Dana Carpender Says It Best

Dana Carpender is one of the low carb world's favorite cookbook authors (along with the wonderful, and Canadian, Karen Barnaby). She recently wrote a piece for the Tuscaloosa News, "Animal products are 'whole foods' too" that, try as I might, I cannot do better than. So I'm going to be a huge cheater and post it here, along with a few of my own comments [in italics]. Thank you, Dana.

Published Wednesday, January 9, 2008
DANA CARPENDER: Animal products are ‘whole foods,' too
COOK WELL, EAT WELL

The nutritional buzz phrase is 'whole foods.' This is encouraging. I've been watching the nutrition scene long enough to remember when people who insisted that whole-grain bread was more nutritious than enriched bread were scorned as 'food faddists.' [When I was a kid, brown bread was considered one of the most disgusting things on the face of the earth, right up there with spinach and boogers. As I became more health-conscious in my late teens/early twenties, I packed in enough whole-grain starches to feed all the cows in Texas - and felt very smug about my wholesome, evolved diet.]

But the admonitions to eat whole foods seem to apply only to grains, fruits and vegetables. Officialdom still recommends discarding large fractions of animal foods. Yet few see these fractionated animal foods as the refined, depleted foods they are.

Take dairy. Virtually all recommendations for dairy products include the qualifiers 'low-fat' or 'fat-free.' But that's not the way it comes out of the cow. Yes, whole milk has more calories than skim. It also has far more vitamin A, because it's carried in the butterfat. (Some skim milk is fortified with vitamin A —- the equivalent of adding a few vitamins back to nutritionally depleted white flour.) Because fat aids in calcium absorption, you'll get more calcium from whole milk. Whole milk from grass-fed cows supplies CLA, a fat that increases fat-burning and reduces heart disease and cancer risk, and omega-3 fats, which reduce inflammation, and heart disease and cancer risk. It is worth paying premium prices for such milk. [Low-fat yogurt? Let me count the ways...I ate gallons of the stuff, and reduced-fat cheese, sour cream and ice cream. Gak.]

And eggs. Oh, poor eggs. There they are, just about the most perfect food in the world, and what do people do? They throw away the yolks. The part with almost all the vitamins, including A, E, K and the hard-to-come-by D, not to mention brain-enhancing choline and DHA. Eggs from pastured chickens also have yolks rich in omega-3. Better to throw away the whites, not that I'd recommend that, either. Just eat whole eggs, will you? [I remember once, at a truck stop, haughtily requesting that my veggie omlette be made with whites only. The waitress looked at me as if I'd asked for poop-kabobs. I'm lucky I didn't get my ass kicked.]

Then there's chicken. When did 'chicken' become synonymous with 'boneless, skinless chicken breast?' Chicken breast is a good food, but the whole chicken is better. Dark and white meats both have nutritional strengths. They are not identical in vitamin and mineral content. Chicken skin is a good source of vitamin A, again because it's fatty. I wrote recently about liver's nutritional bonanza, and hearts are nutrient-rich as well, making giblet gravy a great idea. Simmering the leftover chicken bones yields flavorsome broth rich in highly absorbable calcium and joint-building gelatin. (I save my steak bones, too, for beef broth.) [In the damp, dark days of winter, I have a broth going almost constantly. I get beef bones from my local pet food store - full of marrow and guaranteeing a stock that looks like meat jello. You can freeze your leftover meat bones in zipper bags or, just because it's so much fun, in a vacuum bag. Do the same with veggie scraps, if you use them for flavour.]

Our ancestors, ever mindful of where their next meal was coming from, relished every edible part of every animal they killed. Indeed, paleoanthropologists assert that hunter-gatherers ate the rich, fatty organ meats first, preferring them to muscle meats, and smashed bones to eat the marrow. As recently as a century ago, marrow was such a popular food that special spoons were made for scooping it out of bones. I love the stuff. I've been sucking the marrow out of lamb-chop bones since I was a tyke. [Me too! It's my favorite part of the lamb. I remember as a kid, we had lamb once a week with homemade mint sauce. My dad and I would end the meal by plucking a bone, sticking one end in our mouths, and noisily sucking it empty.] A 1997 article in the journal Nature asserts that human brain capacity decreased at the dawn of agriculture 10,000 years ago, very likely because of a reduction in animal-fat consumption. Whole animal foods are part of our nutritional heritage. [Grains also have neurological effects - see The Gluten File. Also see Dean Ornish. You'll never eat a grain again.]

My low-carbohydrate eating habits are often referred to as a 'fad.' Whatever. If it was good enough for my hunter-gatherer ancestors, it's good enough for me. Do you want to know what's really a fad? Removing the fat from milk and the yolks from eggs, and discarding three- quarters of the chicken, all organ meats and most bones. There's not a culture in the world where our narrow, refined, low-fat, flavorless versions of animal foods are part of the traditional diet. [Dana - you truly are my hero. No-one's said it better.]