Jerky looses to Peanuts

Jerky, it's meat right?  Wonderful quality protein-filled meat!  And meat usually comes with healthy fats too!

Except that jerky is often marinated in a sugar solution since Americans don't have taste for the amount of salt required to make it shelf stable without sugar, and most of the fat is removed from the meat before this process starts.

Honey roasted peanuts?  A plant covered in honey?  Gotta be bad for the high fat eater?  Not necessarily.  I wouldn't want all those Omega 6s as part of my daily diet, but as a convenience store food, it's up there in calories from less processed fats.

Product	Servings	Fat grams per serving	Protein grams per serving	Carb grams per serving	Fiber grams per serving	Fat grams	Protien grams	Digestable Carb grams	Calories	% fat calories	Ketogenic Ratio
Tillamook Jerkey	10.0	1.5	10	7	0	15	100	70.00	815.00	16.56%	45.95%
Bridgeford Jerkey	3.0	1	11	6	0	3.00	33.00	18.00	231.00	11.69%	47.76%
Honey Roasted Peanuts	6.0	13	7	7	0	78.00	42.00	42.00	1,038.00	67.63%	120.71%

You could probably improve on those nuts by getting a less sweet flavor, but it meets the 60% calories from fat target, and is strongly keytogenic (although not strongly enough for treatment of epilepsy).

Low calorie Avocado?

So, I was shopping, and there was a label above the avocados claiming they were a "low calorie food" which I thought was pretty odd, given that avocados are one of the highest fat foods you'll find in the produce section.  So looking into it:

http://www.fda.gov/Food/GuidanceRegulation/GuidanceDocumentsRegulatoryInformation/LabelingNutrition/ucm064911.htm

40 cal or less per RACC (and per 50 g if RACC is small) (b)(2)Meals and main dishes: 120 cal or less per 100 g (b)(3)

Of course, the tricksy issue is that a RACC/"serving" is pretty ambiguous size.

An avocado has 227 calories in it, 167 calories per 100 grams, but only 50 calories "per serving".  So that means you get to eat 1/5 of a medium avocado per sitting to keep it within the official serving size.

But even with that serving size, 50 > 40, and 167>120 this is not a "low calorie food".  Read your labels, but also use your brain!

That said, avocados are a pretty good for you food.  They got fiber, they got fat, they have all the sorts of micronutrients expected from fruits and veggies.  The vegetarians like them, the low omega-6 eaters like them, the glycemic index folk like them, the alkaline diet folk like them, even the guy that thinks we should eat chlorophyll and absorb sunlight recommends them (and the avocado is probably why his followers are still alive.)  If you've got something against the avocado, you're in the minority.

So, have and avocado, but remember the calories count, it's not a free vegetable in your diet plan.

Modern furniture leads to modern posture?

I recently stumbled across the Gokhale Method.

“Most pain can be attributed to how we hold ourselves and how we move. Since we aren't born with a user’s manual, we rely on our culture to guide us.
About a century ago, our culture took a wrong turn.”
- http://gokhalemethod.com/gokhale-method

She seems to have some good points about there being evidence that people of modern western culture have a different posture than our ancestors or modern third world cultures.  I wonder though, if it is not so much our culture as our furniture.

Sit on the hardest surface you can find. Start sitting with your spine in an s curve, your shoulders relaxed and slightly forward.  Feel the discomfort of the surface, feel most of your weight on two little hip bone points.  Now shift to Gokhale’s recommended posture, roll your hips so your tail bone is sticking out behind you, and pull your shoulders straight and your spine tall.  Feel the discomfort of the surface under you.  Feel how the pressure has been relieved by being distributed over the leg instead of over one little point.

Modern furniture is made for modern posture, and reinforces modern posture.

Yet another reason to consider replacing my "ergonomic" office chair with a wooden bench, but I don't think I'll be buying the stretchsit cushion or balancing her special pillow on my head (if I want that kind of exercise, our ancestors taught young ladies to balance books up there.)

Ezekiel Bread

Some people go nuts for Ezekiel Bread, supposedly a perfect food whose recipe is given in the bible.  The recipe is based on Ezekiel 4:9.

"And you, take wheat and barley, beans and lentils, millet and emmer, and put them into a single vessel and make your bread from them."

Ohh!  Multi grain!  Ain't it wonderful!  The perfect food ordained by God!

No, not really...

Let's read the whole chapter:
Ezekiel 4:1-3, Ezekiel is instructed to construct a model of a siege against Jerusalem.
Ezekiel 4:4-8, Ezekiel is instructed to lay down in one place for over a year without moving, while facing the siege model.
Ezekiel 4:9-11, Ezekiel is given the recipe for the bread that he is to eat during this ordeal, with the amount of food and water to be strictly rationed as would occur during a time of siege.
Ezekiel 4:12-15, The baking instructions for the bread is given, to be baked over human dung.  Ezekiel begs mercy on this point, and is allowed to use cow dung instead.  (I've never seen any fans of Ezekiel bread include these instructions.)

