Why I DON’T Support the American Heart Association!

There are a few organizations that I will NEVER EVER support unless they can begin getting the correct info out to consumers.

The American Heart Association is one of them.   The information they tout on their website is simply WRONG!

From a recent article on weight loss from their site;

Keep portions smaller than your fist.  They say a reasonable portion for most foods is 1/2 to 1 cup of food!  Do you know how much a half cup of food is?  Go to the kitchen and grab that stainless steel measuring cup and look!  Not much food!

• They recommend oatmeal topped with fruit for breakfast.  Absurd!

This for breakfast will give you 396 calories. 20% of those calories are from fat, way too low.  62% of those calories are from carbs, way too high and a prescription for gaining weight.  19% of those calories are from protein, way too low.  You get 43 mg. of Vitamin C, pretty lame.  4499 IU of Vitamin A, 2.2% of what is needed each day.

• They recommend you have a servings of meat no bigger than 2 to 3 ounces

4 ounces or lean chicken will give you 99 calories, ONE mg. of Vitamin C,  4% of needed iron, 19 mg of Vitamin D (you need 50,000 IU a DAY!).  And this advice will leave you needing to fill up on a LOT of other foods!

• They recommend you eat low fat baked goods that have margarine or veggie oils!
• Add vegetable meals to your menu that don’t require a lot of oil or butter to cook, to keep the amount of cholesterol in your meal down. If you must use some, opt for olive oil, which contains antioxidants that can help lower your numbers.

These are the oils that CAUSE heart disease!!  Heated vegetable oils are one of the causes of sticky blood lipids which cause cholesterol to clump together, causing blockages.  Remember cholesterol is your best friend nutrition wise, it’s when the LDL’s are elevated that there is a problem. 

They keep stressing low fat, lowered calories…but who can eat that way>  And eating that was keeps you from both losing weight and getting healthy through meeting all of your nutrient needs.

When you get an adequate amount of calories and nutrients you do nor crave carbs and sugars. Eating enough healthy fat and protein (from butter, meat, eggs, coconut oil, avocadoes, foods that actually have nutrients)…then “dieting” is not necessary.  BUT each meal should give you a third of your nutrients and calories for the day. That’s 2000 calories a day, 50% fat, 30% protein and 20% from veggies and a small amount of fruit.

AND the last reason is this…THIS recipe they posted on their web site.  Why something like this would be on their site, I do not know…There are SO MANY wonderful, healthy…even decadent desserts..that are healthy.  According to the Heart Association you shouldn’t make your brownies with butter…oh no!  They want you to use evaporated milk and corn or canola oil!  But THIS?  What person who knows better would put that crap in their body?   Hmmm.. I wonder how much Nestle’ contributes to this agency…and yeah, they own Carnation Milk as well as Nestle Chocolate;.

Chocolate Pudding Cake

Rich and gooey, this easy-to-prepare pudding cake is intensely satisfying. It magically bakes into two distinct layers, one cakelike and the other a chocolate pudding sauce.

Cake Layer
1 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 cup sugar
1/3 chopped pecans
3 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/8 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup fat-free evaporated milk
1 tablespoon canola or corn oil
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Pudding Layer
1/2 cup sugar
1/4 cup firmly packed light brown sugar
3 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder
1 cup water
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

Ick!

What if Bad Fat is actually Good For You?

It is!!!

By: Nina Teicholz Another great article from Men’s Health

For decades, Americans have been told that saturated fat clogs arteries and causes heart disease. But there’s just one problem: No one’s ever proved it!

Suppose you were forced to live on a diet of red meat and whole milk. A diet that, all told, was at least 60 percent fat — about half of it saturated. If your first thoughts are of statins and stents, you may want to consider the curious case of the Masai, a nomadic tribe in Kenya and Tanzania.

In the 1960s, a Vanderbilt University scientist named George Mann, M.D., found that Masai men consumed this very diet (supplemented with blood from the cattle they herded). Yet these nomads, who were also very lean, had some of the lowest levels of cholesterol ever measured and were virtually free of heart disease.

