Didn’t fall down today. Not too sore, considering.
But Jane and I are both tired of starving ourselves and still not losing weight. So we are undertaking a new weight loss push. I hate walking. I hate walking with a passion. But Jane loses weight best when she walks. So I’ve agreed I’ll walk to support her. Twice a day. Sigh. And—we have resolved to pick the far backside of every parking lot, park there, and walk to whatever store, give or take the presence of shopping cart repositories to help us with the load. This can actually add up. We did two back-of-the-parking lot hikes today.
I’m back at work with the Mantis, but Jane asked me to lay off it today, since I have a persistent headache from the fall yesterday: didn’t hit my head, but the jolt gave me a mild bit of whiplash.
So wish us luck. It’s not reasonable we starve as we do and never have desert and exercise and still can’t lose weight. So we’re going to try Something Different, and just walk more.
There was some other national walking challenge I took part in once, can’t remember who sponsored it, that used a map of the U.S. to chart progress — we were “flying” or I dunno taking a train or something from city to city across the country. The person at UA who designed all our challenged did a lot of research to make it interesting — like for the Everest Challenge she wrote up info about each of the villages & camps that someone who was actually doing an Everest expedition would go through on the way to the summit (& back down again). We could all see how other participants were progressing — from the 4 main units of the UA system across the state — so some people got pretty competitive. (My coworker & I came in first & 2nd for UAA.) There was one guy down in Ketchikan who must have walked & hiked & whatever all day every day — he finished a good couple of weeks before the next person to finish. Very motivating! Other people were more relaxed about it.
The flight line at the AFB is aligned with prevailing winds. On one side of it you’re pedaling straight into the wind, even with the buildings around. My cycling partner is on a fitness kick right now so he’s pushing the pace all along that. He calls the wind “coach…”
While we do have wind tunnels at LaRC, I don’t get to cycle in there. The model shop guys would have a fit (and fall in it). And I don’t want to be in the Spin Tunnel, I am sure I would not drift delicately down…
Yeah, I guess that’s how they lay out runways 🙂
I actually went to elementary school a few miles away in York County a few decades ago…
For another poster, yes diet does work long term. I’ve been low carb for 12 years, lost a lot and gained none, even when not exercising. Which happens every time I blow out the bad right knee, for several weeks.
Fat is added to the body by excess carb, not from protein or fat. I don’t eat much carb at all, there’s no pathway to add it. Fat is not harmful or fattening if it is a natural, animal or plant fat that can be extracted without industrial processes.
Check out http://www.thincs.org and http://heartscanblog.blogspot.com/ for some hard science and some a cardiologists take on it. The notion of a low fat diet is terrible, you can look back to the time before they were recommended and see just how horribly unhealthy the public was when meat was fashionable and cake was “fattening.” It’s instructive looking at film from 1950 or thereabouts and after 1980.
I found that the best method for me to lose weight is to visit Europe. I hardly, if ever, rent a car and so depend on public transit. Since I’m visiting and don’t know the schedules, I often just walk if it isn’t too long a distance. My wife usually averages over 13,000 steps each day when in Europe even without any “exercise”. And even with the food we eat, I still end up losing a few pounds.
Now, if I could only convince my insurance company that airfare qualified as a “medical expense” 🙂
I completely agree that diet can and does work long-term. But it’s absolutely not true that fat is only added to the body by excess carbs, but not by excess protein or fat. Excess calories will lead to excess body fat no matter what kind of excess calories they are. Here’s an explanation of why — How We Get Fat — this article doesn’t have references because it was done on the fly, but the author of it (Lyle McDonald) has done the reading in science over long years to back it up (his books do include references — including the single-best based-on-science book on low-carb diets, called The Ketogenic Diet).
As he sums it up:
(1) Excess dietary fat is directly stored as fat.
(2) Excess dietary carbs increase carb oxidation, impairing fat oxidation; more of your daily fat intake is stored as fat.
(3) Excess dietary protein increases protein oxidation, impairing fat oxidation; more of your daily fat intake is stored as fat.
De novo lipogenesis — synthesis of fat from glucose (carbs) in the body is extraordinarily rare in humans (less rare in some other animals). But with a notable exception: “when dietary fat is below about 10% of total daily calories. Under that condition, the body ramps up de novo lipogenesis.” Which is (one of the reasons) that ultra-low fat diets are extraordinarily stupid. (There are other reasons too.)
