Favorite Blogs: Food!
Among my friends and relations (and anyone who follows me on Instagram), it's no secret that I love food and that I love to cook. I follow a low-carb, grain-free diet, (primal style), and rather than feel restricted by it, those slight limitations inspire me to stay creative with meats, vegetables and spices in the kitchen. Food is meant to be enjoyed.
I am also extremely interested in food culture and culinary history. To be entirely honest; my obsession with health has created a bit of a monster--I always want to find out why people eat what they eat, especially in America, where choice reigns supreme and cuisines from around world are represented in all their splendor.
In my mission to stay open minded, inspired and creative, I subscribe to a few blogs which keep my palate and my mind working tandem. Today's blogroll includes a list of a few of my favorite food and cooking-related blogs:
- Anthony Bourdain - Did you know that the cynical host of "No Reservations" has a tumblr account? Well, he does. He posts his thoughts on shooting the show, as well as his own ideas about world foods and food culture. Personally, I'm a big fan of Tony Bourdain. We share a love of meat in tube form, and I appreciate the fact that he differentiates between the image of a culture's advertised cuisine versus the reality of what people actually eat, while still acknowledging the significance of of both styles of food.
- The Foodie and the Family - In line with my own primal/paleo lifestyle, this blog is a great inspiration for gourmet cooking with the family in mind. The paleo diet is based on a wheat-free diet that is generally low in starch and high in protein, and TF&tF is great for ideas that are not only extremely creative in their ingredient combinations, but appetizing enough to appeal to the whole family.
- The Food Lover's Kitchen - Another paleo recipe sharing hub. Much like The Foodie and the Family, this site offers many extremely creative recipes, constant reminders of how truly delicious it is to eat healthily. But the true hallmark of Food Lover's Kitchen is that it is an interactive web site, with new recent additions of user-made meal plans, recipe books and kitchen profiles. If you don't need or want to spend a lot of time logging your kitchen into a web site and all you're looking for is a good recipe, don't run off, because Food Lover's Kitchen boasts one of the cleanest and most comprehensive databases available.
- Happy to Serve You - Life is too short to waste time on sub-par coffee, and although this web site is Australian, its sensibilities concerning coffee are on par with anything one might expect from Portland itself. Happy to Serve You is hopelessly devoted to artisanal coffee and the people and equipment who bring it from the bean to cup. The team behind HtSY doesn't update the page very often, but their site's uniqueness, the quality of the photography and reviews (covering shops, beans and equipment) have it firmly anchored in my bookmarked RSS feeds. In case you haven't guessed it; I, love, coffee.
- Paleo Spirit - Like most of my favorite blogs, I enjoy this one for the author's personality as much as its content. Lea is a great writer who includes her family in her blog as much as possible. She is also a vocal Christian, which is hard to find in the paleo community. She goes the extra mile to review some awesome restaurants, letting the rest of us know where the best places to find good, real foods are in major cities. She also includes her kids in many of the posts, not only as taste-testers and photogenic kitchen subjects, but as contributors, such as a recipe her son posted, based on the lamb stew in Suzanne Collins' bestselling novel The Hunger Games.
- The Primal Kitchen: A Family Grokumentary - One more family-oriented, Christian primal eating site. This one I followed to first show my mother that it was possible to maintain a grain-free diet and still make family meals, but I continued to follow it because I found the voice behind the blog engaging. "Mrs. Grok" is just like you and me, but she uncompromisingly follows through in her conviction to feed her family healthily (and feed them extremely well) in a way that makes the rest of us very jealous. And, somehow, she and her husband find time to raise a family and actively participate in CrossFit.
The Southern Problem Pt. I - Observations
There is a reason that food tastes good. If food were meant to just be nourishment, and nothing more, taste buds would be unnecessary. Fruit would not exist. Instead of a there being a smorgasbord of cuisines to help define cultures all over the world, humans would be content to subsist off of generic pastes or nutrient wafers; real-life food would be like Soylent Green.
However, it just so happens that food is so much more than the sum of its nutrients and energy potential. Food is delicious. Food is meant to be enjoyed and embraced for both health and taste.