Scientists, confused by the finding, argued that the tribe must have certain genetic protections against developing high cholesterol. But when British researchers monitored a group of Masai men who moved to Nairobi and began consuming a more modern diet, they discovered that the men’s cholesterol subsequently skyrocketed.

Similar observations were made of the Samburu — another Kenyan tribe — as well as the Fulani of Nigeria. While the findings from these cultures seem to contradict the fact that eating saturated fat leads to heart disease, it may surprise you to know that this "fact" isn’t a fact at all. It is, more accurately, a hypothesis from the 1950s that’s never been proved.

The first scientific indictment of saturated fat came in 1953. That’s the year a physiologist named Ancel Keys, Ph.D., published a highly influential paper titled "Atherosclerosis, a Problem in Newer Public Health." Keys wrote that while the total death rate in the United States was declining, the number of deaths due to heart disease was steadily climbing. And to explain why, he presented a comparison of fat intake and heart disease mortality in six countries: the United States, Canada, Australia, England, Italy, and Japan.

The Americans ate the most fat and had the greatest number of deaths from heart disease; the Japanese ate the least fat and had the fewest deaths from heart disease. The other countries fell neatly in between. The higher the fat intake, according to national diet surveys, the higher the rate of heart disease. And vice versa. Keys called this correlation a "remarkable relationship" and began to publicly hypothesize that consumption of fat- causes heart disease. This became known as the diet-heart hypothesis.

At the time, plenty of scientists were skeptical of Keys’s assertions. One such critic was Jacob Yerushalmy, Ph.D., founder of the biostatistics graduate program at the University of California at Berkeley. In a 1957 paper, Yerushalmy pointed out that while data from the six countries Keys examined seemed to support the diet-heart hypothesis, statistics were actually available for 22 countries. And when all 22 were analyzed, the apparent link between fat consumption and heart disease disappeared. For example, the death rate from heart disease in Finland was 24 times that of Mexico, even though fat-consumption rates in the two nations were similar

The other salient criticism of Keys’s study was that he had observed only a correlation between two phenomena, not a clear causative link. So this left open the possibility that something else — unmeasured or unimagined — was leading to heart disease. After all, Americans did eat more fat than the Japanese, but perhaps they also consumed more sugar and white bread, and watched more television.

Despite the apparent flaws in Keys’s argument, the diet-heart hypothesis was compelling, and it was soon heavily promoted by the American Heart Association (AHA) and the media. It offered the worried public a highly educated guess as to why the country was in the midst of a heart-disease epidemic. "People should know the facts," Keys said in a 1961 interview with Time magazine, for which he appeared on the cover. " Then if they want to eat themselves to death, let them."

The seven-countries study, published in 1970, is considered Ancel Keys’s landmark achievement. It seemed to lend further credence to the diet-heart hypothesis. In this study, Keys reported that in the seven countries he selected — the United States, Japan, Italy, Greece, Yugoslavia, Finland, and the Netherlands — animal-fat intake was a strong predictor of heart attacks over a 5-year period. Just as important, he noted an association between total cholesterol and heart-disease mortality. This prompted him to conclude that the saturated fats in animal foods — and not other types of fat — raise cholesterol and ultimately lead to heart disease.

Naturally, proponents of the diet-heart hypothesis hailed the study as proof that eating saturated fat leads to heart attacks. But the data was far from rock solid. That’s because in three countries (Finland, Greece, and Yugoslavia), the correlation wasn’t seen. For example, eastern Finland had five times as many heart-attack fatalities and twice as much heart disease as western Finland, despite only small differences between the two regions in animal-fat intake and cholesterol levels. And while Keys provided that raw data in his report, he glossed over it as a finding. Perhaps a larger problem, though, was his assumption that saturated fat has an unhealthy effect on cholesterol levels.

