Update - Kitchen Clean Challenge, My Big Fat Diet, and a Delicious Lunch

13 days in to March, and I've yet to post the rules for the Kitchen Clean challenge I'm taking part in on the Magic Bus. Bad, bad me. But, better late than never:

Allowed
* any part of any animal (natural clean cuts)
* eggs
* VLC dairy
* VLC vegetables, nuts, seeds
* coconut oil/milk
* olive/nut/seed oils (for condiments)
* seasoning, salt, VLC sauces, stevia
* water, tea, coffee

Disallowed
* no grains, legumes, fruits
* no vegetable oils, mayo, salsa, bbq sauce, etc.
* no processed meats/cheese
* no artificial sweeteners (except stevia)
* no alcohol

This is pretty close to my usual diet, with the exception of artificial sweeteners, mayo and salsa. I like using a mix of erythritol, Splenda and stevia for baking, but I've kept it to stevia only in my occasional coffee.

Thing is, I've only clocked 6 days! After the carnivore challenge, I went a bit carby and had some real junk food - cheezies, and the dreaded Ruffles. And you know...they didn't taste very good. Why do they still hold any appeal for me? No idea. It's like smoking - I know they're gross, taste bad, and are bad for my health, but there's an addiction factor going on. Junk accounted for two days - the rest were due to having a small amount of rice with sushi, or a banana (which, I discovered, made me bloat!)

But the other day, I saw a terrific documentary on the CBC called "My Big, Fat Diet" by Mary Bissell. From the website:

If you visit Alert Bay off the coast of Vancouver Island, you'll find a picturesque fishing village inhabited by two cultures, the Namgis First Nation and their non-native neighbours. Here an epidemic is undermining the health and vitality of community. Like most aboriginal communities across North America, the rates of obesity, metabolic syndrome, and diabetes here are up to five times the national average. No one's life is untouched by this problem, everyone is related to someone who is either at risk, or coping with one of these health issues. Mainstream medical professionals cite sedentary lifestyles and a diet rich in fat as the underlying reason for the growing epidemic.

But after two decades of service in public health and a distinguished career, Métis physician, Dr. Jay Wortman, believes that the western diet which replaced the traditional diet is the primary cause of the epidemic. "Obesity, diabetes and heart disease were unknown in these populations until very recently. No aboriginal language has a word for diabetes."

Wortman's conviction comes from personal experience. Four years ago, he discovered that he had type 2 diabetes. "My immediate instinctive response was to stop eating any food that caused my blood sugar to rise. So I eliminated carbohydrates from my diet. Within four weeks, my blood sugar and blood pressure had normalized and I began to feel much better."

Directed by Mary Bissell, My Big, Fat Diet chronicles how the Namgis First Nation goes cold turkey and gives up sugar and junk food for a year in a diet study sponsored by Health Canada and the University of British Columbia. Through the stories of six people, it documents a medical and cultural experiment that may be the first of its kind in North America.

Around 100 residents took part in Dr. Wortman's study, while others opted out but still ate in a more traditional fashion - natural fats (including golden-yellow oolichan grease, oil from a smelt-like fish and referred to as their "sunshine in the winter"), meat, eggs, veggies and fish. Cauliflower, especially cauli-flied rice, was a huge hit - the lone grocery store on the bay was selling 112 heads a week!

After a year, total weight loss amongst the participants was over 1,200 lbs (544 kilos). The average weight loss after three months was 16.5 lbs (7.5 kilos), and after six months was 24 lbs (11 kilos). Triglyceride levels plummeted by 30%, and markers of diabetes improved within days. One of the six people featured, Art Dick, was able to go off both his diabetes and blood pressure medication.

If you're in Canada, you can catch the doc again on Saturday, March 15th at 10pm ET/PT on CBC Newsworld (and can we give the CBC props here for even airing this doc?). If you're elsewhere, check out YouTube for some clips. I've heard word from the filmmaker that the doc may air in the States at some point - somebody tell Oprah, and fast, so we can get Dr. Oz outta there and Dr. Wortman in! Edited to add this tip from Wifezilla: radio interview with Dr. Wortman here.

Finally, I made a delicious lunch today: crab meat mixed with garlic, onion, a little lemon juice and some locally made green onion cream cheese on Cleochatra's infamous "oopsie" rolls, with some organic mozzarella melted on top. Served with some tomato-cream soup, it kept me going for the rest of the day. Look upon my lunch with awe and wonder:

Chief Bill Cranmer, of the Namgis First Nation, advises other First Nation communities to "listen to the wisdom of our ancestors to achieve weight loss and health improvement." I think that's advice we can all take to heart. Our paleo ancestors ate a diet concentrated on meat and fat, with varying amounts of vegetation depending their geography. If it wasn't for meat and fat, we wouldn't be here to be told that meat and fat are the reasons we're dropping dead of diabetes, cancer and heart disease. Doesn't it make sense that traditional foods, the foods we evolved eating and thrived on, are the best foods for our health? And does it make any sense at all to base a diet on foods that have been altered, skimmed, or invented in a lab? There is a reason behind all of Nature's recipes. When will we grow up and realize that Mama really does know best?

I'll remind myself of this next time I catch myself eyeing a bag of Cheetos.

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.]

Nutrition and Physical Degeneration Online!

It's online! Weston A. Price's pivotal work on nutrition, and a must read for anyone with even a passing interest in dietary health.

Go here: http://journeytoforever.org/farm_library/price/pricetoc.html

Who is this guy, you ask? From the WAPF (Weston A. Price Foundation):

"Dr. Weston A. Price, a Cleveland dentist, has been called the "Charles Darwin of Nutrition." In his search for the causes of dental decay and physical degeneration that he observed in his dental practice, he turned from test tubes and microscopes to unstudied evidence among human beings. Dr. Price sought the factors responsible for fine teeth among the people who had them- the isolated "primitives." The world became his laboratory. As he traveled, his findings led him to the belief that dental caries and deformed dental arches resulting in crowded, crooked teeth and unattractive appearance were merely a sign of physical degeneration, resulting from what he had suspected-nutritional deficiencies.

Price travelled the world over in order to study isolated human groups, including sequestered villages in Switzerland, Gaelic communities in the Outer Hebrides, Eskimos and Indians of North America, Melanesian and Polynesian South Sea Islanders, African tribes, Australian Aborigines, New Zealand Maori and the Indians of South America. Wherever he went, Dr. Price found that beautiful straight teeth, freedom from decay, stalwart bodies, resistance to disease and fine characters were typical of primitives on their traditional diets, rich in essential food factors.

When Dr. Price analyzed the foods used by isolated primitive peoples he found that they provided at least four times the water soluble vitamins, calcium and other minerals, and at least TEN times the fat soluble vitamins from animal foods such as butter, fish eggs, shellfish and organ meats. "(http://www.westonaprice.org/brochures/wapfbrochure.html#about)

It's not a quick read - bookmark it and return often. Why this study has not formed the basis of our current dietary guidelines just baffles me.