LOOPTECHS

Garden Update: A Banner Year

On April 15, 2014 By jammy // No comments:

Things are warming up here in Seattle and the flowers are blooming. I just planted my first crops of the year-- potatoes and strawberries.

2013 was a banner year for my 500-square-foot urban vegetable garden, including my first experience growing and processing a grain. I never got around to posting about it last year-- so here it is.

Interbay mulch technique

The bed on the right has been mulched with leaves, spent coffee
grounds, and burlap sacks ($1/sack at the local hardware store).
The beds on the left were planted with a rye-clover-vetch-pea
cover crop. Paths are mulched with wood chips.

In the fall of 2012, I tried a new technique for improving the soil called "Interbay mulching". This is a variation on sheet mulching, which involves placing uncomposted organic matter directly onto the garden soil in fall and letting it compost until the next growing season. To Interbay mulch, you simply cover your sheet mulch with burlap. This keeps everything moist, protects earthworms from bird predation so they can munch freely, and suppresses weeds. I used leaves (carbon) and spent coffee grounds from a local coffee shop (nitrogen) for my organic matter.

When I pulled back the burlap last spring, I was initially disappointed. The coffee grounds had disappeared completely, but there was still a lot of leaf matter left on the soil, indicating that it had only partially composted. However, I later decided that it had worked well, because the soil structure underneath was improved and it seemed to be enriched with significant organic matter as well as a large population of fat earthworms. The mulch suppressed weeds remarkably well, and the beds remained mostly clean for the rest of the season.

Those observations, combined with huge yields from the mulched beds, convinced me that it was worthwhile.

New tools
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More Graphs of Calorie Intake vs. BMI

On April 11, 2014 By jammy // No comments:

In the last post, a reader commented that the correlation would be more convincing if I graphed calories vs. average BMI rather than the prevalence of obesity. It was a valid point, so I went searching for average BMI values from NHANES surveys. I dug up a CDC document that contains data from surveys between 1960 and 2002 (1). Because these data only cover five survey periods, we only get five data points to analyze, as opposed to the eight used in the last post. The document contains BMI values for men and women separately, so I averaged the two to approximate average BMI in the general adult population. It's also worth noting that I use the approximate midpoint of the survey period as the year.

First, a graph of average BMI over time. It went up:

Now, let's see how well average BMI correlates with calorie intake:

The correlation between calorie intake and obesity prevalence was remarkable, but this correlation is simply incredible. An R-squared value of 0.98 indicates that daily calorie intake and average BMI are almost perfectly correlated.

We can further deduce that each 100-calorie increase in daily food intake is associated with an 0.62-point increase in average BMI among US adults.

Calorie Intake and the US Obesity Epidemic

On April 09, 2014 By jammy // No comments:

Between 1960 and 2008, the prevalence of obesity in US adults increased from 13 to 34 percent, and the prevalence of extreme obesity increased from 0.9 to 6 percent (NHANES surveys). This major shift in population fatness is called the "obesity epidemic".

What caused the obesity epidemic? As I've noted in my writing and talks, the obesity epidemic was paralleled by an increase in daily calorie intake that was sufficiently large to fully account for it. There are two main sources of data for US calorie intake. The first is NHANES surveys conducted by the Centers for Disease Control. They periodically collect data on food intake using questionnaires, and these surveys confirm that calorie intake has increased. The problem with the NHANES food intake data is that they're self-reported and therefore subject to major reporting errors. However, NHANES surveys provide the best quality (objectively measured) data on obesity prevalence since 1960, which we'll be using in this post.

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Uncovering the True Health Costs of Excess Weight

On April 02, 2014 By jammy // No comments:

Is excess weight hazardous to health, or can it actually be protective? This question has provoked intense debate in the academic community, in some cases even leading researchers to angrily denounce the work of others (1). There is good evidence to suggest that excess body fat increases the risk of specific diseases, including many of our major killers: diabetes, heart attack, stroke, heart failure, cancer, and kidney failure (2). Yet strangely, the studies relating excess weight to the total risk of dying-- an overall measure of health that's hard to argue with-- are inconsistent. Why?
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New Position with Nestlé

On April 01, 2014 By jammy // No comments:

Warning -- Satire -- April Fool's Post

I'm happy to announce that I've accepted a Product Research and Development position with Nestlé Foods. Nestlé is known for its skillful application of 'neuromarketing'-- using neuroscience to enhance product development and sales-- and the company recruited me for my background in neuroscience and food reward.

As Whole Health Source readers know well, food reward has a major impact on food selection and consumption, and therefore it has huge potential as a product development strategy. Although product development by the food industry has always relied to some extent on a basic understanding of food reward, corporations still lag far behind the cutting edge of food reward research, and they are therefore missing out on a major opportunity to drive repeat purchase and consumption behavior and increase total sale volume. I plan to leverage science-corporate synergy to develop food product solutions that people LOVE*.

Even more exciting, Nestlé has asked me to lead a strategic partnership initiative with Coca-Cola to utilize neuromarketing to tailor beverage product development specifically for children, who have a somewhat different set of reward criteria than adults. We're excited to develop product solutions that kids LOVE* even more than current offerings, by scientifically designing new combinations of flavors, sweeteners, and totally safe habit-forming drugs such as caffeine.