Although more than a dozen types of saturated fat exist, humans predominantly consume three: stearic acid, palmitic acid, and lauric acid. This trio comprises almost 95 percent of the saturated fat in a hunk of prime rib, a slice of bacon, or a piece of chicken skin, and nearly 70 percent of that in butter and whole milk.

Today, it’s well established that stearic acid has no effect on cholesterol levels. In fact, stearic acid — which is found in high amounts in cocoa as well as animal fat –is converted to a monounsaturated fat called oleic acid in your liver. This is the same heart-healthy fat found in olive oil. As a result, scientists generally regard this saturated fatty acid as either benign or potentially beneficial to your health.

Palmitic and lauric acid, however, are known to raise total cholesterol. But here’s what’s rarely reported: Research shows that although both of these saturated fatty acids increase LDL ("bad") cholesterol, they raise HDL ("good") cholesterol just as much, if not more. And this lowers your risk of heart disease. That’s because it’s commonly believed that LDL cholesterol lays down plaque on your artery walls, while HDL removes it. So increasing both actually reduces the proportion of bad cholesterol in your blood to the good kind. This may explain why numerous studies have reported that this HDL/LDL ratio is a better predictor of future heart disease than LDL alone.

All of this muddies Keys’s claim of a clear connection between saturated-fat intake, cholesterol, and heart disease. If saturated fat doesn’t raise cholesterol in such a way that it increases heart-disease risk, then according to the scientific method, the diet-heart hypothesis must be rejected. However, in 1977 it was still a promising idea.

That was the year Congress made it government policy to recommend a low-fat diet, based primarily on the opinions of health experts who supported the diet-heart hypothesis. It was a decision met with much criticism from the scientific community, including the American Medical Association. After all, officially endorsing a low-fat diet could change the eating habits of millions of Americans, and the potential effects of this strategy were widely debated and certainly unproved.

We’ve spent billions of our tax dollars trying to prove the diet-heart hypothesis. Yet study after study has failed to provide definitive evidence that saturated-fat intake leads to heart disease. The most recent example is the Women’s Health Initiative, the governments largest and most expensive ($725 million) diet study yet. The results, published last year, show that a diet low in total fat and saturated fat had no impact in reducing heart-disease and stroke rates in some 20,000 women who had adhered to the regimen for an average of 8 years.

But this paper, like many others, plays down its own findings and instead points to four studies that, many years ago, apparently did find a link between saturated fat and heart disease. Because of this, it’s worth taking a closer look at each.

The Los Angeles VA Hospital Study (1969) This UCLA study of 850 men reported that those who replaced saturated fats with polyunsaturated fats were less likely to die of heart disease and stroke over a 5-year period than were men who didn’t alter their diets. However, more of those who changed their diets died of cancer, and the average age of death was the same in both groups. What’s more, "through an oversight," the study authors neglected to collect crucial data on smoking habits from about 100 men. They also reported that the men successfully adhered to the diet only half the time.

The Oslo Diet-Heart Study (1970) Two hundred men followed a diet low in saturated fat for 5 years while another group ate as they pleased. The dieters had fewer heart attacks, but there was no difference in total deaths between the two groups.

The Finnish Mental Hospital Study (1979). This trial took place from 1959 to 1971 and appeared to document a reduction in heart disease in psychiatric patients following a "cholesterol-lowering" diet. But the experiment was poorly controlled: Almost half of the 700 participants joined or left the study over its 12-year duration.

The St. Thomas’ Atherosclerosis Regression Study (1992) Only 74 men completed this 3-year study conducted at St. Thomas’ Hospital, in London. It found a reduction in cardiac events among men with heart disease who adopted a low-fat diet. There’s a major caveat, though: Their prescribed diets were also low in sugar.

These four studies, even though they have serious flaws and are tiny compared with the Women’s Health Initiative, are often cited as definitive proof that saturated fats cause heart disease. Many other more recent trials cast doubt on the diet-heart hypothesis. These studies should be considered in the context of all the other research.

