Saturday, May 10, 2008

Things of Interest in the AJCN

American Journal of Clinical Nutrition always has a few things of interest to me:

Fat teens who watch TV are not fat because it cuts back their physical activity, they eat more. Of course, I would attribute the rest of the effect of TV to the constant brainwashing to eak gak.

Omega 3 makes you less depressed. I've said this many times. My family was transformed by taking fish oil supplements. Cranky, depressive teenagers really need it, too. Apparently ADD kids need it, too.

Surprise - not. People who get their stomachs stapled struggle with serious nutritional deficiencies. Please do not get this operation.

Hmm - another study that shows coconut oil (lauric acid) has some beneficial effects - in this case compared to olive oil.

High glycemic index meals were inflammatory.

Subcutaneous fat = harmless.

Friday, May 09, 2008

Is Food Addictive?

Of course!

Some ways to deal with the urge to eat:

Drink some water or tea.
Use a food diary - go enter today's data now, if you haven't already.
Eat something low calorie, yet filling - celery, spinach, carrots - crunchy stuff is especially good.
Do something away from the kitchen - take a walk, wash the car, weed the garden.
Don't buy tempting food - shop twice a week and keep your pantry and refrigerator fairly empty.

Fat Cell Q&A

Radioactive carbon dating shows that we have the same number of fat cells throughout our adult life. When we gain or lose weight, they just get skinnier and fatter along with us.

What this says to me is that the number of fat cells don't have that much to do with weight. I was a thin 18 year old. I weighed 105. At 47, I weighed 156. Now, I weigh 122. Same number of fat cells. Someone who is starved and emaciated still has those fat cells.

I wonder if the tendency to store fat in various areas of your body depends on the number of fat cells in that area. Or, do some of your fat cells store more fat than others? That seems like the next logical question. Many women store a lot of their fat in their hips and thighs. Breasts obviously vary quite a lot. Why is that? Hormones? Or number of fat cells in those locations?

How CR'd Am I?

Short answer: I don't know exactly. I've come to reject the notion that the scientists really know exactly how CR'd the rats are. There is no baseline, really. They feed them something, and then they feed them something different. There is no such thing as a "normal" weight, just a typical weight. The CR numbers on the rat are the delta from the normal lab rat baseline.

I used to eat a significant amount more - and weighed more than I do now. My blood tests look like a CR person, with low white cells, great lipid profile, and low C-reactive protein. So, I am CR'd.

This gets to the heart of one of the difficulties in adopting CR as a personal health practice. How much to cut back? What is a good calorie target.

I would estimate my pre-CR calorie intake at 1700-1800 calories a day. So, at 1200 I am very CR'd - in theory. However, I was overweight at 1800 calories a day, with a BMI of 28. Perhaps that was not my ad lib, but a "calorie excess" state. Maybe 1600 is my normal baseline. In that case I am less dramatically CR'd.

I've stuck with 1100-1200 calories per day for a long time, since it works for me.

In setting a target, it's important to pick something reasonable. It's increasingly hard to get complete nutrition when you get below 1500 calories a day. So targets in the low 1000s require more effort to eat well. But, for a small woman, especially an older one, 1500 may not be CR. If you are not muscular, you don't burn the calories. For most men, 1800 calories is a good lower limit, and 2500 might even be good CR, depending on your lean body mass. There is a wide variation in calorie levels amongst CR practitioners. I don't think formulas work that well. Bodies are too variable.

At the same time, make sure you don't set your target so high that you don't ever make it into a CR'd state. Only you know how likely you are to really meet your target, on a day to day basis. I personally have found it better to set my target at 1100, so that when I miss it and overeat, my average is still at 1200. If I was overweight - BMI over 25 - and not losing weight, then I would drop my target calories. Remember that if you set your target at only 100-200 calories less than you've been eating, you will probably not really even get a deficit. You are likely to accidentally eat that much more fairly often.

Also, I have a personal bias against lowering the calories gradually. Every time you change your calorie target, your body has to go through a challenging adjustment phase. You tend to feel more hungry and distressed. You have to learn what portions you need to eat and adjust your diet. Doing this once or twice is enough. It's not been easy for me to change my target. I've only done that once - when I upped the calorie level from 900 to 1100 in the first year. I did that after reader Walford's book and deciding that 900 was not an acceptable long term level.

