Category: Nutrition

Sometimes, there just isn’t anything you can add. Enjoy!

The race in a nutshell. @JoeBiden @ProjectLincoln. Perfect ad https://t.co/a1by6sv4l7

— Steve Schmidt (@SteveSchmidtSES) August 16, 2020

How did we end up in this mess? It is increasingly difficult to sit by quietly and watch as Donald Trump makes a mockery of us all.  Not the latest incident, likely, but there’s Goya.

And I can already hear some people saying “what’s wrong with that?” And the answer is, it’s prohibited. Kind of like our discussion yesterday, there are things you cannot do because it does not serve the public, you know, the people who do the voting. And there is an office called The United States Office of Government Ethics. And they are very clear about what is not allowed. Federal employees, including the President are prhibited from:

• Using public office for their own private gain for the private gain of friends, relatives, or persons with whom they are affiliated in a non-government capacity;
• Endorsing any product, service, or company;
• Engaging in financial transactions using nonpublic information, or allowing the improper use of nonpublic information to further private interests; and
• Misusing government property or official time.

So, the question becomes, why do we continue to let this slide? What is it about this terrible man/child that we let him so boldly flaunt the rule of law without ever holding him accountable? Why are so silently complicit? It is only by holding our officals accountable that we’ll ever make any change. As long as we sit by idly, waiting for something good to happen, we’re going to be exploited for their gain over, and over, and over again. Speak up!

Oh, and wear a mask! 🙂

I offer you two words, slaughter and butcher. Two words where virtually every meaning is bad, except (presumably) the killing of animals for food. And in response to that, I offer you Melanie Joy. If you haven’t seen her TED talk, enjoy.

slaugh·ter | ˈslôdər |

verb [with object]

• kill (animals) for food.
• kill (people or animals) in a cruel or violent way, typically in large numbers: innocent civilians are being slaughtered.
• informal defeat (an opponent) thoroughly: our team was slaughtered in the finals.

noun

• the killing of animals for food: thousands of calves were exported to the continent for slaughter.
• the killing of a large number of people or animals in a cruel or violent way; massacre: the slaughter of 20 peaceful demonstrators.
• informal a thorough defeat: an absolute slaughter by the Red Sox.

butch·er | ˈbo͝oCHər |

noun 

• a person whose trade is cutting up and selling meat in a shop.
• a person who slaughters and cuts up animals for food: a porkbutcher.
• a person who kills or has people killed indiscriminately or brutally: acallous butcher of men.
• North American informal a person selling refreshments, newspapers, and other items on a train or in a stadium or theater.

verb [with object] 

• slaughter or cut up (an animal) for food: the meat will be butchered for the local market.
• kill (someone) brutally: they butchered 250 people.
• ruin (something) deliberately or through incompetence: the film was butchered by the studio that released it.

As we saw in the last post, food labeling can be tricky business. There are all sorts of loop holes and shenanigans that lure the unsuspecting consumer (us!) into believing they are getting something nutritious when, in fact, they are not. So today I thought we’d take a look at milk. As many of you know, I am not a fan. In fact, I would support complete dairy boycott as I firmly believe that milk and it’s byproducts are some of the very worst foods we can consume. The most prominent proteins in milk are casein (82%) and when (18%). By the standards set forth to test for chemical carcinogens (chemicals that can cause cancer) casein is considered one the most potent ever identified. But I’m not even going in to that (or the implications for diabetes, heart disease, or the gross inhumanity of cattle) I’m just here to talk about the fat.

In the United States we have wide access to 4 kinds of milk, which are probably familiar to everyone. There is “whole” milk, 2% milk, 1% milk and skim milk (putatively “fat free”). The Washington Post ran an article on October 3, 2014 that states:

Whole milk isn’t made wholly of fat, or largely of fat, or even substantially of fat. In fact, it doesn’t contain much fat all.

Whole milk is actually only about 3.5 percent fat.

Well, that’s not so bad, right?

WRONG!

What does that actually mean, 3.5% fat? 3.5% of what? Therein lies the magic (illusion?). Whole milk is 3.5% fat BY WEIGHT. And what makes up most of the weight of milk? Anyone? Yes, it’s water! And water has how many calories? None! Can you see where this is going?