Just in case you can't follow what's going on here, the chapter sums it up nicely for you:

"Moreover, he said to me, “Son of man, behold, I will break the supply of bread in Jerusalem. They shall eat bread by weight and with anxiety, and they shall drink water by measure and in dismay. I will do this that they may lack bread and water, and look at one another in dismay, and rot away because of their punishment."

So there you go, Ezekiel bread was not for obtaining optimum health of the prophet during his ministry, it was a visible sign of the terrible famine and war that was coming to Jerusalem.

There are several more modern examples of "War Bread" which is made from whatever starchy scraps you have on hand to stretch the scarce flour.  Traditional ingredients include multigrain, legumes, and potatoes.  They have more crumb than white or wheat bread as they lack the gluten strands that make wheat bread so airy.

http://www.food.com/recipe/war-bread-234185
http://www.cooks.com/recipe/ld61c046/war-bread.html
http://thehomefronthousewife.blogspot.com/2011/11/recipe-5-national-loaf.html
http://www.cooks.com/recipe/9z73307d/my-grandmothers-war-bread.html
http://www.americanfoodroots.com/recipes/war-bread/

Now I don't mean to discourage you from eating multigrain over white bread, or from sprouting your grains, a variety of grains is probably more healthy for you than sticking to white flour.  These traditional war bread recipes exist because our ancestors used to have supplies of those other grains around to stretch the white flour with, so if you're not thickening soups with rye berries and eating bowls of oatmeal, a multigrain bread may be a good way to get these alternative grains into your diet.  (Assuming you tolerate carbs better than I do.)  Just please don't tell me that your multigrain bread is spiritual or a God-ordained perfect food...

Finding the diet that works best for you

You may know JP Sears for his satire on the more extreme elements of the holistic health movement, but he also has some real valuable advice.  How to find the diet that works best for you:

I'd add that if you have physical symptoms from your diet, tracking those as objectively as possible should also be a factor.  If you have energy but your lymph nodes are swollen, that might not be working so well for you...

A plea for balance, scientific rigour & death to dogma

I don't usually like just re-linking other people's content, but this is a great one that everyone on both sides of the low carb debate should read:

http://sportsscientists.com/2016/04/low-carbohydrate-diets-plea-balance-scientific-rigour-death-dogma/

"Nitrate Free"

So a newbie at The Salt Cured Pig was excited about a "nitrate free" jerky product she had found. The community quickly set her straight, but was still lacking numerical data, so I went and found some.

Unfortunately the USDA Nutrient Database does not track Nitrates/Nitrites, so we had to look to other sources.

The content of nitrates and nitrites in fruits, vegetables and other foodstuffs

lettuce, frozen spinach, fennel, radishes, parsley: >1000 mg of KNO3/kg
lettuce: 3500 mg/kg
carrots, celery, leeks and frozen French bean: 24 - 800 mg KNO3/kg
strawberries 58.7 mg KNO3/kg
fruit-vegetable juice: 355.30 to 584.53 mg KNO3/kg

The exact numbers were highly variable between samples, often with an order of magnitude difference. The soil conditions, fertilizer, maturity of the plant, etc. affect the levels.

Meanwhile, cured meats are federally limited to 200 ppm of nitrite (same as mg/kg in this context)

So when you turn down that bacon in favor of a "healthier" salad, you're likely consuming seventeen times as much nitrogenous compounds.

Now there is an issue that we're talking nitrates and nitrites, but nitrates do convert to nitrite both in storage and in the body. "Nitrate free" cured meats work by converting the natural nitrates in celery juice or other sources into nitrate, and the same can occur in your own body.

Meanwhile, the nitrite in those cured meats makes them resistant to breakdown by bacteria and resistant to contamination by the deadly botulism toxin, making your meat safer as well as more flavorful.

Yes, excessive Nitrites and Nitrates are toxic, yes, under some conditions they can turn into carcinogenic compounds in your body, but they are a normal part of natural food.  They have a very long standing history as a food additive, much longer than most of the additives in your average can/box from the store.  The amounts included in cured meats are nothing to worry about.

Internet healthcare 4tw! Sometimes... - On the ups and downs of medical discussion groups

My dog was drastically sick, I made a vet appointment but got in the internet right away and started a change to his feeding regimen based on likely diagnosis and what had worked for others and would not be a problem for my dog.  He was already feeling better the next day when we could get into the vet.  My husband said "Internet healthcare 4tw".  (Although this is an ongoing battle and we're still making adjustments with the help of our vet.)

