Generally Regarded As Safe

Posted on June 4, 2015 by dcarmack

A phrase that ought to be banned, where food chemicals are concerned…”generally regarded as safe”. The FDA regards something as safe, it seems, as long as food companies are putting it in food and eaters aren’t dying in droves or giving birth to deformed children. Anything short of that outcome will allow a company to add or adulterate any food with any chemical.

Remember earlier this year when the FDA came out in favor of discontinuing the use of an untested amphetamine found in a weight loss supplement? Once it was banned in Canada and some volunteer scientists proved to them that it was, indeed a hazard to human health, they applauded the voluntary withdrawal of these weight loss supplements from the market, falling short of an outright ban.

Therefore, don’t be surprised if this statement by the FDA does not give me a warm fuzzy feeling wherever I may find it, “safe at the current levels occurring in foods.” That is the blessing given to the plastic chemical BPA. They had the good sense to recommend not using BPA in baby bottles and baby formula can linings. You see, BPA is a chemical compound that looks to the human body just like the human hormone estrogen. It activates the same processes. Estrogen is linked to human health problems like reproductive disorders and breast cancer. Hormones work at fantastically low dosages. The FDA knows this, but…BPA in food currently is “safe at the current levels occurring in foods.”

Today, I read in my Mother Jones magazine online:

BPA Messes With Your Hormones—and It’s in These Canned Foods

Want the list? It’s most of them.

Here is the only statistic that matters:

A 2011 Harvard study found that those who ate canned soup every day for five days had levels of BPA in their urine that were ten times those who had fresh soup.

See that date? I guess this Harvard study did not get much press. This is the first I have ever heard of it. Anyway, the presence of a hormone-like chemical in your urine means there is plenty in your bloodstream to have it’s effects.

Maybe you have heard of some of the food labels that use BPA in 100% of their can linings.

The companies that use BPA in all their canned products, listed below, include familiar brands like Progresso, Hormel, Green Giant, Ocean Spray, Wolfgang Puck Organic Soups, and Manischewitz.

BPA-Chart_0

 

There ought to be a law! Oops, there is a law, but the FDA chooses to not actually look at these things because good science costs money, and money doesn’t grow on trees. Expecting your US government to come to your rescue shows your dependency on handouts. Sorry for the snark, there, but in this case you just have to know that anything found in a can in the US is unhealthy and not just because of BPA. It is unhealthy because it also contains additives that haven’t been adequately tested. It contains foods that are grown and packed at the absolute cheapest rates to be found. No corner is left uncut in delivering to you the least expensive ingredient and processing. Our fascination with avoiding anything living at our dinner table is killing us.

So, what do you do? You make your own. If you want healthy ingredients pick them up at the market, they will look like living things. Nothing worth eating comes in a can or bag or box. Even the shredded cheese you find at the dairy counter has starch added so that it won’t stick together like real cheese would. Your convenience is that important to shredded cheese makers.

Eat real food that you make yourself. You can, alternatively, trust that the food you eat out of cans, bags and boxes will not kill you this week. Everyone doesn’t get breast cancer, either. Lots of kids can eat BPA and not have any immediate outward signs of trouble. Your kids might be in that number. If saving money now seems like a more sure thing than the gamble of loss of quality of life down the road, then roll those dice!

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June 3, Day 3

Posted on June 3, 2015 by dcarmack

We are doing well. Even the newcomer to no-carb dining is doing well. Going from the Western Diet to a no-carb diet cannot be described as ‘One Small Change’. Changing from carbohydrate and fat and protein to fat and protein would better be described as a paradigm shift in living. Nothing that you can do would have a more profound effect on your body chemistry in such a short period of time.

It is very good that we have a newcomer in our group. There are five of us this time, and four of us took this trip last year. Even then, the four of us had experience with radical diet shifts from previous years. Personally, I never took the radical shift of just eating meat until I did it earlier this year. Our new companion is on the meat-only course, the most radical shift of them all.

