Updates and a Recipe: Yeast Cleanse, PUFAs and NaPoWriMo

Happy Sunday! Day 3 of NaPoWriMo and I'm loving it so far. Since my major New Year intention for this year was to be a more excellent reviewer and stayer-on-track, I want to dedicate this post to a few updates. I plan to do some review and updating at the beginning of every month: this didn't happen quite so well last month, but now I'm back on track. So, today is an update on my yeast cleanse, which is now one-third through; my latest thoughts on nutrients, particularly PUFAs; and I also have some additional thoughts about Poetry Writing for this coming month to share.

Yeast Cleanse Progress
I've finished my course of ketoconazole, which I was taking along with grapefruit seed extract for a bacterial infection. I have two more months of the restricted diet (which still seems quite lenient to me, with its permitting of root veggies and even some fruit), together with probiotics and berberis tincture (to eliminate more bad-boy bacteria). I'm happy with progress so far: it has been fairly uneventful, for the most part.

Better yet, my energy has been returning, even since before I quite finished the ketoconazole. This medication is hard on the liver, and together with die-off and toxins exiting, it promises a debilitating time. For the first couple of weeks, I was slammed. In Chinese medicine too, Liver governs anger. I have often seen the connection, and definitely these past four weeks. I've been cranky! And even with Tapping, and all the other tools I have to help me, it's been hard to curb that. Sometimes emotions have such a strong physiological base that they can be hard to neutralize with the mind. I try to remember this when I'm dealing with others and it helps me to be compassionate when someone is being unpleasant.

So, no more cranky, is my intention! :)

PUFAs and Others
When I started the yeast cleanse and shared its restrictions on here, Bitt asked the very sensible question: Would I continue to restrict PUFAs, as I have been for a few months now, in addition to those other restrictions? At the time, I wasn't sure of the answer. So many experts do insist that omega-3's are not only essential, but anti-inflammatory and otherwise beneficial. Many people, especially plant-based types, share the experience that the omega-3 seeds help tremendously with mood regulation. I was seriously considering incorporating flax and chia seeds again.

However, I just carried on doing my thing, opening myself to guidance, tuning in and listening to my body, and I haven't added them back in. I'm not restricting all PUFAs completely: I've been eating some beans, which have a few, and when I've made cheesecakes, with cashews (fairly low in PUFA as nuts go), I've had a taste of them. I've also been having a little avocado (zealous PUFA-avoiders would avoid all of these). But otherwise, I haven't felt moved to add any of them in. I can't guarantee that I'm feeling generally 'better' as a result of PUFA avoidance, as it could be due to the added starch alone, and at some point I should probably try adding omega 3's and keeping everything else as close to the same as possible.
For now, though, I'm not even putting olive oil on my salads most of the time: they're plenty juicy with some lemon or lime juice, tomatoes, julienned beets--

 --and I've been making my snacks mostly out of some form, or several forms, of coconut. Coconut pulp from making my coconut milk, shredded coconut, coconut butter. These bars (sorry for the poor picture)--

--are made from the zest and juice of a lemon,
about a cup and a half of coconut pulp,
a quarter cup of shredded coconut,
a quarter cup of coconut butter,
a quarter cup of irish moss gel,
an eighth cup of xylitol,
a teaspoon of ginger--all whizzed in the cuisinart.

These are really good, but a little more crumbly than most snack bars. Maybe best kept in the freezer. But isn't this odd? I was making energy bars with 'chia sweet' for such a long time (and there are tons of posts on it)--stevia-sweetened chia gel replacing dried fruit because I was avoiding sugar--and now I'm replacing the chia! Doesn't it seem a little reductive?

Well, part of the reason that this cleanse is feeling so easy is that I'm enjoying the starches so much. It's been a while since I mentioned that I'm feeling so good eating a fair amount of starch : before embarking on the cleanse, this included increasing amounts of fruit. And my blood sugar has only gotten better since making these changes. Until the last couple of years, I'd been a big fruit-eater (and fruit geek) my whole life. I feel that I have had enough of a break from fruit, and no longer need to demonize it, nor to demonize high-glycemic foods (I think the whole concept is far too reductive anyway, and will talk about it more if there's interest). So, come June, watch out for some recipes on here that feature fruity goodness again after all! Yes, I'm a nutritional whirling dervish, but I do feel that I get closer to the truth, for me anyway.

NaPoWriMo
I set myself a few additional guidelines for my daily poem effort. While part of the attraction of a daily poem is that it places the emphasis on generating material rather than on polishing it, I have required of myself that every poem I write, even if it isn't polished, should be worthy of polishing later, should be taking me somewhere. I've also decided that using ideas that are scribbled in my notebook waiting to be born into poems is allowable too: what a good opportunity to give them birth! I want to use the opportunity to play with some forms that I haven't yet played with, although not all poems need to be form poems. Finally, I've suggested to myself that I produce at least one 'funny' poem per week.