One of the reasons low-carbing works well for people it works for (& no, it doesn’t work well for everybody) is that both protein & fat are more satiating than carbs. If you include a lot of very fibrous nonstarchy veggies (that have carbs but not many) which also fills up the tummy. Another reason, especially for insulin resistant (at risk for Type 2 diabetes) people, is that high carb intakes lead to big fluctuations in levels of blood sugar & insulin, which (amongst other things) can contribute to hunger pangs & carb cravings, contributing to overeating. (And lots of the carbs that people crave are usually packaged with lots of hidden fats of the worst variety.)
Interesting. It could explain some of the strangeness about dieting.
De novo lipogenesis is not rare, it is very common.
http://www.ajcn.org/cgi/content/abstract/74/6/737 AJCN direct link, blog below:
http://www.scienceblog.com/community/older/2001/A/200110712.html – study on de novo lipogenesis in lean vs obese women. Short story – obese women store carbs as fat more than lean ones, so even if it is rare, if you’re worried about your weight chances are it’s a factor for you.
http://ajpendo.physiology.org/cgi/content/abstract/253/6/E664 Adipose tissue and the liver both engage in DNL
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12566139 – Dietary fat unrelated to weight gain
A case in point, both the Masai and the Inuit have (had) diets that were composed almost entirely of animal products, high in fat and both societies were entirely free of the diseases of civilization at the time of contact. They were lean, they had great bones and teeth, they had no heart disease, no cancer, no diabetes, no asthma, no appendicitis… Yet their diets were sky high in fat and by the current thinking nobody eating that way would live past the age of three. (Exaggeration!)
People do react differently to diets, everyone has a different dietary history from everyone else, at the micro level. At the macro level, Europeans seem to have a little more resistance to excessive carbohydrate than do people who came to grain based diets later in their histories. (Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond goes into who had what, when and what it did to them in great detail.) Native Americans eating the same dietary pattern as whites in the same regions become obese and diabetic earlier in life, as an example.
Individuals food preferences will certainly over time shape a metabolic pattern. Also economics, if pasta is all you can afford. And these individual food histories mean we all come at different times, or never if we are fortunate genetically or gastronomically, to the battle of the bulge.
Centenarians come in smoking and non-smoking, carnivorous and herbivorous, drinkin’ and not drinkin’ and all kinds of varieties. The only commonality seems to be low sustained blood sugar and slow metabolism. Well, YAY, that’s ME now that I’m keeping my carbs tightly controlled.
Yes, we’re all different. But the mechanisms underlying our metabolisms are only so variable, and those are stressed when blood sugar is allowed to get too high for too long. Anyone who is fighting their weight should get a meter and check in the morning first thing at the very least to see what their glucose is doing in a fasting state. I’d then check at 1 and 2 hours post meal and keep a log of what it does with what meals, not forever, but for a few weeks. Once you know if you’re having BG issues you know whether you need to keep on metering or not, whether you should see your doctor, etc. Because if your sugar is high it really does mess with a lot of other things including mood, sleep and of course, DNL…
Europe is great, at least I really enjoyed Paris. I wound up bicycling up Montmarte (a big-4$$ hill – 130 meters high) twice in one day, which probably burned at least 20 calories 😉 Then I had a steak and half a beer.
Mostly we cycled in Paris, all over the city. Didn’t get on the Metro, maybe next trip. Didn’t lose any weight that I noticed, but I wasn’t looking anyway.
I have found that fresh, good quality food is more filling and satisfying than something analogous from a chain restaurant or cafeteria. A home prepared meal with no canned or boxed components and from the best ingredients you can afford will result in a net drop in calories consumed. I suspect this is why people are not as fat, and don’t get as fat, in Europe. I exclude the UK from this, I had some lovely meals in the UK but none of them were “English.”
the best european diet is from the south, olive oil and lots of fresh fruit and veg, also pulses. traditional northern european diet is pretty dreadful. I often base a meal around vegetables rather than meat with veg. I am not a vegetarian, but I eat meat sporadically, alternating with fish (oily for preference) and pulses. for instance last night – sprouting broccoli and cauliflorets cooked in olive oil with 2 cloves of garlic, in a heavy le creuset casserole for 10 minutes, much stirring and a little bit of water. after cooking i added a tin of picante sardines minus their olive oil and a red pepper I grilled the night before. delicious, minimal carbs. have to say the rest of the day was pretty carb heavy! I am fairly self indulgent, my favourite temptations being dark chocolate and red wine, but with minimum walking 3 miles a day the weight stays pretty constant, around 120 lbs I am 5′ 3″ and 60, I could lose a little tummy roll I have if I spent a month in my place in Spain and walked up and down all those hills!