Her experience is reminding me what my experience was like all those years ago when I first went hard on the Atkins diet, back in 2003. Back then I had the same issues with carb-withdrawl, and to a lesser extent I had carb-withdrawl last April.

Carb-withdrawl is much like any other addiction. There is a knowledge, which is contained in the cells of your body, that you can get a kind of satisfaction by just doing one thing, eating bread, crackers or sweets. When you get this craving you will think you are hungry. It is not the kind of hungry that you get from actually going a day without food, it is the hungry where you think about food all of the time.

At the beginning of the process of giving up carbs, it is like giving up cigarettes. There is the actual chemical addiction to nicotine, where you have to have a cigarette physically. This addiction goes away during the first week away from cigarettes, it is the hardest part to beat, because it is assisted by the physical triggers that occur every waking hour of the day. The times when you would normally have a cigarette are all triggers to your desire to have one, they amplify the physical urges, and make the first days the most critical to get past.

Eating is EXACTLY the same way. In your first days away from carbs there will be loads of habitual triggers to amplify the physical calls of your body to satisfy your craving. I, personally, find my ache for sugar corresponds with an ache for alcohol. When I am not eating any carbs I have a longing for carbs OR liquor. A person that is quitting anything might have a mental propensity to shift that craving to some other ‘benign’ behavior. We are all prone to habitual behavior, and it is easiest to radically change behavior than it is to just shift behavior from habit to habit. Anyone who has quit drugs or alcohol will be familiar with the shift to food or sweets. Some people will use the ensuing weight gain of the new habit as an excuse to resume the old bad habit. The hard work is in resisting all habits. You can do it, I wish I could tell you it will be easy.

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Vacation is Over

Posted on June 1, 2015 by dcarmack

So, the two weeks that I spent away from my normal, day-to-day life are now over. The two weeks I spent traveling and away from my daily routine are now scrapbook memories. Now I can get back to eating like I like to, not like I do on vacation.

We had a great time, we saw some things you only get to see once in a lifetime, like our toddler grandchildren. We went to great lengths, drove thousands of miles, at loads of road food. It was a terrific time, and I wouldn’t change a thing.

As luck would have it, the day that my routine returns to normal happens to be also the first day of the month. The first of any month is a great day to change something in your life that you want to keep track of. I am going to go for this month without eating any carbs. When I say ‘any carbs’ I happen to mean I won’t be eating anything where the carbohydrate in the food is the point of eating it. I will be eating mostly meat, and if I get any carbohydrate in my diet it will be incidental, like those you might find in a bunch of asparagus or green beans. I won’t be ‘counting’ carbs, because if what you are eating is mostly meat you don’t really need to count anything, it just all takes care of itself.

Eating mostly meat means that I will have to be careful to drink enough liquids to support that kind of body chemistry. Water will be sorely missed if I do not get enough of it. If I recall, the only real problem I had the last time I was on a meat only diet was getting dehydrated. Being dehydrated made my leg muscles ache, which was most noticeable at night trying to sleep.

I have a few friends that are going to be changing back to no carbs with me for the next month. We have all gravitated back to the easy way of eating in the Western Diet, not resisting the sweet and starchy things on our plates. For all of us I will restate the priorities of the things we will and won’t be doing for the next month.

1. Stay away from sugar in all of it’s forms. There is no chemical difference between honey and high fructose corn sweetener. For the first week, at least, stay away even from the natural sweets, like fruit or sweet corn. Even sweet vegetables will keep your cravings going. If you can avoid these things for just a week the cravings will dissipate, making the rest of the month much easier to bear.

2. Eat the best meats you have access to, but eating meat is far better than eating any processed foods. Don’t worry if the only thing you can get is the meat case wares at the local walmart. The nutrients in grocery store meats are far and away better than anything that is added to any processed food you can buy.

