As I’m going to be doing the cooking for my friend, I need to know how to cook for a Post Cardiac patient.
A quick review of online recipes seems to be reduced to:
1) Eliminate salt.
2) Cut way back on fat.
3) Minor the starches, but some is OK.
4) Increase the seafoods (especially fin fish, shellfish not so much) in place of red meat.
It looks generally like poultry is neutral (though skin removed is preferred) and lots of vegetables especially fresh (so no canning salt).
It generally also looked like whole wheat was preferred in pasta and breads; and dairy was cut back though not gone (Parmesan cheese in particular was in some recipes. I’m presuming it’s OK but things like high fat cheddar or Monterrey Jack are out?
Any further ideas or guidance / pointers to pages appreciated. I’ll be asking the Dr. for any handout they might have.
At present, I’m thinking salads with olive oil / vinegar vinaigrette (and losing the cream dressings) and sushi look like “adds” while BBQ chicken w/skin on is “out”. Then a slow cooker “chicken & vegetable” pot but without the “cream of” soup. So a bunch of celery, carrots, onions, skinned chicken pieces, some spices and pepper… With about 1/2 the usual chicken to vegetable ratio as in my usual version. Sound about right?
Or is that ‘low salt’ thing ‘so last decade’? I’d heard a story that some folks have salt issues and for them it matters, but most of us are not salt sensitive so it does nothing to us. But I’ve never followed up on it. Ought I be picking up some “no salt’ KCl salt substitute? Or just forget it?
It looks like assuring mono-unsaturated oils is a “good thing” and both solid animal fats and very long chain polyunsaturated fats “have issues” – though different issues. So I’m thinking just buy a 1/2 gallon of olive oil and be done ;-)
Well, I have until about Friday to prepare, so time to do some homework. I found a few recipe places on line, but they didn’t say much about the theory behind their recipes. I’d rather know a bit more about the ideas behind it and less “paint by numbers”.
Musings from the Chiefio 
I’m sorry E.M. but I now believe that you have been sold a pack of goods on diet. I am now convinced that low carb, high fat diet is optimum for all health, particularly cardiac and diabetic. I am a sufferer from both. The cholesterol you find in arteries is there to repair the damage caused by sugar (which is easily built from starchy carbs), vegetable oils are hydrogenated poison, you are much better cooking in lard or tallow or butter. Eat lots of meat.
I know I have all the fervour of the recently converted, for which I apologise, but I am 67 and I feel ten years younger on this diet. Please have a look at Dr. Benjamin T Bikman’s youtube offerings, or those of Dr. Shawn Baker. None of these suggestions matches the Standard American Diet recommendations, or any dietitian I have ever spoken to, but look how fat your country and mine have become on that diet. Do you, like me, remember when the juices (fat) that dripped of the Sunday roast were a treat? It seams our parents knew more about nutrition than we do.
Good luck with caring for your friend, I hope they recover soon. Holding a pillow to your chest when you cough helps, but it still hurts like hell at first. Remember to do some deep breathing to stop pneumonia.
Apologies for the mis-spelling of off and seems. Tut tut.
I think Andysaurus is spot on. Take look at THINCS
http://www.thincs.org/
Best wishes
Bo Blomberg
Stockholm Sweden
I would say think chicken soup at first, limit salt and pepper,
add green salads or steamed greens, oil and vinegar,
OATMEAL works well to clean arteries by encouraging fatty acid movement
you need oils to clean out the plaque waxes
vitamin E 400iu & C 1500 to 2000mg to aide healing and reduce oxygen demand
just my 25cents worth…pg
I am with andysaurus on this. There has been so much research done by very qualified people in the last few years that has identified excess carbs as well as vegetable oils(seed oils) as the underlying base culprits. In fact they have discovered and elucidated many of the metabolic and physiological pathways from ingestion to to far-downstream effects and disease.This has not penetrated the mainstream yet.
Without getting into the mechanisms, heart disease is initiated by inflammation which is a result of too much carb eating. Cholesterol is necessary to repair the damage and is not itself a bad thing. It is found at the site of the damage the way firemen are found at a fire. There is actually only one type of cholesterol particle that exacerbates the problem and that is manufactured in the body when carbs are in excess. Saturated fat actually results in lipoprotein particles that are either harmless or of the beneficial type.
As for the seed oils, apart from the fact that they are omega 6 fats that follow a pathway in the body that results in inflammatory compounds, also have other issues. Polyunsaturated oils are very unstable compared to saturated fats and are easily altered or turned rancid and when these altered or rancid fats are in your body it can do nothing with them and an inflammatory immune response is stimulated to degrade and eliminate them. So when you see corn oil or canola oil or such on the store shelf they have already been altered during processing to extract the oil using heat or pressure or chemicals. Even simple exposure to light degrades them. And if used in cooking or frying they just don’t withstand heat and enter your body in a completely rancid state.
Here I will paste a few lines from an article by a Dr. Mercola:
“The Problem With Vegetable Oils
As mentioned earlier, Teicholz’s book also delves into a new nutritional twist that has developed as the dangers of trans fats have been exposed and accepted. While the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has removed partially hydrogenated oils — the primary source of trans fats — from the list of “generally recognized as safe” ingredients, the vegetable oils (such as peanut, corn and soy oil) that have replaced them may have even more harmful health ramifications.
When heated, vegetable oils degrade into extremely toxic oxidation products. According to Teicholz, more than 100 dangerous oxidation products have been found in a single piece of chicken fried in vegetable oils. As early as the 1940s, animal experiments showed animals would develop cirrhosis of the liver or enlarged liver when fed vegetable oils. When fed heated vegetable oils, they died prematurely.
Cyclic aldehydes are among the most toxic of these byproducts, and animal research has shown even low levels of exposure cause serious inflammation, which is associated with heart disease and Alzheimer’s. Findings like these make the AHA’s recommendation to use margarine and vegetable oils all the more troubling.”
So, cook with saturated fat. Coconut oil is especially extremely resistant to heat degradation and is in its own right very healthy and heart friendly.
Re andysaurus,
I agree completely.
I will just add that sugar raises blood pressure more than sodium does.
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/286795.php
Also a ketogenic or low carb diet lowers blood pressure.
https://www.webmd.com/diet/news/20100125/low-carb-diet-lowers-blood-pressure#1
This I can attest to from my own experience. My blood pressure had been running in the range of 125 to 130 over 85 to 90 before I started Keto. Currently my diet can be described as a modified Atkins. Basically increased fats and oils (in particular real butter, coconut oil and thick heavy whipping cream which contain a large percentage of MCTs (medium chain triglycerides)) with high protein and low carbs and low starches. (Simply put, above ground vegetables and fruits is good.) Absolutely the minimum processed sugar as is possible. In addition, I practice intermittent fasting, by restricting my hours of eating to between 9 and 5. The other 16 hours is nothing but water. Now my blood pressure is in the range of 110 to 120 over 70 to 80.
There are studies which suggest a low carb, high fat diet may reduce risk factors for cardiac events.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25178568
I have read that it may improve heart muscle function by up to 28%. The study, if I remember correct, was on mice, so there is the question if it carries over to humans.
Simply put, on a sugar diet, muscle mass is at risk of being reduced, especially when under a restricted calorie diet (common dieting techniques). Simply look at the changes a body undergoes while under starvation conditions. On the other hand, while undergoing a keto diet muscle mass remains stable. Since the heart is a muscle, this is important.
Also I have the intensity of the newly converted, but the change in physical responses to the change in diet is simply amazing to me. Every day I am amazed at how much better I feel.
Just a few minutes ago I came across this article on sputniknews.com that is in keeping with the topic discussed here.
If interested: https://sputniknews.com/columnists/201808281067532079-sugar-evil/
Two # items
#1:
Most heart patients are put on a low salt diet – – and that takes some work. Salt seems to be everywhere.
In addition, many are on a diuretic. Those with (just) high blood pressure are taking these also (like me, Hydrochlorothiazide).
Now here’s an issue: My wife was wanting to take a decongestant. The directions said “take with a full glass of water.”
So what’s a full glass of water?
She used a 12 oz. glass.
Her ill feeling continued (she has a valve transplant and a bit of damaged heart) and, being cautious, we went to the emergency room.
She had a bacterial infection, but interestingly, the tests revealed her sodium level was way low. After questioning, the doc felt she had flushed out the little sodium she did have.
He didn’t think the decongestant was of much good anyway – and it just caused more issues. He gave her an Antibiotic that worked.
He suggested she start drinking “Powerade Zero” (P.Z.); Na =150 mg per 12 oz. serving. It took a few weeks, but did bring her blood electrolytes to a balanced condition. P.Z. has 35 mg K / 12 oz.
Perhaps, this was not meant to be long term, but she has continued with the diuretic (Furosemide; Lasix) and with the P.Z. New tests in a month or so will uncover the current situation.
#2
Red meat and fat in a diet:
It seems to me that smart folks have investigated this for many years and have come to many opposite conclusions. It is still standard theory among (most) cardiologists, as far as I can tell. There are many skeptics.
I know you will check this out. Thus, I won’t go on about it. (Others already have.)
General:
Any restricted diet must deal with protein and vitamins. P.Z. does have some B vitamins (about 90% of vegans are deficient).
Finally, Canola Oil is way cheaper than Olive Oil and one’s use and intention ought to influence use of one or both.
For example: from Livestrong dot com
In addition: butter and bacon make things taste better.
The really nasty things said about “canola” are from about 60 years ago when the plant breeders were transitioning it from “Rapeseed oil” to the low eicosenoic and erucic acid contents of today.
andysaurus says: “Holding a pillow to your chest …”
They gave my wife a red heart-shaped pillow.
She had about a dozen medical team members sign it. That’s the only use she had for it.
A friend did use his. Funny stuff, these medical differences.
Salt
Had been demonised for years – it is absolutely imperative you get enough salt when it is hot (over 25C£ otherwise you can not sweat, if you can sweat you overheat.
Some stats from the UK a couple of years ago suggested that the excess mortality during a heat wave was at least partially caused by low salt / inadequate salt intake.
How much salt do you need — depends !
Quick & dirty test – lick your inner arm (just raise it to your face) and taste
Taste salty – too much salt (drink water)
Doesn’t taste salty – not enough salt, up salt intake
I am not a Dr but spent years on ships including in engine rooms in Persian Gulf, Mexican Gulf ( sometimes in summer with no a/c ugh ) and by following the above simple self checks we (mostly) avoided heat exhaustion (salt tablets and lots of water).
Those that didn’t bother, suffered !
Discussion with one Dr about my high salt diet terminated immediately I informed him I worked in hot & humid conditions & used the self test, at which point, he said “I’ll shut up then & bin the low salt diet stuff as you have it fully controlled and we don’t want to kill you ”
It took a couple of years to rebalance salt after I stopped living in hot countries & returned to the kingdom of UK ! ( and every dr has had roughly the same response)
How this translates to a cardio patient I am not sure, but I would be surprised if the REQUIRED salt balance changed over much as core body temperature control would not appear to be a function of the heart !
Good luck parsing all the scare stories to find the nuggets of truth
@AndySaurus:
I don’t see where I’ve been sold anything yet.
I’ve read a few web pages and said “Wha?”, this it it, or not?
Basically I’m open to ideas and pointers.
The hospital folks basically said avoid processed meats and soft cheeses but not much beyond that. “Mediterranean diet” was suggested 2 times and the Dr. said Scotch was ok but red wine was a bit better…so THE major worry out of the way ;-)
At this point I’m not seeing a strong message other than that genetics matters and transfats are evil…
Organize a nice red meat BBQ with a salat bar. Fresh tomatoes, fresh everything.
Create a totally relaxed atmosphere, pleasant people, a nice beer and a good wine, fresh air, later a nice bourbon and good music
Right, you offer him quality time and that’s more important than the food a person eats at a single evening out.
I have not looked into it recently but my understanding is the low salt regimine has been falling out of favor. The idea is that most people will naturally regulate electrolytes if they have adequate NaCl and KCl in their diet. I have seen mentions that what is important is the ratio of sodium and potassium not necessarily the total intake. Many diuretics like caffeine tend to dump potassium as many people take in too much sodium salts and not enough potassium.
My Mom was a heart patient (artificial heart valve) and they had to monitor her electrolyte levels due to some of her medications.
Bananas and tomato juice being two good sources of potassium.
I personally quit with the low salt diet a couple years ago and salt to taste with a mixture of NaCl and Morton Lite salt which is about 50% KCl and I feel much better.
No current recommendation but I have seen recent articles that the old low salt wisdom is now very much in question.
This is from Mayo Clinic and still recommends reduced salt
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/heart-disease/in-depth/heart-healthy-diet/art-20046702
There appears to be a sweet spot for salt consumption too high or too low both increase mortality.
https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/05/25/a-low-salt-diet-may-be-bad-for-the-heart/
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/salt-diet-high-low-too-little-heart-disease-blood-pressure-lancet-study-a8485341.html
Too bad you don’t have a jar of my Blackberry Brandy to share.
For medicinal use of course ;-) …pg
Good luck sorting all the dietary recommendations out the short phrase “It’s complicated” seems to best describe the current literature I am finding. The various items on this page show no common theme and exceptions by groups, some it makes a difference others not so much.
https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/is-salt-bad-for-you#section5
Of course I am a reactionary that trusts my body to crave what it needs and no longer worries about such things. Take a one a day vitamin tablet and eat what you crave and let my body take care of getting the things it needs.
@p.g.” That Blackberry Brandy will lubricate all the moving parts.
@E.M.: The only dietary advice I got that I thought was worth anything was from my mother. She said, “Eat anything and everything. Just don’t eat too much of anyone thing.”
One of her favorite ‘breakfasts’ was a Wendy’s triple, a large fry, and an order of chicken nuggets. The rest of the day was a few frozen seedless black grapes, a couple of Garden Veggie wheat crackers, garden fresh veggies, and a bit of soup spread through the day. She died last year at age 93 and there’s no telling how long she would have lived if she had only cut out the frozen grapes. 😜
I’m no real help on this topic.
Per oils:
Yeah, I am on-board w/ the point that long chain polys are not good and cooking with them makes acrylamides. That’s why I mentioned olive oil. The very short chain fatty acids (butter, goat cheese, sheep cheese, coconut) are very good especially for cooking. The plan so far is a short list of: Olive oil, butter, coconut oil. For cooking and cold like salad dressing.
I suspect the “cut the fat” is generic for “Americans are fat, eat fewer calories” not “fat evil” (after all, we are made of lipo-protein cell walls…). The other problem is grain fed animals will have seed oils in their body fats so hard to find chickens without it… thus the “remove the skin” statements. I guess? The “avoid processed meats”: when pushed had one hospital staff saying it wasn’t the fat so much as the process chemicals,salts, and fructose in many of them. As they must give one size fits all advice, everyone gets the high blood pressure salt prohibition… so that one is going to be modulated based on the pressure cuff.
