Vega Book Review and Giveaway: "Must Have Been Something I Ate" by Peggy Kotsopoulos

When we returned from our trip a couple weeks ago, I was excited to find a box of goodies awaiting me!

Vega protein powders are always a delight, but I was even more excited to receive two copies of Holistic Nutritionist Peggy Kotsopoulos' new book, Must Have Been Something I Ate: The simple connection between what you eat and how you look and feel. Two copies, yes: I'm giving one of them away and I'll get to that shortly. First, here's my review of the book.

What's In the Book?
The first part of the book consists of twelve chapters, organized into four parts, on the connection between Food and Mood, Weight, Beauty and Health. The second part contains twenty-five recipes illustrating the principles laid out in the first part. There's a full listing of resources and references at the back.

Two Beautiful Things About This Book
I want everyone to know these two things about Must Have Been Something I Ate:
1) As part of commitment to human empowerment through educated choices, a portion of the proceeds from each sale of the book will be donated to the Because I am a Girl initiative, a global movement for social change that seeks to help eliminate global poverty and claim a brighter, safer future for girls globally.
2) Peggy Kotsopoulos dedicates this book to her parents, for thinking, amongst other things, that she's not 'totally nuts (more like a seed).' Wouldn't you love to be 'like a seed' rather than 'nuts?' 

What's the Pitch of the Book?
The meta-message from the way that the book is presented is that Peggy is your fun, empathic friend and aide. You may be far too busy to pay attention to food and diet, but Peggy can hold your hand, sympathize, explain what's going on in simple terms, and show you fun ways to make things better. The tone is familiar and colloquial, full of words like "BFF," "fave," "delish," "'Kay?"--and since I'm a collector of words, I have to mention that she's responsible for introducing me to the most hideous hybrid word I've seen or heard in a long time: "thuttocks" (horrors)!

The chosen layout and color/font scheme reinforces this friendly, unintimidating approach: the main font is the kind seen more frequently in a pamphlet than in a full-length book, always clear and easy to read. As an editor myself, I have to say that I wish there were fewer typos, since typos plus colloquial style can lower credibility in some eyes, but none of the typos are actually misleading and without an editor's eye, they may not be distracting.

Besides, this book won't only be interesting and useful to neophytes and busy business-women who have no idea about nutrition.

In More Detail
The coverage of health-and nutrition-related topics is quite impressive, and is more than initially meets the eye, given the cheeky-cheerful tone. Kotsopoulos explains the functions of hormones, neurotransmitters and digestive enzymes in detail, and covers topics as diverse as coping with stress (both through food and through other means), skin care and food combining. She gives specific recommendations for foods and supplements for specific requirements, with reinforcing sidebars of tips (like soaking legumes, eating vitamin C with iron) and notes from scientific studies. Even for an unrepentant nutrition geek like myself, there were details and specifics that were of interest. Her coverage is also very up-to-date and includes discussion of top 'new' superfoods like medicinal mushrooms and sacha inchi seeds, and supplements like relora (a magnolia extract that gently supports adrenal function: I've been taking it myself for about a year and it has definitely helped).

Food Orientation
Although this is a Vega book, it is not a vegan book per se. Seafood such as oysters, clams and halibut, as well as the super sea veggies, feature as recommended sources of certain nutrients. On the other hand, all the recipes are, or can be, vegan (one has optional feta cheese). There is a strong emphasis on plant-based nutrition but I'm guessing that the 'vegetarian/vegan' discussion is outside the scope of the book: perhaps Kotsopoulos doesn't want to alienate 'newbies' with that topic. She does talk about the downsides of eating a lot of meat and dairy in various places. It seems like she focuses on the positive, on what things are good to emphasize in the diet, and lets the rest of the message come through tacitly.

That said, I would like to know her thoughts on the whole animal products topic. She mentions 'bad saturated fats' at one point, but later extols the virtues of coconut oil. As many of us know, this is not an inconsistent position, but I would have liked some explanation of why coconut oil is so much better than beef tallow, for example!

