Seven reasons it’s good for you.
I started drinking it a few months ago. I can still take it or leave it, though, in terms of either taste or discernible effect on me.
Category Archives: Culinary
The War On Saturated Fat
Yes. Next question?
When you’ve lost the LA Times…
[Update a few minutes later]
“When saturated fat got mixed up with the high sugar added to processed food in the second half of the 20th century, it got a bad name,” noted UC San Francisco pediatric endocrinologist Robert Lustig. On the question of which is worse — saturated fat or added sugar, Lustig added, “The American Heart Assn. has weighed in — the sugar many times over.”
Yes. Also, eating fat doesn’t make you fat. Two of the most damaging nutrition myths are that you get cholesterol build up from eating cholesterol, and you get fat from eating fat. Both are based on the primitive “you are what you eat” theory. Stop counting calories, eat things that are good for you (which include saturated fat) and avoid things that are bad (grains and sugar).
The Paleo Diet
Is it a fad? An interesting interview by Ben Domenech:
…the existing food movement that sprang up around organic food was largely driven by, particularly in the early years, the vegetarian world and the plant-based diet world, with a good bit of progressive ideology. And so that is alienating to a lot of people who might want to be healthier, who do care about where their food comes from. We saw the same thing happen in the environmental movement. You’ve got scores of hunters who care deeply about conservation and practice it in their own lives, and but due to differences in culture hunters have largely been excluded from the environmental movement.
I think there was a latent demand for an alternative approach to healthy eating and healthy living that wasn’t, that didn’t require you to buy in to all this other ideology. Because basically until paleo, until this general evolutionary approach came along, the only options were, you can be a sort of like a hippie vegan progressive, or you can eat tons of McDonalds and become obese and proudly tout that you don’t care where your food comes from, or you can go on some fad diet. And those aren’t actually very good options for a lot of people.
So, first I just think there was latent demand for it. And then there there’s definitely something to the fact that paleo doesn’t look down on eating meat and that definitely appeals to a slightly more masculine group of folks. The latest surveys have shown that paleo is actually split about 50/50 between men and women, but that’s far more men relative to all other dietary movements, which tend to be 70, 80% women. So, people will say it’s all macho, all these men are into it. It’s actually about 50/50, but it just feels a little bit more masculine relative to everything else.
It really has taken off more among libertarians than the general population, I think.
Popcorn At The Movies
A history.
But here’s a question for paleo types. Yes, I know it’s a grain, and grains are bad, but it’s probably the least processed grain we eat. How bad is it, relatively?
Hmmmmm… [googling]
There seems to be a consensus that it’s definitely not paleo. But some say there are worse things if you’re going to cheat. I saw this one horror story, but I think that’s more a problem of the crap they put on it in the theater than the corn itself. I always pop it in butter, and put butter on it, but there are a lot of recommendations for coconut oil instead..
There are a lot of warnings (appropriately, I think) about the microwaved variety. I have to say, that I hadn’t realized how many paleos are anti-GMO. I think that’s taking it beyond eating healthy, and turning it into a religion.
Mitochondria And Obesity
They can either spur or prevent it. It’s amazing how much we still don’t know about this subject, and how so much conventional wisdom, especially about diet, is utterly wrong.
The Paleo Rodeo
The latest one is up. Warning: the twenty-dollar DIY tread-desk is a scam. You have to have a treadmill first.
Whole Foods
I see the gluten-free section filled with crackers and bread made from various wheat-substitutes such as cardboard and sawdust. I skip this aisle because I’m not rich enough to have dietary restrictions. Ever notice that you don’t meet poor people with special diet needs? A gluten intolerant house cleaner? A cab driver with Candida? Candida is what I call a rich, white person problem. You know you’ve really made it in this world when you get Candida. My personal theory is that Candida is something you get from too much hot yoga. All I’m saying is if I were a yeast, I would want to live in your yoga pants.
Next I approach the beauty aisle. There is a scary looking machine there that you put your face inside of and it tells you exactly how ugly you are. They calculate your wrinkles, sun spots, the size of your pores, etc. and compare it to other women your age. I think of myself attractive but as it turns out, I am 78 percent ugly, meaning less pretty than 78 percent of women in the world. On the popular 1-10 hotness scale used by males the world over, that makes me a 3 (if you round up, which I hope you will.) A glance at the extremely close-up picture they took of my face, in which I somehow have a glorious, blond porn mustache, tells me that 3 is about right. Especially because the left side of my face is apparently 20 percent more aged than the right. Fantastic. After contemplating ending it all here and now, I decide instead to buy their product. One bottle of delicious smelling, silky feeling creme that is maybe going to raise me from a 3 to a 4 for only $108 which is a pretty good deal when you think about it.
Read the whole (foods) thing. It’s pretty funny.
A New Benefit Of Coffee
I started drinking coffee regularly a few weeks ago (that is, pretty much every morning when I’m home, though I’ve never actually brought myself to purchase a cup when away from home), primarily for medicinal reasons. I still don’t like the stuff that much, and can take or leave it. But one side effect I discovered, as a result of my latest dental visit, is that my teeth are much cleaner. I noticed that my cleaning was much faster than usual, and my hygienist told me that there was less to clean. I attribute this to the fact that I am brushing twice as often as I used to, because I feel a need to do so after drinking the coffee in the morning (I generally skip breakfast otherwise), partly to get rid of the after taste, and partly to prevent teeth staining. I was particularly motivated about the latter after seeing how hard it is to clean coffee stains from our white porcelain cups.
The Fast-Food Pay Strike
Is it the dumbest strike ever?
Well, that’s stiff competition, but I suppose some strike has to be.
This is fundamentally a Marxist strike. That is, their argument is not that they should be paid more because they are really worth more, but because they can’t live on the wage it pays (“…to each according to his need”). If they can’t live on burger flipping, then they should get a better job. If they can’t find a better job, maybe they should complain to the moron that most of them helped put in the White House who is waging war on job creators.
Paleoista
A paleo blog I hadn’t noticed before, though it seems to have been around for several years (at least in one form or another).