You need:
400-500 g turkey or chicken
1-2 carrots
1 small butter nut squash or half a sweet potato or some other root vegetables
1 can or carton coconut cream
1-2 small red chillies
lime juice
2 tablespoons fish sauce
basil and coriander (I myself don’t like coriander so I leave them out or replace it to some other herb)

5 steps:
1. steam the sliced vegetables for about 14 min and move aside.
2. put the coconut cream and one cup of water to a pan, add the sliced chillies. Let simmer for 5 min.
3. Add sliced turkey/chicken and fish sauce and cook for circa 5 min until meat is tender.
4. Add the steamed vegetables and mix.
5. Remove from heat and stir in the limejuice and herbs.

I like my coconut soup yellow so I add curry (maybe 2-3 tablespoons) at step 2. It also gives a nice taste to it. This is however up to you :)

I have to ask my girlfriend for the really good recipe. She’s the real mastermind behind that :)

//sami

Really enjoy your site, and this 7-day-crash-course info. I know the players well, except for Todd Becker, and applaud your choices.

I’d like to add to your crash course William Davis, M.D. and his just-published Wheat Belly. Tom Naughton recently reviews the book and then interviewed Dr. Davis over at his, TN’s, blog. I found in the interview that Dr. Davis is very well spoken (not some nutty obsessed non-mainstream doctor, as I’d feared).

Besides wheat, an issue that is interesting is stomach cancer and low carb – AND stomach cancer and HIGH carb (but low sugar). At http://perfecthealthdiet.com/?p=1077 Paul Jaminet has a post called “Dangers of Zero-Carb Diets, II: Mucus Deficiency and Gastrointestinal Cancers” and he writes:

“Optimal Dieters have been dying of gastrointestinal cancers at a disturbing rate. Recently Adam Jany, president of the OSBO (the Polish Optimal Dieters’ association), died of stomach cancer at 64 after 17 years on the Optimal Diet. Earlier Karol Braniek, another leader of the OSBO, died at 68 from duodenal cancer.

“A Polish former Optimal Dieter who has now switched to something closer to the Perfect Health Diet [Jaminet's diet] noted that gastrointestinal cancers seem to be common among Optimal Dieters…”

Jaminet’s post shows a picture of what H. Pylori does to stomach mucosa (diminishes it), and seems to be saying that too-low-of-starch may do the same thing.

I asked Gary Taubes about this and he wrote that Jaminet may be right [re Jaminet's solution of adding more starch to the diet] “but then you have to explain why the Japanese have such high rates of stomach cancer.”

As we know, the Japanese are high starch but low sugar.

We all know (the story is told well in Le Fanu’s ‘The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine’) about Barry Marshall, M.D.’s discovery in the mid-1980s that H.Pylori is THE cause of stomach ulcers (not stress, etc.), and it is estimated by some researcher or other that Le Fanu quotes, that H. Pylori is also responsible for two-thirds of stomach cancers…

Whatever you can make of the above…

IMHO THE FEINMAN/LUSTIG QUARREL IS MUCH MORE INTERESTING THAN THE TAUBES/GUYENET QUARREL: I think Prof. Richard Feinman is, at his blog (where I discovered YOU via the comments under Prof. Feinman’s anti-Dr. Lustig or shall I say “corrective-of Dr. Lustig” posts!!!) posing the most interesting questions lately — about Dr. Lustig’s poor biochemistry etc. (I’m not wholly down on Dr. Lustig by any means, but Dr. Feinman is MOST illuminating, AND he’s posting a series of YouTube videos explaining where he differs with Dr. Lustig — he only has 2 done, but they’re up!)

Dr. Feinman writes, “Sugar, HFCS are carbohydrates. We need to be informed as to what the problems with high carbohydrates are and when and if, sugar has a unique effect compared to starch. Lustig’s YouTube is pure propaganda and thoughtless. No biochemist would present anything like that to a class. Because it contains a mixture of truths, half-truths, falsehoods and howlers, it is hard for us to quickly pick it apart. There are thousands of papers on fructose. The sad thing is that, from my conversations with him, Lustig actually knows a lot but what he is doing is not responsible science.”

He also writes, “What we know works well for obesity and the metabolic syndrome is carbohydrate reduction. It could be that that is because of the de facto removal of the fructose in the carbohydrates but the burden of proof is on those who say that. Lustig has not even begun to meet that burden of proof.”

I think S. Guyenet is a complete sideshow. No two people can really agree on what the heck he’s saying. Not a good sign.

I KNOW from personal experience that Taubes/Atkins have the most important things right.

Here I am, a woman in my mid-50s, and look what happened to me after reading GCBC (same with my husband, read it too, lost 25 lbs in 4 mos without exercise; lost his GERD he’d had for decades in 2 days and it never came back, etc…)

Me BEFORE reading GCBC in 2010:
Weight 168, TGs 105, HDL 52

Me AFTER implementing GCBC’s wisdom:
Weight 150 (no exercise done, not that I’m proud of that), TGs 48, HDL 67

Dr. Feinman pointed out to me that my TG/HDL ratio is under 1, when all it has to be is under 3.5.

