healthy eating

Is the Whole30 Diet a Whole Lotta Nonsense?

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Image by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay

Now you know what I’m going to say:

If it’s a fad, forget it.

And if there were ever a fad diet, Whole30 is it. It has become especially popular among young(er) people, with Facebook groups and the whole nine yards. Meanwhile, actual nutritionists and dieticians, people who study science, are clutching their heads and moaning.

I could just re-write the posts I wrote on the food-sensitivity tests for my material on this eating plan, but I won’t, because there are some additional fats in the fire (ha!) here. First, let me tell you a story:

So, this woman I know said that she had been in a town where she had lots of old friends, and a group of them decided to go out to dinner.

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Bad Advice from a Good Source.

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Image accessed from Soloman Baking Co. website, http://solomanbakingco.com/chip-variety/

What’s the bad advice? I’ll quote two statements (actually imperatives) from the back of the bag: “Snack Often with Our Guilt-Free Ancient Grain Chips!” and “great for all day snacking.” What’s the good source? This locally-owned company, Soloman Baking Co., that produces a range of pita bread and pita chips. My mother-in-law had bought a bag of their chips on sale and boy, were they good! I liked them so much that I bought a dozen bags online. (Small bags.) But here’s the thing: they’re very tempting just to eat on their own, and their overwhelming encouragement on the bag is to eat the chips as snacks. I’ve eaten two of the bags, I think, and while I’ve tried to eat them as an adjunct to a meal probably most of them were eaten between meals–the dreaded s-n-a-a-a-a-a-a-c-k-s. I plan to use the rest of the crackers as part of a concert reception and use them up that way. They’re just too tempting! (I normally buy chips and crackers to use for parties

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Food Sensitivity Testing–Science or Scam?

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I don’t know how many people reading this post are following a food-sensitivity diet regimen or are supporting someone who is, but I’m sure there are some. So let me say first of all that my purpose here is not to offend but to inform. I got a little tickled/horrified recently with some comments regarding my keto diet posts. One woman said, in essence, “Why is Debi doing this? She’s not going to make any money by keto-diet bashing.” Then she named some diet celebrity whose

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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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All Calories Count, But Not All Calories Count the Same

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Nothing stays in Vegas. That’s our starting point here: that every calorie you consume has to get used or disposed of by your body in some way. No calories simply disappear into thin air (although they may disappear somewhere else, as noted below). No calories are “free.” Every single molecule you eat must be dealt with. Your body doesn’t function like a car’s gas tank, when there’s an absolute limit of capacity that results in gasoline on the ground (and the gas station owner yelling at you) if you keep trying to outwit the automatic shutoff by “topping off” the tank and manually restarting the pump. Your esophagus doesn’t have an automatic shutoff valve. I’m not even sure where that organ would be best situated: above the larynx? Halfway between the mouth and the stomach? There’d be a food backup, I guess. Kind of gross, and maybe dangerous. You certainly can get into the “I can’t eat another bite” mode, but in reality the stomach’s capacity is very flexible and expandable. (Just ask the people who’ve had stomach-reduction surgery that leaves them with a greatly diminished stomach pouch. If they’re determined enough, they can outwit the surgery, either by eating constant small meals that don’t overstrain the new little pouch or by going ahead and eating too much. The pouch can stretch, eventually. Read about this and other dangers of the surgery at “Long-Term Complications after Gastric-Sleeve Surgery.”)

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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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