Archives For nutrition

Pregnant? Might CrossFit be a better way of exercising than Pilates?

May 30, 2014 — 6 Comments
courtesy of Pilates Style

courtesy of Pilates Style

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Courtesy of Huffpost

One doesn’t have to look far to find many testaments to the value of Pilates during pregnancy. Though it has not received a specific endorsement from any UK health authority (RCOG for example), I doubt that there are many Pilates teachers who would tell a mum-to-be that Pilates wasn’t a good idea. Searching for ‘risks of Pilates during pregnancy’ doesn’t yield many results.

Equally, though perhaps less numerous, there are a number of women who will attest to the value of (appropriately scaled) CrossFit during pregnancy. Indeed there is a website, and social media pages and websites for ‘CrossFit Moms’. In this instance the doubters are a bit more vocal. While they may be largely lay people, photos of a heavily pregnant CrossFitter doing weighted squats caused a storm of controversy, with commentators declaring that she was endangering her baby, and that this activity should be regarded as child abuse.

I am an enthusiast for both of these exercise modalities, but recently I’ve had cause to reconsider my beliefs around pregnancy and exercise.

I’ve also had cause to wonder, prompted by social media threads in particular, about the prevalence of pre- and post-natal sacroiliac joint problems and symphysis-pubis dysfunction. Of course, the release of relaxin, not to mention hyper mobility, will have an impact on joint stability. We know that relaxin is released for a reason, yet it seems a very inefficient (thus unlikely) natural response if it causes lasting problems. I don’t believe in the ‘we just spontaneously break’ model of health that we generally adopt in the developed world. Something about our inputs, or our environment causes ill health – whether it’s joint problems or heart problems, for example. If we are (symptomatically) hyper mobile I suspect it’s because something in our diets, or parents diets (inputs) led to changes in collagen structure leading to lax connective tissues. There appears to have been a variety of research around the subject of diet and collagen (a protein), particularly in relation to caloric, protein, or cholesterol restriction – here’s a study on rats, if you fancy it. Thus, pelvic instability is not a random luck of the draw occurrence, but has an underlying cause. This is not an attempt to lay blame on anyone who has suffered with this problem – rather, to suggest that they have been unfortunate in their genetic inheritance and expression; or have not received the best guidance.

To get back to comparing exercise, first off, what are the most important exercises, or important muscles to be worked during pregnancy? Pelvic floor, right? You’ve got to do your pelvic floor exercises, for heaven’s sake! I’ve certainly done my fair share of teaching PF contractions to pregnant clients.

And then, last year, I watched Jill Miller’s webinar on CreativeLive, which featured the excellent Katy Bowman, as she put it, ‘dropping the Kegel bomb’ (Kegels is the term used in the US). She asserts that the most effective, and balanced way of keeping one’s pelvic floor toned during pregnancy is to squat, and to walk. We might say ‘practice natural human movement patterns’….Her argument is that, while they may be appropriate for some women, isolated pelvic floor exercises may lead to excessive pull on the inside of the sacroiliac joint and consequent imbalance/instability. Squatting would give more balancing posterior support, and both walking and squatting would help to keep tone in pelvic floor muscles.

And what are the issues around Pilates and pregnancy? We encourage pregnant clients at our studio to work with the apparatus, rather than doing mat classes. We’ve had great results and have had plenty of women coming to class right up to the end of their pregnancy. That said, during their second, and especially in their third trimester, a lot of their class doesn’t look much like classical Pilates. We don’t encourage participation in mat classes largely because of the restrictions in lying down (though I’d be the first to agree that guidelines on this are heavy handed, and that a woman’s body will most likely have a way of telling her to stop if lying down is causing vena cava compression), and herein lies one of the fundamental drawbacks of Pilates, especially in the classical practice – there’s a lot of lying down. I know of Pilates teachers who have had terrible problems of pelvic instability during pregnancy. There was a heated debated on a Facebook forum recently about the rights and wrongs of allowing a pregnant woman to participate in a Pilates mat class. Another recent post on the same forum was from a Pilates teacher in her third trimester, unhappy that her workouts feel incomplete because she can no longer follow the sequence that she’s used to. Advice from her responding peers ranged from suggestions for standing (Pilates) work, to taking walks and enjoying nature. Great suggestions, yet I fear that they may fail to address the problem of the lady’s frustration – her workout has to change completely. Is there an issue with the scalability of Pilates? Or the scalability of a ‘classical’ approach to Pilates? Mari Winsor’s book, ‘The Pilates Pregnancy’ is a case in point, with a number of reviews on Amazon commenting that the sequence of exercises varies little from one trimester to the next, and that she doesn’t offer much in the way of modification. In the third trimester she suggests the Hundred with bent knees and feet on the floor, or kneeling up if lying down is too uncomfortable.

