LOOPTECHS

I make a half gallon of yogurt, twice a month. I like making my own yogurt for many reasons, but it's a bit of a pain. Since I make large batches, I can't use a standard yogurt maker. I often get distracted and over-heat the milk, and the method I use to incubate the yogurt is wildly inefficient (my beloved Excalibur dehydrator). I also need a constant warm temperature for various other fermentation projects, and that's often difficult to achieve with the tools I have.

I finally found a better solution: a temperature controller that accurately regulates the temperature of a slow cooker by turning an outlet on or off. I simply set the temperature of the controller, place the temperature probe into the slow cooker, and plug the slow cooker into the temperature controller outlet. The slow cooker then stays at whatever temperature I want. Here's what the temperature controller looks like:

Once built, the temperature controller with or without the slow cooker can be used for a variety of other tasks (including regulating cooling devices). Here are some ideas that come to mind:

Sous-vide cooker
High-capacity yogurt maker
Bread dough riser
All-purpose thermophilic fermenter (e.g., for tempeh, natto, koji)
Beer/cider/wine fermentation temperature controller
Kegerator controller
Freezer-to-fridge conversion
Egg incubator
Soil temperature controller for seed starting

Don't worry, I'm not turning into a food blogger. But this sous-vide-cooked
chicken I made with my DIY temperature controller was pretty tasty.
I used this recipe from NomNom Paleo.

You can build the whole thing for about $40, including the slow cooker.

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Is Meat Unhealthy? Part IX

On February 27, 2015 By jammy // No comments:

Welcome to the last post in the series. Time to summarize and wrap it up!

Respect

I respect each person's right to choose the diet they prefer. This includes vegetarians and vegans, particularly because most of them make daily sacrifices to try to make the world a better place for all of us. I'm an omnivore, but I sympathize with some of the philosophy and I often eat beans or lentils instead of meat*.

Our history with meat

Our ancestors have probably been eating some form of meat continuously for at least two hundred million years. However, the quantity has waxed and waned. The first mammals were probably largely carnivorous (insectivores). Yet our primate ancestors went through a 60-million-year arboreal phase, during which we probably ate fruit, leaves, seeds, insects, and perhaps a little bit of vertebrate meat. We only outgrew this phase in the last few million years, when we developed the tools and the brains to pursue prey more effectively.

During our 2.6 million-year stint as hominin hunter-gatherers, we ate an omnivorous diet, although we really have very little idea how much meat it contained (it probably varied by time and place). Historical and contemporary hunter-gatherer cultures are all omnivorous, and typically eat significant to substantial quantities of meat, suggesting that our ancestors may have done the same. Non-industrial agricultural populations eat as much meat as they can get, although they usually can't get as much as hunter-gatherers.

If there is such thing as a natural human diet, it is clearly omnivorous.

Meat, obesity, and chronic disease

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We Do Science Interview

On February 23, 2015 By jammy // No comments:

I recently did an interview with Laurent Bannock, an expert in sport and exercise nutrition. His podcast We Do Science has rapidly become quite popular, due to Laurent's credibility and the interesting guests he interviews. We covered body composition, metabolically healthy obesity, the relationship between BMI and mortality, calorie counting, body fat regulation, and other related topics.

If you've already listened to several of my interviews and are starting to find them repetitive, you might enjoy this one because we cover some new ground. Laurent was a gracious host. Follow the link below to listen:

Neurobiology of Obesity, with Stephan Guyenet

Food Reward Friday

On February 20, 2015 By jammy // No comments:

This week's lucky "winner"... the Cinnabon cinnamon roll!!!

Can High-Fiber Foods Fight the Metabolic Syndrome?

On February 16, 2015 By jammy // No comments:

The metabolic syndrome (MetSyn) is a cluster of signs including abdominal obesity, insulin resistance, high blood pressure, and blood lipid disturbances. MetSyn is the quintessential modern metabolic disorder, and it affects about one third of Americans. Many MetSyn diets recommend eating high-fiber foods, and research on the role of the gut microbiota in body weight and health tends to support this recommendation. Yet these diets are complex, so it's difficult to attribute positive effects to the high-fiber foods specifically, and some people have questioned the benefits of dietary fiber. Do high-fiber foods really improve MetSyn and promote weight loss?

