You Are What You Eat Part II

First, a disclaimer: I am not a doctor or nutritionist.

By reading further, I hereby agree that I hold the writer harmless for any misleading information or off-the-wall interpretations of my own devising.

I did inherit a keen interest in health issues that had me reading health-related articles from my childhood years on. I began taking supplements nearly 50 years ago, starting with Vitamin C in 1968 to ward off hangovers. I suppose I could have quit drinking, but I wasn’t ready for such extreme measures. Yet.

I added unprescribed prescription diet pills to the mix around that same time. “Better Living Through Chemistry” was a meme widely adopted in the Sixties and Seventies, supporting the then-popular notion that “If it feels good, do it.” Probably feels pretty good to jump out of an airplane without a chute and just soar like an eagle! But…then there is the landing…(This just in: see link, but “don’t try this at home!”)

If you are wondering about the apparent contradiction between my interest in health and my relentless attack on my own health, let me refer you, once again, to Natalie Cole: “That’s an addiction for you. It drives out all the sane ideas and reinforces all the crazy ones.” Slick cried out to be fed and my “logical” brain went along for the ride, bullwhipped into a frenzy by my crazed Drug Zombie jockey.

Much more on this to come as I dedicate a post to Slick and the Drug Zombie.

During a temporary lull in the severity of the attack, when I tapered onto marijuana and off beer and speed, I reevaluated my diet after reading Let’s Eat Right to Keep Fit in 1971 *. Prior to that, I had thought that a “balanced diet,” meant that if I had a slice of pizza in one hand, I needed a beer in the other. Turns out that a frozen pizza has about the same amount of nutrition as the cardboard “tray” it sits on.

If you agree with the basic idea underlying my previous post, "You Are What You Eat,” that you can’t create muscle, for instance, out of processed foods, even if you eat steaks (muscle), because you won't have the nutrients that power the systems that break the steak protein down to amino acids and reassemble them as your muscles, you are probably left to wonder, “where do I find these foods?”

While most articles on nutrition give folks the basic ideas we’ve all seen, “leafy greens, colors…,” because people’s tastes vary so much, it is hard for an article to address “an average person’s daily diet.” Also, individuals’ DNA and “microbiomes” vary, so what works for me, may not work for you. It will take some experimentation.

If you do begin a new nutritional program, ease into it to give your microbiome time to adapt. And add one food at a time, so any effect will not be confused with that of another new food. And for some foods, there may be an initial side effect as your system adapts, like gas, so start with small amounts.

Let’s start with something simple: Try adding yogurt first. BTW, “lactose intolerance” doesn’t necessarily mean you can’t tolerate yogurt. As many cultures around the globe with a reputation for longevity have discovered, yogurt is a useful part of their diet.

As I struggled with this complex piece, lengthy even if broken into segments, I just realized that there is no need to give you an “indigestible” amount of information in one serving. Changing a lifetime of nutritional habits (addictions) is a slow-but-steady “early recovery” issue too.

Crash diets lead to wrecks. Sudden weight losses, followed by sudden weight gains, lead to the famous “yo-yo” effect that actually makes sustainable weight loss more difficult as our metabolism responds just like it would have 50,000 years ago, by going into survival mode: “Slow down the engines, boys! Stuff every calorie into fat cells! Who knows when we’ll eat again!”

So let’s pause here, while you run out for some yogurt, ready to begin your recovery. While plain, unsweetened yogurt should be your goal, when I first tried it out, in spite of my lifelong love of buttermilk, I couldn’t handle it. I started with the Cinnamon Apple Pie and worked my way down to the plain, my last stop being with the Lemon, mixing the two together at first. I love the taste now. I make my own, using twice as much powdered skim milk as called for, yielding a product quite similar to cream cheese.

I didn’t like the taste of my first beer either. Alas, things that are truly good for you don’t make you feel like you have finally found paradise, so quit looking for food that induces an orgasm. “oh-ohh-ohhh-ohhhh-ohhhhh (Taylor, T. Home Improvement). I seem to recall there are better ways to achieve those.

See you next week with another suggested food and some tips.

*Adelle went overboard, as early enthusiasts/adopters often do, but her general ideas, adapted through many iterations, have served me well. More on supplements to come.

If you have a topic you would like me to write about, please leave a comment on the blog, reached by clicking on the title, underlined in blue. 