Lying down isn’t just a problem from the point of view of possible restriction of blood flow, but also because it doesn’t train the muscles and soft tissues around the hip joints and pelvis to handle to take the increasing load of the growing baby. Indeed, would it not be better to be loading these joints (hip & SI) before conception, and in the early stages of pregnancy, in order to have a strong/stable foundation for the certainty of increasing load?

Here’s where the CrossFit mums-to-be that I know of step in. (Firstly, let’s be clear – I’m sure that many women have had happy and healthy pregnancies and deliveries with Pilates as their exercise companion). The wife of my first CrossFit coach is due in a matter of days, and still doing pull-ups. Another lady that my current coach is training, who is expecting twins in three months, is still deadlifting and squatting with weight – and maintaining that her back has never felt better. The beauty of the exercise methodology that they are following is that it can be scaled to fit their changing needs, without having to change the exercises themselves, and there are articles, in addition to the website mentioned above, to guide mums-to-be and coaches alike. In other words, they can squat throughout their pregnancy – the load and the range needs to change but the activity remains the same. High intensity workouts can be left ’til later, so there’s no need for any stopwatches, but there’s lots of scope for strength work (indeed, it doesn’t matter whether it’s called CrossFit or strength & conditioning). A lot has been written about the community aspect of CrossFit, and one of the benefits of this scaleability is that it means that pregnant women do not have to miss out on their fitness community, and the potential disempowerment of ‘I can’t do what I used to’.

I’m not really advocating that everyone pregnant gives up Pilates and signs up at their nearest CrossFit gym. I just wonder if there isn’t (sometimes) something missing from Pilates that needn’t be. Or maybe there’s a middle ground. I’ve never seen film or photographs of Joseph teaching a pregnant woman, and I don’t remember any reference to pregnancy in his writing. Perhaps he never intended pregnant women to use his method. If, like me, you believe that Pilates is about moving well then many activities can be approached with a Pilates sensibility, perhaps to the significant benefit of women both pre-conception and during their pregnancies.

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Tofu Causes “Dumbing Down”

March 8, 2014 — 2 Comments

150px-PET-imageA recent, soon to be published study by the prestigious Centre for the Understanding of Nutritional Technology and Science has found that consumption of more than two servings of tofu (a soybean derived food product) per week may lead to a loss of IQ.

The study, conducted over a number of years, looked at the effect of varying degrees of tofu consumption on subjects’ scores in standardised IQ tests. Even when allowing for other factors that have been previously indicated to negatively effect intelligence, the results were “damning”, according to the study’s conclusion. In an interview, a representative of the Centre declared that he and his team are satisfied that they have achieved a significant breakthrough in our understanding of tofu, and have proven beyond doubt that, when consumed in greater than normal amounts, it does make humans more stupid. He added: “We have yet to prove a link between tofu and obesity, but our research continues.”

I’m sure that you will be aware of a number of stories that have made the news in recent years, linking consumption of certain foods, particularly red meat, to various diseases. If you want to read rebuttals of news stories like Red Meat Causes Cancer, or the more recent High Protein Diet as bad as 20 Cigarettes per Day, or simply to read about the problems inherent in these kinds of studies, you can do so here, here and here. This is the territory of people with degrees in medicine or biochemistry, neither of which I have. Instead here are a couple of questions that we should all be asking ourselves when faced with news stories that make these kind of alarming food related claims.

The first is, what’s the agenda? As the articles I linked to above point out, epidemiological studies (that look for patterns, or associations) almost inevitably start out looking for specific patterns – in other words, researchers don’t set out to see if they can spot any patterns at all, they go looking for a specific one. If you go looking for a specific pattern the chances are that you will lean towards finding evidence to support it. Epidemiology might support a hypothesis, but never proves it. T. Colin Campbell, one of the authors of the “China Study”, is well known as an advocate for a vegan diet, and (to quote Wikipedia): “The authors conclude that people who eat a whole-food, plant-based/vegan diet—avoiding all animal products, including beef, pork, poultry, fish, eggs, cheese and milk, and reducing their intake of processed foods and refined carbohydrates—will escape, reduce or reverse the development of numerous diseases.” 

