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Photo by Rishi Bandopadhay

• No onions.
• Used peas instead of green beans.
• Used chicken stock instead of veggie stock.
• Used less Parmesan cheese, but added a splash of cream.
• At the end, I threw in some shrimp.

My guess is the key to making great risotto is gradually adding the stock to the Arborio rice and cooking it slowly. What veggies or protein you use or don’t use is probably less important. The creamy texture can come from butter, cheese, cream or some combination.

The next risotto I make will be loaded with mushrooms.

Shrimp Risotto

I also speculated in the post update that the chlorine in the water could be a factor in my headaches. My average headache intensity for the 75 days using the filter is 1.4/5.0. The 75 days prior to the installing the filter it was a little lower at 1.1/5.0. So this experiment showed there is no measurable connection between chlorine and my sinus headaches.

My results are just that – my results. Two weekends ago I met a guy that is super sensitive to water and soap. He uses a filter and swears by it. His skin gets red and inflamed without his shower filter. So perform your own tests. I will continue to use the filter. Maybe the benefits take longer than 3 months to see?

Photo by Steven Depolo

The article Gelatin, stress, longevity by Ray Peat makes a solid case for supplementing with gelatin for deeper sleep. The short explanation is that the modern diet is very heavy in muscle meats and low on the non-muscle parts of the animal. And each part has a different amino acid profile. When we favor too much muscle meat and not enough of the parts used more in traditional cuisines (think organ meats, bone broths), we are out of balance. From the article:

When only the muscle meats are eaten, the amino acid balance entering our blood stream is the same as that produced by extreme stress, when cortisol excess causes our muscles to be broken down to provide energy and material for repair. The formation of serotonin is increased by the excess tryptophan in muscle, and serotonin stimulates the formation of more cortisol, while the tryptophan itself, along with the excess muscle-derived cysteine, suppresses the thyroid function.

The article goes into scientific detail on how eating too much muscle meat, which is high in cysteine and tryptophan which affect the thyroid, can produce nocturnal stress. This stress can negatively impact sleep quality. By supplementing with gelatin that balance could be restored, nocturnal stress could be reduced and the result would be deeper sleep. The author tested it on himself and said:

For years I hadn’t slept through a whole night without waking, and I was in the habit of having some juice or a little thyroid to help me go back to sleep. The first time I had several grams of gelatin just before bedtime, I slept without interruption for about 9 hours.

Even though I already consume bone broths on a regular basis, I was interested in trying this supplement out. My research lead me to Great Lakes Unflavored Gelatin as a clean source of quality gelatin. So I bought a two pack from Amazon.

Great Lakes Unflavored Gelatin (AMAZON USA)

Did It Help?

I’ve been tracking Sleep Quality every night for almost a year. I rank sleep on a scale of 1-5. A 5 represents perfect sleep and 1 is awful. I consumed gelatin prior to sleep 13 times in the past 26 days. Here are my Sleep Quality averages.

• 3.77  Gelatin
• 3.92  No Gelatin

My sleep quality did not improve at all with the Gelatin supplementation. In fact it was slightly worse. I don’t believe the Gelatin made my sleep worse. If I extended the test out, my guess is the numbers would equal out. I may repeat this test at a later date, but I’m not expecting the gelatin to suddenly give me deep uninterrupted sleep.

Gelatin has other more known benefits such as a joint repair. I’m going to continue taking the supplement, mostly on workout days or when I’m making meals that are all muscle meat with no bone broths. What I did learn was that Gelatin was not my magical sleep bullet, but I could see where others that don’t make their own bone broths could get those benefits.

Making cucumber kimchi

Mine had a nice sweet taste and I knew it would make an excellent salad dressing. Much better for you than the vegetable oil based salad dressings you find at the store. Anyway, I found an alternate use. I mix the cucumber kimchi with canned sardines. Note that you only want to buy the sardines packed in water. 99% of the other ones are packed in soybean oil.

Sardines and cucumber kimchi

This is a highly nutrient dense meal that can be made in 30 seconds, assuming you already made the cucumber kimchi. Tastes good too!

I’ve had pastured beef liver many times and goat liver a few times. It tastes closer to goat liver, but I found the flavor superior. I cooked it just like I did my Beef Liver + Asparagus + Garlic recipe, only without the asparagus. My side dishes were steamed sweet potatoes and Brussels sprouts with some butter.