In 2000, a respected international group of scientists called the Cochrane Collaboration conducted a "meta-analysis" of the scientific literature on cholesterol-lowering diets. After applying rigorous selection criteria (219 trials were excluded), the group examined 27 studies involving more than 18,000 participants. Although the authors concluded that cutting back on dietary fat may help reduce heart disease, their published data actually shows that diets low in saturated fats have no significant effect on mortality, or even on deaths due to heart attacks.

"I was disappointed that we didn’t find something more definitive," says Lee Hooper, Ph.D., who led the Cochrane review. If this exhaustive analysis didn’t provide evidence of the dangers of saturated fat, says Hooper, it was probably because the studies reviewed didn’t last long enough, or perhaps because the participants didn’t lower their saturated-fat intake enough. Of course, there is a third possibility, which Hooper doesn’t mention: The diet-heart hypothesis is incorrect.

Ronald Krauss, M.D., won’t say saturated fats are good for you. "But," he concedes, "we don’t have convincing evidence that they’re bad, either."

For 30 years, Dr. Krauss — an adjunct professor of nutritional sciences at the University of California at Berkeley — has been studying the effect of diet and blood lipids on cardiovascular disease. He points out that while some studies show that replacing saturated fats with unsaturated fats lowers heart-disease risk, this doesn’t mean that saturated fats lead to clogged arteries. "It may simply suggest that unsaturated fats are an even healthier option," he says.

But there’s more to this story: In 1980, Dr. Krauss and his colleagues discovered that LDL cholesterol is far from the simple "bad" particle it’s commonly thought to be. It actually comes in a series of different sizes, known as subfractions. Some LDL subfractions are large and fluffy. Others are small and dense. This distinction is important.

A decade ago, Canadian researchers reported that men with the highest number of small, dense LDL subfractions had four times the risk of developing clogged arteries than those with the fewest. Yet they found no such association for the large, fluffy particles. These findings were confirmed in subsequent studies.

Now here’s the saturated-fat connection: Dr. Krauss found that when people replace the carbohydrates in their diet with fat–saturated or unsaturated — the number of small, dense LDL particles decreases. This leads to the highly counterintuitive notion that replacing your breakfast cereal with eggs and bacon could actually reduce your risk of heart disease.

Men, more than women, are predisposed to having small, dense LDL. However, the propensity is highly flexible and, according to Dr. Krauss, can be switched on when people eat high-carb, low-fat diets or switched off when they reduce carbs and eat diets high in fat, including the saturated variety. "There’s a subgroup of people at high risk of heart disease who may respond well to diets low in fat," says Dr. Krauss. "But the majority of healthy people seem to derive very little benefit from these low-fat diets, in terms of heart-disease risk factors, unless they also lose weight and exercise. And if a low-fat diet is also loaded with carbs, it can actually result in adverse changes in blood lipids."

While Dr. Krauss is much published and highly respected — he has served twice as chairman of the writing committee of the AHA’s dietary guidelines — the far-reaching implications of his work have not been generally acknowledged. "Academic scientists believe saturated fat is bad for you," says Penny Kris-Etherton, Ph.D., a distinguished professor of nutritional studies at Penn State University, citing as evidence the "many studies" she believes show it to be true. But not everyone accepts those studies, and their proponents find it hard to be heard. Kris-Etherton acknowledges that "there’s a good deal of reluctance toward accepting evidence suggesting the contrary."

Take, for example, a 2004 Harvard University study of older women with heart disease. Researchers found that the more saturated fat these women consumed, the less likely it was their condition would worsen. Lead study author Dariush Mozaffarian, Ph.D., an assistant professor at Harvard’s school of public health, recalls that before the paper was published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, he encountered formidable politics from other journals.

"In the nutrition field, it’s very difficult to get something published that goes against established dogma," says Mozaffarian. "The dogma says that saturated fat is harmful, but that is not based, to me, on unequivocal evidence." Mozaffarian says he believes it’s critical that scientists remain open minded. "Our finding was surprising to us. And when there’s a discovery that goes against what’s established, it shouldn’t be suppressed but rather disseminated and explored as much as possible."