So, if I write a story about the link between tofu consumption and reduced IQ (let’s be totally honest, and in case you didn’t guess, I made that up), you would need to ask yourself why I went looking for such an association in the first place. Perhaps I’m some kind of omnivorous fundamentalist who thinks that soy products are rooted in evil….

The second, and perhaps more significant question is, (to quote Robb Wolf) “What is the mechanism?” Unless there is a viable explanation for why heavy tofu consumption causes a loss of IQ (I just had a thought – imagine if my made up story turns out to be true!), then it’s simply an association that may be a complete coincidence. A favourite analogy is ‘Fire engines cause fires’ – because studies show that there is a strong association between buildings on fire, and the presence of fire engines. Or even better, if you didn’t follow the link to Dr Briffa’s article above: ‘ice cream causes shark attacks’.

Who can blame researchers who want to catch some headlines? Both of the UK broadsheet newspapers that carried this story had some caveats, if you read to the end, but the headlines and the accompanying pictures are what stay with you (do you think tofu seems more sinister when I include a picture of a brain scan?) It’s too bad that the news media we appear to want is that which scares, rather than informs.

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My Primal moment

August 21, 2013 — Leave a comment

The story that follows is nothing compared to the stories of hundreds of thousands of people who have experienced danger, disaster, war etc. That said, it felt like I learned something useful about myself, and it also felt as though it justified the changes I’ve made to my lifestyle in the last couple of years.

Here goes:

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The view, on a good day…

I was recently on holiday in Southern France with my wife’s family. We were staying in a house that is about 350m above sea level, on the side of a hill (mountain?) that is 1050m above sea level. There’s a rough but easy to follow path from the house to the peak, and 3 of us set off to the top one afternoon.

Clouds had been building up, and after only 5 minutes or so we could hear a sound like a strong wind through the trees, that turned out to be a wall of monsoon-like rain coming toward us. Prudently we turned back, but set off once again after the rain had passed, only 10 minutes or so later.

Around the point that we had previously turned back, all 3 of us wearing shoes, shorts and nothing else, passed a family coming down the path, wrapped up in waterproof jackets and looking miserable. I’d be lying if I said we didn’t feel amused by the contrast between our party and theirs, though that was tempered by discovering some of the hailstones that had fallen earlier, probably on that poor family.

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My brother-in-law has spent many summers exploring the area so, when he suggested deviating from the main path to make a more circular than out-and-back journey, we had no doubts about the idea. This is a beautiful part of the world, there are stunning views to admire, and on this morning there was the chance to see the impact of heavy rain on the landscape, some paths still being mini rivers.

Around the time that the sky was turning particularly blue-grey, it was acknowledged that we had missed our uphill path, though on the hillside what appears to be a path can quickly disappear into the undergrowth. The solution was to simply head upwards, negotiating the vegetation in the way. So far, so undramatic. When the rain started we experimented with sheltering under trees and scrutinising the pallor and movement of the clouds, confident of a break in the rain. It didn’t come, so we decided that being on the move was better, and carried on uphill. It had already crossed my mind that I wasn’t feeling the need to hold F (my brother-in-law) responsible for our predicament -weird.

It seems counterintuitive but the vegetation became denser the higher we got, and the way (not path – definitely no path) got steeper. Did I mention the rain was unrelenting? So the purchase on mud/stones/roots was increasingly tricky. I’d had my favourite eggs, bacon and avocado breakfast, and was feeling energetic and strong. P, the youngest of our party, is what I might (in a judgemental moment) call a ‘sugar-burner’ – bread and jam for breakfast. He’s young, and was raised that way, so the choices he makes are more habit than real choice. Anyway, P was beginning to shiver, and the novelty of our situation had evidently worn off. (I later discovered that, in the conditions, his shoes were disintegrating from the inside out, so his crappy breakfast may not have been entirely to blame for his mood).

F was regularly assuring us that we were nearing the top so, of course, it felt as though we weren’t. Amazingly, the rain became more intense and we decided to try to shelter again. This was when I had my ‘epiphany’. Squatting under a tree, with hail cutting through the leaves of our ‘shelter’, and with rain water running into parts of my body that even a shower won’t always get to, I was amazed at how I felt. Again, I wasn’t blaming anyone else, and in years gone by I know I would have been angry with F for leading us to this point. I was reminded of scenes from ‘Platoon’ when the grunts are sitting in the jungle drenched under the incessant rain (yes, I do know that we were in no danger of being shot at). I wasn’t cold (daily cold showers paying off?), instead feeling incredibly resilient. I was a bit concerned about P, whose shivering was intensifying, but at the same time I knew that I was strong enough to carry him to safety if I had to. Our situation was ludicrous and, again to my surprise, I wasn’t at all dispirited.

