Posts Tagged: food

Nutrition / Questions — 0 Comments
9
May 09

Supplementation. Macronutrients vs. Micronutrients.

I have received a few questions lately about various supplements and which are the best to take. My general stance on supplementation is that it’s not needed… but let me elaborate:

Supplementation implies that you have a void in your basic diet that needs to be filled. It is a solution to a symptom, and not a cause.

Nutrition is at the foundation of health and well being, and every culture in the world already knows the secret to good health: You are what you eat!There is little room for argument surrounding the fact that your body can only repair and fuel your body with the food that you are feeding it. If you are feeding yourself refined, modified, denatured, and otherwise chemically altered variations of food, then how do you expect your body to perform? To use an analogy, would you pour dirty gas into your car and expect it to perform at an optimal level? Probably not.

To restate what I have said in earlier posts, food should not be broken down into micronutrients. There is a popular trend in the media right now to tout the latest magic bullet pill, vitamin, or antioxidant as the cure to X health risk. The problem with this approach is that our place in nature is a part of a larger system. Our genome didn’t evolve to eat the extracted vitamin C from citrus fruits, or isolate whey protein from milk, or iron pills, we evolved to eat the WHOLE FRUIT, and drink WHOLE MILK, and eat WHOLE VEGETABLES… seeing a trend here?

The three macronutrients of protein, carbohydrate, and fat are the building blocks of human life. Keeping your food in the rawest form you can before digestion ensures that you are getting as much nutrition as you can from the food you eat. Excessive heating, processing, and nutrient isolation removes much of the digestive enzymes from food that helps your body process and break down these foods into useful compounds. Without these enzymes, many foods get treated by the digestive system as a threat and trigger a stress response.

Supplements often lack many of the chemical components that allow the body to use them properly. To compensate for this, most supplements increase the amount of raw product you have you ingest to absorb a significant amount of whatever nutrient you are supplementing for. This practice can often lead to allergies caused by repetitive exposure to compounds that agitate the digestive system.

If you feel that you need to supplement your diet with a protein source, or vitamin, you should probably step back and take a look at where your real food diet is failing. A paleo based diet of meat, vegetable, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch and no sugar, combined with proper proportions for your body type, should be providing all of the macronutrients, and consequently all of the micronutrients that you need to thrive.

Diet / Health / Nutrition / Questions — 0 Comments
20
Mar 09

Milk. Part 2

Continuing from Part 1 on Milk…

Just as our diet affects our health and performance, the diet of our dairy source is equally important. Cows belong to a class of animal called ruminants, meaning they poses an organ called the rumen that digests grasses by initially softening it before is is regurgitated and chewed again for further digestion.

The key ingredient in the process of creating good quality meats and dairy from cows is grass. Grasses are the natural food source for cows, and the reason they have rumens. Modern factory farming however, has decided to go over the head of nature.

Factory farmed dairy cows are now fed mixtures of corn, soy, grains, and other “high energy” feed stocks to make sure the cows are producing as much milk as possible, for as little money as possible. A major problem with this diet is that many non-grass foods (such as soy and alfalfa) contain compounds that mimic the actions of the female hormone, estrogen. While these can cause cows to produce more milk than they normally would (and thus increase profit per animal), some studies have called into question possible impacts on animal health and nutrient content of the milk.

Also, a major issue with cows eating mostly a grain based diet has to do with the cow’s biology. As I mentioned before, cows have an organ called the rumen, that functions to break down cellulose in grass into simple sugars through a mixed process of mechanical churning, and a symbiotic relationship with plant digesting microbes. The problem comes with the fact that these microbes perform best in a pH neutral environment, like the one created in the rumen when cow saliva mixes with fermenting grass. When cows are feed too much grain, the pH balance in the rumen turns acidic, and the bacteria that break down cellulose can no longer do their job, and bacteria that can survive in an acidic environment flourish and begin eating the walls of the rumen. This is where all the antibiotics come in.

What does this mean for human?

