Wednesday, June 18, 2014

healthy foods everybody can agree on!

^^^  irony.  ;-)

Ah, what a dietary history I've had during most of my adult life!  Low-cal, mostly, then a short flirtation with low-cal-low-carb, then the low-fat days came upon us, then I tried vegetarian for awhile (though I never could give up fish & shellfish), then back to conventional low-fat, then finally low-carb, and here I happily stick.  I've fallen off the wagon from time to time with each and every single regimen, but only now is the old "i need to get back on my proper diet" statement joyful and relieved.

A couple of years ago (before I started using my ipad to write posts, and had trouble with the "label" utility), I mentioned that low-cal-low-carb program:  it was a book my grandmother had called "Eat and Reduce" by an MD in post WWI practice.  My grandmother had a very similar build to mine -- willowy in her teens, but as Life attacked, she lost and gave up on the Battle of the Bulge which I am still valiantly fighting.  (more irony -- she had a tough life, and hadn't the leisure I have to pursue success ... not to mention the internet.)  ENNNNYHOW,  E&R was an approximate 600-cal-per-day program with a little fruit, moderate lean meats, and LOTS of vegetables.  When i tried following it, there were irritating aspects -- to begin with, buying and preparing all those vegetables, but mainly filling my belly with them and yet not being actually SATISFIED with the food.  As we say in this discipline, you CAN'T devise a low-carb diet with low fat and expect success!

Throughout every diet i ever tried, it was non-negociable -- you eat lots of veggies cuz they're rich in vitaminsandminerals, they're chock-full of FIBER and they're GOOOOD for you!  You MUST eat vegetables.  EVERYBODY agrees:  we can't possibly all be wrong!

Wrong.

The lovely thing about science is that it delights in casting doubt on things EVERYBODY agrees is true.  My stubborn, independent soul enjoys that.

The less-than-lovely thing about human beings as "experts" is that most of us get to a point of learning and understanding a subject, and conclude we know "enough," and then we say stoopid shit and hold stoopid beliefs ... like "vegetables are HEALTHY -- everybody must eat them!"  Vegetables are, in fact, problematic.  Some people are better off minimizing them.

I've eaten a lot of them recently, mostly "innocent" vegetables in "innocent" ways ... just more than usual amounts for me.  The associated bloat has been most uncomfortable!  I wake up waterlogged, with a bulging midsection which diminishes with coffee and fasting.  If this stuff is so damned good for me, why does it make me feel so crummy?

A website (which unfortunately didn't allow me to leave a comment) i was reading about intestinal bloat spoke of things we, individually, may not digest well.  It ignorantly stated that if your wind is particularly rank and skunky, the problem is with meat and eggs, because of all the sulphur they contain!  No, the problem is all the healthycruciferousveggiesuperfoods and healthymicrobiomefeedingsolublefibers that the nutrition world loves so much!  Those suckers are NOT the benign heroes that they might seem to be on paper -- they're out to get you, if you have the temerity to sink your teeth into their tissues and set free the chemical bomb they established for their own protection.

As we see over and over in nutrition study, all those "beneficial" chemicals in petri-dish/isolation may do one thing, but put them all together in a living human body and you'll see an entirely different picture.  Feeding your gut microbiome to make THEM happy is, to me, kinda like paying a blackmailer -- at the end of it all, you end up drained of your resources (health), and what have they given you in return?  Temporary respite (allowing you to eat foods you didn't need in the first place, but which you desired) ... that's all.

The "starch people" have been trying to convince us that it's in our best interests to cultivate the ability to ... eat more starch.  WHY?  Because misery loves company?  Because they have been so brainwashed by Conventional Wisdom that they STILL believe in healthyfruitsandvegetables?  Because they can't resist starches themselves, and want to bolster their own self-respect by making a virtue of "necessity"?

I feel good on minimal vegetable intake.  I'm obviously well-adapted to it, because a cup of mushrooms or squash, a half-cup of nightshades or cooked brassicas, a quarter-cup even of beans, corn, and pseudograins don't get me down.  A lot of the latter two categories DEFINITELY gets me down, even in combination.  I have healthy gut-bugs ... but they STILL don't like lots of vegetables.

Personal experience shows that conventional wisdom is wrong again.  We don't NEEEED vegetables, we desire vegetables.  We desire fruits and starches and dairy and alcohol and caffeine.  Some of us, whose ancestors ate these things for more thousands of years, tolerate them better.  Some of us, who were born with or have developed issues with them, need to use them with discretion.