I'm not going to reproduce poems in full on the blog here, but I will share snippets and updates.

Thus far, Friday's poem was a braided poem, whose first line is "Panorama has no intentions."
And yesterday's poem was my first try at a Triolet.
Today's is yet to be written, and I'm off to do it!

We're off to Anchorage tomorrow again for a couple of days. Hopefully my wonderfully slimmed down new bag and netbook will make the whole thing easier and smoother.

Tapping and Feeling Empowered; PUFA-Experiment Update

Feeling Good: Thanks, Tapping World Summit!
We are such moving targets: we adjust one thing and something else changes too. Sometimes change spreads like a stain, from the focal point outward; other times, it's more like a domino effect, and everything changes in a cascade.

A snapshot only catches a glimpse of our perpetual motion.

I am so excited by having the feeling of being able to make things better. I'm so excited that I've woken up the past couple days feeling really energized and confident! I have been working on the Tapping, having listened along this past week or so, and am amazed at how it has been affecting my energy and general outlook. With any method of self-help and self-improvement--or anything novel, for that matter, I worry about the trajectory where an initial burst of enthusiasm then gradually peters out and moves into disenchantment. However, the Tapping is having such an immediate and positive effect, internalizing the Law of Attraction into my physical meridians, that I'm finding myself motivated to continue with it. They suggest committing to 40 days of Tapping post-summit, clearing one blockage each day. Now, I'm thinking that many of my 'blockages' will take more than a single day to clear, but I'll take the empowerment of group energy and the optimism of commitment!

Any suggestions, shared stories, ideas for further reading would be much appreciated.

Further thoughts on PUFAs (and how to avoid/reduce them) and an Update on My Experiment

Self-Experimentation

Speaking of being moving targets, and of the impossibility of changing one thing without changing others... Of course I haven't been 'perfect,' haven't completely eliminated all PUFAs, not even all omega-6's. But I have dramatically reduced them in my diet the last month or two, and on the few occasions that there's been something more omega-6-heavy around, like that peanut-butter-mousse brownie (yes, my fault!) I've added back some flax or chia into my morning smoothies to balance it out.

Here's a post by Dr Weil that Mindy shared in a recent comment that explains in straightforward terms why it's so important to keep the omega-3 to -6 ratio from getting overly high to the -6, to rebalance if you have something high in the -6.

Well, a couple of observations on this. I hadn't realized until I put flax/chia back in my smoothies that the post-breakfast nausea I'd had for ages had gone away. It came back when I put them back in! Whaddaya know? And I don't think it was a case of higher overall fat content: I think I'd upped the coconut oil in my smoothies to compensate. So that's an unexpected downside of flax or chia for me (I hadn't noticed any correlation with nausea at times other than breakfast, though).

Otherwise, I haven't noticed any instant alarm signals like memory loss, neurons not firing, intense depression, or any of the EFA deficiency classic signs. One the other hand, I haven't noticed that my metabolism is roaring quick all of a sudden without the metabolism-dragging PUFAs (although my digestion transit seems to have improved, as I mentioned earlier, but that seemed to be more to do with increasing starch consumption).

One negative thing that I have noticed, or more accurately, that Phil has noticed, is that my skin is not as clear and smooth as it had been since I started coconut oil and a generally higher-fat diet. It seems that my back is broken out and that generally my skin is a little rougher. Again, I don't know whether to ascribe this to absence of PUFAs, to reduced fat intake overall, to increased starch, or to my excursions into cacao and more sugar than normal for me (mostly by way of fruit).

For other reasons, which I'll discuss more soon, I'm nixing the cacao and sugar excursions and suspect, just from how my body works, that I should replace them with more fat, i.e. coconut, in my diet. Hopefully that will smooth my skin out, but if it takes flax and chia seeds and a few nuts to make that happen, it would be some interesting data for sure!

PUFAs and How to Avoid Them

Unless you're of the 80-10-10 persuasion (as I was for years) and avoid all fats like the plague, it might sound like a pretty tall order to be a mostly raw-foodie who eats good amounts of fat and to avoid all heavy PUFA sources. In fact, it's really pretty easy. When I started out, I wasn't even eating avocado or olive oil on my salads for a bit, and was still enjoying satisfying and delicious salads as a staple. (Lately, perhaps for sanity's sake, and partly because my ND specifically asked me to eat avocados, I've eased up on that restriction: both olive oil and avocado have much more Monounsaturated fat (or MUFA) than they do PUFA.)