Similarly, she seems to err in favor of low-glycemic eating, and talks about the problems with over-consumption of sugar. But in the recipe section, she has a delicious sounding 'mash' recipe involving parsnips and cauliflower (I would have made it to review here, but parsnips have been unavailable where I live for a few weeks!)--this would be a great place to explain why she uses those vegetables instead of the more traditional potatoes. And although she mentions caffeine consumption as implicated in poor sleep, in the recipe section she recommends a cacao-based smoothie as a good evening drink--not for me, that's for sure, delicious though the recipe is!

I don't think it's a bad thing that I'm left 'wanting more' in certain areas. For a short, very easy-reading book, Must Have Been Something I Ate contains a surprisingly large amount of information presented in a way that may, additionally, appeal to people who are not ordinarily 'into nutrition.'

What About the Recipes?
The twenty-five recipes include smoothies, salads, appetizers, soups, a couple of noodle (kelp and zucchini) dishes, a stuffed/baked peppers recipe and several desserts, some baked, some raw or semi-raw. All the recipes are simple and beautiful, and attractively photographed. Some contain several components that could be made separately or together. As I mentioned above, they're all basically vegan--optional feta cheese on one of the salads.

Some of the recipes use pre-made products: often Vega products. Sometimes they're used in innovative ways, like a dash of protein powder enlivening a salad dressing. A crostini recipe also starts with whole-grain bread, and maca-sure and vega-vibracy bars are crumbled for dessert crusts. For me, this is a downside: I always prefer to make things from scratch. Since part of the message of the book is to move away from processed foods, there is also a slight dissonance there. On the other hand, Kotsopoulos does note that companies producing healthful packaged foods are on the rise, and she's providing a service by showcasing these. There are plenty of recipes that are 'make from scratch,' and if part of her target audience is used to the 'open a box and heat up' style of cooking, these 'short-cut' recipes may be a boon.

I tried out a couple of her recipes. I made the chocolate mousse, based on pumpkin and sweetened with maple syrup.

For once in my life, I actually followed the recipe exactly--I went out and bought maple syrup for the first time in years!

She says simply to stir all together with a fork: I used the handheld blender...

...and concluded that a fork might actually have been better!

I served this to Phil, his daughter and her fiance.

Phil's daughter and her fiance, who are major chocolate-lovers and lovers of traditional comfort foods, both loved it, and were surprised by how much they loved it. Phil thought it was "just ok." There's a pattern here: so often, I make something 'alternative,' everyone loves it and Phil thinks it's "ok." In this case, he doesn't love maple syrup, and I should probably have called it something other than 'chocolate mousse,' because he was expecting 'ditto chocolate mousse!' Aside from that, some very mainstream eaters found it delicious. I was super-impressed by the way that the maple syrup enhanced the chocolate flavor: that's one for me to remember.

I also made her lentil soup.

This time, I confess, I didn't follow it precisely--because I didn't have the exact ingredients! I subbed a couple of veggies. As it stands, it's fairly bland--which is a great starting point, but I'll probably add some more spice to it. This is a great, easy recipe for a big, hearty batch of soup which, as she suggests, can be frozen in batches.

To Win Your Copy
Yes, finally--the Giveaway! I hope that you're intrigued to read the book for yourself. Here's how you can enter the Giveaway:

1) Become a follower of my blog--leave a comment to say that you have, or that you already are.

2) Like Vega on Facebook and leave a comment back here.

3) Follow me on Twitter (@Ela_HG) and leave a comment back here.

4) Follow Vega on Twitter and leave a comment back here.

5) Tweet about this giveaway: please include the link to this post and leave a comment back here.

6) Mention this giveaway on your blog--you can leave five 'entry' comments back here with the link.

Winner will be chosen at random on Tuesday June 7th.

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.

Nutritional Research: This Much I Have Learned

I've been mentioning several times recently that I've been avoiding polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs), including omega-3's, and overcoming carbophobia to increase starch. I've promised to talk more about it and hope that in doing so I will start some interesting conversations, gain some insights myself, and also hold myself accountable to experiment on myself in a sane way and not as a back door to more restrictive behavior.

So, since rule number 1 in nutritional research is: For any assertion out there about the benefits or detriments of any individual food or macronutrient, there will be an equally vehement claim to the contrary (kind of like Newton's third law), I wanted to start by stating baldly what my research and personal experience has shown me so far. I'll be talking mostly about macronutrients.

