fatty, fat, fatty (semi-mlp)

[Spike]

This is almost 9 years old, but Gary Taubes released a new book recently, and so I'm wondering if anyone else here loves bacon as much as I do.

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/07/magaz ... t-lie.html

[juliet999]

I do!

[Hufflepuff]

The article seems disingenuous to me. At least, if I understand Atkins and criticisms thereof properly: nobody ever argued that Atkins' plan didn't work. Eating only protein and fat and no sugar or starch will indeed enable you to lose weight -- I can't remember anyone ever denying that. The major criticism was always that eating nothing but protein and fat is really, really unhealthy.

Is it an effective weight-loss system? Of course. Nobody's arguing that. But it's phenomenally unhealthy. You can drop fifty pounds on Atkins, but you'll end up with liver disease or heart failure.

The article presents a false dichotomy in high-fat vs low-fat, claiming that The Man has been telling us low-fat is good, high-fat is bad but that the reverse is actually true. Ask any registered dietician and nine out of ten will tell you it's balance that's healthy. Low-fat and high-fat diets are unhealthy. "Diets" in general are nonsense. Balance, not some crazy gimmickey plan, is what's healthiest.

The article also uses "health" and "weight" interchangably in a very disingenuous way. "Atkins does help you lose weight, The Machine has been lying to you; Atkins isn't unhealthy at all!" The two are quite separate. You can be any weight within reason and be healthy, you can be any weight and be unhealthy. The "weight = health" paradigm is an insidious one that unfortunately pervades my culture (American). And there's ten score feminist reasons it's bullshit, too.

And I hate to break out the chorus, but correlation is not causation. "Low-fat diets, obesity and diebetes have risen together. Gasp of Gasps! You've all been fooled by The Establishment!" Diabetes and obesity are rising among Americans for a dozen reasons each, and I don't think low-fat diets are on either list.

Everyone who says "this specialized diet is the way to be healthy and thin!" is a crackpot, whether it's Atkins or the AMA, because people are biologically individual. There is no diet that would be healthy and safe for anybody and everybody, that's patent nonsense. The only good general advice is "balance." That and maybe "cut back on processed foods." Eat fat, eat starch, eat carbs, eat sugar and eat to your fill. Just make sure that those fats and starches and carbs and sugars are, as much as possible, basic foods that you've cooked yourself. Snack foods, fast food and prepared meals aren't unhealthy because they've got fat or starch or carbs or sugar; it's because there's barely any food in them whatsoever; they fill you up with empty calories while giving you little in the way of nutrition.

...

But yes, I love bacon. Don't get to eat much (see my Introduction topic), but when I do, I love it.

I've found a really amazingly delicious way to cook bacon, by the way, and I've just gotta share. First off, you need thick-cut bacon. Take enough rashers to crowd the bottom of a pan, and cut them in half (so you have shorter rashers than what comes packaged), then go ahead and crowd that pan. Put them over the very lowest possible heat your stove's capable of, and leave them there - uncovered - for twenty minutes. They shouldn't take any color or make any sound during those twenty minutes. If they do, your stove is too hot, so maybe put an extra pan or two underneath the pan to diffuse some of the heat.

Careful not to poke the strips, flip them after those twenty minutes, and let them go for another twenty. They should basically still look completely raw - just paler, but not at all browned or crispy.

After the second twenty is up (they should be paler and opague, but basically still look raw), flip them one last time and turn the heat up just enough until they start making noise. Let them sizzle for ten minutes, then serve.

By using thick-cut bacon and spending a long, slow time heating the rashers through and rending out a lot of the fat, then finishing by searing them, you'll end up with bacon that's crispy on the outside, and meltily fatty on the inside. It'll crunch like porkskin, but have the body and unctousness that only pork fat can deliver. In a word -- heaven.

[lizpoona]

That bacon cooking recipe sounds amazing (dunno i I have the attention span for that, though).


My general rule of thumb when grocery shopping:

1. Are there the least amount of ingredients possible (for a simple food like meat slices, crackers, cookies, etc..)
2. Can you recognize most of the ingredients?
3. Avoid high fructose corn syrup; consume foods/drinks containing it only when there's not much else available
4. when having trouble deciding, pick the one with less calories or less sugar (less sugar trumps less calories for me, since diabetes runs in my family... my retail job burns enough calories for three people)
5. Always get one or two sweets or snacks, because it's clear after 20 yrs that you're going to crave it at some point, and picking something moderately digestible now will save you from wasting money at a vending machine.

And, every day eating: make sure you've gotten protein, fiber, vitamins, minerals, some carbs (carbs are easy- bread is everywhere), and various other nutrients. I don't often have time to eat a bunch of fruit and vegetables, so I usually just drink a ton of v8 and fruit juice. Bad for fiber intake but it keeps me going! Once I get my braces off, it won't be a terrible inconvenient pain just to eat an apple.

Fat usually comes with the protein, so just focus on the protein and fat will follow.

aaaaand you have to stay active. Take a walk, ride a bike, work a retail job in a huge store that requires you to run back and forth from the front to the back or around your department for 6 hours straight.


Be healthy isn't too hard once you get daily habits down... I'm still working on those habits. Having *time* to be healthy is something you have to deal with too, and that's not easy.

[rowan]

I think Atkins has modified to allow veggies now, though I'm not sure. I did South Beach and that's pretty healthy & has certainly gotten me to eat healthier in general.


I would add to your recipe that good-quality bacon really helps.

[Spike]

Atkins always allowed veggies. High fiber veggies, as fiber is by definition non-digestible, so fiber is not included in carb count. The view that no veggies are allowed are mostly media hype supported by people seeing friends on the induction phase, which lasts two weeks. The purpose of induction is to kick-start a state of ketosis (no, not ketoacidosis, don't get the two mixed up), and then gradually up your carbohydrates to a level that allows you to stay in ketosis, but also allows for more flexibility in diet. Induction, from what I've heard, used to involve less veggies, but that was changed recently.