The problem I see in the food culture of America, is that we have succeeded. We are a wealthy nation, and our abundance of food, the plethora companies providing food and food products on a grand scale and the quality of our healthcare reflects just how well we have done as a nation.
We have plenty of food with which to make other foods, allowing for companies to make a tidy living selling variations on food, some naturally of higher quality or nutritional value than others, but the point still stands.
And as to our healthcare system, we can get by eating pretty much anything, because medications and technologies exist to do damage control over both the short and long-term problems brought on by an unhealthy diet. Nowhere is this more prevalent than in my home region of the American South. I watched a few minutes of Blazing Saddles on the CMT Network last week. It was presented through the program Southern Fried Flicks, with each segment of the film introduced with an celebrity interview or correlating food item by "southern goddess," Hazel Smith.
The presentation of otherwise good films through a program like this is abhorrent to me on several levels. The immediate pairing of "Southern" with "fried" is a descriptive term long devoid of charm in my own mind. Furthermore, the presentation of a grossly overweight woman peddling cheaply-prepared, fried foods is a gimmick which one would assume would yield diminished returns in most markets for the visual depiction of cause-and-effect, especially in the post-Paula Deen era. To present Hazel Smith as a "goddess" because she has an accent and a country music background is an affront to every healthy, beautiful Southern woman I have ever known.
These are some fairly petty grievances to take with a show I would not have even turned on had Blazing Saddles not caught my eye in the channel guide. But it brought to mind an issue which has been germinating in my mind for a while: Southern image problem.
As a native Floridian from the non-Disney wasteland of northwest Florida, I honestly resent the popular image of a typical Southerner as a paranoid, racist, homophobic and uneducated cretin, one generation removed from the Deliverance crowd but still marrying within the family. Country music, once an honest expression of working-class emotion, now an American Idol-approved industry capitalizing on the image of plaid shirts, denim shorts and cowboy boots, is certainly no help, either. But one of the biggest issues to me is our food.
Southern cooking is loved and hated in one way or another all over the country. Every native Southerner, from Kentucky to Florida, has memories of at least one relative (usually aged and female) who disappeared into their kitchens and engaged in culinary magic resulting in savory and sweet dishes that combined any and all comforting foods into bakes, casseroles, pastries and side dishes. My own memories along these lines concern my Mississippi-born grandmothers. They both moved to the Florida Panhandle from the Mississippi Delta and combined the best of Delta fare with Florida's seafood offerings to create dishes which left indelible memories.
Now, the problem with Southern cooking is that, due to the hardscrabble economic circumstances which surrounded many of the Southern States, our cooking traditions, which persist to this day, resulted mostly from poverty. The ingredients available to agricultural communities of lesser means defined the food which came from these communities.
The impacts of economics, agriculture and ingredient availability and population demographics are visible in much more detail than just the broad spectrum, Cracker Barrel image of Southern food to the country at large. The ubiquitous practice of frying chicken became prevalent in the South because it was a common practice for many of the Africans who were kidnapped into slavery and whose descendants carried on the traditions in their own kitchens and those of their owners across the South. Familiar, regional crops such as rice, beans and yams defined the dishes which arose out of the Carolinas and Louisiana to produce such distinctive branches of southern fare as Creole and Gullah cuisines. The availability of seafood in coastal states led to the incorporation of fish, shrimp, crawfish and oysters into the definitive dishes of Florida, South Carolina and Louisiana. The cheapness of lard, cornmeal and flour was responsible for biscuits and cornbread becoming such an identifiable pastry in the South, much more than its Scottish grandfather, the scone, which remained more common in the north.
All of these varieties, and many others, are the components which make up the whole of southern food. Southern food was born largely of poverty, it is very carbohydrate-based, and was made to be filling and satisfying to meet the needs of people who worked hard labor their entire lives. As anyone who has ever spent a holiday in a traditional Southern home, where all the classics tend to converge at a single meal, the food coma concomitant with such heavy fare is not unfamiliar.