FWIW, I worked in a peach cannery where it was 100 F+ outdoors and hotter in the warehouse. Salt tablet dispenser near the water fountain. I started eating salt tablets and my sweat became salty enough to burn my eyes as it ran off the forehead. Then swapped to just water… sweat became nearly sweet watery… My conclusion was our sweat glands can modulate salt as long as you are sweating. I just put a little extra salt on my dinner on hot days and everything was fine… The “lick your arm” sounds like a decent salt meter in low sweating environments where it isn’t running into your eyes ;-)
We are going to ditch the daily salami & cheese plate and add fish & rice more (as much to drop about 40 lbs as anything else…) plus add more salads and greens. Seems this all started from a stress test to make sure he was fit enough for a colonoscopy… that lead to an angiogram that lead to the bypasses… so getting the fiber up for other reasons is also important… along with some body fat burn and more omega-3 / less omega-6…
He doesn’t do much sugar or starch food that I’ve seen, just diet sodas… So I’m thinking more balance is likely the best direction… He doesn’t like to cook so has often just had chopped cheese and salami plate with crackers or chips &dip…with TV for dinner… Not a balanced diet at all.
So far; my intent is just to move closer to “normal real food” and away from grease plate with cream dressing… (It has done well for my family…) So dumping the hot dog BBQ but adding chicken BBQ (w/o fructose filled BBQ sauce…) and adding roast turkey as an example (with a side salad & some beans or green beans). Dropping the chips & dip. Adding a fish meal 2 x week (as much for the omega-3 as reduced calories) via sushi or a rice /steamer kit. (rice in bottom, vegetables and fish lump in top.) That ought to help with vitamin levels too.
We’ll see though. This is still a moving target with various conflicting advice.
I think his breakfast has been cold cereal w/sugar so likely needs an alternative (like that high fiber oatmeal…) and lunches I’m not sure. White bread sandwiches some of the time… so maybe the start of the day is too much sugar & starch.
If it isn’t just dump & eat, it is weekend BBQ. That’s too narrow a range. But what to put in?
Sigh.
Too many orthogonal vectors and not enough prior data…
BTW this is the friend where 20 years ago we did the full keto only meat thing for a few months (me just as moral support) so he’s familiar with it… but it is likely too stressful just out of major surgery… and until b’fast is in balance, the evening grease plate is arriving at just the wrong time (just hours before bed…so hitting the blood when not needed) I think part of the process ought to be shifting calorie arrival closer to demand. So bigger low sugar b’fast, lighter more fiber dinners.
At least that’s where I am today…
Ah! chips for that spot, Have you tried those sweet potato also beet chips? little oil and salt, actually quite tasty. I fix my oatmeal, 1/2 cup dry, 1 cup H2O and nuc to cook, stir with a tablespoon of butter. NO sugar. for me, as the oatmeal makes me gassy. The butter solves that problem and makes it palatable.
pg”s oatmeal cookies; https://pgtruspace.wordpress.com/2016/06/28/oatmeal-cookies/
are tasty and contain a LOT of oatmeal per cooky as I designed them for heart healthy breakfast food…pg
After all the false narratives concerning food, I still have to nominate bacon. I know in my case high cholesterol (even if it’s a problem) was being produced by my liver, and not sourced from the food I eat. Just consume fiber to keep the nitrites moving at a steady clip.
You’ve probably seen Spurlock’s “Super Size Me”.
After that, it’s worth watching “Fat Head”.
This guy ate nothing but “fast food” for a month – not just McDonalds, but Dairy Queen, Burger King, whatever. He lost weight and his blood chemistry improved – cholesterol included. The post-production footnote says he got many, many people who used the same diet to the same effect. Big thing was, he restricted carbs, but not fat or protein.
Also worth noting that “diet soda” despite not containing any sugar, still manages to increase your blood sugar level…
Also, an interesting “coincidence” was the timing of low fat, low protein diets and the “depression epidemic” – low fat diets make you sad!
Finally, WRT weight – ask your grandmother. She knew that bread, pasta etc (carbs) make you fat. So did her grandmother, and her grandmother etc etc. How did we forget?
p.g.: “Ah! chips for that spot, Have you tried those sweet potato also beet chips?”
Sweet potato chips, nyet!
Beet chips, da!
I like sweet potatoes, but the chips or fries just don’t do it for me.
I snagged a bag of veggie chips once that included beets and parsnips with a couple of othertypes of veggie chips . They were mmmm good. I haven’t run across them again, though I’m sure they are generally available at grocery stores; just not readily available at all grocery stores.
To satisfy my cravings in the crunchy-salty food group, I’ve switched to pork rinds. Zero carbs. Works for me. As soon as our two little 4-legged miscreants hear the bag crinkle, they are immediately underfoot trying to convince me they are my bestest, bestest friends in the whole wide world and I am the world’s greatest dog owner evah! and oh… who’s that woman that lives here with us?
A good habit of burning calories daily will be very good moving forward once permitted. Sedate lifestyles play a significant role in health problems like this more often than not as we age.
All the best to your friend!
I’m with Andysaurus and ray warkentin, et al. I generally avoid all the conventional advice. It’s one of my soapbox subjects. How much time do you have?
One sacrilegious nugget I gleaned from http://www.westonaprice.org was that your heart’s favorite fuel is saturated fat. Also, we should eat the meat with its attached fat. You need to include the fat to utilize the protein more fully. I switched back to whole milk (after 34 years of skim and low fat milk) and saw my heel spurs melt away. Allergies minimized. Strength and stamina improved. Mood improved. My kid benefited also, in the same ways. Also, cod liver oil is a good friend.
Another sacrilegious nugget I gleaned from http://www.watercure.com is that it is a lack of salt that triggers your body to turn on high blood pressure because the electrolytes are out of whack between what’s in the cells and what’s outside the cells. A quick-and-easy way to get more minerals (it’s best to get them in water) is to add 1/2 teaspoon sea salt to 1/2 gallon water. I call it the “Half and Half Water” recipe. Don’t use table salt. Use sea salt. Bone broth is another decent source of minerals.
Another anti-establishment item I’ve picked up is avoiding artificial sweeteners and chloraminated water and Glyphosate because their germ killing effect is too strong for my “good bugs” to tolerate. I had begun to worry that I was becoming gluten intolerant or allergic to wheat. Long story short, as long as I avoid excessive germ killers in my diet, and take my various probiotics/prebiotics fairly regularly, I can eat anything and not have to spend days close to the loo.
When I had that surgery a couple years ago, and the home health nurse came around frequently, it was cool to have her take my blood pressure and consistently find it in the 115-120 over 70-75 range. I always reminded her that I freely eat cholesterol-containing foods and use salt as much as I want it. :-)
She also found no infection all those months the wound was packed daily. I got back on my probiotics the same day I came out of surgery (with permission), and I avoided refined sugar except for maybe 1/2 teaspoon in my morning coffee. I think that had a lot to do with the avoidance of infection.
Finally, I find helpful insights on https://learninggnm.com/home.html about the emotional traumas that can trigger serious disease. For a heart attack, the trauma is what they call a “territorial dispute”. As an example, there was a man I was acquainted with at work, a trim, wiry little guy with lots of energy, and who functioned as the liaison between my department and contractors. The story was, he had an annual checkup and was told by his doctor that his numbers looked great and he would “live forever”. Well, it wasn’t long after that checkup that he had a heart attack and died. The events in his life were the key, IMHO. That heart attack took place at the time when the man was handing over the keys of the latest building project to our company’s own maintenance people. Before that, only he and the contractor had free run of the project. I can’t help but think that there was a troubling element to the turning over of control to the other people, thus losing his own control of the project.
Sometimes I look into TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine) articles because they have such a holistic approach to health and disease. I knew a man who, even though conventionally trained, learned to use different treatment modalities on the acupuncture trigger points and could work wonders.
Here is another link:
http://www.cholesterol-and-health.com/
Yet another link:
https://chrismasterjohnphd.com/
reading this article:
https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1161/CIRCRESAHA.114.302721
leads me to the conclusion it is the slow accumulation of {various crap} in the artery walls that leads to attempted repair processes that include inflammation, macrophages, remodeling, eventual necrotic lesion cores and various growth of smooth muscle cells out of place, calcification, and more.
This tells me that by the point of occlusion most of the damage is already done and not readily reversible. So preventing new damage in the grafts is most important, healing partial plaque sites a nice idea but not likely.
So what is the {various crap}? It looks like various chemicals (smoking and such) along with excess fats, salts, and sugars beyond what can be efficiently processed; that then lead to oxidative products causing more cellular damage.
Which leads to the reason things like stress and high fat or high sugar diets are linked to higher disease rates. Which points to what to do. Some is chemical elimination, some gross burden reduction. Some just symptomatic help at the process level.
As a first cut at it:
1) get gross calories down below stasis to get body burden of fats and sugars down. In particular, get rid of those contributing most to oxidative stress. Sugars especially refined with rapid blood level spikes and fats especially those with multiple oxidation sites (polyunsaturate) but all fats in general (down to the point where body fat is lower than most folks today… so worry about that if you ever get skinny…)
2) Add all the fiber you can. It slows sugar absorption and absorbs a lot of chemical crap itself and takes on out. This means fruits and vegetables and salads a lot.
3) Avoid any compound not found in nature. You don’t know what they do to the artery wall or how the body reacts. If we knew, you could play the selection game. But we don’t. So ditch even the artificial sweetener sodas. Don’t eat processed foods with 50 things on the label you can’t pronounce. May not do any good; but might do a lot. It’s a big unknown.
4) Increase the antioxidants in the diet. From vit E & C pills to color rich foods (berries and such with anthrocyanins like blueberries and red grapes) and even things like dark chocolate.
5) Reduce things that stimulate increased inflammatory response and immune reaction. From stress to worry and on to various recreational drugs and lack of exercise. Avoid foods that you individually ‘react’ to. (For me, tomatoes make my joints unhappy – so what is it doing to the arterial walls, eh? So some individual customizations, as for other folks the red color agent is a good antioxidant lycopene) Too much booze can cause issues too.
6) Get Omega-6 fats out of the diet – they increase inflammatory processes. This is the seed oils and the most common cheap oils (soybean, corn, etc.) This also means a lot of processed packaged foods are out too, as those seed oils are the most common in commercial production.
7) Add Omega-3 fats & oils (they are easily oxidized so you don’t just buy a bottle). This basically comes down to eating wild fish, grass fed meats, and flax seeds / meal. They reduce inflammation.
8) Monounsaturated oils like Olive Oil and saturated fats are neutral to inflammation, but need to be as low as possible until body fat levels are low in general. It’s a body burden handling fats in general issue. Once low enough, then put back in some Olive Oil and butter and such… So modest levels during the weight reduction phase then ramp up to stability at lower total body fats.
9) Carbs readily convert to sugars. Keep them low until body fat total is low, then only add in what can be burned daily and doesn’t hang around to be processed into something else… soaking into the arteries while it waits.
10) Spread the calories out. Many small meals is less waiting in the blood to be used up.
11) Fast some times. Give the machinery time to catch up to the food / fats load.
12) Exercise all you can. It burns up more of what needs to be gone, and increases the body levels of things like growth hormone (from repairing muscles) that can help in places like the arteries where otherwise there isn’t a lot of stimulus for producing all those activity hormones.
So that’s what it says to me.
Looking at the places with lowest rates here:
https://www.healthline.com/health/heart-disease/statistics#2
I find the Japanese, French, Swiss, and Australians as likely examples of those various properties. Lots of fresh foods and fish, grass fed animals, exercise. Israel is another one, so looking at what makes food Kosher may be of benefit too. Lamb in the diet helpful? Places without a lot of corn oil, soybean oil and high fructose sugars…
Well, that’s where I’m at now. Who knows what tomorrow may bring. But the link to inflammatory processes and multiple causation from small molecules leaking through the artery lining, overwhelming the repair process, looks pretty solid. Kale and broccoli don’t have a lot of those things in them, but do have a lot of antioxidants and anti inflammatory benefits. Ditto salmon…
Gary Taubs covered this some years back, Why We get Fat and What To Do About It. Fat good, protein good, carbs not good , sugar very bad. PaleoLeap.com has a lot of recipes, and a weekly email with suggestions for recipes.
Hit Costco and get a couple 3# rolls of Sausage and a box of 5 dozen eggs, some sweet onions, and other veggies of you choice, and start breakfast with a sausage egg and veggie scramble. While you are there, get some Avocado oil, as it will stand higher cooking temps than olive oil. Get a good start on breakfast and taper off the food the rest of the day, where you are neither hungry nor really full. Aim for the morning as the main meal.
Cardio usually suggest increased potassium, so use the Lite Salt with 50% potassium.
This is not hard, just think about meals like your grandmother did, everything from scratch and nothing processed. Opening a can of broth or tomato sauce or a jug of milk is ok. Common advice is “No white at nite” as in carbs like white potatoes and rice and bread.
A major issue in changing a diet is the taste factor. Hamburger with 30%fat tastes a lot better than that with 10% fat. Keep the fat portion high enough to retain a good taste. If the taste is not there, your friend will reject the change and go back to the old habits. Think twice about the boneless, skinless chicken breast, both for taste and moistness.
Best wishes for success.
Per Saturated Fats:
I’m generally in agreement they are more good than bad, and I’m not blowing off the idea that they are needed for health (our body makes them after all…)
What I am saying is that for someone 40 lbs or so over weight (which is most of America…) we are not suffering a lack of fat intake… So first work on getting rid of as much fats as possible until the burn rate is in balance and blood lipids are low. Then adjust the saturated fats to neutral weight change levels (whatever that may be). There’s 40 lbs of fats (mostly saturated) already on board, so lack of fats is just not an issue for a good while… and you want to get the body sucking the fat deposits out of those artery walls as much as possible to eliminate the oxidative stress and cascade of decay cycle.
Basically I’m talking process change over a time cycle, not good fat vs bad fat, when it comes to saturated fats. While also saying 100% dump the PUFA oils. (But modulate the butter and lamb fat for neutral weight setting…)
@Terry Jackson:
Actually don’t need to reach back to grandma… I cook like my Mum did and she was a from scratch real foods person.
Odd that you mention eggs and breakfast… I’m a good example (so far!) of no cardiac issues, and I usually start the day with eggs & toast (and always real butter).
But the description of the disease process just above (the link) leads me to conclude that “keep it away” is different from “you are already way past injured” in that lipid pools are already in the artery walls (and likely contain polyunsaturated oils from the prior diet). Those lipid pools must be reduced to reduce more damage. Not being in a normal place means “extraordinary fat need” to motivate their mobilization and elimination. So I think a very low fat phase is needed to get to a defatted arterial wall status. Then shift back to normal saturated fat intake as stability held.
The alternative would be a full keto diet with all the stress that involves…probably not good for a post surgical patient…
I tried some avocado oil, but didn’t like the flavor. I think it was oxidized… Likely just a poor grade. But there isn’t much need for cooking temps beyond what olive oil can do. I regularly use 1/2 butter and 1/2 olive oil and it’s fine for fried meats and such. What am I missing? Where is it that you need high temp cooking oil?
