Disaster Waiting to Happen

I am sorry that I have not posted in a while. I recently had a major change in that I changed companies and I have been adapting to my new position and company and getting everything figured out as far as my exercise schedule and all that jazz.

That above is what I was SUPPOSED to eat on Sunday. That is the wedding cake we froze for a year to celebrate our one year anniversary. It is a white cake with bavarian cream filling and fondit frosting. So pretty much it is sugar, filled with sugar and coated with sugar. Yuck. Anyways we just couldn’t eat it.

So in the trash it went and I whipped up this to substitute…

Much Better

It is my Gorilla Cake with a home made strawberry cream cheese frosting. It turned out delicious with no guilt, no sugar coma and no hospital visits!

All in all an excellent trade I would say.

The Whole Cake

Indeed... indeed

Thanks to reader/close friend Roger De Rok for the picture!

Everyone loves to demonize bacon. But whats so bad about bacon anyways? Take for example just on the McSoG post where Dangeruss commented on how he has a hard time viewing bacon as a healthy food. Many of us have the same problem. Bacon is viewed by our collective CW society as optimizing bad diet.

I have 3 theories on why this is:

1. We are still stuck on Ancel Keys bs “fat is bad for you” theory. This has been pretty heavily debunked but still sticks with us in out conventional wisdom ways. Bacon has plenty of fat in it. Heck, you can SEE all the delicious fat all over it. In our minds thanks to Ancel Keys, it is still sometimes hard to get over the though of fat=bad.

2. We have this thought that if something tastes good or feels good… it must be BAD for you. Because eating healthy is supposed to be hard right? No way it can be easy. NOT! This is another one that we have a hard time getting over. Your body still knows whats good for it. Just because something tastes good does in fact NOT mean its bad. Just look at all the delicious, real food we get to eat in our primal lifestyle.

3. Some bacon IS bad. Many companies process the hell out of their bacon. They add sugar (bad), nitrates (may not be as bad as we think), and other chemicals and crap. This has given the rest of the bacon a bad name.

Now lets take a look at why bacon can be good and healthy. (Assuming of course you get bacon that is as natural as possible without the added sugar and crap.

1. It is full of protein and fat. This fits in perfectly with a primal/paleo profile.

2. It tastes freaking awesome. If you can’t stick to an eating program that greenlights eating bacon… I don’t know what hope ther is for you J/K of course… you can be primal WITHOUT eating bacon… but seriously… dude… bacon.

What are your thoughts? Do you love tha bacon as much as I do?

Angel said one of the coolest things to me over on her blog. I had commented that a picture she had of eggs with nice dark yolks was making me drool. She responded that was good because it meant my “Food recognition software was working properly”.

I thought this was one of the coolest things that I have heard! It also holds so true. My food recognition software has not always been working properly. There was a time where a picture of eggs with dark yolks would have held no interest for me. A picture of a Big Mac though? That would have made me drool. You see I used to be mistaken into thinking that “Food-like products” were actual food.

I am glad that my brain, my senses and my systems recognize real food now and recognizes processed crap for what it is. The “Food-like products” don’t even smell like food to me anymore. I smell the food that co-workers bring in the fast food bags (that probably taste like the bags themselves) and i smell the microwave meals being heated up in the breakrooms. These things make my stomach turn and not in a good way. There was a time though that these smells would have made me HUNGRY!

Right now, a piece of fruit may taste like a piece of fruit to you (unless you are already reprogrammed of course!). To a fully operating sense of taste that fully appreciates flavors though… a piece of fruit may taste more like a little slice of heaven than you can imagine. Everything real food just tastes so much better when you can truly appreciate the deliciou flavors.

Here are some tips on how you can reprogram your Food Recognition Software:

1. Cut the refined sugar out of your diet. Your poor taste buds are being bombarded and desynthesized by all that sugar. This is a great step towards not only increasing insulin sensitivity and losing weight but also towards repairing your taste buds. Foods tend to taste better when you can actually taste them.

2. Cut out the grains. Grains and grain products in and of themselves are extremely bland. The reason most people THINK they love bread is because of the tastes and flavors added to and delivered by the bland bread. Please read my old post here (“Love the flavor hate the grain) for my thoughts on grains as a delivery system.

3. Cut out other processed crap. What does a dough conditioner, sodium bithalitalateizine (yeah I made that up) or yellow 5 really taste like anyways. These cant be adding real flavor to your food and are further serving to desynthesized your tongue to true delicious flavor.