However satisfying it might have been intended to be, for most people, food is not so hard to come by, nor our daily workload so difficult, that we need to eat massive amounts of biscuits, gravy, potatoes and fried cuts of meat on a regular basis. The following graph was a self-assessment in which the sampled population rated the quality of their diet and the amount of money they spent on food. Take a look:
This graph was part of a larger study, but was the segment of it which I found most interesting. Whether people think they are eating well or eating poorly, they are spending about the same amount of money on food. This seems to communicate that healthy food and unhealthy food are both in ready supply, but if the restaurant choices and belt-straining waistlines of my hometown are any indication, Southern-influenced comfort foods, "soul food," fast food and pre-packaged foods continue to reign as the options of choice for dining both out and in.
Part of this is resultant from the forty-year miseducation of the public as to what constitutes a "healthy diet." This is worth its own post, and is already the stated purpose of multiple books and blogs. But viewed as a whole, the shortcomings and detrimental effect of American food culture are showing themselves more every day.
In pop culture, the likes of Paula Deen and Hazel Smith are presented as womanhood's Southern norm. The average southern man is far more likely to watch football than to ever pick up a pigskin himself after high school, and his appearance tends to reflect that fact. And don't even get me started on Nascar.
In short, Southerners have a immediate connotation with obesity, and I'm sorry to say, the facts back it up. Diabetes is more prevalent in the American Southeast, and has been for years. Southerners do it to themselves through a historical nutrient-deficient diet, which continues in the modern day in correlation with the national trends of increased overall caloric intake (see diagram 2-1).
The problems are evident. For the next few weeks, I plan to continue with this theme and post a series of entries about the history of southern food, agriculture and health. Everyone knows there is a problem, but I want to dive in and find the root cause, focusing on the South. Whether it be simple correlation or as concrete proof of cause, I want to see what is available. I find food history interesting and this is a good excuse to dive into some research.
I will still be posting lighter fare to keep the blog from becoming a one-note stream of data, but you can count on at least one sizable post a week about Southern food culture for an indefinite period of time. Stay tuned!
External Links:
Southern Fried Flicks - CMT
Paul Deen and Diabetes - Diabetes-Warrior.Net
"Hogs and Hominy: Soul Food from Africa to America," by Frederick Douglass Opie - Google Books
Louisiana Creole cuisine: Overview - Wikipedia
"Low country Gullah/Geechee Soul food" and African based cuisine - CravesSoulFood
What's the Difference Between Biscuits and Scones? - YumSugar
The Best Way to Get Diabetes: Follow the Diabetes Dietary Guidelines - Mark's Daily Apple
Profiling Food Consumption in America - USDA Factbook (PDF)
The Superhuman50!
If you haven't done so yet, now is the time to head over to LivingSuperhuman and get started with the first Superhuman50 Challenge! Run by Andrew and Anthony Frezza, the Superhuman50 Challenge is a chance to jumpstart your fitness and health goals alongside many others, under the constructive and encouraging coaching provided by the Frezza brothers. I've been following their site for a while now, and I can vouch for them without reservation. I'm looking forward to getting started.
I went through a very dramatic personal transformation over the past year. Last summer was when it hit me that I had let myself go. I could feel my stomach moving at odds with the rest of my body when I walked. Running was impossible. I could still crank out a decent number of calisthenics, but I would be out of breathe for several minutes after each set.
I made the decision to overhaul my entire life via the Primal Blueprint, and have been transitioning toward a stricter, paleo approach to eating. I eat heartily of real, whole foods (including plenty of red meat and butter!), and exercise a few times a week. This is the transformation:
I'm actually reluctant to post the transformation photo; I've enjoyed some relief in the anonymity provided by my change in appearance...
The status quo I mentioned above has been enough to maintain my new, healthy weight. Another plus has been that by eliminating grains from my diet, I no longer have seasonal allergies to boot.
But it's time to take it to the next level. I look damn scrawny in the latest photo. I can do pushups all day and run a 5k any time, but I want better body composition. It is my goal, with the encouragement of the Superhuman50, to burn through that last bit of subcutaneous fat around my middle and build up my upper body's lean mass. I want to have well-defined musculature. I want to be Captain America, goshdarnit!
In fifty days, I will post another photo and we'll see what I will accomplish.