The one exception to the idea of “no white at night” (nice phrase, BTW) that I’m making is in Japanese style meals. Sushi Fridays kind of thing. It isn’t that much rice, and Friday is a stay up late and burn calories time anyway. I’m going to try brown rice in the steamer set up for something like salmon and steamed vegetables with rice side; then the family can have more of the rice and the cardio patient a small serving of rice, big chunk of fish and vegetables. That’s the idea anyway.
On taste: Absolutely. While I’m angling for a low fat phase, that doesn’t mean no fat to the point of cardboard. It’s a relative thing. Instead of the cheese and salami mostly fat plate, it’s going to be salmon with a butter and olive oil sautee finish… that kind of thing. (In alternation with the steamed, but salmon is oily enough even the steamed is tasty ;-)
Oh, and we’re not doing chicken breast. It’s going to be skinless thighs… Skinless chicken breast is just too dry and flavorless unless you are a very good cook with “tricks” or apply liberal butter… I have a regular slow cooker chicken I make but it gets a thick fat layer on top as it renders out. This will just reduce that layer (but with thighs there’s still some…) I’ve never found a way to make skinless chicken breast meat taste good (other than on sliced bread with a thick layer of butter and salt… that’s likely not a good idea ;-)
FWIW, I only make two meals that are based on processed foods. One is “tuna noodle casserole” where the spouse requires Kraft Mac N Cheese as the base. The other is “scalloped potatoes with ham” where the spouse again requires Betty Crocker packaged potato stuff as the base. Oh Well.
Oh, wait, theirs a third. The slow cooker chicken dish uses a can of “cream of” soup. I’ve got a variation using roux, but it’s not as finalized yet…
Most of what I do is “lump of meat, side vegetable, side starch” where the side starch is often a potato or beans. Occasionally rice. About 1/2 cup serving to 1 cup max. About the same size as the vegetable. I also do a “chef’s salad” dinner with 1/2 hard boiled egg, diced ham, diced bird if we have some leftovers in the fridge, arranged on top of a basic salad. Sometimes add avocado slices or shredded cheese topper.
Mostly I cook a “meat lump” and add stuff around it. It can be baked, roasted, fried, BBQ, slow cooker, whatever… then sides are just straight cooked vegetables, some starch (as above or one slice of buttered bread or baked potato). Fruit for desert. Pretty simple formula. Seems to work, though.
But for the post-cardio meals I’m going to take the starchy vegetable lower, and try a reduced level of butter in the vegetables. Enough to keep the flavor,but he really needs a bit less weight… and since activity will be low for a month or two… calorie need to match.
Anyway, hope that clarifies what I’m thinking… It isn’t a “all fats bad” so much as it’s a “get the stored crap level down then saturated fats and O.Oil to stability weight”. Plus add lots more vegetables to a very non-vegetable diet.
Who would have thought! Melons as health food?
http://www.medicalmedium.com/blog/healing-melon
at least entertaining…pg
Who would have guessed ? The healing power of melons.
http://www.medicalmedium.com/blog/healing-melon
Wow! and I just over did it with eating a 6 pound Crenshaw melon from the garden…..by myself, pig! …pg
E.M. When I was six yrs old, I contracted Measles very badly, three months in
a darkened room, Dr visits. Highlight… my oh-so beautiful mother would read me
Grimm’s Fairy Tales. :) I couldn’t eat much except Beef Tea a la Mrs Beeton’s
Cook Book. My mother cooked low salt, so probably less than recipe. As I seem
to remember, It never tasted too salty. I think she grated the beef and added
boiling water.
TO MAKE BEEF TEA.
‘1858. INGREDIENTS – 1 lb. of lean gravy-beef, 1 quart of water, 1 saltspoonful of salt.
Mode.—Have the meat cut without fat and bone, and choose a nice fleshy piece. Cut it into small pieces about the size of dice, and put it into a clean saucepan. Add the water cold to it; put it on the fire, and bring it to the boiling-point; then skim well. Put in the salt when the water boils, and simmer the beef tea gently from 1/2 to 3/4 hour, removing any more scum should it appear on the surface. Strain the tea through a hair sieve, and set it by in a cool place. When wanted for use, remove every particle of fat from the top; warm up as much as may be required, adding, if necessary, a little more salt. This preparation is simple beef tea, and is to be administered to those invalids to whom flavourings and seasonings are not allowed. When the patient is very low, use double the quantity of meat to the same proportion of water. Should the invalid be able to take the tea prepared in a more palatable manner, it is easy to make it so by following the directions in the next recipe, which is an admirable one for making savoury beef tea. Beef tea is always better when made the day before it is wanted, and then warmed up. It is a good plan to put the tea into a small cup or basin, and to place this basin in a saucepan of boiling water. When the tea is warm, it is ready to serve.’
Here’s one I can contribute:
E.M. grouses (😜): “I’ve never found a way to make skinless chicken breast meat taste good […]”
This is the only way I cook chicken breasts, always boneless and skinless.
I inject boneless, skinless chicken breasts all over with lots of Goya brand Mojo Criollo marinade. Puff those puppies up with liquid!. I get my grill stokin’ smokin’ hot and quickly nuke the chicken breasts on the grill until temperature is just done in the center. Hotter and faster is better. What’s happening is that the chicken breast is getting steamed from the inside with yummy seasonings. Flavorful moist, tender, juicy.
You gotta be fast and turn the chicken a lot to drive the heat to the center without burning or drying the outside, and it takes a time or two to learn when they are just done. While learning about ‘just right’, err on the side of under-done because you can take them hot off the grill and nuke a whole plate of them in the microwave for just 1-2 minutes and it will finish the job of steaming the insides. Do not over-cook!
I just grabbed a bottle of Mojo Criollo out of the fridge and all the ingredients can be pronounced. Here are the ingredients right off the bottle and in the US standard largest-to-smallest amount listing:
Water,orange juice, lemon juice, salt, garlic, onion, spices, sugar, 0.1% sodium benzoate and potassium sorbate as a preservative.
My guess on the spices listed is chopped cilantro, ground cumin, and Mexican oregano.
Okay, not too bad for a commercial product so it looks like you could come up with a very similar marinade, made fresh the day before to allow the flavors to blend, and cut down on the sugar to just a pinch to maintain the flavor profile. Salt could be adjusted too, and fresh made would eliminate the preservatives. There are probably several mojo criollo marinade recipes online posted by Mexican cooks.
Pro Tip: the garlic onion, and spices will clog the injector needle, so I shake the marinade and let it settle just a minute or so before pouring some off the top out into a small, six oz juice glass. That mixes the flavors yet still allows the finer spice bits that will go through the injector needle to remain in solution.
Get the heaviest injector you can find with the largest diameter needle possible. I assume this is obvious, but maybe not. The juice glass is necessary so you’re not refilling the injector from the main supply of marinade as the needle will be contaminated by the raw chicken.
Make plenty, because the leftover breasts can be refrigerated and then taken out and cubed as needed for a salad topper. I have also been known to cube the leftovers before refrigerating and pouring in a few splashes of the marinade to keep the flavor and moisture going.
Best chicken evah!
@H.R.:
Thanks for that! Don’t know when I’ll get to try it, but at some point it will happen. (I hate it when I know a thing can be done and know I can’t do it right… just makes me feel ignorant ;-)
@Beththeserf:
OMG! you awoke a very old memory of beef tea… don’t have any details, just sick and a few years old, and mother…
BTW, I too had the “few weeks of dark” measles thing…
Measles, chicken pox, German measles, mumps (well, one mump anyway… right side IIRC), flu and a rough one at that, strep throat. Had them all… I suspect that’s why so little makes me sick now. Very little antibiotics until most were history too. Did manage to avoid polio (but I remember the March Of Dimes collections and my sister 5 years older was ‘best friends’ with a girl in leg braces…) but partly just luck as vaccination was only started when I was about 8? Something like that. Had the first round of the killed virus (a shot IIRC) then a year or two later they swapped us over to the sugar cube one with attenuated live virus.
While I remember the misery being intense, it seems to result in a very “dynamic” immunity to things. I just toss off colds and minor infections.
@All:
I’m still trying to work out the dynamics of plaque formation (so as to know how to resolve them to the best state possible).
It looks like figuring out what’s the “bad stuff” starting the inflammation and immune attack / arterial decay process is at best “complicated” and at worst impossible. Fat accumulates in the arterial walls and then an immunity cascade happens with cytokines and all. Clearly disrupting that matters; but is the fat causal or consequence? What’s the root cause of the problem? Maybe multi-factorial with occult causes (hidden from view).
There seems to be a lot of “shooting in the dark” and “leaps of faith”.
The fact that there’s more coronary involvement in diabetics argues for some of it to be sugars related, while the increase in places with lots of PUFA (Poly Unsaturated Fatty Acid) profile and high fats intake implies some fats are involved (and likely the PUFA / Omega-3 ratio via the infalmmatory process.)
My overall leaning is to “shotgun” the “crap” and go to a diet promoting lower blood sugar, lower body fat, and improved Omega-3 levels / ratios. But it feel a bit too much like guessing and shotgunning when I prefer to know the processes and know the reasons. Sigh.
Oh Well… I’ve got about 3 more days before he’s to be discharge; so time to continue the “Dig Here!” on all things plaque forming.
I do appreciate the POV that a primitive meat / saturated fat diet ought to be fine as it is avoiding PUFAs and is what we evolved to eat. But I think there may be more that can be done for someone already fully into the plaque formed stages. Basically “not forming plaque” is different from “damage done, how to promote healing?” I’m guessing that requires removing the fat pools from inside the plaque / artery walls and further guessing that means a low fat period until body fat is low. But that’s just a guess. I don’t like guessing…
I’ve also not yet got to the point of assessing drug impacts on metabolism of diet choices. I know a “statin” is involved. The rest is a black box ATM.
I suspect my “conclusions” will continue to mutate as I read more, dig more. Any position I state ought to be viewed as a hypothesis for testing, not as a conclusion. So saying something like “low fat diet to pull fat from arterial wall fat pools” is at best a guess. I have no grounds for asserting it is correct, it is only a “reasonable speculation” that when needing to find fat somewhere the body will dig it out of occult stores / locations. That could be entirely wrong. ( I can see a case where it’s blocked by plaque materials and the body generally is only looking to fat cells for supply – in which case fat intake excursions could be more harmful than good. Say body fat for historical reasons is high PUFA – then pulling that out of fat cells for 6 months getting weight down is not being helpful to the arteries…)
I just wish there was more definitive process information on the recovery side. There’s lots of partisan bickering on the generation of plaque and disease, but little about “once you have it how to reverse it”. Or maybe my “search foo” is just off…
Well, I’m rambling. Ran out of coffee yesterday and didn’t get to the store last night… grumble.
So the plan, as of now, is to just look at who has done well and model on their cooking style and food choices. Mediterranean (olive oil, sea foods, sheep / goat meats and cheeses for short chain fatty acids, butter), Japanese (sea foods, low fat, sea weed – minerals and more, modest rice), etc.
And keep digging…
Medicine is prone to fads, and that’s especially true of diets. Current cardio is no added salt. Normal food has plenty of sodium in it. Actually you need balanced minerals. Enough sodium, potassium, chloride, magnesium, calcium, phosphate and a few others, but for those we are talking micrograms.
Other thing is that inflammation from any source counts. I would be wary of taking any supplements in pharmaceutical doses, except where it has been demonstrated that you do need that much. Chemistry is chemistry and it is dose and route that make the medicine or the poison. And yes, we do need unsaturated fats in our diets. We can’t make arachidonic acid, among other necessary fatty acids, without them. {One man’s meat is another man’s poison.}
My wife uses this:
https://recipes.heart.org/
She printed this out:
Click to access Dinners_Cookbook_508-compliant.pdf
My cholesterol is normal. My triglycerides are a little bit high. I do not have clogged arteries. I know because the doctor has been in there and looked. I do, however, have a stent because one of my arteries collapsed. Unfortunately for me it was an important one, the LAD, and I almost didn’t make it. Fortunately the ER was next to the cath lab and the cardiologist was in there performing an elective (non-emergency) cathertization..He left the other guy on the table and put my stent in. While he was in there he poked around the rest of my heart and everything was fine. My cholesterol remains low but he and my wife still freak out about all this stuff. Oh well
Interesting article on a synthetic molecule to disrupt the plaque forming process:
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2015-02-plaque-formation-arteries-amphiphilic-nanoparticles.html
finds a natural moleucule that does it, but does not say where to get it:
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-07-molecule-atherosclerosis.html
The consumption of sugar free sodas may not be benign. This is specific to splenda (sucralose) but raises a general suspicion…
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-12-biological-effects-popular-artificial-sweetener.html
Selling the notion of NOT having a diet soda several times a day will be a hard sell… and I need to find out the specifics about what is in the soda of choice.
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-01-culprit-atherosclerosis.html
Finds the molecule cells secrete that causes accumulation of macrophages. Not much use to me now, but does confirm the “clean up the fat” process is important and that reduction of immune response is helpful.
I think I’m starting to get a handle on process, so how to reduce it. Lower fat deposit formation, lower immune response / inflammation.
And, of course, we have the “maybe we have it backwards” article…
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2014-09-oxidized-ldl-good-guy.html
More adding a detail than changing the overall flow. Still need to get fat uptake by the arterial walls down and get inflammatory process moderated. Might be useful to investigate “selective lipid uptake” as a process and find out of “oxidized LDL” is found in any particular foods (and survives the cooking and eating and digesting and transport processes…)
One other corollary of chemistry: There is no chemical that man can make that the rest of nature can’t; and vice-versa.
One thing occurred to me is that the ‘boom’ in cardiovascular disease here dates to the 40s and 50s. Widespread antibiotic use and vaccine use date from the 50s. People forget that ‘childhood’ illnesses killed lots of children and that’s more than diarrheal/dysentery types.
Count me with the andysaurus / Terry Jackson lo carb / hi fat recommendations. Been doing it with some success for almost a decade. Taubes documents it well and is worth your time. Best book on the subject is Taubes’ Why We Get Fat and What To Do About It. Taubes documents the turn from lo carb to hi carb in the 1960s and the associated increase in what he calls the “Western Diseases”, Type II Diabetes, arteriosclerosis, heart disease, strange cancers, obesity, high cholesterol, hypertension, among others.
The only numbers to pay attention to are carbs and fiber. Effective carbs per serving is carbs minus fiber. Drive that number as low as humanly possible and things will work nicely. Blood numbers and cholesterol do well under a lo carb hi fat diet.
It turns out that fat is what turns the appetite off. This is why the lo fat diets always leave you starving.
