(Sort of) Recent Eats

Quick and dirty run-down of some late November meals:

This is one of my favorite lunches to make. It needs to be made in advance, to allow the nori to get soft, but it's so so good. And once it's made, it's fast and easy to eat!

"Sushi:" (Pal-ushi? Lazy person's sashimi?)

• A can/pouch/what-have-you of salmon (but I've used other fish as well)
• Avocado
• Fermented vegetables (sauerkraut, kimchi, whatever)
• Coconut aminos
• Toasted sesame oil
• Nori, as above
• Maybe some grated/dry ginger or garlic (if it's not already in your fermented vegetables)

Roll it up and let it sit! Then enjoy a pretty fancy lunch! 

 Pretty simple meal (I probably ate it for all three):

Brussel sprouts, cooked in bacon fat or tallow, and pork breakfast sausage (this was before I finished clearing out my non-AIP items).

This was a pretty exciting concoction: 

• Loose pork breakfast sausage
• Mushrooms
• Onions
• Cranberries

Sauteed and stuffed in a (unfortunately tasteless) roasted pumpkin! I don't know if I would bother with a whole pumpkin again (I had two and they were both pretty bland) but this is definitely a saute to make again (and again and again... once I'm off strict AIP or if I make my own sausage spices). 

This breakfast was exciting! It's my first time introducing whole-fruit citrus back into my diet. I've been using lemon and lime juice for several months now, but I had yet to eat any citrus fruit and this grapefruit tasted so good! It's funny how I used to sprinkle sugar on my grapefruits, because this was very sweet on its own. Served with more breakfast sausage and more vegetables than a vegetarian (carrots and kale)!

And finally...... MY HALF HOG SHARE!

I was afraid it wouldn't fit in my freezer, but there was room to spare!

Seriously, it was like Christmas came early (for both of us)!

And such personal service put a smile on my face! 

Seriously, this half-hog business is the way to go. It all came out to about $5/lb AND when I got there, several people didn't want their organs and I got about 10 lbs of bones for free because the farmer just wanted to clear out his freezer. Unfortunately they've moved so I'm not sure if they will be back in the area, but if they are, next time I might try a lamb share. 

And to wrap it up, one of our last PChem lectures posed a question along these lines:

"Do you think a low carbohydrate, high protein, low fat diet is a good way to treat a human with diabetes mellitus?"

Our professor's answer was a resounding yes! He told us a story of an old friend of his (who taught at the med school) who had DM and could no longer read/prepare his lectures due to diabetes cataracts. At his wit's end, and against the advice of his doctors (including his peers), he adopted the Atkins diet. And voila! much of his sight was restored and he regained much of his health. Unfortunately, he has since passed away, but our professor went on to talk about the benefits of keep insulin low and why Atkins had a lot going for him. He expressed utter confusion as to why MDs still suggest high carbohydrate diets for DM patients, but then again, one of his catch phrases is, "MDs know nothing," so...

In addition, at one point he asked us, "So... do you think starvation is a good way to get an animal to lose weight?" after talking about the body's coping mechanisms during survival, including things like cortisol response and protein metabolism. Again, the answer was no, which was music to my ears! I wonder (hope) if some of my classmates' minds were blown... 

Recent Eats and Rants

Blogging is not yet a habit... and it may never be. But here are some of my recent meals.

My favorite stew I've made so far (I don't have a picture of it yet) included:

• lamb stew meat (100% grass fed, but unfortunately from Whole Foods and therefore, New Zealand)
• lamb heart (the butcher at WFM pulled it out of the back for me and it was only $3 and change/lb)
• carrots
• celeriac
• butternut squash
• onions
• lots of Merlot
• salt, pepper, sage, rosemary, and thyme

I froze quite a few containers of this and so I've been trying to spread them out to punctuate some of the not so successful stews as of late.