As readers will already have heard, an “ideal” diet is 10% of calories from fat, 5–10% of calories from protein, and 80–85% of calories from complex, unrefined carbohydrates (whole foods and that does NOT include Doritos, Snickers, etc.). And this is how pretty much everyone thinks about food, macronutrients (fat, protein, and carbohydrate), and calories; as a percentage of total calories. No one thinks about fat, protein, or carbohydrate as a percentage of the weight, unless they’re into marketing and trying to fool you. And they do it because it works.

Let’s look at whole milk again with a more rational lens:

Serving Size                             1 cup (8 ounces)

Calories                                    148

Total fat                                   8 grams

Saturated fat (the bad kind)   4.6 grams

Total Calories from fat            72 (8 grams x 9 calories/gram)

% of calories from fat             49%

Yes, it’s sadly true, almost half of the calories from a glass of milk are from fat. Here’s a table of how the different milks compare. Notice that when you take out most of the fat, almost half the calories disappear.

But even “fat free” skim milk still has 2% of it’s calories from fat, obviously much improved from it’s 1%, 2%, and whole milk siblings, but it is not free of fat. And don’t forget, there’s still that casein to contend with!

But, don’t worry, there’s always a dissenting opinion. You could certainly turn to Karen Giles-Smith, a registered dietitian and health and wellness coach. Her article tells you that milk fat is good for your body. By the way, Ms. Giles-Smith was previously employed by the Dairy Council of Michigan for nutrition communications and she does quote Greg Miller, president of the Dairy Research Institute and executive vice president of the National Dairy Council. I’m sure there was no bias in this work.

Yes, I want to spend a couple of minutes on our friend PAM purely olive oil. According to the label, this product’s first (and really only) ingredient is olive oil. But due to some sort of magical process by our friends at ConAgra Foods, this olive oil as been depleted of it’s fat. Isn’t that amazing!

Right there on the label, just below the cap it says “FOR FAT-FREE COOKING”. If you still aren’t convinced, there’s this nifty label on the bottom of the front:

This one tells us that it has no calories and no saturated fat as well as no sodium or sugars. But then again, we don’t really expect a lot of sodium or sugars from an oil and saturated fat, as you know (if you’ve been reading the blog) is basically animal fat or, more rarely, coconut oil.

So how did ConAgra pull off this little magic trick? I’m hoping that a couple of you already know the answer, but the real answer is that they didn’t. Magic is what it always has been; an illusion. Let’s look at the back label (sorry it’s a little blurry).

Again we see, no fat, no calories from fat and total fat = 0g. But! But this is “per serving”. And what is a serving of PAM purely olive oil? Well, as you can see, it’s a 0.25 second spray. A quarter of a second spray. Really? Have you ever seen anyone do a 0.25 second spray except where there’s that one little spot you missed when you doused the pan? Why would they list anything so ridiculous as a 0.25 second spray? The answer — and here’s the illusion (er, magic) — is that the FDA has an exemption that allows manufacturers to “round down” if the serving size is less than 0.5 g. And our amazing 0.25 second spray yields a serving of 0.25 g, thus ConAgra can, within the limits of the rules, round down all of their values to 0.

Let’s do a little quick math on that label. There are 473 “servings” of 0.25 grams, which means there is 118.25 grams of olive oil in a full can. A tablespoon (15 mL) of olive oil has 14 grams of fat and since there isn’t really anything but fat in olive oil, we can assume that there are about 8.4 tablespoons of olive oil in full can (118.25/14). Kind of makes the can seem expensive, doesn’t it? More to the point, 118.25 grams of fat is 1,064.25 calories, all from fat, for a full can.

Or, in more typical use, a 3 second spray is 3 (seconds) x 4 (spray/second) x 0.25 grams/spray) = 3 grams of fat or 27 calories (9 calories per gram for fat). Really, not bad for applying oil to a pan to prevent sticking and better, I’ll grant, that rubbing it up with butter or shortening, but it’s not zero and it never will be, no matter how hard they to fool us.

Since a lot of the commentary has been about the importance of making it easier to adopt a plant based diet, I’m going to include a few tidbits.

Thrive Market is the Amazon of WFPB pantry goods.  Prices seem pretty good and free delivery for orders over $49. It doesn’t get much easier than that.

The Purple Carrot is a service that delivers ingredients and recipes to your home. A bit expensive, I think, but the convenience factor has to have a price.

For working with your kids, here are 7 Days of Kid Friendly Dinners from Dr. John McDougall’s site.

