Best Gluten-Free Italian Meatball Recipe

Gluten-free Italian meatballs recipe with pesto g-free pasta.

Craving meatballs but shun evil gluten? 

Have I got a meatball recipe for you. And it's so good you won't even have to apologize to your Aunt Carmella. I promise. She won't ever suspect you pulled a switcheroo on the old family recipe and made it gluten-free.

Mum's the word (or is it Mama mia?).

Let's face it. When it comes to making meatballs every family boasts an ultra-special top secret meatball recipe, right? There's a loyalty to meatball mojo as fierce and tooth baring as the die hard belief that Mom's meatloaf can cure all ills, mend bruised hearts, and restore order to chaos theory.

So why am I putting myself on the line here? How do I even dare to post a gluten-free meatball recipe? The wrong ingredient or technique might actually lead to fisticuffs. Or bristling. You might turn away from Gluten-Free Goddess in utter, sheer contempt.

I'm putting my reputation on the line here, and I know it.

So why risk it? Why torture myself with the inevitable backlash? Reason one-  an obvious plea. My meatballs are gluten-free and casein-free, in other words, GFCF. My audience. My people.

These meatballs also happen to be egg-free (yes, I hear the snorts of derision- may you wake tomorrow with a blooming albumen rash and come crawling back to peruse my egg-free recipes).

Reason number two? My spaghetti and meatballs? Killer. I'm serious.

Meatball bliss.

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The Gluten-Free Diet Cheat-Sheet: How to Go G-Free

How to Begin a Gluten-Free Diet

Foods to avoid:

Gluten is the elastic protein found in wheat, rye, barley, durum, einkorn, graham, semolina, bulgur wheat, spelt, farro, kamut, and triticale. Commercial oats also contain gluten due to cross contamination in processing (see more on gluten-free oats below).

Recipes that use flour (bleached white flour, whole wheat flour, cracked wheat, barley, semolina, durum, spelt, farro, kamut, triticale) or vital wheat gluten are not gluten-free.

Semolina, durum, spelt and whole wheat pasta, including cous cous and ramen noodles, are not gluten-free.

Beer, ale and lager are not gluten-free. Brats, meats and sausage cooked in beer are not gluten-free.

Malt vinegar, malt flavorings and barley malt are not gluten-free.

Recipes calling for breadcrumbs, breaded coatings, fried onion rings, flour dredging, bread and flat bread, croutons, bagels, croissants, flour tortillas, pizza crust, graham crackers, granola, cereal, wheat germ, wheat berries, cookie crumbs, pie crust pastry, crackers, pretzels, toast, flour tortillas, sandwich wraps and lavash, or pita bread are not gluten-free.

The vegan protein sub seitan (made with vital wheat gluten) is not gluten-free; and some tempeh is not gluten-free (you must check). Flavored tofu may or may not be gluten-free due to seasoning. Injera bread (traditionally made from teff flour) and Asian rice wraps may be gluten-free, but are not necessarily gluten-free (check labels, always).

Barley enzymes used in malt, natural flavors, and to process some non-dairy beverages, chocolate chips, coffee, teas, and dessert syrups (and even some brown rice syrups) are not gluten-free. Always check.

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Some success, some failure

Its been a few weeks now since beginning this gardening and growing my own plants which will hopefully produce nice food. I've had 6 of the 10 strawberry plants grow, the others there was this hairy fungus or something growing inside the pot. It must have been the humidity created by the bag over the countainers to keep warm air in here. Probably not good enough air ciculation? Anyway thats ok, 6 strawberry plants is fine and I'm happy. Now I just got to get them to a full plant without losing anymore! THey're still really tiny but I read that soon they should start to pick up and grow much faster.



I have two types of spinach out the garden and one of them is doing FINE, everything is growing as you can see above. However the other box only a few have come up and in total I was expecting around 50 spinach plants. Maybe its the seeds I used in the other box are not too good or maybe they just take longer (i'll have to re read the packet). If nothing happens in the next week I'll sort that out again because its not too late for spinach :) The broccoli is also doing fine, I think its also starting to pick up a bit now.



Now my tomato plants, I gave 2 of them away to a friend and have 5 in a big pot, and a couple downstairs that I think are only just starting to come up. The other plant I hit the pot over by accident lol. whoops! But even if I only end up with 5 tomato plants that great! (also note my Mint plant to the right here, gottta find a home out the garden for this because apparently it literally takes over. So this will go in a small box on its own I think! In the middle there is a strawberry plant, just one in that pot but I might have put 2-3 seeds in there. The others are downstairs.



As for the Basil, well its holding up, I realize that cold weather not so good. Sometimes its showing signs of dying, then it springs back to life agian. Might have been at least a month too early to put it into the garden but I'll learn from this if it dies and just buy another one. Cheap anyway!

Soon the made up green house I made out the garden will be done, I will then place some of the plants in there shortly.

Oh yes and I almost forgot, I sowed two rows of carrots and there seems to be these grass-like things coming up. I guess its not grass so I'll leave it alone lol.

thats all for now :)

Nutrition and Infectious Disease

Dr. Edward Mellanby's book Nutrition and Disease contains a chapter titled "Nutrition and Infection". It begins:

There is general agreement among medical men that the susceptibility of mankind to many types of infection is closely related to the state of nutrition. The difficulty arises, when closer examination is given to this general proposition, as to what constitutes good and bad nutrition, and the problem is not rendered easier by recent advances in nutritional science.

