The House of Sick

The Migraineur is moving mighty slow lately.  Stomach flu will do that to you.

My husband and I came back from his parents’ place by train on Wednesday.  It’s a long trip, about 8 hours just on Amtrak, plus the commute on either end, but we prefer it to the institutionalized torture, humiliation, invasion of privacy, and abitrary rules that create the illusion of security (you can bring your exploding laptop battery on board, but your shampoo was to go in the cargo hold) that is the American air travel system.  On the subway ride back home, I started to feel fuzzy-headed, with a kind of rumbling in my stomach.  It was so much like my low-blood sugar episode last week, I was sure that I was having another crash.  The problem was, I hadn’t eaten anything that I’d expect to trigger such a crisis – eggs and bacon for breakfast, a large meat and veggie salad for lunch, nuts and a small amount of 70% chocolate for a snack.

Back home, we dropped off our bags, petted the kitties, and walked two blocks to our favorite neighborhood steakhouse.  I ordered a burger, hold the bun, with a side of broccoli, and before I could finish it I was in the bathroom.  Details are unnecessary; let’s just say I was the person you do not want to share a public restroom with.  And that I was up all night evacuating from both ends.

I thought it was food poisoning, probably from the meat on that beautiful lunch salad, until my husband called me from work on Friday – “So, what was your first symptom the other day?”

Folks, we are the House of Sick.  And man, oh man, are we sick!  Tuesday was the last day I consumed, and kept down, anything like a normal amount of food.  On Thursday I had Pedialyte (revolting stuff – why do they add artificial sweetener to something that’s already that sweet?) for breakfast and lunch and graduated to applesauce for dinner.  On Friday, I tried a couple of soft-boiled eggs and a little rice – not too bad.  Somewhere in there I had some sugar-free Jell-O.

There has been no vomiting or diarrhea for several days now, but I am still weak and I don’t have much of an appetite.  I’ve been gradually increasing my protein – today I had some cheese and yogurt and chicken soup.  I have lost three rather unwelcome pounds.  Ordinarily I’d be jumping up and down over a three pound loss, but I am sure it is a combination of dehydration and loss of muscle mass, and I’m sure it will come back once I’m able to be active again.

The worst of it for me is, this was my vacation!  I had all these plans to finish up a dozen small but unfinished household projects, and instead, walking up and down stairs wipes me out.  (I have, at least, read a couple of novels.)

And some of it, too, is that when one is sick for more than a couple of days, one starts to really feel one’s mortality.  My husband and I are like some doddering old couple who have to take naps after any major exertion and can’t keep up with basic housework.  This is a stark reminder that we are not going to live forever; flesh is weak and subject to shock.  I don’t like being reminded of this; who does?  But the Reaper comes for us all.

It has also occurred to me that for some people, migraine is a lot like stomach flu, except it comes with a blinding headache and occurs monthly, weekly, even daily.  I am lucky that, when a migraine does strike, my nausea is mild, but in my teens I could almost guarantee that a migraine would convert me to the Church of the Porcelain Altar.

Tonight, my husband and I toasted the New Year with our flat ginger ale – “May the new year begin better than the old year is ending!”

Happy Holidays!

The Migraineur has been a little quiet this week in honor of not being handcuffed to a computer having 12 straight days off from work. I will resume my review of Mindless Eating after Christmas.

If there was anything good about my little incident with the Hershey’s Nuggets, it’s that I am finding it almost ridiculously easy to pass on the sugary Christmas treats. Yesterday at a buffet brunch, I couldn’t even look at my husband’s slice of German chocolate cake, much less ask him for a bite. So there was a silver lining in that cloud. Or a lesson learned. Or something.

And I would like to thank my readers who offered advice and information in the comments section. Over the last ten to fifteen years, the Internet has evolved from what was largely a novelty to a massive treasure house of mainstream information, alternative information, and oddly personal connections over a long distance. Low-carb living is still an alternative lifestyle five years after I first discovered it, and I am frequently, indeed, almost always, the only person at the table skipping the bread and ordering coffee in lieu of dessert. But the Internet has made me feel less isolated, less like a maverick, and less freakish. For all of the strangers who have contributed to that sense that I am not alone, and that what I am doing is in fact a healthful way of life and not the sure death sentence that the USDA and mainstream medicine claim, I am very grateful.