This is a meal I made the Sunday before our second anatomy exam. I used a Dutch oven instead of a slow cooker, so it was done in about 3-4 hours. I would've left it on longer, but it was getting late. I definitely prefer the oven taste, but sometimes I just need to leave it for longer.  This mixture included:

• beef short ribs
• crimini mushrooms
• carrots
• red cabbage
• onions
• garlic
• Merlot
• rosemary, salt, pepper, sage

Served with a sweet potato and coconut oil on the side. I recently took the dairy-free plunge (again). This is the third time I've challenged dairy in the last year, and for the first time, I see a substantial difference. I'd come to rely on raw cheddar and 24 hr fermented yogurt (both always 100% grass fed) as quick and easy sources of fat, and so it was probably the hardest this time to give it up. But my "seasonal" allergies were just getting to be too much. I was sick of sniveling all through lecture and always needing to make sure my pockets were stuffed with tissues. I was going to try to finish my butter and cheese, but one day I decided enough was enough. I still have a hunk of cheese and a mostly whole stick of butter in my fridge, plus a few small jars of flavored ghee sitting around. The improvement in my allergies isn't a miracle by any means--I'm still a bit sniffly but the other day I forgot to bring a tissue with me to class, and it wasn't a big deal. Maybe it would be totally gone if I could consistently get at least eight hours of sleep. Who knows? I guess I needed to get more healing done to be able to see a difference at all. Maybe once I finish my round of SIBO supplements and go back to a leaky gut supplement protocol it will improve even more. That said, I'm looking forward to getting some raw heavy cream to on top of pumpkin desserts at Thanksgiving.

Here's a picture of the two slow cookers going at once (broth and maybe the lamb stew). I could definitely use some more counter space. 

These came out of the pork neck bones I had going in that broth. Anatomically relevant cervical vertebrae for our second exam!

This was one of my more boring stews. As usual, I was overly optimistic as I was chopping things, and ran out of room for more vegetables. So this only included:

• ox tail
• beef stew meet
• green cabbage
• onions
• Merlot
• salt, pepper, rosemary

Served over spaghetti squash.  

These were some weekend vegetables: the carrots that didn't make it into the stew and broccoli, drowning in tallow and sprinkled with rosemary, then baked. 

This was a fancy weekend dinner: 

• simply steamed carrots (with coconut oil) 
• steamed green beans (tossed with Dijon mustard)
• spaghetti squash
• sauteed mushrooms and onions in bacon fat and Merlot, tossed with mussels from a can

Definitely plan on repeating that one. 

In other news, my head banging impulse control has been sorely tested over these last few weeks. 

I had a few of "Hallelujah!" moments when...

1. I posted that British/fat/anti-statin article on Facebook and a couple of friends (including one of my classmates) liked it (I'm not alone!)
2. I found out that one of my classmates used to work at the integrative animal hospital I've begun taking my pets to. I haven't sought her out yet, but I will (maybe I'm REALLY not alone!)
3. Our physio lecturer said that fevers were a good thing, as long as they didn't get too high (ok, so in animals it's a bit different since we don't go around bringing down fevers and owners probably don't know their animal has a fever until they bring it in, but still, he was sort of talking about us as people patients, too)
4. He also consistently repeats that ketone bodies are the brain's preferred fuel source (as in, over glucose)! But he's a bit hypocritical because he also says ketosis really isn't a good thing (it's only good in a compensatory manner). 

And then, unfortunately, there were more times when on the outside I was taking notes like a good little schoolgirl while on the inside I was screaming, "YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND!!!!!" Let's take a look at some...