Everyone who participates in the Superhuman50 fills out their own personal goal sheet, including their goals, foods to avoid, and foods to include more of in daily intake. Mine looks like this:
The note about sitting might seem odd, but now that I'm about of school and catching up on a lot of personal written projects, I can easily get lost in a train of thought (seewhatididthere?) and go hours at a time without budging from my desk. Sitting isn't good for the body, and I need to spend more time working upright when possible. And yes, that is what she said.
What I love about LivingSuperhuman, and why I encourage everyone to check out their website, is that the Frezzas are incredibly encouraging in their advice and approach to overall health. They espouse paleo nutrition 99% of the time, but they also freely acknowledge that indulgences are not something to be criticized and posted on some sort of scorecard. A "cheat day" now and again is necessary to stay sane, and on that point alone they rise high above some of the more dogmatic health and nutrition writers. They want all their readers to embrace life to the fullest at every level of existence, from the physical to the emotional. I'm excited to participate in this latest project.
So, will you join the Superhuman50? Don't wait another second!
External Links:
The Superhuman50 Goal Sheet - LivingSuperhuman
Standing Desk: Its Benefits and History - Art of Manliness
Maybe it's not just the carbs...
Last year, I went Primal. No regrets. Mark Sisson's book got me going and his blog remains inspirational.
However, Mark isn't the only person who writes on primal living and ancestral health. Through expanding my knowledge of health and fitness, I have been exposed to the the ideas of other writers and bloggers who talk about the paleo and primal schools of thought.
The Primal Blueprint is a title. It is a structured "blueprint," written by Mark Sisson, for getting into good health and losing weight.
Bear in mind the meaning of the word "blueprint"--A plan, a map, a diagram. I most readily associate the word "blueprint" with house-building. But as we all know, there is more than just one way to build a house.
The Primal Blueprint is Mark Sisson's blueprint. It is based on sound research. It is effective for weight loss and body maintenance. It is, above all, a healthy way to live.
However, promoting this style of living is how Mark Sisson makes a living. His books are written by and large for people with bad habits and addictions to break. His meal plan is strictly regimented to bring the greatest results out of the greatest number of people. He tends to use a lot of general guidelines in his blog. That keeps his material well-reviewed and ensures that people like myself continue to refer other newcomers to his body of work.
I have followed the Primal Blueprint quite faithfully for the past six months. But as I wrote before, Mark's books and web essays are not my only source of information. If you read enough material, it becomes apparent that, although Mark is a larger-than-life figure in the primal/paleo movement, he represents only one school of thought. I do not say this to denigrate Mark or his work. Quite to the contrary, I believe that Mark has done more good than possibly any other individual in the paleo community. But I want to explore some thoughts of my own.
If one explores the "paleo diet," The Primal Blueprint is a fairly standard first encounter. But beyond the body-repairing information it offers for someone who is insulin-resistant and overweight, questions are rising that the paleo movement has not yet done research to answer fully. I have a few of my own which I would like to pose at this time.
Once the body has had time to repair itself, that is, for insulin sensitivity to be restored and for the body to adapt to the ideal fat-burning state for its energy needs, are natural carbohydrates still a problem?
I ask this because Richard Nikoley has done some extremely interesting self-experimentation lately, purposefully including extra starch in his diet in the form of potatoes. However, he has not increased his caloric intake, he has simply changed the fat : protein : carbohydrate ratios of his daily meals. And he has had good results, actually seeing beneficial changes in body composition.
This is one factor which increased my curiosity on the subject. Another was a point raised by Angelo Coppola in the last episode of his podcast, Latest in Paleo. He has also been eating more starch each week in the form of sweet potatoes and rice, and has reported results similar to the "leaning out" described by Richard Nikoley: looser pants, increased muscle definition.
This comes after the mainstream paleo community's applying a long-standing mantra of "lower = better" in reference to carb intake. But the movement is still relatively new. Its influence is creeping into everything from 60 Minutes to celebrity fitness, but there have yet to be many serious studies done to provide new baselines with which to measure more specific effects. More on that in a minute.
Is it carbs on their own, or the kind of carbs that are the problem?