In my research, I joined a discussion group.  Discussion groups have been very helpful to me in the past, although one must tread carefully when taking advice from random people on the internet.  (Don't ever take my advice, take my information and my experiences and go research what I said for yourself.)  One person can make or break your experience in a discussion group.  There are a lot of different types to look out for:

The good folk in discussion groups:

• The encourager - This person lets you know you're not alone.  They let you know that there is hope.  They check up on you that you're following your program.  They let you vent when you need to vent and shut you down when you need to get a grip.  They may not solve any problems, but they equip you to stay engaged and take advantage of resources that do help.  This is a role you can fulfill even as a newbie in the group.  You can say "I'm sorry for your loss" or "that happened to me too" or "it sounds like you had a rough week, what's your plan for dealing with this next week?"
• The Guru - The guru has been around a long time, they've seen fads come and go, they've seen different solutions work for different people, and they're willing to discuss all those potential solutions.  Maybe they're a professional that likes the additional challenge of unique cases he finds in the group, or maybe they are an overcomer who has been where you are now.   Hope this person takes an interest in your story, but don't monopolize their time, as many people need their advice.  Common advice from the guru will circulate and you will end up getting it from other members as well.  Aspire to become the Guru
• The Nerd - This person may not be very knowledgable yet, but they are very well read in general and they'll eat up every bit of literature they can, maybe even run some calculations for you.  This person is useful for coming up with new ideas, but their ideas may not be well tested enough to try before more long standing solutions the guru offers.  This is usually me.  Butting into conversations I know nothing about, providing reference links that explain what the guru or his follower said in more detail.
• The sharer - this person may not know a whole lot, but they're willing to add to the group knowledge with what did and did not work in their situation.  An overabundance of sharers with no guru or nerd to wade through the data can be counterproductive, but in moderation they can help you find new solutions or avoid common pitfalls.  I try to include this in my group participation.  Sharers can turn into salesmen.

The neutral folk:

• The fellow sufferer - These groups stagnate and die without problems to solve, so the sufferer is a necessary member although not a direct contributor.  
• The Guru follower - Useful for offloading some work from the guru, and pointing out the guru or the nerd when the sufferer has a difficult issue, but often prone to parrot old advice without knowing why it is so or when it is not actually so this time.
• The true believer - Has an unusual viewpoint and persists in espousing it at every opportunity.  They should not be totally ignored, sometimes they are right, or they at least have stumbled upon something that works for completely different reasons than they believe it does.  To be avoided when crossed with the salesman or the dictator.

The ugly:

• The salesman - This person is on the group to promote a product or idea, and they don't really care if it is the best idea for you.  The salesman doesn't care what all your protocol entails as long as it includes their product/idea.  To be avoided at all costs when their solution is not supported by the majority of the group and doesn't stand up to a skeptical research binge. 
• The dictator - This person has a one true protocol for sucess, and they want you to ignore all doctor's advice and all common sense, and all independant research, and listen to them, even though you just met them and you have no references to back up what they say.  Some gurus turn into dictators, the protocol may work but it's still a bad idea to shove it down the sufferer's throat, and the dictator is more resistant to new information and new solutions that may work even better, can't handle special cases that can't follow the protocol, and runs off people that still want to work with a professional that follows a different protocol.
• The iron mod - Sometimes the moderator is an ally of the bad guy or the true believer, and enforces compliance among the membership.  A good mod may censor heated conflict or salesmen, but the iron mod suppresses reasonable discussion of alternative ideas.
• The guilt tripper - This person wants to make everything your fault.  They feel superior when you look stupid.  If you don't have the resources to follow the best case protocol, there is no second best option for you and you're just not trying hard enough.  Every time you have a snag they pounce on your mistakes rather than help you stop making them...  Occasionally a useful person with bad bedside manner looks like a guilt tripper, so you might give them some leeway until you get to know them.

Some of these ugly personalities are really hurting themselves.  They are trying to convince themselves that what they are doing is correct for them, and then obviously what is right for them is also right for you, and you not taking their advice is an attack on what they are doing...  Although they are hurting, vocal sympathy is not always helpful in dealing with them, they may lash out if you strike close to that raw nerve.

Besides the people involved, the size and format of the forum matter.  The ideal forum is small enough that everyone gets to know each other, and every thread is seen by some of the good folk before it gets squashed down the list.  This can be done by keeping total membership small, or by having a format that breaks things up into subtopics where different gurus hang out...

So I do encourage you to participate in discussion forums, I wish you luck in finding mentors in cozy environments like I did in Minimalist Runner and Ancestral Running, and avoiding dictators in huge crowds like I encountered at Canine Megaesophagus support group.  

Above all, and always, stay skeptical.  Use the group as a place to get/share research ideas, as a place to ask/answer questions, as a place to commiserate, but don't mistake group consensus for absolute truth, or the viewpoint of someone across the world as more important than your own eyes on the situation...

I don't know at this point if I'm sticking with the Canine Megaesophagus group, I'll at least be abandoning my thread where the dictator is subscribed.  (I usually like to keep as much as is reasonable in on thread so the nerds can get a coherent full story without having to search all my threads, but if she is bothered enough by me to call in a moderator, and won't unsubscribe to the thread, I have to leave the thread to leave her.)

