The Great Health Debate, Our Perceptions of Experts, Impulse Indulgence vs. Make Your Own

I hope everyone's having a beautiful day. Sun is shining the snow bluish here, up in Anchorage, floating around again, on funny schedule and chancy internet connections again. We spent almost the whole of yesterday _outside_, on a boat, in Prince William Sound. I'll post more about it when I'm home and can upload photos.

Internet connection notwithstanding, I'm listening to The Great Health Debate and really hope that I can catch as much of it as possible this week. They have an amazing line-up of genuine experts from all sides of the nutritional spectrum: for example, last night's debate, that I'm catching up on now, was between Gabriel Cousens, MD and Joseph Mercola, MD. The luminescent level of speakers stays as high as that throughout the course. It's an amazing thing that Kevin Gianni and the Renegade Health folks have put on. These two, one raw vegan, the other high-raw omnivore respectively, are compatible otherwise in that they both advocate a metabolic-typing approach. I had to admire the respect with which they debated with each other and look forward to continued sincerity and courtesy in the information-sharing to come.

As someone blessed with slow internet connections, I'm also eternally grateful that the talks are basically audio files, not videos, which would be very frustrating: it makes it far more likely that I'll get to hear all of it.

So, I'll be spending some time with them this week and encourage anyone else with like interests to do so too. It can be so enlightening to meet experts in person, and also to hear their voices, even over the computer: get a sense of how they talk, how they interact, what their energy is like. It must be a little daunting as an 'expert,' especially a 'nutritional expert,' that every nuance and foible may be judged, and may be used to judge the efficacy of the approach that you espouse! I feel a little shy of coming out here with my impressions of Cousens and Mercola as personalities--but I met Cousens in person too about seven years ago, and my impression now is similar to what it was then. I would say in brief that I find both of them quite impressive but also with some significant reservations. Despite the 'spiritual' emphasis, there is definitely a strong 'ego energy' present.

And is it unfair of me, as an intensely verbal person, to feel uncomfortable/judgmental when an 'expert' mispronounces or malaprops several words? And speaking of judging experts, Ray Peat, on the basis of whose research I'm experimenting with minimizing PUFAs, as I shared in the last post, is an interesting and engaging speaker but he 'um's and 'er's so frequently and so much that you start to wonder whether all the neurons are firing! Fatty acid deficiency? If I start to 'um' and 'er' too (except when I'm multitasking, when I'm allowed!), tell me and I'll go back and pound some flax seeds, ok? On that note, interestingly, both Mercola and especially Cousens talked emphatically (if not at great length) about the importance of PUFAs and omega-3's. I wish I could have asked them about Peat's research and what it says to that in their judgment.

Being in Anchorage, being on the road, being unsettled and boomeranging, occasionally I succumb to a packaged indulgence, especially when there's a tide of hormones to ride out too and/or I didn't get enough to eat the day before. If there's something bar-shaped that has no gluten or dairy and is raw-ish and I haven't tried it before, I sometimes feel the need to do so, and almost always wish I hadn't (they're never cheap).

This time, I tried an 'Organic Fiber Bar' in the chocolate flavor--yet another nut-date bar with some added fiber, and some sunflower oil that I really would not have preferred to have (I don't like that concentrated sunflower taste in sweet things). The sunflower taste is the biggest strike against this, but generally the chocolate flavored nut-date bars are not my favorite. One good thing that I'm noticing, though, is that these kinds of bars don't crash my blood sugar as much as they used to.

What is it about these packaged snacks that is so appealing, even when I can read the ingredients and be pretty sure it won't taste great and that I could make something far better? (Of course, being in Anchorage in the Natural Pantry and being hungry both play a part). My own stuff almost always tastes and feels way better, and is definitely worth the time invested. Maybe I should make fancy foil wrappers for it... Of course, chia-sweet-based snacks are out of the picture for me for the time being (interestingly, I wasn't really eating them for a bit even before the PUFA-minimizing experiment). But I have my barks, which are always good, and have been experimenting and playing with some other things too: I'll share soon. I've also been eating more plain raw carrots and leftover roasted yams/parnsips as snacks, but am planning a challenge to design a low-PUFA-compatible snack: I'll share more soon.

Are you an impulse indulger or do you always bring your own? Do you feel ok about impulse indulgences?