Dr. Mellanby was primarily concerned with the effect of fat-soluble vitamins on infectious disease, particularly vitamins A and D. One of his earliest observations was that butter protected against pneumonia in his laboratory dogs. He eventually identified vitamin A as the primary protective factor. He found that by placing rats on a diet deficient in vitamin A, they developed numerous infectious lesions, most often in the urogenital tract, the eyes, the intestine, the middle ear and the lungs. This was prevented by adding vitamin A or cabbage (a source of beta-carotene, which the rats converted to vitamin A) to the diet. Mellanby and his colleagues subsequently dubbed vitamin A the "anti-infective vitamin".

Dr. Mellanby was unsure whether the animal results would apply to humans, due to "the difficulty in believing that diets even of poor people were as deficient in vitamin A and carotene as the experimental diets." However, their colleagues had previously noted marked differences in the infection rate of largely vegetarian African tribes versus their carnivorous counterparts. The following quote from Nutrition and Disease refers to two tribes which, by coincidence, Dr. Weston Price also described in Nutrition and Physical Degeneration:

The high incidence of bronchitis, pneumonia, tropical ulcers and phthisis among the Kikuyu tribe who live on a diet mainly of cereals as compared with the low incidence of these diseases among their neighbours the Masai who live on meat, milk and raw blood (Orr and Gilks), probably has a similar or related nutritional explanation. The differences in distribution of infective disease found by these workers in the two tribes are most impressive. Thus in the cereal-eating tribe, bronchitis and pneumonia accounted for 31 per cent of all cases of sickness, tropical ulcers for 33 per cent, and phthisis for 6 per cent. The corresponding figures for the meat, milk and raw blood tribe were 4 per cent, 3 per cent and 1 per cent.

So they set out to test the theory under controlled conditions. Their first target: puerperal sepsis. This is an infection of the uterus that occurs after childbirth. They divided 550 women into two groups: one received vitamins A and D during the last month of pregnancy, and the other received nothing. Neither group was given instructions to change diet, and neither group was given vitamins during their hospital stay. The result, quoted from Nutrition and Disease:

The morbidity rate in the puerperium using the [British Medical Association] standard was 1.1 per cent in the vitamin group and 4.7 in the control group, a difference of 3.6 per cent which is twice the standard error (1.4), and therefore statistically significant.

This experiment didn't differentiate between the effects of vitamin A and D, but it did establish that fat-soluble vitamins are important for resistance to bacterial infection. The next experiment Dr. Mellanby undertook was a more difficult one. This time, he targeted puerperal septicemia. This is a more advanced stage of puerperal sepsis, in which the infection spreads into the bloodstream. In this experiment, he treated women who had already contracted the infection. This trial was not as tightly controlled as the previous one. Here's a description of the intervention, from Nutrition and Disease:

...all patients received when possible a diet rich not only in vitamin A but also of high biological quality. This diet included much milk, eggs, green vegetables, etc., as well as the vitamin A supplement. For controls we had to use the cases treated in previous years by the same obstetricians and gynecologists as the test cases.

In the two years prior to this investigation, the mortality rate for puerperal septicemia in 18 patients was 92%. In 1929, Dr. Mellanby fed 18 patients in the same hospital his special diet, and the mortality rate was 22%. This is a remarkable treatment for an infection that was almost invariably fatal at the time.

Dr. Mellanby was a man with a lot of perspective. He was not a reductionist; he knew that a good diet is more than the sum of its parts. Here's another quote from Nutrition and Disease:

It is probable that, as in the case of vitamin D and rickets, the question is not simple and that it will ultimately be found that vitamin A works in harmony with some dietetic factors, such as milk proteins and other proteins of high biological value, to promote resistance of mucous membranes and epithelial cells to invasion by micro-organisms, while other factors such as cereals, antagonise its influence. The effect of increasing the green vegetable and reducing the cereal intake on the resistance of herbivorous animals to infection is undoubted (Glenny and Allen, Boock and Trevan) and may well indicate a reaction in which the increased carotene of the vegetable plays only a part, but an important part.

P.S.- I have to apologize, I forgot to copy down the primary literature references for this post before returning the book to the library. So for the skeptics out there, you'll either have to take my word for it, or find a copy of the book yourself.

Fructose vs. Glucose Showdown

As you've probably noticed, I believe sugar is one of the primary players in the diseases of civilization. It's one of the "big three" that I focus on: sugar, industrial vegetable oil and white flour. It's becoming increasingly clear that fructose, which constitutes half of table sugar and typically 55% of high-fructose corn syrup, is the problem. A reader pointed me to a brand new study (free full text!), published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, comparing the effect of ingesting glucose vs. fructose.

The investigators divided 32 overweight men and women into two groups, and instructed each group to drink a sweetened beverage three times per day. They were told not to eat any other sugar. The drinks were designed to provide 25% of the participants' caloric intake. That might sound like a lot, but the average American actually gets about 25% of her calories from sugar! That's the average, so there are people who get a third or more of their calories from sugar. In one group, the drinks were sweetened with glucose, while in the other group they were sweetened with fructose.

After ten weeks, both groups had gained about three pounds. But they didn't gain it in the same place. The fructose group gained a disproportionate amount of visceral fat, which increased by 14%! Visceral fat is the most dangerous type; it's associated with and contributes to chronic disease, particularly metabolic syndrome, the quintessential modern metabolic disorder (see the end of the post for more information and references). You can bet their livers were fattening up too.

The good news doesn't end there. The fructose group saw a worsening of blood glucose control and insulin sensitivity. They also saw an increase in small, dense LDL particles and oxidized LDL, both factors that associate strongly with the risk of heart attack and may in fact contribute to it. Liver synthesis of fat after meals increased by 75%. If you look at table 4, it's clear that the fructose group experienced a major metabolic shift, and the glucose group didn't. Practically every parameter they measured in the fructose group changed significantly over the course of the 9 weeks. It's incredible.