If I get comments on this post I'll share more of my research on Megaesophagus in dogs, but I've mostly kept my dog health stuff off this blog.

Earthing: Gets you to the right place with the wrong reason

Now and then when one is researching minimalist shoe products, you come across the concept of earthing.

Earthing is bunk.

I do highly recommend proper grounding for all electrical appliances.  Low powered appliances are grounded through the neutral line, high powered appliances have an additional grounding plug.  A simple outlet tester should tell you if your house wiring is behaving correctly.  Stray voltage is no joke.

Another possible source of stray voltage is static.  This is almost impossible to avoid in indoor heated environments.  Even the best "earthing" shoes will do nothing because most indoor flooring is an insulative material.  The stray voltage you pick up with static is way less than stray voltage you can get from bad wiring and isn't a huge concern unless you're playing with a Van de Graaff generator.

From Wikipedia

Even if you were worried about proper "grounding" the earth isn't all that conductive, proper electrical grounding requires rods be sunk into the ground.  Electrical fences generally use three six foot rods for proper grounding.  Home systems are grounded with one eight foot rod.  Just touching the earth is not likely to do the trick.

That isn't to say that you won't experience an improvement in health if you try earthing.  Barefoot and minimalist shoes may help some people with gait issues through reducing constriction of the foot and leveraging the nerves in the foot that are muted through cushioned shoes to improve gait with biofeedback.  Sleeping on a hard surface with no pillow may have postural benefits for relieving back tension and even sinus issues.  Spending time outside increases your exercise level, sun exposure and Vitamin D production.  Soil also contains beneficial bacteria that you can alternatively pick up through gardening.  If earthing got you there and it's helped you, good for you, but it's probably not the actual earth contact doing the trick.

So if earthing helps you, but you're miserable in winter, get some good wool socks (insulative) and thin leather moccasins (water resistant), build yourself a platform bed with minimalist padding, take some Vitamin D supplements, get some exercise, bring in some plants potted in local soil, and enjoy being warm in winter.

(Amusingly this hits just about all of my non-diet blog labels.  Even endocrine, since Vitamin D is as much a hormone as a vitamin.  Earthing does touch on a lot of real benefits even though the reasoning is all wrong.)

Calories In/Calories Out "Myth"

Lots of people advocating high fat diets try to say that the Calories In/Calories Out model of weight loss is a complete myth and doesn't work.

They're wrong.

But let's rephrase this in terms of physics.  "When someone looses weight, where does it go?"  Ruben Meerman has an excellent explanation of it:

In summary, you breathe it out as CO2 and H2O.

Let's back up further though, before the food you eat becomes fat.  Physics says that matter is neither created nor destroyed (without releasing massively more energy than we're talking about here) so everything that goes in your mouth has to go somewhere.  There are several types of things that enter your mouth:

• Water - leaves body as urine
• Fat - becomes part of the body
• Fat and Water Soluble Compounds
• Compounds we can use - becomes part of the body
• Compounds we can't use - leaves body as urine
• Some of these things spend time in the liver getting converted into something easier to use or eliminate.
• Some of these things accumulate in the liver
• Non-Soluble Compounds - leaves the body as feces

So Fat, Carbohydrates, Protein, and lots of micro-nutrients become part of the body when you ingest them.  You gain weight.  All macro nutrients break down into gasses when you exercise.  You loose weight.  Calories In/Calories Out, or to be more tangible, Mass In/Mass Out.

Fat does require more calories per gram than carbs and protein to break down into water and CO2, so you do have to work harder to convert that into a form you can expire, but let's not write it off as a diet food yet, as it may be helpful in other ways.

The real problems with the Calories In/Calories Out diet scheme are: hunger, metabolism, and feeling well enough to exercise.  In other words, when you're talking about real humans, our brains and our bodies don't always comply with the plan.  

I'm seriously re-evaluating the mass going into my body.  My last noticeable weight decrease was two years ago, my net mass has now come back up to where it was before I started.  Diet is a complex matter, especially if you have other health issues, it's not as simple as eating less and exercising more, but that does need to be factored in.  It is not as simple as avoiding ingredient X or adding ingredient Y, although that does need to be considered.  My primary goals right now is to home cook more of my food, continue to avoid empty calories, and eliminate snacking.  This is the basic plan I was doing well on before.  Hyper analyzing that and trying to replicate it with convenience foods and "healthy" snacks does not work for me.

I'd like to re-evaluate the mass leaving my body, but this is a terrible time of year to add exercise.  It's getting to be dark by the time I get home.  But I can make sure I'm idle less.  Even just being on my feet cleaning my kitchen, or bending over combing wool will spend more calories than computer or TV time...

