Sugar

Beating Bipolar with nutrition

Bipolar is bad.  I have friends diagnosed with Bipolar.  Forbes has a terrific feature article by Michael Ellsberg, a young man with a devastating history of Bipolar II.  He spent years with psychiatrists doing psychotherapy.

"I asked the psychiatrist I was seeing at the time whether he thought there was any link between dietary habits and mental health. He looked at me as though I had just asked whether there was any link between mental health and UFO rectal probes. “There is absolutely no evidence of any link whatsoever between dietary choices and mental health,” he said curtly, and changed the subject."

With the help of Dr. Ron Hoffman -- a paleo-friendly doctor right here in NYC -- he gave up sugar, alcohol, and coffee for one year.

"The first two weeks of the quest were hell. The alcohol wasn’t that hard—I had been a mostly well-behaved social drinker throughout my twenties—but the coffee and sugar got to me. All I could think about was coffee and sugar. Coffee sugar coffee sugar coffee sugar. It was like being extremely horny, except for coffee and sugar instead of sex. Coffee sugar coffee sugar coffee sugar—thoughts on instant replay in my mind 24/7, even in my dreams. Headaches, fatigue, depression, haze. I almost gave up the challenge on several occasions during that first two weeks.

But I knew this was something I had to do, if I wanted to stay alive.

One morning, two weeks into the challenge, I woke up. The haze in my mind had lifted. It was a clear, crisp, brilliant sunny day in my mind—the first such day of sunny internal weather for years."

And got his life back on track, started making more money, and met the love of his life.  It's a touching story, read the whole thing.

Is sugar toxic? Gary Taubes in the NYT Magazine

This is a must-read.  Gary Taubes asks in this weekend's NYT Magazine: Is sugar toxic?  Not just empty calories.  Worse.

"If Lustig is right, then our excessive consumption of sugar is the primary reason that the numbers of obese and diabetic Americans have skyrocketed in the past 30 years. But his argument implies more than that. If Lustig is right, it would mean that sugar is also the likely dietary cause of several other chronic ailments widely considered to be diseases of Western lifestyles — heart disease, hypertension and many common cancers among them.

I've been known to use words like "evil" to describe gourmet cupcakes.  Apparently, I'm not the only one - and he's got a lot more scientific credentials than I do.

The viral success of [Lustig's] lecture, though, has little to do with Lustig’s impressive credentials and far more with the persuasive case he makes that sugar is a “toxin” or a “poison,” terms he uses together 13 times through the course of the lecture, in addition to the five references to sugar as merely “evil.”

Taubes also talks sense on high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), which has been demonized, but is made up of glucose and fructose, just like "natural" sugar.

Full article here  Definitely use one of your twenty NYT articles per month on this one.

The world's greatest pastry chefs on dessert

The New Yorker interviews some of the world's greatest pastry chefs on dessert.  From Alex Stupak, the pastry chef at WD-50 (a Michelin-starred NYC restaurant which focuses on molecular gastronomy):

"I happen not to like sweets,” he said as we sat down after dinner and he began to explain his work. “It’s an idiosyncrasy of mine. I decided to become a pastry chef because it gave me autonomy. Whether you think your desserts are manipulated or not, they are! When you’re conceptualizing an entrée, a protein, you generally expect to get a piece of that thing intact. In pastry, it doesn’t occur. Pastry is the closest that a human being can get to creating a new food. A savory chef will look at puff pastry not as a combination of ingredients but as an ingredient in itself. Pastry is infinitely exciting, because it’s less about showing the greatness of nature, and more about transmitting taste and flavor. Desserts are naturally denatured food.” He looked at me sternly. “Birthday cake is the most denatured thing on earth.”

White House pastry chef, Bill Yosses:

“Dessert is aspirational,” Yosses said, laying out his philosophy. “It’s the one part of the meal you don’t have to eat. It’s the purest part of the meal: the art part. But it’s also the greediest part, the eat-it-in-a-closet part. We don’t have to have it, and we do. When I was a kid, I would stuff my face with éclairs. I still would, I guess . . .” His voice trailed off. “The real question is this,” he said. “How did this thing, this spice, sugar, become a staple? How did something that ought to be like saffron, a rare thing to add, become the thing we build on? How did a whole way of cooking creep up from sweetness? Why do we use it to end the meal? Those are the big questions.”