If you are unaware of just how awesome liver is nutritionally, check out the post on FreeTheAnimal titled Nutrition Density Challenge: Fruit vs. Beef Liver. As great as liver is, I figured that some of vitamins were getting destroyed during the cooking process so I started a habit that may gross out some people. Prior to cooking the liver, I cut off an inch or two and eat it raw. Whereas beef liver has a harshness when eaten raw, the Icelandic sheep liver had none. Had I not already chopped up the garlic, I may have eaten the entire liver raw.

I also believe this to be safe, since the liver was frozen for more than 2 weeks. MarksDailyApple has an article on raw meat, which does advise against this practice for specific groups.

…pregnant women or those trying to conceive, young children, “the elderly” (not our word), patients receiving chemotherapy or those who are taking immunosuppressant medications, and people with weakened immune systems

Anyone else eating raw organ meat?

Brussels sprouts, sweet potatoes, Icelandic sheep liver

The Art of Fermentation is the most comprehensive guide to do-it-yourself home fermentation ever published. Sandor Katz presents the concepts and processes behind fermentation in ways that are simple enough to guide a reader through their first experience making sauerkraut or yogurt, and in-depth enough to provide greater understanding and insight for experienced practitioners.

While Katz expertly contextualizes fermentation in terms of biological and cultural evolution, health and nutrition, and even economics, this is primarily a compendium of practical information-how the processes work; parameters for safety; techniques for effective preservation; troubleshooting; and more.

I just ordered my copy of the 528 page book. I’m a big fan of Sandor Katz.

The Art of Fermentation by Sandor Katz (AMAZON USA)

The sequence of steps in this recipe were inspired by The Lean Green Bean. The approach to spices came from 5 Spices, 50 Dishes. My selection of spices was inspired by what I had available to me when I started cooking.

What I Don’t Eat

I have found that most of my health benefits came from eliminating the foods with the highest amount of anti-nutrients. People that preach moderation when it comes to toxins never seem to have excellent health. Here is what I avoid.

• Gluten (Wheat, Barley, Rye, Couscous)  - Why Grains are Unhealthy
• Vegetable and Seed Oils (Corn, Canola, Soy, Sunflower, etc) – Deep Nutrition: Why Your Genes Need Traditional Food
• Excessive Sugar
• Soy that hasn’t been fermented for 6+ months (I eat miso and natto, not BOCA burgers and Tofu)
• Legumes that haven’t been soaked and sprouted (#7 on If I Were Still a Vegetarian)
• Beer, Wine, Cider (my body hates liquid sources high in histamines)
• Milk (unless raw, which is a very rare treat)
• Fruit Juice (no fruit without fiber)
• Food from China
• Peanuts (except purposeful trace exposure)
• Oranges, Tangerines. (I hate the taste and smell)

Things I have taken off the No List include starchy vegetables and white rice. My experiences suggest that The Perfect Health Diet is accurate in labeling them safe starches. I’ve also started drinking the occasional Coke Zero again. It helps me when I have extreme headaches in a way that coffee, tea and water don’t. In Podcast #15 of Upgraded Self Radio, I felt James Krieger made a strong case for the safety of diet colas. In an ideal world, I wouldn’t drink Coke Zero, but it is more effective than Alleve or Advil for my headaches.

Neutral Foods

Here are some foods I eat that fall into a middle ground. They aren’t necessarily healthy, but I have found they don’t cause me problems. Run your own experiments.

• Popcorn
• Gluten-free grains (in small quantities)
• Ice Cream (occasionally and on high activity days)
• Cheese

What I Eat

Once the toxic foods have been removed, I like the strategy of loading up on highly nutrient dense foods. The post High Velocity Super Warrior Foods has a list of ideas. Here are the foods I eat.

• Mostly pastured, organic meat
• Mostly clean seafood
• All vegetables (raw, fermented, cooked)
• Seaweed
• Some fruit
• Coconut oil, butter, lard, tallow, ghee, palm oil, olive oil
• Eggs
• Yogurt (Full Fat)
• Coffee and Tea
• Dark Chocolate
• Soaked almonds

Questionable Foods

As much as I’ve tweaked my diet in the past few years, there are some foods I still have some uncertainty about. I will run tests on these foods to determine my personal tolerance.