One of the hardest things is when you’re cooking for 2 and around allergies.
We’re both allergic to onions, and tolerate garlic only if it’s made from fresh, not powdered: we tolerate the garlic, but not the powder they put in to keep the garlic powder from clumping. That’s worse than onions. Jane’s sensitive to bell pepper (I love them)and paprika (there goes my goulash recipe, and many chili versions.) We both love salmon, but I’m iffy on white fishes, and loathe freshwater fish. Jane hates liver. But liver and onions was right out. I love fried potatoes. Well, we both do. But those are death bombs. And both of us are sensitive to Irish potatoes, to tomatoes in any form, and somewhat to bell pepper (all related New World plants that contain (Ilisidi would love them) strychnine): they give us incredible joint pain and stiffness if we eat them, and really bad, bad stiffness if we eat them several days running: no french fries for us! Jane hates asparagus. I love it, but can’t have much of it without distress. Jane loves beets. I’m ok with them. Jane’s not fond of lima beans. I really like them. Fortunately we both love pintos, lentils, and all varieties of peas, but they put on weight. I’m not keen on canned green beans: we’re going to try to grow some. And I have to force myself to eat raw vegetables of any stamp—cauliflower, broccoli, —I can tolerate small carrots, but get a gut ache if I overdo it; Jane likes all these raw. I love brussel sprouts. Jane can tolerate them in moderation. Both of us love corn on the cob, but both of us are sensitive to corn, particularly Jane, including cornmeal in any form, including corn chips.
It’s a minefield, cooking in this house; and the things we agree on are all fattening. We never have the desserts we learned to cook, no pies, cakes, puddings, or the like. Ice cream is forbidden, as are malts, soft drinks, carbonated drinks in general, fruit juice (heavy in sugar). I like V8; Jane detests it. And we get past temptation by just never having the temptations around. Peanut butter is Jane’s downfall; and I like it, too. We have eggs for breakfast; but Jane hates eggs. We sometimes have Kashi cereal, and use almond milk; and I get a latte (sugarfree) at the rink. More rarely, usually only on car trips, Jane gets a chai.
Sigh. But we’ve got to do something. And we are not yet doing our around the block walks, but we are doing heavy yard work—I’m running the Mantis, and Jane is digging up sprinkler heads and blocking them off—and we are parking the car at the rear of the parking lots we go to: and we’re skating daily again. It remains to be seen how resolute we are when the temperature rises above 80 and heads for 100 this summer.
I just read an article recently (which of course I can’t find now!) highlighting the importance of exercise. The basic gist was that, while the US is still the fattest country in the world, the trend seems to be slowing down in the US and increasing in the rest of the world. And the culprit is that the rest of the world is adopting the current US lifestyle: more fast food, less exercise, more sugary foods, while the US is starting to wake up to the importance of getting more exercise.
So the comment about people being less overweight in the 50s could have a lot more to do with the lack of labor-saving devices and more physical activities (no computer games and less tv to suck up time, so more people were out DOING things) than it does with the kinds of foods that people were eating. Although having less money also probably helped… my mom tells me that when she was growing up, she almost never had meat at meals, because it was too expensive. And when they did, it was chicken or pork, because they raised them, or snake or venison, because that was free if you could catch it. But they ate a lot of starches (rice, corn, potato), because that is cheap to get, and were definitely NOT fat from doing so.
I am fortunate to really only have to avoid wheat and walnuts. I find that heavy fibrous things really HURT me – all this advice to eat fiber sort of treats us as if we are cows and we are not, we haven’t the digestive tract of a ruminant, and fiber “works” by damaging the epithelial cells of the cut, causing them to secrete mucus patches. Once I learned that I ceased to concern myself with it and have been feeling Much Better in that regard.
We make a low carb ice cream with just heavy cream, a flavor and maybe a little splenda. You can’t eat enough of it to get a real sugar hit, it’s too filling. Commerical low carb ice creams are full of garbage that makes the gut explode, like sugar alcohols. But if you can tolerate dairy maybe experiment with a little heavy cream based frozen treat, it really is NOT fattening. Ginger-almond is my favorite, it has a smooth nuttiness that would be too bland without the ginger bite.