Humans have an acidic stomach for a reason, to kill harmful bacteria. It is a safety mechanism that evolved partly because of our taste for meat. Because cows that eat grass grow bacteria that thrive in a pH neutral environment, most bacteria that was left on the meat after slaughter could not survive in our acid stomach. It was a fine balance.

Does the problem now become evident?

Factory farmed cows, which are fed a net acidic producing diet of grains, grow bacteria in their rumens that THRIVE in acidic conditions. This means that any bacteria that is left on the meat when we eat it can no longer be killed by our acidic stomachs.

The message to be taken away from all this info is do your research, and look for high quality sources of meat and dairy. There has been a movement recently back to pasture, or grass-fed beef, and many small farms are beginning to raise cattle again as the demand for high quality meat grows. A Google serach is your best bet to find grass-fed beef in your area.

The issue of factory farming and it’s effects on the health of our society is no stranger to controversy. Corn surplus, a high demand for dairy, and cheap antibiotics have all contributed to the relatively recent decline in nutrition and quality of a food source that has been a staple of the human diet for hundreds of thousands of years.

Michael Pollan talks extensively about the corn and dairy industry’s intimate relationship and how it is degrading out standard of living in his excellent book The Omnivore’s Dilemma. The book is also a must read for anyone concerned about what they are putting in their mouths (read: EVERYONE).

Fats / Nutrition / Questions — 0 Comments
17
Mar 09

Milk. Part 1

Shannon recently asked:

What is the truth behind chocolate milk? I have heard that it is better for you than regular milk, and that you should drink it after a hard work out.

The answer to this question requires some background information on milk, so lets take a step back and look at the broader topic of dairy in general.

The verdict on dairy’s effectiveness as a healthy nutrient source has not been passed yet. There seems to be a war raging between those for the consumption of milk, mainly the dairy industry, and those against it, mainly vegan activists, and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA).

As in most wars unfortunately, truth is usually the first victim, and the dairy battle is no exception. Propaganda put out by both parties of the debate have left little room for objective investigation, and truthful reporting of the facts.

Milk, it would seem is yet another case of the West’s industrial complex destroying a food that was once a valuable source of nutrients. Much like beef, chicken, and pork, our quest to squeeze the most profits out of a resource has left it barren of nutrients, and full of unknown additives. This shift is not just happening in animal products. Fruits and vegetables have long been selected for genes that express themselves as the best looking, best tasting, and longest lasting produce. Sounds good doesn’t it? Unfortunately, these traits have come at the detriment of our nutrition and health, as nutrients were needlessly bred out in favour of a taste (Read: Higher sugar content).

Similarly, through the processeses of pasteurization and homogenization, milk has been effectively stripped of most of it’s natural enzymes and bacteria that are necessary for the proper digestion of dairy products.

Furthermore, the common misconception that fat is evil has lead to the mass production of reduced fat milk.

Never drink reduced fat milk. (skim, 1%, 2%…)

Fat is taken out milk through a process that over-heats the milk until is it becomes a powder. The fat is separated, and then water is added back to the powder until a milk like consistency returns. You are essentially drinking water with milk ingredients to it. Not milk.

The heat, and exposure to oxygen during the powdering process also damages cholesterol in the milk, which can cause injury to your arterial cells, as well as cause a pathological buildup of plaque in the arteries similar to having high triglycerides.

Heating milk also:

  • Alters milks amino acids, lysine and tyrosine, making the proteins in milk less available for use.
  • Lowers Vitamin C content as much as 50%.
  • Lowers the water-soluable vitamin content as much as 80%.
  • Destroys vitamin B12 completely.

To mention just a few…

These destroyed vitamins are added in artificially after the pasteurization and fat reduction processes so that they may appear on the nutrition label.

If you would still like to consume milk, your best option is to try and find a source of raw milk. Unfortunately, raw milk is illegal to buy in Canada, however, the option does exist to buy a share in a cow. Drinking raw milk from a cow that you own is not illegal. Also, cheese is still allowed to be made from unpasteurized, raw milk. Emmental and Gruyere are just a few of the options.

The second best alternative to raw milk is to buy whole milk, or switch to goats milk which can still be bought in a raw form.