Finding #1: All Proteins are not created equal. That's the one piece of information about macronutrients that everyone knows, and is responsible for that pesky 'where do you get your protein from?' question that plagues vegetarians. Proteins, with the extra Nitrogen and Sulphur molecules, are formed of a dizzying number of amino acids, not all of which we can synthesize ourselves, and therefore are obviously different.

Finding #2: Protein in whole food is almost always found together with either fat or carbohydrate. Protein isolates and concentrates take work to produce, and it's not always work in a lab or factory. Plant proteins from the greens, grains and legumes come with carbohydrate and from the seeds/nuts and some fruits, they come with fat. Animal proteins come with a lot of fat (eggs, meat) or both fat and carbohydrate (organ meats, milk/cheese) and if they don't have a lot of fat with them, it's because they've been skimmed or skinned, and are therefore not whole foods but 'isolates' or 'concentrates.'

I'm not hereby saying that there's anything wrong with isolates/concentrates: just pointing out that that can of tuna is not a counterargument to this statement that protein is not found all alone. Tuna is actually a fish (despite the illusion of the can) and contains plenty of fat.

Therefore,
Finding #3: Most tweaking of macronutrient ratios pivots on carbohydrate versus fat, with protein in the fulcrum. And I have to say, I have experimented with a high-protein (i.e. high-isolates/concentrates), low-carb, low-fat macronutrient balance, as well as high-fat and high-carb, and felt the worst, experienced the most physical problems and the least muscle response on it than on anything else. And that's aside from the fact that I hated eating meat/dairy. You need protein to build muscle, but on high-protein and low-everything else, my muscles (unimpressive to begin with) dissolved.

Finding #4: All fats are not created equal. I used to think that fat was fat and that was that, and the root of all evil to boot. Nowadays, I understand that the much-and-erroneously-maligned saturated fat is a whole different player in our bodies than are monounsaturated or polyunsaturated fats. I understand that the differently structured fat molecules fit differently in our bodies and have much different susceptibilities to rancidity and other damage. Different fat molecules are also more or less likely to be stored. And of course there's the scary trans fats that the body simply doesn't recognize and that wreak havoc.

Finding #5: All carbohydrates are not created equal. Well, at first glance, this seems almost as obvious as the variety among proteins. Middle school biology taught us about monosaccharides, disaccharides and polysaccharides, right? They're worked upon by different enzymes in different places. Sugar and starch, right? And not even all sugars are equal among themselves, nor all starches either. (I.e., some are better than others. But for a while, I swallowed the orthodoxy of the Low-carb movement, perhaps mostly influenced by my insufficiently critical reading of Gary Taubes' Good Calories, Bad Calories, and believed that a spoonful of sugar, an apple or a sweet potato amounted to the same death-trap within the body. They all trigger massive insulin release, which drives fat into the cells and causes insulin resistance and a host of health problems. Lately, I've been learning, from wide reading but more impressively from my own experience, that this is not the case. Starch in the body doesn't feel or act the same as sugar. Of course, all starches are not created equal either. As a celiac, I don't do well with grains and have had periods of time when I haven't been able to handle any starch at all. But it seems like the ability to handle them is a sign of healing that brings good things with it.

Finding #6: Attempting to exclude completely either carbohydrate or fat will not yield good long-term results. I've done both. I used to be an ardent lipophobe. I swallowed everything that the 80-10-10/Natural Hygiene diet folks say about fat being the root of all evil. It would be quite comical sometimes, even as a 'believer,' to hear someone troubleshooting their diet with one of the 'gurus' of this movement, and the guru triumphantly condemning whatever infinitesimal gram of fat the person had eaten in the past month for whatever the problem was. I ate mostly fruit, some greens and occasional 'potluck' nuts/seeds/avo for years. I could never gain any muscle, ended up with pretty terrible candida, was extremely thin but also very accident prone and neurotic.

