Jason's Food Log

[furious fitness]

My goals and philosophy presented like an onion (peel off layer by layer):
If I had to put my nutritional goals simply, it'd be to eat the paleodiet.
More deeply, I have two main goals:
1. To get the building blocks (nutrition) my body needs--and not get things that are bad for my body (this is too simplistic in that too much and too little of some things can be bad, and certain things in or not in certain combinations can be bad, but it's a start and why I will try to focus more on eating real foods than quantifying nutritional components)
2. To eat in a way that is hormonally and emotionally good for me (especially with regards to insulin).

To go into a little more detail, I want to eat mainly meats, seafood, nuts, eggs, veggies, and fruits. At least transitionally, I don't mind cheese now and then, I will be using whole grains only as a crutch, and won't worry about cooked beans. I'm also not going to worry too much about condiments right now--except to make sure they're not too sugary.
More detail: Organic is of course preferred. With meats, I'm going to try for lean meat unless it's grassfed (I disagree with Cordain on that for those following along). With seafood, going to watch out for the high-mercury fish. With nuts, I haven't decided if raw-only is the way to go or not. Eggs are definitely going to be organic and mainly omega-3 enhanced.

The only supplementation I'm interested in at the moment is a broad spectrum multi-vitamin and mineral (just as a backup and filler), probiotics (because I never eat anything fermented), and Omega 3 supplementation (because it's so important and grossly deficient in our modern diets, and the best source--fatty seafood--is often the best source for mercury due to pollution).

Question:
1. Any comments on the above are appreciated.
2. I've been thinking (a la Nourishing Traditions cookbook) to add fermented vegetables to my diet as a source of probiotics, Vitamin C, and good and different tasting veggies. Anyone have experience with this?
3. I learned to cook as a vegan, so I'm still scared of cooking raw meat to some degree and ignorant as to shopping for it, so I've been relying upon buying chicken and burgers and deli meat. I need to learn to buy meat, prepare it, and cook it safely. Help?

[furious fitness]

(For a week of previous days, you can see my training log "Cleaning the slate".)

July 19, starting with lunch:
12ish Subway club (yuck, bad crash later)
7ish slice bread with deli meat
small amounts of nuts and fruit

July 20
7ish apple, banana, 4 oz. tuna
salad w/TJ (Trader Joe's) buffalo burger & lemon ginger dressing
NY Burger Co. single burger and Very Berry Smoothie (too sugary, minicrash)
TJ's flounder with crab meat and cheese (yuummmie!); cantaloupe

July 21
sandwich w/ deli meat
TJ's steak wrap (sugar crash)
TJ's sushi combo--didn't eat most of the rice, though it had seeds on it (yum yum yum)

July 22
smoothie
...don't remember and didn't log rest of day

July 23
ate decently in morning but didn't log, evening was a party and I ate: chips, salsa, wheat thins, cream cheese, artichoke and spinach cheese dip, chana masala, aloo gobi, chicken, naan, ice cream with orea crumbles and "Genuine Chocolate Syrup" (main ingredient: high fructose corn syrup)

July 24
sardines and salad
lunch: chana masala, aloo gobi, and rice
later lunch: subway steak
supper: artichoke and spinach cheese dip with chips and naan, orange, salsa with chips, .75 oz dark chocolate

July 25
7:30ish: don't remember (jeeze)
1ish: chana masala, aloo gobi, and rice, and chicken
6ish: chips, cream cheese, wheat thins, chocolate

[furious fitness]

7:40: eggs with spinach, bell pepper and avocado, with some green grapes
8:40: cinammon roll (the cinammon helps with the sugar, but who am I kidding. at least it tastes really good)

[Coach Tran]

Jason,

Thank you blogging your food choices and allowing us to see it. I think it is important to know your dosha. Meaning it is vital to know what foods are good for you and what isn't. This means knowing your metabolic type. You may want to research this and find out your metabolic type. If you have time, go to Barnes and Nobles which is not too far your work place and check out a book by William Wolcott and Trish Fahey authors of “The Metabolic Typing Diet". Treat this book as a guideline and you will find your basic golden ratio that fits for your specific needs.

[neogenius]

I'm curious, why eactly is your goal to follow the Paleo diet?