You Are What You Eat

You Are What You Eat

Or, as the Beatles put it in “Savoy Truffle,” “You all know what you eat you are, but what is sweet now, turns so sour.” We shall see just how sour.

The winter of 1970-71 was a tough one outside and a weird one inside. Weird in my brain and weird in the atmosphere of the black-light-lit sleeping room that a friend described as looking like: “the inside of Edgar Alan Poe’s Mind.” It started with me at a bottom so low that, short of a sudden plunge of six feet, any movement had to be upward. The next winter began with me in the same dismal state. In between were sandwiched three new, and much happier, lives, just like Mr. Mason promised me: “…lots of changing faces and lots of things to be…”

I’ll save most of that story for my memoir, or perhaps another post, but that winter I discovered my first “food lady,” Adelle Davis, in her book Let’s Eat Right to Keep Fit. While some of her ideas have not held up, the basics were spot on. And, I’m sure they contributed heavily to my new doctor telling me, forty years later, when I was 68, “you’re incredibly healthy.” He didn’t qualify it with “for an old man…” either. That was in spite of having spent another 14 years abusing my brain and body with alcohol and weed. At least, during that era, I was giving my liver something to work with, as it struggled to detoxify me.

When I first heard the phrase, “You are what you eat,” I laughed, taking it as another example of the nonsense phrases popular at the time, like “why work when you can carry your lunch?” But…could it be any other way?

Over the years, I came to see “You are what you eat,” as not only literally true, but an obvious and inescapable fact. Including air and water in the same general category as food, from what else could we fuel our body's activities, power all its systems, and build and repair its structures? Never forget: our brains are also an organ in our body. A brain that has been damaged by using, clogged up with resin and tars, and burdened with dangerous ideas and survival skills we patched together to deal with life in The Little Land, that are now interfering with life in The Real World.

Our brains need to be sharp, clean, functioning well, to help us sort out the “weird thinking” that helped us adapt to the Drug World and start seeing the world in the sometimes harsh glare of reality, but also in the soft glow of loving relationships with our families, friends, community, world, universe and God.

All that repair of our brains and bodies takes place while we sleep, and vigorous exercise will help you get that sleep without resorting to solutions that lead to trouble of one sort or another.

Meanwhile, the food industry was heading in the opposite direction, concentrating on inventive ways to fool the survival system in our brains: “That felt good. Must be good for me. Better do it again.” Sound familiar? Yes, here came another addiction, this time to “designer foods” that promised our reptile brain all the benefits our ancestors had enjoyed when they ate foods of certain tastes, smells, textures and crunches, but carefully milling out all said benefits.  I believe it was Adelle who first informed me that “they process out 40 nutrients, add 12 of them back in, and call it “enriched flour.” And now that we are beginning to learn about phytochemicals and the microbiome, it is even more likely that the supplement industry can’t replace all the missing ingredients, and in the right proportions, to support the optimal health our lifestyle and DNA make possible.

The food industry’s very well-executed attack on your wallet and health are described in this article: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/magazine/the-extraordinary-science-of-junk-food.html?_r=0

One item therein that really struck me was the Crunch Factor. The industry really did their homework. Noting that folks liked a certain “crunch” to their food, they designed a machine that would crunch, say, their potato chips, and measure the pressure. Focus groups would identify the “sweet spot,” and soon those crunchy more-fat-than-potato chips would be rolling off the assembly line, with just the right amount of unneeded salt to hit the “Bet-you-can’t-eat-just-one” zone. Sound familiar? Yes, me and beer. I remember telling someone in the Seventies, "I think they put something in beer to make you want more than one." Well, duh! Alcohol! Although, I’m sure they left nothing to chance there either and added a little something to the mix.

As an aside, I don’t believe the “Paleo Diet” meme is going to prove to be valid. Adelle spoke to the general idea in a chapter on the notion that you could say, “An apricot has x amount of beta carotene," when she wrote, “Which apricot? Grown where?” Humans started out eating a diet available in one location in Africa, then spread all over the globe. That led to Eskimos thriving on blubber in the Arctic Circle, then adapting back into the foodstuffs available everywhere from the prairies and forests of North America, to the jungles of South America. So, which Paleo Diet? Consumed where? By who? What will your genetics, epigenetics and microbiome thrive on? If you start scarfing blubber in hopes of having “supple arteries,” will your DNA and microbiome convert that for you?