25% of calories from fructose is a lot. The average American gets about 13%. But plenty of people exceed that, perhaps going up to 20% or more. Furthermore, the intervention was only 10 weeks. What would a lower intake of fructose, say 10% of calories, do to a person over a lifetime? Nothing good, in my opinion. Avoiding refined sugar is one of the best things you can do for your health.

U.S. Fructose Consumption Trends
Peripheral vs. Ectopic Fat
Visceral Fat
Visceral Fat and Dementia
How to Give a Rat Metabolic Syndrome
How to Fatten Your Liver

Garden Update

These plants you can see in the picture are tomato plants, the top right two big pots are from apple seeds that my niece and nephew planted. They look after these because I want to learn them to take care of the plants and stuff. I'm not using these of course, I'm buying apple trees because I actually want fruit either this year or next year! The little green pot I have no idea what it actually is, I never did that... maybe it was the kids again. The plant right at the bottom of this picture is an Aloe Vera plant that was given to me by my aunte. Soon when these grow a little more I will plant the tomato plants outside in the green house that we're building. Okay so it's not the best looking thing in the world, but I'm making something out of materials that we just had around the garden to save money. At least it will get the job done! Maybe at a later point I can buy a nice glass green house but maybe next year.


To the right you can see part of the garden but theres still more space around the top corner to the left which is about the size of my house, and then behind the camera and to the right. I have to sort out the trellace that you can see in the picture because we haven't grown anything on it before. I have no idea why not... my dad just didn't bother in the end I guess. I'll post other pictures of the rest of my garden when it's actually all sorted out and the plants are in place. I might actually make a video instead and go around my garden showing what I'm growing and how everything is getting along. You can probably see a lonely little basil plant in the big garden box to the right. I have to get more herb plants this friday to put in that section.

So this year is mostly a big learning experience for me. Next year I'll probably start preparing in feburary or so rather than end of march to early april as I started this year. It's all fun though, I love watching everything come up. I get my cup of green tea and go into the garden to check every morning or evening :-)

The strawberry plants I haven't pictured yet because they've only just started germinating after 2 weeks. I have about 3 or 4 left to germinate but I ain't sure how many seeds I put in each pot... I'll see if I can transplant them later on.



The spinach and broccoli are really started to grow a bit faster now, the 'true leaves' on the spinach have just started coming up I think. I couldn't get a detailed enough picture but below is how they're doing now. Because the true leaves have just popped up I think the plants are really going to start growing faster soon.




Other stuff

The other day it was a nice day so me and some friends went to the park. As you all know I took something called CIPRO in 2007 that caused tendinosis all over my body, including both achilles tendons. Although it was relatively mild to what msot people who react to these drugs get, it was still was very long lasting and persistent even with the right measures employed to try and heal. Anyway, it's 18 months later and thye seem to have finally healed or mostly healed. I played football for over 1 hour and I had no problems with my tendons at all. This is definitely a good sign, because as you can see with my garden progress I've also been busy there and had no problems. So everything is going in a positive direciton right now, I hope it continues :-)

Thats all for today everyone, I'm off to make a green smoothie and relax.

Oh yes one other thing before I go, I'm a bit disappointed that so many CRON bloggers have stopped. It seems we go through waves of new bloggers then they all eventually give up. This is what I've seen over the last few years anyway. I hope some of you out there can continue to blog, even if it's once a month! It really doesn't take a lot of time. But I understand if you haven't got much to say them you can tend to start just repeat yourself over and over. I've also had a few people ask me about how successfully people are with CRON because all they can see is CR blog community just getting smaller and smaller and they assume that everyone just gives up on CR. It's my understanding that for most people this isn't true? The majority of CRers actually do not share their experiences, but you can find them at the Calorie Restriction Society email lists.

A Testament to the Flexibility of the Human Mind

I'm sure you've heard that humans have five senses: sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell. But we actually have far more senses than that. The canonical list doesn't include equilibrioception-- our sense of balance-- the result of fluid sloshing around in the inner ear. It also doesn't include proprioception, the ability to detect the position of our limbs using nerve endings in our tendons and muscles.

Furthermore, the sense of touch is actually several different senses, each detected and transmitted by its own special type of neuron. The sense of touch includes vibration sense, pressure sense, heat sense, cold sense and pain sense. The sense of smell can be divided into roughly 400 senses in humans, each one tuned in to a different class of airborne molecules. Vision can be divided into cells maximally responsive to four different wavelengths of light. I could go on but the rest are less exciting.

This brings me to what I really want to write about, the development (or perhaps refinement) of a new human sense: echolocation. Echolocation is the ability to gather sensory information about your surroundings by bouncing sounds off of objects and listening to the echo that returns. It's what bats use to hunt in the dark, and dolphins use to navigate muddy water and find food under the sand. There are a number of blind people who have developed the ability to use clicking sounds to "see" their surroundings, and it's remarkably effective. This represents a new use of the human mind, or at least a refinement of a rudimentary sense. Here are a few links if you'd like to watch/read more about it:

Human echolocation- Wikipedia
Daniel Kish- You Tube
The boy who sees without eyes- You Tube

Images of Tooth Decay Healing due to an Improved Diet

This one's for the skeptics out there. As I mentioned in my previous post, Drs. Edward and May Mellanby and Dr. Weston Price reported that under the right circumstances, tooth decay can be reversed by proper nutrition. Here are images taken from the book Nutrition and Disease, by Dr. Mellanby, showing the re-calcification of decayed human teeth due to the growth of tertiary dentin (formerly known as secondary dentin). These are sections (slices) of teeth that have been treated with a chemical that darkens decayed areas. They represent four different teeth at different stages of decay reversal. Click on the image for a larger view:


Here's the text that accompanies the figure:

The hardening of carious areas that takes place in the teeth of children fed on diets of high calcifying value indicates the arrest of the active process and may result in “healing” of the infected area. As might be surmised, this phenomenon is accompanied by a laying down of a thick barrier of well-formed secondary denture. Illustrations of this healing process can be seen in Figs. 21 (b), (c) and (d). Summing up these results it will be clear that the clinical deductions made on the basis of the animal experiments have been justified, and that it is now known how to diminish the spread of caries and even to stop the active carious process in many affected teeth.