The trick is to find lo carb substitutes for your former diet. Substitutes include but are not limited to alternative flours (soy, almond, coconut), sweeteners, fruits, sweeteners, lo carb chocolates, pork rinds rather than chips. Good news is that bacon and eggs are now your friends. Bad news is that you either need to consume more green fiber than you would ever be able to eat or go on Miralax, as lo carb will stopper you up worse than the drugs did Elvis.
Resources at the link:
Cheers –
A bit of intro:
A few weeks back I read an article on the topic of bee population decline. Among many other “triggers”, one hypothesis was the removal of micro-nutrients from bee’s food by the substitution of high fructose corn syrup. The introduced syrup does not have the micro-nutrients of the bee’s natural honey. The hypothesis was this would compromise their healthiness.
This reasoning was something I had not considered.
Previously, I have argued that because Fructose has the highest sweetness of any non-artificial commercial sweetener, one can use less of it than other sugars and still get the desired sweetness. Thus, from a chemical point of view, using fructose sounds like the way to go.
Now I think getting one’s sugar from fresh fruit (plus all that comes with fruit) is “the bee’s knees.”
[ https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/the-bees-knees.html ]
Note: I work at elevations of 3 to 4,000 ft (up to 7,000) building and repairing hiking trails. Lunch includes potato chips for salt and K, and mix cola-soda (½ sugar + ½ non-sugar) for hydration, caffeine, and energy. [pre-opening and mixing releases CO2 so it doesn’t fizz at high elevation]
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Unrelated, but I also eat All-Bran buds (these are infused with psyllium) and provide 11 grams of dietary fiber per 1/3 cup. I don’t use as a breakfast cereal, but rather as a snack, maybe with something else – like nuts. [For some reason I don’t like milk and never drink any. Oddly then, I like ice cream and consume much.]
ps: this is an interesting thread
Thanks to all.
It has been my opinion that artificial sweeteners are even worse for you then the sugars they replace. That said, sweets are not good for you, humans did not evolve to live on sugar. The liver breaks down old fats in the blood and makes bile that it dumps into the large intestine to help digest resistant fats and carbohydrates. Fiber that persists into the large intestines also tends to grab old fats and bile salts for elimination. To help dissolve, move and flush old fats from the cells, Alcohol will help move the old fats to the liver. Alcoholics tend to have clean arteries. Too much alcohol tends to damage muscle tissue and nerves so should be used with discretion. Good quality new fats will also help dissolve and move old fats from the cells. New fats metabolize in the cells for fuel where as old fats are ignored as their by-products are toxic to the cells machinery….pg
I disagree with the hypothesis that “carbs are bad” they are bad for people with low activity but absolutely essential for someone who is engaged in long term high energy output. Your body simply cannot process enough fat to maintain high output without creating other problems.
That is why long distance runners crave starches and pasta and related forms of carbohydrate. When I was running marathons I would sit down to a huge plate of rice covered with a sweet and sour tuna sauce as my favorite post intense work out meal. Meals heavy in fat and protein dropped off my menu choices. The body can only properly metabolize 2-3 ounces of protein a day (as protein) the rest gets stripped to carbohydrate to feed the demand for muscle glycogen for those who work hard all day. (think Irish miners sitting down to a huge plate of potatoes).
The diet needs to cater to the demands on the system. High intensity work load of long duration uses up muscle and liver glycogen stores. Those are best recharged with carbohydrates, but if the person has low physical activity excess carbohydrates get turned to fat. It is not a good or bad thing, it is proper fuel for the use intended.
As far as stripping plaque buildup from artery walls, high density lipids (HDL) help mobilize and keep fats in suspension in the blood. This is one of the reasons long distance runners with high HDL counts keep clean arteries even though they often eat huge amounts of carbohydrates.
Garlic has some impact on blood cholesterol and HDL /LDL balance but needs to be taken with caution by those taking blood thinners as it also has a blood thinning effect (slight anticoagulant activity which may compound with some drugs)
https://www.verywellhealth.com/can-garlic-lower-your-cholesterol-698110
Aloha! My preference for research on this topic is to the engineering approach, rather than a trained MD “standard of care.”
Ivor at thefatemporer dot com slash blog (scroll down and d/l free movie “The Widowmaker” then get your MD to authorize your Calcium score).
“Follow the money” for dietary fiber and fat: Nina’s “The Big Fat Surprise.” The ‘oat is heart-healthy’ thing is a purchased regional badge only: the fiber removes only hdl and one’s body then replaces that with ldl, bogus (the ldl=bad and hdl=good cholesterol is bogus, too). (Big Medicine is going to hate having to live up to the new rules.) I listen to Nina’s podcasts, like this one: https://www.ihmc.us/stemtalk/episode-52/
Jason’s idmprogram dot com slash blog (Nephrologist) is the one that got me “woke.” Hormones like insulin are key: calories in/calories out is not a thing! At all. “How could we have been so gullible?” As with AGW, the simplistic logic and appeal to authority is a clue.
Some older Medical Doctors have twigged to this and changed their standard of care to evidence-based, often at great personal and professional cost (see the legal woes recently of: Dr Tim Noakes, and Dr Fettke https://www.dietdoctor.com/dr-fettke-censored-recommending-low-carb. https://www.dietdoctor.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/PREVIEW_-Tim-Noakes-Interview-London-2018-1.pdf “We are not designed to be chronically ill, so what happened?”
I agree with other comments that your friendship and help for your friend is a great stress abatement, after the surgical procedure. Dr Fung’s “The Obesity Code” got me started! His career is genius-level, imho. Your friend’s colonoscopy, if he is to have it after stabilizing, would require a fast and purge: ancient medicine had fasting as a healing art, also!
Thing is, ultimately, is that we are mortal and that our bodies contain within them everything necessary to kill it. Don’t die from x, you’ll die from y, or z, or ….. The survivor effect gets forgotten, now why that happens in epidemiology is a head scratcher (not, actually, given human nature). Cure, kill all the lawyers ;p.
Put me in the keto camp with intermittent fasting. I’ve only done it for a couple of months (and took a break on vacation last week), but am optimistic about the effects on my diabetes.
Taking CBD oil now too so I have ditched my anti-seizure med.
And just started making yoghurt following this guide using an oxytocin-producing probiotic… https://www.wheatbellyblog.com/2018/04/make-l-reuteri-yogurt
I think many of the comments above are good for some occasional meal to be prepared. For a long term fix of cholesterol build up I think Linus Pauling’s ideas are reasonable. His idea is essentially that he root cause is too low levels of vitamin C.
Low vitamin C levels will impact the collagen synthesis. Collagen consists of a bundle of three protein fibers chemically welded together. The less vitamin C the fewer welds. The amount of vitamin C needed on a daily basis can easily be estimated from the collagen replacement rate of the body. It is estimated that ca. 30% of the body consists of collagen. It is also estimated that the time needed for the body to replace all collagen is roughly seven years. From this we can estimate that for a normal male (80 kg) between 5 and 10 g of collagen needs to be produced every day. Looking at the chemistry of the fibers I have estimated that roughly the same amount of vitamin C (that is destroyed in the process) is needed for 100% welds. This then means that the normal vitamin C consumption thus should be 5 – 10g per day and not 0.1 g as is recommended today.
When the vitamin C level is low collagen is still produced but the quality gets worse the less vitamin C is available. At the scurvy level between one weld point in 100 or one weld point in 200 is actually welded. The result is leaking blood vessels causing “bruises” without reason. Tooth gets loose because the “glue” holding them in place has got inferior. These are exactly the symptoms of scurvy.
Leaking blood vessels are fixed by the body using cholesterol as the short term fix to be permanently fixed later when enough vitamin C is available to produce the collagen needed. Because there will be a continuous vitamin C shortage new cholesterol is added to old patches … at some stage the body decides to make the temporary cholesterol fix permanent by supporting it with calcium.
Linus Pauing’s and Rath’s idea is then to add enough vitamin C to make a real repair of the collagen. To get rid of the cholesterol L-Lysine is needed (pills or in meat). The lysine hinders the collagen to fix again to the artery wall. The amount of L-Lysine needed according to Pauling/Rath is at least a few grams per day during the artery cleaning process weeks to months.
I think Pauling’s/Rath’s protocol is understandable for any person with some basic education in physics and chemistry. My personal solution has been to take 5 – 10g vitamin C per day mostly in the form of ascorbate (vitamin C + roughly the same amount of baking soda (natron)). So returning to your friend it could be a good idea to point out the importance of adequate amounts of vitamin C on a daily basis.
http://www.paulingtherapy.com/
A great site for both food/diet and Cardio is http://www.drgourmet.com .
It’s run by a fellow who is both a gourmet cook and a Cardiologist, so it covers the issues one faces with cardio problems and trying to eat (somewhat) normally. He also recommends the “Mediterranean Diet”. He also has a lot of information about special diets, e.g. dealing with Coumadin (Warfarin), glucose/lactose/other intolerance, allergies, etc. Finally he has recipe, diet, food, and shopping planners, and other resources, as well as more technical information and links to even more technical information.
It’s a very good (and yet entertaining) site. He also has food reviews for those who don’t have time/desire/opportunity to cook stuff from scratch.
All the best for your friend’s recovery!
Then you have this crap – https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/apos-official-alcohol-bad-according-152900697.html
I would say the best diet is – everything in moderation.
Beer butt chicken! The only time I do like chicken breast.
Well, the plot thickens….
The friend never told me, but he was diagnosed with mild diabetes…. a few years ago…
So looks like the rice / grains / breads / potatoes get reduced too.
Like it or not, this pushes toward the keto / Atkins / low carbs diet.
Yes, per Larry’s point, more activity to balance the intake, but low intake as base level.
He’s up and walking around already, so doing really well.
Found out his diet drink of choice has aspartme, that is bad for inflammation… so we’re going to be talking about un-sweet iced tea…
I plan to keep the one day a week sushi, but push toward the brown rice option. Seaweed (nori) is a big win as is the ginger, so worth a small rice intake. Also a good time for checking blood sugar response to starch challenge.
But the core of meals will be lower carbs than I’d otherwise pondered.
The vitamin C point is a keeper; but also a vitamin / mineral supplement. Seems he needed a mineral adjustment (given via I.V. tonight) so that’s another detail… I’m starting to think he’s been far away from balanced diet for a long time and any added formality will improve things…
Tonight did a trial run of carrot slices and chicken strips sauteed in olive oil with a pat of butter and drops of citrus juice. No breading. Worked well. Slightly caramelized carrots with citrus O.O. “glaze” is very nice. Chicken too ;-) So that’s sort of the pattern. Meat, non-starch vegetable base. Added adjunct (soup, salad, side vegetable,…) as needed.
Sugar and carbs are the inflammation agent – cut them out. For the rest, go mediteranean diet.
You might want to point him to the 1970 edition of DR. Kenneth Coopers New Aerobics book.
Dr. Cooper developed the program for heart health and recovery from heart problems in the Air Force through an organized walking program. His research was validated by 10’s of thousands of Air Force personnel who used the method to build their physical and heart fitness by using a gradually increasing walking program. Some went from barely able to walk to being able to run marathons and 10k races. It is well documented and explains exactly why the “training effect” occurs and how it changes the way the body responds to exercise. Still one of the best books I have ever read on the subject.
This older version is actually better than more recent similar publications as he talks in layman’s terms and had not yet turned it into a multi million dollar fitness business, so explains in detail how it all works.
@EMSmith; to sweeten ice tea, try stevia leaf, I don’t know about drops. A leaf in a glass of tea is a nice light sweetener and you just add tea as you consume the tea as the leaf gets better with use. The first use has a kind of bitter back taste at the start but softens with use. Stevia is destroyed with heat so it can’t be boiled but I think it might stand up to 140F
Yeah Aspartame is about as bad a thing that you could consume as a regular thing.
Your direction of starting with light meats and lots of different vegetable dishes sound like the right start ,with some brown rice as filler. Hard to make a mistake with brown rice as food for sickies of any kind. Chicken and fish as well.
Really need to engage your friend into adopting a new way of looking at food and preparation. Of nourishing rather then feeding yourself, Cooking is not a chore if it is creative….pg
See also:
https://www.cooperaerobics.com/Downloads/About/Aerobics-Points-System.aspx
The target of the program is to work up to accumulating 30 “points” each week by what ever exercise method fits your life style
@e.m.
Paleo did two things, it lost me 35lbs and got me out of the mild/pre diabetic range. At 74 I am now down within less than 10lbs of my weight as a junior in high school. I now eat a lunch sandwich and sometimes splurge on biscuits and sausage gravy in the am, but am still dropping weight, but quite slowly. Keto is more for serious trainers, so mostly Paleo will get the job done.
As mentioned by others, fat is taste, and fat shuts off the hungry. Fat goes pretty directly to energy, and not much gets stored. Carbs are what goes to storage for later conversion to energy in times of shortage, but we currently have no such times of shortage. Eat the eggs and the butter and drop the toast. The toast and the potatoes were needed for farm work, but we don’t do that today.
By all means ditch the soda, especially the so-called diet stuff. My drug of choice is coffee, about a pot a day. I have a soda at the rate of 2 12 packs a year, as sometimes they just taste great. Full sugar when I do. Samewith beer. Wine gives her a headache, so whiskey with a touch of sweet vermouth of an evening.
You will research the living ghoulies out of it, but I doubt there is a diet for plaque removal, only one for failure to form.
Your friend does not want to spend kitchen time, just get something to eat. Focus on that and taste reward and you can make a difference. I face that from time to time and resort to a ridiculously ground beef heavy chili that takes little time or skill and can feed one for several days. But the big easy is still a large egg and meat and veggie morning scramble or omelet breakfast, and a bit less the balance of the day.
Best wishes for success. What a great friend/
@E.M.Smith:
Everyone should have someone as concerned and willing to help like this as you.
Your 4:26 AM post 8/29 pretty well covers everything. My only comment about salads is that lettuce isn’t food; just an awful fiber material that holds water. Let rabbits eat it, then eat the rabbits. Replace it with spinach.
Terry Jackson’s comments about carbs are spot on. With diabetic family members, I look at the carbs more than anything. Sugar in anything is not a good idea. I have eliminated anything white, rice and potatoes and bread, and corn products, especially chips :-) , and that has made a big difference. Walking along with diet will improve just about anything.
Please remember that doctors are like everyone else. They get settled into a comfortable pattern and have a great deal of trouble getting out of that routine, examining ( pay attention, H.R. ; these are the jokes, son ) different ideas. Fortunately, you are a serious researcher, and will explore any path you think will help.
@Corsair Red:
I’m something of a process oriented guy. If I can describe the process correctly, then I can usually see how to shift it to better. Most references ignore the process and just list recommendations… that may be wrong. So I dig…
per lettuce: Like celery, it is a fiber filler that consumes calories to eat and scrubs the insides. Not a nutrient so much as a scrubby sponge… but all things need a bit of a scrub from time to time, and Americans are typically overfed so some innert filler is a good thing…
@Terry Jackson:
He does’ t mind cooking, but doesn’t enjoy it either. One of my tasks is to make it easy and a bit fun or interesting. To make the process part of the reward instead of a chore…
Part of that will be big dishes that store well, like a chile pot. Or a chicken vegetable stew.
