The only plant food that can provide vitamin D is mushrooms with exposure to UV light. All other sources of Vitamin D come from animal foods.
Category: Food
New Fruit for Me
Papaya. Best with lots of lime juice. You can eat the seeds and even the skin. High in fiber and good for the intestines. Try it.
5-Day Fast
Completed my first 72 hour fast today. Hunger wasn’t the issue. It was fatigue. Felt fatigue in both my legs and arms. But I do Joel Fuhrman GBOMBS diet with high carbs from complex carbs and whole foods with lots of vegetables and fruit — 200 to 300 grams of carbs a day. So when glycogen/glucose go through the floor, I feel it. My goal is to be able to do two 5-day fasts per year, for the autophagy benefits. Getting there with these baby steps.
Keto or Not Keto?
I do 20:4 5 days a week on a vegan plant-based, complex carb diet where the average carbs is around 240 grams and the average calories is 2100. But on 2 days a week, I do a vegan Keto diet (just 800 calories) where the net carbs is only 10 grams, so that the subsequent fasting periods for those two days kicks in the ketosis much sooner because of the low carbs digested. I also do one 48 hour fast every month. That 48 hour fast has the 2 Keto days on each side of it. I put all my meals into cronometer.com. It is clear to me from cronometer, comparing the high complex carb diet to the Keto diet that the former has much more nutrition. But I do use Keto on those 2 days to boost ketosis. People who do Keto 7 days a week get their ketosis from Keto, but I get mine from intermittent fasting boosted by Keto — there’s a significant difference there. Personally, I don’t think the Keto diet is a very healthy one.
Cardamon
Do you prefer the green or the black?
Food
Watching the series “Alone” on Netflix. The entire program, the contestants are talking about how they are starving and need to find food, so it is probably not the best TV to watch if one is watching how much one is eating. But I do find it a fascinating series. Kind of explains what travails early man — the caveman — would have been facing. The constant and unpredictable search for food. They don’t really know how long homo sapiens has been around. Estimates run from 1 to 2 million years. And then there was our immediate ancestor homo erectus — for a few more millions. Our current civilization is only about 3000 years old. Just a tiny fraction of the overall time we’ve been here. So the relentless search for food, like animals in the wild currently, was our lot for most of that time.
Bread Frustration
Have you ever noticed in grocery store-bought bread that no matter what type of bread you are buying — “oat bread” or “rye bread” or whatever — the first and therefore most prominent ingredient is wheat, not oat or rye or whatever? This is my first pet peeve with commercial breads. They are all wheat bread, including the ones masquerading as something else. I would like to buy an oat bread made exclusively from oats with no wheat at all. It doesn’t exist.
Pet peeve number two is that all the breads now have sugar, that is, added sugar, usually from cane sugar, which I suppose is the cheapest, and therefore the one they all choose. Why must bread have ANY sugar, added or otherwise? I don’t want sugar added to my bread. I don’t want that additional insulin spike from added sugar — the insulin spike from the carbohydrates in the grains is severe enough. I want a bread with no sugar. It doesn’t exist.
Which brings me to the only alternative available to one who wants an oat bread with no sugar. Make it oneself.
And that thought has my more creative juices flowing. What would be the ingredients in an ideal bread that I might devise myself, given that all the options are open-ended? While I don’t want any sugar in MY bread, I do think the taste would be improved with some healthy fats, so I would combine the main ingredient — oats — with almond or walnut flour, and I would add sprouted seeds for their healthy fats as well as flaxseed powder for its omega 3 fat. I think the seeds would make the bread chewier, which is a plus. A touch of cinnamon would round out the taste. And the bread would include nutritional yeast, of course, and some apple cider vinegar.
Nutrition, A Soft Science
Nutrition is a soft science because it is in fact very difficult to prove anything when it comes to food. The reason is that everyone’s diet consists of a wide range of different foods, so that it is virtually impossible to show that for any specific food, here are the consequences, as all the other foods in one’s diet will have played a role too.
This is the reason why there is so much controversy in nutrition on virtually every point or aspect of different diets. It almost seems as if for any given issue, there will inevitably be “authorities” arguing for both sides of the coin. For instance, there is a huge debate in nutrition over how unhealthy, as in heart disease, saturated fat is — those who argue that it should be avoided at all costs and those who argue just as vehemently that it is harmless.