23 comments:

  1. Yeap, I love garlic and mushrooms but have to be REAL judicious in my consumption of them. I hated broccoli all my life, but I can eat a boatload of it, raw, with no issues, and feel good about the nutrition/vitamins I get from them. Others can't handle broccoli but do fine on boatloads of mushrooms and garlic. We are ALL different. It's the same as some being blond, black haired, auburn, gray...brown eyes, blue eyes, green eyes....hell, even no set of fingerprints are identical to anyone else's. So is our guts, and our internal micro systems.

    Great post!

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    1. thanks, Gwen! SO interesting that some people can eat things with impunity that really get others down!

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  2. Sounds like a little shop of horrors or a phytochemical cabal. I'm getting the impression you're not fond of eating vegetation. ;)

    My recovery from a pounding heart and low whatever (blood pressure, blood sugar, iron, calories, who knows) has seen me eating less vegetation than than usual, and I don't seem to be any worse for it. But I've discovered a sad fact: my beloved coconut milk, in any but little amounts, makes me gain weight even though it's low carb.

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    1. alas, I DO like eating vegetables, but the aftermath can be unpleasant. ;-)

      i'm so sorry about the coconut milk! do you find the same response with every brand you've tried? how about fresh coconuts?

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    2. There are only a couple of brands I like and they're both just coconut, water and guar gum. I eat dried coconut (it's a major ingredient in coconut-flax bread). Too much of that is a gut bomb for me--I blame the flax seeds. I wouldn't venture far from the bathroom if I ate more than a couple of slices.

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  3. Since going low-carb I've discovered that I can eat onions, which I love, cooked or raw with no problems. It seems that my problem with onions only appeared when I ate them with starch such as bread and/or potatoes and I always blamed the onions. I guess I didn't think there could be interactions between foods and it was a surprise to me.

    Regarding coconut, I can use a bit of coconut oil occasionally, but coconut anything just doesn't sit well in my gut. The only reason I can think of is that my ancestors never had the occasion to eat it. I'm the same way with protein powders of any kind. My body can't handle them.

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    1. coconut certainly isn't the miracle substance it was promoted to be. i don't seem to have trouble with it, but don't get the promised benefits either. :-( maybe like lactose, after a certain age the lauric acid isn't as beneficial either? i still love it for frying, but tallow suits my general physiology better. how about you -- how do you relate to different fats?

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    2. I primary cook on a coconut oil - it is so convenient! Somehow I love how the taste of coconut get mixed with the taste of a liver - no one in my family can relate to it, and my ancestors sure wouldn't.

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  4. I recently attacked a person on WHS blog, which I don't do frequently, only when extremely irritated. I don't enjoy fights. I disagreed with her definition of a ketogenic diet.. That arrogant person was smoothly raving how happy and satisfied her patients were in the weight-loss clinic she was running using a "ketogenic protocol" , with the energy intake of just 800 calories a day, and the diet was described as having 65% of carbohydrates through all stages of patients treatment.
    In my first comment I reminded readers about Kimkins 800 calories fraud and the following law-suit. My second comment Stephan didn't published in order not to encourage the acrimonious discussion (it is his blog,I don't mind). In my comment I advised Deirdre to read something else besides company manuals and to learn how to google-up the terminology she used in her sales-pitches.
    She now erased her comments there, and I am satisfied with that. Poor desperate fat people, mostly females, who were paying to be jailed in the starvation clinic because they couldn't stay from eating too much food on their own. They were sure they experienced the famous ketogenic diet! I wonder, how the manager of the clinic came to the conclusion they were not hungry and happy?!

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    1. surely anyone who eats a 65%-carb, 800-cal diet is going to be ravenous, even if they DO show ketones in their urine! you're right -- poor desperate people who are used to being mistreated (fat people, and fat women often are) DESERVE advocates who shine light on the BS!

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    2. All these people were happy on a diet of 800 calories and 65% carb? Did they have Stockholm Syndrome? People get psychosis on starvation diets. She needs to read The Great Starvation Experiment.

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    3. Since she even didn't manage to read the definition of the world "ketosis" before calling her diet a" ketogenic protocol", I was not sure she would start reading anything now, therefore I mentioned the Kimkins lawsuit right away. I hoped it would get the necessary degree of attention from that starvation clinic prison guard. May be the patients payed so much for their imprisonment they didn't have guts to admit that the king was naked. Or they received ephedra or big doses of guarana under the medical supervision.

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  5. Thanks Tess, great post.
    I have only recently discovered that most veggies do not sit well in my gut. I don't advocate the RS addition to HFLC because of carb-creep and that is going to happen to most of the people doing it. Starches are the cheap way to put on mass...gut bugs or not.

