Chicken Breast with a Side of Arsenic, Please

So many times it seems that going organic isn’t worth the price hike, or that there can’t possibly be anything so wrong with getting factory-raised meats. They’re regulated, right?

Regulation doesn’t seem to be doing all consumers would expect it to for the factory meat industry, however. The newest eye-opener is coming from the poultry industry. A group of scientists from John Hopkins University Center for a Livable Future revealed residues of several unexpected feed additives clinging to the feathers of broiler chickens.

It turns out that additives put into chicken feed collects in chicken feathers, and those feathers are made into feather meal. The scientists had only to test the feathers to figure out what all was making its way into chicken feed. The list of things making their way into chickens is strange, upsetting and—according to the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Science and Technology—outlawed.

Outlawed Antibiotics

Apparently, a banned class of antibiotics called fluoroquinolones is routinely found in feather meal. These antibiotics were banned because they help breed antibiotic-resistant diseases that also attack humans.

Arsenic

Um, a poison? Yes, another peer-reviewed journal, the Science of the Total Environment, reports arsenic in every sample of chicken feather meal tested. Arsenic is intentionally fed to chickens to make the flesh a prettier pink color. While the accumulation of arsenic in the flesh isn’t supposed to damaging, this is still upsetting for several reasons, not the least of which are the fact that arsenic accumulates in the human spine and that the synergistic consequences of consuming arsenic for multiple meals and feeding it to children hasn’t been fully explored. But this begs the question: is pink chicken meat worth intentionally feeding a poison to our food animals? Oh, this one’s easy.  Nope!

Uppers

Okay, so caffeine is such a common upper it hardly bears mentioning. Except why is it fed to chickens in the first place? It’s to keep them awake longer so they’ll eat longer and, hopefully, fatten up more.

Downers

And what goes up tends to come down, though the extra feeding hours and often atrocious living conditions in a chicken factory farm get the chickens so stressed out that Tylenol and Benadryl are added to the feed to force them to come down. It turns out stressed chickens taste bad and don’t eat much, but doped chickens are fat and palatable.

The Verdict

Um, no.

Seriously, if there weren’t already a ridiculously long list of health and humane reasons to go organic, the very idea that adding uppers, downers, poison and super-disease-breeding antibiotics to something as common to the dinner plate as chicken is COMMONPLACE is a compelling argument.

Check out the studies yourself!

• Arsenic species in poultry feather meal
• CLF Researchers Find Evidence of Banned Antibiotics in Poultry Products
• Researchers find evidence of banned antibiotics in poultry products
• Feather Meal: A Previously Unrecognized Route for Reentry into the Food Supply of Multiple Pharmaceuticals and Personal Care Products (PPCPs)

All About Protein

Why Protein?

Part of the popularity of high-protein, low carb diets lies in the attraction to those who succeed on them, such as Hollywood stars and professional athletes—pretty much the epitome of those sought-after body types. The rest of the population on the Standard American diet, which consists primarily of high-carb foods (grains and sugars for the most part), hardly gets a hint that the macronutrient that truly helps you burn fat while building muscle is protein.

Protein Function and Metabolism

To get calories from any macronutrient (such as fat, carbohydrates or protein), your body needs to spend energy to digest it. The body can access the calories from fat and carbohydrates fairly easily—without breaking a sweat, so to speak. Protein, on the other hand, takes 2.5 to 3 times the amount of energy from the body to digest and access the calories as it does to get the same amount of calories from fat or carbs. It literally heats up your body and makes you burn calories! This means that, without any exercise whatsoever, you’re burning up to three times the calories you would from a diet focused on carbohydrates. You can imagine how fast this can trim the waistline with just a token amount of time spent playing, doing sports or exercising.

Protein’s Mechanism for Feeling Full

Have you ever noticed how it takes several minutes after a large plate of pasta or a ton of bread to start feeling full? And then you REALLY feel full—sometimes painfully so! Grains and other forms of carbohydrates don’t give you a full sensation right away (sometimes not at all!). To add insult to injury, many start expanding in your belly after you eat. Protein actually facilitates the message to the body to feel full. When you eat a high-protein, low-carb meal, you feel satiated and stop eating—before you over-do it. And that painful stretch in your belly from over-indulgence? It’s rare you’ll feel that after a steak dinner—provided you skip the bread.