3. While we are on the subject of processed food, don’t eat anything that is not in it’s natural form. I would like to say that this includes any health powders, pills, or potions, but my dear wife would argue this point. I happen to think that if they cook it and disassemble it to give you just this or that special piece of a food that the specialness will be gone from it. Real foods contain probiotics growing right on their surfaces. Cabbage contains the bacteria that would turn it into sauerkraut, as do most vegetables. Eating them does not kill this bacteria, but cooking them does.

4. Drink plenty of water, if you have to drink any liquid that isn’t water, make it some other clear liquid, like tea, coffee or bone broth.

5. Keep notes of how you feel and your progress. When you tell other people about how you went a month without eating anything but meat its great to be able to let them know what the potential pitfalls are.

If you want to take this journey with us come back to this site and read how we are doing. We would love to hear from you, and how it is going for you, as well, so leave comments. Every one benefits from our shared experience.

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Walking the Walk

Posted on May 26, 2015 by dcarmack

Preaching, meet practicing. I preach to myself and others about the hazards of carbohydrates and sugar consumption. I fully intend to live exactly like I advise that you live. Actually putting that lifestyle in practice all of the time is not as easy as it is to talk about it.

We spent a few days on the road, and except for our anniversary dinner, we did a pretty fair job of just eating fats and proteins for our meals. Breakfast was easy, just eat the bacon and eggs they bring, not the side items of toast and potatoes. Lunch was skipped, and dinner was pretty easy, too. Just eating meat is pretty simple, but you feel wasteful throwing all of the extra stuff away that they pile next to dinner.

Once we got off the road it got harder to eat right, not easier. We made good breakfast three mornings here from our spartan Air B&B in Oak Harbor, Washington. All we had to work with was an electric wok, but it was possible to make four-egg omelettes for two in it. There was a local-supply grocery store where we got farm eggs, raw milk cheese curds, fresh vegetables to put in them. Not too bad.

Dinner at the kids’ house was not as easy to do right. We had dessert every night. I drank canned root beer, usually a couple per day. We ate potatoes and rice. They were typical family dinners, western-diet style. Hamburgers one night, really good hot dogs another night, with buns. They weren’t the hand-crafted multi-grain buns either, but good old bargain bin buns. Ah, well, it’s only one week.

We have renewed our pledge to eat right as soon as we regain full control of our home kitchen and settled habits. Vacation (thankfully) doesn’t last all that long, and I refuse to feel any remorse or guilt that we have enjoyed what life put in our path for the last two weeks. It has truly been a magical visit, wonderful reconnecting with our kids and grandkids. I won’t let a little thing like my eating plans cloud the telling of the experience one iota.

Enjoy your vacation. Eat outside the lines, if you must, and don’t feel guilty for doing it. Be out of control for a couple of weeks, it reminds you why you want to stay in control.i-FgZT-gqGLVUnJ4

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It’s Not A War, It’s a Migration

Posted on May 25, 2015 by dcarmack

A couple of days ago I found an article on the Fortune magazine website that started with this headline:

Special Report: The war on big food

In my opinion just about every word of it was good news. It was about a decade ago that people wanting to eat less carbs on the Atkins diet spawned a new niche of food, there were lots of new things popping up that sought to replace old standby foods, sought to mimic things we liked eating, but that didn’t have carbohydrates in them. It didn’t last long, but some of them are still around. The Atkins craze was just that, a crazy wave that big food could milk until the wave subsided.

This time, it’s different.

An analysis by Moskow found that the top 25 U.S. food and beverage companies have lost an equivalent of $18 billion in market share since 2009. “I would think of them like melting icebergs,” he says. “Every year they become a little less relevant.”

The iceberg is very large, and it is reacting to the melting away of it’s market share. Mostly when these companies that make up this iceberg find someone that is melting the customers away they react by buying the competition. When you started buying Atkins diet products they started buying Atkins diet food companies.

That strategy won’t work this time.

It’s pretty simple what people want now: simplicity. Which translates, most of the time, to less: less of the ingredients they can’t actually picture in their head.