Deciding once more that we were better off on the move we set off for the ridge, where the vegetation disappears. There is a track running the length of the ridge which was a river a few inches deep at this point. Our way back meant following the track a little more up hill before meeting the path back down to the house. We jogged our way to the top of that path, and then sped up on the descent. Now the rain eased. The path is rough, alternating from stones to gravel, clay to chalk, and with roots here and there to add spice. Once running it was hard to stop, and I have rarely felt as invigorated as I did then – concentrating hard on each footing and feeling agile and powerful. Some 4 hours after we set off we arrived back at the house with, for me at least, a feeling of triumph.

Again, I’m well aware that this isn’t a tale that involves much peril, or endurance, and we all came out of the experience unscathed. Nonetheless, it felt to me that 2 years of ‘primal lifestyle’ had made me better able to cope with adversity. I’m better nourished; stronger; more resilient; my immune system is stronger; and, perhaps most importantly, I’m aware of how empowering it is to, instead of blaming someone else, own responsibility for my actions and any resulting predicament.

Thanks for reading.

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Better Than God?

June 5, 2013 — Leave a comment

Most people, if you stopped them in the street to talk about nutrition, would probably know that butter and saturated fat are bad for you. They may well also know that those fats will raise your cholesterol level, and that high cholesterol can kill people. They may well also have some ideas about what constitute healthy fats. After all, this information has been very well disseminated by governments, medical professionals, news media, and producers of healthy fat and cholesterol lowering products.

I know how easy it is to make butter. I made some once when I was overzealous in my cream-whipping, trying to impress someone. Margarine, or Benecol (“Benecol is a range of foods that contain a unique patented ingredient, Plant Stanol Ester, that is proven to lower cholesterol. Benecol is available in a variety of delicious products including yogurts, yogurt drinks and spreads.”) is a different story – I’ve no idea where to start, so I looked it up, and apparently making margarine goes something like this:

It appears that olive oil is also relatively simple to extract from an olive. Certainly the process is mechanised these days, but it’s easy to find instructions for the home enthusiast, requiring nothing more complicated than millstones… It’s also pretty easy to render lard – animal fat, heat, a pan, a jar and some cheesecloth are all that’s required.

Vegetable oil, or seed oil is, like margarine, a different story, as this video shows. In the US they call it ‘canola’, in the UK we call it ‘rapeseed’. (You may not fancy watching the whole thing. If you do, listen out for key words such as: ‘solvent’, ‘chemical extraction process’, ‘wash with sodium hydroxide’*, ‘bleach’. You’ll be glad too to hear that they deodorise the final product…)

It’s pretty much the same process that’s outlined in the flow chart. (Clearly not instructions for making Benecol, because there’s no mention of adding those plant stanol esters….)

What, might you ask, has this got to do with God? You can say God, if you like, or you might choose Mother Nature, for the sake of this particular argument. I’m inclined to simply call her Nature. And here’s my point: someone who is very dear to me is a regular consumer of industrial food products like Benecol margarine, and also happens to be a practicing Catholic. He eats Benecol on his bread (there’s a whole other problem) because medical professionals, and advertising have told him this is what’s best for him, and because I’ve got no credentials for getting into an argument with his doctor.

I don’t practice any religion, so I’m guessing how the thinking might go. At the same time I believe that human evolution has been intimately entwined with us making use of the things that nature provides us with, just as is the case for most living things. Predatory carnivores pick their food from herds of herbivores, antelope graze, killer whales eat seals, seals eat fish (some of the really mean ones eat penguins!), many fish graze on algae etc. Technology changes many things for us – it’s very much easier for us to control fire the it used to be, we don’t need to hunt wild animals any more because we’ve learned how to corral and domesticate them. That list can go on and on. The thing is that technology tends to make life easier for us, and tends to generate revenue for the inventor and/or manufacturer. It doesn’t necessarily make us better (Yes, this was last week’s subject.) And when we’re talking about fat, we’re talking about nutrition. Say it out loud: ‘NUTRITION’ – that which nourishes us. There’s hardly anything more important than this in our lives. If we make changes to how we nourish ourselves, surely they should be based on making us better – not based on making life easier, or generating huge profits for industrial food corporations? (By the way, isn’t it weird that the same company that makes Cornetto, also makes Comfort fabric softener?)