4. Eat real food. By eating real food, you will be training your tongue, your mind and your body to say “Hey… this is good for me and it tastes good… this is REAL food YAY!”. You will also be learning delicious true natural flavors that your body was designed to enjoy, not flavors that were engineered to spike your hormone in ways your brains THINKS its happy.

One of the things I love about the Primal/Paleo/Crossfit blog community is that someone can post a picture of a nice juicy grassfed steak or some dark yolked eggs and almost always there is a comment to the effect of “That makes me hungry” or “I am drooling now”. If only marketeers and companies knew how easy it was to appeal to someones senses with real food as opposed to processed crap.

Zombies of the future will probably be nice and fat like this.

Bear with me on this. This commentary may seem a little far fetched (or not). Evidence contained within may be anecdotal and tangential to reasonable thought… but ask yourself as you read… is this really that far out there?

Imagine a world where George Romero ruled.We would be surrounded by zombies. I don’t feel to far different from that now. Maybe there aren’t droves of people out looking for braaaaaaaiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiins, but how often do you really feel surrounded by competent, well balanced people?

When I am driving, I feel like most of the other cars are being driven by brain dead zombies. Oh, and some angry zombies… and stupid zombies, and crazy zombies. Same thing at the grocery store… the rest of the shoppers seem like zombies! Go to the mall… zombies. Movie… zombies. Large concert or sporting event… zombies.

This is made all the more prevalent by the lack of ownership that people are willing to take over their own life these days. Personal responsibility seems to be continuing to fight a losing battle. Without getting too political, people are willingly rolling over and even pushing for socialistic ideals in our own country! They want the government to take care of everything for them because it seems to daunting to do it themselves.

Really though, look at what is going on.People are getting fatter. Crime is going up. Neighborhoods don’t even tend to be friendly anymore. I know that half my neighbors run inside if you wave and say “Howdy neighbor”. Good Samaritan laws are almost becoming a necessity because people just aren’t willing to help people anymore. I am serious… people will watch someone die on the sidewalk or in the street without even attempting to raise a helping hand. Zombies I tell you.

What could be driving this? Call me crazy but I would argue part of it to be that evil creature known as “Conventional Wisdom”, or the “Western Diet”, or even the “totally ridiculous amount of engineered substances and chemicals and toxins we are force exposed to on a daily basis”. This exposure seems to be increasing exponentially much like the advance of technology.

In 1983, average sugar intake per United Statesian was about 123# per year. By 1999, it was 158#’s per person. Thats 30 percent higher in that short period of time! 158#s of sugar is equivalent to about 1/2 cup per day(*see footnote)! Sugar consumption continues to climb and climb. We all know what kind of havoc sugar can reek on the hormones. Add this in with the chemicals in our water and air, glade plugins, processed foods, big pharma drugs… how long until we really are surrounded with zombies like the one above?

What are your thoughts? Am I reaching to far here? Do you feel surrounded by zombies ever?

*There is some debate over the validity of these USDA numbers as the are based on economic figures. Anyway you looks at it though… people eat a LOT of sugar.

This was my actual final product

I have been playing around with trying to make a cheesecake for a while now.I was well on my way along the right track but reader Tim e-mailed me a cheesecake recipe that quickly skyrocketed me to success. This is largely that recipe he e-mailed me but minus the splenda and plus the berries. I like my sweet additions natural.

This recipe is very heavy on dairy.Which makes sense cause how could you make a “cheese”cake without dairy lol. Anyways, that means this recipe is not Primal per say but is pretty darn healthy IMO. No added sugar and no artificial sweetener. Mostly just good fat and deliciousness. Even our guests (chronic sugar eaters) enjoyed it!

Ingredients: (Note: remember that organic DOES matter when it comes to dairy)
Crust:
1+ cup of almond flour
3 tblspn organic butter OR Coconut oil
1 teaspoon cinnamon
Filling:
Approx 2 cups or 10 Large Strawberries. I used the frozen kind
2 8oz. packages organic cream cheese
2 dollops organic sour cream
1 teaspoon vanilla
3 eggs

Directions:
Crust:
1. Melt the butter or coconut oil in a large bowl.
2. Add cinnamon
3. Add almond flour and mix until you get a good crumbly consistency. This should take a little more than a cup of almond flour.
4. Press very thinly into your pie pan. A sprigform pan is recommended but not necessary. As you can see from my picture, I used a regular pie thingamabob

Filling:
1. Add all ingredients in a large mixing bowl.
2. Use a mixer or a hand mixer and beat until smooth
3. Pour mixture into your pan over your crust

Bake:
1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees
2. Put cheesecake in the oven
3. After about 5 minutes, turn the oven temperature down to 200 degrees. This will allow the cheesecake to bake while slowly cooling.
4. Chck cheesecake periodically after 60 minutes. Mine took about 90 minutes to cook. The cheesecake should appear firm on top all the way to the center.

