Recap of the weekend and a note on health
Hello Livejournal, how's it been?
I've been doing well. Lots going on and lots of downtime as well. I've recently been ripping a lot of records to MP3 so I'm getting new (very old) music from my grandparents' passing.
Of immediate import is my new-found inspiration due to a book a few of my friends have suggested to me. Over the last few months, my cooking time and skills have degraded (mostly the former; I made a great off-the-cuff tom kha last weekend). But winter brings with it not only some cold (it is habitually 0C here) but a bit of down time. I feel my schedule being a bit looser, although band practice resumes this week, so that will cut into my schedule a bit more. That said, I want to spend more time cooking and making stuff like pickled foods, and Nourishing Traditions is currently the inspiration for all of this. More about that later.
Katie, the little sister, is in town, so we're focusing mostly on family this week and spending time with her before she returns to TX for the next term in grad school. Last night, we had Korean at DJK, one of the better Korean restaurants I've been to. Lecz (Kat?), Derek, M, Carolina, Katie, and I all gorged ourselves on the wonderous cooked-and-pickled goodness that Korean food has to offer.
This last weekend was spent in a four-day fashion at the coast. For M's birthday, we gave her peace, quiet, and time to just be. No plans, no stuff to do, etc. It was very relaxing. We drove there on Friday via Astoria to avoid the mountain passes. The drive was tedious, but generally uneventful. We got there just after dark.
The next day, Mike, Bronwyn, and Derek (as well as Mike's friend Craig) gathered over 100 mussels on a nearby beach. Much of the evening I spent listening to Craig prattle on about astronomy and physics stuff that he had no idea what he was talking about. It was like listening to someone try to tell you that they finished a puzzle... but they were looking at the box--the puzzle itself is still a big mess all over the floor. While listening to that nonsense, I was boiling, shucking, and preparing mussels and barnacles for everyone to enjoy. I had a simple recipe for Cambodian-style mussels that simply required a bit of garlic, ginger, soy (fish) sauce, and cilantro (of which I had plenty). I put a teaspoon of sauce on the mussels that we left in-shell after cooking them; a majority of them ended up in the freezer (which are now at my house).
For M's birthday, we lounged around the house, got in the hot tub, I cooked dinner for everyone (tom kha soup, Sichuan noodles with barnacle and crab), gazed at the stars in the frigid night air, and read our books. I read the majority of Nourishing Traditions' introduction (non-recipe part) during this weekend.
On Monday, we drove home taking highway 6 which was generally uneventful. The pass was clear and the trip was fairly short.
So, this book has up-ended my understanding of nutrition. For the longest time, I have contended that there is something in the American food supply that is making us unhealthy and obese. It doesn't make any sense that the Asians I visited can eat that much food and still stay small. Granted that yes, we tend to exercise less than many others, it still doesn't make any sense. And then you have the French paradox whereby the French eat a lot of butter and meat and still manage to be (generally) healthy.
According to this book (I want to conduct my own research as well), all the demons that our American media prattles on about are not the demons. In fact, the 'solution' that has been proposed over the last 20 years, such as monounsaturated fats (vegetable oils) and soy products and a vegetarian diet are not the solution. Eating more carbohydrates and grains are not the solution. And that is easily observable by the protein-and-fat-rich fad diets of the early aughts.
I try not to take everything at face value; I do want to do my own research before going gung-ho, but much of this is making sense to me. The culprit is not (good) meat, but the culprit is the industrialisation of our agriculture and agricultural products. It is fillers, stabilisers, and packaged foods; it is convenience, bleached flour, and nutrition-free foods. It is sugar. It is sugar as a substitute for fat. Fat and cholesterol are symptoms of the problems we have: over eating, too many carbs, too much convenience food. The culprit in the fast food meal is part overindulgence in calories and part carbohydrates soaked in vegetable oil.