Back to my Bencol eating, Catholic friend. Because it feels cruel, I’ve resisted saying to him: ‘God has given us all this bounty with which we can nourish ourselves. Do you really think that we can manufacture better nourishment in a factory, using enormous resources of energy, chemicals and precious water, than God has seen fit to make easily available to us?’ Again, I’d rather be talking about ‘Nature’ than ‘God’, but that’s largely irrelevant. What kind of arrogance leads us to believe that we are somehow different from any other lifeforms on the planet, and that despite millennia of successful nourishment, garnered with the assistance of  some simple hand tools, and fire, we can ‘create’ food that will do a better job of nourishing us?

Of course the real truth is that it’s probably a combination of greed and fear that leads us to the point where we believe that readily-derived-from-nature is bad, and chemically/industrially manufactured is better. However, if we can strip that away (tough, because fear is what drives capitalism so well) then perhaps we can see that it is vanity and arrogance that tricks into thinking that we (or our doctor) may know better…

Special bonus video (reward for perseverance)

*Yes, it’s caustic soda, but don’t worry, it’s of a higher grade than the oven cleaning or sink unblocking kind.

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What you DO, not how you DIET

January 25, 2013 — 8 Comments

The “Fast Diet”, also referred to as the “5:2” diet seems to be all over the UK media at the moment, accompanied by both very positive reviews, and expressions of concern about the dangers of encouraging anyone to fast.

I had this diet described to me as “fast for 2 days (actually, limit calories to 500/600 per day), and eat what you like for 5 days”. The man behind this is Dr Michael Mosley – and he made a television programme all about it, so it must be infallible. Apparently he found evidence that, aside from weight-loss, the Fast Diet is also associated with a range of other health benefits.

I have grave misgivings about any suggestion of ‘eat what you like’, because it seems to suggest that nutrition is unimportant. In other words, there’s an awful lot of ‘food’ around these days of very limited nutritional value. The idea (not Dr Mosley’s, I’m sure, but possibly widely-held nonetheless) that it’s okay to eat crap for 5 days, and then severely restrict your calories for the other 2, sounds like a recipe for very poor nutrition. And food, after all, is meant to nourish us, not simply supply us with calories.

I can’t help but listen to news items about diets without my Paleo-biased brain shouting “It’s what you eat, not how much or how often, that matters”. I’m also trying not to be a 197693_3967280097068_451202589_nfundamentalist about food. I do get a little stressed over vegan parents raising their babies as vegans. Equally, it would take very strong evidence (that I’ve seen no trace of) to persuade me that being vegetarian is as healthy (never mind sustainable) as being omnivorous . At the same time, occasional rants about soy products aside, if someone feels that the way they eat is the best for them, what business is it of mine? None, of course.

Back to ‘diets’. The biggest problem that I can see is that they always appear to be temporary. I may well be wrong, but I doubt that Dr Mosley is proposing that anyone follows the 5:2 ratio for life. This is why I really like the way that I’m eating these days (and why I’m always a little baffled by people asking me if I’m “still doing that diet”) – it’s great because it feels totally sustainable. I choose, generally, not to eat certain things, that were amazingly easy to give up. That’s it. Again, I’m trying not to evangelise.

I was exposed to another idea today (courtesy of Paleo Solution podcast episode 167), attributed to Greg Glassman, founder of CrossFit. It seems like a brilliant approach to body composition, health, and (probably) any other outcome one might desire from a diet. Essentially, set yourself some athletic goals that will really stretch you. The podcast mentions double-bodyweight back squats and a couple of other outlandish strength/gymnastic goals, but we can all figure out athletic achievements that will stretch our individual capabilities. Perhaps it’s mastering the entire Super-Advanced Reformer repertoire, or doing “Romana’s Mat Challenge” 4 times in a row, if Pilates is your thing (though I think a more profound strength challenge would be best). Maybe it’s preparing to climb Kilimanjaro for charity. The point is that, if your goal is sufficiently challenging for you, doing what it takes to reach it will inevitably involve eating appropriately, and making positive changes to your body composition. No 5:2, no GI, no Caveman, no South Beach, no Atkins, no Blood Type (and on and on and on and on)

Perfect! Nourish yourself to achieve amazingness, and enjoy the combined side-effects of better health, and the body composition you’ve dreamed of.

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Food, Glorious Food, Part 2

September 17, 2012 — Leave a comment

How did cheap and dirty become delicious?