So please accept my best wishes for joy and peace, no matter what holidays you and yours celebrate.

Image credit: http://www.wonderwallpapers.com

Beware the Honey Tree

Before I get back to my review of Mindless Eating, I want to share a personal experience.

In one of the Protein Power books (I forget which), Michael and Mary Dan Eades describe how primitive humans would’ve had only one source of concentrated carbohydrate – the occasional lucky find of a honey tree.  They hypothesize that a hunter-gatherer stumbling on a honey tree would have sent signals to all the other members of the band, and pretty soon there’d be a honey party until every last bit of sticky, sweet, gooey honey was gone.

In honor of our human heritage, they suggest that we modern humans might allow ourselves to indulge in sugary goodness, occasionally.  Occasionally here is key.  Think about how often our hunter-gatherer ancestors might have run across honey.  Hint:  it’s not “daily.”

Well, all I can tell you is, if you’re going to raid the honey tree, be careful, because it can sting you.

I don’t know what got into me last night, but on my way out of the office I passed a candy dish full of Hershey’s Nuggets.  I have walked by that candy dish with complete disinterest every day for months, but yesterday was different.  I ate one, went back to my office to turn off my computer, went back for another, put on my coat and gloves, went back for another … you get the picture.  I think the total was five.

On the subway, I thought, “I really should not have done that.”  On the other hand, since my doctor refuses to order a glucose tolerance test, I thought that I could turn this moment to my advantage by actually testing my blood sugar (I bought a glucometer a while ago) to see just how high a little carb binge could drive my blood sugar.  It takes me about 45 minutes to 1 hour to get home, depending on the condition of the winter sidewalks, so I figured I’d be getting home at my blood sugar peak.

One hour later I stuck my finger and waited.  Blood sugar reading:  57.  (For comparison, a healthy fasting blood sugar is around 85.)  This was not what I was expecting – I figured the reading would be sky high, not low.  Clearly, though, it was time to eat something.

I immediately went to the kitchen and started heating up leftovers (my husband was eating dinner at the office, poor guy).  Ten minutes later, I broke out into a cold sweat and started shaking.  Back in the bathroom, the glucometer read 41.

If you are not familiar with diabetes – a blood glucose of 41 constitutes a medical emergency.  I was in danger of passing out, alone in my house.  The only treatment for this is to consume some fast-acting carbohydrates, fast.

I made a beeline back to the kitchen and started consuming whatever sugar I could find.   And folks, I’m low-carb woman, so it’s not much.  I had a few swigs of my husband’s Coke (yuck! it’s been at least a decade since I drank regular Coke), a few sips of his milk, and two low-sugar cookies I made last week from a recipe on Anna’s blog.  I was about to start eating sugar straight from the jar when I noticed that the cold sweat was dissipating and the shakes were going away.  I then ate a normal, low-carb dinner – leftover slow-cooked turkey in chipotle pepper sauce, with plenty of Monterey jack and Greek yogurt (in place of sour cream).

The good news is, apparently I am not diabetic yet – clearly my pancreas knows how to produce insulin, and lots of it!  But I have to wonder, just how high did those 5 chocolate candies initially drive my blood sugar?  It must have been pretty high to cause my pancreas to pump out enough insulin to drive my blood sugar down to 41 in a matter of 1 hour and 10 minutes.

The other thing is, I felt terrible for the rest of the evening, nauseated and sort of foggy.  I am surprised that, Inderal notwithstanding, I didn’t come down with a migraine, too – skipping meals, with the resulting low blood sugar, was one of only two reliable migraine triggers I uncovered before Inderal set me straight.  (The other was lack of sleep.)

The whole experience confirmed, quantitatively, what I’ve known qualitatively for years.  My glucose tolerance is terribly impaired.  I may not be diabetic yet, but if I had continued to eat the carb-laden diet recommended by most authorities, I guarantee you my poor pancreas would’ve worn itself out, and by now I’d be jabbing myself with insulin several times a day.  This is why I do not think it is an exaggeration to say that Gary Taubes’s landmark article in the New York Times magazine saved my life.

Mindless Thinking – Flaws in the Research

Before I go on to identify all the problems I see with Wansink’s book, and therefore with Wansink’s new job of giving out nutritional advice, let me just say that there is much in this book that I don’t disagree with, for example:

• People eat more from larger plates.
• People have to make hundreds of decisions about food every day, most of which are made on a barely conscious level. 
• Names and appearances can make a food more appealing.
• Things other than hunger can lead you to eat more.

