On Diet - Part 5

The liver you save might be your own

Winter is coming!

Bears are omnivores, like us, meaning they’ll eat many different things. That could be other animals, grains, grubs, and whatever else they might find in the forest. But as summer comes to an end, they start eating all the fruit they can find. The reason for this is discussed in Dr. Richard Johnson’s book Nature Wants Us to Be Fat. As winter approaches, bears are driven to eat massive amounts of fruit. To understand why, we need to dig deeper.

You may have heard fruit referred to as “Nature’s candy”. The sweet taste of fruit comes from the sugar molecule fructose. Table sugar is mostly sucrose, which is a simple sugar that the body turns into glucose. Honey is about half sucrose and half fructose. High fructose corn syrup is around 55% fructose. No matter which form of sugar you ingest, it winds up in the liver to be processed. Sucrose is made into glucose very quickly, but fructose requires more processing to make it usable. Excess sugar, which usually means MOST sugar, gets made into fat.

This is exactly what Nature wants for the bear. By consuming huge amounts of fruit, which is laden with fructose, bears accumulate a lot of fat. This is critical if they are to survive a winter of hibernation. Metabolizing stored fat keeps them alive until spring. But what about us non-hibernating humans? It still makes sense. When sweet tasting fruit was available to our ancient ancestors, they ate lots of it and got fat (but likely far from obese). During the winter months, when game was scarce, that stored fat kept them alive.

All that changed when we started farming, and learned to preserve fruits. Now you can have fruit all year round, with it being imported in winter from the opposite hemisphere which is in summer. If fresh fruit were our only source of fructose I could probably stop banging on about it. Unfortunately fructose has become an important tool for the corporations that are focused on maximizing profits at the expense of our health. Dr. Johnson discovered that fructose turns on a switch that tells the body, “Winter is coming!” This makes you consume more. The excess winds up as fat, stored in and around the liver. It takes a surprisingly short amount of time before you have Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease (NAFLD). This is the same sort of disease that happens to hard-core alcoholics, but no alcohol is involved. Over time the liver function is reduced. At some point a transplant may be needed, and eventually cirrhosis of the liver can lead to death.

Whoa, whoa, whoa - stop the bus! Fruit is healthy, full of all kinds of minerals and vitamins, like potassium. It’s even on the government food pyramid. How about that “Apple a Day Keeps the Doctor Away?” thing? This is all true. The danger is in how the fructose is packaged. Let’s take that apple. It’s got about 12.5 grams of fructose in it. Unless you’re a horse, it will take lots of bites to ingest that apple. That slows down the arrival of fructose to the liver. There is also a lot of fiber involved, which slows digestion, again delaying the hit on the liver. So you can give your toddler half an apple, in slices covered with a bit of peanut butter, and the process is slow and naturally controlled.

But maybe we don’t have time to slice that apple, so we just pour a glass of apple juice. Same difference, right? Not at all! It took maybe 10 apples to make that glass of juice, so we’re serving up 125 grams of fructose, 20 times more than a half apple. It’s liquid, so it takes very little time to hit the liver, and the massive amount winds up quickly going to fat. The food giants have conditioned us to believe that fruit juice is just as healthy as fruit, but much more convenient and easier to prepare. Take a stroll down the supermarket aisle and see how many cans, bottles, and boxes all have labels promising 100% real fruit juice. The implication is that if it’s real fruit, it must be healthy.

If you follow the trail of ownership, you’ll discover that many (maybe most) of the fruit juice companies are owned by the same corporations that make soft drinks. In the US soft drinks are almost universally sweetened with high fructose corn syrup. They don’t have to claim to be healthy. Instead they advertise images of people having fun, smiling, and enjoying life more. Again the fructose is in liquid form for rapid delivery to the liver. We’re conditioned to believe that it’s harmless, other than being empty calories devoid of nutrition. But the damage it causes is real. I spent many years consuming up to 6 liters a week of soft drinks. As my weight increased, I switched to the “diet” form. The psychology of soft drink marketing is what makes people order a diet drink with their 2,200 calorie fast food lunch. Meanwhile the body sees something sweet coming across the gums and sends out the order: “Release the insulin!”

In my quest for weight loss I fell into another fructose trap: dried fruit. The problem with that is that drying fruit removes the water, but not the fructose. It also reduces the volume. You would be hard pressed to eat 8 or 10 fresh plums in one sitting, but you could easily consume the same quantity if they were dried prunes. I really should leave my poor abused liver to science, so they can see how it managed to keep from killing me.

That’s not to suggest that I’ve become pure and fructose-free. I confess there is one dried fruit I still indulge in: tart cherries. In addition to the fructose, they are sweetened with sugar and they are also coated in sunflower oil, one of the hateful eight seed oils. In defense of my hypocrisy, I’ll say that tart cherries are helpful in eliminating uric acid, which brings its own litany of problems. For a deep dive on that, see Dr. David Perlmutter’s book Drop Acid. I also don’t chow down on the proverbial bowl of cherries. Instead I sprinkle some on my salads, or even in stir-fried vegetables. They make for a delightful little surprise in the occasional bite. Given that I’m already ingesting glyphosate (Round-Up) residue, microplastics, and who knows what else, I’ll take the risk. For more about seed oils, see this from Levels.com.

Resources

I have no affiliation with any company, food or otherwise, and I don’t get any money for promoting these products. Here are some foods that we enjoy. Save the list for when you reach your weight goal, and then enjoy them.