(This post owes a huge debt to “It Starts With Food” by Dallas and Melissa Hartwig – buy it for yourself, and for everyone else that you care about…)

Millions of years before food scientists existed, our ancestors developed ways of helping them distinguish, and then remember, between good sources of nutrition, and bad. Sources of quick energy tasted sweet; sources of dense calories tasted fatty; and salty tastes were a sign of foods to help hydration, or maintaining hydration.

The net result: we are ‘hard-wired’ to seek out sweet, fatty and salty foods. It’s worth mentioning that the fruit our early ancestors ate was probably a fraction as sweet as the fruit we enjoy – we’ve had hundreds of thousands of years to select the sweeter mutations and make them dominant in their species. Fat sources would have been unprocessed, and salt simply found in more sodium-rich foods.

Everything our ancestors needed to nourish themselves was available in nature.
We all know that food can elicit an emotional response, and if our brain is receiving the signals that we’re being nourished it will release dopamine and endorphins. Thus, our ancestors would not only be nourished, but would feel good too.

Fast-forward to around ten thousand years ago, and our less-distant ancestors developed agriculture – allowing for production of food by a few for many to consume, and the potential to store food for long periods (never mind, for now, that this food was less nutritionally dense than more traditional hunted/gathered food).

I only mention agriculture because it allowed for all sorts of development, not least the study of sciences. Not needing to hunt or gather, some of those ancestors of ours had the time to indulge in more lofty pursuits. So, in more than one sense, agriculture gave us food scientists.

Fast-forward again, this time to the middle of the twentieth century, and manufacturers of food products had the knowledge and facility to exploit our hard-wiring to generate masses of profit. All that was necessary was to make food products that were sweet, fatty, or salty, or (ideally) a combination – doughnuts, potato crisps…..

These food products tasted amazing, and ticked the boxes that our DNA was programmed to recognise as nutritious input.

Here’s the best part, and the answer to the opening question. Real food (animals, fish, vegetables, fruit) can be costly to come by, might require a lot of looking after, careful handling and so forth. Those crops that lend themselves to an industrial scale of production (grains, corn, rape, soy, sugar beet etc) do so because they’re much less complicated they can be mechanically harvested and require minimal care in their handling en route to processing. Therefore they’re relatively cheap, and never mind that they’re a poor source of nutrition, the food scientists have an array of additives, or means of manipulating them so that they can be turned into ‘super-normal’ (super = beyond) tasting sweet, salty or fatty foods – way beyond what nature could conceive.
What effect does that have on our emotional response to food, mentioned above? Natural/real food, with its modest level of sweetness, fattiness, or saltiness, rapidly loses the ability to get our brains excited enough to release those feel good chemicals. How could it compete with ‘super’ ‘Frankenfoods’?

Have a look at the ingredients of, say, a packet (tube?) of Kellog’s sour cream and onion Pringles:

Dehydrated potatoes, vegetable oil, vegetable fat, rice flour, wheat starch, sour cream & onion flavour(hardened vegetable fat, onion powder, sour cream powder, dextrose, flavourings, sugar, sweet whey powder, lactose, milk protein, potato starch, food acids:citric acid, lactic acid and malic acid), emulsifier:E471, maltodextrin, salt, modified rice starch

Might any of those ingredients look like food? Sugar and salt, probably; dehydrated potatoes, maybe; modified rice starch….?

Where does this stuff come from…..

“Disc centrifuge for vegetable oil refining are widely used in continuous degumming, neutralizing, dewaxing, and washing of vegetable oils, such as peanut oils, colza oil,palm oil,oliver oil,sunflower oil,cottonseed oil,corn oil etc.”

Makes for an interesting contrast with ‘first cold pressing’, no?

                                                                                                               Modified starch making machine                            For more on rice starch click here

Mmmmm, ‘spray process’.

(It was an eye-opener having a brief search for suitable pictures, especially if one is viewing them from the ‘food’ & ‘industrial’ are two words that don’t go together perspective)

Perhaps this was my subconscious at work – I thought of Pringles as an example before I remembered their advertising strap line: “once you pop, you can’t stop”. They make a virtue of the fact that their food product is addictive…. Plus, it’s cheap to produce, dirty (in that, if shown them all individually, you probably couldn’t identify any of the ingredients, apart from sugar and salt), and (doubtless, to many) delicious.

Why would you want to eat real food ever again?

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Food, glorious food

June 4, 2012 — Leave a comment

Dallas and Melissa Hartwig, of  Whole9, have determined a set of ‘Good Food Standards’, set out below.

The foods we eat should:

  1. Promote a healthy psychological response.
  2. Promote a healthy hormonal response.
  3. Support a healthy gut.
  4. Support immune function and minimize inflammation.