Both companies have been very responsive to my nutritional concerns about processed foods, and so we're working together to make healthier products. Here are some of the changes we're discussing:

Adding vitamin C and cod liver oil to chocolate.
Replacing a portion (1.7%) of the sugar in beverages with stevia across the board.
Stealthily decreasing the portion size of beverages. To do this, we'll increase the thickness of the plastic bottles so the exterior of the bottle is the same size, but the actual beverage content is reduced by 0.2 oz.
Getting these healthy snacks and beverages back into schools where kids can enjoy them!

One of the first things we discussed is getting the advertising department at Nestlé to write guest posts for Whole Health Source. This will be a fun way for WHS readers to stay informed of current Nestlé products and what we have coming down the pipeline!

April Fools!!!!!!

* Learned Obedience Via Eating

Corrections to the New Review Paper on Dietary Fat and Cardiovascular Risk

On March 26, 2014 By jammy // No comments:

The meta-analysis by Chowdhury et al. raised quite a furor from certain segments of researchers and the popular media. I find this reaction interesting. I usually write about obesity, which is a topic of great interest to people, but my post about the review paper received more than twice my usual traffic. People whose findings or opinions are questioned by the paper are aggressively denouncing it in the media, even calling for retraction (1). This resembles what happens every time a high-profile review paper is published that doesn't support the conventional stance on fatty acids and health (e.g., Siri-Tarino et al. [2], which despite much gnashing of teeth is still standing*). I'm not sure why this issue in particular arouses such excitement, but I find it amusing and disturbing at the same time. This kind of reaction would be totally out of place in most other fields of science, where aggressive public media outbursts by researchers are usually frowned upon.

As it turns out, the critics have a point this time. Significant errors were uncovered in the original version of the meta-analysis, which have been corrected in the current version (3). These include the following two errors, one of which alters the conclusion somewhat:

The outcome of one observational study on omega-3 fatty acids was reported as slightly negative, when it was actually strongly positive. This changes the conclusion of the meta-analysis, making it somewhat more favorable to omega-3 consumption for cardiovascular protection.
The authors left out two studies on omega-6 fatty acids. These didn't change the overall conclusions on omega-6.

Book Review: Your Personal Paleo Code

On March 25, 2014 By jammy // No comments:

Chris Kresser has been a major figure in the ancestral health community for some time now. It's funny to recall that I was actually one of his first readers, back in the early days of his blog when it was called The Healthy Skeptic and the audience was small. Chris's readership rapidly eclipsed mine, and now he's in high demand for his ability to convey ideas clearly and offer practical solutions to important health concerns.

He recently published a book titled Your Personal Paleo Code, which also happens to be a New York Times bestseller. The primary goal of the book is to help you develop a diet and lifestyle that support health and well-being by starting from a generally healthy template and personalizing it to your needs. Let's have a look.

Introduction

Kresser opens with the poignant story of his own health problems, which began with an infectious illness in Indonesia and several courses of antibiotic therapy. After years of struggling with the resulting symptoms, trying a variety of diets, and finally accepting his condition, he was unexpectedly able to recover his health by adopting a personalized Paleo-like diet that included bone broth and fermented foods.

Why Paleo?

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Food Reward Friday

On March 14, 2014 By jammy // No comments:

This week's lucky "winner"... the Taco Bell waffle taco!!

The Ultimate Detox: Your Kidneys

On March 06, 2014 By jammy // No comments:

The specter of unseen, unspecified toxins eroding our health is worth many millions of dollars in the United States and abroad. Companies offer "detox" supplements, beverages, and creams that supposedly rid us of supposed toxins, despite a complete lack of evidence that these products do anything at all*. This comes from an industry that excels at creating boogeymen and offering costly solutions for them.

If your wallet needs to lose weight, then these products are highly effective, otherwise it's probably best to save your money. Here's why.

The body is equipped with an extremely advanced system for excreting toxins. The kidneys are part of this system, and their design is genius. The basic functional unit of the kidney is the nephron, and the average kidney contains about a million of them. Nephrons have two major parts: a renal corpuscle and a renal tubule.

A nephron. In this image, the Bowman's capsule and glomerulus make up the renal corpuscle, and the proximal/distal tubules and the loop of Henle (#1-3) make up the renal tubule. Note the network of blood vessels (capillaries) that allow the transfer of water and other goodies from the tubule back into the blood. Image source.

The renal corpuscle is the interface between the blood and the fluid that will eventually become urine. Blood is filtered by a fine "sieve" of cells that prevents everything larger than a small protein from passing into the renal tubule. Red blood cells, platelets, and most proteins stay on the blood side, while small proteins such as albumin, minerals, urea, glucose, water, and almost anything that would be considered a toxin** are allowed through into the renal tubule.

The renal tubule is a long tube that re-absorbs everything in this filtered blood that the body wants to keep. Water, minerals, albumin, glucose, amino acids, and other useful molecules are re-absorbed. Everything else ends up as urine and is excreted.