Where do we find simple at, readers? On the outside walls of the store. We find single ingredient foods. Lettuce. Meat. Butter. The inside aisles are crammed floor to ceiling with foods that have health claims on the labels. They claim to have healthy additives. The foods on the outside walls of the store don’t have labels and they don’t need health claims. The nutrients in them are in exactly the right proportions for your dietary needs.

What is happening is not a ‘War on Big Food’, it is a migration back to real food. They cannot buy us back. By turning to local, by turning away from fake, we are reclaiming the food supply of America.

I still don’t know for sure how I will be able to live on just local food when California no longer has the water it needs to produce spring vegetables for us all winter long. I am for sure that I can do it, though, because being able to buy lettuce all winter long is a relatively new phenomenon for man. I will not have to turn to boxed foods to get by.

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Someday soon we will all have to eat local foods to get by. The market will change to meet that demand. Maybe ads on television will be for things like broccoli and hamburger. Maybe we won’t need food ads at all to attract us to healthy local foods. What would really happen if we all turned our backs on processed foods, even those found in the ‘health food’ section of your nearest mega-mart? Can we go back to eating locally sourced foods, or are we now trapped in a world where food must be trucked over a thousand miles, or be produced from artificial ingredients in a factory around the world?

The men and women of near-history that didn’t have access to modern convenience foods had something that we don’t have in abundance these days, time. People didn’t have to carve time away from this season of “Girls” or the hottest new video game. Before electricity was in every home people spent most of their time getting ready for winter. Fresh foods were collected or purchased and preserved in jars for the looming time of shortage. Meats were preserved, dried, and smoked, vegetables fermented and canned. It is harder to do these things for yourself now. You have to find the vegetables when they are ready, not when you are. Same goes for the meats. I can see the attraction of prepared and processed foods.

Yet, I am not all that attracted. I know that even the simplest of processed foods contain things that are not good for me, or not as good as any of the real foods that are available to me.

You want to know how serious this is all getting, and how I know that this time is different? Hershey Chocolate is spiking all artificial ingredients in its chocolates. They will use real vanilla, instead of vanillin. Once again there will be actual milk in milk chocolate. You know what we, as consumers, will lose in this deal? Consistent flavor will be the only casualty. Industrial vanillin has a consistent flavor, where as vanilla flavor changes with the weather where it is grown. Chocolate may someday be like fine wine, where the year of the chocolate manufacture has real meaning. What a world.

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What Does Cheap Meat Cost?

Posted on May 24, 2015 by dcarmack

Why was Roundup herbicide invented? What need did it fill that has made it’s use almost universal in the world of corn and soybean (and now many other farm crops)? Roundup is sprayed on plants that are primarily used to feed our meat-producing animals cheaply. The plants that is is sprayed on have been genetically modified to resist the poisonous effects of the herbicide. All plants that have not been modified are killed, making the soil feed only the desirable plants. It turns out that that feature is also a bug…

Habitat loss has been particularly prominent in the Midwest since the development in the 1990s of corn and soybean crops that have been genetically engineered to be resistant to a popular herbicide, Black says.

“With the advent of “Roundup Ready” – or glyphosate-resistant – corn and soybeans [farmers] have been able to effectively remove that milkweed from 100 million acres of land,” Dr. Black says.

I am certain that milkweed destruction is collateral damage in the war on weeds. It is a weed, it volunteers to grow all over the US, some varieties are poisonous to farm animals, of course these animals wouldn’t intentionally eat it. However, the milkweed is the primary food for the monarch butterfly. Everyone knows the monarch, it is the king of the butterflies.

The monarch butterfly is a terrific messenger of what modern farming is doing to the world. Because the monarch butterfly is known to migrate and then to all fly to a small spot in Mexico it makes it very easy to see the effects of modern farming.