It seems like many other foods, paying attention to the source is the best way to ensure you are eating quality dairy. Furthermore, just as our diet affects our health and performance, the diet of our dairy source is equally important. I will cover importance of what cows are built to eat, and how that is important to humans in the second part of this series.

I admit I have digressed from Shannon’s original question, but it was necessary to formulate a complete answer. As you have read, milk is a good source of protein and vitamins… in it’s original state. Commercial production however, has destroyed most of what is good about milk, and the nutrients that it does contain are artificially inserted backing into the milk product.
Also milk, being high in lecithin produces a high glycemic load, and thus a high insulin response. Adding chocolate syrup (sugar) to milk adds to insulin response, and should thus be avoided.

There was a study however, published in 2006 which indicated that chocolate milk aids in recovery when taken after intense athletic workouts. The study authors believe this to be due to its ratio of carbohydrates to protein, among other nutritional properties. The study was small in scale and partially funded by the dairy industry, but the results may warrant further study. (“Chocolate Milk: The New Sports Drink?”, Associated Press, 24 February 2006)

Diet / Nutrition / Video — 0 Comments
17
Mar 09

Alice Waters on Slow Food

Alice Waters, author of The Art of Simple Food, owner of world famous restaurant Chez Panisse, and matriarch of the Slow Food Movement in the US was recently features on the popular investigative reporting show 60 Minutes. In the interview Leslie Stahl draws the conclusion that perhaps the ever passionate Waters is living in a parallel universe filled with luxury, where the average consumer can afford $4/lb locally grown, organic grapes.  While I agree that the lifestyle that Waters advocates is a bit out of reach for many people who have to work with a limited food budget, she does make a good point at 6:56mins about the often attacked price of organic and sustainably grown food.

To paraphrase:

We all make decisions about what we want to eat and how we spend our money…some people want to buy Nike Shoes, two pairs. Others want to eat good, sustainable food.


Watch CBS Videos Online

The point being made here is that good food should not be some elitist luxury, but rather a restructuring of our priorities. Do you need another pair of Nike’s? Or would you be better off spending that money on good quality food?

From the perspective of a recent university student, a lifestyle often associated with late nights of partying and frequent binge drinking, it has been my experience that people are very quick to call organic food expensive, and complain about being unable to afford it. A claim not often grounded in logic however, as most students will spend more money in one night at the bar than on a typical grocery bill.

Good food should be the last item sent to the chopping block when funds are tight. In a down economy, the best resource you can invest in is your health.

Carbohydrates / Nutrition / Video — 0 Comments
16
Mar 09

Robb Wolf of CrossFit HQ on Insulin Resistance

Today’s CrossFit WOD post came with a video on insulin resistance that nicely coincides with the post I wrote a few days ago about the insulin response.

In the video Robb Wolf explains how our body’s resistance to insulin happens very much analogous to they way our olfactory reaction to perfume is very strong when we first smell a new scent. That smell fades however as our noses become desensitized to the perfume’s aroma. To experience the smell with the same intensity as the first inhale, we either have to increase the amount of perfume (similar to having to increase drug dosages to maintain effectiveness), or decrease our exposure to it. The sad reality is that most people choose the former when it comes to insulin levels.

When insulin resistance occurs, the body has trouble releasing the energy that it has already stored in fat cells, and thus asks for more food to burn as instant energy in the form of hunger pangs. If this demand is satiated by carbohydrates, as is common in North American eating habits, the cycle continues to repeat itself, and fat stores grow while energy levels need continuous “topping-up” with more carbs.

To elaborate what I said in the post on the insulin response, eating low Glycemic Index (GI) carbohydrates, in conjunction with fats and protein, will keep your blood glucose levels low, and thus maintain a normal insulin response.

You body is stuck in an evolutionary past where sugar was relatively non-existent. Due to this environmental scarcity, when a sugar source was eaten your digestive system became very good at instantly storing it as fat, not knowing when the next opportunity for such a high energy intake would be.

If you would not like to be in a constant battle with your genetics, limit your intake of high GI carbs, and cut the refined sugar.