[furious fitness]

12:20 NY Burger Co single burger with french fries (and I didn't finish either, weird)

6 lots of different tapas (ham, cheese, peppers, fish, potatoes...)

[furious fitness]

Jason,

Thank you blogging your food choices and allowing us to see it. I think it is important to know your dosha. Meaning it is vital to know what foods are good for you and what isn't. This means knowing your metabolic type. You may want to research this and find out your metabolic type. If you have time, go to Barnes and Nobles which is not too far your work place and check out a book by William Wolcott and Trish Fahey authors of “The Metabolic Typing Diet". Treat this book as a guideline and you will find your basic golden ratio that fits for your specific needs.

Thanks for the book recommendation. However, I have checked out some Metabolic Typing stuff in the past (not that book nor any book, just websites) and was not convinced. I will check it out if I have some extra time, but I hope that if there is something to it, my practice of logging will make it clear.

[furious fitness]

I'm curious, why eactly is your goal to follow the Paleo diet?

After much research, it's the best nutritonal theory I've found. The simplest argument is that humans evolved to eat a certain way and did so for millions or at least hundreds of thousands of years. (Yes, there has been some variation since agriculture, and being of European stock, that is why I don't worry as much about eating some cheese and wheat.) There is much more detailed argument in various sources, but especially that the paleodiet has a low insulin response, has healthy fats, plenty of protein, and plenty of trace nutrients, as well as lots of antioxidants. I'm not sure what more one could want from a diet--there might be more, but I don't know it.
(My main source is http://www.arthurdevany.com/, along with tons of paleodiet websites, and of course Cordain's great work The Paleodiet.)

[furious fitness]

july 27
9:40 banana, left over burger (1/8th)
1 Quizon's large beef brisket (yeech, sugar crash)
8 vegetarian chili and salad
9:20 half a slice of pizza
-
july 28
9am cinammon roll
1 multiveg pizza and ham & pineapple pizza

[furious fitness]

5:30pm salad with lots of different veggies and some good tasting beef
7:10pm real ice cream with whip cream and oreo cookies

[neogenius]

After much research, it's the best nutritonal theory I've found. The simplest argument is that humans evolved to eat a certain way and did so for millions or at least hundreds of thousands of years. (Yes, there has been some variation since agriculture, and being of European stock, that is why I don't worry as much about eating some cheese and wheat.) There is much more detailed argument in various sources, but especially that the paleodiet has a low insulin response, has healthy fats, plenty of protein, and plenty of trace nutrients, as well as lots of antioxidants. I'm not sure what more one could want from a diet--there might be more, but I don't know it.
(My main source is http://www.arthurdevany.com/, along with tons of paleodiet websites, and of course Cordain's great work The Paleodiet.)

Has the Paleo Diet ever been properly researched and discussed in peer-reviewed scientific literature?

[Coach Tran]

Stu,

There has been several medical research on the Paleo Diet. If you read the book, there are cited scientifical jounrals to back it up.

[Connie Brown]

Has the Paleo Diet ever been properly researched and discussed in peer-reviewed scientific literature?
As much as any of them have. The key word is "proper." Even the government's food pyramid has not been tested in that way. Many of the diet research is short term - 3 months. And riddled with flaws - people reporting what they remember eating instead of metabolic wards and things like that.

In my opinion the whole field is at the very early stages of science where zillions of theories abound and there is no consensus. And if you wait for the most rigorous kind of research - double blind, one variable and the rest controlled, published in peer-reviewed journals, and repeated by others - times a year for each study, times 100 for the variables in diet - do the math, I ain't waitin.

Meanwhile, we must eat.

I personally like paleo because after I found out wheat and dairy are problematic, from my personal logging and experience, all that's left is paleo foods anyway, so why not.

[neogenius]

There seems to be no consensus on the amount of animal products that our hunter-gatherer ancestors ate. The advocates of the Paleo Diet also have done little to attempt refuting the very well-supported research that shows a diet high in complex carbs, low in total fat and saturated fat, low in cholesterol and without excessive protein is indeed the healthiest diet for humans.

[furious fitness]

There seems to be no consensus on the amount of animal products that our hunter-gatherer ancestors ate. The advocates of the Paleo Diet also have done little to attempt refuting the very well-supported research that shows a diet high in complex carbs, low in total fat and saturated fat, low in cholesterol and without excessive protein is indeed the healthiest diet for humans.