I just think these things are largely irrelevant.

Eating a little more or a little less food doesn’t matter, provided that you are eating the right macronutrient mix.  As I described in my Calories In, Calories Out post, the body is pretty good at conserving calories during a shortage.  It’s also pretty capable at burning off extra calories during times of plenty, again provided that the diet does not contain too many carbohydrates.  It is excessive carbohydrate consumption, not excessive food consumption, that fosters the storage of excess calories as fat.

And this is one of my real beefs with Wansink’s research.  Every experiment described in Mindless Eating was conducted with foods high in carbohydrate.  He serves stale popcorn to moviegoers in two different sizes of bucket; the people with the larger buckets ate more.  He gives half of the diners in his research restaurant a regular bowl of Campbell’s tomato soup; the other half get a specially designed “bottomless” bowl that pumps extra soup into the bowl without the diners’ noticing.  The folks with the bottomless bowls eat more.  (Campbell’s tomato soup is high in carbohydrate with no fat and little protein).  He monitors how many chocolate candies secretaries eat from their Secretaries’ Day candy dishes.  (Wow, I wish a researcher would sneakily put a bowl of Hershey’s Kisses on my desk and count them at the end of the day.  They’d get a real schock when they learned that I hadn’t eaten a single one!)  Even his experiments with chicken wings include “low-price BBQ sauce,” surely loaded with sugar.

What if Wansink had done experiments with moderate-protein, high fat, low carb meals?  Would his subjects have eaten more steak from larger plates?  What about a bottomless bowl of a nice creamy lobster bisque thickened with real cream instead of flour?

My second problem with Wansink is that he doesn’t account for the fact that people don’t live in laboratory conditions.  Sure, in the closed system of his lab, people served small bowls of snacks might consume less than people served larger bowls.  From this, he concludes that you can control your snacking by serving yourself a small bowl and leaving the package in the kitchen.  I wonder if he’d think differently if he had his grad students trail the subjects for a few hours after they left the lab – my hypothesis is that more of the “small bowl” people went straight to the vending machine to get another carb fix.  That is to say, the real world is not a closed system.  I may serve myself a small bowl of snacks and leave the package in the kitchen.  But I am probably going to go back and serve myself another bowl, and another, and another, until the snacks are gone.  Reformed (or even current) carbohydrate addicts like me know what I’m talking about.  Raise your hand if you’ve ever started out by serving yourself a half cup of ice cream from a brand-new pint container and ended up, an hour later, going out to buy another pint.  (Migraineur raises her hand.  Migraineur raises both hands, and both feet, actually.  Migraineur doesn’t have enough limbs to count the number of times she did this before Gary Taubes and his New York Times article came to the rescue.)

Now, raise your hand if you’ve ever finished a six-ounce steak, hold the potatoes, and immediately gone out and purchased another.

My third problem is that, while he proves that factors other than physiology lead people to eat more, he doesn’t actually prove that the amounts eaten have any effect on weight.  This is an important enough flaw that it will be the subject of my next post on Wansink’s book.

Next up:  yet another person who doesn’t understand the laws of thermodynamics.

Mindless Thinking – Is This Man Qualified to Tell You What to Eat?

(Note:  When I finished writing my review of Mindless Eating, it came out to nearly 2,000 words, too long for a blog entry even by my verbose standards.  So I am breaking my review up into installments.) 

Several weeks ago, a lot of the mainstream nutrition blogs were practically wetting themselves with joy about the appointment of Brian Wansink to head the USDA Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion, the division of the USDA that interferes in the diets of Americans advises Americans on what to eat.  At last, sighed the nutrition writers, we’ll see sensible nutrition policy coming from the USDA.

I’m all for sensible nutrition policy, although I often disagree with the mainstream about what that means.  I had never heard of Wansink, though, so I put in a library request for his popular book, Mindless Eating.  Like me, you may not know Wansink by name, but you have probably heard of his research.  He’s the guy who discovered that people eat more if food is served on bigger plates.

Having now read the book, I must say that what Brian Wansink doesn’t know about nutrition is even more interesting than what he knows.  The man has a PhD from Stanford, and I simply couldn’t understand how he could propagate the glaring misconceptions that occur throughout Mindless Eating.