• Nightshades – I plan on doing a 30 day elimination test on this food group later this year.
• Tyramine / Histamine Foods – My test last year was flawed, I need to do a strict test to see if this is a cause of my headaches.
• Coffee – My 2 week test last year was flawed as well. I need to go a full month and not have decaf during the test period. I am not ready for that test. It’ll be much later in the year.
• Cheese and Almond Butter – The two foods I find the most hyper palatable. They are fine foods, but I can’t control myself when they are in the house, so I’ve drastically cut back on both.
• Gin – Recently, I’ve discovered that my body might be able to handle very small amounts of gin. More data is needed.

Less Rigid

This list is less rigid than the one I made two years ago. I now know which foods are the most toxic and which are the most nutrient dense. I suspect having a healthy attitude about everything in between is a better approach than becoming a neurotic eater obsessing about the quality of every calorie.

Peanuts Are Unhealthy, Right?

In early 2009, I watched Art De Vany’s Evolutionary Fitness Seminar. I was very new to the Paleo diet. I wanted to learn more, so I took notes and started thinking about ways I could make changes in my diet and behavior. At one point in the lecture De Vany mentions how we shouldn’t eat peanuts, because they contain a carcinogenic toxin know as aflatoxin. This wasn’t a problem for me. I loved almond butter just as much as peanut butter, so I formed a new food rule and avoided peanuts for almost 2 years.

Then at a Thai restaurant I had a dish made with a peanut sauce. My mouth turned instantly numb. I had trouble speaking, almost like I had been injected with Novocaine. This had never happened to me before. I stopped eating for a moment and instead of panicking, I calmly told myself that I was going to be OK. I slowly finished eating my meal and by the time I left the restaurant the numbness was gone and I was fine. Since that incident, I purposely expose myself to peanuts 2-3 times a year without getting any side effects. Dealing with a numb mouth is one thing, what if I had gone 5 or 10 years without peanuts and then had a far worse exposure?

That incident got me thinking.

The Resiliency Axis

It is not enough that we pursue a path of becoming more healthy. If we aren’t developing resiliency, then we could just be building up a new form of fragility. When we become fully committed to a diet, be it Paleo or whatever, we construct a bubble between us and what we see as toxic. This is a safe environment for losing weight and getting healthy, but we are still in a bubble in a toxic world.

Intermittent Fasting is about building resiliency over eating schedules and being comfortable with the state of hunger. Weight training and cold weather exposure are other strategies used for increasing resiliency. Why not dietary hormesis?

Maybe this post won’t make sense to those that don’t follow a strict diet, but I am aware of a lot people in the Paleo and WAPF (Weston A Price Foundation) groups that get exponentially more neurotic about elements of their diet that have the least impact. Everything must be grass-fed, organic and free range to them. I’m not kidding when I say that I know people that spend hours every week investigating the practices of local farms. While I am glad that someone is keeping tabs on what Local Farmer X is feeding to his heirloom chickens, I don’t see these people as having greater health outcomes than me. In fact, I see the opposite.

Obsessing about what is unhealthy is unhealthy. It makes you less resilient. It is important to discover what your dietary enemies are, but unless you have a life threatening allergy, running from them 100% of the time may not be the most healthy response. During my trip to Ohio, some gluten exposure gave me a severe headache and stomach pains. What if I had exposed myself to trace amounts of gluten on the days leading up to my trip? Would I have felt better and enjoyed my trip more? Sure it isn’t healthy, but my resiliency would likely have been greater.

Another one of my amazing graphics.

RED is the path I see many in the PALEO/WAPF groups following. In their obsession with becoming more healthy, they lose resiliency. The GREEN path is the alternative. Once you’ve become healthy and realize that any additional incremental benefit introduce greater fragility then shift focus to resiliency.

Pick Your Poisons

We live in a toxic world. Constructing walls of super clean eating is excellent way to get healthy, but once you’ve healed, the next step might be to focus on increasing your resiliency to that toxic world by carefully picking your poisons in small doses. It has been over two years since I posted on what I eat and what I don’t eat. In my next post, I will revisit this topic with a bias towards resiliency.