Muscle Building Function of Protein

Your body can digest its own muscle for energy under certain circumstances. Long hours of strenuous activity (such as running marathons) provide one such circumstance. All that hard work just to LOSE muscle! Consuming proteins encourages your body to build muscle during exercise instead of consuming it for fuel. You’ll get no such help from a loaf of wheat bread.

Where to Get Proteins

Happily, proteins are as delicious as they are nutritious. That savory grilled steak, that divine roasted turkey, those poached eggs with hollandaise sauce, that crisp lemon-basil salmon, that heady wedge of smoked gouda cheese—all of these have protein.  Not to mention all the other meats, dairies, organs, eggs, nuts, beans, legumes and vegetables that have appreciable amounts of protein.

Atkins Diet Overview

The Atkins diet is a high protein and fat, low carbohydrate diet.

The Atkins diet is the most popular low-carb diet to hit mainstream America. Embracing the idea that an overload of carbohydrates—and not fat—cause weight gain, the Atkins diet recommends high protein and fat intake and low carbohydrate intake. The Atkins diet breaks down its food and macronutrient (fat, protein and carb) recommendations into phases.

During the first phase of the Atkins diet, the goal is to make the body enter ketosis—a state where the available carbohydrates in the diet are so low that every organ and tissue must find a new source of fuel. For most organs, this fuel is fat. But for the brain, dietary fat doesn’t work as a fuel source. So the body shuttles fats to the liver where they’re broken up and converted into an energy source the brain can use. This, in an over-simplified way, is ketosis. And because the body is using fats for fuel, it burns up body fat and helps people slim down quickly.

Later Phases

Gradually foods that contain carbohydrates, such as berries, fruits, and vegetables, are allowed back into the diet. Grains and sugars are left for the last two stages, since they are the foods with the greatest concentration of carbohydrates. The idea is that weight loss will still occur, but not as fast as during ketosis.

Difficulties

The Atkins diet demands strict carbohydrate counting by gram. This is difficult to keep track of for long periods of time for three meals a day. Specific food recommendations help simplify the process, but it is still time-consuming.

The hard shift into ketosis and complete drop-off of carbohydrates after a lifetime of the Standard American Diet can bring about a variety of side-effects. During the first phase of the Atkins diet it isn’t uncommon to experience brain fog, lack of energy, intense carbohydrate cravings or constant nagging feelings of hunger.  These are mitigated by later phases of the diet that let you start adding carbohydrates and favorite foods back into the diet.

The Paleo Diet Overview

This is what the grill for someone on the Paleo Diet might look like. Plenty of meats, some vegetables, no grains.

There’s a new diet that’s been challenging the low-fat diet presumptions. It has many names: the Paleo diet, neo-Paleo diet, primal diet, ancestral diet, even the caveman diet.It runs on the premise that our bodies are very similar to our hunter-gatherer ancestors, and that the foods they ate are what our bodies are best adapted to eat. Most people following the Paleo diet also advocate taking modern research into the toxic and inflammatory aspects of certain foods when choosing what to eat.

The Paleo/Primal Lifestyle

The first major difference between the Paleo diet and most crash diets or the low-fat diet is that it’s not really a diet at all: it’s a lifestyle. The Paleo diet is not something to follow for a few weeks and then go back to eating the standard American diet. It’s a way of eating (and exercising, too) for a lifetime.

Fat is Not the Problem

The second major difference between the Paleo diet and most any other diet out there is that it doesn’t demonize fat. In light of compounding research and anecdotal evidence that spans the last several decades (even before low-fat dieting was introduced at all) showing that carbohydrates lead to fatty weight gain—not fats consumed in the diet—the objective of the Paleo diet is to reduce carbohydrates and instead focus on proteins and fat as the primary food energy sources.

Grains are in many modern foods, but they're not necessarily good for you.