1. A few people behind me in lecture one day got into a conversation about how one is gluten-free and probably should do things like use a separate toaster, but doesn't and another tried being gluten-free for a while because her doctor thought she might be sensitive, but it turns out she isn't. I happen to know that this person has an autoimmune disease, too. They went on to talk about how they think some gluten-free pancake mixes are "better than the real thing." One of them wants to get into more gluten-free baking from scratch, but the flour mixes are too complicated and expensive, so she buys the premade mixes or just the premade products. 
2. That same person who's gluten-free is also vegetarian and was talking to another vegetarian (who definitely had a morally superior attitude) about how it was so hard for her mom to cook for her, since she's such a great cook but all of her recipes contain animal protein. Ok, I get this. I go through the same thing with my aunt who loves making us pies and cakes. But the way she said animal protein, it was like her mom's recipes all had dirt in them (ok, maybe that's not a good analogy for the traditional foodists out there... let's says she said it like... it was a Twinkie). I think there was definitely talk about sustainability in there too. Oy vei...
3. Plaques, lipids, and statins... oh my! It's being beaten into our brains that a high fat diet is the devil's diet. And that cholesterol builds plaques and yada yada yada. And as I've said before, cats and dogs really haven't been built on high fat diets; however, our lecturer keeps bringing it back to human medicine. And if cats are our obligate carnivore as we're repeatedly told, why doesn't all the corn and wheat in conventional diets raise red flags?
4. This one here was my downfall. I made it a little over two months without rolling my eyes at our lecturers. This was a guest lecturer in one of our pass/fail classes. Our "philosophy" class, if you will. Today's topic was pet therapy, and as someone who's trained a decent therapy dog, I feel really strongly about this and enjoy this topic a lot. Unfortunately, at this school, the head nutritionist is deeply tied to our therapy group. And so when talking about the rules for therapy animals, they mentioned that raw diets are not allowed. Someone raised a question about this and the answer was, "What do you think about bringing a dog who's eaten raw meat into a hospital full of immuno-suppressed patients? Seems like grounds for lots of infections to me!" and then they basically gave themselves a big pat on the back that they're the only organization with this rule, all thanks to have a nutritionist (a nutritionist?! Wow!) on their team. CUE EYE ROLE. So later I went up to them and asked if it was a last meal kind of thing. The answer was, "Absolutely not. No raw meat ever. It's just too unsafe." Right. Because THAT'S where an immuno-suppressed patient is going to get an infection in a hospital, from a raw-meat eating dog. To be fair, I would totally be on board with a 'no raw meat for 24h' kind of rule. That makes total sense to me, because there IS a slight risk involved in eating or handling raw meat. But while you're suggested to wash your hands before and after a visit, it's not like the humans coming in can't ever touch raw meat. It just makes no sense. 
5. We had one slide on the benefits of omega-3's in pet food, and then one slide on the negatives. At the end our lecturer says, "Would you supplement your patients with omega-3's? I wouldn't." *FACE PALM* The negatives included: increased risk of bleeding, lipid peroxidation with vitamin E deficiency, contamination of heavy metals and pollutants, reduced immune reactivity, and reduced insulin release. He summarized by saying, "Currently, there is a lack of good research data on specific cause-effect relationships." Maybe that's true. But maybe, just maybe, it's because any research that's been done is from crudely extracted and processed omega-3's put into diets in ridiculously high quantities removed from their natural food source. Do I have any qualms about supplementing my pets with appropriate doses of Green Pasture's FCLO or adding whole fish, like sardines, to their diets? Not. At. All. 
6. (This may surprise you... this is an anti-paleo rant, but bear with me) So clearly, we've been talking quite a bit about diets in physiology. Which is why it really bothers me when people hate on doctors for not having any nutrition classes. You don't need specific nutrition hours to talk about nutrition! We talk about nutrition every day in physiological chemistry and physiology (because these are classes that can easily be combined between vet and med students). So that's total crap that doctors don't know anything about nutrition. Ok, most don't, because what's being beaten into our brains is bad fat, bad cholesterol, bad low carb, supplements are worthless, and drugs are gold, but it's still nutritional training even if it's not in a nutrition class! Frankly, I think it's a greater disservice to have all these laypeople (ok, they want to help and that's great) becoming "functional medicine practitioners" and various other "health/medicine" degrees that don't mean anything when they have NO physiological education whatsoever. It's a HUGE turnoff and very disappointing to work with a "practitioner" and have them say they're "prescribing" 5-HT, which is a precursor to serotonin, or they can't pronounce the compounds they're looking at in my test results, but coming up with supplement protocols based on it or don't understand what I mean when I say I virtually have no parietal cells left and they want to sell me supplements that boost my own stomach acid production. And so, once again, I find myself practitioner-less.