Perhaps the apparent bias against saturated fat is most evident in studies on low-carbohydrate diets. Many versions of this approach are controversial because they place no limitations on saturated-fat intake. As a result, supporters of the diet-heart hypothesis have argued that low-carb diets will increase the risk of heart disease. But published research doesn’t show this to be the case. When people on low-carb diets have been compared head-to-head with those on low-fat diets, the low-carb dieters typically scored significantly better on markers of heart disease, including small, dense LDL cholesterol, HDL/LDL ratio, and triglycerides, which are a measure of the amount of fat circulating in your blood.

For example, in a new 12-week study, University of Connecticut scientists placed overweight men and women on either a low-carb or low-fat diet. Those who followed the low-carb diet consumed 36 grams of saturated fat per day (22 percent of total calories), which represented more than three times the amount in the low-fat diet. Yet despite this considerably greater intake of saturated fat, the low-carb dieters reduced both their number of small, dense LDL cholesterol and their HDL/LDL ratio to a greater degree than those who ate a low-fat diet. In addition, triglycerides decreased by 51 percent in the low-carb group–compared with 19 percent in the low-fat group.

This finding is worth noting, because even though cholesterol is the most commonly cited risk factor for heart disease, triglyceride levels may be equally relevant. In a 40-year study at the University of Hawaii, scientists found that low triglyceride levels at middle age best predicted "exceptional survival" — defined as living until age 85 without suffering from a major disease.

According to lead study author Jeff Volek, Ph.D., R.D., two factors influence the amount of fat coursing through your veins. The first, of course, is the amount of fat you eat. But the more important factor is less obvious. Turns out, your body makes fat from carbohydrates. It works like this: The carbs you eat (particularly starches and sugar) are absorbed into your bloodstream as sugar. As your carb intake rises, so does your blood sugar. This causes your body to release the hormone insulin. Insulin’s job is to return your blood sugar to normal, but it also signals your body to store fat. As a result, your liver starts converting excess blood sugar to triglycerides, or fat.

All of which helps explain why the low-carb dieters in Volek’s study had a greater loss of fat in their blood. Restricting carbs keeps insulin levels low, which lowers your internal production of fat and allows more of the fat you do eat to be burned for energy.

Yet even with this emerging data and the lack of scientific support for the diet-heart hypothesis, the latest AHA dietary guidelines have reduced the recommended amount of saturated fat from 10 percent of daily calories to 7 percent or less. "The idea was to encourage people to decrease their saturated-fat intake even further, because there’s a linear relationship between saturated-fat intake and LDL cholesterol," says Alice H. Lichtenstein, Ph.D., Sc.D., who led the AHA nutrition committee that wrote the recommendation.

What about Krauss’s findings that not all LDL is equal? Lichtenstein says that her committee didn’t address them, but that it might in the future.

It could be that it’s not bad foods that cause heart disease, it’s bad habits. After all, in Volek’s study, participants who followed the low-fat diet — which was high in carbs — also decreased their triglycerides. "The key factor is that they weren’t overeating," says Volek. "This allowed the carbohydrates to be used for energy rather than converted to fat." Perhaps this is the most important point of all. If you consistently consume more calories than you burn, and you gain weight, your risk of heart disease will increase — whether you favor eating saturated fats, carbs, or both.

But if you’re living a healthy lifestyle — you aren’t overweight, you don’t smoke, you exercise regularly — then the composition of your diet may matter much less. And, based on the research of Volek and Dr. Krauss, a weight-loss or maintenance diet in which some carbohydrates are replaced with fat — even if it’s saturated — will reduce markers of heart-disease risk more than if you followed a low-fat, high-carb diet.

"The message isn’t that you should gorge on butter, bacon, and cheese," says Volek. "It’s that there’s no scientific reason that natural foods containing saturated fat can’t, or shouldn’t, be part of a healthy diet."