Soylent guy at it again

Chris is more eloquent than I:
http://anarchangel.blogspot.com/2014/12/soylent-is-made-out-of-diabetes-diabetes.html

In addition, I must say the soylent guy is way off in left field.  He thinks he's saving the world but doesn't think of the effects of how products are manufactured.  He has proposed soylent as the solution to wold hunger.  So we take crops from poor farmers, send them to a factory, process them, throw out the parts that don't belong in soylent, and ship them back, and this is more economically viable than letting the farmers eat their own produce as it comes out of the ground?  Maybe it has application in refugee camps, as golden rice does, but for the greater populace there are much more efficient ways to obtain your daily calories in a balanced and ecologically sound method.

The soylet guy has a new kick of getting off of A/C power and going to a small solar cell.  Some of his changes are sensical, but in order to ditch his clothes washer, he has started buying all his clothes from China, wearing them once, and then donating them.  Sure it may take less water than washing his clothes, but considerable energy is spent in textile manufacturing, if the clothes are colored then nasty chemicals are used in the dye process, if they're flame retardant cotton or shrink resistant wool those are more chemicals...  Then he takes his nasty dirty laundry and dumps it in the donation bin.  This is unsanitary, and just pushes off the washing burden onto someone else.  If he was to trash those dirty clothes instead, then he adds to the landfill problem, if he was to buy clothes of recyclable materials, recycling takes more energy than washing...

Did Ketogenic Diet Kill My Beneficial Bacteria?

I'm starting to look more into gut flora and probiotics.

1. Most probiotics made up of species that are not dominant in the healthy adult human gut.
2. Although not dominant in adults, they are common in infants.
3. Infants gradually adjust their gut flora to the adult biome over three years.
4. The diet you regularly eat affects the ratios of the types of flora in your gut.
5. The types of flora in your gut affect how well you digest different foods that reach your gut.
6. Some categories of foods that are broken down by gut flora are: carbohydrates, disaccharides, monosaccharides, alcohols, fructose, lactose
7. There is a high correlation between foods you need gut bacteria to break down and foods forbidden on some Paleo diets.

So it is pretty well known in Paleo circles that when you give up wheat you become more sensitive to it over time, but I've not seen a satisfactory explanation for why.  But if I'm understanding gut flora correctly, as you stop eating a particular food that is digested by gut flora, the relevant gut flora die out and next time you eat that food there may not be enough relevant gut flora left to digest it.

Did my stint trying to eat ketogenic kill off most of my FODMAP digesting bacteria?  If so, what is the best way to get them back?

I'm still trying to figure out the role of probiotics.  They have a pretty good track record in research, but yet they are not the normal guys in our gut.  In years past we ate a lot of preserved foods in winter, and many of those foods were preserved with lactic acid loving cultures, cheeses, sausages, sauerkraut, pickles...  There are entire alternative healing diets based on these lactic acid loving bacteria.  But they are not the dominant species in the gut, implying that the other species are more efficient at digesting most of the food that reaches them.  Do they do a "good enough" job when our other bacteria are not doing so hot?  Do they foster an environment friendly to the other bacteria and stimulate them?

Chocolate Denial

Many Paleo folks abstain from every form of seed, because of unfavorable omega 6/ omega 3 ratios, but yet they keep dark chocolate on the good list.  It just occured to me to realize that chocolate is a seed, and wonder how it's much better than other seeds...

USDA data on "Baking chocolate, unsweetened, squares"

Nutrient	Unit	Value per 100 g	Fat Class
18:2 undifferentiated1	g	1.435	Omega 6
20:4 undifferentiated1	g	0	Omega 6
18:3 undifferentiated	g	0.117	Omega 3
18:04	g	0	Omega 3
20:3 undifferentiated1	g	0	Omega 3
20:4 undifferentiated1	g	0	Omega 3
20:5 n-3 (EPA)1	g	0	Omega 3
22:5 n-3 (DPA)	g	0	Omega 3
22:5 n-3 (DPA)	g	0	Omega 3
22:6 n-3 (DHA)1	g	0	Omega 3

That's a pretty sad Omega 6/3 ratio for a "healthy" food.

I'm still slightly in denial, and many chocolate companies use cheaper fats in their products, so I looked up cocoa butter, the results were not much better:

Nutrient	Unit	Value per 100 g	Fat class
18:3 undifferentiated	g	0.1	Omega 3
18:04	g	0	Omega 3
20:5 n-3 (EPA)	g	0	Omega 3
22:5 n-3 (DPA)	g	0	Omega 3
22:6 n-3 (DHA)	g	0	Omega 3
18:2 undifferentiated	g	2.8	Omega 6
18:3 undifferentiated	g	0.1	Omega 6
20:4 undifferentiated	g	0	Omega 6

Dark chocolate may be a reasonable cheat food, low in sugar, rich in antioxidants, minimal processing agents, but it can hardly be considered a "good" food on the low omega 6 diet.

Sorry Paleo dieters!