Let’s start with the most obvious one:

But in 1968, grain prices were low.  When I innocently asked Uncle Lester why we weren’t seeing a movie that year, he summarized the state of agricultural economics in seven words, “We would if people ate more corn.”  To an 8-year-old, this pretty much translated into “If I ever hope to see a movie again, I’d better think of a way to get people to eat more vegetables.”  (Mindless Eating, p. 3)

Corn, of course, is not a vegetable.  It’s a grain, and poor in nutrition even as grains go.  (Think pellagra.)  I can forgive Wansink’s 8-year-old self for thinking corn was a vegetable – in the 60s virtually every parent in America fed corn and peas to their kids and called them vegetables.  Heck, many parents still do this.  But grownup Wansink, with his PhD, should know better, and it is his responsibility to spread knowledge, not misconceptions.

Another thing that Wansink doesn’t seem to know is the role of insulin in the regulation of hunger (more on that in a minute).   Discussing the surge in popularity of the Atkins diet a few years ago, he says:

The Atkins Diet worked initially because it made eating a mindless activity.  There were bad guys (carbohydrates) and good guys (meat and vegetables), and very little variety.

The good news:  the Atkins Diet worked.  The bad news:  It was boring to eat just meat and vegetables.  (Mindless Eating, p. 70)

Does Dr. Wansink not know that Atkins works by directly regulating the production of insulin?  How could a guy with a PhD be unaware that insulin is secreted in response to carbohydrate consumption, and that it causes the storage of both serum glucose and serum fat in the adipose (fat) tissue?  And how could a nutrition expert not know that the allowable foods on a low-carbohydrate regimen are legion?  You can eat eggs, bacon, beef, lamb, pork chops, sausage, ham, fish, chicken, duck, turkey, fresh cream, sour cream, literally thousands of different kinds of cheeses, lettuce, spinach, watercress, arugula, mizuna, dandelion greens, mushrooms, green beans, broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, kale, collards, turnip greens, radishes, zucchini, summer squash, winter squash, pumpkin, red peppers, green peppers, yellow peppers, tomatoes, eggplant, turnips, carrots, peanuts, walnuts, almonds, cashews, macadamia nuts, sesame seeds, poppy seeds, sunflower seeds, flax seeds, pistachios, pumpkin seeds, fish roe, anchovies, olives, avocados, full fat yogurt, smoked salmon, oysters, lobster, mussels, scallops, clams, crab, blueberries, raspberries, strawberries, canteloupe, honeydew, crenshaw melons, casaba melons, small quantities of apples, pears, oranges, grapefruit, bananas, peaches, nectarines, and plums, chicken livers, calves’ liver, olive oil, peanut oil, butter, coconut oil, 85% dark chocolate, coconut milk, lemons, limes, chile peppers, garlic, onions, and every herb and spice imaginable.  (In the last three months, I’ve probably eaten all of these, except bananas, which I don’t like, and liver, which I didn’t like as a kid and have not tried since.)

I have never, ever been bored by a low-carb diet.  And as for Wansink’s implicit claim that carbohydrates add variety to our diet, anyone who is truthful has to admit that it is the high-carb snack foods that are boring.  One of my favorite posts at Mark’s Daily Apple, says it best:  “But even being so careful about what goes on my plate, I’d say honestly I get a lot more flavor and variety than some people I know who insist on a steady diet of burgers, beers and pizzas. The truth is, “fun” foods like nachos, pizza and tacos all taste the same: the texture is usually a mix of creamy or crunchy, there’s a lot of salt, some meat-type seasoning, and sugar. Eat that stuff and you’re starving the next hour…. But honestly, I never am deprived, hungry or suffer from any cravings. Actually, I refuse to eat something that isn’t delicious, period. To me, the relentlessly boring, salty, familiar flavor of most processed foods is not delicious. The fact that they’re also totally unhealthy is almost a side issue.”

Amen, Mark.

Yes, the diet’s simplicity makes it easy to understand – no grains, no potatoes or other starchy vegetables, no caloric sweeteners, no liquid milk – but the ease of understanding the diet is a secondary, bonus feature.  One could conceive of an even simpler diet – eat 1000 calories worth of pure sugar a day, for example – that would fail because it doesn’t address how fat is stored by the body.

