SHAKE, SHAKE, SHAKE YOUR MIDDLE

I was probably one of the first people to pre-order the new book, The 6 Week Cure for the Middle Aged Middle, by Drs. Michael and Mary Dan Eades. When the publication date passed and others were already blogging and posting about it, and I still hadn't received my copy, I gave up and ordered it again. Then I had to read it, collect the necessities, and wait for a time when my husband, whom I shall hereafter refer to as “D,” would be home for 2 weeks at a stretch to start the initial 2-week phase. (I decided that wasn’t going to happen so we started anyway; he's going to miss 2 days of the second week).

I had been dropping hints for months that I thought we should try the protocol; D never responded, but then he didn’t say no either.

I knew it would be difficult to follow a special diet while I'm still testing recipes for my own book; for almost a year now, we’ve been eating whatever I needed to make. (For the last few weeks there has seldom been a time when I didn’t have at least 3 pie crusts on the kitchen counter, sometimes 6. They are low-carb, but not exactly part of the Cure.) I anticipated another problem after reading the description of the plan. For the first two weeks, we would be drinking 3 protein shakes a day plus eating one low-carb meal. That appealed to me because it sounded easy compared to cooking 3 times a day (we can’t really live on pie), but D has never been fond of meal replacement shakes. Today is day 5 of the Cure and I've been trying to "shake" things up to keep him from getting too grumpy.

So far, I’ve made Italian soda shakes (DaVinci’s syrup, cream, and carbonated water), Diet-Right Cola shakes, and chocolate-cherry, raspberry, and strawberry shakes. I’ve turned them into hot chocolate (I just heat the liquid part, in case the protein is heat sensitive) and frozen yogurt. I plan to try turning the ingredients into pudding, mixing it into yogurt, and perhaps making a gelled dessert of it.

I’ve also deconstructed them—the authors included the option of putting a raw egg in one of the shakes if you wanted to add some good, undamaged cholesterol to the diet, so I thought it would be acceptable to eat the egg, lightly cooked so the yolk is still liquid, with our morning shake so it would feel more like a real breakfast. They also suggested that you could add ½ cup of berries, so I put fresh raspberries in a bowl with a little of the cream that would normally have gone in the glass to serve along with the noontime shake. Then at about 4:00 PM we have our one meal of the day, which holds us nicely until the third shake that serves as an evening snack.

When I went to the store today, I looked for powdered flavorings that could be put into baggies with pre-measured shake mix and packed in a plastic shaker bottle to send along with D in his suitcase while he’s traveling. I didn’t find much, since most of them are made with aspartame, but I’m going to try using some sugar-free cocoa mix and unsweetened Cool Aid. If the hotel supplies coffee, they may have those little cream packets that don’t need to be refrigerated that he can stir in.

You can probably tell that I’m the motivated one here, but hey, I do what I can.

BTW, I’m using MRM, All Natural Whey Protein Powder because Dr. Eades said in one of his blogs that it is the one they use. I order it from http://www.bodybuilding.com/ at an incredibly good price. It is about half the list price and they have been running a 3-for-the-price-of-2 special. Their shipping is the fastest I’ve ever seen. I get an e-mail from them almost as soon as the order goes in, saying, “your order has shipped.” They have a warehouse in Idaho, only one state over from me, and the package is on my doorstep the next day. (I think I’m now required to tell you that I have not received any free products or special perks in return for mentioning this company or recommending their product.)

PS
I don't know what I was thinking--my husband said there was no way he would try getting on a plane with a plastic bag full of white powder! Unless I can find prepackaged protein powder in individual packets, he'll have to make do with low carb bars when he flies.

© 2009 Judy Barnes Baker

LOOKING FOR CARB WARS?

Due to an inventory mistake at the fulfillment center, Carb Wars is temporarily sold out. A second printing is underway and more books should be available soon. Amazon does not have any books in stock, but will continue to take orders. (My Amazon page now says, "usually ships in one to two months," but it shouldn't take nearly that long.) Regular bookstores may still be able to get copies from Ingram by special order. The Cookbook Marketplace, www.cookbookparketplace.com, also has a few left and they are having a Fall sale on all their titles until the end of October. They are offering a 30% discount if you use the following code when placing an order: OCT09-30.

To all of you who purchased books and came back to buy more for your friends and family, and to all of you reviewed Carb Wars, mentioned it on your blogs, or recommended it to others, THANK YOU!

(C) 2009, Judy Barnes Baker

IN SEARCH OF THE PERFECT HUMAN DIET

I recently had the opportunity to see a confidential, 22-minute completion fundraising preview of C. J. Hunt’s documentary, In Search of the Perfect Human Diet, and I can tell you that this is going to make waves. He's done a fantastic piece of investigative journalism that leaves no doubt about which diet is the best match for the human genome. This is the scientific evidence that the world, especially the media, needs to see in order to find solutions for the epidemic of obesity and chronic diseases that threaten our well-being and our very survival, both individually and as a society.