The New Doctor

I have a new doctor.  She was highly recommended by someone who eats a diet similar to my own and also has a complicated chronic condition.  She is an endocrinologist and a holistic practitioner.  I went in skeptical because of some of the alternative medicine mentions on her website, but conventional docs have not done well by me so it seemed worth a shot as long as I keep my eyes open.  I've only had one visit so far, but my thoughts:

Pros:

• Ordered a huge pile of blood tests to try to cover all the bases in one draw.  (I'm a difficult draw, it took them three pokes to get a good blood flow, and I'm bruised on both arms.)
• Ordered Cortisol test that should show if I have Adrenal Insufficiency.
• Covering all her bases, even ordered a parasite screening of the real medical variety.  (I have heard of some pretty hokey alternative medicine tests for parasites that I would not have accepted.)

Eh:

• Recommended an herbal salve that I think is less effective than A&D.  It does help some, but any over the counter intensive moisturizer used on the proscribed frequency works as well.
• Recommended an herbal supplement for sinus health that happens to contain something I'm allergic to.  Thankfully I read the label and didn't open the bottle.
• She did not cover any bio-mechanics or sun exposure.  On the other hand we used most of our appointment time on other things, it might come up later.

Con:

• Implied that she subscribes to the blood type diet which has little to no scientific basis.  All four blood types are instructed to avoid processed food, so I'm sure everyone that tries the diet benefits over the standard american diet, but which of the four diets works best for you may have nothing to do with your blood type.  I do strongly recommend elimination diets if you think you have a food related problem or any chronic inflammation, to determine food sensitivities by experimentation, but wholesale elimination of food groups based on a fad diet or someone else's sensitivities may do you no good and may do you some harm if you don't properly re-balance your diet without that food group.  Note that my diet is not a strict interpretation of anyone else's Paleo/Ancestral diet, but I've experimented with specific suggestions from those diets and worked out a diet that works for me.
• Her website and signs in the office indicate a belief in homeopathy.  Now sometimes herbal remedies are labeled homeopathic for marketing reasons and some of those are valid, but true homeopathic remedies are diluted beyond usability and have no scientific plausibility.  That said, true homeopathic remedies are decent placebos.  If the modern american is so easily fooled by a placebo that they are affected even when they are aware the drug is a placebo, and that they are more heavily affected the more expensive the placebo is, if there is no viable medical alternative, or patience and time to heal is the best remedy, I can't really say it's unethical to sell magic water, oil, or alcohol to patients that would benefit from it.  It would be unethical to sell magic water to someone that really needs an antibiotic, vaccine, or other well-proven and effective medication.  Who knows, the herbal salve she sold me could be considered magic oil.  I am being more diligent about applying three times a day than I was with my cheaper over the counter moisturizer, because I don't want my skepticism to prevent me from seeing possible benefit that *might* be there.

In my search for health, I have found a lot of wisdom mixed in with nonsense.  People willing to look outside the box for answers find good and bad ones alike.  I'll just have to stay on my toes and independently vet her recommendations.

I'm considering making my own salve when this is gone.  I think the herbal is less effective than my over the counter because the carrier is too thin.  The herbals may or may not be helpful.  My cousin grows Comfery and will send me a plant, and I can order pure lanolin online.  Can't hurt, the lanolin will still do it's job wether the comfery has any effect or not...

Book Recomendation: Keeping a Family Cow

Keeping a Family Cow: The Complete Guide for Home-Scale, Holistic Dairy Producers

This is a great read for anyone, even if you live in an apartment in a big city, you will find out a lot of interesting things about the history of the dairy industry, food safety, and raising a healthy family.  You'll find recipes for various milk products you can make in your kitchen at home.  Not all the claims are substantiated, but there is a lot of research referenced and a fairly impressive bibliography in the back.  This is not the blind dogma I see in some other pro raw milk propaganda.

For the cow-curious, the book further details a lot about how to care for a cow on as little as one acre with just a family garage for a barn, and details many other benefits of having a family cow besides fresh milk and homemade milk products for the family table.  (High quality feed for chickens and pigs from waste milk, beef, and garden fertilizer...)

I still think large raw milk dairies and bottling plants are stupid.  One mistake with one cow can contaminate the whole batch.  Much better to work with a single cow.  Even with a single cow, mastitis usually only affects one quarter at a time, and is easily detected.  The affected quarter could be milked separately and fed to chickens.  Fecal contamination is harder to detect, but the book outlines a strict protocol for barn cleanliness, cow cleanliness, and preventing the cow from kicking and getting her feet near the milk.  I'm satisfied that fresh milk from my own cow could potentially be cleaner than any of the vegetative foods I eagerly pluck raw and devour right in the garden.

I'm cow-curious, but don't see how having a dairy animal is compatible with my current schedule...  Speaking of, time to go, I'm late bringing the sheep in for the night.