So there I was, reading, and scratching my head over how one could obtain PhD in nutrition from an illustrious university like Stanford and know less about how insulin works that little ol’ amateur me.  Then I discovered that Wansink’s PhD was in marketing, specifically a field called Consumer Behavior.  Yes, that’s right – the guy at the USDA that is supposed to be telling Americans what to eat has a PhD in marketing.  But maybe his bachelor’s or master’s degrees are in nutrition?  Nope, his B.A. from Wayne State College is in Business and Technology; and his M.S. from Drake University is, as he says on p. 3 of Mindless Eating, is in communication research.

Yes, boys and girls, it is entirely likely that the man who will be heading the Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion knows less about nutrition than I do.  Or you.  Or your 8-year-old.  Will you take advice from him?

So the mystery of how Wansink could manage to know so little about nutrition is finally cleared up – it’s actually not his area of expertise.  But this raises a new mystery – why are so many nutritionists from Marion Nestle on down so excited by this guy?  Shouldn’t a nutritionist be skeptical that the new nutrition czar at the USDA actually has no special expertise in that field?

Next up:  flaws in Wansink’s research.

Save the Planet, Ditch the Twinkies

You knew Twinkies were bad for your health.  They contain sugar, corn syrup, high fructose corn syrup, AND dextrose.  They are made with white flour.  The filling is composed largely of trans fats.

But did you know that Twinkies are bad for the health of your country, the world economy, and your planet?

Check out this article.

Yes, you’ve read this right.  Twinkies are made with ingredients that are derived from fossil fuels, many of them of foreign origin.  I usually try to stay away from politics on this blog (other than frequent digs at the USDA, which rightly gets criticized from both ends of the political spectrum), but really!  Fossil fuels are a scarce, non-renewable natural resource.  No one is sure when we will run out of them, but surely everyone agrees it will happen someday, and when that day comes, very bad things will happen to the world economy.  Furthermore, our dependence on foreign sources of fossil fuels implicates us in partnerships with repressive regimes like China and Saudia Arabia that violate the principles of freedom that Americans hold dear.  Some people argue that one or both of the Iraq wars have been fought to protect our foreign oil interests, and we send our nation’s youth there to die.

And we’re pumping petroleum products into Twinkies?  And what for?  So we can all get fat and sick and rely on expensive pharmaceuticals that may relieve some symptoms but don’t prevent us from dying before our time?

If you look up “bad bargain” in the dictionary, you’ll find a picture of a Twinkie.

How to Stay Young Forever

(Got your attention there, didn’t I?)

Last weekend over dinner with a book group I belong to, I casually mentioned to a good friend that I had made 5 or 6 quarts of chicken broth from the carcass of a chicken she’d shared with me earlier in the week.

“You got five quarts of broth from the meager amount of meat on that carcass?” she said in disbelief.

“Well,” I said, “it’s not really the meat that makes the broth.”  And, after pausing to ask if anyone was a serious vegetarian, or squeamish, I said, “It’s the cartilage.”

An 81-year-old gentleman of our acquaintance, who looks at least 15 younger than he is, an active theatre director and actor, said, “Oh, yes!” and rattled off what was, in essence, my chicken broth recipe.  You put the chicken carcass in a pot, add a tablespoon of vinegar, some salt, whatever vegetables aren’t quite fit to eat but are too good to throw away, and cover it with water.   Simmer until the cartilage around the leg bones is gone, daddy, gone.  Strain and refrigerate or freeze.

I recalled how shocked I had been when I learned his real age, and resolved to eat chicken broth every night forever. 

I make mine in my slow cooker overnight  - I’m sure the Fire Department thinks this is unsafe, but I am also sure that it is safer than leaving it on my gas stove.  If you’re really patient or frugal, you can rescue the little bits of meat and use them in soup.

The resulting broth is full of glucosamine and chondroitin, two compounds that people pay a lot of money for to ensure joint health.  And you get them for free, from something that most people throw out.  The presence of these two substances surely helps explain how my director friend has continued his career well past the age when most people retire.  Directing is a very active profession; in spite of what you see on TV, the director does not just sit in a canvas chair all day.  I was once in a play where the director broke her ankle, and a new director had to be brought in, because the previous director’s doctor didn’t want her hopping around on the stage.  Surely my friend’s joints are more supple than the average 81-year-old’s at least in part because of his magic broth.