Grains Aren’t That Good for You

You won’t find any advice for eating whole-grain foods in this diet. Since grains are composed primarily of carbohydrates and very few nutrients, they aren’t necessary for a diet based around proteins and fat. The inflammatory nature of many grains (such as wheat and its increasingly well-known irritant, gluten) makes them even less appetizing to those on the Paleo diet. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors didn’t rely on grains much, either. The sheer amount of time and energy necessary to make grains palatable at all simply isn’t a worthwhile investment. It wasn’t until the advent of agriculture that grains saw a rise in the human diet. Compared to millennia of human evolution, the last few thousand years that humans have been adapting to grains is considered a drop in the evolutionary bucket.

Get Your Fruits and Veggies

Although meats and their associated animal fats are more essential to this diet than others, plants are central as well. Vegetables and fruits are vital for their micronutrient content. Let’s not forget that we’re also looking at the diet of hunter-gatherers. What they gathered were vegetables, fruits, nuts, and other forageable foods to round out their diet. Most of these could be eaten raw, and were cooked to store longer or for flavor.

Who’s Doing This Diet?

So why would anyone choose a diet that restricts foods like pasta, pizza and cake? Primarily people drawn to the Paleo diet or the Primal lifestyle do so for health reasons. Other diets just don’t work for them (or work for very little time before the weight just comes right back) and they have problems associated with obesity such as diabtes (which demands a low-carb diet anyway) or heart problems. Some have inflammation issues, especially along the digestive tract or in joints and the skin that can be traced back to intolerance of certain grains or other modern, processed foods. Many others don’t like the constant feeling of hunger associated with most diets. The Paleo diet doesn’t demand calorie-counting, so people on the diet can eat many delicious meats, vegetables, fruits and nuts without having to go hungry.

And if Everything Else Really Isn’t Working…

But perhaps the most compelling reason for people to try any new diet is the failure of past diets. The last 50 years has seen an outrageous rise in the per-capita instances of diet-related health problems such as diabetes, obesity and heart-disease. And the last 50 years has also seen far more processed foods and grain in the American diet coupled with far more low-fat foods. Low-carbohydrate diets like the Atkins diets are seeing far more success in weight loss than low-fat diets. In light of these trends, many people have just stopped believing that a low-fat diet is the way to eat.

Vegan Versus Vegetarian: What’s the Difference between the Vegetarian Diet and the Vegan Diet?

Some types of vegetarians are all about salads with cheese, vegans not so much.

If you’re considering going on a vegetarian diet, but you’ve heard of the vegan diet, you’re probably wondering what the difference is an why it matters. Depending on your reasons for deciding to be a vegetarian, the difference matters quite a bit!

Lacto vegetarians eat cheeses and other dairy products.

Vegetarian Diet

Vegetarians usually don’t eat any form of meat: pork, beef, chicken or fish. But there are a lot of variants on the vegetarian diet, since people become vegetarian for a wide range of ethical and health reasons.

For example, some vegetarians consume milk products and eggs. These guys follow the ovo-lacto vegetarian diet (ovo for the eggs, lacto for

Eggs are fine for the ovo-lacto vegetarian and ovo vegetarians.

the milk products). But someone who’s lactose-intolerant might shun the milk but stick with the eggs. That would make them ovo vegetarians. There are others who don’t mind animal products so much, but don’t consume any form of meat, and consider eggs meat. Those would probably favor a lacto vegetarian diet.

Vegan Diet

The strictest vegetarian diet is the vegan diet. That’s right, the vegan diet is a sub-diet of the vegetarian diet. Vegans shun all animal products, and not just milk products. They often avoid honey and even yeast. However, many vegans lead a vegan lifestyle, and this is a bit different from the vegan diet. Vegan lifestylers don’t use any animal products in their daily lives at all, such as leather, some glues and beeswax.

If You’re Considering a Vegetarian Diet…

Keep in mind that cutting animal meats and products out of the diet means a substantial reduction in protein. Vegetarians have to make sure they get complete proteins from other sources, such as nuts, beans and rice. Ovo-lacto vegetarians get some protein from milk and eggs as well.