@Larry:
He has a lake in his back yard and a kyack Just needs to put them together… and take his bike off the hooks in the garage… I bought my kyack so we could paddle together, so I need to expedite getting it here sooner…
@P.G.:
I dropped sugar in drinks some time ago and it wasn’t hard. Now unsweet tea is just fine. IMHO, the sweet craving is an addiction indicator and once stopped, stays away. I find that now I like the slightly bitter flavor. Habituation is a “thing” :-)
“Now unsweet tea is just fine”. I can’t seem to get there. I read that a 12oz coke has 8 tsp of sugar. Well I put one tsp of sugar in 12oz of iced tea. I figure moderation in all things works for me. Just saying.
I love unsweetened tea. The trouble for me is that tea and kidney stones don’t mix. Soda, sweetened with sugar or not, tends to be too sweet. Coke being somewhat of an exception as it didn’t taste nearly as sweet as, say, Pepsi or RC Cola. That changed somewhat when they went to high fructose corn syrup, ostensibly because you could use less of it to get to the same sweetness as cane sugar (NB that sucrose is about half fructose). To the extent that I go for carbonated drinks, it is plain carbonated water.
A key to good unsweetened tea is get the water hot to boil, take it off and steep for just a few minutes. You get less extraction of the bitter chemicals that way. Oversteeped tea requires more sugar to cover the bitterness.
Oh, lest I forget, you might try “sun tea”. Fill a mason jar or other glass container with water. Put bags in it and sit the jar in the sun until the water is tea colored. Remove bags. Drink as is, or add one flat tsp of sugar per 10 or 12 oz, shake and chill to drink later, with or without ice.
Hospitals! Fed him mashed potatoes, peas and melon cup (sweet mellons) then complained about his blood sugar an hour+ later… just as it is digesting…
Per iced tea:
Since mum was British, I make proper tea (boiling water, steep 3 min) and really like it made with Earl Grey… cool to room temp. Pour over ice. It is possible to make it double strong and pour over ice while hot, but not as good…IMHO. But I do it anyway when in a hurry.
@Corsair Red – “My only comment about salads is that lettuce isn’t food; just an awful fiber material that holds water.”
That is called being a “secondary” vegetarian. :-)
When my doctor put me on a niacin regimen, I got a little pre-diabetic. Cutting out carbs dropped my levels back to normal (the beer was the only hard thing I had to give up).
Actually Larry Ledwick, a couple of guys with Phd’s debunk what you are saying regarding carbs being necessary for athletic performance. They have done a large amount of research over many years and have written a book titled “The Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Performance”.
Part of the book description at amazon:
“The keto-adapted athlete benefits from superior fuel flow not only when nearing glycogen depletion, but also during training, recovery, and in response to resistance exercise as well. “On a well designed ketogenic diet as recommended by Jeff and Steve, I consume up to 4200 Calories per day while maintaining 6-7% body fat. This transformation has increased my power to mass ratio and allows a high level of performance in a range of activities. Equally if not more important is the efficiency with which I operate in every facet of my life. My energy level in the keto-adapted state is constant and nver undulates.” Tony Ricci, MS, CSCS, LDN, CISSN, CNS. High Performance Coach/Sports Nutritionist.”
Several long distance competitive athletes have ketogenic eating and dramatically increased their performance and won competitions.
As for short burst performance, five years ago I started a ketogenic diet and went very high saturated fat in the 75-80% range. Within a year and a half I lost 60 pounds of fat and now as a 70 year old man have gained several pounds of muscle and when in the gym can push more weight than 65% of the gym-rats in their twenties. Previously during most of my adult life on the typical diet I was always pudgy and always dismayed at my lack of stamina in the gym. I could go on about tremendous improvement in other health markers such as blood pressure and blood sugars.
The thing is that thousands of other people have had exactly the same results doing this same thing. And it is not based on bias or some guru’s pet belief extracted from his imagination but is based on actual science and mountains of research by many people that ties things together in a coherent and credible way. Needless to say, I am a convert and now a practicing believer.
Human metabolism has two major modes. Ketone burning and glucose burning. Most folks can do either. Some folks work better on one than another. I’m good for both (pretty much the same on high carbs or all meat). Other folks get blimpy on carbs. The spouse has trouble getting to and keeping the keto state…
Yes adaptation can improve performance but that does not change how body chemistry works. The first choice for energy in the muscles glucose, even in fat metabolism you ultimately end up oxidizing glucose. Availability of glucose is required for fat metabolism to occur. That is why you run into the wall at about 18 miles running a marathon. Once muscle and liver glycogen stores are used up (basically glucose in compact storage) the fat metabolism cycle shifts to a very inefficient chemical pathway. As a result non-adapted athletes grind to a halt and can barely walk let alone run (been there done that personally). Endurance trained athletes slightly out flank that process by adaptations.One is the increase of enzymes necessary for fat metabolism (which are normally not used much by athletes which do not approach glycogen depletion), the second (which is the basis of carbo loading) is that their body gets better at storing more glycogen so that wall gets moved back, and a third is that the body does not use fat/glycogen/glucose in the same ratios becoming more efficient at stretching out that curve.
Normally at totally aerobic (lots of oxygen available) levels of effort about 60% of your energy comes from fat metabolism. At that pace the body metabolism can keep up with energy demands using the relatively slow fat cycles to produce energy and only taps a little bit of blood glucose and glycogen. With adaptation the body gets more efficient in that process (and also gets better at providing adequate oxygen to support it) and does not deplete glucose/glycogen stores as rapidly. It also learns to shift some of the metabolic load of anaerobic exercise to relatively idle muscle groups. The body still has a chemical need for glucose/glycogen for energy production from fat, it just gets better at managing the work load and develops more effecient pathways to do the same chemical processes.
Red blood cells because they have no mitocondria and neurons cannot use fat for energy because the fatty acids in the blood stream cannot cross the blood brain barrier, and they both must use glucose (or Ketones) for all their necessary biologic energy needs.
Blood glucose levels are basically one of the biological switches that turns on and of fat burning or fat storage. Long term diet changes are basically a way to manipulate that switch and change its set point, to turn on fat burning earlier and shut off fat storage or delay its onset during high blood glucose conditions or low activity.
The various special diets are essentially ways of “hacking” your bodies biological programing and shifting the set points where various processes start and stop or the ratio between different energy pathways.
So a question,,, if I put some V8 and a tablespoon of powdered protein and saaaay a stick of celery in my beers, that could possibly be considered a full healthy meal? ♡¿♡
Coffeemate in the morning coffee could close the fake milk group out…..
Nice mix of comments in this thread…!
I gotta put my oar in again re low fat diets. In the mid 1980s, I went on Weight Watchers with my housemates. We did well. I reached my goal weight.
However, I have to look back on that time as the time when lack of fat caused me to start developing heel spurs. At that time, I was diagnosed with allergies. I got dry skin when I had never had dry skin before.
So I am confident I could go on that diet again and lose a significant amount of weight, but I hate to go back to having those health issues if I cut that much fat out of my diet again. I really like not having those issues anymore.
Getting rid of heel spurs without surgery or special shoes or shoe inserts is the feather in my cap! They were 20 years in the building, but after making changes advocated by the Weston A. Price Foundation, they started going away in 2002 after the first food change, and by 2003 they were totally gone. They haven’t returned.
Another thing I remind myself of often is what Hippocrates is reported to have said: Let your food be your medicine, and your medicine be your food (something like that).
The body preferentially burns glucose for energy for a reason but not because it is a better source for energy. When you exercise and your muscles produce lactate your mitochondria will utilize lactate ahead of glucose because lactate buildup is poisonous and needs to be disposed of. In the same way when you have more glucose available than your mitochondria can utilize for energy the buildup is detrimental and your body wants to get rid of the excess. Extra glucose inside the cells causes glycation where the glucose molecule sticks to other molecules such as proteins in enzyme structures and disrupts their functioning and produces what is known as “advanced glycation end-products”. In essence excess glucose is a slow poison and fructose is worse.
In fact, the cells try to protect themselves from the harmful effects of glucose by down-regulating their insulin receptors to keep the glucose out. Now you are developing insulin resistance which is diabetes properly understood because your blood sugars can stay normal for a long time because increasing levels of circulating insulin levels overwhelm the insulin resistance until it can no longer do so. But this chronically high level of circulating insulin has a myriad of negative effects in the body.
It is a fact that without any glucose ingestion at all the body is capable of easily making all of the small amount of glucose it actually needs.When doctors give insulin to diabetics they are actually worsening the disease. They are happy when the blood glucose level is lowered but they are only worsening the insulin resistance and levels of circulating insulin and don’t consider the negative effects inside of the cells from all that glucose. Why do you think that diabetics develop all of that tissue and nerve damage?
We are talking about different things, you are talking about pathological conditions, I am talking about normal metabolism. The only time you have significant lactate build up is due to oxygen debt. Either your work effort exceeds your normal ability to bring O2 to the tissue or your O2 transport is compromised for some reason failing due to some pathological condition like holding your breath while swimming underwater etc.
The Lactic acid cycle is a backup fall back system for normal glucose and fat metabolism, it is much less efficient than either but it can temporarily fill the gap in an emergency (like when you are running from an attacker at full sprint and can’t take in enough O2 to satisfy normal oxidation of glucose or fats. The glucose you talk about from gluconeogenesis mostly comes from glycogen in the tissues or liver which is an interim storage for glucose ingested. A small amount of glucose can be created by destroying protein, at the expense of higher nitrogen load on the kidneys, need for water and usually some cannibalization of tissue or sacrificing dietary protein to energy rather than essential building blocks for tissue restoration.
If you have adequate O2 perfusion of the tissue essentially 100% of energy is provided by fat and glucose metabolism, lactic acid cycle only comes into play when your physical demand for energy out runs your ability to transport O2 to the tissue. In that special “abnormal” condition you temporarily create energy without O2 via lactic acid production but at the expense of poisoning the cell chemistry if too much builds up and accumulating an Oxygen debt which must be promptly paid back as you oxidize that lactic acid and convert that stored oxygen demand to satisfied oxygen demand.
The muscle and liver glycogen come almost entirely from dietary sugars/carbohydrates, and take priority until your body satisfies its storage requirements for glycogen. Once that is satisfied and if blood glucose remains higher than desired for too long (there is a time factor here too), then the body switches on conversion of blood glucose to fat storage.
That is why carbo loading works (which is very similar to the special low carbohydrate diets) but instead of being done to lose body fat it is done to induce the over compensation in the glycogen storage system. After a few days of low carbo diet your body dials up its chemical plant to agressively store excess blood glucose as glycogen. Since glycogen also contains a lot of water, you also gain a lot of weight as the body packs in that metabolic water along with the glucose in anticipation of the next high endurance exercise to exhaustion situation it expects.
This works to the advantage of the endurance athlete as he/she has more reserve of both high output carbs to consume during intense activity (relieving the body of the need to poison itself with lactate to produce urgently needed energy) but it also releases metabolic water as that glycogen gets broken down into glucose cutting down on dehydration during intense exercise.
The bodies metabolism is a multilegged stool, if you shorten one leg (cut out carbs) the body increases its ability to store carbs when they are available and also increases its machinery to process fats at a higher rate, and increases its ability to handle lactate build up.
All you are doing is tricking your body into making specific adaptations to imposed demands that in your view are desirable. Your 6%-7% body fat is too low for best health but desiarable if you favor low fat weight over long term health. Depending on age healthy body fat for men is 8% – 20%.
https://www.dexafit.com/blog2/what-is-the-ideal-body-fat-percentage
Insulin is a fat storage hormone but also a growth promoting hormone. Something was discovered accidentally when experiments were done for other purposes that required an intravenous insulin injection for a period of time. After a while it was found that at the site of the insulin injection and immediately downstream there was a furry growth of epithelial tissue on the lining of the blood vessels. The insulin caused this overgrowth and a narrowing of the vessels.
Another little tidbit! When you become sufficiently insulin-resistant your liver can no longer read the insulin signal which usually tells it to stop making glucose. So now when you eat carbs and your insulin spikes the liver doesn’t get the message and continues to produce glucose which is in addition to that ingested. Diabetics can have a contribution of glucose from the liver which is greater than that from the carbs they eat. But this process already begins long before a person is officially considered diabetic.The ultimate downstream effects beyond diabetes are cancers, heart disease. alzheimers and others.
Why I’m reluctant to embrace a full on Atkins / ketogenic diet of all meat all the time for a diabetic with cardiovascular issues:
https://www.diapedia.org/metabolism-insulin-and-other-hormones/51040851169/ketone-body-metabolism
While it is called benign dietary ketosis for a reason: I’m suspicious that the nature of being diabetic is non-benign ketosis… and making that more so might cause more vascular issues not less (the goal being a diet that improved the vascular risk…)
Which is why I’m pursuing a path that has less oxidative stress (adding anti-oxident radical scavengers like Vit-E and Vit-C and dietary oils not prone to oxidative decay – remove PUFAs, add Olive Oil) and have just enough complex carbs to satisfy daily demand (but no more) and spread out in time so that there’s no need to do the insulin modulation dance nor swings into higher ketone body levels.
Essentially I want to get the diabetes risk down to near zero first, the oxidative stress levels down near zero, and the peroxidation of fats to near zero (to the extent possible); and then worry about things like anti-inflamatory load and optimal energy level…
I think it is doable, since the resting 4 hours post dinner sugar level was 110 tonight. looks to me (so far) like it’s just starch / carb surge at dinner that makes an excursion. That ought to be highly manageable with smaller portions more often, added fiber to slow absorption, avoiding fast digesting carbs, and moving the bulk of the calories to proteins and good fats (but not so much as to induce ketosis…)
Hold that level for a few weeks, things ought to stabilize as glycogen stores work down to middling normal (no longer over stuffing the glycogen pathway or the fat creating pathway) and some weight loss is accomplished.
Then reassess for adjustment. IF the diabetic tendency can be wrung out then moving to more of a benign dietary ketosis mode might make sense. But until then, it looks like asking for trouble.
Larry, I am not disputing what you are saying. The body is adaptable and an endurance athlete can be successful with the carb loading and carb replenishment method but it has been shown can also be successful on a ketogenic diet. I simply used the lactate example to make the point that the body will give glucose preference over fat for energy production because it wants to get rid of excess glucose. What it can’t burn it turns into fat. It just doesn’t want glucose hanging around doing damage. Otherwise it is very happy to utilize fatty acids and ketones and the research is piling-up that it is very much healthier in doing so.
A point I would make is that even an athlete doing carb loading and having success in competition is at risk of harming his or her long-term health and a non-athlete eating too many carbs certainly is.