The following reference contains a summary of Dr. May Mellanby's experiments on healing tooth decay in children using diet: Mellanby, M. et al. British Medical Journal. Issue 1, page 507. 1932. The diet they used was typically a combination of some source of vitamin D (cod liver oil or irradiated ergosterol), plus liberal full-fat dairy, meats, eggs, vegetables, potatoes and grains low in phytic acid such as white bread. The most effective version of his diet, however, did not include grains.

In the book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, Dr. Price provides X-rays showing the re-calcification of a mouth full of cavities using a similar diet.

Asparagus Leek Risotto Recipe

Creamy asparagus risotto  for spring.

May I just take a moment and express my deep appreciation for risotto? And tender-crisp spring asparagus? A week like we've had triggers a need for comfort food- but not the heavy, spice laced comfort food of winter. Something fresh and light and creamy. Asparagus risotto to the rescue. It's been a roller coaster week for us. From opening a bottle of Veuve Clicquot to learning that our buyer had run into a snag. He missed the deadline for obtaining a mortgage. We remain hopeful and knee deep in book stacks and boxes, however. He's still trying. Still interested.

And us? We're practicing our best zen detachment.

With bourbon.

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Vegan Carrot Soup

A simple and elegant vegan carrot soup.

Here's a fresh and easy vegan carrot soup recipe for spring. Why soup? Because it rains in spring. It snows in spring. It even does so simultaneously, accompanied by thunder, out here in the wilds of sunny New Mexico. We experienced the gamut of meteorological events over the weekend as we were loading boxes of books into the car. Four seasons in one day. Packing and unpacking. Once again weeding out what is no longer necessary, hunched in our cramped little storage unit, out of the stinging sleet, rummaging through boxes, weeding out for the next move. The migration West. To Southern California.

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Seedlings

I never thought that I'd become so interested in gardening, as I said in my previous post I was going to do it for many years now but each time I never pushed myself to make any real effort in growing things. A couple weeks ago the sun was out, I stopped being lazy and started to prepare the garden and make the garden boxes. This was all fun, gave me plenty of exercise and time outside away from the computer or TV. I was surprised how much work had to be done though because it took quite a few days to get everything sorted. A lot of hard work from 11am to 8pm most days with only a few breaks. Because of the energy requirements I did actually lose a bit of weight because I never compensated but I'm sure that will come back again. On a side note, I had no issues at all with my tendons (from Cipro) so this is a good indicator that they have healed or are very close to normal now.

The best part though is watching the little seedlings germate and come through the soil. One night there might be nothing, and then suddenly they just appear the next morning! I think at least 90% of the seeds I put down seem to have germinated. Majority of my broccoli and spinach seedlings have germinated but one or two that didn't come up. Some of them I put 2 seeds in each hole just in case ad then will pull out one of them soon.

Because I'm growing several different things I hope I can keep ontop of it and not become too much for my first effort. I think I'll be alright though.

In a week or two I should have enough money to go and get the apple trees. I'm also thinking about getting a mini green house. Although our garden is definitely big enough to support a big one I don't think my parents would be happy taking such a huge space up :) If I had my way though the whole garden would be growing something lol.


Spinach Seedlings


So yeah, very excited to see the results and love watching the seedlings come up and grow :)

Why Grow your own vegetables? For me I'm hoping its going to save me money... See this news report.

Modern Diet-Health Epidemiology: a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy? Part II

Certain ideas about diet and health, for better or for worse, have worked their way deeply into the American psyche in the last few decades. We're advised by health authorities, the news media, food advertisements, our doctors and our friends to eat less saturated fat, red meat and sugar, and more fruit, vegetables and whole grains. This has been the mainstream message for roughly four decades. To some degree, people are listening. We've replaced animal fats with unsaturated vegetable oils, red meat with poultry, whole milk with low-fat milk, and we're eating more fruit and vegetables than in recent history. Here are two graphs of U.S. Department of Agriculture data to illustrate the point:Whole grains are a very instructive case. Dr. Dennis Burkitt was one of the originators of the idea that fiber is good for health. He spent a number of years in eastern Africa, where he observed that natives on their traditional high-grain-fiber diets were free of many modern degenerative conditions, particularly those involving the digestive system. He found that as these cultures began to rely on Western foods such as white flour and sugar, their health declined dramatically. This is similar to the observation Dr. Weston Price made, however the two men interpreted their findings differently. Price attributed the effect to a loss of micronutrients, while Burkitt attributed it to the loss of fiber.

There are a number of observational studies that have examined the relationship between whole grain intake and health. The massive Iowa Women's Health Study, for example, showed that women with a high intake of grain fiber had a 17% lower risk of death from all causes combined. In the same group, women in the top quintile (top 20%) of whole grain consumption had a 30% lower risk of heart attack than women in the lowest quintile. These two papers were published in 2000 and 1998. Here's where it starts to get interesting. From the second paper:

Higher whole-grain intake was associated with having more education, a lower body mass index and waist-to-hip ratio [and] being a non-smoker, doing more regular physical activity, and using vitamin supplements and hormone replacement therapy.