The majestic North American monarch is well known for both its trademark orange and black stripes as well as its epic annual migration from Canada to Mexico. The number of monarchs reaching the wintering grounds in southern Mexico has declined by 90 percent in the past 20 years. The losses have been so pronounced that the US Fish and Wildlife Service is considering listing the iconic butterfly as an endangered species.

http://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/2015/0522/How-Obama-s-butterfly-highway-paves-way-to-save-embattled-monarchs

Think about it, the herbicide we are spraying all over North America, and exporting to countries far and wide, because it kills everything that has not been lab-modified to resist it, has killed 90% of one kind of insect. There is no reason to not think that it is also killing thousands of other kinds of insects, insects that don’t have the cute and cuddly factor of the butterfly, and whose declining numbers are harder to quantify because they don’t have a huge convention that draws tourists every year.

We are killing the life-sustaining habitat of countless insects, whose value to us are unknown. We are doing this because a field of corn that contains zero weeds is more valuable by a fraction of a cent per acre than one that contains more than one kind of plant. We are doing it because ridiculously cheap corn and soy are justified because we feed it to our meat-producing animals, despite the fact that they are not suited for this food type, and it would kill them in six months time unless we give them drugs to keep them alive while they eat corn and soy.

Almost killing cattle while they are force fed corn is another unintended consequence of trying to modify the natural plan so that our food can be manufactured in a way that is more efficient for us. Killing off all of the honeybees and bumblebees in North America is another example.

Waiting for the government that currently exists in Washington to do anything about this is a fool’s game. If you quit eating food-industrial-complex meats and processed foods you will be doing exactly what needs to be done to rectify this situation. Already people are moving away from processed foods. If we also move away from meat-case meats we will be completing the change that needs to take place to protect the Monarch and all of his natural neighbors in the corn fields of America.

I applaud our government for considering a milkweed superhighway for the butterfly. Losing that animal would be a natural disaster, but the monarch is just the canary in the coal mine, just the most visible symptom of the true natural disaster that we are causing. Planting 1500 miles of milkweed will not protect the anonymous insects that are also a part of the natural order of things. We need to ban roundup the way we banned DDT back in the 70s, but we won’t. Our national government is far more gutless than it was back in the day. We have to do the hard work at the local level. Stop supporting corporate farming, reject their cheap products. Acknowledge the true cost of their cheap meats, they are far to expensive in external costs to keep using them.

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Avian Flu Not Cured By Antibiotics

Posted on May 22, 2015 by dcarmack

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There is nothing like a natural disaster to showcase the reasons that I subscribe to the New York Times. Their reporting today on the Avian Flu that is destroying commercial egg-production is just stellar.

Food Companies Fear Bird Flu May Cause Egg Shortages

This piece lays out, unintentionally, some of the things that are normally not public knowledge about the markets for eggs in the US.

Eggs, like corn and soybeans, are natural foods for us humans. We have all enjoyed eggs and corn our entire lives. They are also both, it turns out, the source material for artificial and processed ingredients. Lots of the mysterious and unpronounceable items found on processed food labels come from these natural foods. Of course just because processed foods contain items manufactured from natural ingredients that doesn’t make them health foods.

When you think about the effects on our food chain of avian flu, which has killed 87 million laying hens across the nation already, you probably think of places like McDonald’s breakfasts, or perhaps you think of you favorite bacon and eggs place, but I bet it never crossed your mind that it would be found in so much food.

…eggs are used by grocery chains, restaurants, food service companies and food manufacturers in a wide variety of products, including mayonnaise, ice cream, cookies, muffins, batter for breading and French toast.

And that may or may not be from using whole eggs. There are companies, like Michael Foods, that produce ingredients from eggs that can be used instead of real, perishable eggs. These companies are seeing their egg-based product customers begin to look for even more artificial ingredients to replace the almost natural eggs based products in their recipes.

And on Thursday, Hampton Creek, a small business that makes plant-based egg substitutes, shipped tens of thousands of pounds of its Just Mix powdered egg substitute to General Mills, which uses egg products in things like its Betty Crocker Angel Food Cake Mix and a variety of refrigerated cookie doughs.