The paleo diet, in its broadest definition, is simply eating the foods which our spear-weilding ancestors would have access to. Meat, fish, fowl, vegetables, fruit, nuts. Basically, this is a "whole foods" diet. Foods which can be consumed in their natural state without the need for processing. Grains are excluded from this list (yes, even whole grains) because not only do they require husking, grinding and the addition of extra ingredients to be eaten at all, the grains of today are not the same as what existed a hundred years ago, much less thousands of years ago. And it goes without saying that the recent phenomenon of mass gluten intolerance is yet another reason to avoid grain. I have personally found going grain-free to be the cure for my seasonal allergies.
With the exception of fruit, the paleo diet is grain-free and fairly low carb by its very nature. But when following a regimented eating plan like The Primal Blueprint, it has been my experience that it becomes easy to demonize many natural and pleasant foods like fruit and potatoes; relegating them to "once in a while" treats. But these foods occur naturally. Yes, they contain sugar, and, yes, that sugar is fructose. But, as even Dr. Lustig will readily state, fruit delivers its fructose load amidst naturally-occuring vitamins, minerals and fiber. They contain enough caloric weight that it is simply unpleasant to gorge oneself on fruit to the point of the sugar's affects on the liver, blood sugar and deposition of fat being worse than concurrent nutrients of the fruit delivering it.
If someone is breaking long-standing food addictions, that is where The Primal Blueprint is instrumental.
Speaking from experience, when an individual changes their entire lifestyle to eat natural foods instead of processed foods, it is hard not to constantly seek out "cheats" while there is a lingering addiction to processed sugars. Until the individual's palate returns to its "natural" state and can appreciate the full taste of natural foods, as well as the unbelievable sweetness of natural sugars in fruit, a structured meal plan, with "approved" foods and a carb count is not only helpful, one might say it is catalytic to long-term success.
The physical results of an individual's eating habits show themselves fairly readily and obviously. But what is too often overlooked, or under-discussed, is the unhealthy mental relationship that overweight individuals maintain with food. A popular Lao Tzu quote states that "mastering yourself is true power," and one could easily extrapolate that into an argument that if you can't master your own food consumption against the influence of a very flawed and unhealthy food culture, that is weakness. People declare this weakness every day; telling someone about your own grain-free or paleo diet is usually met with the knee-jerk response of "I could never do that."
It takes guidance and encouragement to help people overcome the onslaught of it, and sometimes a well-written book or a blog are all the only good influence an individual has in their life. For beginners, a blueprint is necessary.
After the initial stages, there comes a certain point in the primal/paleo journey in which it becomes obvious to you and everyone who knows you that you have made a decision to change your life permanently toward a whole-foods approach. This point is usually apparent when you realize that you no longer crave dark chocolate to "complete" a meal, and dairy products are seen less and less on your plate. It is something which I would describe as a mature relationship with food. It is a state of no longer being attached to or craving foods which are culturally mandated as "fun" or "special." Heck, you might be so in tune with your daily needs that you ignore the old standard of "three squares a day" and only eat when you're hungry, regardless if it's a regularly-timed for breakfast lunch or dinner. That is taking the idea of ancestral health beyond ingredients into the re-creation of habits and conditions--worthy experiments, but I digress.
Back to my point. If one has a established a healthy relationship with food, then the allure of sugar should not spark a binge if one chooses to eat some fruit or cut into a sweet potato. The whole idea of "ancestral living" is based on eating healthy food, and eating it according to need. This isn't your mom's low-fat crash diet; it is not about eating healthy food "most of the time" so as to feel better about a weekly nosedive into pizza, nachos and cheap beer.
Claiming a mature relationship with what and how you eat also implies that you are not going to habitually overeat. If natural sugar or starch is part of the meal, it should be factored in as part of the meal, not a superfluous addition that puts one "over the edge" of being full. Remove the desire to binge by including rewarding foods in daily meals.
Finally, if grain-free, whole foods are your first choice, regardless of carbohydrate content, this means that many of the studies which have been conducted about carbohydrates and weight gain no longer apply to you. To my knowledge, the accepted baseline studies have never been conducted from subjects who have lived any significant part of their lives on a whole foods diet. Therefore, their carbohydrate intake was largely from grains and sugars. The kinds of carbohydrates offered to the body by a sandwich bun or a sack of Fritos are much different than those offered from a berries, bananas or yams. The last three all have benefits to the human body that extend far beyond quick energy or post-workout glycogen replenishment. Furthermore, they are not full of synthetic, compound ingredients. The only ingredient in the last three foods are the foods themselves.
