The Illusion of Variety

Like many people who have been holed up in their homes for the past 15 months or so, this past week I entered a supermarket for the first time in more than a year. Omg. I left with one package of granola bites (treat), one cabbage (food), two kinds of beer (treat), and tonic water (treat–Fever Tree, the best!). Hopefully, I’ll do better next time. The whole experience got me thinking once again about what a supermarket really is, and I decided to share something I first posted a very long time ago. Continue reading


Fun is Fine, It’s Just Not Food

There is a very big difference between nutrition and entertainment. Food is nourishing. It’s what goes into our mouths when we choose stuff that’s loaded with fiber and color, like vegetables and beans, nuts, fruits, seeds, and whole grains. Fun, on the other hand, is nothing like food. Fun (which often goes by interesting names like “junk food” or “fast food” or “processed food”) is made with products like white flour, white rice, corn syrup, corn starch, commodity oils (soy, corn, cottonseed) and, of course, sugar, which you tend to find in items that are ultraprocessed. Food nourishes you. Fun entertains you. Sometimes you feel like a little entertainment. That’s fine. Go ahead and enjoy. But it doesn’t go in the plus category. It’s just for fun. Continue reading


Commodity-based Eating

A few years ago, Michael Ruhlman shared with me a copy of a truly original and captivating book written by Chef Dan Barber and called The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food. You may have heard of him; in 2009, Time Magazine named Dan Barber one of the 100 most influential people in the world. It took me a long time to get that through book, primarily because it made me think so hard that I could only read a chapter at a time before I had to set it aside and think about what the author had just said. Continue reading


How Much Stripped Carb is Safe to Eat?

Today’s post is about how much stripped (refined) carbohydrate is okay to eat.  Stripped carbohydrate means white flour, white rice, corn starch, corn syrup, sugar. Plus fruit juice and beer. Basically, stripped carbs are carbs (mostly grain, though not only) that have had their fiber and color stripped away. It’s not a coincidence that white flour looks exactly like corn starch and powdered sugar. They’ve all had their color and fiber stripped away, and all that’s left is a pile of white powder.

This post is only about stripped carbs. It is not a discussion about whether carbohydrates are okay to eat. There are people who feel that carbohydrate has no place in their diets, and who manage beautifully on a very-low-carbohydrate diet. I get plenty of comments from readers who eat this way. Someday, we may discover that this group of people share a combination of genes that makes it very difficult for them to tolerate even modest amounts of carbohydrate. For now, I am glad that they have figured out how best to protect their health. So this post is not for them. It is for people who tolerate whole grains, fruit, and beans without any problems. People who feel awful if they skip the vegetables, grains, beans, and fruit. Like Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn.

If you look out your window at some growing food, you will notice that there is no such thing–in nature–as carbohydrate without fiber attached. Stripped carbs are relatively recent  inventions. Stripped carbs are derived from raw ingredients — mainly grain and produce (dates and beets) — that are abundant in nature. Human beings figured out how to convert these ingredients to flour and sugar only in the past couple of hundred years or so. We did not evolve to eat these food-like products, and certainly not at the volumes we currently consume them.

How much stripped carbohydrate is it “safe” to eat? Not a lot. But I would not say zero. There’s a certain amount that probably doesn’t matter much, one way or the other. At the end of the day, I think it comes down to a relatively simple equation, one that is probably affected by three things: 1) your genes, which are heavily influenced by your environment, 2) the amount of unmanageable stress you withstand on a daily basis, 3) and the amount of activity in which you engage regularly.  

Stress can be physical, emotional, social, spiritual. It can come from within (fever, anxiety, bereavement, pregnancy) or without (a blizzard, a heat wave, a new baby, winning the lottery). It can be the result of circumstance (a safe falls on your head) or questionable decision-making (skipping breakfast). It can be due to conflict, real or imagined. Agents of stress can be small like a virus, or large like an asteroid. Pain, fatigue, sleep deprivation are serious and common causes of stress.  

And, yes, stress can be caused or exacerbated by eating foods that don’t provide the building blocks your body needs to function optimally. Like stripped carbohydrate. In other words, stress causes stress. That’s one place you do not want to be. So eating more nutritious food, which helps make your brain and body work better, is one way to decrease the amount of stress in your life. 

Are you looking for a number? Okay, here it is. You can have two servings of stripped carbohydrate. But how often, you ask? Well, that depends on you. It could be two servings per day, per week, per month, or even per year. If you are slender, active, comfortable, and quite healthy, you may be able to tolerate as much as two servings a day of stripped carb.

Note that this means not two cans of soda pop, but two ounces. A can of soda with 12 teaspoons of sugar is not one serving. It is 12 servings. Two servings is just one-sixth of a can.

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Take Back Your Teaspoon!

Did you know that most sodas are sweetened with a teaspoon of sugar per ounce? That means the average 12-oz. can of soda (pop) contains the equivalent of 12 teaspoons of sugar. Excessive, to say the least. Actually, it causes diabetes and obesity. Not in my cup of tea. When would you ever consider putting 12 teaspoons of sugar in your glass of iced tea? It seems absurd when asked this way, but people are doing it all the time — every time they pop open a can of soda. This week, we’re talking here about the crazy amounts of hidden sugar in processed items. Continue reading


Stripped Carbs: The Emperor’s New Clothes

I promised a friend that I would write another post about stripped carbs and processed edibles. Sometimes stripped carbs are called simple carbs, but there’s nothing simple about them. Stripped carbs include white flour, white rice, corn starch, corn syrup, sugar, fruit juice, and beer. It’s not that you can’t eat them at all; it’s that Americans are drowning in them. Continue reading


The Commodity Compromise

In life, one always has to choose between quantity and quality. If your goal is to obtain an item of the highest possible quality, then it doesn’t matter how much you get. Like a sample of uranium. When it’s quality you’re after, it doesn’t matter whether you end up with a microgram or a kilogram. The issue of its purity is not negotiable, so the amount is secondary. But when it’s quantity you seek, it doesn’t matter whether the end result is purity or perfidy, perfect or problematic. Continue reading



Chocolate Mousse

What follows is a true story. It really happened, and you can draw your own conclusions.

Just over 13 years ago, on a snowy evening in January 2003, my daughter and I went out and brought home the sweetest, gentlest, 8-week-old Labrador Retriever puppy. She was a chocolate lab, and so we named her Mousse. Mousse played ball; Mousse cuddled with the children; Mousse helped me weed the garden; Mousse stole food from the kitchen table when she thought no one was looking; Mousse hung out with the chickens and enjoyed visiting with our friends and neighbors, both human and canine. Mousse became family, and all was well. Continue reading


The Trans Fat Ban

This past summer, some 50 years after concerns were first raised about a possible link between trans fats and heart attacks, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) ruled that partially hydrogenated oils, the primary dietary source of trans fats in processed food items, are no longer “generally recognized as safe” in human food. Processed food manufacturers will have three years to reformulate their products or request an exemption. This action is expected to prevent thousands of fatal heart attacks a year. Multiply that by 50 years. Continue reading