Weekly Round-up

Here are just a few of the subjects, links and discussions the Highbrow Paleo group had this week. Enjoy!

• Some of us can’t get enough of Aravind. We keep sneaking off in the middle of the day to do it with him. Meditate that is.
• What are some of our favorite cheeses you ask? Here’s a few: Danish bleu, blueberry goat cheese, Epoisses Appenzeller, Manchego, Stilton, aged Gouda, Parrano, Camembert, Mizithra, raclette, curds, Brie, Stilton, Roquefort, Mozzarella, Ricotta, Limburger and Feta. And member Sean tells us that all Swiss cheeses are made with raw milk, by grass-fed cattle…by law! Good to know.
• Physical therapy versus naturopathy, bitches!
• Cut off the tip of a finger in a cooking accident and now need a nice healing protocol? We pieced together this one: Vitamin C, Zinc, B12, Folic Acid, Gotu Kola, topical St. John’s Wort and olive oil.
• We listened to and discussed Chris Masterjohn’s interview on Bulletproof Exec.
• We “stabbed”away at this paper – a unifying theory of obesity and metabolic syndrome.
• One of our members shared her amazing transformation with us and on her blog.
• Speaking of awesome blogs we need to appreciate more, how about Tony’s blog FED- Fitness in an Evolutionary Direction? Pretty great, right
• Fat + vinegar + cooked, but then cooled potato = Lower glycemic response to starch. 
• One member’s month-long no grocery shopping pledge is well on its way and is chronicled here. 
• One fascinating thread started with this: “I am going nuts on nuts. Am I going to die?” Here’s how it progressed: Yes, but not because of the nuts. —-> There’s the omega-6 content, which of course should probably be kept fairly low for best results. Macadamias barely have any, though.  —-> Ratio within a food doesn’t matter, it’s a more complex relationship having more to do with absolute amounts in the diet. Eat all foods with no omega-6 except for fish, and you’re doing as well as you can do. —-> Grass fed beef has more omega-3, that can be good to meet a requirement. But the ratio within a food doesn’t matter. The absolute amounts of both in grass-fed beef are pretty low, which makes it an ideal meat because of the low omega-6 content. If there is no fish in the diet, it is desirable to get grass-fed, but if there is fish then it’s not important because there is enough already. —-> It seems like I would still eat loads of butter, bacon, grass-fed beef, and fish, and not much would change at all…except maybe feeling a bit better about eating pecans. —-> And indeed nothing changes, as long as you stay under the magic number, nothing really does. But when people compare something stupid likely 25g of omega-6 and 15g of omega-6 in a study, when we should definitely be getting somewhere under 9 for optimal anti-inflammatory signaling, that’s when it’s useful to know. It’s a very important academic point, not because it’s relevant to us but to public policy in a world full of soy oil and no inhibitions about it —-> Re: high omega 3 and low omega 6, I think there is a substantial amount of evidence (both experimental and theoretical) to suggest that at least initially, obese patients might benefit from increasing omega 3 intake, despite its chemical nature. This is one part of a theory I have in mind, which seems to contradict my (and other people I respect) support of SFA. —-> What do you think of the idea that various saturated fats need omega-3 to function properly in the body? Stearic acid here specifically  —-> I’m not sure we can be in full agreement on the fish, though. There are major sustainability questions having to deal with wild caught fish, and even bigger health concerns with farm raised. —-> A problem with the omega-3 in meat is that it’s not long-chain, it’s the same kind in flax, so it may be better than nothing, but it’s generally not going to cut it from brain health. —-> Krill or algae oil may be better if one were putting sustainability considerations in the foreground? —-> Neptune krill oil specifically has 3 positive studies done on it, it appears to work.

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Here’s what some of us had for dinner this week

~ HBP MENU~

~Roasted green beans with a chicken stir-fry

~ Leftover pot roast and some liver for good measure

   ~ Sesame cucumber salad with pork carnitas

~ Venison short ribs with veggies

~ Chicken breast stuffed with pureed and herbed chicken livers and spinach all wrapped in bacon served with steamed local tiny beets

~ Chili, with liver of course

~ Lamb shank and lamb ribs sautéed spinach and onions and honey-candied squash

~ Roasted chicken leg, broccoli and a sweet potato with lots of butter

~ Home-smoked pulled pork, oxtail broth, egg yolks fried in bacon grease

~ Pecans, dried pineapple, ginger yogurt, oven bakes thick cut bacon, two eggs scrambled, potato, turkey patty, collard greens, apple

~ Oxtail and root veg stew 

~ 3 idlis (fermented with iodized salt), spinach with ground coconut, sweet potatoes cooked in ghee, misc Indian spices.

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