Do whole grains prevent smoking too? An alternative explanation is that the women who were eating whole grains were all-around more conscientious and concerned about their health than those eating refined grains. And why not? They "knew" from mainstream diet advice that whole grains are healthier than refined grains. When is the last time you saw someone smoking a cigarette while eating whole grain muesli with skim milk and half a grapefruit for breakfast? Is it easier to imagine someone smoking while eating a donut and sweetened coffee? Women who eat whole grains, on average, are those that care about their health and adopt patterns that they perceive as healthy throughout their lives. This includes behaviors large and small, both measurable and unmeasurable. The investigators factored smoking into their model, but you can't factor in things you didn't measure or don't understand.

Maybe it will come as no surprise, then, that the Diet and Reinfarction showed a trend toward increased mortality in the group that doubled its grain fiber intake. Here's the graph of survival in the two groups.  It's important to mention that the fiber group probably increased its grain fiber haphazardly, using bran and unfermented grains, rather than the traditional processing techniques of healthy grain-based cultures Burkitt described.

Here's the theory. When the public decides that a particular behavior is healthy, at that point it becomes difficult to accurately measure its impact on health using observational studies. This is due to the fact that healthy, conscientious people tend to gravitate toward the recommendation. If a theory manages to become implanted early on, it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy as healthy, conscientious people adopt the behavior and are detected by subsequent observational studies. People who don't care about their health or aren't motivated enough to make a change will keep living how they used to, and that will also be detected.

You can adjust for some of these factors if you measure them. Researchers commonly adjust for age, gender, smoking, exercise and sometimes other factors when they're trying to nail down the effect of a particular factor on health. But you can't measure all the little things that accompany a health-conscious lifestyle. Do the participants take the stairs or the elevator? Do they take supplements, and if so, which ones? How much sunlight do they get? Do they have positive relationships with their friends and family? How often do they shave (kidding)? What is the quality of the foods they buy? How often do they visit the doctor, and how often do they follow her advice? There are too many potential confounding factors to measure and correct for, and collectively they have the potential to be significant. In my opinion, this means that observational data gathered from populations that already have opinions about the factor you're trying to study may tend to reinforce prevailing notions regardless of their accuracy.

This brings us to the recent study on meat intake and mortality. It was a massive observational study that followed the diet and health of 617,119 elderly Americans for 10 years. Researchers found that the highest quintile of red meat intake was at an elevated risk of cancer and cardiovascular disease, and had an overall risk of dying about 1/3 greater than those in the lowest quintile. That's a pretty somber finding for those of us who love a juicy steak. But let's look at a few of the things that came along with red meat intake. I'm going to post a few graphs of factors that associated with red meat. They're organized by ascending quintiles of red meat intake; in other words, the people eating the least (left) through the most (right) red meat.As compared to men eating the least red meat, men eating the most were three times more likely to smoke, half as likely to exercise regularly, and 22% less likely to take vitamin supplements! These are clearly people who are less concerned about their health in general. The investigators adjusted their model for a number of potential confounding factors: education, marital status, family history of cancer, race, body mass index, smoking history, exercise, alcohol intake, vitamin supplementation, fruit and vegetable intake, and hormone replacement therapy. This adjustment weakened but did not eliminate the association between red meat intake and mortality.

But again, you can't adjust for variables you don't measure. How about vitamin D status? Sugar intake? Quality and frequency of doctor's visits? Mental health? Dental health? Quality of food? There's no way to measure all the little things a health-conscious person will do to take care of himself. These unmeasured (and sometimes unmeasurable) factors can add up to have a major impact on health. So in the end, what are these studies really measuring? The association between diet and health, or the association between a health-conscious lifestyle and health? There's no way to know without a controlled trial.

Here are a few other critiques of the study that are worth reading. Chris Masterjohn points out that the investigators' method of measuring meat intake was stunningly inaccurate, and they may have been measuring wishful thinking more than meat itself. Dr. Michael Eades points out that two other studies appeared at the same time, without fanfare, that contradicted the study's findings. And Jenny Ruhl discusses the implications of the bizarre finding that red meat intake also associates with the risk of accidental death.

Quinoa Recipe: Stuffed Portobello Mushrooms with Pine Nuts and Raisins

Quinoa stuffed portobello mushrooms are a lovely vegan nosh.

The stars are tuning their alignment in our favor. After eighteen months on the market (and more than once price reduction along the way) there are rumblings of a house sale. Negotiations are afoot. We are walking on Easter egg shells through the weekend. Monday will bring us definitive news. Send kind and generous thoughts to our buyer. Wish him luck with his bank.

We've been preparing for good news, sorting through books both old and new. Stripping away much of what we've accumulated since our last move. Lugging movies and art books and cookbooks off in recycled Whole Foods bags to the used book store in Santa Fe. Those things we carry.

Trading media for food.

We took the cash and bought wine, gluten-free flours, olive oil and boxes of tea. Not enough to last through May. On purpose.

Read more + get the recipe >>

Modern Diet-Health Epidemiology: a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy? Part I

Epidemiology is the study of population statistics to learn about health. It can provide simple information such as the prevalence of hepatitis C in a particular region, or it can provide more complex information such as the association between dietary patterns and gout. It has brought us many great things, from its roots in understanding the transmission of communicable diseases, to the identification of smoking as the probable cause of lung cancer.