I saw an ad for the mantis while we were at lunch yesterday, my husband thinks it would require a lot of effort to keep it Down in the dirt… can you comment on whether it rocks or whether it’s kinda OK?
oooh. mind passing on that low carb ice cream recipe?
The Mantis is how we dug our pond. And stripped the back yard of grass. It’s got an amazing guarantee: use it for 90 days and if you don’t like it, you can return it.
Ours is 3 years old. The way you use it: it works while being pulled backward. It will buck if you attempt to push it forward. Release the trigger and walk forward with it in neutral to start a new row, then start pulling it backward again. Cross-hatch your ground to be sure it all churns up. It’s bite is about 2″. It’s light enough to carry easily, it eats rocks the size of a baking potato and flings them out. It’s tough, impervious to damage from rocks and dust.
As you’re pulling backward, it digs itself into the ground, as much as 4″ deep, if you want to stand in one spot, but best to do the cross-hatch passes. We used it in the digging mode for the pond. Tilling a whole garden, keep it moving.
Its weight lets you maneuver around plantings with great accuracy. Its small size lets it go where big tillers can’t; and it’s a deadman’s switch: you take your hand off the trigger and it stops, for safety.
Servicing? Starts like a charm after a winter’s inactivity: just remember to put the switch in ‘on’ position and to prime it, then pull the choke.
Starts by at least the second pull on the cord thereafter, and it’s not hard to pull.
I can’t recommend this little beast enough. We’ve done all the servicing it’s ever had, and it’s taking on the heavy root mat in the front yard (nearly a peat layer) without complaint. Costs about 300.00, and it can do flowerbeds. Most households would get a lot more use out of a Mantis than a full-out big Rototiller, because of its ability to get into most places a household vacuum cleaner could go. We store it for the winter by putting it up on the rafters of the garage, and it hangs easily and compactly from hooks, if you prefer.
The Mantis sounds like it would be a very big help for when we want to replace our poor weed-choked yard; does it come in an electric version? Our gasoline is mandated to have ethanol additive, which does bad things to small 2-stroke engines like lawnmowers; the ethanol gums up the carbuerators and gas lines unless the engine is run frequently. Not so bad if you have a yard service where the machines run almost constantly, but otherwise you’d have to be constantly tinkering with your gasoline powered equipment. After my old Toro died (gas) and my Homelite electric proved to be unreliable (rechargeable battery died after less than a year), I went with a reel-style push mower. Exercise + reliable + environmentally happy = WIN!
Its tank is readily accessible, holds about 3 cups of gasoline (50:1 oil/gas mix) which you may have to refill during a large job, but you’d need more stamina than I’ve got. When through with a job, you could easily just upend it and drain the tank into a dedicated bucket. I can lift the tiller easily with one hand, and the tank is a pervisible plastic tank sitting atop the engine, so just open it up and dump, then return unused fuel to your gas can. It’s a fast, buzzy little engine. Mine could probably do with some new filters…but it runs and runs and runs.
You might also phone the Mantis people and ask their recommendations. I’ve found them one of the best companies to deal with.
I bought a Mantis in 1989 and used it until it finally fell apart last year. I guess I loved it to death. I found it very easy to use….just had to watch for stones getting jammed in the tines (New England soil), but they are easily freed. I think it took me about an hour to get used to using it. Minor repairs are easy…I think I had mine worked on professionally once in all the time I had it. I’m thinking of replacing it with an electric version.
I had a Mantis and it was indeed a sturdy little workhorse. But I definitely disagree about ease of starting; I could almost never do it. I’d pull and pull and pull, and nothing.
I just got an electric Troybilt. It’s pretty similar to the Mantis in size and operating technique. They make an electric Mantis, but it costs twice as much. Only prob with my new one is that the housing over the tines seems designed specifically to encourage it to jam on potato-sized rocks. Bigger ones it will kick out behind, little one go right through. Middle-sized ones, unlike in Goldilocks, are just WRONG. Also 100 feet of 12-gauge extension is a load to carry out to the garden. But the instant-start power is worth it.
It did a good job in creating garden space for the first time in years. The sugar-snap peas are heading up their trellis, the tomatoes are blooming, the zucchinis have sprouted ENORMOUS cotyledons — healthy delicious eating is ahead! I already had a sandwich made with thinned radish sprouts.