Like politics, religion and virtually everything else in any human culture that exists simultaneously in the areas of philosophy and process, the paleo movement has become fragmented into contrasting ideas.
"Paleo" does not strictly mean "low-carb, ketogenic diet."
The definition of the word "paleo" literally means "old," and is most often combined with geologic or biological terms. Hence the "Paleolithic Diet," referring to the eating habits of early humans.
This simple definition (and it truly is appallingly simple compared to many of the other ludicrous options offered to the weight and health conscious) only became fractured into its present, multi-faceted form as various new-school health and nutrition professionals have written and spoken to educate the masses on the subject.
Most books are written with weight loss in mind. Weight loss requires insulin sensitivity. To ensure insulin sensitivity, low-carb is ubiquitously recommended among paleo writers as the surefire way to go.
But once sensitivity is restored, and the decision has been made to eschew grains and processed non-foods, the old damage will not return. There is also the assumption that moderation is a way of life and that food will be eaten when hungry until the individual is not hungry any more.
So are natural carbs a problem?
I've been eating right for a long time now. At this point, it seems much more natural to eat right than it does to eat poorly. I was at a business meeting the other night where the dinner provided for attendees was a stack of delivered pizzas. I won't name the franchise, but I will say that I have never seen anything quite so repugnant as the overcooked slabs of dough with their scant population of cheese, sauce and toppings. And there was a time in my life when I would have eaten an entire pizza by myself in one sitting, washed down with a sugary beverage. Never mind the relative quality of ingredients or preparation...it's pizza, and pizza means good things are happening, right?
That was a long time ago. My entire life is different now. Now that the psychological chains are broken, even milder attractions don't appeal to me any more. I readily admit to indulging occasionally, but I reserve those times for foods that are truly unique and well-made, like when a friend brought home-dipped, chocolate-covered bacon to a movie party. With such exceptions accounted for, the other 99% of my diet is made up of naturally-occuring fats, proteins, starches and sugars.
So, last paragraph. let's see if I can make it good for a change...
Should we give some respect to our day-to-day preferences, eating a little more starch or fruit on some days and little-to-none on others? If one is not simply stacking extra calories on top of regular intake in their starchier meals, it does not seem like an unbalanced way to live. This is especially true when intermittent fasting is involved and leptin and insulin sensitivity is optimal. A mature relationship with food and not fretting over natural carbohydrate consumption seems a lot more fulfilling than avoiding something as tasty and refreshing as a piece of mango because of its sugar content.
Thoughts?
External Links:
http://www.marksdailyapple.com/the-book/the-primal-blueprint/
http://freetheanimal.com/2012/03/the-moderate-carbohydrate-flu.html
http://www.latestinpaleo.com/blog/2012/4/27/latest-in-paleo-56-who-you-gonna-trust.html
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18560_162-57407294/is-sugar-toxic/
http://hwbfitness.hubpages.com/hub/matthew-mcconaughey-workout
http://www.marksdailyapple.com/how-to-intermittent-fasting/
Internal Links:
My favorite meal.
I'm a man of simple taste. I might not eat wheat any more, which rules out all derivative products such as pasta and most fried foods, but I still crave me some soul food now and again. And it just so happens that my favorite feel-good meal is the perfect post-workout spread.
And what do I love so much? Eggs and a sweet potato! The eggs are usually fried, and the potato is always split down the middle with a shake of cinnamon and a big pat of butter in the middle. I augmented my eggs with some homemade guacamole this evening. My plate was a playland of protein, healthy fats and good carbohydrate. So, so satisfying.
The meal was especially welcome today as it was my fast-breaker after a semi-unintentional intermittent fast lasting around twenty-eight hours. I finished out the day with a ninety-minute martial arts workout at my home dojo.
I'm writing again about fasting because I also just wrote a "just the basics" Hub on the subject. If you want to help me make some money, I'm trying to get back to India this summer, and every click counts: