Elizabeth!

I’m completely awful. This time it’s my turn to apologize for a long delay. That makes it even more interesting to me that your last post was on balance. This last month, I lost it. Completely.

Also, I found that the longer I waited to post, the better I felt the post would have to be to be worthy of posting. That spun me up into a loop of not feeling like I had good enough content, and consequently filling my time with other things in a perpetual cycle of postponement and delay. To that end, here’s a completely scattered and conclusion-less brain-dump.

As you know, I’ve spent the last month recovering from a surprise appendectomy. When isn’t it a surprise? The surgery went very well, the recovery went very well and quickly, and all is fine now. The recovery took a lot of my spare mental energy, however. I didn’t knit. I didn’t blog. I got lazy about food and have gained a couple of pounds as a result. Then, the laziness became a habit, and the habit got easy.

Well, enough is enough. I’m sick of loosening pants tightening again. I’m sick of dinner happening by chance rather than plan. I’m sick of not being proud of my habits. It stops now.

This doesn’t mean I’m going into an orthorexic fit of pure eating, just a return to solid habits. A step away from gluten-free pizza every week, away from a glass of wine every day, away from a weekly ice-cream treat, away from lazy snacks at work.

I’ve restarted my kombucha practice (post forthcoming!) and I’m making ghee again (should I post?). We’ve got this year’s pig pending delivery from our farmer. I’ve improved my bacon recipe, and I’m starting to feed my baby real foods.

There’s lots going on, and I can’t wait to share it with you!

So with this, I recommit.

Much love and missing you terribly,
J

Elizabeth!

It seems like I blinked and two weeks shot by.  Fall is well and truly on the horizon, trees are starting to turn orange at the corners and the morning is characterized by a parade of yellow school buses.  The sugar maple that I still think of as *your* sugar maple is positively glowing now!  Not fully turned, but just starting in from the edges.  Winter is coming, as they say.

As you know, I’m back at work now and I’m finding the commute from Stillwater into Minneapolis is an absolute pleasure.  It’s quiet time between the bustle of home and work.  I’m by myself, and I love it.

I also listen to audio books, and these days that’s just about the only way I get any reading done.  Progress on the Primal Blueprint Certification has slowed considerably, sad but understandable.

I use Audible and I recently listened to Biological Anthropology: An Evolutionary Perspective, part of The Great Courses series. It’s wonderful!  I had realized that I’m all about being paleo, and reading up on it, but I actually don’t know that much about the evolutionary origins of humans.  Kind of central to the whole “paleo” idea, don’t you think?  So I loaded this up and got a really interesting grounding in human origins.

The thing I most enjoyed is that this isn’t a paleo diet book.  It’s not trying to sell me on a way of eating and living, it’s just laying out what we’re pretty sure we know about our origins.

I came away pretty comforted – I think that the paleo diet community has a pretty solid grounding in evolutionary anthropology.

One of my favorite ideas that came out of listening to this book is the idea that evolution and diversity are different.  In particular, lactose tolerance is part of the remarkable genetic diversity of our species, but since it’s not representative across all (or even most) populations it’s not precisely “evolution” yet (or at least as I interpret from this audio book).  Just a very popular, successful, and useful genetic mutation.  It’s like skin color, or hair texture.  Makes me wonder where it will be in 10,000 years.  Will all humans have the gene?  Fun to think about.

Makes for an interesting drive too!

Miss you!

J.

Greetings to you!

What a wonderful market!  Reading your post, I sat here thinking how marvellous it must have been, and wondered out loud (yet to myself) why *I* haven’t been going to farmer’s markets this year the way I usually do.  Then the baby started crying and all in a rush I remembered why.  It’ll be more fun next year when I’m not constantly circling the baby and the breast-pump.

Here are some photos from a market in Barcelona I visited in grad school.  It was completely spectacular and I’d love to go back.  Ostrich eggs!  Seafood galore!  Minnesota does well with farmer’s markets, but not a patch on this…

I love that picture of Henry!  I know John would have been exactly the same, even down to the choice of cheese pizza.  Heck, if it didn’t mean days of tummy upset, I’d be tempted too 😉

All here is well. This week I’ve been thinking about sugar.  Trying to organize my thinking on it.  Partially this is prompted by the coursework for the Primal Blueprint Certification, and partially by watching my honeybees and bumblebees in the garden.  One of them stung me on the bum, and though I did a bit of dancing and cursing as a result I’m still thrilled that they are enjoying my garden.  I particularly love the bumblebees (Dumbledores!) and am reminded of an old joke my dad tells about an aeronautics engineer who studied bumblebees and told a friend that he’d come to the conclusion that bumblebees can’t fly.  It’s impossible.  The friend promptly shushed him, “Shh! Don’t tell the bees!”.