Healthy fats are also crucial—your body can’t survive without them. One of the most important fats to include in the diet (since it can’t be produced in the human body) is Omega 3 fatty acids. While it is found in high amounts in wild fish, free-range eggs and grass-fed animals, people on a vegetarian diet often need to supplement to make sure they’re getting enough. But Omega 3’s are also found in flax, walnuts, avocados, almonds and olive oil, so adding these to the diet will help.

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Beware of Natural and Artificial Flavors

The flavor industry, based mostly in massive chemical factories off the side of the New Jersey turnpike, is worth billions of dollars. These chemical flavors are responsible for giving processed foods the illusion of real food. Distinctions between artificial and natural flavors can be relatively meaningless, based more on how the flavor has been made than on the chemicals it actually contains. If you read “Natural Flavors” or “Artificial Flavors,” on the label, you’re holding a chemical stew.

For example, a typical artificial strawberry flavor, such as that found in a McDonald’s strawberry milk shake, contains the following ingredients: amyl acetate, amyl butyrate, amyl valerate, anethol, anisyl formate, benzyl acetate, benzyl isobutyrate, butyric acid, cinnamyl isobutyrate, cinnamyl valerate, cognac essential oil, diacetyl, dipropyl ketone, ethyl acetate, ethyl amyl ketone, ethyl butyrate, ethyl cinnamate, ethyl heptanoate, ethyl heptylate, ethyl lactate, ethyl methylphenylglycidate, ethyl nitrate, ethyl propionate, ethyl valerate, heliotropin, hydroxyphenyl-2-butanone (10 percent solution in alcohol), a-ionone, isobutyl anthranilate, isobutyl butyrate, lemon essential oil, maltol, 4-methylacetophenone, methyl anthranilate, methyl benzoate, methyl cinnamate, methyl heptine carbonate, methyl naphthyl ketone, methyl salicylate, mint essential oil, neroli essential oil, nerolin, neryl isobutyrate, orris butter, phenethyl alcohol, rose, rum ether, g-undecalactone, vanillin, and solvent.

I think I’d rather have a strawberry, thanks.

Quote of the day

“We are living in a world today where lemonade is made from artificial flavors and furniture polish is made from real lemons.” ~Alfred E. Newman

Grains are overrated. Really.

Some of you know that the main reason I have been MIA recently is because I’ve been writing a book called the “Fat-Burning Man.” Some of the ideas stand in direct opposition to Conventional Wisdom, and I have changed my views on several issues as I’ve learned more about what the human body is designed to eat. To give you a little taste, here is a bit about why I have almost completely eliminated grains from my diet…

I can hear you out there… What?!? No bread, you’ve got to be kidding me! I love bread!

But do you really?

What is the best part of a hamburger? The meat. The bacon. The cheese. Right?

How about the best part of a breakfast – the omelet covered in cheese, sausage, and sautéed veggies, or the toast?

Pizza? Most people don’t even eat the crust, because it’s boring and mostly tasteless. The best part of pizza is the meat, the sauce, and the cheese. Bread, dough, and starch is often simply a vehicle for its toppings.

But pasta is different, I hear you say! Have you ever eaten a plate of spaghetti without anything on it? A plain plate of spaghetti… mmm. But what about a plain steak? Now I can hear you salivating.

Cutting out grains, admittedly, does take a bit of getting used to. But once you do adapt, you will probably be surprised to find that you don’t miss it. Especially when you look in the mirror and see a six pack.

More to come!

This very simple trick could cut 1000 calories from your diet.

A colleague in college needed to drop an insane amount of poundage in order to make weight for the crew team. When we asked him how he intended to do so, his answer was surprisingly nonchalant and confident: “I’m going to stop drinking calories altogether and just switch to water.” We all laughed at the presumed absurdity of his weight loss strategy, and mostly wrote him off as a joker for a few weeks. A month later, he had dropped THIRTY pounds from his already smallish frame! He said that just saying no to booze, milkshakes, sodas, and other fattening drinks becomes very easy, and you stop craving unhealthy carbs, start losing weight, and start feeling better within just the few days. Years have passed since he first cut out drinking calories, and he still carries on, fit as ever.