Robb Wolf is both a scientist and athlete as a personal trainer at NorCal Strength & Conditioning. Robb is an NSCA Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist. In addition, he is a USAW Olympic Weightlifting coach, and a certified CrossFit Coach, the highest level of CrossFit training certification, possessed only by a handful of strength & conditioning coaches throughout the world.

Additionally, Robb is co-publisher and editor-in-chief of The Performance Menu.

Common Interest / Health / Questions — 0 Comments
13
Mar 09

Can you determine your economic status by how healthy you are?

Brandon, who writes Coachbjl’s blog, recently asked me:

Can you determine your economic status by how healthy you are?

In my opinion, the answer to this question is NO, because health is independent of socioeconomic status (SES).**

Eating well, and being conscious of your health should be a top priority in everyone’s life. If you agree with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, it is easy to see how failing to satisfy the needs of good food and health will cause a major weakness in your personal pyramid.

We live in a world in which obesity has reached epidemic proportions. With more than 1 billion adults overweight (at least 300 million of them clinically obese), this extra bulk is a major contributor to the global burden of chronic disease and disability. Often coexisting in developing countries with under-nutrition, obesity is a complex condition, with serious social and psychological dimensions, affecting virtually all ages and socioeconomic groups.

We as North Americans pride ourselves on being part of the developed world and having the resources to feed our population. It is sad that the way we have chosen to feed these people is with refined corn products such as high fructose corn syrup, and meat that has been so pumped full of antibiotics that it’s slowly destroying our immune systems. Combined this with an increasingly sedentary lifestyle and it is easy to see why obesity rates are exploding across all socioeconomic levels.

Figuratively speaking, yes everyone eats, but most of them eat crap!

To get back to Brandon’s question, just as economic status doesn’t determine health, health can’t determine your economic status. It works similar to trying to judge SES by looking at the clothes someone is wearing, or the car they are driving. Almost impossible in today’s credit supported, culture of stuff.

What health can determine or at least positively affect however, is a person’s happiness.

A healthy body, fueled by good food is an excellent vehicle for fun. You will be able to take part in more experiences, not miss out due to illness, and living your life upright and able instead of overweight and in a chair.

If you are worried about how to finance your new healthy way of eating, consider this: An apple cost less than a bag of chips, water is free, and when you stop spending money on cheap carbohydrates which have little food value, and only make you feel more hungry. You will have all that money to spend on good quality protein and fats.

** In the developed world.

Diet / Nutrition / Video — 0 Comments
11
Mar 09

Mark Bittman supports Michael Pollan’s call to arms for food

Eat FOOD, mostly plants, and not too much.

An idea put forth by food expert Michael Pollan in his book In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. (Check out the Recommended Reading section for more by Micahel Pollan)

These words are so simple, yet so powerful. It seems rather ridiculous that this idea needs to be sold back to the average North American consumer. Unfotunately, we have deviated away form real food.

Here is a video presentation from Mark Bittman, a food expert that is concerned with the ecological and health impacts of our modern diet. The video was recorded at the EG 2007 Conference in Los Angeles, California. Bittman offers further support to Michael Pollan, the idea that began this post.

Mark Bittman is a bestselling cookbook author, journalist and television personality. His friendly, informal approach to home cooking has shown millions that fancy execution is no substitute for flavor and soul.

You can read more from him on his blog: Bitten, his New York Times column The Minimalist, or check out one of the cookbooks he has authored, How to Cook Everything (Completely Revised 10th Anniversary Edition): 2,000 Simple Recipes for Great Food
and The Best Recipes in the World.

You can also check out Mark’s recent appearance on ObsessedTV.com with Samantha Ettus, a recent addition to the online TV domain from Gary Vaynerchuk of Wine Library TV fame.

TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader.

The annual conference now brings together the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes).

Diet — 0 Comments
10
Mar 09

The Paleolithic Diet

In today’s over-advertised culture of fad diets, and miracle weight-loss pills, how is the average health conscious consumer supposed to weed out the good from the bad?

To answer this question, let’s look back into our past for a minute.