Fat Food You SHOULD Eat

For years you’ve heard that eating saturated fat is like pouring superglue into your arteries. But the fact is, this forbidden fat actually increases your HDL (good) cholesterol, which helps remove plaque from your artery walls, decreasing your risk of heart disease. So quit depriving yourself and start eating these eight foods — without guilt.

Beef

Most people consider turkey, chicken, and fish healthy, yet think they should avoid red meat — or only choose very lean cuts — since they’ve always been told that it’s high in saturated fat.

But there are two problems in that thinking. The first problem is that almost half of the fat in beef is a monounsaturated fat called oleic acid — the same heart-healthy fat that’s found in olive oil. Second, most of the saturated fat in beef actually decreases your heart-disease risk — either by lowering LDL (bad) cholesterol, or by reducing your ratio of total cholesterol to HDL (good) cholesterol.

And besides being one of the most available sources of high-quality protein, beef also provides many important nutrients such as iron, zinc, and B vitamins. So the idea that beef is bad for you couldn’t be further from the truth.

However, you should always buy organic, grass-fed beef! Grass fed beef has 10 times the Vitamins A, D and E.

Poultry

I probably don’t have to sell you on the virtues of chicken and turkey. After all, nearly all experts agree that these foods are healthy sources of high-quality protein. But unlike most nutritionists, I also say go ahead and eat both the dark meat and the skin. Because both are composed of animal fat, their fat composition is very similar to that of beef. Meaning neither raises your risk for heart disease.

Remember, eating more fat — not less — is the key in helping you automatically reduce your calorie intake, without feeling deprived. Always buy organic, free range chicken.

Pork

It’s true: Pork really is the other white meat. Ounce for ounce, pork tenderloin has less fat than a chicken breast. And food scientists are finding ways to make it leaner and leaner every year.

Of course, the downside to this is that fat is what makes pork taste so good — which explains why ham and bacon are far more popular than leaner cuts. (As Emeril Lagasse says, "Pork fat rules.") But remember, there’s no reason to fear fat.

Not everyone has a taste for bacon, pancetta, and ham. But you can make your choice based simply on what you love without worrying about the fat in these foods. When you follow the TNT Diet, your health and body composition results will be every bit as impressive with these foods as without — so why deny your taste buds?

One caveat: Bacon and other cured meats often contain sodium and other preservatives, such as nitrates, that may raise blood pressure or increase your risk for cancer. To limit your risk, choose fresh meats or packaged products that contain no preservatives — typically labeled "all-natural" , free range and organic.

Eggs

Whole eggs contain more essential vitamins and minerals per calorie than virtually any other food. They’re also one of the best sources of choline, a substance your body requires to break down fat for energy. In addition, eggs provide lutein and zeaxanthin, antioxidants that help prevent macular degeneration and cataracts.

They may even be the perfect diet food: Saint Louis University scientists found that people who had eggs as part of their breakfast ate fewer calories the rest of the day than those who ate bagels instead. Even though both breakfasts contained the same number of calories, the egg eaters consumed 264 fewer calories for the entire day.

However, you’ve probably been told at one time or another to avoid eggs because they’re high in cholesterol and fat. This is the same thinking that led to low-fat diets — and a mindset that has probably made us a lot fatter over the past decade. It’s simply a leftover recommendation from the low-fat legacy that was never forgotten.

In a recent review of dozens of scientific studies, Wake Forest University researchers found no connection between egg consumption and heart disease.

Always buy cage-free, organic and free range eggs.

Butter

If this delicious dairy product were the star of a sitcom on the Health network, the show would probably be called "Everybody Hates Butter." The reason, of course, is that it contains a significant amount of saturated fat. But again, it’s animal fat, like the kind in beef, bacon, and chicken skin. This is a natural fat that men and women have eaten for thousands of years.