The new Mantis is much easier to start……with a primer and all…which mine did not have…..however, I did learn to start it fairly quickly on two pulls
Low Carb Ice Cream
Just Heavy Cream, preferably pasteurized only and not ULTRA or UHT. The kind with no carageenan.
For a 1 quart freezer, you can use two pints of heavy cream (they mostly don’t come in quarts..) and the flavoring of your choice. For Ginger Almond, we use Trader Joe’s almond flour (somewhat over 1/4 cup and 8 tablespoons (!!! I had no idea!) of ground ginger. Do not use fresh ginger, it will curdle the cream. This makes it Very Tingly. Maybe you don’t want that much. Sugar to taste – make it sweeter than you want because after it freezes it will be less intense. Also, your ingredients may cause you to vary this recipe. Use the blender to distribute the ginger or you will get LUMPS. TASTY FIREY HOT GINGER LUMPS. But you can put the almond flour in there too. Add a little cinnamon, too. Maybe 1/4 teaspoon. In addition to flavor, Cinnamon is great for helping your body regulate blood sugar.
Put it in the freezer, we have a self spinning one – when the motor slows down take it out and put it in the freezer.
Some ingredients, like grapefruit, you soak the peel in the cream and strain it out. We wing it, mostly. For Vanilla, we can’t speak highly enough Neilson-Massey vanilla paste.
Low Carb ice creams are really simple. You can even make a quick ‘n dirty
I have conveyed your review of the MANTIS to the Man, ’tis his job to do most of the gardening since he’s the big plant eater in this house 😉
As a weight loss multiplier, exercise really isn’t working out they way people thought it would. When you consider that 89% (approximately) of energy goes to fuel the BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate) and only that last 11 or so to fuel muscular effort, it is not surprising.
It is certainly possible to eat starchy things and not be fat, but serving size and degree of processing matter hugely. My local Italian place when I was in Silver Spring, MD served a tiny bowl of pasta on the side with a meal, which was the way they ate it in Italy. That’s what they said, anyway.
Also, food today is cheaper than ever, in more ways than one. In 1935, arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefannson commented in his article “Adventures in Diet” on the relative prices of sugar versus fat. The difference was on the order of 6 or 7X. But the absolute price of food was higher than we can imagine today, and people would not have indulged so freely. Their flours and other starches were also much more likely to be whole rather than refined. HFCS is probably the biggest “fattener” of today’s people, also. And it is relatively recent.
So, someone who ate “high carb” in 1950 is going to have had a lower absolute level of sugar and calories and is less likely to have been metabolically damaged by it. Today, folks have been following Doctor’s Orders and have been cutting fat – replacing fats with carbs, and the result has been disastrous.
Once your metabolism is damaged (slowed down, impaired glucose tolerance, hyperinsulmia, etc) the real answer for most people is carbohydrate restriction. Not everyone, certainly. But if you’ve been honoring the USDA (coicidence anyone?) Food Pyramid and you’ve gained weight, chances are you’re someone who will do better restricting starches.
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1914857,00.html Exercise as a weight loss strategy (alone) questioned.
Also somewhat alarming:
http://www.naturalnews.com/028587_sick_care_health.html – this is the same conclusion I have come to lately, that the economy depends on people eating cheap big agro products, getting sick and needing health care. I am cynical. I freely admit it.
Re Italy and pasta, dead right. In Italy, lunch is often a pasta and beans mix for those needing carbs, and what we would call a small bowl, up to the colored rim on most flat bowls, no refills, or a hard roll (fresh bread), piece of fruit, and coffee or sparkling water.
Supper: a meat dish, sauteed, not very much, an insalata (vinegar and oil on sliced tomatoes and cucumbers, about 1 of each), a slice of fresh bread, and a saucer-sized serving of pasta, sometimes, but not always. Megahelpings of pasta, no. Occasionally something like a square of lasagna serves as meat and pasta, but not every night. Fish is common. Most meat servings are quite small by American standards. Dessert, not regularly. Glass of wine, maybe two. Period.
Young people in Italy tend to be active and quite slender. At least back in the 70’s you usually did not see plump young people, but older folk, yes, fairly common. I think the lesson might be, even where the Mediterranean diet is the regular, you need to be highly active in exercise—and this is a population that walks, a lot!
