Welcome

Welcome to our new and developing blog about our food journey. We are full time RVers and if that interests you we also have a travel blog Flamingo On A Stick. We are both retired and all our life we have struggled with weight issues but otherwise have been remarkably healthy. However, as we age we know there will be more issues that arise. We both come from families with type 2 diabetes and heart disease. Over the years we have tried various diets and exercise with some success but in the end we always ended up where back where we started. Or worse. So our dilemma is about what can we do to stay healthy and how can we stick with it. One day John followed a link he found on reddit (his favorite internet site) to a couple books and a Youtube video.  This information impacted him greatly and he set about getting me to read and see the video too. My first reaction when he began telling me some of the information was “Oh no, here we go again, down the merry path of another fad”. However, after all my reading and watching what I felt was “Oh no, for most of my life I have been one big experiment for the food industry and they are winning!”

There are a lot of diets out there right now that touch on some of this such as the whole foods idea (which this is totally onboard with), the Paleo Diet which has some similarities and others. We are not endorsing any specific diet or any diet products. We will give links to some of the books and articles we’ve read and eventually I want to share with you some of the recipes I have found, always linking back to the source, and some recipes I have developed along the way. What we really want to stress is that you individually need to decide how you want to eat and live, this is just what we have decided to do and share. We don’t feel this is the magic bullet to health or even weight loss (in fact any weight loss we derive from this we expect to be very slow) as there are still lots of factors out there. This is very simply a blog to share what we’ve found and what we are doing. 

To start this off I am going to repost here, the post I put on other blog when this whole journey began. Whenever you see a Captain’s log that is John and I am hoping to get him to write on this blog a little more than he does on the other one. He can be very entertaining.

So here is the post “Whats for Lunch?” from Flamingo on a stick:

Captains's Log:

If I'm making lunch, it'll be something quick. Leftovers if we have any. Maybe peanut butter and saltines with string cheese and a beer. If there are any hard boiled eggs, those are always good. Mashed up with salt, pepper, hot sauce and olive oil and you have a fast, and really good, egg salad. Not too long ago, I would've just ripped open a power bar or a granola bar.

But then I read a book by David Gillespie called Sweet Poison. He's a lawyer in Australia who became interested in why so many of us were over weight, and why that trend is accelerating. Lawyers aren't trained in science or nutrition, but they know how to research a topic and build a case, and he proceeds to build a case against added sugar in our diets that is hard to refute. I was convinced, and I convinced Janie we should stop eating any foods with added sugar. No soft drinks, no power bars, no granola bars ... you get the idea. When you start reading labels, you end up eliminating most processed foods. We ignored the nutritional information on the label and went right to the list of ingredients. If sugar, sucrose, fructose, high fructose corn syrup, any other kind of syrup, fruit juice, fruit juice concentrate, agave, "natural sugars" or the like was there then it had sugar added. What all these sugars had in common was: they all contained fructose, a simple sugar found in fruit and (to some extent) vegetables. Our bodies can tolerate small amounts of fructose but it is essentially metabolized by the liver as a toxin. Glucose is the sugar we need, but it doesn't taste as sweet as fructose so most added sugar contains some fructose also. The exception is dextrose, or maltose, which is just another name for glucose. If dextrose is the only sugar in the list of ingredients, then that's good. Eat all you want. Maltose is the sugar used in brewing beer, so beer is good. But we already knew that. Of course fruit contains fructose also, but you can (and should) eat the whole fruit. Fruit juice, however, is not allowed because it concentrates the sugar (nobody will eat five apples in a single sitting but it's easy to toss down a small glass of apple juice containing the juice from those five apples).

So eliminating added sugar wasn't going to be easy, or convenient, but it was doable and necessary. There was also another gotcha: sugar is addictive. For some reason, your brain is wired for a positive pleasure response to sugar, another reason why the food industry loves adding it to whatever food they want you to buy and consume. Withdrawing from sugar is not unlike withdrawing from other addictive substances. We decided to just go cold turkey and get it over with. It took a couple of weeks, but I no longer miss my granola bars.

I love all the stuff I can still eat and drink. Although alcohol is another toxin metabolized by the liver, Mr. Gillespie maintains it is ultimately less harmful than fructose and does suppress your appetite as real food would (fructose doesn't affect your appetite because your body doesn't recognize it as food, so you still feel hungry). Excessive fructose in our diets has been shown to have a clear link to heart disease in many studies, unlike saturated fats and dietary cholesterol, which have never been shown to have any correlation to heart disease. Not one single study. But how is that possible? Everyone knows you should trim the fat from your steak, that you shouldn't even be eating steak, that skim milk is better for you than whole milk, that margarine is better for you than butter, that you should limit the number of high cholesterol eggs you eat. How could we have been so wrong for so long without any supporting evidence?

For that you would have to go back to the seven country study shortly after World War II that showed a strong correlation between the increase in the consumption of meat with a significant rise in diseases of the heart. The study was compiled by Ancel Keys of the University of Minnesota. After the war he had nutritional data from twenty two countries. Had he used all twenty two countries, he would have shown there was no correlation between eating meat and heart disease. So he selected seven countries, including the US, that showed both a rise in meat consumption and a rise in heart disease and concluded that meat and saturated fats were responsible. Had he included only the fifteen countries he eliminated, it would have shown a reverse correlation: the more meat consumed the lower the incidence of heart disease. But he was popular enough from his work during the war (he invented the K ration used by our troops) that he was able to persuade many people. It was enough for Procter and Gamble to promote their (new) Crisco shortening as a healthier alternative to saturated animal fats. Low fat became a new industry, and as fat came out, sugar went in because removing the fat meant removing the flavor and sugar helped replace that. It set up the perfect storm we have yet to recover from.

It's not my intent to convince you, just to say that I'm convinced and I would encourage you to do your own research. There is a free video on YouTube called: The Bitter Truth by Dr. Lustig that inspired much of this. Sweet Poison I've already mentioned, but there's another book by the same author I would also recommend: Big Fat Lies.  So have a beer with your bacon cheese burger and don't worry, your body will tell you when to stop.