The study

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Is Meat Unhealthy? Part VIII

On February 13, 2015 By jammy // No comments:

Health can be defined as the absence of disease, and that is the lens through which we've been examining meat so far. However, most of us have a broader view of health that also includes optimal growth and development, physical and mental performance, well-being, fertility, immunity, robustness, and resilience. What role does meat play in this broader view of health?

Non-industrial cultures

One of the things I keep coming back to in this series is the strong natural affinity that our species has for meat. Every culture that does not prohibit meat consumption for religious reasons (e.g., Indian Hindus) seeks and eats meat avidly.

A key fact that stands out from my recent conversations with anthropologists is that hunter-gatherers and subsistence agriculturalists place a high value on meat, even if they already have regular access to it. Here's an excerpt from a paper by Kim Hill, Magdalena Hurtado, and colleagues (1):

Observations of the exchange rate between other foragers and their agricultural neighbors indicate that meat is worth much more than carbohydrate calories (e.g., Hart 1978; Peterson 1981). Hart, in his study of exchanges of meat and casava between Pygmy foragers and neighboring agriculturalists, found that approximately four and one half times as many calories of casava were exchanged for each calorie of meat given. In addition, it appears that almost everywhere in the world meat calories from domestic animals are probably expensive to produce relative to plant calories, and yet subsistence farmers continue to use at least some of their "cheap" plant calories to produce "expensive" animal calories (see Harris 1985 for discussion)

Why do humans around the globe value meat so much? This strongly suggests that we've evolved an affinity for meat because eating it provides a reproductive advantage. In other words, meat may increase our "Darwinian fitness".

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Food Reward Friday

On January 30, 2015 By jammy // No comments:

This week's lucky "winner"... the KFC Double Down Dog!!

Is Meat Unhealthy? Part VII

On January 27, 2015 By jammy // No comments:

Looking at individual diseases is informative, but it can cause us to become myopic, making broad health-related decisions based on narrow information. It can cause us to miss the forest for the trees. In this case, the "trees" are individual diseases and the "forest" is total mortality: the overall risk of dying from any cause. Does eating meat increase total mortality, shortening our lifespans?

Non-industrial cultures

Traditionally-living cultures such as hunter-gatherers and non-industrial agriculturalists are not the best way to answer this question, because their mean lifespans tend to be short regardless of diet. This is due to ~30 percent infant mortality, which drags down the average, as well as a high risk of death in adulthood from infectious disease, accidents, and homicide/warfare. It can also be difficult to accurately measure the age of such people, although there are reasonably good methods available.

However, there are semi-industrialized cultures that can help us answer this question, because they feature a somewhat traditional diet and lifestyle, combined with modern medicine and the rule of law. The so-called Blue Zones, areas of exceptional health and longevity, fall into this category. These include Sardinia, Italy; Okinawa, Japan; Loma Linda, California; Nicoya Peninsula, Costa Rica; and Icaria, Greece.

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Food Reward Friday

On January 23, 2015 By jammy // No comments:

This week's lucky "winner"... barbecue ribs!!

Does high protein explain the low-carb "metabolic advantage"?

On January 15, 2015 By jammy // No comments:

In 2012, David Ludwig's group published a paper that caused quite a stir in the diet-nutrition world (1). They reported that under strict metabolic ward conditions, weight-reduced people have a higher calorie expenditure when eating a very low carbohydrate diet (10% CHO) than when eating a high-carbohydrate diet (60% CHO)*.

In other words, the group eating the low-carb diet burned more calories just sitting around, and the effect was substantial-- about 250 Calories per day. This is basically the equivalent of an hour of moderate-intensity exercise per day, as Dr. Ludwig noted in interviews (2). The observation is consistent with the claims of certain low-carbohydrate diet advocates that this dietary pattern confers a "metabolic advantage", allowing people to lose weight without cutting calorie intake-- although the study didn't actually show differences in body fatness.

In Dr. Ludwig's study, calorie intake was the same for all groups. However, the study had an important catch that many people missed: the low-carbohydrate group ate 50 percent more protein than the other two groups (30% of calories vs. 20% of calories). We know that protein can influence calorie expenditure, but can it account for such a large difference between groups?

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