I better save my suggestions for how to go about shopping for a nutritional program that fits your needs for another post.

Also to be discussed: How our nutritional program affects our moods. And hence our behavior, which in spite of our much-vaunted intelligence, is primarily mood driven.

Savoy Truffle is lyrically, musically and nutritionally deeper than I thought: “But you'll have to have them all pulled out after the Savoy truffle.” I never knew he was singing about Clapton’s teeth if he didn’t listen to his dentist!

If you have a topic you would like me to write about, please leave a comment on the blog, reached by clicking on the title, underlined in blue. 

72 Is the New 27

The flip side of the “27 Club” is the “72 Club.”

Music lovers have all heard of the “27 Club,” personified by Hendrix, Joplin, Morrison, Cobain, et al. and no doubt knew people personally that died of overdoses or suicide at that age. Statistics don’t actually bear out that exact age, but a term like “late  adolescence,” might apply. The insurance company actuaries were well aware of the impulsive nature of brains that were still developing into their later 20s. When I was 24, I bought my first (only) new car. I was surprised to discover that in spite of my clean driving record, I had sky-high premiums, based on the fact that I wasn’t yet 25 years old. Recent studies involving fMRI  scans push that age even higher. “Functional” scans of the brain as it “functions,” light up the screen where “the action” is taking place, based on blood flow, hence the term “lights up.”

The last few years there has been a rash of musicians such as Johnny Winter, JJ Cale and Lou Reed who have died in their early 70s. This led to another of my “bright ideas from a dim bulb” and transposing “27” into “72.” Like the 27 Club, “72” is useful only as a dramatic label and easily remembered meme. George Harrison’s lung cancer did him in, in his mid-60s.

The folks that escaped death at 27, but continued abusing their brain and body, are now dying of avoidable causes and, of course, aging means that there even more people we knew personally who died way too young. Some of my own friends, who severely abused alcohol or illegal drugs in their younger years, actually wound up perishing at the hands of mankind’s deadliest drug scourge, nicotine.  And some never abused any drugs but nicotine.

Sadly, I lost two classmates this spring who apparently lived not only highly useful lives, but basically healthy ones. One to cancer, perhaps from his addiction to golf on chemically-treated turf, the other who shared with me at our 55^th Class Reunion last year that his father had a sudden heart attack in his 50s.

And some, like myself, who pulled out of their nosedives just in the nick of time, are snatched up by carelessness as they forget that even a healthy 72-year-old doesn’t have the balance and reflexes of days gone by. It seems like every time I hear about people crushed by a tree they were felling or breaking their necks falling off ladders while cleaning their gutters, they are in their late sixties or early seventies. I’m talking to you, Pete, and that’s not idle speculation.

In spite of having thought about this issue already, on the Fourth of July, 2015, I was pruning branches with a pole as I stood on a ledge I had built years ago out of concrete highway-paving-test cylinders. I was aware of the balance issues, both in looking up for too long and losing my balance or the possibility of the branch suddenly yielding to my shears, allowing me to be propelled backwards as the resistance vanished and the branch used judo on me.

As it happened, the pole just slipped off the branch, producing the same result, and I was falling backwards, aware there was nothing behind me but either sharp or hard objects and some of them a couple of feet below the elevation of the retaining wall I stood upon. My feet are fast and biking 2K miles a year keeps my legs strong, but I instantly sensed I wasn’t going to pull out of this one by getting a foot behind me. Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted a small plum trunk and grabbed it with my right hand. It was a dead trunk that snapped at the root, but it retained just enough connection to slow down my free fall and enable me to plant my foot behind me. No trunk to grab? Busted head. No sliver of connection? Busted head.

Just to add to the possibility of a bad outcome, no one knew I was back there, let alone back there with me. I’m grateful for the health I so casually risked, so I hope I learned a lesson, but I probably didn’t.

Just because I feel so damn good doesn’t mean I can’t lose it all in seconds, so I need to accept that aging brings physical limitations that need to be respected. Once accepted, I need a policy in place that eliminates activities that exceed my current limitations. Once I decide upon a policy, I need to follow it. Always. Impatience is not a valid overriding reason. A policy “broken at will, becomes a mere procession of vagaries” (Wolfe, N).

If you have a topic you would like me to write about, please leave a comment on the blog, reached by clicking on the title, underlined in blue.