On the history of sugar:

In pre-Crusades medieval European diets, only honey and fruit and other “natural” sweeteners were available, and they were mostly used in savory dishes. For centuries, sugar was a spice as rare as myrrh and as precious as saffron: an expensive extra used to give food taste and color. Only in the Renaissance did sugar slowly, through the New World, become widely current. (“Sweet” became one of Shakespeare’s favorite adjectives: it appears seventy-two times in the sonnets alone, and the first writer who mentions them refers to his “sugar’d sonnets.”)

Thanks to Allison for the pointer.  

Skinny Bitch: Top highlighted passages on Kindle

Recently, I was having a quick read through another vegan diet book: Skinny Bitch.  For those of you haven't read it (knowing this blog, that probably means most of you), Skinny Bitch is a "diet book with attitude" which advocates veganism in a super snarky tone.  Came out in 2005, has sold over 2 million copies, and has spawned a series of Skinny Bitch diet books.

I decided to check out the most frequent highlights in the book, a cool feature of Kindle.  This feature lets you see, more or less, what other Kindle readers tend to think are the most important takeaways.  Here are the top 10 most frequently highlighted passages in Skinny Bitch:

  1. "Follow Your Heart's Vegan Gourmet makes a kick-ass substitute to mozzarella, Monterey jack, and nacho." (Page 64, Location 577)
  2. "A drum roll, please, for a few of our favorite sweets: Uncle Eddie's vegan cookies, Tropical Source or Terra Nostra chocolate bars, Oreo knock-offs by Back to Nature or Country Choice, organic Fig Newmans, and all the cookies by the Sun Flour Baking Co. and the Alternative Baking Co." (Page 31, Location 263)
  3. "Every time you consume factory-farmed chicken, beef, veal, pork, eggs, or dairy, you are eating antibiotics, pesticides, steroids, and hormones." (Page 48, Location 426)
  4. "Other good substitutes for refined sugar include evaporated cane juice, Sucanat, brown rice syrup, barley malt syrup, Rapadura sugar, Turbinado sugar, raw sugar, beet sugar, date sugar, maple sugar, molasses, and blackstrap molasses." (Page 31, Location 256)
  5. "Instead of butter, try Earth Balance Natural Buttery Spread or Soy Garden Natural Buttery Spread, both made from nonhydrogenated oils." (Page 63, Location 573)
  6. "At the top of the list is agave nectar or syrup.  This high-nutrient sweetener can actually be beneficial to your health." (Page 30, Location 247)
  7. "Stevia, another winner, is derived from a plant found in Paraguay." (Page 30, Location 250)
  8. "Eat almonds, Brazil nuts, seeds, nuts, soybeans, kale, collard greens, broccoli, kelp, and molasses to get calcium." (Page 136, Location 1286)
  9. "A simple way to get adequate calcium is by including the following foods in your diet: fortified grains, kale, collard greens, mustard greens, cabbage, kelp, seaweed, watercress, chickpeas, broccoli, red beans, soybeans, tofu, seeds (sesame seeds rate among the highest), and raw nuts." (Page 61, Location 556)
  10. "Health is Wealth makes fake buffalo wings that taste so good, your pubes will fall out.  Gardenburger's Flame-Grilled Chik'n is so amazing, you might have to kill yourself.  Lightlife has a kick-ass line of 'cold cuts' and fabulous 'bacon'.  One amazing website is www.vegieworld.com." (Page 54, Location 482)

When we categorize these ten, we can see a few recurring themes:

  • Acceptable forms of sugar or sweeteners (4)
  • Fake substitutes for real animal foods (3)
  • How to get calcium (2)
  • Warning against factory farmed meat (1)

So 7 out of 10 of the most highlighted passages are essentially ways to eat sugar or processed food.  All this despite a chapter titled "Sugar is the Devil".  Something tells me these aren't the most important takeaways for a healthy diet.  If there's a silver lining, it's that most people don't go back and check their highlights once they're done with a book.

Now, admittedly, sometimes people may highlight information-dense lists they can't expect to remember, instead of simple key points.  But even so.  I'd be interesting to compare with top highlighted passages of other health books.  The Paleo Diet?  The Paleo Solution?  Primal Blueprint?  If you got 'em, link here and post 'em.