Chips
Tex-Mex cuisine traditionally involves chips made from fried corn tortillas. The Siete family in San Antonio, Texas, has produced a line of chips and similar foods to accommodate the dietary needs of a family member. Their Grain-Free Tortilla Chips are made from cassava and coconut flour, and are fried in avocado oil. They are every bit as good as conventional chips, and they are available (at least for us) from Costco, as well as most grocery chains. Note that these chips are NOT low-carb, though they do qualify as vegan. If you are restricting carbs, read the label to see how many you can eat and still stay within your daily carb limit.

Ice Cream
Most ice cream is full of sugar, but we have two favorites that are actually Keto-compliant. Rebel ice cream is full-fat, low carb, and sugar free. They have a lot of different flavors, and I like every one of them. Note that this ice cream is NOT dairy-free, so if you can’t do dairy, it won’t work for you. Another new brand I’ve found is actually branded as Keto. Lots of great flavors, I rate them maybe a quarter star below Rebel. Again, this is full dairy. There are many more brands of Keto ice cream and I have not tried them all. One of the secrets that makes them possible is the sweetening agent. Keto brand uses allulose, which is the sweetener that is most accepted by the Keto community. Rebel uses erythritol, which is sweet, but creates a cool sensation in the mouth. Of course in ice cream that’s not a problem. But if you eat a lot of erythritol on a daily basis, it can lead to bathroom urgency. In moderation, it’s fine, no worries.

Chocolate
Most nutrition experts agree that chocolate is healthy and good for you. Most also caution against it, because of sugar. However we believe that the mood and health benefits of a couple of squares of chocolate at the end of the day outweigh the negatives. Even with the sugar. You can find a lot of chocolate in the stores that proclaims Keto on the label. We’ve yet to find even one that is good. They may replace the sugar with artificial sweeteners, but the quality of the chocolate is uniformly poor in every product we’ve tried. So I’m going to recommend two sources of exceptionally high quality (and far from cheap) chocolate that rate two thumbs up from our chocoholic granddaughter.

Woodhouse Chocolate in California uses real ingredients and has received many awards and accolades for their amazing products. If you like milk chocolate this is the place to go, but they also have dark. Their products are actually little works of art, so they make amazing gifts.

Askinosie Chocolate is the place to go for dark chocolate, which is generally rated as the most healthy. These folks have stepped it up to a new level. Most chocolate is grown and harvested by people who make little more than subsistence wages, going through numerous brokers and shippers before reaching the store shelf. Askinosie sources all of their chocolate direct from the famers that produce it. Every bar has a card with the story of where it came from and who produced it. This is our favorite, even though it’s more than three times the cost of the usual supermarket bars. For her 18th birthday we gave the aforementioned granddaughter the Askinosie Chocolate Library, a compendium of every bar they make. She loved it.

A Small Gift

As a token of appreciation to those of you who have managed to get through this entire series, and for your kind comments, here is a small gift. This is a recipe that we found at Paleo Grubs, a few years back, and modified a bit. It helped us get through some of the feelings of deprivation as we started Keto. It’s actually Paleo, not truly Keto, but none of the ingredients is bad, at least in the quantities used. It requires a food processor, but you might be able to make it work with a powerful blender. I’ll note where we get each ingredient.

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Cherry Nut Bars

Ingredients

2 cups of almonds (Costco)

½ cup of shelled pistachios (Costco - shelled & salted)

½ cup unsweetened coconut flakes (Amazon)

⅓ cup sprouted pumpkin seeds (Costco)

1 cup dried tart cherries (Costco or direct from farm)

¼ cup coconut oil, melted (Costco)

¼ cup honey (Get local, unfiltered if possible)

2 tbsp almond butter (Costco)

½ tsp vanilla extract

The original recipe calls for ½ tsp salt, but the pistachios & pumpkin seeds we use are already salted, so we leave that out.

Preparation

1. Preheat your oven to 325 F.

2. Prepare a 9” pan by lining with parchment paper or greasing well with coconut oil.

3. Put the almonds in the food processor and chop until they are about granola size. If they are too big, the bars will fall apart. Stop before you get flour. Larger particles are fine, but the bars may not stick together well. It takes about 1-2 minutes with a food processor.

4. Add the pistachios, coconut flakes, and pumpkin seeds to the food processor. Chop until everything is well mixed and there are few or no chunks, again so it looks like granola. This doesn’t take very long.

5. Now add the cherries. This is going to bog the processor down a bit. The goal is to just chop the cherries so they are about half the original size and everything is well mixed. I usually pulse a few times to get it all blended.

6. In a large bowl mix the coconut oil, honey, almond butter, and vanilla. Whisk to blend it all together.

7. Add the contents of the blender to the bowl and mix well until everything is well coated. You’ll wind up with a kind of sticky dough.

8. Put the mixture into your prepared pan. Push it down with a spatula or large spoon to pack it tightly. If not packed well, you will get granola instead of bars.

9. Bake for 20-30 minutes. Ovens vary. For us it’s 20 minutes. If the edges next to the pan are brown, they are done. Let them cool, then put the entire pan in the fridge overnight. The next day remove the entire block from the pan. Make 3 cuts vertically and 3 cuts horizontally to make 16 equal sized cubes. Keep them in the refrigerator until ready to serve. At room temperature they will start to fall apart.

My wife and I can make a double batch of these in about 15 minutes, but we’ve been doing it so long that it’s kind of automatic. I do the chopping, she does the mixing and packing in the pan. Initially you should allow an hour for your first batch. If you make them often, it will go much faster.

The finished squares contain about 14 grams of carbs. Yes, the honey and cherries both have fructose and sugar, but it isn’t a lot and it’s worth spending some of your tiny budget of carbs on something that tastes good! If you are worried about going out of ketosis I can attest to the fact that grandchildren like them too.