When you are just starting out, you will lose weight at first, and rapidly if you have been overweight and you are setting an aggressive calorie goal. But, at some point, your weight will indeed plateau. If you were a slim teenager, I would not go lower than that slim teenager weight that you were when you were 18 or 19 or 20.

Another thing to consider is age. The older rats do not do well on the higher levels of CR. If you are older, be conservative.

Wednesday, May 07, 2008

My Eating Philosphy

I could cheat and just repeat an earlier post, but I find it is good for the soul to restate this every now and then. My diet is designed to meet several conditions:

Condition 1: No transfat, no hydrogenated fat, and no high fructose corn syrup. This is pretty much 100% absolute for everything that comes into my kitchen and pantry. Eating out, this may get violated without my knowledge. But, we try to eat out at places that would not use these much and rarely order food that would contain them. The ketchup in the fridge has corn syrup in it, but we only use that on turkey meatloaf. I will bend the rule for a few grams/month.

Condition 2: Eat 1200 calories per day, plus or minus 200. Only go outside this limit for some really good reason and keep the average at 1200 on a weekly basis.

Condition 3: Get a good Omega 6/Omega 3 ratio - under 10 most certainly, with 3 being desirable.

Condition 4: Get the RDAs for vitamins and minerals - or very close to it. I fail this rule on a couple of things which I supplement (zinc, calcium). I would never supplement Vitamin A. I get 400% of the RDA of carotenes. Anyone can do this easily without impacting calories.

Condition 5: Get enough high quality protein. For me, I have set this goal at 80g/day.

Condition 6: Don't go over 150g of carbohydrates a day. I find this makes me hungry and I feel "bad".

Condition 7: Avoid foods on my food allergy list (from IgG testing): cows milk, yeast, egg whites, sunflower seeds, beef, hot peppers, corn, pistachios, cashews. I am actually a miserable failure at the peppers and corn. But, I do pretty good at the rest of them.

If I achieve all of the above, I find that I feel very good, all the time, and have minimal hunger issues.

I eat out, though less lately. I focus on Asian and Mediterranean cuisines - especially Thai and Lebanese, when I was in Virginia. Here, those are not available, but Greek and Vietnamese are. We have been very disappointed in the Thai restaurants so far. All too bland. Here we've found one "favorite" restaurant so far, an Italian one, Hill Country Pasta. We will be going there for Mother's Day. It's a great CR restaurant. They have great salads and will make any pasta dish by replacing the pasta with steamed veggies. Lots of olive oil, too. Everything is very fresh! I will order grilled, baked or steamed fish or shellfish dishes or a salad with grilled chicken in most other restaurants. I eat Mexican too, but here you can order a green sauce and chicken, which cuts out most of the bad calories and adds vitamins.

I eat animal protein at every meal - and a variety of it. The only dairy product I eat is goat cheese, typically hard cheese like goat gouda or cheddar. I eat an ounce or less of this a day. I love cheese too much to give it up, so I switched to a non-cow version and a strong flavored cheese. The sharper and stronger the cheese, the less you have to use to get cheesiness. I also use feta and romano in recipes. My typical protein sources are chicken breast, ground turkey, tilapia, catfish, wild salmon, shrimp, buffalo, and lean pork. I also love crab, lobster, mussels and oysters, but I just eat them less since my husband doesn't like them. I eat enough poultry, fish and meat to get the 80g of protein - typically 6-8 oz a day. I am allergic to egg whites and they do indeed break out my face in hives, so I don't eat eggs. Cow's milk makes my stomach hurt now, so it is also off my list.

I eat 2-3 servings of fruit a day. I do not eat bananas and rarely eat pears or apples. They are just too high calorie and low nutrient. I eat berries almost every day - whatever is in season or cheapest. I eat mangos a lot lately. They are very good here and inexpensive. I cannot eat oranges - they give me mouth sores. I can eat grapefruit and tangerines in small quantities. I eat cherries, grapes, melons, kiwis and pineapples. I tend to treat fruit as a snack or dessert and eat it mid-afternoon and after dinner.

I eat 3-8 servings of vegetables a day. There is no vegetable I don't eat. I adore spinach. I make vegetable soups fairly often. We steam veggies a lot - especially broccoli. We use 3 or 4 bell peppers a week in our cooking and chop peppers and onions into almost every dish. I especially love the red ones. I eat modest amounts of carrots and sweet potatoes. I prefer yellow squash to zuchinni and we eat that often. We make really delicious microwaved winter squash pretty often in the fall and winter. I love chard and kale. There is just an infinite number of vegetable dishes to be made. We usually steam, grill or sautee our veggies and serve them fairly plain with seasonings and no oil or olive oil. I am a big fan of dill. All veggies go with dill. Also coriander.