A professor Tim Noakes was a marathon runner who used traditional eating and carb loading methods and developed metabolic syndrome and diabetes. Here is his youtube video:
@Ossqss:
Your beer & veggies “meal” is lacking in protein. One table spoon is not enough. It is also short of essential fatty acids. To be a “fully balanced meal” you would need to attach a small paper umbrella to a stick of jerky and stick that in the glass… then hang a shrimp on the side [drip of hot sauce optional] for your Omega-3s… ;-) of course…
“,em> diet of all meat all the time for …”
Not that you would get to the extreme, but I found this a few months ago.
Protein poisoning (also referred to colloquially as rabbit starvation, mal de caribou, or fat starvation) is a rare form of acute malnutrition thought to be caused by a near complete absence of fat in the diet.
Lots of links, here is one: https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/rabbit-starvation/
Chiefio, I think you are prudently correct. Keto-acidosis in a diabetic is a serious issue and a different kettle of fish than a mild level of ketosis in a non-diabetic.
There is a Dr. Jason Fung in Canada and other clinicians in the US who have completely reversed diabetes of long time duration and then maintained their patients in a healthy non-diabetic state and free of all medications by keeping them on a very low carb diet. But they first have to normalize blood sugars and insulin levels and eliminate insulin injections. It is amazing how quickly they can do this though, often in just 3-4 weeks.
@Ray:
My buddy is in better shape than that, so ought to reverse faster. No injections and only modestly too high sugar at excursions. I think he can get it done in about a week… But it will depend on what he decides.
I’m basically just doing the research / library work to come up with information for him. He will then look it over and decide what he thinks (i.e. is it complete and does he think it is right). Then I’m chef for a while making what he chooses from the ideas as he recovers. So while I’ll have my beliefs about what is best, he’s the guy lifting the fork and deciding what to cook on any one day (more so when I’m gone home in a little while).
I’ll be with him at hospital discharge and will be seeing what the doctor thinks about the general meal plan (yes, the M.D. gets the final say, regardless of what I think). The nurse tonight said we get a food and diet talk at discharge along with all the other do and don’t directions. So it may be all my speculation gets replaced with a hospital diet prescription… We’ll see. I’ll pitch my ideas and see if it is given the OK or not. (Though I can’t see how modest carbs, fresh fish, lean meats, vegetables & fruits, olive oil, no crap foods and cut out sodas can be rejected… I’m sure the Dr. will let me know if there is )
Here’s one for the diabetic part of the equation. My podiatrist said that for diabetic nerve pain, there was only one prescription medication that is available so far that has been proven to be effective in halting the damage to the myelin sheath, the erosion of which is the source of the pain. It doesn’t reverse any damage but it prevents further damage.
It’s just an Rx of high potency vitamin B complex, and he said you could get the same over the counter anywhere that stocked a good variety of vitamins; grocery, pharmacy, GNC, etc. He was saying, “Let your wallet be your guide. If covered by insurance, get the RX. If not, buy the OTC version. Either is fine.”
Costco has a non-Rx house brand version called Super B Complex that’s pretty much the equivalent and 1/50th the cost of the Rx. You might want to pick up a bottle for your friend to prevent damage to the myelin sheath, particularly if he has had little or no damage.
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Also, earlier in this thread, Larry brought up that he took a good multivitamin daily to cover any shortfalls from diet and it was a memory-jogger. About a year ago, we had a nice thread going on necessary dietary trace elements that some people don’t get due to geography or diet, where they just don’t buy or eat the foods with some of the trace elements.
From that discussion a year or so ago, I went hunting for a good multivitamin and again found that Costco had one that included the trace elements we discussed that weren’t in most other multivitamins. It was the best formulation I could find back when I was in label reading mode looking for those trace elements.
Here’s a link to the one I’m referring to. I didn’t see a listing of the formulation of the multivitamin, but it’s at least a start on identifying the exact one that I started buying. It’s a lot less expensive than most other choices, and the other choices are missing some of the trace elements anyhow.
https://www.costco.com/Kirkland-Signature-Daily-Multi%2c-500-Tablets.product.11491625.html
@E.M. re make-a- batch for easy meals later:
A favorite at our house is taco meat for taco salads. I just made a batch Wednesday ’cause I scored some 80/20 hamburger for $1.59 per pound and bought a 3-lb package.
Once you have a batch of taco meat ready, all you need to have around are the toppers and you can make a taco salad any time in just a few minutes. Here’s the grocery list I have that includes stuff I like and stuff my wife likes. I don’t always have all the stuff, but usually have most of the stuff. Your friend can buy what he likes or add his own preferences.
Tortilla chips in your favorite style for the base
Shredded lettuce, which can be bought ready to go in a bag
Shredded Mexican 4-cheese* or shredded cheddar
Sliced or diced onions (see note under cooking the meat)
Diced tomatoes
Thick and chunky salsa
Black bean and corn salsa
Ortega Taco sauce (the wife’s fave but not mine)
Homemade or store-bought guacamole
Avocado slices
Sliced black olives
Sour cream
Chopped, roasted green chilies
Pick and choose to build what you like. Almost all that stuff can be ‘kept around’ to use when you want a quick taco salad… minimal prep.
I used to make the taco meat filling from scratch, but my taste is entirely different from Mrs H.R.’s preferences, so I started using the Taco Bell brand seasoning packet (Wallyworld, $.69 per packet). We both like that flavor profile. (Psst! Don’t anyone tell her that I add some Mexican oregano, cumin, and garlic powder to the meat while I’m browning it, m’kay? It’s our little secret.)
I like using the 80/20 hamburger because the result has better flavor. and you can control the final fat content by leaving it all in (heartburn for me), draining it in a colander, then putting it back in the pan to do the seasoning bit, or you can drain and rinse the browned hamburger for very low fat content.
I don’t follow the packet directions for the seasoning part because I hve a way that gives more flavor and a different result to the sauce., but some may prefer the method on the seasoning packet. Here’s how I do it.
1. Brown the hamburger with the Mexican oregano, cumin, and garlic, breaking it down to as coarse or fine crumbles as you prefer
2. When just done (95% pink gone) drain the hamburger in a colander (cook longer and rinse with hot water for very low fat) I wipe the grease out of the pan with a paper towel. Fat control is easy enough to get what you need or like
3. Return the meat to the pan and add the seasoning packet(s) and water. Here’s where I diverge from the packet directions. I add a good bit more water because the meat picks up more flavor as you must simmer it longer to get the right amount of sauce I like a little sauce and the packet directions are for a drier result. My batches take 20-25 minutes to simmer down (low heat) and the packet is about 5 minutes, IIRC.
4. Near the end, with about 5 minutes to go, I add diced onions and some masa harina to thicken the sauce. I like sauce but not watery sauce, and we both like onions, but they kick our ass with indigestion, so cooking them down just a smidge with the meat takes the edge off of the raw onions and avoids heartburn.
That’s it. The taco meat goes into a storage container and when you’re ready for a taco salad, scoop out the serving of meat that you want and nuke it in a bowl just prior to building your salad.
@EM, then 6 or more tablespoons it will be, one per beer!
I will experiment tonight during the fantasy football draft party ;-)
Thank you all, wait, thank y’all for your comments. I’ve found much to analyze in all this. I don’t need the heart information; my total cholesterol is only 122 and there is no plaque in the carotid arteries or heart. :- ) The carbs/ketones/glucose/keto reading, though, will keep me busy for some time.
A couple of notes on diuretics (my son had severe CHF (due to WPW) that was almost fatal, so he’s had almost all of the various meds/tests/etc.
There are some diuretics that cause potassium loss, while others cause potassium retention. This needs to be monitored, otherwise hypo-/hyperkalemia can result. Other heart meds also affect this (hence the need to check electrolyte levels periodically).
The other, possibly critical point is, some diuretics, in particular Lasix (Furosemid) in combination with some families of antibiotics (especially aminoglycosides, the -mycins) are SEVERELY ototoxic. One would think that all cardios/internists would be aware of this, but sometimes they’re not. Fortunately there are later-generation versions of the antibiotics available, but it pays to ask/research before it’s too late.
Here’s a good reseach paper on ototoxicity and various meds and combinations thereof:
Click to access 956.pdf
I have a friend who is a pharmacist, who rants about drug interactions and how unaware some doctors are about various combinations of drugs. He suggests talking to your pharmacist (bring a list of all medications to get them to do an interaction review)
There are also online systems to flag drug interactions.
( a quick search brings up dozens of links for online checking your meds.)
https://www.walgreens.com/pharmacy/pharmacy_chat_landing.jsp
https://www.webmd.com/interaction-checker/default.htm
https://www.cvs.com/drug/interaction-checker
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/watchdog/druginteractions/ct-drug-interactions-pharmacies-osco-met-20170812-story.html
More and more research is also linking carbs and insulin resistance to Alzheimer’s disease as well. It’s now being called type 3 diabetes by some.
Insulin is a hormone that up-regulates the enzyme involved in putting fatty acids into fat storage and down-regulates the enzyme involved in taking fatty acids out of storage. So in essence insulin locks fat into storage reservoirs and it can’t be easily accessed. That’s a major reason why carb-dependent athletes hit a wall or “bonk” when they have exhausted their glycogen stores and why fat people with high insulin levels have difficulty losing weight. Those immense reservoirs of fat can’t be easily accessed for use in energy production.
Now when a person is insulin resistant to whatever degree, the brain cells are also insulin resistant. By the way, it turns out the brain can make its own insulin independent of the pancreas. When the brain tissue is insulin resistant, glucose has difficulty getting into brain cells for production of energy and if fat stores are locked in and can’t be accessed for ketone production the brain cells are deprived of energy. Now damage results, dendrites and axons shrink increasing the synapse space and short-circuiting impulse transmission. If the problem is severe enough some neurons will begin to die.
Now it looks like beta-amyloid plaque is not the cause of the disease but a downstream effect that worsens the disease and hastens the progression. Everyone continuously produces this plaque and it appears to have a protective purpose. It turns out that there is an enzyme that degrades this plaque and prevents it from building- up excessively but this enzyme’s primary purpose is degrading insulin, otherwise it would build-up non-stop in the bloodstream until it dropped your blood sugar to zero and killed you. This enzyme is appropriately named “insulin degrading enzyme” and it’s most urgent purpose is to clear insulin. So when a person always has a lot of insulin going-on all of the enzyme reserve is busy with the insulin and none available to clear the plaque. This plaque which is a sticky substance then envelops the cells in the brain as it builds-up further preventing nutrient inflow.
So here insulin is a double whammy, first as insulin resistance develops by depriving brain cells of glucose and preventing access to ketones, and then later allowing the beta-amyloid build-up.
I could go on about other things such as how insulin prevents your brain from reading the leptin hormone signal and the downstream effects of that, but this is enough.
One thing is clear to me. We weren’t designed for an environment in which there was ready access to a large amount of carbs all the time and our body is not structured in a metabolic and physiological sense to thrive in such an environment. I also think that insulin resistance evolved to serve a survival purpose in the context in which humans lived for most of the specie’s history.
If you picture a band of ancient humans wandering about in nature living off what they could kill or find and gather, then carbs were only abundant for a short period of time at the end of summer. That includes fruit. Now, it turns out that even though fructose in the bloodstream does not elicit an insulin response, nothing makes you insulin resistant faster than fructose. That’s because in the process of your liver turning fructose into fat a byproduct is uric acid and uric acid is somehow involved in a powerful way in increasing insulin resistance. In fact, after just one meal containing a large amount of fructose the increase in insulin resistance can actually be measured.
This is where the survival mechanism comes in. Not only do you rapidly store fat in this state but insulin’s interference with the leptin satiety signal in your brain keeps you hungry and eating. This way you store a lot of fat in a short time and prepared for the possible food shortages in the winter. Animals that hibernate or semi-hibernate go through this very same process and become insulin resistant late in summer.
Obviously, carbs including fruit are available every day of the year at the supermarket and the government and health professionals have told us to eat lots and that they should make up 60% or more of our diet. Nonsense! Health crippling, sickness and death inducing advise but big pharma and big food industries are making a killing!
And the thing is, there was never any science behind the nutrition advice. It started with one man named Ancel Keyes in 1953 who knew little of human metabolism but was a specialist in fish physiology. His single study was at worst fraudulent and at best biased with cherry-picked data. When a United States Senate committee accepted his recommendations in the 1970’s and came up with the recommended food pyramid it became dogma without evidence and just as in the global warming charade critics were slandered, ostracized, couldn’t get published and were quickly silenced.
You have an unspoken assumption in your comment above, you blame the problems on high intake of carbohydrates. Why is this not a problem in societies which practically live on very high carbohydrate diets? Japanese and other asian cultures fish and rice with a few other things thrown in. Much of Mexico and latin america, rice, beans and corn very little meat and a bit of lard, Irish before the potato famine practically 100% of their calorie intake was potatoes.
In asia a culture that has huge carbohydrate intake in the form or rice, diabetes was not a problem until very recently. Obviously the problem is not carbohydrates per-se. as diabetes was not common until very recently. Same goes for Alzheimer’s disease. If just carbohydrate intake was the primary cause those cultures would have had problems with both diabetes and azhiemer’s disease for a very long time but it is rather a recent issue.
I would contend that the issue is not carbohydrate intake as a percentage of the diet but how you eat it. In hard working rural cultures where folks worked off their carbo intake or might miss a meal or two or have long periods of low food intake you would have the ability for the insulin sensitivity to reset due to frequent short term fasting and depletion of blood sugar due to heavy work load.
I contend the problem is never getting hungry or missing a meal. Folks who have regular food intake (same time every day) no long fasting periods (midnight snacks) etc. Never get the chance to allow the body to reset insulin sensitivity which as is now well known happens naturally during intermittent fasting. Once the gap between meal increases beyond 6 – 8 hours there is a clear tendency to stabilize blood sugar, and allow the insulin sensitivity to stabilize to normal sensitivity.
It is my belief diabetes and Alzheimer’s are life style syndromes not diet syndromes. The human body is enormously adaptable and if given a chance tries really hard to achieve homeostasis and re-center itself to normal behavior. It is only when we push it out of its natural cycles that we get into trouble. Shift work, short sleep cycles that constantly change etc.
In the natural world where we evolved over the last 2.5 million+ years signature charcteristics of life was periods of food abundance intermixed with extremely lean times, very hard intense work loads and in the winter months periods where little outside activity was possible due to cold or rainfall etc. Only in the modern world do we have a life style where every morning you get up, eat the same breakfast at the same time every day, munch on a doughnut when you arrive at the office, go to lunch at exactly the same time every day much on some nuts out of the junk food machine in the afternoon, get dinner at the same time every day, have a late night snack before you go to bed, wake up at 2:00 am and raid the fridge – then repeat. The body never really quits eating and processing food, there is almost no over night fast any more for most people and even those who don’t raid the fridge at night they literally almost never really get hungry.
Many ancient societies had carbo rich diets for thousands of years and those diseases were mostly limited to the extreme rich of the upper cast and monarchy.
A legitimate counter to that is that the shorter life span made end of life deseases less common, but even in the 1700’s a significant number of people lived well into their 80’s and early 90’s, the statistical short life span was mostly due to high mortality of the young.