What’s more, fat, like that in butter, is necessary in order to help your body absorb many of the healthy nutrients found in vegetables. For instance, without fat, your body can’t absorb carotenoids — powerful disease-fighting antioxidants found in colorful vegetables — or fat-soluble vitamins, such as vitamins A, D, E, and K. So go ahead, eat butter, and do it without guilt. Always buy organic, or better yet, buy raw butter online.

Coconut

Ounce for ounce, coconut contains even more saturated fat than butter does. As a result, health experts have warned that it will clog your arteries. But even though coconut is packed with saturated fat, it too appears to have a beneficial effect on heart-disease risk factors.

One reason: More than 50 percent of its saturated-fat content is lauric acid. A recent analysis of 60 studies published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition reports that even though lauric acid raises LDL (bad) cholesterol, it boosts HDL (good) cholesterol even more. Overall, this means it decreases your risk of cardiovascular disease.

The rest of the saturated fat in a coconut is believed to have little or no effect on cholesterol levels.

We think coconut is highly underrated — if you like the taste, try it as snack, eating the unsweetened, shredded kind straight from the bag. (You’ll probably have to search the health food section of your grocery store to find it.)

I follow the 50/30/20 way of eating. 50% calories from fat (75% of that is saturated), 30 proteins, 20% carbs (NOT bread and pasta). Remember that 95% of the calories in fruits in veggies are carbs, but they are not “empty” carbs. They are packed with vitamins, minerals, phytochemicals; enzymes and moisture that we need to obtain optimum nutrition.

We Evolved to Eat Meat but How Much Is Enough?

NPR had an article today about eating meat and how much we should eat. 

Good article but I disagree with the conclusion he reached; that it is best to only eat meat 2 to 3 times a week.

It IS better to limit meat consumption if you are going to consume feed lot meat because it is so toxic and contains unhealthy types of fat. But if you are going to eat grass fed organic meat then we should do so at every meal!  The reason being if you remove the meat from each meal you are either replacing it with a lower quality protein, like tofu or other bean products. The other alternative is simply not eat much protein which puts most of your intake being carbohydrates, a prescription for weight gain, cardiovascular disease, cancer…and will leave you craving sugars and/or fats. I’m not saying fats are bad, 50% of our caloric intake should be from fats but it should be only from organic sources and from grass fed meat so that the fats contain the amounts of nutrients we need. That is not possible from corn fed animals.

It is vitally important for your health, especially your immune system, that you do not get more that 25% of your calories from carbs.  ALL you have to choose from is carbs, proteins and fats.  If you get too many carbs your body will not be satiated as you are missing nutrients, the brain tells you to keep eating.  THAT is why we overeat.

50% of our calories should come from fats, healthy organic saturated fats.  30% from high quality proteins and 20% of carbs. ALL of those carbs should be from low glycemic vegetables and a small amount from fruit.

Here is a copy of the glycemic table to help you.

Study Says Our Air Conditioners Are Making Us Fat!

I come across these “theories” or half baked ideas occasionally and after I stop laughing I am driven to post them…

This one says that Americans are fat because of our living in air conditioning… It begins by saying maybe it’s because we don’t do a lot of walking.  But studies show you can park your butt on your couch and barely move, but eat a close to perfect diet..and not gain weight.  But you can eat a Standard American diet and exercise like a fiend and not lose weight.  So much for that idea.

Then they go on to say that “reduction in variability of ambient temperature” could be the reason. The widespread use of central heating and air conditioning means that most homes and offices are now kept at a relatively constant temperature year-round. Allison’s group found evidence that this causes the body to expend less energy, because it does not have to work to warm up or cool down, potentially leading to increased fat stores. In the South, where obesity rates are the highest in the nation, homes with central air increased from 37 to 70 percent between 1978 and 1990.

FULL ARTICLE HERE….

Listen up, peeps!  Weight gain occurs when carbs (NOT fat and protein) are not burned off, are converted to to sugar.  So all that low fat advise we’ve gotten is wrong…look around, Americans eat too many carbs, not enough fat, not enough protein.  So they are fat. 