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    1. thank you, Lauren! I THOUGHT about trying it -- for about four minutes -- when a few people I "know" were seeing good results ... and then I said to myself, "i don't have their problems." I have a system that works WELL for me, so why would I want to mess with that? i'm even making progress on the energy and knee-pain front, eating things that don't bloat me up. :-) continuing to try new QUESTIONABLE things are just delaying me reaching my goals.

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    2. Absolutely! If what you're doing is working don't mess with it... that's my belief, too.

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  6. Just another strange food-intolerance story. My son told me that he found out he felt horrible after eating yucca. On of ethnic food places in Tampa where he is a student now, serves a yucca fries , and my son have noticed that every time after going to that place he has less of a mental sharpness next day and his performance in a rock-climbing gym suffers a lot, like he gets noticeably weaker and gets tired easily. He experimented with a LC diet for a week (I don't know why, he is thin), and felt fine after eating in the yucca place because he skipped yucca due to his diet experiment. I have no idea why yucca may be worse than potatoes or rice, it should be better in my opinion.

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    1. Yucca has saponins (you can make soap out of it) and saponins can make your gut permeable. It's the only thing I can think of.

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  7. I just googled the side-effect of saponins, and the reading of my findings caused me to produce a rant - in short - the answer is - there are no side-effects.

    "Side Effects
    Because saponins are phytochemicals that come from natural plant sources such as soy, alfalfa, yucca and many other vegetables and herbs, there are no reported side effects from their use in dietary supplements.

    In the article "Vegemania: Scientists Tout the Health Benefits of Saponins," Manuel F. Balandrin, a chemist at NPS Pharmaceuticals in Salt Lake City, says, "Because the human digestive system has evolved to handle plants, it's almost impossible to overdose on saponins by eating vegetables."

    I am hanging around so much with LCarbers and some paleos that I managed to forget about the insane, but dominating point of view - plants are the perfect human food because they are natural. The usual BS - saponines are very healthy because they come from plants.
    So, there are only benefits "Saponins bind with cholesterol and other pathogens, which blocks them from being absorbed by the body and carries them through the body's digestive system allowing them to be eliminated. In this way, these phytochemicals reduce cholesterol levels, and by eliminating the other harmful pathogens from the body they relieve stress on the body's immune system, allowing it to operate more efficiently."

    I especially liked cholesterol being called a pathogen. May be normal nutrients from food are dangerous substances which would make you fat in the case of a digestion, so eliminating it would be the safest thing to accomplish. The quality of the perfect food is creating the illusion that you have eaten, but delicately passing through your GI tract almost unchanged, except of caring away cholesterol and some real nutritions you may swallow by mistake. From all that and your comment ,Lori, I just can guess that the naturally produced by plants for a self-protection saponines either prevent the absorption of nutrients or indeed cause a leaky gut for susceptible individuals.

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    1. Drugs.com says there's a tradition of using yucca medicinally and that it's antibacterial, antifungal, destroys cancer cells in vitro, destroys red blood cells, and causes renal damage in sheep. It's high in saponon steroidal glycosides, reduces cholesterol and is anti-inflammatory (what does that remind you of?). Doesn't sound the like the sort of thing I'd eat as a side dish.

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    2. It slightly reminded me about the remedy against the main toxin in a human body which needed to be carried away or at least reduced - statines.

      Saponines got mentioning in the WPF article - http://www.westonaprice.org/health-topics/plants-bite-back/ as one of Protease inhibitors " Protease inhibitors, saponins, lectins and phytoestrogens harm insects, animals and other predators that would otherwise eat too many of them." , and it looks like from the article that the substances in soy beans , which discourage animal consumption , are especially resilient to the destruction caused by a cooking, and only fermentation makes it safe to eat.

      "The protease inhibitors in soybeans are not only more numerous than those found in other beans and foods, but more resistant to neutralization by cooking and processing. Only the old-fashioned fermentation techniques used to make miso, tempeh and natto come close to deactivating all of them"

      I don't know, how much it is related to saponines in a yucca (soy beans contain saponine, but probably something else as well), but that tuber now looks more suspicious in my eyes than a plain potato. Potato has anty-bacterial chemical on the surface which are usually removed by peeling.

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    3. Potato peels are full of saponins, too.

      http://thepaleodiet.com/are-potatoes-paleo/

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  8. That is why we peel potatoes when cook it in the old-fashion way. I wonder, how free from saponins is the recent hot item - the raw potato starch.
    Potato skins are used in the folk Eastern European medicine - you boil it in a pot, take it from a stove and inhale the steam while covering head with a towel until steam stop being hot enough - a very effective remedy for the bacterial respiratory infections.

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    1. I'm not sure if anyone knows whether there are saponins or how much in potato starch. If there are, a lot of people with damaged guts are making them worse.

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