Observational studies are a mainstay of epidemiology. In observational studies, investigators gather data passively rather than manipulating variables. For example, if you want to know if people who wear tight shoes develop bunions, you would find a group of people who wear tight shoes and one that doesn't. You would try your best to make sure the groups are the same in every way besides shoe tightness: age, gender, weight, etc. Then you would follow them for 10 years to see how many people in each group develop bunions. You would then know whether or not wearing tight shoes is associated with bunions.

Observational data can never tell us that one thing caused another, only that the two are associated. The tight shoes may not have caused the bunions; they may simply have been associated with a third factor that was the true cause. For example, maybe people who wear tight shoes also tend to eat corn flakes, and corn flakes are the real cause of bunions. Or perhaps bunions actually cause people to wear tight shoes, rather than the reverse. Observational data can't resolve these questions definitively.

To establish causality, you have to do a controlled trial. In the case of our example, we would select 2,000 people and assign them randomly to two groups of 1,000. One group would wear tight shoes while the other would wear roomy shoes. After 10 years, we would see how many people developed bunions in each group. If the tight shoe group had more bunions, we could rightly say that tight shoes cause bunions. The reason this works is the randomization process (ideally) eliminates all differences between the groups except for the one you're trying to study. You should have the same number of corn flake eaters in each group if the randomization process worked correctly.

A less convincing but still worthwhile alternative would be to put tight and loose shoes on mice to see if they develop bunions. That's what researchers did in the case of the tobacco-lung cancer link. Controlled studies in animals reinforced the strong suggestion from epidemiological studies that smoking increases the risk of lung cancer.

Finally, another factor in determining the likelihood of associations representing causation is plausibility. In other words, can you imagine a way in which one factor might cause another or is the idea ridiculous? For example, did you know that shaving infrequently is associated with a 30% increase in cardiovascular mortality and a 68% increase in stroke incidence in British men? That's a better association than you get with some blood lipid markers and most dietary factors! It turns out:

The one fifth (n = 521, 21.4%) of men who shaved less frequently than daily were shorter, were less likely to be married, had a lower frequency of orgasm, and were more likely to smoke, to have angina, and to work in manual occupations than other men.

So what actually caused the increase in disease incidence? That's where plausibility comes in. I think we can rule out a direct effect of shaving on heart attacks and stroke. The authors agree:

The association between infrequent shaving and all-cause and cardiovascular disease mortality is probably due to confounding by smoking and social factors, but a small hormonal effect may exist. The relation with stroke events remains unexplained by smoking or social factors.

In other words, they don't believe shaving influences heart attack and stroke directly, but none of the factors they measured explain the association. This implies that there are other factors they didn't measure that are the real cause of the increase. This is a critical point! You can't determine the impact of factors you didn't measure! And you can't measure everything. You just measure the factors you think are most likely to be important and hope the data make sense.

This leads us to another important point. Investigators can use math to estimate the relative contribution of different factors to an association. For example, imagine the real cause of the increased stroke incidence in the example above was donut intake, and it just so happens that donut lovers also tend to shave less often. Now imagine the investigators measured donut intake. They can then mathematically adjust the association between shaving and stroke to subtract out the contribution of donuts. If no association remains, then this suggests (but does not prove) that the association between shaving and stroke was entirely due to shaving's association with donuts. But the more math you apply, the further you get from the original data. Complex mathematical manipulation of observational data requires certain assumptions, and while it is useful for extracting more information from the dataset, it should be viewed with caution in my opinion.

Of course, you can't adjust for things you didn't measure, as the study I cited above demonstrates. If factors you didn't measure are influencing your association, you may be left thinking you're looking at a causal relationship when in fact your association is just a proxy for something else. This is a major pitfall when you're doing studies in the diet-health field, because so many lifestyle factors travel together. For example, shaving less travels with being unmarried and smoking more. Judging by the pattern, it also probably associates with lower income, a poorer diet, less frequent doctor visits, and many other potentially negative things.

If the investigators had been dense, they may have decided that shaving frequently actually prevents stroke, simply because none of the other factors they measured could account for the association. Then they would be puzzled when controlled trials show that shaving doesn't actually influence the risk of stroke, and shaving mice doesn't either. They would have to admit at that point that they had been tricked by a spurious association. Or stubbornly cling to their theory and defend it with tortuous logic and by selectively citing the evidence. This happens sometimes.

These are the pitfalls we have to keep in mind when interpreting epidemiology, especially as it pertains to something as complex as the relationship between diet and health. In the next post, I'll get to the meat of my argument: that modern diet-health epidemiology may in some cases be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Dental Anecdotes

Here are a few anecdotes gleaned from past comments that describe improvements in oral health due to a change in diet. Please feel free to add your own (positive or negative) experience to the comments. I may add it to the post.

Stan: My teeth stopped decaying and some breakage (broken tooth due to mechanical damage, 5 years ago) begun sealing itself with new enamel on my high animal fat, low carb diet of the last 10 years. I still have all my teeth including wisdom teeth. My teeth no longer develop plaque/scale and thus no need to descale, and I no longer develop cold sores on my gums. I haven't been to a dentist since 1999 (I am 53). [From another comment] I can fully confirm the astounding effect of a diet very high in animal produce and low in plants, on my teeth. My tooth decay has totally stopped! I wrote about that before but it is worth repeating: - my teeth would not decay even if mechanically damaged, broken in half etc. The broken exposed parts of a tooth, even if the core is open, just seals itself over time.