This is a 'slaw that is pretty much what you can see: napa cabbage, purple cabbage, carrots, sprouts. The dressing was made of appropriate spices, apple cider vinegar and coconut oil! Kind of Asian-tasting and really good and refreshing.

Since macadamia nuts have virtually no PUFAs in them, you can team them up with coconut to make all kinds of creamy dressings and dips. By the way, here's another instance of a case where the 'cooked' version of something might be healthier than the raw. At the moment, I feel better about eating real black beans than a raw mock refried beans dip made mostly of sunflower seeds (although it's true that legumes contain more omega-6 than omega-3 also, like most seeds of any kind, flax and chia being the magic exceptions, legumes have far less of either than nuts and seeds do). Ditto for nut-based hummuses.

For the wiggle room, since I'm not crying off them altogether and forever, there are ways to reduce overall PUFA content in your creation. I think the best long term strategy is to use mostly coconut and macadamia (sure makes me miss Hawaii--why are mac nuts so expensive when the farmers there can't sell their crops?) and otherwise use flax and chia so that the PUFA ratio favors the omega-3's.

But for the excursion times, I already showed in my peanut-butter-mousse-brownie recipe how easy it was to reduce the PUFAs by using mostly peanut flour instead of peanut butter.

Thankfully for us, cashews and filberts are relatively low in overall PUFA (around 2g per ounce), so they'll work for the odd cheesecake and crust...(though I love a mac/coco crust).

Another trick: remember those Congo Bars I made all the way back before Christmas (wow, have I been playing with reduced PUFA that long??

Well, the base involves a whole bunch of walnuts and pecans (i.e. a boatload of PUFAs), that you pulse first and then add a bunch of other ingredients. I processed them a little far, and the cold ambient temperature and the warmth of the processor provoked the nuts to release their oils, and they separated from my dough. Rather than try to mix it back in, I poured it off!

It was a slow process: you can see the oil still pooling at the parchment paper under the batter to the left of the pic. I probably got about a half cup of oil from those two cups of nuts! So that was a half cup of PUFA that no one had to eat (although it may end up on Phil's popcorn one day)!

Conclusion: I feel good about continuing my moderate exclusion (as opposed to exclusive exclusion!) of PUFAs. I still think that the most important thing is to avoid much omega-6, however, and I wouldn't be shocked if long-term, flax and chia regained their status as staples in my diet. More changes coming soon!

What do you think about omega-6's? Do you think I'm over-thinking this whole thing or is it interesting? What's your latest great experiment on your body? (And what about that Tapping?)

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?

PUFA Talk, Photo Uploading, Fun With Leftovers

Happy weekend, everyone!
Since this post will be otherwise unashamedly food and nutrition-related, I'll start with the view from our front door.

Gorgeous, no? (Gorgeous snow!)  The gilding, the distillation of color contrasts--a mirror for mind's thoughts to bounce off.

Thank you for all the helpful advice on resizing (downsizing) photos and de-bloating picasa.  My less-than-tech-savvy brain was beginning to get a grip on some suggestions, and then I remembered it's First Friday, which meant drop-in computer help at our local library. So I got some wonderful help and a clear angle on how to do this--thank you so much, Ryan and the library! picnik.com allows me to shrink the huge pictures already in picasa, and iPhoto will allow me to make them small to begin with: an extra step, but they'll upload faster. Orders of magnitude smaller--I had no idea that the resolution size could vary so much (for so little apparent gain)...and it's an extra step before uploading, but at a few hundred KB instead of 3MB, they'll load up so much faster.

PUFAs and Why I'm Experimenting with Minimizing Them
PUFAs = Polyunsaturated Fatty Acids: the long-chain, highly unsaturated fats found in nuts, seeds and their oils, fish. Highly unsaturated means that many carbons in the carbon/hydrogen chain are unbound, which means that they can easily pick up extra oxygen bonds: i.e., oxidize. I think pretty much everyone knows now that seed and grain oils are a poor choice for cooking especially, (even more so if hydrogenation is involved or prolonged high heat) and probably for general consumption: being so highly oxidative, they go rancid fast and also 'go trans'--the molecule changes (or is changed by hydrogenation) in structure to something that is not recognized or easily incorporated by the body, something that is clearly correlated with heart problems, elevated cholesterol, etc.

It's also fairly generally acknowledged that maintaining an optimal omega-3 to omega-6 ratio within one's polyunsaturated fat intake is important for health maintenance: high omega-6 correlates with inflammation, tumor formation and much more. Hence the fish oil craze, hence the importance of flax seeds, hence the whole concept of 'essential fatty acids.' There is a high polyunsaturated fatty acid concentration in the human brain, and many nutritionists believe that we need to ensure consumption of two of them, EPA and DHA, in particular, for optimal brain and mood health.

