On What I Eat These Days

"I forget most of what I have read, just as I do most of what I have eaten, but I know that both contribute no less to the conservation of my mind and my body on that account." - Georg Christop Lichtenberg on food frequency questionnaires.

I've procrastinated about this ever since Peter Hyperlipid posted his own classic eating update a while back, trying to contextualize what purpose a similar post of my own might serve. Ah-Ha! I see. OK then.
Basically, it's good to know these things can be done, are being done, and the reasons for certain decisions are probably worth revisiting.

Music by Mink - a lost treasure from 1996, "Your Bad Example".


Wake up - too early, give a brother some rest, my start is 6am these days which means coffee. Strong with cream and maybe if it's too strong a little soft brown sugar but, like, 1-2g, which is plenty sweet if you eat low carb, yet not enough to contribute to the world's fructose problem. Might have 2 or 3 coffees like this in the day (almost all without sugar). If it's instant coffee I'll stick a teabag in it because - I should have taken out a patent - this makes instant coffee taste like fresh coffee. Yup, I'm a wild and crazy guy, livin' on the edge now.

Coffee, as any fule kno, has powers to protect the liver in every study you can think of, and enhances the response to combination therapy in Hep C. Nice work if you can get it, as a poor liver function can slow caffeine metabolism and make you intolerant of coffee. So a little chicken-and-egg but still, there are solid biochemical reasons why both caffeine and coffee polyphenols of the caffeic acid family ought to inhibit fibrosis etc. (for example, caffeine blocks adenosine receptors, adenosine released from damaged cells serves as a chemoattractant "stop" signal for hepatic stellate cells, these cells remodel collagen matrix, caffeine is switching off their GPS. Caffeic acid phenethyl ester, CAPE, which you will also find in propolis and which is a normal metabolite of other dietary polyphenols, inhibits HCV replication. And so on.)

Other drinks I might enjoy, because I don't drink coffee after the early afternoon, include well water, green tea, black tea, red bush tea (aspalanthus, rooibos) or hibiscus flower. 

Breakfast I will try to have at 10am. I used to be stricter about food-window IF but now that my appetite is tamed I'm more concerned with getting sufficient energy so will eat outside of opening hours if I feel hungry. And if I'm going out for the day I have to eat early anyway. Breakfast is fairly consistent:
3 rashers bacon (chopped small), or occasionally most of a tin of sardines (the dog gets one) or a few kidneys or a chicken liver or two. Fried slowly in a tablespoon of beef and lamb dripping (AKA tallow). This takes care of excess PUFA in the bacon, as I add one large tomato, chopped (for the potassium and carotenoids), a tablespoon of butter (or two or more if I need extra energy), a teaspoon of crushed garlic, 2 (or 3) egg yolks, a bit of any gelatine broth I have lying around, spice and salt if needed. (Note; I use various pre-mixed Indian spice mixes, masalas. I only buy masalas that contain salt - chat - as an ingredient, as this shows attention has been paid to creating a rounded flavour). So any linoleic acid in the bacon or yolks has been diluted by the more saturated fats of the dripping and butter and shouldn't matter in the greater scheme of things.

Snacks - might or might not want these in the afternoon, which might be 25g dark chocolate, or a handful of almonds, 4 Brazil nuts for the selenium, or some cold meat left over from the night before. Probably a little fruit too; at the moment, that's mandarins, kiwifruit, persimmons. Used to eat cheese but I'm a bit allergic so trying to quit. If it's a higher-carb day - or I feel like it - I'll have a banana.