What we know as humans (the genus Homo in one form or another) have been on Earth for about 2 million years, and their predecessors were here up to 7 million years ago.  Combined, these early humans had around 9 million years to adapt to a diet that remained relatively unchanged for most of that time.  We became, through millions of years of evolutionary trial and error, a species of omnivores who were able to derive energy from both plants an animals. This ability to eat a variety of foods allowed us to maximize our energy intake from our surroundings, but it also helped keep our population in check, because only a certain amount of calories could be obtained from hunted animals, and foraged plants (many plants in their raw forms, like grains, beans and potatoes, are inedible and even toxic to humans).

This all changed around 10,000 years ago however, with the remarkable discovery of cooking. Cooking granted us access to calorie rich food such as grains, beans, and potatoes because the heat destroyed enough of the toxins and enzyme blockers to render these plants edible, forever changing human histroy, and in turn, our diet. The effect of cooking had an enormous effect on our food intake- perhaps doubling the number of calories that we could obtain from the plant foods in our environment. Other advantages were soon obvious with these foods:

  • they could store for long periods (refrigeration of course being unavailable in those days)
  • they were dense in calories- i.e. a small weight contains a lot of calories, enabling easy transport
  • the food was also the seed of the plant- later allowing ready farming of the species

These advantages made it much easier to store and transport food. We could more easily store food for winter, and for nomads and travelers to carry supplies. Food storage also enabled surpluses to be stored, and this in turn made it possible to free some people from food gathering to become specialists in other activities, such as builders, warriors and rulers. This also caused an explosion in the human population and in turn set us on the course to modern day civilization. Agriculture, factory farming, and the refining and processing of food into… something other than food, were technologies what were soon to follow.

What does this mean for me?

For millions of year our bodies had to adapt to eating mostly meat, fish, fowl, and the leaves, roots, and fruits of many plants. This diet has been coded into our DNA, and it is the diet that humans function most optimally on. Proof of this can be found in the few remaining hunter-gatherer tribes still living in the world. Most, if not all are strong, fast, have straight teeth and perfect eyesight. Also, cases of arthritis, diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, stroke, depression, schizophrenia and cancer are also absolute rarities.

The common factor: Lack of exposure to a Western diet!

So why fight your genes? If you need a diet to follow, why not follow the one that your body has been designed by time for?

How do I follow a Paleolithic Diet?

I will borrow from CrossFit’s Greg Glassman on this one. He has very succinctly reduced the Paleo way of eating into a few simple words.

Eat meats and vegetables, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch, and NO sugar.

That’s all folks. So simple a 5 year old could figure it out. Memorize this line, ingrain it in your mind, tattoo it on your body if you must. These words: Eat meats and vegetables, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch, and NO sugar, should ring in your head every time you are thinking about food.

To elaborate a little, what Coach Glassman is saying when he shortened the Paleo diet to this simple sentence is:

  • Try and keep your food shopping to the perimeter of the grocery store.
  • If it comes in a box, or needs a nutrition label to tell you what is in it, IT’S NOT FOOD!
  • If doesn’t expire, IT’S NOT FOOD!
  • If you are eating out, get extra veggies and skip the potatoes, fries, sweet potatoes, etc.
  • Do not eat grains, pasta, bread, rice or beans, all of which wouldn’t have been available to our Paleo ancestors.
  • Make sure you are eating enough good fats. (Fish Oil especially!)

Yes this is a low carbohydrate diet, and what carbs you do consume should be coming from green, leafy vegetables. More on why we should all be lowering our carb intake can be found in my article on triglycerides. Also, as mentioned above, evidence of the lower-carb, Paleo diets effects on the body can be seen in the body compositions of the few remaining indigenous tribes scattered throughout the world.

More details about the Paleo way of eating can be found in Loren Corain’s excellent book: The Paleo Diet: Lose Weight and Get Healthy by Eating the Food You Were Designed to Eat.

The final word.

For every food decision you make, ask yourself this question first: Would a caveman have eaten that?

We may not live in a Paleolithic world, but our body, and it’s biological process are very much a relic of that era. On the time line of human history, our advances in food technology are very recent (2 million vs. 10,000 years), and with evolution being a slow process, our bodies haven’t had a change to catch up to our brains.