Dave: Our family has had similar experiences. In particular, my daughter had a poorly formed molar (she was a spring baby, before we started Vitamin D, hmmmm). The tooth had quite a large crater in it. I put her on D3 and cod liver oil/butter oil. We finally got a dentist she'd cooperate with enough for X-rays. The result was exactly as described above: a thick layer of dentin had formed. The dentist was thoroughly puzzled, which I enjoyed immensely :-)

Arnoud: For years my dentist has been insisting on more frequent and more aggressive cleaning techniques.... to no avail. Last year I started Vitamin D supplementation, and a more Paleo style of diet, and the 'chronic' inflammation of my gums resolved themselves within days, literally. My dentist claims it is a coincidence. I think not!

Martin: Once I changed my diet to one close to what is listed in this entry, and added a vitamin D3 supplement, my dental health greatly improved. No more cavities, and beyond that, no more rapid build-up of dental plaque. To prevent gum problems, I used to have to get my teeth cleaned four times a year, now, once a year is enough, and it seems to me, even that might not be necessary.

Thresshold: I am a cavity-every-six-months person, who arrested decay for 3 years by going on a Protein Power-like diet. No limit on non-starchy veggies, lots of meat-- turkey, beef --lots of nuts, olive oil, egg a day. No grains. Very little fruit, no sugar. Plenty of supplemented vitamin A and D, E, C, Bs, some dolomite.

Jeff: I just had a dentist visit, first in almost 3 years. No cavities for the first time in a while. Your advice and a Paleo diet are the reason, in my mind.

Dr. Dan: Before paleo I had bleeding gums and sore teeth. Now that I have been on it I have not had them and my flatmate just commented how white my teeth are looking.

Cheeseslave: I have also eliminated cavities since I changed the way I eat. I avoid all phytic acid (I try to only eat sprouted bread or naturally fermented sourdough) and I soak or sprout all my grains, legumes, nuts and seeds. I also take cod liver oil, and eat a nutrient-dense diet consisting of mostly meat and dairy.

Dr. B. G.: Myself, I had periodontal disease (esp immed after pregnancy and lactation -- wonder W-H-Y ??!) however at the last check up -- I have no more pockets of '5' and am released to come in only 2x annually instead of all the extra (painful) de-planing and cleanings. This was improved by: vitamin A, vitamin D 5000 IU every am, high dose fish oil, flaxseed and egg yolks and saturated fats and some K2 supplements. [From another comment] I have to admit -- my dental problems reversed prior to total Paleo eating (eg, wheat-free). On vitamin D and fish oil alone my cavities sealed. In fact I had gone back to see the DDS but he couldn't find one tiny 'sticky' spot. When he decided to fill it irregardless (and I was an idiot to not walk out b/c who knew that cavities could heal/seal...on their own??), then I had to leave him. At that point, the dental hygienist had already let me return to a 'normal' insured 2 cleanings/yr schedule, instead of the $$ 4/year (where 2 were out-of-pocket). With going 100% wheat-free, vits ADEK and adding a little (fresh highquality) flaxseed oil, my gums are super healthy and no throbbing at all for the last 9mos!

Brock: When I went to my dentist for the first time in a while last September I was told I had six cavities. My dentist told me to schedule to get them filled in, but I never did. I just had the intuitive feeling that the human body ought to be able to heal itself, and that for some reason my dentist just didn't know how. So, I started Googling. My search lead me here and to the Weston Price Foundation. I bought Dr. Price's book and changed by diet months ago. I eat mostly paleo but mainly just focus on avoiding wheat, corn, sugar and n6 fats. I supplement with Vitamins A, C, D, E and K2. Long story short, my six cavities have closed up and my teeth have noticeably improved in color and "feel". Swelling in my gums is down. I can often go for weeks now without brushing my teeth without any noticeable side effects. It's great.

Andrew S.:I had a lot of cavities growing up, and as a young adult. I started up a new company, didn't have health insurance, and didn't go to the dentist in a while -- and started eating whole, natural foods, with a bit of supplementation (mostly cod liver oil). I was surprised when I visited the dentist for the first time in years to not have any decay.

Robert Andrew Brown: I too have gone from regular cavities, indifferent gum health, sensitive teeth, and a host of dental work to prove it, to none since balancing the Omega 3s and 6s, and regular 'industrial' cod liver oil. Small carries that were sensitive and on the list for restorative work have re mineralised and skinned over but not refilled. I have only recently started seriously increasing vitamin D and reintroducing grass fed butter.

Wow

Last Thursday, the post "Reversing Tooth Decay" made it to the front page of Reddit, a news aggregator site. I ended up getting 46,429 hits that day, and another 8,646 the next day. I normally hover between 1,500 and 3,000.

It was a wild ride. I'd like to send out a big thanks to whoever posted the article to Reddit, and everyone who voted for it. I appreciate you helping to spread the message.

Growing my food

After many years of saying that I would grow my own food I finally just got started on the garden and preparing it all. Because kids come over and for other reasons we made a couple garden boxes. Although there is no sheeting underneath it, it acts more as a barrier so that they don't get stamped on by people. So far in the first box that you can see has been done I have planted spinach and broccoli. I plan on having tomato plant, carrots, apple trees, herbs, I'll also have some sprouts growing by my window inside the house. I'm still looking at other things to grow of course but doing some research on it at the moment since I'm quite new to this. We have a fairly big garden so at least we are now putting the space to good use.

Here is the garden as of today;





I am planting in those two boxes, to the left of them where you can see the earth dug up. Also I have a little patch on the upper right too. We have more space behind where I was standing on the first picture, and we also have even more space to the right of where I was standing. At the moment I'm checking out how long each patch has in sunlight though first. I'm wanting at least 5-6 hours I think, preferably more.