Can you see the genius of this design? Urine is blood, minus all the good stuff. Everything that isn't specifically recognized by the body as useful is excreted by default, no matter what it is. The body doesn't have to recognize each of the thousands of foreign compounds that make their way into our circulation each day. These substances are all out the door, by default.

Are you impressed by your kidneys yet? If not, consider this. Your kidneys filter your entire blood volume roughly 70 times per day. The reason you don't have to pee a liter a minute is that urine volume is reduced by 99 percent due to water reabsorption in the renal tubules.

This is why most drugs have to be taken on a regular basis, often several times per day. In concert with the detoxification enzymes of the liver, which tend to make drugs easier for the kidneys to excrete, the kidneys rapidly reduce the circulating concentration of drugs simply by excreting everything they don't recognize as useful.

Can a detox product improve upon 500 million years of kidney evolution***? I have my doubts.

* Exception: chelation therapy offered by a licensed medical practitioner for actual, diagnosed heavy metal poisoning. Second exception: strategies that use the word "detox" loosely to refer to removing unhealthy foods from the diet.

** Toxins tend to be very small-- either small organic molecules or minerals such as arsenic. Larger toxins such as proteins are uncommon in the circulation because proteins are generally not absorbed by the digestive tract. Toxic proteins have to be injected or otherwise directly introduced into the circulation, e.g. by a snake bite or a bacterial infection. But if you're bitten by a rattlesnake, I hope your first line of treatment won't be a detox kit from your local supplement store.

*** Kidneys are present in hagfish and lampreys, the most "primitive" living vertebrates.

Food Reward Friday

On February 28, 2014 By jammy // No comments:

This week's lucky "winner"... Kirkland Signature Cashew Clusters!!

WHS reader Brad Dieter mentioned these on Facebook the other day:

Nutrition tip of the day. Do not buy Cashew Clusters from Costco. You will eat an entire bag in one fell swoop. Sweet, salty, crunchy, and calorie dense, the perfect storm in Stephan Guyenet's model of overeating. I have n=1 data as proof.

n=1 quickly turned into n=6 as other people chimed in, including myself. I can attest to the fact that Cashew Clusters are like crack. Here's more evidence from their Amazon reviews:

"Addiction with less guilt!" These things are SO freaking good!!!... I'm eating some right now and I am having trouble keeping my hand out of the bag long enough to write this review!

"Delicious". I gave this as a gift to my girl friend... She loved it ! Heard there wasn't much sugar either. Seems the nuts were crispy and the clusters were very addicting, in a nice way. It lasted only for 6 days. [SG- each bag contains 4,800 calories]

"Buy these and you will be hooked for life!" One word "NUMMY!"... Very addicting.

Cashew Clusters are only about 11 percent sugar by calories, with the other 89 percent of calories coming from whole nuts and seeds. They're probably a healthy snack if you can eat them in moderation. Can you?

Snacktime in My Kitchen

On February 26, 2014 By jammy // No comments:

Here is a photo of all visible food in my kitchen:

Along the back wall, we have glass containers of raw nuts, unsalted roasted nuts, grains, and legumes. It's easy and attractive to organize your dry foods using inexpensive 2 quart Ball jars. They also have the advantage of being moth-proof. On the left, we have fresh fruit and a few onions. On the far left in the background is our hand-cranked conical burr grinder, for occasional coffee (Skerton).

If I walk into my kitchen between meals, the only food available to eat without doing any cooking or reheating is unsalted nuts and fresh fruit. There is no other snack food in the kitchen. No chips, cookies, bars, popcorn, snack mix, candy, or anything else that's tempting and easy to grab and devour.

When it's mealtime, we eat good home-cooked food. When it isn't mealtime, we don't have anything available that we would eat without feeling genuinely hungry. If we do feel genuinely hungry, fresh fruit and unsalted nuts make a satisfying snack.

This is the way of my people.

What's the point? Eliminating tempting food cues from our surroundings and creating small barriers to food consumption decreases the quantity of food we eat while increasing the quality. Engineering a food environment that discourages eating for reasons other than hunger helps match food intake to the body's true energy needs, favoring leanness and health.

Mindless Eating

On February 13, 2014 By jammy // No comments:

You think you're in control of your eating behavior-- but you aren't

In 2005, Brian Wansink's research group published a remarkable study that demonstrates the powerful unconscious influence of the food environment on our consumption (1).

Volunteers were invited to a test kitchen to eat bowls of tomato soup for lunch. Each person was given a bowl containing 18 ounces of soup-- but there was a catch. Half the volunteers were given custom-made soup bowls that partially refilled as they ate, such that the soup level dropped more slowly.

5 Easy and Effective Ways to Eat Less

On February 11, 2014 By jammy // No comments:

Why do we overeat? Why is it hard to lose fat once we've gained it? Is there a way to comfortably and sustainably eat less and lose fat?

I recently did an interview with Armi Legge of Evidence Magazine that gives an overview of my thinking on these topics-- based on a large and compelling body of research that rarely reaches popular media sources in useful form.

At the end of the interview, Armi asks me to list my top five tips for reducing calorie intake. Enjoy!

5 Easy and Effective Ways to Eat Less