Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Shorty


This is a short one, but this is important for perspective.

My mother has two of her own chickens. She keeps them in her yard and they eat what insects they can find in the green grass under their claws. She occasionally tosses in some seed, worms that she she finds on the walkway when it rains and the odd handful of corn when she feels like feeding them for fun. They aren't crammed into cages, beaks chopped off so they can't hurt any of the others, never to see the sun, and fed cracked corn which is not part of their natural diet. All in all these chickies have a pretty respectable diet, certainly as chickens go. She loves them because she has always loved chickens (and her kids gave them to her). In return for a happy chicken life, they give her each one egg a day for a total of over a dozen a week! Not a bad gig, huh?

Recently one of her hens laid a behemoth double-yolker that my mom passed onto me. The picture here is of this double-yolker next to a single-yolker that I bought from the grocer. Keep in mind that the single is an Omega-3 happy, cage-free, organic feed chicken egg. STILL note the difference!
And you thought the difference between real and organic-but-still-commercially-grown wasn't that great, uh huh! The yellow to orange color of the egg yolk is created by carotenoids, the same you would find in carrots (lutein and zeaxanthin to be exact). Commercially produced eggs are made yellow by adding synthesized carotenoids to the chicken feed. The deep orange color of my mother's chicken's egg is caused by carotenoids that are naturally occuring in this bird's diet as well as it's exposure to real sunlight. Eggs from free-range chickens have been shown to have higher levels of Folic acid, Vitamin B12, and Omega-3 fatty acids!

It's amazing what kind of nutritional difference occurs when an animal is permitted to eat what it would eat on it's own time in it's own real environment. Think about that and then think about what you are eating. Is it food that you are eating or is it just merely edible?

Friday, May 15, 2009

A lesson on Brussels Sprouts...they're GOOD!


If you cook them right that is! My goal here is to get you started on the road to enjoying, if not loving, these funny little guys.


Brussels Sprouts are members of the brassica family of vegetables and happen to be amazingly, ridiculously, almost disgustingly good for you. Brussels sprouts are actually mini cabbages that grow on tall stalks. Thankfully we can find them sans-stalk (less work when you get home, but not by much) and it is admittedly kind of fun to buy a giant stalk of sprouts. Other members of this group of veggies are broccoli, arugula, beets and cabbage.

So let me try to sway you first with science. Brussels sprouts are really a nutrient powerhouse. One cup of sprouts (plain) has just 38 calories and has so many vitamins and minerals this would be a very tedious read if I listed them all. For short, here are some of them:
Lutein, Zeaxanthin, beta Carotene, phytosterols, Vitamin K, some Vitamin E, Vitamin A (664 IU!), Potassium (342 mg), Phosphorus, Magnesium, Iron, Calcium, Vitamin C (about 75 mg) and you will be glad to know that several components of brussels sprouts & their family members have been shown in studies to inhibit the growth of cancerous cells. (yay!)

As for why you don't like them, it's the sulphur. It is the high sulphur content that is in most of these vegetables that give them that distinctive odor and in most cases flavor that you may find off-putting. It may also be the texture if you cook them too long! So follow me to better buds...

Brussels Sprouts
1 package of sprouts (the tinier & more tightly closed the better)
2 Tbsp butter (for beginners) and 1 Tbsp Coconut oil or olive oil for the rest of you

First rinse your sprouts and slice off the discolored bottom, only a little slice though. You want to keep most of your sprout! Next slice them in half length wise. Throw them all into enough water to cover them and boil them 6-8 minutes (you can steam them also). You want them to turn BRIGHT green, but not get mushy.

Drain them out and while they're dripping heat your butter or coconut oil in a large saute pan. When it's hot enough to sizzle (test by tossing in a sprout leaf and make sure it sizzles at you) toss the sprouts in. Toss around to coat in your fat of choice and then let 'em sit on one side. You want to brown them, get 'em crispy! Flip and toss to brown other sides, letting them sit for a minute or two on each side. They will be browned as they are in my picture.
Keep the heat high and don't over cook. When they are mistreated for too long they will emit the sulphur compounds we don't like! Also, if you really are trying to like them and are starting from hate, add bacon. I'm not a bacon eater, so I don't know, but bacon eaters seem to be adamant that it makes everything taste better. So throw some pancetta into the pan and see what happens!
Please let me know if you try this and what your results were!


Sunday, May 3, 2009

Carbs for cave dwellers

I just received a question about carbohydrates and I think that it's a good topic to address. So here it is;
"Where do we get our carbs from now? I was getting all of my carbs from whole
wheat pasta, grains, and beans. Where do I get them now?"

So a quick question to you would be, what do you think vegetables and fruits are made of?