You will not be notified when they successfully change their recipe to include something that is almost just like eggs in it’s effect on the foods you buy. If there is to be any notification to you that your favorite processed food muffin has been made even more artificial, it will be in a great big health claim on the label “Contains No Egg Products”. This announcement will be to let you know that your food is now perfectly safe from the possibility of you getting bird flu from eating a totally dead food. There never was any chance of you getting the flu from eating a boxed muffin, but they will know that some of you are very afraid of just about everything, so the ‘no-egg’ health claim will be for the very terrified among us, but it is the only notice that those of us wary of unnatural ingredients in food will get that the recipes have changed in our favorite artificial indulgences.

It’s a shame that all of the billions spent every year by the chicken industry on antibiotics that they put into the flocks’ food supply cannot help in any way against this flu. It is like all of the money pored into the church during the black plagues of the dark ages–never gonna clean up the city so that the rats that carry the plague will go live somewhere else.

They never gave the chickens antibiotics to keep them alive, they always did it because it makes them grow faster on less food. I always could see that. I could also see that keeping so many animals cooped in such close quarters to one another would lead to an apocalyptic disease outbreak, much like the black plague that I just referred to. These things don’t spread like this to isolated populations, but then how do you supply an industry cheaply with products that they use by the millions of pounds every year any other way? We are about to find out.

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Rough Communications

Posted on May 19, 2015 by dcarmack

You have to appreciate a place that will charge you over two hundred dollars per night to stay there and doesn’t provide wifi, cel phone service, OR TELEVISION. We stayed at the Old Faithful Inn at Yellowstone park, which is just such a place. Never had a better time at a hotel in my life. Not having any way to amuse yourself by yourself actually forces you into society with other fellow low-tech humans.

The day we arrived at the hotel there had been an electrical emergency at the entire Old Faithful lodging area, which includes three hotels. Electricity was being rationed between the three campuses. Each hotel got three hours of electricity to get it’s electrical needs met, then the power would go off for six hours.

Electricity rationing meant that the dining options for dinner our first night were the reduced options of the Old Faithful disaster plan–which was pretty damned good. Karen ordered meatloaf, and they brought her two gigantic slices. I order Osso Buco! They brought me an entire pork shank!

Dining from the reduced menu was no disadvantage at all. Now I know that I will be making osso buco very soon at my house. It was really good coming out of a crippled kitchen, I can’t wait to see what it will be like coming out of my fully functional one.

As far as being able to eat on the road without having to get processed foods or mostly carb-based foods it hasn’t been that tough. We had a great dinner last night at a five star restaurant in Bozeman Montana. We decided to get a dessert afterwards, which a person can do when they aren’t eating sugar or carbohydrate in every bite they take or sip they drink.

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Vaca Day One

Posted on May 16, 2015 by dcarmack

We are going to be living on the road for the next two weeks. One day is done and I did well, I think, finding healthy foods to eat. I made sure to get my bacon and eggs at home. We got a box of McDonald’s fries at lunch time which was our only blemish. I snacked on cashews for the rest of our eight hours on the highway. Karen had apples and a kind bar.

Dinner was the food highlight of the day. At “The Albany”, an old-school steak house, we got beef and garden salad. Karen got a strip steak and I got prime rib. She got some sweet potato fries and I got onion rings but I ate my beef first which left no room for rings.

We will try and do at least this good today. There is an “Egg and I” close by where I should be able to get just meat for breakfast. So far, so good!

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Feasting On Asphalt

Posted on May 11, 2015 by dcarmack

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As luck would have it, just a few days before we hit the road for a two week road trip, the New York Times has a long feature about eating out and eating healthy at the same time. I can tell you, from experience, that their idea of healthy and mine will not mesh one hundred percent, but lets look at what they have to say, and see what to make of it all.

