Food

What’s the Connection Between Your Brain and Your Stomach?

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The Hungry Brain: Outsmarting the Instincts that Make Us Overeat by Stephan Guyenet, Ph.D., originally published in 2017, now available in several formats. I accessed the book via Audible.com.

This is a book that mixes immensely practical, down-to-earth information and advice about our current diet and health issues with somewhat-technical information about the actual biology of the brain. I found some of the biological sections to be rather frustrating, as Guyenet seems to subscribe to the idea that all of our thoughts, desires, motivations, decisions and choices can be boiled down to biochemical reactions at the cellular level. So in an early chapter he goes into an explanation about how our “lizard” brain (or, in this book, our “lamprey” brain) functions, with “feedback loops” putting in “bids.” Guyenet is careful to say that whole process is how scientists understand this all might work, as there’s no way

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Should you become part of the Brady Bunch?

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refer to caption
image accessed via Wikipedia.

Hi folks!

I should have posted this right after the Super Bowl, when (sigh) Tom Brady pulled it out yet again. At least everybody said it was the most boring SB ever. I don’t care much for Tom Brady—can you tell? Of course, one might ask, “Who asked you, Debi?” And I give him full, full props for his total unflappability and steel under fire. Hey, arrogance has its upside.

Anyway, though, I hadn’t realized that Mr. Brady, just like every other celebrity on the planet, has his own very special diet plan with his own very special science. Well, it’s actually his guru who has all

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Paleo Diet Pitfalls

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On to the next fad diet floating around out there! Remember, you don’t need me yammering at you in order to be able to evaluate these ideas. There are very, very simple things to look for:

1. Does the diet have a gimmick or a hook? In the case of the paleo diet, the gimmick is the idea that we need to return to those halcyon days when life expectancy was less than 30 years, there were no antibiotics, and you were in constant danger of starvation. Right, those days!

2. Does the diet have a solid basis in fact or is it just “science-y”? The premise of the paleo diet is that not enough time has passed in our evolutionary history from our hunter-gatherer days (say 10,000 years ago) till now for our bodies to adjust to our modern diet, specifically the food we eat that comes

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Is It Better to Know the Truth–About Diets or Anything Else?

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Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love by Dani Shapiro, available in multiple formats.

This is a pretty interesting book, and I enjoyed reading it. Dani Shapiro is an accomplished and best-selling author of several previous memoirs and novels. If you like real-life mysteries, especially ones that involve delving into the past, you’ll probably get seriously drawn into the story. I read it in big chunks over the course of a couple of days.

The plotline of the book centers around Shapiro’s discovery, by way of an impulsive DNA test, that the man she considered to be her father, whom she loved and revered, was not. She had been conceived with the help of a sperm donor. I won’t give away more of the story as I don’t think that’s fair, so you’ll have to read the book to find out if she finds her biological father and how she handles all the fallout. But here’s the central question for the purpose of my post today: Would she have been better off not to have known? Or, to put it the other way: Is it always better to know the truth?

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All Calories Count, but Sugar Calories Count Especially

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All calories count, but they don’t all count the same, I said in my last post. So I ended with the horrible prospect of how many grams of sugar are in a 32-ounce Big Gulp regular soda. (At some point I’ll take on the diet soda industry, but not today.) 72 grams of sugar all dumped into the bloodstream at once constitute an EMERGENCY. Remember, these liquid sugar calories basically pass right through the stomach and into your small intestine where they’re absorbed. Alarm bells are going off and your pancreas is pumping out insulin at a mile-a-minute clip. And the system is proactive as well as reactive; your digestive system doesn’t wait for nutrients to hit it before swinging into action.

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A Family’s Hilariously-Written No-Sugar Memoir

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Year of No Sugar: A Memoir by Eve Schaub, first published 2014.  I read this book way back in 2014, having seen it on the new-book shelves at our local library. It had a catchy cover, and I was just getting awakened (awoke?) to how high my sugar consumption was and how I needed to cut down. So I thought the book might help me with my own struggles. But I have to say that I didn’t enjoy it much. I remember skimming parts and thinking that the book was losing steam as it went on. I ended up getting the book Sweet Poison by David Gillespie that had kicked off the Schaub’s family project and writing about it.