Alcohol and the holidays

This week is one of the best times of year in New York City.  The air is finally brisk, there's a dusting of snow, work is light, the holidays are coming, and the carolers are knocking on your apartment door.  Okay, maybe no carolers.  And then there's the social calendar -- yes, all the holiday parties.  I've got a packed dance card from here until I go back to Michigan, which means one thing: trying not to drink too much.

For me, alcohol is a bigger issue than eating a bunch of sweets.  I'm generally off sweets, and if I do have a little something, it usually doesn't stick with me.  I'll fast a little, and I don't keep sweets in the house, so my core routine is good.  Drinking too much alcohol, on the hand, can destroy my sleep, give me a serious hangover, and kill the entire next day.  And the times when I've gotten sick over the past three or four years almost always involve unseemly amounts of alcohol.  That is way more damaging to the life I want to lead than an occasional bit of sugar.

What's the old saying?  It only takes one drink to get me drunk...the problem is, I can't remember whether it's the 14th or 15th.  It's not that I have a drinking problem.  (They always say that.)  I'm just a social guy.  Which means for the next two and half weeks, from now until New Year's, I will almost certainly be averaging 3+ drinks a night.

So for me, this year, I'm following a few guidelines:

  • Drink early (that means I can coast on just a couple of drinks to increase sociability)
  • Stop early (that means at least a couple hours before bedtime)
  • Avoid sugary mixers
  • Stick to one type of drink (mixing and matching is a bad idea)
  • Have a glass of water in between drinks
  • Oh yeah, and drink less (almost forgot that one)

And gentlemen, this means being confident enough in your posture to not constantly be nursing a beer.  (You'd be amazed at how many bros feel awkward at parties without a drink in their hand.  It's like a security blanket.)

Anyhow, I'm off to dinner at Takashi for some offal (courtesy of French TV), and then going to drop by Tim Ferriss' release party for The Four Hour Body.

Wish me luck.

Do you take your coffee like John Wayne or Mary Poppins?

If you're going to drink coffee, drink it black.  Like John Wayne.  Enough with the spoonfuls of sugar.  A spoonful of sugar is what Mary Poppins gives to little children to help the medicine go down.  Take your pick.

 

 

OR

 

Don't get me wrong, I love Mary Poppins.  I just don't need to take my morning medicine like little Michael Banks.  Here are a few more John Wayne pics, just for kicks.

Corn sugar: A new name for the same old crap

High fructose corn syrup, no more!  Please welcome the new belle of the ball: Corn Sugar.

This is rich.  The corn industry noticed that high fructose corn syrup gained a reputation as an unhealthy food.  So what do you do?  Re-name it corn sugar.  And release a fancy new website you must visit at www.CornSugar.com (damn, why I didn't I buy that domain).  Now, before you get your hemp undies in a bunch about evil corporations coming up with Orwellian names to market garbage to us, realize that this is actually a brazen act of reverse-Orwellian naming.  Yes, high fructose corn syrup actually is a bunch of sugar (with more fructose than glucose).  Not a whole lot different than honey, table sugar, or agave nectar.

Corn sugar is trying to borrow some of the positive attitudes toward natural sugar.  But hopefully the disease will go in the other direction -- and everyone will start to realize that sugar is the real problem, no matter whether it's natural or synthetic.  Don't get me started on "organic sugar" -- possibly the most idiotic "healthier" food in all of human history.  That deserves its own post. 

Let's continue this fun name game.

  • Better carbo-load before that race by eating a lot of pasta wheat sugar!
  • Yes, I'd love a bowl of rice rice sugar
  • Every morning I love to eat a bagel bagel sugar
  • I am addicted to carbohydrate sugar

Okay, there's more in grains than just carbohydrate.  But sugar -- that's what carbohydrate looks like to your body, no matter how complex it is.

I need to go buy www.bagelsugar.com.   Slate article here.  Thanks to Sam for the timely pointer.

When divorce causes a sugar arms race

What effect does divorce have on children's health?  The initial stages of many divorces can be very acrimonious.  During custody battles, and in the years after, both parents usually have a strong incentive for the children to like Mommy or Daddy.  More and better Christmas presents.  New toys all the time.  But the easiest way for parents to control (and please) their children is -- you guessed it -- sugar and candy.   The same stuff that we warn children to fear when in the hands of strangers. 

