Tuesday, April 15, 2014

Optimal potatoes less than optimal?

Not long ago, i acquired and read the two English-language books on the Optimal diet by Jan Kwasniewski.  I decided to give it a try.  Particularly when i was out of town and only ate exactly WHAT i wanted to, WHEN i wanted to, things were going well.  Except...

My bad knee would NOT stop hurting.  Accidental wheat contamination is always possible when eating other people's cooking, especially in restaurants.  A few days at my daughter's house, eating mostly my own cooking:  inflammation was down in the whole-body sense, but the knee still gave me trouble.  I treated with Tiger Balm, which felt good but wasn't curative.  I came home and treated with heat, which also felt good but wasn't curative.  I started thinking.

The higher-target carb allowance gave me more freedom in vegetable choices.  I wasn't eating exclusively from any particular source, but the one time i ate parsnips certainly wasn't a problem.  The two times i ate rice/risotto were extremely unlikely to be the difficulty, because i've indulged modestly in rice dishes without problems over the last couple of years.  The sporadic use i've made of my sourdough rye doesn't fit the pain pattern, and i haven't touched other grains.

But it could be the potatoes.  I haven't eaten much at a time, but i have eaten them a couple of times a week for the last few.  I KNOW nightshades can give me trouble.  I think i've read that some people specifically have joint pain from their use.  Damn.

I still think that i lose weight better with slightly lowered protein intake, in the "Optimal" range, which Lutz also seems to recommend (just read his book, too).  Their plans are convenient when i spend time around other people (as i do when traveling and since my husband retired).  "Strong Medicine" was great while i was home by myself for weeks on end, but harder to stick to when other people are around.  Since my guts don't really like lettuce salads, potatoes looked like a viable alternative, but i'm extremely doubtful about that now.

So i'm off the potato truck for the time being -- i've got to get rid of the knee pain before i test it again.  Not sure what i'll put in their place!  I'm not that enthusiastic about carrots and turnips.  Plantains, maybe?  The only place to get decent Japanese sweet potatoes is across town, and they don't keep well (and i HATE "garnets" -- damned sugar-bombs).

This is probably the time to experiment more with the "pseudograins" -- things like quinoa and buckwheat.  It must be admitted, the blossoming spring weather encourages the use of more fresh ingredients, and the thought of tabouli salad made with quinoa instead of bulgur is making my mouth water....  I just need to make sure that my use of tomatoes and peppers doesn't do the same thing that the potatoes have apparently done!

29 comments:

  1. Loren Cordain has a whole chapter on potatoes in The Paleo Answer. They do contain toxins. Native Americans prepared them in a way to neutralize them; it's in Nutrition and Degeneration.

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    1. i always peel them, which i understand gets rid of a lot of the problem. what they used to do in South America sounds like a real pain in the neck! :-) ...i've never perceived a problem with the things, which is why i so belatedly concluded that they COULD be the source of the knee pain....

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  2. Cordain calls potatoes "one of the worst foods we can eat." He notes their glycemic index (111 for russets, 89 for red), saponins (which can cause leaky gut), lectins (which "have been found to irritate the immune system and produce symptoms of food hypersensitivity in allergenic and nonallergenic patients"), and protease inhibitors.

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    1. since writing the above, I did a little internet-searching -- read the discussion of nightshades on the Weston Price site. yes, it seems likely that the potatoes ARE to blame. I've eaten so few since going LC-paleo, that having a half-cup twice a week is quite a large dose for me. ...bummer! potatoes make SUCH a good vehicle for things like butter and cheese....

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  3. Hope you can find what it is, Tess. Pain is a good motivator, but it's hard when you have to be systematic. I had to force myself to eat white potatoes as a kid, then I could binge on fries pretty easily. I can look back at foods that I "forced" myself to eat and find that 90% I should not have been eating - potatoes, beans. They cause me all sorts of GI upset.

    Good luck with the other foods.

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    1. thanks, Karen! ...i suspect that a lot of food aversions are intolerances in disguise -- we instinctively want to avoid what our bodies don't like, even if the symptoms are subtle.

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  4. Tess:

    Being eastern european I could eat potatoes, rye bread and buckwheat all day if I could but I can't. I eat buckwheat and pork sausage occasionally (every 3 months or so) and it doesn't seem to affect me very much. In my case, all these things are no longer an option for me. If I get down to an ideal weight I could try them one at a time to see how they affect me, but for now forget it. It's good that you are experimenting. Luckily my body lets me know the next day if something isn't good for me as my ankles blow up like balloons. I prefer to see a definitive ankle shape to balloons. The balloon effect immediately before my joints start hurting..