And also there is the camp that points out that correlation doesn’t prove causality, i.e., that two things happened to be very correlated could just be random chance and not causal at all. This is the argument that attempts to debunk many of conclusions drawn in the famous China Study that had such an impact on the course of nutrition as science (I don’t buy the argument here; I think the conclusions in the China Study are indeed causal). But in the absence of the type of concrete and irrefutable proofs that you can arrive at in other sciences, the argument that correlation isn’t proof has some weight.
And if this confusion of conflicting opinions isn’t bad enough to begin with, you must consider this: that not all the so-called “experts” on nutrition out there are speaking from a purely disinterested point of view where truth is the objective, but in fact are putting out ideas that support an agenda of a particular food industry. So you have pundits from the meat lobby throwing verbal grenades against the use of soy as a protein alternative because, according to these shills, it promotes estrogen in men! In fact, a huge percentage of the nutrition literature is pure propaganda from writers paid for and in the pockets of particular food industries. They are not telling you THE truth, but THEIR truth.
So what is the layperson to do with such a welter of contradictory and even perverse points of view in the “science” of nutrition? First, don’t give up. Second, keep listening to various experts and soon enough, you will find ones that are more convincing in their arguments. Third, when you have enough experts that you have come to trust, if they have common views about specific foods and specific diets, then that majority opinion among these experts that you have come to trust is what you ultimately have to go with. Not proof certainly, in the scientific sense, but definitely an educated guess.
My Experiment
I’ve been doing this experiment now for about 10 years in retirement. It has been an acceleration of what I was doing before retirement, as I have taken it to a much more intense level.
You see, I’ve grown a bit skeptical of the medical community being in a position to ensure my health. It seems what they offer relative to major illnesses and a general deterioration in one’s health is either pills (bandaids really) or surgery — not real cures.
Which brings me to nutrition. I believe that nutrition plays a huge role in one’s health. You are what you eat is literally true. And I think for the body to achieve maximum health, you have to feed it optimum vitamins and minerals. It’s just that simple. As the ancients understood, treat food as thy medicine. So instead of thinking that the medical community can safeguard my health, I came to believe that nutrition was the main pillar of health, not doctors.
As a consequence, the experiment has been to eat a diet that maximizes nutrition to as high a level as possible, which of course means that you have to have knowledge of nutrition. I’ve been reading about nutrition now for 25 years. I started reading about it in the mid-90s when I was seriously overweight and needed to find a diet that would help me lose the weight (a high fiber diet was the discovery then). So I have the knowledge, guided mostly by Joel Fuhrman and his Eat To Live treatise, but many other books and videos.
I call myself an “almost vegan,” as I’ll go for 6 months totally vegan and then 6 months where I eat a small amount of turkey, back and forth, but very little meat even when I’m eating the turkey (a single slice a day max).
I use cronometer and plan every meal precisely. I also do 19:5 intermittent fasting. My most recent major change has been to try to introduce more variety in my meals, so I started to use the service Leafside for their soups and sweet bowls, but even with those, they are just the starting point, as I add many and various nutritional powders to each to achieve true nutritional excellence. (Note: Leafside plugs their meals as nutritious certainly, but also very easy to make, which they are, but I didn’t go with them for that reason — ease of preparation. I just wanted to introduce a significant level of more variety in my diet with these 12 meals per month, as variety itself is a significant aspect of nutrition — the more the better. I also liked the endorsement by Michael Greger, a recognized authority on nutrition, so I knew from the get-go that their meals were of a high standard nutrition-wise.)
I’m always on the lookout to ratchet up the nutritional intensity of my diet, even with tiny little changes at any time. Now, what I eat on a daily basis is nothing like what anyone else is eating, I’m pretty sure. It is a totally unique diet that has never been done before — by anyone.
So the experiment continues.
Dragon Fruit
Tried dragon fruit for the first time today. I didn’t know how to cut it up so I had to Google a video on that. You cut it in half and then peal away the skin. The video explained that dragon fruit is like bananas — the longer you let it ripen, the sweeter it gets.
Dragon fruit might be the most over the top food I’ve ever seen, from the point of view of how it looks. I can see where the name came from.
Have a recently opened Whole Foods near me and have been taking advantage of it to try new food — a kind of exploration.
Henry's Views 