Serve and enjoy:
1. Cool cheesecake and place in the refrigerator to further cool.
2. Once cooled, cut and serve.
3. Enjoy delicious strawberry cheesecake!

This is really quite good. I used strawberries as my “sweetener” but i think that other berry would work very well too. You could try blueberries or blackberries!

Actual shot slightly burnt

We already pointed out that Larabars tend to be a little high in natural sugar. So what can you do when you get a craving for a mobile, portable slightly sweet snack? Grab a SoG Primal Peach Patty.

These bad boys have about 110 calories each and less than 6 grams of natural sugar. That means that you could get away with eating 3 or 4 of these without reaching the sugar in a Larabar. they are also very very easy to make.

They are slightly sweet with a pretty awesome texture (it is VERY similar to bread for those of you trying to kick the grain habit.

Ingredients:
1 cup dried peaches (the chewy kind… not freeze dried)
1 cup roasted almonds
1/2 cup shredded unsweetened coconut
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 egg

Directions:
1. Put peaches, almonds and coconut in a food processor. Pulse until nicely broken down.
2. Drizzle in olive oil while pulsing mixture.
3. In a mixing bowl, combine mixture with egg and mix thoroughly.
4. Make 10 “patties” by rolling and pressing this “dough” with your hands and place on a baking sheet
5. Bake at 350 degrees for 20 to 25 minutes.
6. Enjoy!

These are a little sweet and “bready” for my liking but my wife absolutely loves them and I have had a few friends give them the thumbs up.

Try it and let me know what you think!

A diet Big Gulp is really just crud too

 Lets call a horse a horse. Soda pop is colored sugar water. Diet soda is basically colored chemical water. We have already covered some reasons not to drink regular sodaso now lets focus on “diet” soda. The chemicals alone go way against the primal blueprint (or paleo lifestyle) but if that hasn’t been enough to motivate you to drop the can of crap… hopefully this will do the trick.

First I have to mention the ridiculous sight that most of us seen.The person ordering the double quarter pounder with cheese meal, supersized fries and the diet coke. lol. Anyways.. on to some science.

Diet soda is made from asparatame.
Three byproducts of asparatame are methanol, formaldehyde, and formate. Yum. Defenders of diet soda will claim that these are in small amounts. Interestingly enough, tobacco companies will also defend the levels of these chemicals in cigarettes.

Feeling a little down lately?
Aspartame and Depression and Bipolar Disorder
In 1993, a psychiatrist by the name of Dr. Walton conducted a study of 40 patients with unipolar depression and a similar number without a psychiatric history. The subjects were given 30 mgs per kg of body weight a day of aspartame or a placebo for 20 days. That is about the same amount of daily consumption if completely replacing sugar.

Thirteen individuals completed the study, then an institutional review board called the project to a halt “because of the severity of reactions within the group of patients with a history of depression.” In a smaller, shorter repeat of the study, “again there was a significant difference between aspartame and placebo in number and severity of symptoms for patients with a history of depression…”

Accordingly, the author concluded that “individuals with mood disorders are particularly sensitive to this artificial sweetener and its use in this population should be discouraged.”

Dr Walton stated that he believed aspartame inhibits serotonin synthesis by decreasing the availability of the precursor L-tryptophan. This was further supported in another research 1987 experiment on rats.

This study is the only one that has been done looking at both mood and aspartame. No study since has been attempted to support or refute Dr. Waltons Findings. According to Dr. Walton, “The NutraSweet company clearly tried to block our study.”

Diet drinks and obesity.
#1.In 2005, the UofT Health Sciences Center presented 8 years (!) of research data showing diet soda as identifier in over 1,500 Mexican Americans. The numbers they showed were staggering.
For diet soft-drink drinkers, the risk of becoming overweight or obese was:

36.5% for up to 1/2 can each day
37.5% for 1/2 to one can each day
54.5% for 1 to 2 cans each day
57.1% for more than 2 cans each day.
For each can of diet soft drink consumed each day, a person’s risk of obesity went up 41%.

#2. Researchers have found a correlation between drinking diet soda and metabolic syndrome — the collection of risk factors for cardiovascular disease and diabetes that include abdominal obesity, high cholesterol and blood glucose levels — and elevated blood pressure.

The scientists gathered dietary information on more than 9,500 men and women ages 45 to 64 and tracked their health for nine years.