Then, more recently, I went to the other extreme. Fruit-only had clearly not sustained me or allowed me to thrive, and now I had candida into the bargain, and started reading all the research about insulin and carbohydrates, and so any kind of carb, even veggies, which I've always loved, became strictly limited and worried-over. At first I lost a lot of weight: too much, eventually, because my absorption and digestion got so bad and there were a few months where I hardly ate and didn't digest what I did eat. Then, not surprisingly, my metabolism got even slower. Over the past several months I've gradually been working more vegetables back in, and the more carbohydrate (not sugar, but including a little fruit) I eat, the more energy I seem to have, the more stable my mood, the better my digestion.

Finding #7: If you read a lot exclusively about how good/bad something is for you, you're likely to feel that way when you eat it. Bodies are so suggestible.

One last point: The only 'food group' that I've never made a staple, bizarre and perverse as it may sound, given the history of humanity, is STARCH! I've always avoided it, because of my misapprehension that all starches were equal. I supposed that since I can't digest gluten grains, I can't digest anything else either. Even when I was high-carb, it was fruit that I was eating. As a raw-foodist (but still anorexic), I was actually scared away from carrots by a self-proclaimed Natural Hygiene guru who told me that eating carrots (=starch) would make me gain weight but that I could eat all the sugar I wanted and stay skinny!

So, lately I've been loving yams and parsnips and really 'digging' the effects of them on my system. I'll talk about that more soon. And here's my reminder to myself--and to anyone else making such experiments--that even if I'm eating more starch, I need not to cut out fat completely: I already know that that doesn't take things in a good direction.

What are your most useful findings about food, nutritional research, and our minds' impacts on our bodies' experiences? Please share!
much love

A Conversation about Ground Rules for Nutritional Research and Self-Experimentation

I will always follow nutritional research with great interest and have been doing so for far too long to expect that I'll ever think all the questions have been answered. Within the limitations of food allergies and ethical and aesthetic considerations, I am also likely to continue to experiment within my own body, to experience potential benefits for myself.

Important caveat: I am not a research scientist! My body and home are my only laboratory and I have no control subjects. When I change something in my diet, other changes often coincide, whether a change in season or activity level or something else. That's why I started out by saying 'I follow nutritional research' rather than 'I research nutrition.' Yes, what I do is a species of research, but it's the compiling work of reading what others have written about their findings, as opposed to being in the crucible and witnessing in person.

I am not alone in this. Many of us are keenly interested in nutrition research, whether it's because we're trying to heal health challenges, lose weight, want to 'be right,' 'know the truth,' or simply find these amazing physical selves that we inhabit endlessly fascinating. New data are always coming to light, and the best sentence I've read recently about the whole arena is "If you aren't confused by health and nutrition information, then you haven't studied the subject long enough, or deeply enough." This sums it up beautifully.

I wrote recently about how some of my recent readings have been helping me to overcome my fear of carbs and others are prompting me to drastically reduce my intake of PUFA's, including 'friendly' omega-3's. Before I go into detail about those readings, I wanted to start a conversation about ground rules for nutritional research: to build a BS-meter, if you like. I'd love to hear your thoughts too, so please chime in. Here's what I have for starters:

1) Always understand the researcher's motivation/where they're coming from/who's paying them. This is a crucial point, and sadly banal to anyone who has dug deeper on certain very open-and-shut-looking studies, only to find that they are being funded by the industry that profits from sales of the food in question. However, when you're reading someone else's research, or testimony, or anecdotal evidence, you can never know all of their motivations. It's not only in the 'Arts' that emotions and interpersonal relationships can muddy the waters. It's not only in the blatant 'industry-funded' cases that you need to beware.
Another circumstance in which I have learned to be careful how literarily I take the findings presented is that of what might be called the quasi-religious evangelists. You've all come across them: the folks who were at death's door and had tried everything and were sick and depraved and deprived and obese and godless and cancerous and...and... And then they saw the light and attained salvation and became healthy and happy and lean and enlightened. And now everyone else must see that light too: because there can't be more than one 'right way,' right? So since I'm 'right,' you all must be 'wrong,' because I can't possible be wrong! I'm parodying slightly, and I admire such people their singleminded, monolithic conviction, especially if is has brought them ease, healing and good health.
However, I cannot believe and never have believed that there is the same road to salvation for everyone: we're all starting from different places to begin with, so how can there be? Of course, sometimes the saved-evangelists become sellers-of-products also, and then they're doubly to be doubted.

