King Corn

We need to change the way we to food. Yes, that means prices will go up. But it also means that the quality of the food we eat will go up as well. This documentary explores these issues without a heavy hand. 

What Do I Eat For Breakfast?

I know that each of you is waiting impatiently for me to reveal what I actually eat that made me lose 50 lbs. 

Well here is one thing I eat most mornings.

Yes, really. Natto tastes fine, like what I remember pork 'n beans used to taste like when I ate that. But the slimy look leaves something to be desired. 

One reason I eat it is that it has more vitamin K-2 than any other food in the world. There are a few vitamins that are in short supply in our diet. K-2 is one of them. For a more in depth discussion of this click here. 

If you eat fermented cheese like blue cheese, liver, pasture fed butter and milk, or have good gut bacteria that live on soluble fiber, you might be ok—might. But if you don't, you should supplement. This is not the K-2 you are looking for, move on. (Remember that K-1 is not the same vitamin!) 

K-2 is crucial in calcium allocation. Even if you have enough calcium, without this vitamin, along with vitamin D, the calcium is not laid down in the bones as well. Even worse, the calcium might be put in places you do not want it, like your heart. 

So either crack open the styrofoam Natto container, eat a lot of blue cheese, or get some supplementation. 

Update on Friday, October 11, 2013 at 8:43AM by [Positive Dennis]

Note that I do not eat white rice for breakfast!

Dietary Infographic

I thought I would give Mark Sisson a little publicity, although the pro-saturated fat mania among low carb dieters is not well placed. I would place fruit and vegetables at the bottom, with most of that portion dedicated to vegetable. 

I try to replace saturated fats with mono unsaturated fats. like olive oil, dietary heresy for some. 

Thinking Out Loud About Fruit and Alcohol

Surely people need to eat more fruit.

Surely.

Maybe.

First a little biology. Sucrose, table sugar, is made up of a combination of glucose and fructose. Fructose is the sugar in fruit. These two carbohydrates are metabolized quite differently by the body. Glucose is turned directly into blood sugar, and its presence in the digestive system causes the body, in a healthy person, to produce insulin. However, fructose is metabolized by the liver and turned directly into fat.

Maybe I am easily amused, but what this means is that someone who thinks they are on a low fat diet, but eats a lot of fruit, is eating a lot more foods that turn to fat than they think. Some vegans eat ten servings of fruit a day. The reason this may work for them is that a high fruit vegan diet metabolically is actually not a low fat diet.

Now this is a beer belly! This phenomenon explains the notorious beer belly. Alcohol is also metabolized by the liver in the same way that fructose is--it is turned into fat. This is why I am suspicious of the claims alcohol is good for you.  Most people who drink, even in moderation, are drinking in addition to their normal daily calories. What this means is that the alcohol they drink is directly changed to fat and is stored in the waistline in men and the posterior in women.

For someone who is balanced metabolically at their individual correct weight, drinking alcohol means that they have substituted alcohol for something else. Which would you rather have, a glass of wine or a serving of fruit?

Hmm, maybe I worded that wrong. Let me try again.

Which food do you think is more healthy, a glass of wine or a grapefruit? A lot of the questions I ask have an obvious answer, at least to me. This is one of those questions.

So should a person drink alcohol or eat fruit since both are turned into fat by the body? The answer is not obvious this time. It depends on the amount of triglycerides in your blood. My triglycerides vary from high to crazy high, thus my reluctance to endorse either alcohol or fruits.

However, since I am losing weight and my body is dumping all kinds of fat into my blood, it is too early for me to say what I will be eating once I lose this last 15 pounds. If my triglycerides are still too high, alcohol and fructose will be something I limit.

Below I have again embedded Dr Lustig's notorious lecture on sugar, "Sugar, the Bitter Truth." While I agree with Lustig philosophically, there is something about his style, his video "bedside manner," that I do not care for. I am trying to read his latest book, but I am having trouble finishing it.

If you want more information on this topic, click here for my last blog post on this lecture.

Is It Tuna?

It is becoming more and more obvious that we can cannot trust the labels that Babylon the Great puts on its food. 

I personally came across this last year when I ate "Julian bread." It was supposed to be a high fiber, low carb bread. It turned out that they had, well, made a mistake. Their new line may be low carb, my guess would be it is, but it is no longer high fiber--and it tastes like cardboard. To me it does not matter now anyway as I no longer eat wheat because I am sensitive to it.

Much of the fish you buy is not labeled correctly. A mistake no doubt. 

Oceana.org comments:

Of the most commonly collected fish types, samples sold as snapper and tuna had the highest mislabeling rates (87 and 59 percent, respectively), with the majority of the samples identified by DNA analysis as something other than what was found on the label. In fact, only seven of the 120 samples of red snapper purchased nationwide were actually red snapper. The other 113 samples were another fish.

While I do not know anything about Oceana, this is a meme that has gotten a lot of traction lately. I am sure that with the strong financial incentive, the idea of adding lower quality fish is quite tempting. If you have some fish that usually has zero market value, and add it to your tuna...well, it doubles your income. 

As I am trying to increase my fish consumption, this is of great interest to me. (As an aside in our "low inflation" world, wild smoked salmon from Trader Joe's just went up $1 a pound.) 

Sorry, but I have no solution for you. As for me, I have stopped buying canned tuna, as the fish that is most commonly used to replace real tuna is quite disgusting, and in some people can cause digestive problems including anal leakage. I think I will pass, so I don't pass anything I would rather not. 

To paraphrase Socrates, Know Thy Food.