From 1863 (William Banting) Do you Bant? to 2017 (Gary Taubes) via Captain TL Cleve, John Yudkin and Nina Teicholz How Did We Get Here?, people have been documenting the detrimental effect sugar has on our health. However, for the past 40 years the advice from most official sources was that it was saturated fat that was the enemy, sugar intake was only relevant as a source of calories and weird, highly processed seed oils were positively good for us.

How this advice has managed to persist without a robust scientific basis against all of the available evidence of increasing levels of obesity and diabetes and now a global health crisis in human health will be something that future generations will discuss at length and in awe of our seeming inability to see what is in front of our noses. Always of course assuming there are some future generations.
Let’s take a hopeful view that there will be such generations holding those discussions. In which case, Gary Taubes has very helpfully set out one side of the argument for them… the case for the prosecution of sugar as a criminal addition to the human diet that is as poisonous as it is unnecessary.

He carefully sets out the way in which the sugar industry has sort to influence the medical and political consideration of sugar as a food, drug or health damaging additive to our diet and use its financial muscle as a potent influence.

A recommended read, particularly the sugar/tobacco link.

So another January and another Whole30. What were the results? Actually a better weight loss – let’s call it “fat loss” as my strength didn’t decrease at all – this year and my weight is now as low as it has been since I was about 12 years old. I think I was 12 stone (168lbs) when I was 12. Here’s the data  below. You will see it’s a slightly longer period than 30 days as I wanted to get in the highest high (27 Dec) and the lowest low (2 Feb). Just keep in mind that the Whole30 isn’t a weight loss diet, it’s a “reset your relationship with food” diet. Oh and it’s really restrictive as the newspapers and medical community will tell you. Yeah right, here is my last Whole30 dinner… stir fry cooked in goose fat with slices of home cooked cold roast beef. It was delicious.

Anyway, here is my weight data, top graph weight, white line is the trend, bottom graph is body fat %age.

The doctors tell us…

Whole30 the worst diet

“…if you were considering trying the Whole30 diet, you might want to think again.

Whole30 is an extremely restrictive diet that you follow for 30 days – the plan requires cutting out sugar, alcohol, gluten, grains, dairy and legumes, but rather than focussing on weight loss, it’s all about resetting your relationship with food and – supposedly – changing your life.”

So 23 days into the Whole30 and what on earth have I been eating on this “extremely restricted” diet?

Well I had some burgers and salad made with grass fed ground steak with avocado

 and salad.

Then I had some lamb stew

made with bone broth and root vegetables. Oh and then I had this

Porchetta… pork belly stuffed with delicious herbs.

Yes, if you were thinking about the Whole30, you may want to think again. But then again, you might not…

And what about my weight? My report will come at the end of the 30 days. Now I’m off to eat my turmeric roast chicken and squash. So very restricted…

#whole30 #dryjanuary

… and let’s face it, apart from surgery, there is only one way to get rid of unwanted body fat and that’s to burn it as fuel. 

So orthodox medical opinion will tell you that the way to burn body fat as fuel is to restrict what you take in as fuel through your mouth. Seems obvious doesn’t it? But is it true? Hmm… that’s more tricky… let’s look at the evidence… except there isn’t any.

Of course we can all point to a starvation situation and say “Well that’s a calorie restricted diet and these dying people are clearly not overweight…” but no one is suggesting that people that want to lose weight should commit suicide. Clearly that would be pointless. So what’s the evidence that calorie restricted diet activates fat burning in the human body? As far as I can discover, none, nix, nada.

Where’s my evidence that my diet, be it paleo or Whole30 burns fat as fuel in my body. It’s here:

My ketostix from today. The more purple it is, the more fat is being burnt for fuel in my body. I don’t calorie restrict. I eat as much as I want and I am still burning off my unwanted body fat. In my experience, losing unwanted body fat is nothing about how much you eat, it’s all about what you eat. 

From the same people who brought you 50 years of weight gain, increasing heart disease and now a global obesity and diabetes catastrophe… 38 “diets” ranked in order of how closely they fit in with their orthodoxy. Surprise, surprise, the less you look like them, the less they like you.

Whole30 is ranked the worst fad diet

I am proud to say that the man who saved my life – Dr Atkins – is coming in at 35/38; the food that keeps my weight stable and healthy and lets me go for hours and hours without feeling hungry – the paleo “diet” – is one below at 36/38; and the Whole30 – that resets my relationship with food once a year and I am using right now – is right there at the bottom at 38/38.

Just in case you have forgotten what the established medical opinion has done for obesity rates over last few decades…

So there we have it. Despite the fact that it has manifestly done nothing to prevent a worldwide catastrophe over the last 50 years, orthodox medical opinion will brook no dissent. Here is a picture of a bear in the woods.

Thanks Docs.

Another Whole30 starts today aiming to lose about 10lbs in a month eating food like this …

Check out Dallas and Melissa Hartwig’s website firm the links aside. 

Updates during the month. Happy New Year! 

The year is drawing to a close and it’s Christmas Day tomorrow. My celebrations traditionally begin with my family collecting together for supper and carols around the piano. This year was no different and I laid on my usual supper of a hand raised pork and game pie, home made pickle and chutney and salads. Now the pie isn’t strictly paleo but the pastry was made with spelt flour which is now, astonishingly, widely available. I got mine  from Sainsburys.

The recipe is hugely complicated so I won’t reproduce it here but you can find it on Delia Online

http://www.deliaonline.com/recipes/international/european/british/old-fashioned-raised-game-pie

You begin this collecting the ingredients together and making the pork mixture that will layer between the diced game.