Their basic message is that you should eat things that are nutritious (good for you), and avoid those ‘foods’ that are not – for instance, food with a high caloric but low nutrient value. I’m three and a half days into my fist attempt at a Whole30, a thirty day nutrition programme devised by Whole9. A Whole30 involves eliminating the following: all grains; all legumes (pulses, beans, peanuts etc.); all dairy (apart from clarified butter); all sugar (and substitutes); all alcohol. In addition, potatoes aren’t allowed, nor are any processed vegetable oils, which basically eliminates any restaurant fried food.

What’s the point? For me, it’s mostly to do with seeing if I notice any changes in all aspects of my life – exercise, sleep, energy levels, body shape and so on. It’s already been interesting to see how careful one has to be to follow this regime. I absent-mindedly reached for the chewing gum in the car yesterday and, thank goodness for my alert wife, was stopped in time.

I’m, typically, fairly mindful of what I’m eating, aiming to be generally living a primal lifestyle, but I’d noticed that I was managing to sneak more sugar back into my diet (85% cocoa chocolate still has sugar in, as apparently does alcohol, damn it). I’m curious to see how easy/hard it will be to go without those things that I’m used to having for a whole month, and my resolve is being bolstered by concurrently reading “Primal Body, Primal Mind” by Nora Gedgaudis, full of fascinating information about the consequences of our food choices.

It turns out that our digestive system is intimately linked with our immune system and overall health. We also, apparently, have more nerve cells in our gut than our brain, and 95% of all serotonin is produced in the gut, suggesting that there are links between digestion, and mood and sleep quality.

So, our fridge is stuffed with eggs and animal protein, and plenty of vegetables and fruit. I am feeling slightly more obsessive about food than usual, but obsessing about nutrient density doesn’t feel like such a bad thing. If it seems at all interesting I’ll report back at the end of June, when my 30 days will be up.

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Conventional wisdom causes obesity, and repetition causes heart disease

March 28, 2012 — 1 Comment

I have to hold my hand up at the outset and acknowledge that this post is going to be little more than a highly abridged version of Gary Taubes work in “The Diet Delusion“. That is to say, your time may be profitably spent reading his book instead of this post. I’m writing this really only to vent my frustration at the endless repetition of myths that Taubes so compelling takes apart in his book.

There have been a quite surprising volume of health/nutrition related programmes, and news features on UK television recently, ranging from: ‘Supersize vs. Superskinny’; to news coverage of the Harvard School of Public Health’s ‘Red meat increases cancer risk’ study; to Horizon documentaries like ‘The Truth About Fat’ and ‘The Truth About Exercise’.

What I find particularly remarkable about so much of the content is not what’s included, but what’s left out. That is to say that all of these programmes that I have seen assume that the viewers are already in possession of various ‘facts’ that require no explanation or back up. Things that we all ‘know’, such as: Dietary fat is bad for you, saturated fat is especially bad for you, cholesterol is bad for you, vegetable oils are more healthy than animal fats, wholegrains are healthy, high fibre is good, starches should form the basis of our meals, milk is healthy if it’s low fat…etc.etc.

Some time ago I saw another news story in which a member of the public was interviewed about lifestyle, and came out with the line: “We all know how to eat healthily…”. Obviously this is true, we’ve all heard it many times, and we can look at the Department of Health website if we’re not sure, that will show us the ‘Eatwell Plate’ to guide us to the right choices.

This is the conventional wisdom: low fat, high carbohydrate; 5 a day; and, increasingly, eat less meat. The question that Taubes set out to answer in “The Diet Delusion” was: ‘If we know so much about healthy eating, and sales of low fat and fat free foods have been so strong, why are obesity (and heart disease) rates still rocketing up?’ The answer, of course, is that we’ve been given bad advice on how to eat for the last fifty years or so.

Horizon’s ‘The Truth About Exercise’ was the first programme to make me think about the regurgitation of  conventional wisdom. The point of the programme was apparently to look at how exercise might prevent the presenter form succumbing to diabetes. One of the segments looked at his blood lipids (how much fat was in his blood) after eating, and if exercising before eating had an impact on his blood lipid profile. The meal used for this was a ‘typical’ Scottish breakfast.