If made with vinegar or lemon juice or another acid, the broth is also rich in all the minerals that make up bone – calcium, phosphorous, magnesium, boron, silicon … and in exactly the same proportions in which they occur in bone.  There probably isn’t a supplement out there that is so well balanced.  Again, you get them for free from something that most people throw out.

And, of course, homemade chicken broth is delicious, far richer, tastier, and silkier than what you buy in a can.  Migraineurs must be wary of canned chicken broth, which usually contains MSG, hydrolyzed vegetable proteins, or “natural flavors” that probably include glutamate.

Next time you roast a chicken, try it out!

Recommended Reading 3: The Brain Trust

Both in my Comments section and in the comments on other blogs, cyberpals and strangers have been telling me that Dr. Larry McCleary’s book, The Brain Trust, recommends a ketogenic diet for migraine. I have had it on hold at the library, and I finally finished it last week.

If you read my blog because you are a migraine sufferer, please read this book. If you read this blog because you are a devoted low-carber, you will find yet more confirmation of the health benefits of the low-carb lifestyle for everyone, not just people who need help managing their weight. And if you read the blog because you are interested in low-carb, but wary, or if you stumbled onto this entry because you googled “Alzheimer’s” or “Parkinson’s,” please also read this book.

I’d particularly like to address myself to my migraine friends, but before I do, let me make some general comments. If you are a long-time fan of low-carb, you know that skipping the bread, pasta, rice, potatoes, and dessert leads to weight loss, stable blood sugar, improved lipids, and rapidly normalized blood pressure. If you are like me, you also suspect that you’re doing good things for the rest of your body – your joints may have stopped aching, your acid reflux may have improved, your acne may have cleared up, your PMS may be less severe – heck, I am convinced that low-carb is responsible for the near disappearance of my carpal tunnel. (Actually, what I’m convinced of is that it wasn’t carpal tunnel at all, but hyperglycemia-related neuropathy.) And, of course, you may have noticed that your mood has improved and your after-lunch brain fog has disappeared. Again, if you’re like me, you may know some people who, although not overweight, might benefit from skipping their daily Coke to clear up some nagging health problems, but have the false perception that low-carb is just for weight loss. If so, please ask them to read this book – McCleary’s recommended diet to prevent the gradual cognitive decline that so many of us think is inevitable looks very much like the maintenance phases of the Atkins and Protein Power diets.

And now, for my migraine friends: if you don’t want to read the whole book, please at least read the chapter on migraine. I know that migraine is a complex disease, or series of diseases, and after a year spent combing the interwebs for every scrap of information I could find, I know that what works for some people fails miserably for others. I also know that there are many lifelong migraine sufferers who have tried everything from pharmaceuticals to biofeedback to elimination diets to Chinese herbal medicine. And I also know my blog is heavily biased in favor of low-carb, because low-carb has bestowed so many general health benefits on me. Having said all that, the reason I am so excited about McCleary’s migraine prevention plan is that I have never seen anyone explicitly recommend a ketogenic diet for migraine before. So, if you feel you’ve tried everything, this kind of intervention may be news to you. And while a ketogenic diet can be somewhat more expensive than the standard American grain-based diet, it is less expensive than pharmaceuticals, and it is certainly less expensive than alternative therapies that are not covered by your health insurance. Finally, it seems like a relatively safe treatment to try. And as I wrote several weeks ago, there are some reasons to think that it might make sense. For one thing, McCleary stresses that periods of low-blood sugar can cause migraines, and that rings true to me because many people, me included, find that skipping meals, especially breakfast, can trigger migraine. (In fact, skipping meals and losing sleep are the only two things that reliably triggered migraines for me, pre-Inderal.) McCleary’s argument is that a ketogenic diet bypasses the blood sugar cycle altogether by offering the brain ketones as an alternative fuel source.

One note: one of McCleary’s recommendations for migraineurs is an MCT (medium-chain triglyceride) supplement. This seems unnecessarily expensive to me. Coconut oil is about 60% medium-chain fatty acids, is cheaper, and can be used in cooking and baking. So you could replace a couple of tablespoons of other fats in your diet with coconut oil, and probably get the same benefit.