Then make the hot water crust but be careful not to scald yourself… boiling fat is dangerous!!

Press out the pastry to the approximate size of the tin. No rolling pin required.

Raise the crust up the sides of the tin by pressing it with your fist. Avoid making cracks or thin bits.

Line the crust with bacon.

First layer of pork mixture goes in the bottom.

Followed by a layer of diced mixed game.

Keep layering until the pie is full and fold over the bacon.

Make the lid.

Make a steam hole – very important! And decorate with spare crust.

Cook for 2.5 hours. You need to cover the top with foil. Stand the tin on something to slide it off the pie.

Turn up the heat and the egg was the pie. It goes back in the oven to brown and finish cooking. About 45 mins.

And now it is cooked and needs to cool down and firm up.

When it’s cool fill the pie with the jellies stock using a pie funnel. 

And there it is!! A traditional, if not very paleo, Christmas treat. One a year won’t hurt 😉 

Happy Christmas! 

I like to keep my food in line with the seasons, as far as possible. Growing your own vegetables helps that, as the vegetables that are seasonally available tend to drive you to a particular type of protein choice. That’s my theory anyway. At this time of year, the vegetables that are around tend to be robust, growing semi-underground, and require a fair amount  of cooking. There are some stronger salad leaves around too and, of course, herbs. Bearing that in mind I set off for the butcher to see what he might have in the way of autumnal protein to compliment the available vegetables and was delighted to find… game! Pheasants were ready and would go perfectly braised with my selection of roots and herbs as they would all require a few hours slow cooking.

I admit a few of the things in the picture were not grown in my garden… but I did say as far as possible… Here we go then with three good sized birds. Why three? Because they were 3 for £10.

I browned the outside of the birds in the casserole dish in a fair amount of fat, beef dripping in my case but I don’t think it matters. I added diced bacon and then I fried off the onions, mushrooms, peppers and chillies. Finally I added the root veg cubed and fried that off too making sure it didn’t stick.

I returned the birds to the casserole on to of the vegetables and added red wine and good strong homemade chicken stock (broth). All that was left to do was add a bouquet-garni of garden herbs put a lid on and cook on a medium heat for two and a half hours or so, checking periodically to make sure it didn’t dry out.

Being an almost wild animal pheasants can be tough, so need a long gentle cook with liquid, I think some liquid helps, and because there is not a huge amount of meat on a pheasant, I reckon on a bird per person. Maybe you could get away with a half a bird per person too but I like them too much to scrimp!

Finally don’t forget that you will have a lot of  bones left over that will make a perfect gamey stock for your next autumn food adventure!

Happy seasonal eating.  🙂

Autumn is the season when all the hard work in the vegetable plot pays off and you can start to feel really primal collecting your own food that you have grown and preparing meals with it or preserving it for later. 

Here I have piccalilli to have with the cold turkey at Christmas and some vegetable and fruit chutney that will be prefect for making barbecue sauce throughout the year. Yes it has sugar in it, but you eat so little of it so infrequently that its not going to be a problem.

 
But preserving takes planning and preparation and Autumn sometimes doesn’t allow time for that, it simply presents you with food and you quickly have to decide how to eat it before it passes its best, drops off the tree, goes rotten or gets eaten by something else! If you always have a container of stock (broth) in the fridge, you will always be able to do something! Say you have a glut of sweet corn and you can’t face another corn on the cob? 

If you have a good chicken stock in the fridge you can easily make a lovely smoked haddock and sweet corn chowder. This isn’t a classic chowder as I omitted the potato. The green is the herb chervil.

Suppose you have some beautiful herbs that are just ready to use?

If you have a good lamb stock in the fridge you can simply collect up any vegetables that are ready to eat and make a delicious lamb stew! Here with shallots, turnip, white beetroot, borlotti beans and tomatoes. The jellied stock was made from the bone of a roast joint of lamb.

However, its not always possible to be spontaneous I find. Sometimes, simply because of what they are, some things require a bit of planning to use them… enjoy your Autumn 🙂 

Another day, another set of data that demonstrates the spiral of decline that worldwide levels of obesity are causing.

Obesity, type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure are now routinely diseases of children where they once were the exclusive preserve of adults and in the case of type 2 diabetes, quite old adults. The cause of this transmission of diseases from old to young people is simply caused by diet according to a report from the World Obesity Federation. With the UK government backing down on trying to do anything about childhood obesity in the UK and UN targets on reducing obesity all but unachievable, it looks like the world is giving up on the health of its children, condemning them to a life of ill health, amputation, depression and ultimately, an early death.

“More than 3.5 million children now had type 2 diabetes, which was once unknown in this age group and can lead to horrible complications in later life, such as amputations and blindness. The World Obesity Federation, which compiled the data, predicted that number would rise to 4.1 million by 2025.

About 13.5 million children have impaired glucose tolerance, which is a precursor to diabetes. Around 24 million have high blood pressure and more than 33 million have fatty liver disease as a result of obesity, which is more often associated with alcoholism and can lead to cirrhosis and liver cancer.”

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/oct/07/junk-food-shortening-lives-children-obesity-diabetes-data

Astonishingly, some of the children referred to in the report were both obese and stunted. Stunted growth occurs as a result of poor nutrition. So these children were eating enough food to make them obese, but it was of such poor quality, their bodies were unable to use the food to grow. All the “food” that they were eating did, was make them fat.

“You cannot replace contaminated water with Coca-Cola or Chocolate Nesquik, or a lack of good meals with a pack of fortified noodles, and still expect children to grow healthily.”

I wish someone would tell Coca-Cola and Nestle that.