Then somehow last week I ran across the book again and checked out the Kindle version. This time I enjoyed it thoroughly, laughing out loud several times a chapter. Eve Schaub is a very, very funny woman with a gift for ridiculous similes. I have no idea why I didn’t care for the book the first time around. Maybe I’m just more attuned now to this whole idea of severely limiting sugar in our diet than I was back then. Who knows?

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What’s Up with So-Called “Natural Sweeteners”?

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Ah, the wonderful world of so-called “healthy” or “alternative” sweeteners! A food blog that I follow faithfully, Pinch of Yum, has just finished up its “sugar-free January” stretch for at least the second year, with the idea that for one month you’ll stay off “refined” sugar. So what does that term mean for this website? Anything that can be called a “natural” sugar, as opposed to a refined one, including maple syrup and honey, is allowed in small amounts.

Folks, I hate to break it to you, but:

Maple syrup and honey are just sugar.

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Is Sugar Addictive? Further Thoughts.

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In the first of my four posts on problems with the keto diet I made the point that it’s probably a mistake to label our desire for sugar as an “addiction.” Dr. Robert Lustig, a pediatric endocrinologist whom I’ve quoted and posted from, does posit that sugar is addictive in his video #4 which I post below and have also posted on my author’s Facebook page. I’ve been doing some further reading and thinking, and, with all due respect to Dr. Lustig, I still think he’s wrong. (Notice—patting myself on the back here—that while I’ve gained excellent information and insight from Lustig, I don’t just take what he says at face value. He’s not my guru.)

Here’s the central objection that I have to saying that sugar is innately addictive:

It’s food.

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Keto Case Study #4–Stay Away from Gurus!

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This is the final post for now about the problems with following the so-called “ketogenic” diet. Today I’m addressing some issues I’ve discovered with one of the leading keto gurus, Eric Berg DC. Note that I don’t call him “Dr.” Berg, even though that’s what his YouTube channel, his books, his website and his ads call him. HE IS NOT A MEDICAL DOCTOR. HE’S A CHIROPRACTOR. Sorry. I try to steer clear of all-caps ranting, but sometimes it’s just necessary.

Just a reminder: the “case study” I’m using is that of the blogger who runs the Addicted2Decoraing website. She says in a post titled  “The Personal Stuff: A New Furry Family Member, More Keto Info, and What I’m Listening To” that one of her five ways to get started on the ketogenic diet is:

Find one keto expert you like and trust, and stick with him or her.

And the “expert” she’s decided to follow is Eric Berg DC. Now why on earth would you want to “stick with” just one source? That makes no sense. The best way to get a balanced view of any topic is to consult multiple sources, checking out the discrepancies that you find. Then you make your own well-informed decisions. Otherwise you’re just outsourcing your choices. (And, as I’ve said before, I love this blog, follow it faithfully, and totally respect its author. She’s so independent in her decorating choices that I find it very puzzling that she’s willing to blindly follow anyone about her health choices.)

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A Keto Case Study, Part Three

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A reminder if you’re just coming across this series of posts: I am taking some material from the website Addicted2Decorating which I follow faithfully and enjoy tremendously. Ordinarily it’s a DIY home improvement site, but the author sometimes includes a personal post—what music she’s listening to, how the new dog is doing, and, for my purposes, what new diet plan she and her husband are following. I want to emphasize again that I am in no way trying to badmouth Kristi, the website author. I am simply using what she says herself as a means of examining the mistakes people make when they adopt some type of extreme fad diet, in this case the so-called “ketogenic” diet. I’m putting the name of the diet in quotation marks because it’s actually very difficult to get your body into the state of ketosis, a condition in which your body has switched from burning glucose, its preferred fuel, to “ketone bodies,” which is fuel made from fat. This switch in fuels is supposed to “trick” your body into dipping into its fat stores, thus helping you lose weight. I’d encourage you to go back and read parts one and two of this series if you haven’t already done so. You’ll note below that I’m still mining the ideas contained in the original quotations I used, as there’s so much to say about just this short section.

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