C. J. is hoping to get his 4-part documentary edited and on HBO, the Discovery Channel, or PBS by January 2010. (He still needs corporate sponsors for the film. If you know anyone who might be interested, contact him through his Website at: http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?et=1102739921369&s=0&e=001B9bbkQXkwqDABQSznzqB5KPtWoQXr4RDj8uTfxDIJGsGJtEw45zwKViDwm580MSdxn4k5WfKrbfG98SHpIC3RBlIKtGaATUN0ABb--fWcLmkVWkoWnv_liFzVwSr4uw5.) A video about the mission and scope of the project is on the website and the new blog

In Search of the Perfect Human Diet reminded me of something I have puzzled over since 2004 when my husband was working on a project that took us to Greece. The first picture at the top of this post shows me with our Greek friend and host at the entrance to a beehive tomb in Mycenae. The hill behind us is really a huge stone dome built without interior supports. Notice the size of the stones in the entry walls, with the largest stones at the bottom, becoming smaller toward the top. The second picture, with my husband standing in the same spot, gives you a better idea of the scale of one of the stones. The 2nd Century Roman geographer, Pausanias, described the walls as being made of stones, “so big that a pair of mules could not move the smallest from its place in the slightest degree.” The Greeks called them Cyclopean walls, because they thought they could only have been built by giants. (Cyclops were a mythological race of one-eyed giants.) Some modern writers cite them as proof that the Earth has been visited by aliens. Similar walls are found in other places in Greece and Italy and at Machu Picchu and other pre-Columbian sites in the New World.

The Egyptian Sphinx presents a similar riddle. Many scholars believe it was built, perhaps as much as 8,000 years ago, by people who predated the pyramid builders. An inscription found in 1857 on an “inventory stele,” said that Khufu (2589 to 2566 B.C.E), the pharaoh who built the first pyramid at Giza, excavated and restored the Sphinx. It was already old in his time. The head was altered by one of the early pharaohs to depict his own image, but the body was constructed of massive stones, many times the size of the ones used to build the later pyramids. (The stones in Khufu’s own pyramid, all 2,300,000 of them, averaged 2.5 tons each.)

If you go back even further, 15 to 30 thousand years ago, you find the beautifully rendered paintings of animals on cave walls, such as the ones at Lascaux. They are so realistic, so detailed, so beautiful that when Picasso saw them, he exclaimed, “They’ve invented everything!”

How did these primitive people, on the cusp of the change from hunter-gatherer to an agricultural lifestyle, accomplish such feats? Writing had not yet been invented, or at least not to our knowledge, so we don’t know. But scientists and anthropologists can tell us what they ate and the affect that a radical change in diet had on future generations.

We tend to view history as a one-way street of progress with ourselves at the pinnacle of human achievement. Perhaps these early people were really much smarter than we give them credit for. Perhaps they were also stronger, healthier, and better looking than we are. I wonder what we could have accomplished by now if we had not traded our birthright for bread and sugar.

© 2009, Judy Barnes Baker

FAT IMPROVES PERFORMANCE FOR PILOTS

A military-funded study conducted by researchers at the University of North Dakota discovered that pilots who ate the most fatty foods, such as butter or gravy, had the quickest response times in mental tests and made fewer mistakes when flying in tricky conditions. Forty-five student pilots were tracked to test their performance on flight simulators while eating four different diets: high-fat, high-carbohydrate, high-protein, and a control diet.

Psychology professor Tom Petros, who conducted and reviewed the tests, said, “We wound up analyzing the data every which way but upside down. It came out consistent every time.” (As usual, they kept looking for some way to make the findings fit what they already “knew” to be true. If the study had shown the fat-eaters to be mentally less capable, with slowed reflexes, I dare say, they wouldn’t have given it a second thought.)

The researchers concluded that high-carbohydrate diets were much better than high-protein diets and high-fat was slightly better than high-carbohydrate, but you have to see how they defined the diets to understand the results. The menus on all four diets were similar so the participants wouldn’t know which plan they were following. A typical meal consisted of a thin-crust pizza with extra meat and cheese for the fat diet; a thin-crust chicken supreme pizza for the carbohydrate diet; and a grilled chicken breast with mixed salad greens, fat-free dressing, and fat-free shredded cheese for the protein diet. Another meal included brownies for all groups but some had smaller ones and some didn’t have frosting. So the high-fat plan was also high in carbs (what low-carb diet would have pizza and brownies?) and the high-protein diet was really a low-carb, low-fat diet. A low-carb, high-fat, adequate protein diet, which would have trumped them all, was not included.

Even so, the improvement made by the extra fat was obvious to the students. One of them was quoted as saying, “I could tell the difference on how well I was doing on the different diets.” He added, “I think a lot of people felt they did better when they got the lobster and the good stuff.” Well said, young man! Perhaps eventually, the researchers will see what has been staring them in the face all along and realize that fat is not the evil, villainous stuff they have been led to believe it is.

According to the article, National Transportation Safety Board statistics show that 80% of civil and military accidents are caused by human error. Next time you get on a plane, you might want to take along some butter and cheese for the pilot.

Read the Associated Press article here: http://www.boston.com/news/health/articles/2009/10/06/hold_the_mayo_not_when_it_comes_to_astute_pilots/

(C) 2009, Judy Barnes Baker