Poor, Underappreciated Margarine

Everyone knows Margarine is evil.  You ask the traditional nutritionist and they say it has too much fat, you ask the rogue nutritionist and they say it's hydrogenated oil high in Omega 6 and possibly rancid.

But it wasn't always that way.

Margarine, as originally invented, is an emulsification of skim milk and tallow.  Yes tallow, the ultimate perfect fat (when from grass finished beef) in my diet plan.  I regularly render large amounts of tallow and then it just sits there unless I want to do some deep fat frying, because it's too hard to easily spoon out for everyday cooking.

Making margarine from tallow would be a great way to serve more tallow, and there are options for making dairy free margarine for those allergic to dairy and looking for a decent spread or soft cooking fat.

Andreas Viestad suggests limitless possibilities with emulsification of fats and labels them all margarine.  You could use tallow, coconut oil, coconut water, brightly colored juices, etc...

This vegan recipe describes well the emulsification process, using the freezer to cool the fat quickly while emulsified.

denisedaniel concocted a recipe using tallow/lard and cashew milk to get around major allergy problems.

Lost Formula has bulk recipes for margarine.  (From 1927?  Possibly a rough translation.) That include several different fat alternatives and are flavored with a bit of cream.

The Washington Post has a couple additional recipes:

• Homemade Herbed Margarine

• Homemade Margarine With Coconut and Ginger

I think this is going to become an experiment soon in my kitchen.

Bittersweet Chocolate Chips - Fooling Myself

So I did an analysis a bit back on chocolates, and found 70% cocoa a reasonable ketogenic ratio.  I found bittersweet chocolate chips at the warehouse club at a very reasonable price, and thought I'd found an inexpensive way to indulge in dark chocolate.

Nope.

Here's the comparison:

Product	Servings	Fat grams per serving	Protein grams per serving	Carb grams per serving	Fiber grams per serving
Bitersweet Chocolate Chips	1.0	4.5	1	9	1

Total Calories	77
% carb calories	42%
% protien calories	5%
% fat Calories	53%
Ketogenic ratio	50%

Product	Servings	Fat grams per serving	Protein grams per serving	Carb grams per serving	Fiber grams per serving
70% dark Chocolate	1.0	19	3	17	3

Total Calories	239
% carb calories	23%
% protien calories	5%
% fat Calories	72%
Ketogenic ratio	105%

Back to expensive chocolate for me...

As a wandering side note, this analysis of 70% dark Lindt bar differs from my previous one.  I've added some new fields to my calculator and wanted to include those, but it seems that the values have changed since my last analysis.  This change was favorable, but it is a lesson to be wary and keep checking labels even occasionally on familiar products.  I've definitely noticed this before when familiar products changed to more watery formulas, necessitating changing some old favorite recipes.  This watering down of some canned/frozen products is why I use dollars per calorie as a measure of value between similar products.  Water is really cheap per pound/volume, and the devaluation of the watered down brand is only reflected in the nutrition information panel.

A Real Sneeze

For years, I've been known for my ineffective sneezes.  They have been called "cute", "tiny", "kitten sneezes".  My husband was convinced he could teach me how to sneeze "properly".  But even when I tried to go with the sneeze, the best I could manage was a heavy breath along with the sneeze, which didn't really clear anything up.

Seemingly unrelated...  I've had issue with my rear molars for years.  I have a small mouth, and orthodontic work pushed the molars back further than they were meant to be, and I was always getting cavities in them.  One was removed because it was in too rough of a shape to save, and that quadrant of my jaw felt an incredible release of pressure that I lived with in the other three quadrants of my mouth.  Next time the other molar needed filling, I asked the dentist to pull it, and he assured me it could be saved and should be saved and did the drill/fill routine instead.

Recently, that tooth started hurting real badly.  I'd just moved and had not picked a new dentist yet, and was driven into a nearby office.  Between the delays of getting my records copied over, and the dentist being out of town for two days, I couldn't wait for an appointment and went to the emergency dentist in town.  They also refused to pull my tooth, and instead drilled out my old fillings, drilled out some decay forming under the filling, and put in a temporary patch, recommending I have my regular dentist put a crown on it.  It was still sore, but nothing like the pain that was making me sweat while on multiple pain killers.

I finally got in to see my new dentist.  Dr. Dupre was wonderful.  We had a consultation, and agreed to give the tooth a few weeks to heal from the emergency work before making a decision.  After the healing period I got a cleaning, exam, x-rays, the works, and had a chat about the situation, and he referred me to an excellent surgeon to remove the tooth.  The specialist was quick, efficient, and as painless as possible.  (The needle itself hurts, not the procedure.)

The day after my procedure, I sneezed.  Not a "kitten sneeze," but a real sneeze.  This felt very strange to me.  For a week I had real sneezing, I was slightly worried about the possibility of this being the beginning of some strange side effect and went back for a follow up check.  The dentist examined my socket and tested my sinus integrity and declared all to be well.  His suggested that I may have had a cracked tooth jutting up into my sinuses causing perpetual irritation and sinus infection.  If that's so, I've had that cracked tooth for years.