The book does have its shortcomings. It’s not a lengthy volume, and several pages in the center of the book are occupied with little exercises you can do to test and improve your cognitive abilities, which makes the book even shorter than it appears. I sometimes feel that, because of the brevity of the book, McCleary sacrifices details that could help make his case. When discussing the use of ketogenic diet, he does not describe in great detail exactly how one does such a diet (check out Dr. Atkins’ New Diet Revolution or Protein Power if you need details), and he doesn’t address the health concerns that many people in today’s fat phobic world will have. Furthermore, he doesn’t say whether the ketogenic diet should be adhered to indefinitely, or whether one should stick to it for several weeks and then go back to his ordinary recommended diet. And for those of us who are low-carb fans and know the almost magical weight-loss effects of ketosis, it would be nice if he gave some guidance on how exactly a normal weight person avoids weight loss on a ketogenic diet.

Disclosure: Perigee Trade, the publisher of The Brain Trust, is owned by the same company that owns the company where I work. Please note, however, that even if every single one of my 100 or so daily readers bought a copy of that book, and persuaded two other people to buy it, too, the total effect on the value of my company’s stock would be nil. Seriously.

Seven Things Meme

Diana Lee at Somebody Heal Me tagged me with the Seven Things Meme.  Here are the rules:

link to the person who tagged you and post the rules for this challenge on your blog

share seven facts about yourself

tag seven more bloggers and link to them on your blog

I like doing these memes because it gives me an opportunity to direct a little traffic toward other bloggers whose work I admire:

1. Fanatic Cook
2. Weight of the Evidence
3. The Former Donut Junkie
4. Going Against the Grain
5. The Daily Headache 
6. Her Life in a Nutshell
7. The Skinny Daily Post

Oh, yeah, and Deborah at Weathering Migraine Storms already got tagged by Diana, and Fat Doctor has recently been tagged by someone else, but you should still check out their blogs.

So, here are my seven things.

1.  I didn’t get my driver’s license until I was 27, and I’ve never owned a car.  I even lived in St. Louis without a car!

2.  I got my bachelor’s degree from St. John’s College.  My years there were one of the best experiences of my life.

3.  In hot weather I like pouring unsweetened, flavored seltzer into a glass that has a tablespoon of cream in the bottom.  Vanilla and black cherry are good.  Sounds weird, but it sure kills the ice cream cravings.  It’s like a less sticky version of a root beer float.

4.  My husband and I gave out M&Ms with our names on them as wedding favors.

5.  There are 11 states I haven’t been to.  I’m going to California for the first time in January, so then it will be only 10.  (If you give me a blank map, I can name every state on it, as well as all the state capitals.  I once had a job at a company that sold geographic data, and I stared at a map of the US for 8 looooooooooong years.)

6.  My company has a used book sale every year to raise money for charity.  This year I contributed 4 books and bought 5.  That’s better than last year, when I contributed 3 books and bought 12.

7.  In the Six Degrees of Separation game, I am only one degree away from Matt Damon, Terry Gilliam, Orson Welles (really!), Spike Jonze, and Steven Spielberg.  And I’m not in the film industry, not even close.  I just know some smart people who are.

Food Pantries

The nutrition sites in the blogosphere have been spreading the word that the nation’s food pantries are in trouble.  I’ve been noticing that more and more grocery stores, in lieu of open donation bins, are putting together packages that they ask their customers to purchase for $5 or $10.  This is very convenient for people who want to contribute – pay your $5 or $10 and you’re done.  The problem with these packages is that the food in them is not very nutritious – things like dry pasta and rice, which are already over-represented in the diet of the poor.  The best I can say is that most of the bags contain a jar of peanut butter, but it is probably some national brand that is loaded with trans fat and sugar.

So I thought I’d buy a bunch of cans of tuna and salmon and drop them off at some local food pantry.  I’m embarrassed to admit that I don’t know where the food pantries are in  my community, so I googled and found this list:

http://www.cambridgema.gov/DHSP2/meals1.cfm

The first thing I noticed when reading this was how restrictive their hours are.  They are almost always during the workday, and often just a couple of hours of the day.  I don’t mean to bust on the volunteers who run the places (and I am sure these organizations have few, if any, paid staff), but I can’t imagine how a single, working parent who is struggling to make ends meet could make it to one of these places.