The way I see it, there are a few ways to approach sugar and paleo.

• Total Ban – like the Whole 30.
• Strict Restriction – like Primal Blueprint, avoid added sugars but there is some flexibility in the famous 80/20 rule/escape clause.
• Moderate Avoidance – this isn’t so much tied to a plan as it is a reflection of what happens when perceived paleo-friendly sugars are used particularly when making “paleo” treats.

I vacillate between these three levels. I don’t worry much about a spoonful of sugar here and there, and I tend to steer clear the profusion of paleo sweets since I’m working on losing weight.

The major sugars I’m thinking about here are glucose, fructose, and sucrose (white table sugar) which is made of a glucose stuck to a fructose.

In all the paleo brownie recipes etc. that are out there, many of which are delicious and can be perfectly sensible treats (no judging here!) the sweetener called for is often honey, maple syrup, or (less often) agave syrup. The perception is that they are a healthier choice than white sugar (debatable) and that they are delicious (absolutely!)

Apart from a few trace minerals, I don’t see how these are better for you than white sugar? Tastier certainly… but I have a hard time believing they are healthier.

Ultimately, based on the reading I’ve done, I believe fructose is worse for you than glucose, and that people should limit all sugars in the diet.  It also seems to me that many of the fashionable paleo sweeteners are heavy on the fructose, and as such I tend to try and avoid them, but I don’t get paranoid about it.  Though I don’t use added sugars very often at all (except when making kombucha!), I tend to use white sugar or coconut sugar when I do.

• Honey is a mixture of glucose and fructose in varying amounts.  Sometimes the glucose crystallizes out and you get crunchy honey, sometimes (like Tupelo honey) there isn’t much glucose, it’s mainly fructose and it doesn’t crunch up. I know there are some groovy enzymes and micronutrients and the like in there, but once it’s been baked into a brownie – are they still significant? Are they degraded by heat? Do you get enough in a sensible serving to make it worth it?  As far as I can tell (Wikipedia) honey that is heavy on the fructose is comparable to public enemy number one, high-fructose corn syrup.
• Maple Syrup also contains a few groovy micronutrients, seems to be lower in fructose than honey but has more than white sugar (according to the University of Vermont).
• Agave Syrup is very high in fructose and reportedly has saponins and other unfriendlies in it.  Can’t recommend it.
• Coconut Sugar is mostly sucrose, and the rest is balanced between glucose and fructose.

Mark Sisson covers this all a lot better than I can.  Robert Lustig has a great video on sugars here,  and there’s a good rebuttal  of Lustig here.

I know you don’t have much of a sweet tooth, but I’m very interested in your thoughts on this.  Am I off base?  Should I refine my thinking?  Or do I need a chill-pill and a cocktail, and to not overthink it especially since I don’t have much anyway?

That having been said, I’ll never pass up a paleo brownie if one is handed to me!

Cheers!

J.

El-Ra,

WOW.  You have a nice desert garden there!  Cereusly.  I adore xeriscaping, and I actually think that we need more of it here as well as over in your neck of the woods even though you’re the one in the middle of a famous drought right now.  This is where my day job is creeping in here a bit.  Minnesota is seen as water-rich.  It rains plenty (it’s raining right now!), the rain stays on the landscape in short- and long-term storage, and flows off in a more-or-less orderly manner.  And we’re still using too much of it and running out (case and point – draining White Bear Lake).  My professional opinion is that the domestic lawn is the number one crop in America, and is a massive waste of resources.  I think we’d do better to have smaller lawns – keep them exquisite and jewel-like if needed, and surround them with wilder, richer xeriscaping and permaculture. If I return to Landscape Architecture, it will probably be my battle-cry.  It’s a battle I fight in my own home and my long-term plans for this place include reducing our turf footprint and watering needs.  Hopefully I can get the community association president to okay the plans.  Luckily, I’m married to him 😉

In the meantime, I’m looking forwards to hearing about the foods you’re harvesting from your own little bit of paradise.  Pomegranates, avocados, grapefruits and persimmons?  Mmmm! I’m very very curious about the Cereus… how exotic!