Even raw-foodists (other than 80-10-10-ers, who restrict all fats severely) sometimes note that they feel better not eating too many nuts and seeds, but on a raw food diet especially, it's very easy to make these a staple and to end up with a huge omega-6 intake.

I've always had this on my radar, and (like Gabriel Cousens recommends in Conscious Eating), have made sure to balance especially high-omega-6 foods like sesames and sunflower seeds with some flax or chia. Coconut, of course, contains almost entirely saturated fat, and perhaps this experiment was appealing to me because I've always 'felt' better with coconut than with other nuts and seeds.

Recently, I've been reading Ray Peat's work, and it seems appropriate that I was led there by Matt Stone's research trends since, on the PUFA issue at least, this is a complete 180 from anything I'd read before. It's a 180 but it's also stunningly plausible in places, and Peat has a PhD in Biology and has been working on the interactions between nutrition and hormones since the late 1960's. According to his research, Polyunsaturated fats in general, not just the trans fats, not just the omega-6's, are less than optimal for consumption for several reasons, mostly connected with their oxidative nature. They correlate with lowered metabolism and increased fat storage, with inhibition of proteolytic enzymes and detoxification enzymes, and with increased estrogen output (which also lowers metabolism). He cites studies suggesting that many problems that have been linked to 'fatty acid deficiency' have been remedied by adding vitamin B6 in some cases and E in others.

Now of course, it's easy to claim all kinds of things, and one has to wonder why this side of the picture is not more widely known. Part of the answer is industrial/monetary--the market is flooded with cheap seed oils--but that doesn't explain the fatty acids in the brain part. I'm not done reading all that he has to say, and plan to follow up further, checking some references, but some of the detriments that he associates with PUFAs are so close to me that it seems worth making this experiment on myself.

I have a grievously slow metabolism, obviously, having stayed in starvation mode for about half my life so far, and am coming to recognize the benefits of encouraging it to speed up, especially as my body no longer tolerates starvation! Upping starch and focusing on coconut as fat source may help with this. Additionally, after a decade of no menstruation, I'm 'estrogen dominant' as equilibrium struggles to exert itself, which tends to slow metabolism further. If PUFAs and estrogen are in a positive feedback loop and my estrogen needs to be lowered, lowering PUFAs seems like a sensible plan.

From a culinary perspective, within the confines of raw eating this can be quite a challenge, since so many fun recipes are extensively nut or seed-based. But I haven't missed them at all (maybe partly because I've been reaping the benefits of starch (update coming soon). Macadamias have almost no PUFAs, cashews and hazelnuts are also pretty low, and I'm not doing this as an absolute black and white thing, for once! For thickening my smoothies, irish moss has come into my life and it's surprising to me that something so minimally flavored should become such a favorite.

If I find that I'm suddenly plunged into depression, despite all the vitamin D and full spectrum lighting, I'll eat some flax or chia and see if that helps.

Fun with Leftovers


I've mentioned before that I love leftovers but don't always know what to do with them. This past week has been fun. Before we got on the road for Anchorage this week, we had friends over to dinner. I had made mashed sweet potatoes with coconut cream and a salad, amongst other things. For the road, I added some berbere spice and nutritional yeast and some peas to the mashed sweet potatoes, and mixed it all with the salad. This made two very satisfying and delicious lunches!

Then, in Anchorage we ate out one evening at a Thai-Vietnamese restaurant. I enjoyed spicy coconut soup with lots of veggies in it (also a lot of pieces of galangal and lemongrass, which I don't mind but I know some people really do). It was good for lunch next day too. It came with a scoop of rice too: I had a few nibbles but am still cautious with rice because it hasn't sat well with me. I knew Phil wouldn't eat plain leftover rice either, but I also knew he loves rice crackers. So, I mixed the rice with about three tablespoons soy sauce, a dash of sesame oil and a sprinkle of salt and black pepper, and whizzed it with the hand-held blender (that my friend David calls the 'outboard motor'). Stirred in a tablespoon or so of sesame seeds (obviously, my no-PUFA-experiment is just on myself and not on Phil too!) Then, I spread it out flat on parchment paper, dipping my fingers in water to keep them wet, scored it into squares and baked it at 325. It was probably about an hour and fifteen minutes total baking time; I flipped them over and removed the parchment paper half way through.

They were definitely a hit with Phil and did not last long!

Any creative uses of leftovers you'd care to share?
Have a beautiful weekend.