On the road there are two basic challenges. The first challenge is to get food that is not predominately carbohydrates and this one you can usually get around by buying a meal and just not eating the starchy sweet parts. Second is not eating foods that are mostly artificial. This one is actually the more challenging of the two, because artificial flavorings and meats that are tainted with hormones, antibiotics and omega6 essential oils are the majority of meats in the USA.

Most meals at American restaurants aren’t healthy. They’re packed with processed food and enough calories to cover two or three sensible meals.

This is a very good start, the article calls out road food for being overloaded with calories and ‘processed food’ is a dog-whistle for artificial ingredients. I am intrigued.

Every lunch or dinner here stays under 750 calories — about one-third the number many adults should eat in a day — and many meals are well under; the breakfasts are under 500 calories. We’ll start with some good news: The restaurant scene has never been better.

To me, this paragraph is troubling. I don’t believe in counting calories. I am much more interested in what I eat, the kinds of macronutrients (Carbohydrate, Protein, Fat) are more important than the catch all calorie.

After reviewing a ‘healthy’ sandwich from an upstart chain called ‘Pret A Manger’ in which they found a sandwich that contains just the right combination of everything, they make this summary assessment:

The result is not just low in calories, added sugar and saturated fat, but also relatively high in things you need, like fiber and vitamins. The meal has 13 grams of fiber, about half of what nutritionists say people should eat in a day, and just 3 grams of saturated fat. Over all for these meals, we aimed to avoid added sugars where possible and to keep saturated fat well under 8 grams (nutritionists recommend eating fewer than 16 grams daily), with a bonus for meals that provided fiber and nutrients from a variety of foods.

I can almost stop reading this article right here. “We aimed to avoid added sugars where possible and to keep saturated fat well under 8 grams” is a show-stopper. Any regular meal plan that aims to keep saturated fat below 8 grams will contain too high a percentage of carbohydrate for healthy eating.

There are only three macronutrients, and your entire energy supply must come from a combination of them–carbohydrate, protein, and fat. There is only one of these macronutrients that can we can safely cut to zero per day and still live–carbohydrate. Cutting fat to 16 grams per day is going to meat the balance of energy would be in the form of carbohydrate. Eating carbohydrate means insulin, insulin means fat storage and hunger. My road diet will go the exact opposite direction. The bulk of my calories will be in the form of fat, the balance in protein, the number of carbohydrates will be very low and unavoidable. I would not eat the sandwich that they describe above.

Hack the menu
The most valuable trick: Don’t eat an entire portion

Actually this is advice I would give, in these exact words. You have to start with a hackable meal, though. If you order a pizza, it has to have enough meat and cheese on it that when you don’t eat the crust and just eat the topping you still get enough food to take you to your next meal without hunger. I would like to add here that if you eat a great pepperoni pizza this way, and eat none of the bread, crust or drink a sweet drink or beer with it, you will not get heartburn. The heartburn you would normally get is caused by the carbohydrates in the meal. You might think it is the pepperoni or spicy parts of the dish that are causing it, but that is just because what you burp up because of the foaming carbohydrates in your stomach will taste like the tastiest thing you ate.

Sweetened drinks add calories without filling you up.

This will be my huckleberry for our trip. I will be tempted every single meal to get a Coke with dinner. I love Coke. I know that it is the single biggest villain in making me gain weight, once I quit drinking beer at every meal. If I have a Coke at lunch I will have a Coke (or two) at dinner, because “today is already shot.” That is what the little voice in my head tells me to get me to have another one. Quitting sugar is a lot like quitting alcohol, complete with all the same devils on the shoulder. The best strategy here is to just get a glass of water at mealtime. Coffee is okay at breakfast, no juice, but at lunch and dinner a glass of water will go mostly untouched, while a glass of soda will get refilled at least once.

Choose mustard instead of mayo on a sandwich, or olive oil and vinegar or lemon juice instead of creamy salad dressing. It’s easy to undercut a salad or sandwich with dollops of ranch or Caesar dressing.