I strongly recommend microwave cooking.
I suffer a cardiac insufficiency, and now I have an implanted automatic defribillator.
I was obese also, but in the last year I have lost 40 kilograms eating the food you mention in the article cooked in the microwave, and using only virgin olive oil in little quantities, helped by an hour of walking every day.
Ray’s information was very interesting as to how things work, but I think Larry hit the nail on the head here. What changed? It wasn’t so much what was eaten, but the constant availability of food these days. There might be a link as well to the gut biome, given that over-use of antibiotics tends to reduce the variety of the gut bacteria. I recall experiments on mice where by swapping the gut bacteria with that from fat mice and lean mice, the fatness/leanness could be transferred too.
Maybe therefore one thing to avoid would be GM corn with the BT toxin built-in. That may mean avoiding eating animals that eat it, too. Not enough information on that at the moment, so regard that as a hunch that may never get the data to prove it. Avoiding sugary stuff would be good, but it seems very difficult for some people, but it seems any other natural sweeteners (Stevia, Liquorice) have some medical effects too. Artificial sweeteners definitely a no-no, and I suspect Aspartame may be a carcinogen anyway.
EM’s strategy for diet looks logical. Maybe also add in the odd fasting periods from Larry, since that does seem to reset the body. I tend to have one meal in the evening at the moment – maybe not the best time to eat but I don’t get hungry during the day – maybe the odd biscuit or a few handfuls of peanuts at lunchtime, but mostly making sure I drink enough water. For people that do, maybe something that’s filling without providing a lot of sugars energy could be useful, and oats seem to be a good source of longer-term energy and fibre.
I don’t really have a lot of knowledge on diet, which is why I didn’t add to this string before. Larry’s comment however made sense to me and suggests ways to repair the damage by allowing the body to repair itself.
If people are hooked on fizzy drinks, maybe get fizzy water and use fruit-juice in it. There’ll be some sugar in that, but far less than Coke or similar. Of course, avoid the normal “diet” drinks since the artificial sweeteners may be more biologically active than is admitted. I buy a low-minerals water for the morning coffee (keeps the kettle clean) and use fizzy water (medium/high mineral content) for the drinks during the day. Water from the tap has too much Calcium and too much Chlorine to be a good idea to drink it except when there’s no choice.
@Jeff:
CHF – congestive heart failure.
WPW? Wolff Parkinson White?
https://medlineplus.gov/ency/article/000151.htm
Hope all is well now.
FWIW, hearing loss from drugs is common. Even regular aspirin makes you more sensitive to noise induced loss. As a partially deaf person, it is one of my hot buttons…
@H.R.:
Yeah, Big B is something I take often. Given the mineral supplement the friend got in hospital I’ve got to review vitamin & mineral sources and supplements.
Thanks for the recipe. I make a similar taco meat from scratch, but as a dumper I have nothing written down and can’t say how to make it! If I need to tell someone, then I usually make a couple of batches and take notes… Things like “it was about a tbs of Comino…”
@Larry:
Thanks for the links!
Drug interactions and side effects being ignored is a major irritation at M.D.s for me. One friend is on a few meds one of which makes her a bit loopy… so they gave another med for that, that makes her stupider but quieter… Spouse’s mom was on a cocktail of stuff and we changed doctors (broke a leg and was in a facility so a staff doctor). She (the doctor) removed all meds to find out the actual symptoms, and then only about 1/2 of them were restarted with a few changes (the rest had been treating the drug effects they were causing…) At that point the MIL was far less loopy…(Went from hearing things and shouting for the police to just some memory loss / mild dementia.) Then there’s that whole thing of most school mass shootings being done by kids on SSRI drugs where one of the list side-effects is suicidal ideation… Another friend has gone from smart and crisp engineer type to self-absorbed emotive on some psych med (for depression) and we’ve drifted apart. He’s just not the same person on the meds ( cycled on and off a couple of times then on long term; then the drift apart… so I got to see on/off comparisons.)
IMHO we are a way-over-medicated society.
@Ray W:
I had a thread some long time ago about fructose. There’s a study that found it triggered you to eat more… my speculation being as you described: End of summer time to stock up for winter eat all the sweet stuff you can and pork up signal.
What’s missing now is the forced fasting / starvation to shift back to the “burn it up” half cycle.
I’d heard of the Type 3 idea, but not seen the proposed metabolic series. Interesting process / cycle. Folks often talk about a brain fog post binge effect (the infamous post Thanksgiving Dinner sleep fest in the living room ;-) and now I’m wondering if they are related.
Nature is a penny pincher – so if there was no NEED for a self-limit on eating, it would not evolve one nor preserve one that existed. For most of history “food excess” just didn’t exist and it took hours to collect some carbs.
@Larry:
To your points: I agree that it’s a “too much too often” issue not just a kind issue. That’s why I’ve stated “carbs to the amount you can burn up in a day”. It’s the excess carbs that’s the issue.
For me, I have dinner and them I’m generally done for the day. Often have morning coffee but don’t eat anything until about 10 A.M. ( I’ll have a 12 to 14 hour fasting period most days). It seems to work better for me. Most carbs I’ll have with breakfast is 2 slices of buttered toast (something about egg yolks that just really wants some buttered toast to sop it up ;-) Last night, for example, “dinner” was at 4 pm (a bit early but that’s when it was possible). Nothing since then, and headed for about a 10 am breakfast (if I ever get up an make coffee ;-) Yet even with a fast of about 15 hours so far I’m only a little hungry. I’ll wait until I’m really interested before I make breakfast. I think that’s an important point.
A couple of “pudgy people” I know have 2 behaviors that look causal to me.
1) Lack of a fasting period (lots of little snacks).
2) Very large portions. Why make one giant burrito when you can make two? Often the added calories in are “on the sly” or fooling themselves. One girl I remember stated she didn’t eat to excess but then put a few spoons of sour cream on her “wrap” (washed down with a ‘diet’ soda) and then after this “modest” meal managed to stuff in some desert cream filled snacks. Total calories way more than I ate at the same meal even though I had a “larger” meal.
I don’t know if it is a metabolically caused excess hunger feeling, lack of saity signal, or what; but clearly they are not comfortable with a long daily fast and “eat only enough” at the meal. (I suspect a big sugar load at b’fast with blood sugar crash by dinner and attempt to compensate. My b’fast habits are more eggs ‘n bacon as the sugar bowls are just too much carbs / sugar for me…)
@Heber:
Thanks for the “testimonial”! Nice to know it worked. Microwaves are a mixed blessing. They do break down multiple bonds, so can break down things like Vitamin K (that we have so much of in our diets nobody needs a supplement) and can cause some foods problems ( breads become bricks); yet for a fast “no frying” meal can work wonders on other foods.
I’ve from the “all modes” of cooking school. Microwave is one of them. Used every day, but along with the steamer and oven and fry pan and boiling and… One of my favorite uses we’ve taken to calling a “jump start”. So if making a “loaded baked potato” for dinner, if plenty of time we’ll bake it in the regular oven. Fluffier and more even. If just a few minutes, nuke in the microwave. But in between… We’ll do it about 1/2 way in the microwave then let it finish for 20 to 30 minutes in the regular oven. Best of both worlds!
Microwaved veggies are great and no water leaching of nutrients…
@Simon:
I dropped sodas for fizzy water ( Calistoga!) Good stuff and ends heartburn too. ) and then moved to just plain water. Now I only drink water or unsweet iced tea with meals. Even beer or coffee are too ‘rich’ with food.
Note too that Scots & Oats were not a problem until recently.
IMHO it is a balance thing. IF the carbs are in balance with your daily burn, you are OK. If always to excess, the body runs out of places to store it and you end up in a metabolic no-mans-land we were not built to handle.
Oh, and I’ve noticed that sometimes when I feel hungry, I’m really dehydrated. I suspect the body confounds hungry and thirsty. That would make sense as lots of foods have moisture in them, so “eat or drink something” would be the preferred activity. I wonder to what extend folks feel hungry by really just need water.
Not only salicylates do that, by the way. Acetaminophen can do it as well as all of the non-steroidal anti-inflammatory agents. All of these, too, by the way, can cause kidney failure. [As can excessive vitamin C and other plant derived chemicals that get metabolized into oxalic acid.]
I’ve been on prednisone from time to time, once for an acoustic neuronitis that caused a temporary partial deafness. I’ve mentioned being on sulfasalazine, which I’m now into the 21st year of taking it. I have permanent tinnitus as a result and kidney stones as a result (all known potential complications … so ye take yer chances … you’re going to die of something, some day and most likely long before you get to 120 … and the span of man’s years shall be 120). Throwing that clot last week was a reminder. In the old days, that clot would have either killed me in the first hour after lodging in my lungs, or the pneumonia would have gotted me within 3 days, or some predator would have caught me and eaten me.
Personally, I’m far more happy to shuffle off this mortal coil from the ‘diseases of long life’, than from being eaten after being cut/crushed/suffocated.
Oh, that’s another thing … over medication. Was the doctor older or younger? MD/DOs used to be taught to minimize multi-drug regimens, given the greater and mostly unknown risks, unless the person being treated had a higher than usual number of conditions to treat and the treatments didn’t overlap enough, such that the choices were limited among the various modalities and you had to seek the lesser evils among the batch. I am wondering if today’s ‘avoid surgery’ fad and nurse practitioner fad, given that nurse practitioners ‘have to go by the book’ and have lesser training in how to choose among alternatives, has added to the over-medication.
I think the saity thing is partially a genetic bias. When I was a kid I was constantly the last one to finish eating and having my parents tell me to eat all that was on my plate. I would eat until I was no longer hungry and would have been quite happy to just walk away from the table. Maybe dogs are a good example, I know some dogs that as long as you put food down, they will keep eating it, others will eat until they are satisfied (like cats) and leave the rest of the food in the bowl and go do something else.
As mentioned above part of the problem is too large portions in restaurants. When I go to a restaurant, I will eat until I feel stuffed pack up the left overs and take them home and might get 2 and sometimes 3 light meals out of the left overs. A single classic Arby’s roast beef sandwich or two Taco Bell’s beef tacos are a full meal for me, I simply don’t want any more after eating that amount of food.
My breakfast alternates between 2 eggs scrambled and about 4-6 ounces of milk to on other days just the milk and two pieces of toast.
I gain weight if I eat over about 1200 calories a day. If I am being a pig, I will eat 1600-1800 calories a day (actual food diary based numbers). I can get by not feeling really hungry on 800 calories a day for a couple days before the hunger signal turns on and really forces me to down a big meal.
Pizza – usually one large slice occasionally 2 slices and I am done.
Last night when I got home from work (11:00 pm) I had 3 slices of bread topped with tuna fish salad and 6 oz of milk (small can of tuna, a large spoon of sweet relish and a spoon of Kraft Miracle whip.) It is 8:06 am and I have not eaten anything since I got up and am not really hungry, will probably fix breakfast about 11:00 am or so. Occasionally I don’t have breakfast until 2:00 in the afternoon on my days off.
My breakfast yesterday was 6 oz of milk as I left for work, lunch yesterday at work was 1/2 of a BBQ beef sandwich, and I had perhaps 3 cokes during the day.
Occasionally I will simply go off feed and might go 36 hours before I realize I have not had anything to eat except something to drink.
Other people I know have to eat a big meal every 4 – 6 hours or they get headaches or feel shaky. I am sure some of that is conditioning but I am also quite sure that some of that is driven by genetics.
And a reminder about the SSRI kids. They’re on them because they were not only having suicidal ideation, they were acting on it, most of the time. It has been known for decades that a person with a clinically significant depression episode is thinking about suicide but doesn’t have the will to do it. When they start coming out of it, whether by talk therapy or drugs or both, there is a period of time where the thoughts remain but the will to act resumes. That’s the most likely time the affected person will do harm to themselves or others. In the old days, these people were in institutions, and for the most part could be gotten past that without doing any harm. Today, these people are not in institutions, so some of them do have the opportunity to do harm and successfully do it.
Remember how the FDA works. The side effect listing includes all signs and symptoms that the treated person is having, whether they were due to the disease or not, while taking the pharmaceutical.
@Larry, that’s about the most efficient metabolism story that I’ve ever heard of. Flip side is that the bigger you are, the more you must eat to maintain your body; yet the tiny person will have to eat relatively more than the bigger one just to maintain body temperature if they don’t dress properly. Heat loss is proportional to surface area/volume.
I’d say that if you are an ‘eat like a bird’ person, and there are such, you do need to eat a little, more often, but mostly not more than over 12 hours.
Pick your poison. 4 to 6 small meals over 12 hours or two to 3 larger ones over 12 hours. If you want the overnight fast to be longer, shorten the meal times. For me, more than 12 to 14 hours fasting leaves me hungrier the next day. Given that, it is too easy to overcompensate.
I am trying to lose some weight. I have been losing some successfully and want to lose about 10 to 15 pound more then try to maintain that weight. When I have had to take prednisone, I always gain weight while on it. The longer I have to take it, the greater the gain. Once off it, I start losing weight naturally, but to get back to the previous level takes work. Not that I mind work :).
@E.M. re taco meat batch: You’ve discussed making taco fillings and have mentioned you and the Mrs. having a ‘taco’ night. You know which end of the spoon to hold. That was for your friend. The injected chicken breasts were, too.
Add some tortillas (I’m buying the ones made with lard from now on) to that ‘grocery list’ of pile-on toppings, and a quick burrito or quesadilla can be made for a change of pace.
Here are three more food items from Costco that can help your disinterested-in-cooking friend and I’m pretty sure they will be on the approved diet.
Costco has a box of hard-boiled eggs that I buy: 16 packages of two eggs per pack for about $10(?) bucks. They are long-dated because you only open a pack of two at a time and the rest stay sealed. My wife likes them because she can slice two eggs and throw on a couple of slices of whole wheat toast (find the no-added-sugar type, which is what I buy. We also slice them up to throw on top of a chef salad.
They also have a bag of pre-cooked frozen, sausages that are supposedly free of any horrifying additives. Wrap a few in a paper towel, nuke ’em for 1-2 minutes, and you can have sausage, eggs, and toast in minutes with virtually no fuss.
The last item is their roasted chicken. They are huge! I cut off the leg quarters for one meal for us. Then I remove the breast portions and either cube them up for a chef salad or to make chicken salad or I take a fork and shred the breasts up. The shredded meat can be used for sandwiches, or simmered briefly with (good ol’!) Taco Bell seasoning and water for making chicken quesadillas or chicken burritos. If there’s a sugar-free barbecue sauce out there, the shredded chicken can be mixed with that to make pulled chicken for sandwiches.
I know Larry has posted a few things he makes in batches and of course there’s p.g.’s famous “Breakfast of Champions” oatmeal cookies. And I know you have some batch dishes you’ve mentioned here and there.