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    1. "I prefer to see a definitive ankle shape to balloons" -- lol, i have to agree! :-)

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    3. Wheat balloons my ankles most effectively. I eat small amounts of starches , especially in soups, but stay away from wheat and beans.

      Huff, on my way back from Russia, passengers of Transaero were served sort-of funny from the American perspective dish - sausages with buckwheat and a small pouch of ketchup. It tasted good.

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    4. how was the buckwheat prepared? most americans are only familiar with buckwheat in pancakes, and i'm not much better. ;-)

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    5. Mother used to prepare buckwheat and potato casserole and buckwheat cabbage rolls. Boiled buckwheat to which was later added bacon bits, drippings, onions and rolled into cabbage leaves. Then we also had the buckwheat and blood sausage and/or buckwheat and pork sausage. We would slice it up and fry in in bacon fat or lard. OMG it was great. It may be an acquired taste for those who didn't eat it throughout their childhood like I did.

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    6. I never had buckwheat pancakes back in Russia, we mostly used it in a way people in the rest of the world use rice. It is often cooked like a rice (one cup of buckwheat berries+two cups of boiling water, salt, slow-cooked for 30-40 minutes),great reheated several times with couple TBS of water but it is very tasty to add sauteed onions and mushrooms. It is more reasonable to buy buckwheat in Eastern European stores, in regular supermarkets it is often more expensive and/or was not roast properly, so when cooked, turns into a gooey mass.

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    7. i obviously need to experiment with buckwheat! :-) St. Louis has some great "international" grocery stores -- next time i'm in one, i'll look for eastern-European-style buckwheat

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  5. Hi Tess

    I send all my spuds to RN these days he can’t get enough of them. I think he is going into the starch business, evidently it makes good wallpaper paste. What larks.

    Kind regards Eddie

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    1. :-) and one big difference between you and him is that you have recently published a photograph, and he has not.

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  6. Tom Naughtom just had a fresh safe-starch and RS post. Indeed, not all LCarbers have to be very strict with their diet, body reactions vary a lot (not everybody feels like a rocket on the way to the Earth orbit after consuming that now famous raw starch), and for many black and white approach is not the best one. However, I can tell right away names of couple former LC bloggers who were more mentally stable on a standard LC food.

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    1. so true! dietary intake influences neurotransmitters -- that's not debatable -- and in so many people, higher carb intake makes them less reasonable. why else would cancer patients and parkinson's sufferers go off their ketogenic diets just so they could have things like carrots and chocolate???

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  7. I'm sure it's not readily available at your corner grocery store but I lived in Hawaii many moons ago and loved taro. You can do the same things you do with a potato (bake, boil, mash, roast) and it's pleasingly bland and starchy--great vehicle for butterI . I miss it!

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    1. interesting! i'll have to play with taro, too -- Global Foods has it, i'm sure!

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  8. On a more serious note.

    Per 100 grams.

    broccoli contains almost 5 times as much vitamin C as potato
    broccoli contains 8 times as much calcium as potato
    broccoli contains almost 2.5 times as much dietary fibre as potato

    Unless an increase in vitamin C, calcium and dietary fibre increases the respective possibility of scurvy, osteoporosis, and constipation, it seems reasonable to conclude that the replacement of potato by broccoli (or numerous other nutrient rich vegetables) provides a viable dietary strategy.

    Kind regards Eddie

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    1. no doubt, broccoli is a nutritional powerhouse compared with potato!

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  9. Sure enough, when I asked local butcher, she directed me to frozen food section where I made off w/a pound of calf's liver...
    I lost my appetite when I prepared the Super Nutritious Meatloaf (I've handled too many diseased livers in my career, sorry!), but husband & son both enjoyed it. I'll screw up my courage to have a few bites of the leftovers ;-)

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    1. yeah, the diseased ones are bound to put you off, i'm sure! i would be curious to try chitterlings, but it's not easy to get past where they came from....

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  10. You can think about chitterlings as the thing which forms the outer level of you sausages.

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    1. oh, yes! that is, if they use the real thing and not "collagen casings" such as i bought to fit my meat grinder.... or maybe "collagen casing" is the polite term for cleaned intestines? :-)

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  11. Hi Tess

    Sorry I've not been around too much lately, as I’ve had a few days off sorting out some family health issues. As the saying goes sometimes real life intervenes …but all is going well now.

    So taking time to catch up on reading ....and see that Eddie has been reading and commenting. Keeping it in the family LOL

    Take Care and hope the knee has improved

    All the best Jan

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    1. yep, "life happens," indeed! :-) hope everything is straightened out now! my knee is improving at last, thank you!

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