A divorce can make it harder for each parent to make decisions that are in the long term best interests of the child.  Rather than suffer through a tantrum, much better to just give in to his demands for a Kit Kat.  Rather than seem mean, much better to give her a little something sweet.  Don't we have fun when we see Daddy?  He gives us candy.  Don't we have fun when we see Mommy?  She gives us treats.   It's an arms race with no winners.  Denying short term enjoyment is easier to do when you aren't battling with your former spouse for the primary affections of your child.  

I get that there are plenty of married parents who use sugar to control their children.  I get that divorce is sometimes necessary.  I get all that.  That's not what I'm talking about.  Got any perspective on this issue?   Please share it in the comments.

Newsflash: Vitaminwater just sugar water, not actually good for you

Coca Cola is being sued for making false health claims about Vitaminwater.  John Robbins exposes the idiocy of Coca Cola's claims in court -- Coke isn't arguing that Vitaminwater is, in fact, good for you, but that no one could possibly believe that it is a healthy product.  Really?  I actually like Michael Pollan's rule of thumb: Avoid foods you see advertised on television.

 

A few other reactions:

Yet somehow Vitaminwater is one of those products that is acceptable to drink if you are an upper-middle class conventionally health-conscious person.  Snickers bars, not so much.  That's because Vitaminwater has been branded as smart, intelligent, water-based, and full of vitamins.  Brilliant branding, but guess what?  It's still just sugar water.

                      

The White Man's food and tooth decay

This is Killjoy Week at Hunter-Gatherer.  I've railed on the evils of gourmet cupcakes and candy's powerful sway on children.  I'd love nothing more than to villify raindrops on roses or whiskers on kittens based on health grounds.  (Hmmm...both are too sweet?)  Okay, so you aren't splurging on cupcakes everyday, you might not have kids, and if you do, Halloween only comes once a year -- why does this matter?

Let's take a look at cavities.  There is clear evidence -- archaelogical and anthropological -- showing that hunter-gatherers have dramatically fewer cavities than agriculturalists who came after.  Here is data based on skeletons in North America around the transition to agriculture.  Before agriculture, fewer than 5% showed signs of a cavity at death.  That jumps to over 20% with agriculture (around 500-1,000 A.D. in this case).  Remember that these people aren't eating hard candy and Twizzlers, they're primarily adding more grains and grain-products to their diet.
 
 
Full paper here, via Nat Geo's Spencer Wells and his new book, Pandora's Seed: The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization.  
 
Of course, this is old hat to people in the paleo community, primarily due to the research of Dr. Weston A. Price, a dentist from Cleveland who traveled the world in the 1930s looking for isolated peoples living their traditional diet.  His mangum opus, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, documented case after case of healthy teeth among people eating their indigenous diet, and those same people ravaged by dental problems as soon as they started eating the White Man's food.  Dental problems were one of the worst ongoing health epidemics in the world leading up to regular tooth brushing and fluoride in our water supply not so long ago.
 
Looking at the pictures below reminds me of those frightening before and after photos of meth addicts.  At left, healthy people who eat traditionally.  At right, people from the same tribe who eat the White Man's food.  
 
Don't forget to brush your teeth.  And beware the White Man's food.
 
 
                          

 

Don't take candy from strangers

This is one of the first lessons we teach children. Don't talk to strangers, and never ever take candy from a stranger. But why do we have to tell this to our kids? Is it because they're naive? Is it because kids are just too trusting?

As it turns out, small children come equipped with a pretty strong preference to be physically close to their mother, father, and other relatives.  By relatives I mean genetic kin, or those living in such close proximity that they are presumed to be genetic kin. This is why children cry when mom and dad go out to a movie, why it's hard to drop off kids at school for the first time, and why kids are more likely to get homesick than adults. It's a pretty simple rule: Trust people who have the same genes as you.  It's no different in most of the animal kingdom.

Candy is a safety-override switch. The appeal of sugar, particularly once a child is hooked on it, is so strong that it overwhelms the evolutionary mechanism that has tended to keep children safe for time immemorial.  Of course, sugar is what most parents use to control the behavior of their children.  A devil's bargain.

 

So as not to be a total killjoy, here is Jerry Seinfeld on the power of candy (the first 1:30).  Sometimes it takes a comedian to point out the absurdity of the mundane.

 

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