Over all, a Western dietary pattern — high intakes of refined grains, fried foods and red meat — was associated with an 18 percent increased risk for metabolic syndrome, while a “prudent” diet dominated by fruits, vegetables, fish and poultry correlated with neither an increased nor a decreased risk.

But the one-third who ate the most fried food increased their risk by 25 percent compared with the one-third who ate the least, and surprisingly, the risk of developing metabolic syndrome was 34 percent higher among those who drank one can of diet soda a day compared with those who drank none.

#3.An independent study by researchers with the Framingham Heart Study in Massachusetts, has turned up results which indicate that the consumption of diet soda correlates with increased metabolic syndrome. Of the 9,000 males and females studied, findings stated that 48% of the subjects were at higher risk for weight gain and elevated blood sugar. The researchers also acknowledged that diet soda drinkers were less likely to consume healthy foods, and that drinking diet soda flavored with artificial sweeteners more than likely increases cravings for sugar flavored sweets.

Rats lead the way.
Rats studied at Purdue University who were fed low-fat yogurt flavored with saccharine ate more rat chow and got fatter than those who ate the same yogurt flavored with glucose. The rats that ate the saccharine-sweetened yogurt were also less able to compensate for calories (i.e. eat less at the next meal to make up for a lot of food eaten at the last one) than those whose meals were “predictive”,” or sweetened with glucose. What does it mean for humans? The authors conclude that while you can’t take what you find in lab rats and assume it will apply to people, too, “it is conceivable that the widespread use of artificial sweeteners may have similar effects on us.

My Conclusions
A lot of this research is heavily disputed and controversial. I am sure I will catch some flak in the comments defending diet soda. The question I ask is “Is that (gross) little can of diet soda really worth the chance of ANY of this being true?” What do you think?

The Infamous Big Gulp

 

If  someone were to ask me “What is the single, most important and easiest way to lose weight?” I would tell them “Stop drinking soda pop”.

IMHO, this is the single easiest way to cut some of those excessive refined sugars out of your diet. According to a study done by UC Berkley, soda is the #1 source of sugar in the American diet. The average American drinks at lease 24 ounces of soda per day. Average soda/cola contains 2.8 grams of sugar per fl. oz.

Lets do the math on that. That means that the average American is drinking at least 67.2 grams of sugar per day! One of those 64 oz gas station drinks that are so popular contains 179 grams of sugar… in one drink. I watch some people in the office go through 2 of these in a day.

The average large drink from a restaurant 32 fl. oz. That is 64 grams of sugar right there. Eat out twice in a day and you are at 128 grams of sugar from sodas alone in the day. That’s not calories.. that’s grams of sugar!

You get the picture. Drinking soda is a sure fire way to get yourself a dose of insulin spiking, diabetes causing, obesity sparking sugar. Is that Coca-Cola with lunch really worth it? Drop the soda pop. Its a really really easy way to clean up your diet.

Important Caveat:Don’t replace the soda with other drinks that have just as much sugar (i.e that sugar laden latte from Starbucks).

Primal Blueberry Apple Pie

Change of plans today, the Larabar can wait an extra day.

I wanted to take the opportunity to talk about this past holiday. It truly turned out great. As I mentioned briefly before, I was hosting my family of grain and sugar lovers. Everyone got along, everyone enjoyed the food and everyone had a good time.

The thing that I want to talk about though is an interesting thing that happened when it came to dessert.I had made blueberry apple pie (no sweetener added). To me and my wife, this pie was SO sweet but to my family, they did not think the pie was nearly sweet enough. (The pie truly was delicious by the way)

This prompted my mother to recant a story from her experience.During her pregnancy with my sister, she was not able to eat sugar. She made a peach pie (no sweetener added) for her and her friends. It was almost too sweet for her to eat but her friends thought she was crazy and could not eat the pie themselves as it was not sweet enough. Sounds similar to my pies that were not sweet enough for my family.

For my wife and I, a simple piece of fruit or a couple berries is more than enough to satisfy any sweets cravings. I wonder how long it took us to get here though… I never really noticed the transition. I would like to be able to tell someone that is addicted to sugar how long it will take them to get to where a piece of fruit is sweet enough but I am not really sure that I know the answer?

The rest of the food was phenomenal though and family did not complain once about not having bread or grains which was nice. We had a spicy buffalo chili Christmas eve and for Christmas day, everyone got their own cornish game hen. As I said, everyone enjoyed time together which in my opinion is the most important part of the holiday!

What is your experience in weening yourself off refined sugar and sweets? How long did it take you? I hope everyone had a great holiday as well.