More to come and if you have any suggestions please pass them along!

I’ve had two people recently ask me to talk a bit about protein. I’ll admit that asking a plant based physician taking a nutrition course to talk about protein is a bit like asking a Trekkie what their favorite Star Trek episode is. So rather than diving into this topic as I am usually want to do, I thought I’d toss out a couple of snippets and see what bounces back. If you read something that interests you, let me know and I’ll make it the topic of a future post.

1. How much protein is needed? The flippant answer is YMMV (your milage may vary) because the RDA (recommended dietary allowance) is based upon your body weight. Thus, everyone’s “number” is a little different. But, practically speaking, the numbers are not that different. The RDA figure is based upon the EAR (estimated average requirement), previously called the Minimum Daily Requirement. The EAR is 0.5–0.6 grams of dietary protein per kg body weight per day. In order to account for variations in diet, activity levels, etc. the RDA is constructed to encompass the EAR + 2 standard deviations. In this way, the RDA encompasses the needs to over 95% of the population and only about 2% (on the low side only) won’t have their protein needs met by following the RDA. So, what is the RDA? The RDA for dietary protein is 0.80 grams of dietary protein per kg body weight per day. So, if you’re a 150 pound person (68 kg) your RDA of dietary protein is 55 grams. Expressed as the percent of total diet calories, protein should comprise 8-10% of total dietary calories.
2. It is important to note that the RDA is NOT the recommended minimum. It is the recommended TOTAL amount of protein necessary to maintain good health.
3. A plant based diet naturally provides 8-10% of calories as dietary protein. While it is possible to push total protein intake to higher levels without consuming animals, it is difficult and requires the use of plant protein supplements. Given the inherent problems with high protein intake (see #8, below) there is no reason to do so.
4. Is there a way to mix some meats into a plant based diet and still stay around the 10% level of calories as protein? Not really. Since a plant based diet alone provides perfectly adequate amounts of protein any additional protein as meat will push the total protein amount up into unhealthy territory.
5. Do plants need to be “combined” to provide adequate and complete protein. Short answer: no. Long answer: no. 🙂 There was some concern about this many years ago, but it is widely understood that anyone eating a varied whole grain plant based diet need not concern themselves with protein combinations.
6. Is animal protein needed for any reason? Again, short answer is no. The longer answer is also no, but the interested reader should have some information on why there is such a widely held misconception that animal protein is better for you than plant protein. I would argue, in fact, that exactly the opposite is true. But back in the early days of protein science, it was observed that animal proteins were used “more efficiently” than plant based proteins. That is to say, when people and animals are fed animal protein, which closely resembles their own protein in composition, the enzymes to digest the animal protein, the absorption, and subsequent utilization of the protein is all more easily done. As a result of this observation, animal based protein was labelled as “high quality” protein and plant based protein was labelled as “low quality” protein. The seemingly obvious follow up to that observation is: does it make a difference? And the answer is yes, but not how you think it does.
7. Diets high in “high quality” animal protein do stimulate faster body growth rate and production of more growth factors. In a previous post I reported that American’s were not only getting fatter, but also taller. Unfortunately, weight is increasing faster than height, so body mass index (BMI) is increasing as well. But, it turns out that increased growth rate and growth factor production also means more cancer, which is just as stimulated by the protein as normal cells. It’s why we’re seeing earlier and earlier menarche (age of beginning menstrual cycles) in our girls, which increases the lifetime exposure of mammary tissues to increasing amounts of estrogen, which results in increasing breast cancer rates. It also means more growth factors, like Insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1), which was implicated in increased cancer rates.
8. Last for today, increased total protein intake is associated with “diseases of affluence”. This includes cancer, heart disease, diabetes, kidney disease and similar long term illnesses. Higher protein intake is independently associated with elevated cholesterol levels. Animal proteins are, by necessity, associated with animal fats (i.e. saturated fats, the ones you’re not supposed to have). Thus a diet rich in animal protein must also be rich in fat. Lastly, a diet of animal proteins and fats is associated with elevated dietary acids, that leads to leaching of calcium from the bones and osteoporosis. It’s well established that countries with the highest meat and dairy consumption have, by far, the highest rates of osteoporosis.

Hope this gives you all a bit to ponder. As I said before, let me know and I’ll be glad to expand upon any or all!