In the spirit of productive landscapes, here are two snaps of John from his recent time at the Children’s Farm.

Thanks for the nudge about Gary Nabhan.  He’s now officially on the reading list, and at the rate I’m going and the length of the list, I should be able to get to it by about next summer.  😉

All this talk of water has reminded me to tell you about my favorite new gadget.

We got a SodaStream and it’s my new favorite thing.  My very own fizzy water!  If I use our wellwater, it’s mineral water too with a distinctive iron-tang to it.  Ours is the Source model and can fizz to three different levels from “why bother” all the way up “crazy fizzy” that makes you burp.  Well, it makes me burp, and I’m sufficiently classless to thoroughly enjoy it. I tone down the fizziness when company’s coming over.

They’ve got some nice fizzy water flavors too, but they’re crazy expensive and hard to get so I can’t recommend them.  I just toss in a bit of lemon juice or some orange extract from the cupboard from time to time.  Roman likes his the same way that Alton Brown does, with bitters in.

I like it so much, I’m considering getting one for work, though I’ll have to get a handle on the whole belching-like-a-sailor situation.

Miss you!

J.

E!

Brownies on the beach? Glasses of wine?  What hedonistic pleasures!!  Thoughts of lounging on the beach all day are delightful, but somehow I think our little beach down on the St Croix doesn’t quite compare to the Pacific Ocean.  I’d love to live by the sea again.  In the meantime I’ll have to make do by coming out to visit you.  To do research on paleo beach cuisine of course.  Business trip, you see.  Tax write-off 😉

Hmmm… not so sure about butter-wine.  Sounds like it would be better poured on a steak than drunk with it.  More testing needed!  I myself haven’t been Bulletproofing my coffee lately, but that’s entirely due to being lazy about the extra dish I’d have to wash.  However, when I return to work in two weeks, it might be worth the (very minor) bother.

We’re having a warm day today, might hit 93 degrees (cue laughter from California).  It’s a bit humid but not too bad.  Once I’ve finished this I’m going to go sit outside with a coffee and enjoy roasting for a bit.

In other news, I did it.  I’ve signed up to become a Primal Blueprint Certified Expert.

So why am I doing this?  I know we’ve talked about this, but I’m still not quite sure why.  It honestly could be the end-of-summer start-of-school itchy feet urging me to seek fresh beginnings through study.  I’m not sure, but here are a few thoughts driving me:

1. I’m interested.  I read a lot of books, articles, and posts about the various flavors of evolutionary nutrition and I continue to find it endlessly fascinating.  I am interested when theories and hypotheses agree with each other, and when they disagree, and how they are changing as the movement matures.  I’m interested in the motivations and goals of the leaders and the adherants in various disciplines.  It’s all fascinating! I’m even interested in our critics, though I’m dismayed by how many are ill-informed.
2. I’ve a soft spot in my heart for the Primal Blueprint.  The web site and book were my first resources when I started down this tangled path nearly four years ago.  At that time I was struggling with many bodily frustrations and I’d realized, with a shock of horror and bad timing (having just moved with my husband, 18-month old, and two dogs back in with my parents to facilitate selling our house) that I really should try giving up gluten.  My poor mum trying to feed us all!  Primal Blueprint gave me hope, inspiration, and explanations.  It also gave me direction and a plan.  Things haven’t been the same since.
3. This will help make me a better advocate.  I will at least feel better informed, and be perceived as a more credible source.
4. The price is right.  Though it is by no means cheap, it’s not ridiculously expensive either.  This is something the budget can bear.  It isn’t so expensive that I feel that I need to make a monetary return on my investment, it’s ok if this is just for me.
5. It’s encouraging me to return to my foundational works.  I’ve read nutrition books as a hobby for quite a few years, and I’m seeing the value now in re-reading them.  Lucky you! I’ll probably tell you all about them!  I’m not just a crashing bore at parties, I can be one here too!

Care to join me?

Much Love,

Jo and the Boys