I have found a wonderful non-dairy chocolate ice cream, made of water, agave cactus syrup, cashew nuts and cacao powder. 185 calories per 100 gms
of course lots of people won’t be able to tolerate the nuts, but there is no soya, no cholesterol, no refined sugar, no gluten, no dairy and it’s organic. and made in the uk …. Booja-Booja is the name. yum. 🙂
older spanish people tend to be plump, yes … not so much the pasta, but the pork products, I think!
Agave is full of fructose, which is hard on the liver and delays processing of any glucose that come with it. While fructose is frequently touted as a good sweetener for diabetics it is actually worse than white sugar for this reason.
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/booster_shots/2010/03/high-fructose-corn-syrup-consumption-may-push-fatty-livers-to-the-brink.html
I know several diabetics who swear by Agave because it has a low glycemic index……Debra Lynn Dadd has a good site all about natural sweeteners…..she comes up easily on google.
I *love* ice cream…….to the point where I do not keep it in the house….when I do eat it, it’s from a local ice cream company. I would rather have a small quantity of the bests than a huge quantity of low fat diet etc.
I am exercising steadily again…..not so much for weight loss as for my knees, which are much better. 😉
The USDA pyramid works for me. LOTS of veg of all kinds, plenty of carbs but almost exclusively whole-grain, a little meat, fairly low-fat but not extreme (25-30 g/day), almost no salt added (couldn’t find the salt shaker when I had houseguests), LOTS of water and LOTS of walking and LOTS of potassium (irish potatoes and cantaloupe have the most). Lost 35 pounds, 30 pts of blood pressure, got the cholesterol down to an acceptable range.
Unfortunately wintertime and cold rain and no farmers market sabotaged my walking and veggies. Hoping to freeze lots of goodies from the garden this year.
The reason Agave doesn’t spike “blood sugar” is because you’re only measuring glucose. Fructose will not show up. Do a google search such as “agave fructose NAFLD” and you will see there is a lot of concern about Agave, and fructose in general. Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease is the next big thing coming down the metabolic pike. For a diabetic to use fructose is actually worse than using straight sugar, as it is for anyone. The liver makes those nasty triglycerides and shoots them into the blood to get rid of the sugars, and that triglyercide goes to your fat cells until you switch to fat burning and can use them. In the interim, it is triglycerides that really determine your CHD risk – high trigs, high risk. Low trigs, no matter what the other cholesterol numbers and your risk is correspondingly low.
ah, I will be sparing in my booja-booja consumption then …. I recently discovered that soya milk was not such a good thing to be drinking, sadly.
So what’s wrong with soymilk? (unless you’re allergic to soy, of course)
Soy is one of those things that we misunderstand in several ways. First, people think Asians eat tons of it so it must be safe and healthful – they do not. Fermented soy products like miso and tempeh have been safely used for centuries, but unfermented soy like tofu or soy milk has not had the questionable components removed from it.
Re: Asia and soy – the chinese character for soy depicts the roots of the plant, rather than the tops of it the way the other 4 of “five sacred grains” are shown. Soy was planted in between crops as a way to fix nitrogen back into the soil, it was not really a food crop.
Soy components that cause concern are things like the phyto-estrogens – compounds that mimic estrogens in the body, which is not always good. If you are an infant, for instance, a male infant in particular, maybe you do not want a soy source estrogen that due to body size and product concentration is almost like taking a couple of birth control pills every day. For girls, it has been linked to precocious puberty – like 3 year olds, not 10 year olds.
Soy lectins are also of concern. Phytic acid is another thing. These chemicals interfere with metabolic processes, phytic acid etc. Here is a story generally on Grains by a fellow who is not particularly a low carb advocate but who has concerns about the modern diets most of us eat, including the fact that traditional grain/bean preparations are often not used that would render these foods safer:
http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2008/04/leptin-and-lectins-part-ii.html
I like this dude because he’s always thoughtful and civil, and he never seems to stoop to rude comments whereas some of my other favorite bloggers aren’t so careful about it. I prefer to argue (or read arugments) where people don’t resort to calling one another idiots…
@chakaal…I totally agree about civil discussions…name calling and insults never wins friends. ( It’s one of the many things I like about this site. 😉 ) What do you think of soy as an estrogen source for women?
I am more convinced than ever that, unless there are real health problems and/or allergies, the best diet is one of variety and moderation. (She said as she ate another handful of macadamia nuts.)
I tried it as a supplement. I wasn’t impressed that it actually did anything, and stopping it did nothing, either. I prefer almond milk, or better yet, low-carb milk.