I try to keep grain servings per day down to one or two. Our grain items are almost always whole grain. The ban on yeast for me tend to make me focus on crackers and tortillas or wraps.

Just say no to dessert. I rarely eat a real dessert. And then, I try to get a very small piece and get other people to eat the rest. I have my fruit and my hot chocolate instead. I will eat a little piece of dark chocolate every now and then. My hot chocolate is good-quality organic baking cocoa mixed with hot water and sucralose. I will eat desserts on special occasions. Since I must record the damage in my food diary, I find it not too difficult to keep the portions low.

I don't use sugar - I use sucralose (Splenda) instead. I am trying to cut this out and not use sweetener. I think it keeps your sweet tooth active if you use it. Your brain does adjust to lower sweetness. I've been there in the past.

I use Morton Lite salt - half potassium salt - to cook with. This is the only way I see to getting a good potassium to salt ratio. We salt very lightly regardless. Prepared foods are usually twice as salty or more than what we cook.

Our only cooking oil is olive oil. Olive oil is the food of the gods. We use it in everything - even baking. We have some unsalted butter in the fridge - which my husband uses occasionally. A pound will last 6 months or more. April's practice of adding flax oil to dishes after they are cooked is really a great idea. I have not made this a habit. Flax oil spoils pretty quickly, so you have to make sure you use it! To get the good Omega 6/Omega 3 ratio, we avoid buying anything with significant corn oil in it. I cannot eat anything made with sunflower oil or I risk a huge hive breakout. This is very helpful in many ways since almost all gakky food contains "one of the following oils: ..., sunflower oil, ...". We look for chips and crackers made with expeller pressed canola or olive oil. These are rare, but still findable.

We eat lots of nuts - basically as a snack or a garnish. We leave some raw almonds in a dish on the counter. I tend to eat 10-20g of these a day. I like to eat them while I cook dinner. We also use walnuts fairly often.

We drink very little. We split a light beer three ways, maybe once or twice a week. I drink a half glass of wine once or twice a week. I am just not that into alcohol. It increases your appetite and reduces restraint. I do not think it is good for CR.

I drink tons of decaf organic coffee. I drink a fair amount of green and black tea. I drink a lot of filtered water. In the past, I have drunk a lot of mineral water - especially Gerolsteiner. This is too expensive here. In the last 8 months, I have become addicted to diet cherry Pepsi. This is annoying. I drink it to stay alert after lunch. I quit buying it this week and started drinking caffeinated tea instead with lunch. Soft drinks are not good for you. Caffeine appears to have some value. I drink low salt V-8 too. I drink a lot of fluid. My husband calls me "the guzzler". I drink twice as much as most people. I always have, so this is not a CR thing.

It's really important to shop well at the grocery store. You should be proud of the foods in your cart. They should smile up at you and say - "We are beautiful wholesome fresh foods that will nourish your body. We have lots of flavors and colors and will taste delicious." My family has a tradition of anthropomorphizing foods, so forgive me for doing that. Food always cries out to be eaten to me. So, I have to make sure that the food I have is the right food.

Last but not least, I diary my eating every day. I weigh things a lot and I am very experienced at estimating portions. A best practice is to record what you've eaten before dinner and then predict your dinner. This will help you to stay on target. I would rather eat a lot of variety and diary. If you are willing to design a diet and stick with it, then you can just eat according to your plan and not have to diary. For some people, this is easier. Regardless, I do not believe that ad hoc eating can be CR. You will forget what you've eaten. By diarying every day, I have to keep a running list in my head of what I've eaten and I have an idea of where I am on calories. If you are not thinking that way, you will be eating ad lib and CR is out the window. Plus, unless you use a tool, like CRON-o-Meter, you will not be improving the quality of your diet with regards to nutrition. Everyone who has tracked their diet for a week is always appalled at how deficient they were. Only the most healthy eaters will not have some deficiencies.

My Fat

A question asked on how I know where my fat is. I think it is actually pretty obvious that it's not visceral from just looking at me. But, one of the benefits of being in Dr. Fontana's CR study is that he measures these things. I was just there last fall and had this measured. I can't find the paperwork to give the exact numbers, it was misplaced in the move.