ANOTHER INTERESTING ISSUE — non-meat eaters doing as well as meat-eaters, as long as you keep in the eggs, fat and low carb: After GT posted his own lipids on his blog, Frank J. Spence, Jr., M.D. posted and GT answered:

frankjspencejr

Gary, this is spooky. As you know I have also been on the 3 eggs a day, high fat, very low carb diet about 2 years. Just yesterday I had my lipids checked, with almost identical results as yours:
T Chol 192, TG 65, LDL-C 114, HDL-C 65.3, VLDL 13, Chol/HDL 2.9
Weight staying mid 180s. Thanks again for your good work.

garytaubes

Hi Frank,
Spooky it is, since you don’t eat any meat at all and I live on it. Nice numbers and nice to hear from you, as ever.
gt

I didn’t mean that a high carb diet necessarily causes weight gain, just that I don’t share Dr. Lustig’s view that sugary diets and starchy diets are two very different things. People do lose weight on high-carb, low-fat diets (I once did, without restricting calories).

I don’t think you necessarily need to be insulin resistant to be hungry due to blood sugar. You’ve heard the chestnut about being hungry an hour after you eat Chinese food, right? Even normal, healthy people get falling blood sugar, and it can make them hungry. Graph of normal blood sugar reaction here: http://www.phlaunt.com/diabetes/16422495.php. For a lot of people, weight gain could be as simple as eating high-carb meals, getting hungry and snacking. If you’re interested, here’s a page about blood sugar control written by Jenny Ruhl, an amateur researcher who studies diabetes. http://www.phlaunt.com/diabetes/14046621.php. SSRIs and corticosteroids are two other things that can increase risk for diabetes.

I totally agree with your quote about wheat. When I quit eating it last year, my appetite ratcheted way down, and just eliminating that one food, I started losing weight. It’s an appetite stimulant. In fact, I could (and would) eat a whole box of cookies or four bowls of cereal or a bunch of brownies at one go, a problem I never had with any other food. The wheat-exorphin food reward could play a big part in obesity.

Pre-packaged low-carb foods haven’t hit the shelves here. (In fact, the low-carb chocolate ice cream disappeared.) Among low-carbers here, the trend is more towards paleo or at least minimally processed foods. Wheat won’t ever go away, but I think in my lifetime, most people will drop the pretense that it’s a health food.

“…there are people who gain weight and suffer from poor blood sugar control when they cut out sugar but still eat starch.”
- Is it starchy or higher carbohydrate diet that causes weight gain in the first place? Granted, low-carb approach will help stabilize blood sugars and likely results in weight loss, but we have populations like the Kitavans that refute the hypothesis that high carbohydrate intake causes weight gain. I might add, that not all overweight people are insulin resistant. This does not mean that insulin resistance wouldn’t be an important piece of the puzzle, but it seems to not be the only determining factor.

“Whether an approach like substituting whole, real foods like fruits and tubers v. cutting carbs helps you depends on your problem. If it’s lack of nutrients, eating a banana instead of a Twinkie will help. If it’s wonky blood sugar, you might as well enjoy the Twinkie if you don’t like bananas.”
- I agree with you when it comes to stabilizing blood sugars but I can’t help feeling that focusing too much on it is akin to focusing on a symptom, not a cause. I assume we agree that those wonky blood sugars are a result of insulin resistance, right? But what causes insulin resistance? It has been shown that low-carb diets help restore insulin sensitivity but is it the low amount of carbohydrates that does it, or is it something else? E.g. something to do with avoiding processed foods, grains, vegetable oils, and fructose? Or simply the effect of lower caloric intake that seems to come naturally to those following a low-carb diet?

“Olives or an avocado will beat both of them in that case.”
- Fo sho :)

I have to say that I’m a little worried about low-carb diets because at least in Finland they are gaining a lot of mainstream attention and more “low-carb” products are hitting the shelves. If the benefits of low-carb diets have been more related to food quality and eliminating grains, the results of people eating processed low-carb foods may very well turn out to be harmful instead of beneficial.

//sami

Whether an approach like substituting whole, real foods like fruits and tubers v. cutting carbs helps you depends on your problem. If it’s lack of nutrients, eating a banana instead of a Twinkie will help. If it’s wonky blood sugar, you might as well enjoy the Twinkie if you don’t like bananas. (I’m exaggerating a bit to make a point.) Olives or an avocado will beat both of them in that case. I think low-carb diets help with both problems: the typical carbs people eat are empty calories with antinutrient properties (e.g., phytic acid in grains, sugars and grains stripped of nutrients). Substitute a scrambled egg for a bagel or cereal and you’re getting more nutrients (and less carb). Substitute a hamburger with no bun for a plate of spaghetti, and a small salad and full fat dressing for a box of crackers or cookies, same thing.

I don’t hear much about this, but Taubes makes the point in Why We Get Fat that obesity is a disease of malnutrition. Low carb diets address this problem.

One thing you could try is to mix 3-5 raw eggs in a bowl, throw in some spices, chunks of bacon etc. and then pour that amidst cooked veggies on a frying pan. You’ll end up with something that almost resembles pizza if you let the egg mix settle :)

//sami