There may not seem to be a consensus...among nutrionists, biologists, or even paleoanthropologists who haven't researched the question recently, but there is a 'consensus' of evidence in the literature. Loren Cordain's stuff is a great start, but I--who used to be a vegan and believed that our ancestors didn't each much or any animal products--came to the paleo diet view based on my own study of the anthro literature.

Your second claim is demonstrably false..again meet Cordain or de Vany. Actually, the best would be Tamir B. Katz's book, available for about $5 in ebook form (http://tbkfitness.org/). He shows the flaws in the supposed good evidence you cite. The primary flaw being the evidence is mostly epidemological studies of diet, which can be explained by factors other than the ones normally pointed to.

[neogenius]

Advocates of the Paleo Diet ignore the many hundreds of thousands of years before the Paleolithic era where hominids ate plant-based diets.

And what of human anatomy? Our teeth and jaws are developed for masticating plant foods.

The first digestive enzyme that food comes into contact in is alpha-amylase, which is for breaking down complex carbohydrates. Meat-eating animals have no need for this enzyme.

We have much lower concentrations of acid in our stomachs than meat-eaters.

The human intestine is long and coiled, with marked sacculations, like that of other plant-eaters.

Humans have a limited capacity to excrete cholesterol, like other plant-eaters.

Humans have the ability to synthesise vitamin A from beta-carotene, and niacin, as these nutrients are not found in a plant-based diet. Carnivores do not have this ability as these micronutrients are abundant in meat.

Humans cool themselves by sweating, like other plant-eating animals, as opposed to panting. They also drink by sipping, not lapping like meat-eaters.

Human males have seminal vesicles, which no other meat eating animal has.

[furious fitness]

Stu,
I used to be began and belived all those things. Careful research shows them either to be wrong or to not lead to the conclusion that a plant-based diet is correct.

For instance:
"The first digestive enzyme that food comes into contact in is alpha-amylase, which is for breaking down complex carbohydrates. Meat-eating animals have no need for this enzyme."
Perhaps, but we also produce meat-digesting enzymes in our stomach in plenty. Perhaps--I don't know--the meat-digesting ones don't do so well in the mouth or some other reason accounts for plant-digesting one being the "first"--regardless, that doesn't prove anything.

A site by a former vegan that addresses all these points:
http://www.paleodiet.com/

[neogenius]

Aaaaaaargh! I admit it, I'm confused! Some people thrive as vegans, others eat tons of animal products yet stay healthy! Surely there is one ideal diet for humans, even if the proportions of each foodstuff vary from person to person? But who's right? I'm gonna go curl up into a ball now :(

[furious fitness]

Aaaaaaargh! I admit it, I'm confused! Some people thrive as vegans, others eat tons of animal products yet stay healthy! Surely there is one ideal diet for humans, even if the proportions of each foodstuff vary from person to person? But who's right? I'm gonna go curl up into a ball now :(

Yes, it's terrible isn't it?
Part of it is that the human body is so adaptable...at a cost. And some people thrive no matter what they eat (at least for a time) just because their body's better able to pay that adaptive cost.
A more important reason in the US is that most eat so poorly that switching to being vegan helps at first and your body adapts to it (it produces more plant-digesting enzymes than meat) and so you think it's 'right' because if you try to eat meat it feels 'bad.' Specifically vegan and vegetarian diets help lots of people because 1. fruits & veggies have antiox, trace minerals, and vitamins that lots are missing, 2. nuts (which veggie-eaters eat more) has good fats and minerals, specifically magnesium which is lacking in the US diet, and 3. dairy is a common allergen so cutting that out might benefit them and they confuse that with all animal products.

But evolutionary speaking, we are adapted to eat like our ancestors. Yes, our more ancient ancestors were mostly plant eaters, but one of the elements in human evolution was evolving to socially be able to eat more meat and to process it because of the higher energy density and the supergood omega 3's. That various populations have adapted somewhat to an agricultural diet I think can be seen in higher rates of diabetes among some non-Northern European genetic stocks (for instance), and in lactose intolerance among most of the world. But that doesn't mean we've adapted to it so much that grains should be the base of our diet just because that's the largest food industry!