Some may harken to the fact that many of our grandparents had this odd thing in that rural people who worked every day and lived off the farm could eat a breakfast of bacon and eggs and still make it into their 90s. There was never a trend to be vegetarian at that point. Traditional societies and cultures that include food and food preparation as a part of them (Korea, Japan, France, China, Thailand, Germany) generally eat plenty of meat, but also supplement their diet with fresh vegetables, pickled foods (kim chi, gari, saurkraut, herring) and cultured milk products, of which many of these pickled foods are actually derived from lactobacillius.
According to this text, the 3000-5000-mile diet we have is devoid of nutrition, but is immensely profitable. Food is dehydrated and rehydrated, powedered, extruded, and processed in ways that rob it of it nutritative content. This makes sense to me. This is what makes America different than many other places. The profit motive! And as America exports its way of life (convenience, cheapness, etc.) the plague of bad food multiplies into the areas where we have this sort of influence.
We currently derive much of our nutrition from a few grains (like 7) and we are completely out of balance. Our bodies are starved for good bacteria, which we assault via processed food and antibiotics. We don't eat balanced meals... we eat a lot of one kind of food (I'm guilty of this: for breakfast, I will often have the same thing for a week).
The first chapter on fats blew my head off. It said that animal fats, saturated fats, like butter and lard are the better fats for you because our bodies are engineered to take that. Additionally, saturated fats are saturated because chemically they are 'whole' fats: they have all the hydrogen atoms they need. Poly- and mono-unsaturated fats are not good for cooking because they are reactive and they create (the dreaded term) oxidants in our bodies, which age us and cause cancer. Now, get this: our body reacts to oxidants by upping its cholesterol level; the cholesterol is produced in the liver as a raw material for cells to repair themselves. So (this is where I was upside down) overconsumption of unsaturated oils brings up your cholesterol level, and overconsumption of carbohydrates leads to obesity because your body stores that.
My body (according to my last blood test) is in siege mode. Nothing like some friends of mine, but my triglycerides are high and my cholesterol is high. I'm starting to develop skin conditions and my guts are always a mess. I considered it normal, but now I'm looking at what I eat (and what others eat) through an entirely different lens. Today, I saw a lady take biscuits and gravy and two pieces of bacon back to her desk. A week ago, I would have said that's unhealthy because of the saturated fat and the bacon. I now am looking at it and seeing the white flour in everything but the bacon as the unhealthy part.
We as humans are not very good at isolating variables, especially in multivariable systems. Our bodies are the ultimate mutivariable system, and we can do experiments and look at fats as the culprit while completely overlooking the rampant processed food in our diet. The 'healthy' people I know aren't healthy because they are vegetarian or not; they are healthy because they make their own food and pay attention. Some people may not have a wheat allergy/sensitivity, but I see it all over as a trend. Maybe we are cracking as a species from GMO wheat or simply an overabundance of this now-inescapable grain. I saw it in the puff pastry in my appetiser (fried in unsaturated vegetable oil, I'm sure) today. Corn syrup, wheat flour, dehydrated and chemical fillers/agents. That is the American diet. That is what is making us fat.
I'm not going to go whole hog, if you will, on a new dietary plan, but I think that pickled (tasty) vegetables will no doubt become a large part of my diet. I'm still reeling from how awesome the pickled Korean vegetables are, and I want to make more of that. I'm going to run with this new perspective and not view eggs as my demise. It does make sense to me that humans would crave in part what is good for them (such as meat/saturated fats/stuff with nutrition) and that a retraining campaign for profit could get us to change our behaviours. I've learned to be sceptical of the medical industry, and I observe with my own senses the sensibility of traditional diets. So, I'm going to do my best to preserve and be better to my body. Still keep my caloric intake low, try to integrate more exercise into my life, but also use 'good' saturated fats in my cooking to enhance nutrition and flavour. That's still weird to say. But 3 years ago, I never would have thought I would be eating meat!