I will keep you updated and add photos as I progress :)

A New Way to Soak Brown Rice

I've been looking for a way to prepare whole brown rice that increases its mineral availability without changing its texture. I've been re-reading some of the papers I've accumulated on grain processing and mineral availability, and I've found a simple way to do it.

In the 2008 paper "Effects of soaking, germination and fermentation on phytic acid, total and in vitro soluble zinc in brown rice", Dr. Robert J. Hamer's group found that soaking alone didn't have much of an effect on phytic acid in brown rice. However, fermentation was highly effective at degrading it. What I didn't realize the first time I read the paper is that they fermented intact brown rice rather than grinding it. This wasn't clear from the description in the methods section but I confirmed it by e-mail with the lead author Dr. Jianfen Liang. He added that the procedure comes from a traditional Chinese recipe for rice noodles. The method they used is very simple:

1. Soak brown rice in dechlorinated water for 24 hours at room temperature without changing the water. Reserve 10% of the soaking liquid (should keep for a long time in the fridge). Discard the rest of the soaking liquid; cook the rice in fresh water.
2. The next time you make brown rice, use the same procedure as above, but add the soaking liquid you reserved from the last batch to the rest of the soaking water.
3. Repeat the cycle. The process will gradually improve until 96% or more of the phytic acid is degraded at 24 hours.

This process probably depends on two factors: fermentation acidifies the soaking medium, which activates the phytase (phytic acid-degrading enzyme) already present in the rice; and it also cultivates microorganisms that produce their own phytase. I would guess the latter factor is the more important one, because brown rice doesn't contain much phytase.

You can probably use the same liquid to soak other grains.

Gluten-Free Garlic and Sesame Crackers

Make your own gluten-free snack crackers- it's easy.

Crackers don't get enough credit. I guess they're not cute enough. Or sexy enough. No swirls of pastel icing. No confetti sprinkles. No tiny ribbons and bows. No Jackson Pollock drips of balsamic reduction or snow pea puree.

Just simple squares.

Ho-hum brown.

Crackers are the wallflowers at the food blogger's party. Too ordinary and unassuming to garner much attention. But there might be a few of you in the same boat I row upstream.

The snack deprived boat.

So this one's for you.

Folks who can consume gluten probably take their snacks for granted. After all, they can grab any bag of chips or cracker box off the shelf of any market or convenience store and motor on over to the cheese section without breaking a sweat. Snack attack solved. Please pass the Doritos.
But for those of us living gluten-free and casein-free- it ain't so easy. (And if you happen to have additional allergies- to sunflower oil or nuts or spices- you get one complicated serpentine quest for a safe little bite.)

At this writing, I can count on one hand the number of available chips or crackers I can eat. Safely. And for some mysterious reason that only the petulant Goddess of the Universe knows, that modest handful of snack options is never stocked. Anywhere.

I search in vain every weekly trip to Santa Fe for the one potato chip I can eat. Or a single non-GMO tortilla chip. Even those funny little white rice wafers play hard to get. New Mexico appears to be staunchly plain rice cracker free (I guess rice crackers don't like to flirt with guacamole and salsa).

Which explains why I bake my own snacks and crackers.

It's a pragmatic choice. I've made Pecan Crackers, and Savory Grain-Free Crackers (back when I didn't know I was allergic to Parmesan). I've made crispy sweet potato and gold potato chips.

But this week we found ourselves crackerless. So we baked up a new recipe on the spot. With garlic and sesame seeds. If you cannot eat sesame, darling, flax seeds or hemp seeds will work.

Crisp and lovely gluten-free crackers.

Garlic and Sesame Gluten-Free Cracker Recipe

I ended up using a half cup of pecan meal in this recipe because nut meal adds to the taste and texture of gluten-free crackers. If pecans are a problem for you, almond meal will work. Or use a quarter cup of seeds, if you prefer (note that adding seeds into the dough may make the crackers less crisp).

Whisk together the dry ingredients:

1/2 cup sorghum flour
1/2 cup buckwheat flour
1/2 cup millet flour
1/2 cup pecan or almond meal
1/4 cup quinoa flour or brown rice flour
1 tablespoon potato starch
2 teaspoons cocoa powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon sea salt
1 teaspoon garlic powder
1 teaspoon dried minced onion
1 teaspoon dried thyme or dried crushed rosemary
1 teaspoon xanthan gum

Stir in:

1/4 cup good olive oil
Ener-G Egg Replacer for 1 egg whisked with warm water
1/3 to 1/2 cup warm water, to start
1 tablespoon honey, raw agave or molasses

Instructions:

Stir the ingredients until a stiff dough forms- you'll need to press the dough out into a thin layer, so if it appears too dry, or it falls apart easily, add one tablespoon of warm water and mix; repeat until the dough is malleable but not too wet.

Divide the dough in half.

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F. Line two baking sheets with parchment or a reusable Exopat.

Using oiled hands flatten and spread half the dough on the prepared baking sheet. Make as thin a layer as possible. Use the edge of a rubber spatula to straighten outside edges, if you like.

Score the flattened dough into cracker sized pieces. I used a pizza cutter to do this.

To bake you'll need:

Sea salt
Sesame seeds (or flax seeds, or hemp seeds)

Sprinkle the scored dough with salt and sesame seeds.

Bake in the center of a preheated oven for 15 to 20 minutes till firm and slightly crisp (they will crisp up more as they cool). I use an Exopat, so keep that in mind; they may cook faster without one. Keep an eye on them.

Remove and allow the crackers to cool on a rack.

We bag and freeze the cooled crackers. If you find they soften from humidity, reheat them on a baking sheet for a few minutes before serving.

Makes 36 crackers.

Sesame seeds add a nice touch.