Dinner (served around 6pm): some meat (could be lamb shoulder chop, if it's chicken I'll stuff it with bacon, rolled oats, butter, sage, onions and fish sauce to up the SFA content). Or could be chicken or fish cooked in coconut cream. Or beef shin bone slowly cooked in a stew with one potato, carrots, onions.
But assuming it's the lamb chops, then a lower-carb vege good for fat-soaking will be roasted with them. Pumpkin, sweet potato, oca yam, whole garlic. Roasted Brussels sprouts are pretty special IMO. Any greens - leek, Chinese cabbage, spinach - will be comfited in butter (fried slowly with lots of butter till it goes soft). Boiled carrots, steamed green beans, mashed parsnip with cream, roasted beetroot are optional but welcome. I probably eat about 200g meat, which supplies about 40-50g protein. I prefer ruminant fat, so if the meat is chicken or pork I'll find a way to include more butter or dripping in the veges. I'm not against olive oil but find I have fewer occasions to eat it.

I'll have a cup of black tea after dinner because of some superstition about iron absorption, though I tend to agree with G. C. Lichtenberg, the best thing you can add to a meal is to remove drinking from the experience.

Dessert might be 2 teaspoons Bourneville cocoa mixed to a paste with cream and 1-2g soft brown sugar. A mousse of sorts I think. Occasionally mix up some kelp powder, spirulina powder, and olive oil to a paste and eat for iodine fix. Not pleasant but miles better than iodine deficiency, which will seriously mess you up. I also use the iodised table salt. I wish someone would add the iodine supplement to unprocessed sea salt.

Calories? I dunno. One day I sort of counted and it came to 1,800, so since then I've tried to stop undereating. Carbs? Probably 50g, not often more than 100g. But all starchy carbs are eaten at the evening meal, and with plenty of fat, so the GI and insulin rise is limited. And I do notice, over time, that this has left me feeling healthier and more energetic in the evenings. I try to stay out of glycogen-depleting ketosis but well below the supposed daily requirement of 150g glucose. Actually I would find it hard to eat 150 carb grams in a day with this diet. I don't often eat potatoes or rice, and I'm sceptical that resistant starch is a type of fibre I need. I do occasionally eat small amounts of oats at the moment. I figure that my Scottish genes - and my years of abstaining from wheat and rye - are enabling me to do this with seeming impunity.

I don't usually exercise for the sake of exercising, but I do run or jump or climb or whatever because I feel like it sometimes. Walking up big hills or small mountains is probably the most energetic thing I do, and swimming in the summer. My house is up a steep drive and a few flights of steps and I run up those rather than walk the boring slow way. Instinctive exercise, like instinctive eating, is what works best for me; attempts to develop my strength capacity tend to result in avoidable injuries, and it seems to be developing satisfactorily anyway.

Supplements - vitamin D and K2, magnesium 150-300mg, vitamin C 1g, occasional probiotics, very occasional low-dose multivitamin. I'd take selenium 100-150mcg if I didn't have Brazil nuts and would supplement zinc if I could find a cheap one with no B6.

So what we have here is Atkins-type macronutrient tinkering, tweaked for the effect on microbiota. Which is like "Phase 2" of any long-term diet plan (see Art Ayer's "Cooling Inflammation" link at the right).
So what do I make of the fact that high-fat diets can produce unwanted LPS elevations in rats and humans eating their respectively standard rat and human chows?

The quality of fats is important. Extrapolations from rodent diets where fats are 30% PUFA, are all extrinsic fats, carbohydrate is still a major part of energy as pure sugar and starch, and types and amounts of fibre are limited are only relevant to similar human diets; these rat diets often resemble cheesecake recipes.
My belief is that a high-fat diet (butter, fish, eggs for cholesterol and choline) can be used to restrict bacterial overgrowth (via higher levels of bile and stomach acid) and set the scene for the right fibre and probiotics to work. Further, butter is a good source of butyrate (about 3-4%), which means 100g butter contributes about as much butyrate as 6-8g dietary fibre on a good day without the risk of a non-specific prebiotic effect. My strategy is to cook whenever possible fibrous vegetables (pumpkin, greens, sweet potato, tomato, parsnip) with butter (as you will find in French quisine) which seems to work well.

Music - Mascagni, the "octopus aria" (Aria della poivra) from Iris.