I think we have all been misled to believe that we will all shrivel and die if we do not consume the 6-11 servings of grains a day that the Food Pyramid recommends. Just for curiosity's sake I search-engined various grains and pastas to get an idea, on average, of how many carbs were in one serving of a generic grain product. I looked up beans, pastas, corn, rice and so on. It seems that a rough average is about 35 grams per standard recognized serving. If you eat all 6-11 servings of grains that are recommended, then you are getting 210 to 385 grams of carbohydrates per day. This translates into 840 to 1540 calories per day, EEP! I'm no scientist, but this sounds a might bit...okay, outrageously high!! Supporters of the Paleo diet seem to dwell happily in a carbohydrate range between 100 and 200 grams of carbohydrate per day (some go below 100 grams but this is particularly for fat loss, not for body weight maintenance or for optimal physical performance). It is not the amount of calories alone that concerns me, but the amount of calories that are left (of the 2,000) to spend on lean proteins and antioxidant-rich vitamin and mineral sources!

Quick story: I lived with a group of Australian Aborigines for two months after I graduated college as part of an Anthropology research trip. We were there to study the hunting and gathering techniques that the people used. I, of course, followed along with the women. One morning (and only once) we started with black tea and a piece of seed "cake" that we had prepared the day before. Five hours of gathering thousands of seeds (similar in size and color to poppy seeds) followed by 4 1/2 hours of grinding and pounding on a real stone mortar to create a seed paste which, when poured onto hot clean sand and buried with coals, baked into a "cake". Not really an effective use of time; ten hours of processing for one "cake" about 8" across to feed 6 people? Put your hands 8" apart and you can see that isn't much for 6 people for breakfast.

Then we would head out into the desert to hunt lizards. Along the way we would nibble on wild tomatoes we found. Sometimes we found larvae of various sizes and we would eat those also. We did not eat the lizards until we got back into camp at the end of the day and everything got roasted together and evenly distributed. Most often there was left over wild tomatoes and such and those were eaten for breakfast when there was no seed "cake", which was often. The vast majority of our carb intake for the day was from wild fruits (in this case tomatoes), seeds and berries. As you can see, there was no pasta or italian bread to fuel us along as we walked for miles hunting and gathering. Please note that homo sapiens had been living this particular way for thousands of years before the advent of fettucine!

I think that if you approach the Paleo diet trying to make sure you get the same amount of carbohydrates you get eating grains, then this will goof you up, even if you have the best of intentions. I feel the Paleo diet is much more about nutrition. This diet is about FEEDING your body with nutrients, not drowning your body with mere substance. I have read many blogs trying to get a feel for people's physical reactions to starting this diet. Some feel a little weak for about a week, and that seems to be normal as your body is adjusting to being fed properly (or more efficiently anyway). All your hormones are adjusting, blood sugar is balancing out and your muscles too are getting adjusted. Personally when I first started I felt good for one week and then a little weaker for a few days during the second week. That weakness, however, was only apparent when I tried to lift heavy weights. A weight I had pressed overhead 10+ times the week prior now felt almost impossible to lift. The rest of the time I felt really good! The next week however I was back to lifting that weight and more. Now my sweet tooth has diminished, my desire for coffee has waned (in part thanks to the teeccino distraction), I sleep more soundly and I can still run!

It is true that the need for carbohydrates is going to vary from person to person and that will also change for whether or not you are active. For instance, I feel better eating a banana after an 8 mile run than I do eating one on a rest day. Please do not sabotage yourself by thinking that there is some sort of grain-carb to veggie/fruit-carb equivalance tabulature. If you have been following the Paleo guidelines for awhile and you feel good then you are likely doing it well! If you feel tired then you may indeed need to increase either the amount of carbohydrate you consume each day OR you may need to just the amount of fat you are eating instead!

Yeah, fat is an energy source! This is especially true if you are following the Paleo style of eating. Some folks still hold onto the '90s notion that dietary fat is the devil and they have a hard time adding it into their diet when they go Paleo. Nuts, fish oil and coconut oil are your friends my friend! [They make your body happy and energetic and they make your hair, skin and nails pretty too!]

Americans typically have a skewed sense of how much vegetable matter is adequate, especially in the absence of bread. And you may be suprised to find out how much fat you can eat! If you need some help determining how much you should be eating I would recommend going to the Zone Diet website (http://www.zonediet.com/) and using their block calculations to help get you going. First use their block calculator to get an idea of how many blocks you would need to eat in a day. Then write down what you typically eat each day, or write down what you just ate for the last meal. Include rough estimates of how much of each component there was. For instance, how many cups of lettuce in your salad? How much meat did you eat? Was there a dressing or oil on your meal? Then compare this to the Zone block method and you should see if you are short on veggies or fats.

Start strictly and then do not be afraid to tweak your diet to see what works! You may find out what works straight out of the gate, you may not. If you decide to add or subtract something, give your body a week or two to adjust before you rule it in or out. Be flexible and listen to what your body tells you. Make sure you drink plenty of clean water (unflavored) so that you do not misinterpret thirst for hunger. Eat when you're hungry, stop when you're done. That's probably the hardest part!! There are days when I feel I have grossly over eaten but when I look back on it I realize, "I ate what, too many apples? Too many walnuts? Too much spinach?" Please. Just imagine your cave-dwelling tribe just found an apple orchard and happily gorged; eat fewer tomorrow!