Soooo… just my opinion based on what you wrote about your friend…
1. Print out a grocery list of approved mix-n-match ready-to-go items
2. Print out a few E-Z to make batch base meat/protein recipes
3. Print out a list of suggested meals that can be made by mixing and matching the base items and the ready-to-go items.
You’re probably two steps ahead of me on getting your friend set up for “after the chef (you) leaves the kitchen” and have already done something similar to what I’ve suggested. I wrote all that as a ‘just-in-case’ you had other things you were occupied with.
You don’t need cooking lessons 😜 but perhaps there were a couple of ideas there that you deem E-Z enough for your friend. I don’t know what you’re up against, but it can’t be worse than my wife. She does not cook, but she can do assembly work.
Fish should be in there but I have no clue how to work up something E-Z that your friend would mess with. I’m sure you’ll have that covered, though.
Haber Rizzo says: ” I have lost 40 kilograms”
When a person drops weight rapidly (I don’t know the specifics, but I lost 25 pounds in 25 days), the muscles of the abdominal wall, known by the name Hesselbach’s triangle, can weaken.
This is a common site for a hernia. Just walking across a room might be enough to tear the muscles. The sigmoid colon (pelvic colon) is behind this triangle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inguinal_hernia#Direct_inguinal_hernia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inguinal_triangle
On the quick easy food makings a couple things I have found.
In Walmart over near the tuna fish display you will find cans of pre-cooked roast beef (and other meats) by keystone.
labels look like this: (they also have smaller 14.5 ounce cans, and the flat Great Value cans are 12 oz)
https://www.walmart.com/ip/Keystone-All-Natural-Beef-28-Oz/22309254
quick video review of the keystone canned meats
Looks a bit like dog food when you first open the can but if you put in a sauce pan and heat and the fat melts and it is real honest to god roast beef pieces. For Taco Tortilla filling you want to simmer it a bit and pull it apart with forks to give you shredded pulled beef. You may want to pick over it a bit there are sometimes a few small pieces of gristle in the meat which I pull out) add some onion bits and some small diced tomatoes then package it in zip lock bags and toss in the freezer. Instant microwave beef taco filling, add a couple spoons of refried beans and a tortilla shell, and a slurp of hot sauce. I also pack small packages of fresh cooked rice which I toss in the freezer. Reheated in the microwave to the point the zip lock bag swells and almost pops from the steam and let steep for a minute and it is like fresh cooked rice.
I also sometimes take one of the canned chili products and a few spoons of that along with the rice and beef/onion/tomato pouch and you have a meal that takes just about 3-5 minutes to fix.
But by pre-packaging some of the fixings in the freezer it makes it very quick and easy to make a decent meal for one.
https://keystonemeats.com/all-recipes/
@DQuarles:
MIL had 3 or 4 different doctors for different things. Each prescribing (but I doubt reading the record or familiar with drugs they didn’t use). Then broke a leg in a fall… At the rehab hospital, she had one, young, woman doctor who got a good look at the whole list… It was her job to manage it all. She said “What the?” as yet another “something” happened (Paranoid delusions). As that was a potential side effect of things being taken, Ms. Dr. decided to start from a clean slate and not from 20 years accumulated habits / old prescriptions.
IMHO, it was the “many specialists no one in charge of the patient” that was the issue.
@All:
BTW, Florida Friend just walked into his home and is now in his recliner watching his TV… Things going very well.
@H.R.:
My problem is exactly as you observed. I know but I’m not sure what to tell him since he does NOT know. I’m pretty sure I can work it out, but… Things like “make hard boiled eggs” is trivial to me. I’d never ever think of buying them pre-made. Yet your point fits his style better than making hard boiled eggs at home…
It is that complete lack of familiarity with how non-cooks feed themselves that’s an issue for me.
I’d pondered the idea of some kind of printed guides, but not got to the specifics yet. Only now starting the meals prep design process.
@E.M.: Larry had some good ones, but I really liked his idea of portion control using ziplocs AND that he freezes them. That’s way better than the plastic containers in the fridge that I do. It probably leaves a few servings of this and that as ’emergency rations’ if your friend decides he’s not up to making a new batch of something.
You might start thinking about a list of things like the canned meat and the Costco roast chicken instead of YF (Your Friend) cooking the anchor dish. Then just write some meal ideas that say, “Use this, this, and that to make, chef salad, or burrito, or whatever.”
My thinking would be, from his approved or encouraged list, identify what can be bought already made or that requires minimal prep to to have a supply of ready-to-assemble ingredients on hand. The crockpot is a good idea to aid in making batches without really cooking.
Then you, a cook, look at the list to create appealing meals – like a restaurant menu – and list the meals. I think that’s where non-cooks fail. My wife can look in the loaded pantry, fridge, and freezer and say with a straight face, “What’s for dinner?” having no clue as to what all that stuff makes.
I think that’s the key. Make the list of stuff to buy, and don’t ask let him ask why he’s buying it. You figure out a bunch of meals. Then list the items to assemble for that meal. Last, you’ll only need minimal cooking how-tos to make a few items on his bill of materials.
If you get the chance, and there’s a Costco nearby, cruise through with a different eye; not your cook’s eye, but a “hey-a-bag-of-this-will-keep-for-a-month-and can-make-foo” eye. Same for the local grocery store.
For YFs health sake, the recommended and Dr. approved grocery list will make it easy to check the larder/freezer inventory, shop efficiently for missing items, and always be able to assemble a meal from his custom ‘restaurant’ menu.
P.S. My wife spotted the bag of heat-n-eat sausages in Costco. Oh, and they have microwave bacon there too, It never occurred to me to buy some; walked right on by. I buy fresh sausage or bacon and cook them up. Cook’s Disease, you could call it. Causes blindness to cooking shortcuts in the refrigerated/freezer section at the grocery store. 😜
@Larry L, you suggest microwaving in the ziplock bags. There was a fuss about that in Australia about 25 years ago because it was reckoned that the plastic could give off carcinogenic chemicals when exposed to the microwaves. I asked my brother who has a degree in organic chemistry from Cambridge University what they might be. His answer has stayed with me because I thought it was funny. “Well, I don’t know, but it may be polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons”. [Maybe I have a weird sense of humour].
I just got off the Ziploc® bag site and they say it is OK to microwave food in them as directed. They recommend venting slightly and placing the bag of food on a microwave safe plate.
I think some of the plastic bags are formulated differently from 25 years ago. It will probably say on the box if you’re buying some that are OK for microwaving.
Those single serving pull top cans of pork and beans and Bush’s Baked beans are along with the little fruit cups like diced cling peaches and apple sauce another super idea for the single guy who does not want to screw with cooking.
I also use lots of instant mashed potatoes. I only use the Idahoan brand, and prepare as follows.
I have a small screw on top tupperware type container made by Ziplock ( 2 cup size – these are perfect for zapping something in the microwave.)
I take 1/3 cup of flakes put in the container then put in 1/3 cup or water (add all at once and stir to wet all the flakes) put the top on loosely and place in microwave and zap for 30 seconds and just let it sit there while you fix the other parts of the meal. When ready to serve take the top off and smack it on the plate open end down and it will drop a hockey puck sized lump of steaming hot mashed potatoes. Mixed this way it is a pretty dry mix (not the usual runny sludge) I take the puck and using my hands pack it into a baked potato sized lozenge on the plate and drop a pat of butter on the top and a bit of salt and pepper. By letting it rest a bit in the microwave and then hand packing it, you come out with a good approximation of a baked potato (not identical but good enough when you are hungry)
One of my problems is since I eat such small meals is how do I serve myself vegetables. I like whole kernel corn and french cut green beans as side veggies and buy them in the standard sized cans rather than the single serving cans (much cheaper per serving). I open the can and spoon out several heaping spoons of the veggie well drained from the can plop it in those same screw top ziplock 2 cup containers and heat, cover the can with saran wrap and put it in the fridge. I get 2-4 side servings of veggies per can that way with essentially zero fuss. If I am motivated I might pour the can out into another one of the ziplock containers but since it only stays in the fridge for a couple days, covering the can with plastic wrap works just fine for me.
I’m not into rabbit food much so don’t make complex salads. Occasionally I will buy the smallest firm head of lettuce I can find in the cooler and slice off a couple thin slices and chop them, toss them in a bowel and dribble some salad dressing on them. The full head seems to keep longer than the pre-chopped lettuce in bags and given the recent food contamination issues with precut lettuce I am more comfortable with doing like my Mom and pulling the outer leaves off a head of lettuce and cutting off what I need and wrapping the rest in plastic wrap and putting it back in the fridge.
If I am ambitious I will buy a small bag of the baby carrots and use a food grater to shred them on the top of the salad and that is about as complex as i get.
I will occasionally fix a can of Campbell’s vegetable soup ( I prefer the vegetarian vegetable) if I feel I need to add some additional vegetables to my diet.
V8 juice and CranGrape juice are also handy for a bit of quick fruit sides along with applesauce cups and the cling peaches cups I mentioned above. Fresh fruits and veggies are just too much work to fix and don’t last long in the fridge so I end up throwing most of them away. The baby carrots keep well and whole black olives keep in the fridge for a very long time and add a bit of variety to a meal.
I think the main issue with the plastic bags, is if you you heat fatty foods in them. The fat gets extremely hot and can melt the plastic. I use interrupted microwave heating with two or three cycles of only 10-15 seconds, and pause the heating if I hear the food starting to pop (that is a sign the fatty parts are getting really hot.)
I often buy a take out pizza and eat my usual one or two slices then stick all the rest of the slices in individual zip lock bags while they are still warm and fresh and toss in the freezer. To reheat – zap several short bursts of about 10 seconds and let rest for 20 between bursts or so until the bag starts to puff up from the heat expansion of the trapped air. (I always pause when it gets hot enough to pop and avoid too long a heating pulse, as it turns the bread crust into tough shoe leather)
It is almost as good as fresh, but if you fail to let it rest between the heat cycles the frozen pizza will have a frozen or cold spot in the center even though the edges are too hot to handle.
‘My problem is exactly as you observed. I know but I’m not sure what to
tell him since he does NOT know. I’m pretty sure I can work it out, but…
Things like “make hard boiled eggs” is trivial to me. I’d never ever think
of buying them pre-made. Yet your point fits his style better than making
hard boiled eggs at home…’
Small hills not mountains, I guess, EM. Teach him how to cook three
simple nutritious meals that can be a basis of a weekly menu, eggs,
meat for grilling, frozen mixed vegetable to steam, maybe start breakfast
with half an orange. A pre-dinner scotch-on-the-rocks to keep his spirits up. )
Great Information! Maryellen McGrath
My doctor says that some folks are extremely sensitive to salt (heart, blood pressure issues), and others are not. So, I don’t think there is a blanket answer to the salt question. I would definitely go less salt unless told otherwise.
@H.R.:
Good recommendations. I admit I can’t look at microwave bacon and see a “feature” in it…
I’m probably going to be there again about December for a “refresher” and QA check; then add some more detail / structure. Things were a bit rushed / hectic last time as, well, he was being surgered upon…
I generally avoid the pre-made pre-packaged stuff (especially for specialty diets) as they just all tend to have so much of the forbidden crap in them. Today I was at Trader Joe’s. Nice house brand Asian pre-made bag of food. (Several kinds, I was some chicken and vegeable mix thing I was looking at). This is a health food store. It’s all holistic yoga chicken and heirloom snap peas… and then there was “soybean oil”… As part of the “no no list” is seed oils, and they are in just about every single factory packaged food; well, it’s going to be quite difficult to search out the good stuff.
Doesn’t mean I won’t try. I did find sardine fillets in olive oil at Costco, after all ;-)
Per Plastics:
Not all plastics are created equal. I used different ones for different things. Some Very Special plastic bags made of specialty high temperature plastics can be microwaved with hot food / oils in them. TV Dinner trays and plastic overwrap for example. Pretty much every single “Rubbermaid” like food storage tub is NOT that kind. They will leach plasticizers into your food and hot oil will pit and stain them. I regularly use them to store food in the fridge or freezer, just put it in ceramic to heat it…
Since I don’t EAT from the plastic bag, I see no added work from putting it in a bowl or one a plate then microwaving. (I do have a plastic cover for the plate from a “microwave on the road” plate and cover set bought years ago – so I don’t have to jury rig a plate cover).
Oh, and I also only by “Freezer Bags” as they are tougher and thicker, but also more expensive. It’s a lot easier to just put leftovers in the re-used KFC tubs that go through the dishwasher anyway, and they do heat well in the microwave. KFC marks these as reusable as a feature, BTW. Despite going a lot less than we used to go, we do still sometimes grab a bucket w /sides. Then I save the plastic tubs and tops. We now have an entire box of them and I’ve stopped saving any more. My plastic bag bill is now near zero… Those KFC tubs are tough and heat proof in the microwave. Even have a nice little pin-hole vent middle of the lid (so don’t turn upside down filled with olives & canning juices…) so steam doesn’t build up.
@Larry:
Buy a flat of pint canning jars. Ought to be about $10. You now have a dozen nice glass storage jars that will take your 3/4 of a can of beans or corn or whatever and a sealing lid to match. As long as they are never actually canned, you can just rinse the lid and reuse it. If desired, for something like $2.59 you can get a package of a half dozen plastic screw on lids at Walmart in the canning section… Just rinse and reuse forever.
IF you regularly use 1/2 the can, buy the cup sized jars instead. Each one holds 1/2 can…
I did that for a few decades until we started saving the (New! Improved!) KFC tubs a few years back. Now I use them most of the time. Just about as good though not entirely air sealed and the do leak if inverted.
You need not keep buying Saran wrap ;-) (Nor dealing with that whole clingy thing problem…)
Salad adjuncts for a lettuce base can be very quick and easy. Take a carrot, scrape with the back of a knife. Now use your potato peeler to slice of thin wafers of it into your salad. The rest can go in a tub in the refrigerator. Add a couple of olives ( I put a can in a tub then use a few every day for weeks – then repeat) and a sprinkle over of shredded or grated cheese if you like. For fancy days, peel and quarter an egg, or add some avocado slices (other 1/2 avocado in tube in fridge, next day cut of browned edge and remove pit, use other half for omelette topper or another salad), or take a slice of sandwich ham, roll it up, cut lengthwise, stack, chop end to end into small bits and place on salad… You can also sprinkle on nuts or croutons if you like, or cube up a bit of left over chicken from last nights dinner…
@Beththeserf:
Bingo! A small set of skills, easily mastered, and FAST prep time as he’s not “into it”. Then variations based on changing one or two ingredients through similar kinds (so easy to grasp and not much else to deal with like ‘adjust seasonings’…).
We’ll add complexity later.
Oh, and yeah, the Scotch is a KEY part of recovery ;-) and “instructional motivation” 8-}
@Dorothy Grover-Reed:
He’s got a BP cuff and records it daily, so salt sensitivity can be measured and adjusted accordingly. Better to measure and know than take blanket action and hope.
I like pink salt. I heard it has approximately 40 micro nutrients. What are some benefits of salt?