2) Always be aware of your own motivation/where you're coming from/who's 'paying' you
It's easy to assume that we're so openminded, we're always reading, researching... In fact, we might be more objective than the actual experimenters because we keep all the research before our eyes from all sources, rather than being pinned into one niche.
So I thought, and then my Naturopath suggested that the entity 'paying' for my research is an anorexic teenager who doesn't want to give up her kid-sized pants! Given my history of serially and totally demonizing every food group under the sun on the basis of research I've read, I have to admit he has a point. If I'm totally honest, I'm always reading to see 'will doing this make me lose weight?' whether it's appropriate for me or (actually) not. I'm never going to stop following the research, so for myself I just need to beware that that is a bias in my own reporting/evaluating.

3) Make sure you're comparing like with like
It sounds like common sense, but it's surprising how often this one is violated. If one study involved 10 obese women over a period of seven days relying on self-reporting and another study involved 300 lean young men over a period of six months in ward conditions, drawing major conclusions from the differences in the findings is tenuous, to say the least. And related to this:

4) Beware of short-term conclusions
It takes seven years for all the cells in your body to be changed over completely. The endocrine system works powerful forces in favor of 'status quo.' Both when reading research and when experimenting on yourself, don't dismiss something if it doesn't show 'instant results,' and by the same token, don't assume you've found the holy grail if huge results obtain within a week. Wait and see, and keep reading the research in the meantime.

5) If you look far enough, you'll find support for every dietary theory and its opposite, so don't get too attached and read both sides of the debate
This is back to Matt Stone's excellent comment above, and is why we need ground rules/bs meter in the first place. Similarly, if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

6) When experimenting on yourself, listen to your body 
Yes, this one's for me in particular but I know there are others out there. In fact, in the cleansing/fasting/purifying camp there's a certain heroism attached to going through horrendous 'detox' challenges that sound somewhat like biblical plagues, with a similarly biblical salvation at the end of it, at least as the stories go. But while acknowledging (with 4) above) that things take time, if something you're trying is making you feel awful continuously, consider that it may not be appropriate and that it might be time to do something different. Our bodies are so complex, the research is so fragmented and partial: you may not know everything that is going on and can sometimes do damage. Having read some more research on the 'other side' of the 'carbs are the devil' debate, it horrifies me that 'back then,' I persisted in my 'very low carb' experiment despite problems I was experiencing that are blatantly indicative of exacerbation of the thyroid/adrenal problems I had already. Especially considering that I was fairly lean to begin with, I did myself--and everyone around me--no favors at all.

Related to this, when self-experimenting, be aware of how suggestible your body is to what you've read. It's amazing how easy it is to persuade yourself that you're experiencing something as a result of eating a certain way if you read enough times that you should be! Disconcerting, actually: I don't know about you, but I don't feel like my interest in this subject is born of an urge to conform?! 

7) Recognize your own contradictory beliefs and accept that similar are embodied in research
I hold contradictory beliefs. I'm perfectly comfortable believing that animal protein is highly beneficial in some bodies, and might even be so in mine. I also believe that eating it makes me feel sick, and I know that I don't want to eat it. I believe that wild meat is more 'natural' food than farmed meat and that my husband's killing and eating bears is participation in the local ecosystem, but I also believe that wild animals are subject to hardship (including disease, as many 'natural diet' advocates deny) and that well-cared-for farm animals can have a healthy, happy life, leaving aside the ethics of the endgame tradeoff. I no longer believe that 'fat makes you fat,' but I know that when bears are nearing hibernation, they will pound as much fat as they can obtain (although they have been known to raid freezers up here and take all the berries and disdain the meat)!

grey whale on our beach this summer, 'degloved' by orcas

And related to this point:

8) Celebrate diversity and keep exploring
This game never ends, but you might begin to discern general tendencies. You might even get a general idea of what 'works' in your body and why you think it does, why that makes sense. Just don't assume that what works for you is going to work for everyone else: life is far more fun than that!

This is just a start and I don't want to be too verbose on Sunday night. But I would love to hear others' thoughts, so please share! I will update this to reflect important additions.
much love