teaspoon of sugar. Check the sugar content on your juice. There are 28 grams of sugar per 8 oz serving in the juice in our fridge so that's 7 teaspoons of sugar per serving. YIKES!

Where Low Fat Came From and Why It No Longer Makes Sense

This post should be short. My hope is to make shorter post with increased frequency. I write most of these without a lot of planning and I know I can ramble on and on.

So where did this idea of low fat come from and what was the rationale behind it? I think it is a very important question to know the answer to but so few actually understand. About 50 years ago Americans began getting fat. During WW2 Americans were required to ration their meat for the soldiers fighting on the front lines in Europe. To replace the calories America turned to grains and our waist lines started to expand. (This coincides with Coke introducing high fructose corn syrup). Exercise for weight loss was unheard of, it was called "working up an appetite" back then. So America was getting fat and something needed to be done.

The scientists of the day looked at the macro nutrients (nutrients that provide energy) to see where they could make cuts. Protein and carbohydrates contain 4 calories per gram and fat contains 9 calories per gram. The simple idea was to cut fat and therefore cut calories. The thinking was that eating fewer calories and exercising (burning calories) would result in weight loss. This sounded easy and is still the current view of most backward thinking doctors. Unfortunately not all calories are equal. Weight gain is not a matter of eating more calories than one burns. Many studies have shown that simple calorie restriction will result in an equal reduction in resting metabolism. The body adjusts the the amount of fuel it is given.

Weight control is more a matter of chemistry than calorie. For starters, cutting fat means cutting a nutrient that the body requires. Ever hear of "essential fatty acids?" Guess what, they come from fat! Also, cutting fat usually means reducing protein intake since most fats are literally attached to proteins. But protein is absolutely required, it is what most of the human body is made of. But what about carbs? Has anyone ever heard of a disease or condition that resulted from not enough carbohydrate in the diet? Absolutely not! Actually, the body's daily requirement for carbs is ZERO! That's right, I will say it again. ZERO! A healthy liver produces all the blood sugar the body requires and that in turn maintains a level blood glucose AND insulin level. Any sugar added to the blood stream, sugar from the digestion a carbohydrate, will cause insulin spikes which tell the body that there is plenty of easy access energy around and now is the time to store it. Extra energy is stored as... Anyone? FAT!

Below is a short clip from the upcoming movie called Fat Head. It is a brief but humerous look at the science that resulted from the poor judgment of cutting fat.

In Memory of Einstein, My Best Friend for 14 Years

Many souls pass through our lives, some stay longer then others. For 14 years my dog Einstein has been a companion through good times and bad but his attitude was always the same. He was amazingly happy, lazy and lovable. Years ago he was diagnosed with a thyroid and weight problem and proper medication and diet were used. By the time he was 12 years old he had pretty bad arthritis and required many expensive med's to keep him going. Recently, at age14, we found a cancerous tumor growing near his shoulder. More med's were added to keep him comfortable and it looked like they were dong the job. On Saturday it appears Einstein suffered a stroke. We rushed him to the Kingston Animal Hospital where the decision was easily made to stop Einstein's suffering. Mary and I were close to him as the injection was made and through tears we shared his final moments of peace.

Many of you remember him as the gentle giant he was; large and lovable and always a long, sticky line of drool (Love) hanging from his lips. No one could resist him though... Once the love was wiped away with a paper towel, that is.

My favorite Einstein story took place in Colorado, his birth place. I was helping my friends the Reynolds build a new deck so I took Darwin and Einstein over the night before to get an early start. I had forgotten to bring breakfast so during the morning Einstein helped himself to the dog food at hand. As many of you know he has always had a sensitive stomach. Around lunch time the new food had worked its magic and had made its way to Einstein's business end. At first no one was sure what we were smelling, certainly no human was going to admit to being the source. The Reynolds had a pretty good size backyard and this was Colorado with lots of open space and fresh air. That said, we all had to go inside to get away from Einstein's power. Yes, Einstein cleared the outside.

Also, apparently Einstein decided to lick his balls during our wedding ceremony in the backyard. Always a charming dog, he did this in front of all our family and friends.

Today, there is an empty spot in my heart like I have never felt before. I am with out a dog. I still think I see him out of the corner of my eye, coming down the hall. It is now possible to walk from one room to another with out have to take 1 large step over him, and I miss that big step. He will never be completely gone though. I am sure I will always have some of his thick fur stuck in a fleece pullover or find some dried drool stuck to the ceiling. He could shake his head and send it EVERYWHERE.

I won't miss stepping in his poop in the hall or picking it up with on a late night walk in the rain (sometimes finding there was a hole in the plastic bag). But that's what I signed up for and I have no regrets. Some where in doggy heaven Einstein is together again with his partner in crime, Darwin, and I hope there are low fences to escape from. There were many in Colorado and escape they did. Once, I had Einstein on a dog run but when I bailed him out of doggy jail I found he had pulled it out of the trees on both ends and dragged at least 75 feet of steel cable around the neighborhood with him.

Einstein will join Darwin and Princess and be cremated the placed in a beautiful wooden box. Einstein's box will hold a position of honor though. He lived the longest and the best. We all could have learned from him. No one could nap better, could hold down a carpet better or just completely relax quite like him. His patience with kids was bottomless.

If you can, please leave a thought or a story about him. There are too many of you to call and tell personally. And Michael is a light sleeper so I can't call you anyhow. I am going to bed now with out him at the end of my bed for the first time in 14 years. I miss him so much already...

Goodnight my friend.