So the take-aways?  One, listen to your instincts, insist on the medical care you need unless you can find a doctor that can give you a good reason why you're wrong.  Two, this may be an alternate explanation to the amalgam filling theory of fibromyalgia.   Some people have gotten fibromyalgia relief from having teeth pulled, and attribute it to the mercury in the fillings, but they may have had cracks under those fillings causing infection in sinus or bone that was a constant source of inflammation.

It's allergy season for me, I'm struggling with the same runny nose and post nasal drip issues I have every year, but the sinus congestion is totally gone.  I can breathe out of both nostrils most of the time, and when I sneeze it seems to actually clear things out.  I'm grateful for my new sneeze.

Pain Killers - Haying

We all know them and love them, those little pills that make the pain go away and let us go back to our normal lives.  I'll leave discussions of the side effects and long term damage to the more informed, but how about the primary, advertised effect?  What is pain, why do we have it?  It is a signal from your body that something is wrong.  If we take pain killers in order to ignore this signal from our body, then we at the least are not fixing what is wrong, and at worse are injuring ourselves.

Now the experts claim that pain killers promote healing, which I might believe is true given equal actions of the patient on pain meds and off of them, but pain medication affects behavior, and behavior affects healing.

For years I was on daily pain medication.  I took them like vitamins morning and night.  But they never made the source of the pain go away, so I kept needing them, and I kept shrugging off minor injuries until I'd aggravated them for a couple weeks and escalated the severity.  Only when I addressed the source of the pain did I get true relief.  It took some experimentation and ignoring the advice of my doctor, but I got to the bottom of it and got off the pain meds (and off doctor visits).

Given that experience of ignoring pain on a daily basis until I'd hurt myself, I'm very careful now about how I use pain medication.  If I'm in pain, I give myself permission to take it easy and rest, if it's so bad that I have to take pain medication, I command myself to rest until the meds wear off, since my body's communication to my brain about my limits is muted while under the influence.

Last Sunday must have been a blue moon because I took pain meds.  Saturday was our first hay day.  On hay day, a fellow comes and harvests our hay.  He keeps a share for his labor and fuel, and gives us a share.  The hay wagons are his, and have to be emptied as soon as possible so he can use them on the next field he's doing today.  A small square hay bale weighs about 40-45 lbs, and a hay wagon holds about 100 of them.  That's 4000+ lbs of hay that has to be moved by hand.  We have a hay conveyor, but there's 20 feet from the hay wagon to the bottom of the conveyor, then the bale has to be lifted four feet in the air to get slammed firmly down on the conveyor spikes, then up top they have to be pulled off the conveyor before they cause a jam or get sucked onto the underside of the machine, and stacked up in the mow.  We had a good deal of help, but it was still a lot of work for each person.  I probably personally handled about half the bales, so 50 reps of lifting 40 lbs, and some of those had to be carried a short distance, not just lifted.

Needless to say, I was a sore puppy.  I made it through Saturday night, but Sunday morning the DOMS set in and I caved enough to go for the pill bottle.  I then rested completely.  Not even computer time, just napping and reading.  Monday morning I was still feeling like my arms were massively overworked.  Tuesday the arms were better, but I noticed the leg that had been doing the pushing during the turn-and-slam-hay-on-conveyor move was still not real happy about full extension.  Wednesday I did some back stretches when getting up, but was mostly fine.  Thursday I noted I was back to waking up before my alarm clock and felt fine.  I really don't think I would have recovered so quickly if I'd taken more than the one dose of pain killers.  I know in the past that a setback like that would have required a week of painkillers until I could get to the next weekend and take the maximum dose of muscle relaxant (always makes me sleep in so I don't do it on work days)  in order to get a good rest and  finally heal up.

I did experience foot cramping when I tried to do something else after haying.  But my hip and my calf that always used to trouble me were silent.  I hope to eventually strengthen my feet so they don't cramp any more, but I'll take a few hours of foot cramping over weeks of perpetual hip pain any day...

Deviant Thinking and Innovation

The low-carb, high fat diet debate and deviant thinking

Deviate: to depart from an established course or norm

The word deviant usually has the connotation of someone who doesn't fit in, who rubs all the conformists the wrong way and has strayed from the golden path.  But all creativity is deviation as well.  All innovation is deviation.  All invention is deviation.  Deviation can be undesirable when unproductive, but it is downright necessary to keep our society from becoming stagnant.

Some people don't like my health plan because it's not mainstream.  It goes against what they were taught all along, and people don't like hearing that what they know is wrong.  But really, I'm taking all the risk for you, trying out deviant ideas, allowing for the possibility of innovation and progress, while you sit back and keep on doing what you think will work for you.  If what you're doing is not working for you, then maybe you need to think a bit harder about becoming a deviant yourself.