Nope. Real mayonnaise is one cup of olive oil and one egg yolk, and a dash of mustard and vinegar. Why avoid mayonnaise? Elsewhere in this article, even in this same paragraph, they crow about the benefit of olive oil, yet call it mayonnaise and now it’s a source of fat to be avoided. Then they call out ranch dressing. Guess how you make home made ranch dressing. One half mayonnaise, one half buttermilk. Mix. I am not kidding. Ranch dressing is just buttermilk and mayonnaise. There is nothing unhealthy about either thing, and given a choice you should always pick ranch dressing, because it will contain no sugar. This is hilarious to me that they would say eat olive oil but don’t eat mayonnaise. THEY DONT KNOW WHAT IS IN THE FOODS THEY RECOMMEND OR CAUTION AGAINST. Therein lies the entire problem with food reporting (and maybe reporting in general). You don’t have to know anything at all about a topic to write about it.

The addition of oatmeal to the Starbucks menu makes a truly healthful breakfast far easier to find on the road. We prefer the plain over the blueberry-flavored, and don’t automatically add an entire packet of brown sugar. The dried fruit that comes with the oatmeal already supplies sugar.

Why do you think they think that oatmeal is healthier than any other breakfast food found at Starbucks? Because their mom’s fixed them oatmeal as a kid. Guess what, that doesn’t make oatmeal a health food. Adding sugar to oatmeal is like adding more oatmeal to oatmeal. Processed oats, especially the quick oats you would find at Starbucks are exactly one increment more healthy than the sugar they warn against. All of the calories in oatmeal are carbohydrate. Adding sugar or fruit is like frosting on a cake. Might as well add frosting, because you can’t make it any less a health food than it already is.

My own road breakfast will be the easiest meal of the day. I will order two eggs and sausage or bacon. I will not eat any toast, drink any fruit juice. It will just be eggs and meat, and it will last me all the way to lunch time without hunger. Try that with a big double stack of pancakes. You will be hungry before you are out of the parking lot.

A calorie is not always a calorie:

If you prefer a fattier cut, try splitting a steak with a friend. Or eat light in the morning so you can splurge on a high-calorie steak dinner. “I would take more of the tack, if I’m going to Ruth’s Chris, it’s going to be a thousand calories,” says Dr. Aaron E. Carroll, an Upshot contributor. “And I’d try to budget for that.”

A thousand calories of protein and fat on a Ruth’s Chris ribeye steak is not the same as a thousand calories of ice cream and cake. If you eat the steak you will not be hungry again for a very long time, and your body will produce ZERO insulin to deal with those thousand calories. The cake will produce a massive insulin response, you will get an sugar crash within an hour afterwards, followed by hunger–even though you just ate a thousand calories. I can eat a thousand calorie steak at every meal an not gain weight. I have done it. I can eat 1500 calories of meat a day and not be perpetually hungry. You cannot say anything close to that about carbohydrates. It’s why people on diets are miserable all the time.

And volume can be your ally. “One of the things you want to think about when you to go a restaurant is calories, but you also want to make sure you get enough volume of food so you feel satisfied when you leave,” says Marlene Schwartz, the director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at the University of Connecticut. Eating a large volume of food will make you less likely to binge later.

Want to know how it works for me? It has nothing to do with volume. In the morning, after having ate no food for about twelve hours since dinner the night before I cook two eggs, and three strips of bacon. The bacon cooks down to shriveled bits of its former volume, the eggs swell up just a bit. There is very little volume here. I eat that tiny breakfast, sometimes I share it with the grandkids or my pet. I am not hungry again until lunch six hours later. Nothing to do with volume. If you think your stomach has to be full before you get the signal to push back from the table try eating bacon and eggs (only). It really works.

If I go to a fast food restaurant I can eat healthy. This is how. Order a double cheeseburger with the works. Take the sandwich apart and just eat the lettuce and meat and cheese. You will get all the energy you need from the fat in the meat and cheese. It’s how nature intended for you to live.

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