The expert, Dr John Gill  of the Institute of Cardiovascular and Medical Sciences at Glasgow University made a point of the fat in the breakfast (making no mention of the sugars present in the beans, bread, tomato etc.), and then took some of the presenter’s blood after eating, showing the viewer the level of fat in his blood. The message was very clear – eat fat, and the fat in your blood will increase. I’m no biochemist, but my understanding is that the mechanisms of digestion are a little more complicated than that. For example, if you’re eating fruit, and you’re muscle stores are full of glycogen then your liver will turn the fructose from the fruit into triglycerides (fat) that will then be transported by your blood to fat cells.

Horizon also presented ‘The Truth About Fat’ a couple of weeks later. It was refreshing to see that the gastric surgeon turned presenter for the programme changed her view of obese people (it turns out they don’t just lack her self-control). Disappointing to find that the ‘Truth’ that the programme offered lay in surgery, or hormone regulation medication that may be developed. Also disappointing to see the presenter selling the programme on breakfast television and casually mentioning the hormones that make fat people “want fatty foods”. A throwaway remark perhaps, and yet more reinforcement of the idea that fat makes you fat. The evidence is that it is carbohydrate that makes you fat, and addicted to it, to boot. (Read ‘Wheatbelly‘ for more on the addictive properties of wheat in particular).

The view of obese people often seems to be that they are greedy and lazy, and that if they only had more discipline, and exercised more, they would lose weight. I can accept that there are a lot of obese people who are continually consuming manifestly bad stuff – high sugar fizzy drinks, doughnuts etc., and I’m also sure that there are plenty of people who are trying hard to lose weight by “eating right”, but unsuccessful because what we’ve been told is the right way to eat is almost exactly the opposite of what will encourage weight loss. (According to Taubes the truth about healthy eating was being established by German scientists before the second world war but, tragically, there work was ignored – German science having been discredited by the horrors of the Nazi regieme).

Another BBC news story that I happened upon was about the popularity of ‘free-from’ foods (gluten-free, dairy-free etc.). The segment confidently asserted that only 1-2% of us are allergic to certain foods (subtext = it’s a fad). Whilst a small percentage of people may be allergic to gluten, testing is often unreliable, and many more of us may not tolerate gluten well. You don’t have to be celiac to suffer negative effects from gluten, possieffecting not on the gut, but the brain!   The dietician interviewed in the piece suggests that, if we exclude things like wheat and dairy, not only will we be eating a limited range of food, but we may be in danger of becoming malnourished (around 1:40 in the clip if you’re really interested). The story was followed by a discussion in the studio. The BBCs obligation to impartiality clearly doesn’t extend to nutrition, as the BBCs resident GP was the only person on hand to comment. Amongst her advice to viewers: “Do not consult a nutritionist, they are unregulated. Only consult a dietician” – like the one in the segment who thinks that eliminating wheat and dairy from your diet may result in malnutrition! If you visit the website of the British Dietetic Association seeking advice on healthy eating you will quickly find yourself looking at the ‘Eatwell Plate’, pictured above. Yes, meals based on starches, that we know make us fat. In fact, unless we are indulging in regular endurance type activity, we do not need any dietary carbohydrate because, by a process called gluconeogenesis, our body can make carbohydrate from other sources. (I’m not advocating a zero-carb diet, just trying to underline the crassness of suggesting that carbohydrate needs to form the basis of all our meals).

The Harvard School of Public Health’s study implicating red meat consumption represented another opportunity for the BBC news to cover itself in glory, presenting the story in an entirely uncritical light, and featuring a representative of Cancer Research declaring that “We now know that red meat causes cancer.” (To understand why this study is only fit for “lining a budgie’s cage” please see here, here, or here.)

There was no explanation of any possible mechanism, no-one to question how the data was gathered or interpreted. This was not a clinical trial that could legitimately be said to prove anything, yet the ‘findings’ were presented as incontravertible fact. Later that day in the gym I heard a trainer confidently asserting  that his client must get his protein needs from sources other than red meat. Fairy tale has become fact.

You might well argue that misrepresentations about eating red meat are less serious than those about how we become and remain fat – the consequences of people eating less red meat aren’t likely to be nearly as serious as the consequences ofoverweight people beingadvised to eat less fat and more starch (slow releasing sugar is still sugar). The pressing question is how we can be fit and well as a society if poor information, through repetition (often by authority figures), becomes popular belief? What’s the definition of insanity? How about repeating the low fat/high carbohydrate mantra and expecting obesity/cardio vascular disease rates to go down.

There’s a wealth of information available, not least of which is Taubes’ incredibly extensively referenced book. If you don’t fancy reading that, perhaps consider listening with a sceptic’s ear next time there’s a media story on nutrition/health.

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