I moved in to the neighborhood I live in now 13 years ago.  I noticed a man in his thirties jogging by every morning.  He looks out of shape, kinda pudgy, about 40 pounds overweight.  After several weeks went by I really wanted to walk out and offer my services as a Nutrition Coach.  I didn’t.

After about 7 years I was out in the yard one day with my son doing yard work and as I walked to the street with an armful of tree limbs…I couldn’t stand it.  I introduced myself and asked him about his running, weigh gain, etc..  I then, very gently (after asking if he wanted to hear it) explained to him how little effect that exercise had on weigh loss.  I went on to explain that making dietary changes could help in lose 4 to 5 pounds a week.   He explained to me that his mother insisted that if he exercised and took in less calories he would lose weight.  BUT he had been doing this for SEVEN YEARS and still weighed exactly the same!  I offered my services.  He declined. 

Now FIVE years later, he still runs by every morning, we say hello…he weighs exactly the same as when I saw him for the first time 13 years ago…

Maybe it’s his air conditioner. 

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Spicy Mango Ketchup

This is wonderful on French Fries and Fried Fish.

Most people gasp when I tell them I eat fried foods at least once a week!    Fried foods have gotten a bad rap because in the 50’s and 60’s people stopped using traditional fats to fry with and began using vegetable oils.  And THAT is the problem. 

Heated vegetable oils are highly carcinogenic and lead to heart disease because oils gets sticky when heated, leading to sticky blood lipids and causing cholesterol to clump and build up in the arteries.

So, when you fry food..do so in organic beef or chicken fat…these fats are stable and unharmed by heat high enough to fry in…and tastes heavenly!  You get very crispy food, a delightful amount of crispness that is why we want to fry foods in the first place.  How many of you remember how crispy McDonalds fries were before public opinion caused them to begin using veggie oils? 

So when you fry French fries next, use this condiment

1 Tablespoon butter   
2 Tablespoons chopped (not crushed) garlic
1 cup red onions- diced
3 cups rice wine vinegar
1 – 32 ounce bottle of ketchup
1 large mango- peeled and diced
1 1/2 cup brown sugar or Succanat
3 Tablespoons Chipotle puree   
2 Tablespoons minced ginger
1 Tablespoon cinnamon
1 Tablespoon ground cloves
salt and pepper to taste

1) In a sauce pan melt butter over medium heat.  Add onions and sauté slowly until onions are caramelized (about an hour) and then add garlic and sauté about 5 minutes more.

2)  Add the rest of the ingredients and bring to a simmer.  Reduce heat and simmer 10 minutes more.

3) Puree and store in the refrigerator.

Crab Salad in Cucumber-Mango Juice with Candied Jalapenos

For Spicy Remoulade;
2 Tablespoons fresh mayonnaise
1/2 teaspoon capers- small
1 teaspoon gherkin pickles- diced small
1/8 teaspoon red pepper flakes- or to taste
1 sprig cilantro
1 lime

Crab Salad;
1 pound lump crab meat
1/2 each mango
1 teaspoon cumin
1 teaspoon olive oil
1/2 avocado- cut in slices
1/2 cup mango juice
1/4 cup cucumber juice

Candied Jalapenos;
1 jalapeno
1 cup water
1 cup sugar

For the spicy remoulade:

Combine all ingredients in a bowl, cover and chill until ready to use.

For the Crab Salad:

Mix lightly and add salt to taste.

For the cucumber-mango juice:

Toast cumin seeds in a hot pan with oil until they are brown and aromatic. Add seeds to the cucumber and mango juice and season to taste.

Make candied jalapeno:

Bring sugar and water to a boil. Add jalapeno and boil 20 minutes. Drain and cool.

To Assemble:

Spoon 1/2 Tablespoon of the spicy remoulade into the crab and mix gently. Mold approximately 3 ounces of the crab salad in a shallow bowl, then turn out onto a chilled plate. Top with frisee or other greens if desired. Ladle cucumber-mango juice around the crab and top with a few slivers of candied jalapeno. Serve immediately.