You can drop fifty pounds on Atkins, but you'll end up with liver disease or heart failure.

Hufflepuff, did you even read the article? Fat is good for your body, every cell in your body needs it. This is part of what the article is showing, by letting you know how your metabolism works. Your metabolism works like this in part because natural sources of sugar and starch used to not be available year-round, so our bodies adapted to store all the excess energy they provide. But now, in modern society, they're available everywhere, all the time, especially in the first processed food - bread.
Go to the grocery, it's 90% carb-heavy food (and this fact certainly isn't helped by things like the "Heart Healthy" stamp that goes to low-fat food. Gotta replace those satiating fat calories with bloated carb calories!) Low-carb diets, aktins included, tend to cut out nearly all processed food (sausages are the only exception I can think of off the top of my head) by proxy. To argue that you just have to eat "less processed food", you're actually agreeing with atkins quite heavily.

I wouldn't agree that people should eat their fill using sugars and starches because doing so will screw with your hunger response via insulin pathways, which leads to things like metabolic syndrome. Nor would I agree with drinking fruit juice (yay sugar water) in place of berries or other fruit on the go. But I agree with everything else lizpoona brought up.

However I don't think I'm going to waste more words on someone who couldn't be bothered to read the article to begin with.

[lizpoona]

I wouldn't agree that people should eat their fill using sugars and starches because doing so will screw with your hunger response via insulin pathways, which leads to things like metabolic syndrome. Nor would I agree with drinking fruit juice (yay sugar water) in place of berries or other fruit on the go. But I agree with everything else lizpoona brought up.

My reason or drinking fruit juice as opposed to eating actual fruit is that I have braces- it's hard for me to eat fruit that isn't bananas. Throwing an apple in my purse in the morning worked back in middle school, but while I have braces, eating an apple is like death unless it's been sliced up(even then it's precarious). And if I'm in a morning rush (which is most mornings), I don't have time to chop up an apple ten minutes before class. Berries get squished easily, and oranges require time, effort, and some kind of disposal. Thus if I want to consume anything beside bananas when I have a busy day, I can just drink juice.

And, drinking fruit juice has weened me off of soda pretty much for good- it's still sweet, but it's not pure syrup (I make sure to read the ingredients on the juice i drink- if it's made of nothing but fruit puree or even just plain juice when i'm being cheap, then we're good to go). I avoid the Sunny D type crap because that's not remotely healthy.

[Spike]

Thing is, most fruit is sugar + a proportionally small amount of fiber (dark berries seem to be the exception here) + a few vitamins that are also easily found in veggies, dairy, and meat (which all have much less sugar). Since they're mostly sugar, I treat them as dessert. It seems hypocritical to say sugar is bad for you and then eat fruit/drink fruit juices everyday, is all.
This is really my problem with the most commonly accepted nutritional info out there. Sugar is bad, but fruit is good! Processed food is bad, but bread is fine! Low carb diets are at least consistent in their viewpoints.

[Sonic#]

^ Well, yes, but fruit is only bad for you in large doses. I doubt that lizpoona is guzzling down 4 bananas a day or something, or washing down a banana with a coke and a candy bar. And compared to sodas, they are marginally better in their content. All this is to say, I think it's smart to treat them as dessert (I do too), but the true problem here is the excess of dessert in our diet, rather than fruit itself.

[monk]

most fruit is sugar + a proportionally small amount of fiber

plus vitamins and mineral in an easily absorbed form by the body.

Want to know what has what in it? here's a chart

[Spike]

I'm not trying to pick on lizpoona in particular, or argue that fruit is OMG A DEMON. It's just a relatively healthy dessert, not a meal. The (common) idea that it is a healthy everyday meal is kind of disturbing, to me. And that's not saying that fruit is the problem (it isn't, by itself), or that it can't ever be used for breakfast when you're on the go.

It's the combination of generally accepted practices - fruit for breakfast, sandwich for lunch, noodles or rice with dinner - that lead to blood sugar spikes and messed up insulin cycles, eventually causing problems with peoples health. For the most part, we did not evolve to be eating meals that spike blood sugar 3 times a day, nor would we be eating these types of meals year-round. Year-round availability of fruit is over-supply, according to the environment your average caucasian person evolved in. That's why sugar releases insulin, to store the excess energy for later (the winter) when you'd need it. Pair this with the general misconception that fat is bad for you (it is likely to cause problems in combination with a higher-carb/average American diet, so I can understand this misconception) that leads people to replace satiating fats with even more starches and sugars to make up the calorie difference, and you just have a recipe for disaster.

In the end, sugar is sugar. Natural sugar isn't really any better than HFCS, sugar in fruit isn't any different than sugar in, say, a candy bar. Fructose, glucose, sucrose, they're all treated the same in the body. The exception is lactose, which goes an entirely different path when it's being broken down. The sugars in fruit come with other healthy things like fiber and vitamins, and if you're choosing between a pear and a snickers, there's probably less sugar in the pear, so it is a better option. But when you're at the grocery, why would you not buy a vegetable instead of either? You still get the vitamins and fiber, but there is significantly less sugar. The vegetable is probably slightly cheaper, too, for various reasons.

I was kind of shocked when I first started reading about low-carb. Offended, even. How I'd been raised to eat, what I thought was perfectly healthy, just isn't. We evolved to use fat (ketones) for energy. We generally need less of a fatty food to satiate ourselves than we need of a starchy food, because it has what our body needs. That's not to say that sugars aren't okay occasionally, but in the average diet, sugars pop up way more than occasionally.