The cardiologists there seemed to consider me in tip top shape cardiovascular-wise, despite my 30% body fat and fairly high total cholesterol. I have very high HDL though - usually 70 to 80. They told me that the body fat was really not an issue because of where it is. Quite a lot of my fat is actually on my arms and legs. My hips have always been relatively small.

Tuesday, May 06, 2008

Effect of Fat Types

I found this very interesting. Subcutaneous fat appears to be beneficial, regardless of where it is moved to. Liposuction removes this fat - not a helpful intervention. Though, of course, Luigi did this study a couple of years ago and found the same thing already, so it's not really news. Liposuction is strictly a cosmetic intervention.

I like this, of course, because I have lots of sub-cu fat. I am the queen of sub-cu fat. I have 30% body fat, virtually all sub-cu. As I age, it gets even more pronounced. At this point, the evidence makes this seem like an okay thing at worst, and maybe a good thing at best.

Monday, May 05, 2008

Interesting News

Just in case you care about the environment and how your eating habits effect it.

Another attempt to connect fat to genes. We're still trying to figure it out, though.

No Special Genes for This One

I am not sure such an analysis is entirely meaningful, but there were no markers in the genes of a 114 year old who died recently that would account for their longevity.

I like the list of environmental things though: "a healthy lifestyle, a Mediterranean diet, a temperate climate and regular physical activity". I think I am doing very well on all of these right now.

The climate here in Austin is really conducive to a sense of well-being to me. Since Dec 21, when we arrived, there has hardly been a day when a walk was not possible. Most days, the outdoors is gorgeous for several hours a day - with temperatures between 60 and 80 degrees. It smells great all the time from the junipers and other aromatic plants. Birds are always singing.

We ate like kings this weekend. We hit the Farmer's Market on Saturday and then the Whole Foods mothership on Sunday. We bought beautiful berries and vegetables. We even bought a buffalo roast - for later this week. I will have to post about my overall food philosophy again. It's been a while. I eat something close to a Mediterranean/paleo diet. This really makes me feel best. Whenever I stray, I can feel it immediately.

Friday, May 02, 2008

Illustrating my point


This was the lunch served to my grandson today in his school cafeteria. Chicken nuggets, a boiled potato, a roll, milk, and an ice cream sandwich.
Maybe children's nutrition could be a little better, huh?
I would bet you anything that he didn't eat the plain, boiled potato. The roll may or may not have been eaten either.

She Seems Delusional to Me

My morid fascination with the Junkfood Science blog continues. This post seems especially wacky. I can see wanting to correct any misguided nutritional information being passed on to kids, but banning it? As if it is detrimental?

Kid's are bombarded with gakky food advertisements all day long - for junk cereals, fast food and candy. If there is not some effort to counteract this and let them know that they need to eat real food, then they are just not getting the information they need. No one is running constant commercials for oranges and broccoli last time I checked. Not all parents are nutritionists. Some of them are just as ignorant as their kids.

In my ideal world, all children would get nutritional education every year. That information would be evidence-based. It would be improved over time to be more effective. Teachers would be trained enough to avoid giving children misleading advice. I suppose very poorly executed nutritional education would be worse than none - but JS seems to be against it all. Even if some of the programs out there are not very effective, to me that just means we should keep working at it.

She has a libertarian mindset - that no outside intervention should ever be taken. Personally, I always find this naive and idealistic. Everyone gets "intervened" every day of their life. Much of that intervention is beneficial. People do not "naturally" always do the best thing. She should read more cognitive science literature. There are quite a few flaws in our brains - ones that make us do stupid things unless we have outside influence to help up overcome them.

She seems overwrought by mistakes - like any error means nothing can be trusted. An example of Voltaire's "The perfect is the enemy of the good".

Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Apnea Cure All

My mom is doing a "sleep study" tonight, where they hook her up to monitoring equipment to see if she has apnea. Doctors - especially cardiologists - seem to be really on the lookout for it. There is a big correlation for apnea with heart disease and diabetes. I don't know if they have established any causal relationship, but her internist believes that he cured someone's arrythmia by treating their apnea. I don't think she has serious apnea. She sleeps very quietly.

I am skeptical. This seems like one of those fad things. Perhaps for 20% of people, the apnea is a real issue. But, the other 80% won't really be helped by treating it. But, it's very inexpensive to diagnose and treat, relatively speaking, so 20% is worth a lot. I know for those people who get real relief from the positive airway devices, it is a huge benefit. So, I'm not really knocking the doctors for trying it out. It just seems like they think everyone has it.