Paleo-ish Strawberry "Julius" recipe

When I was a kid I loved getting a strawberry-orange Julius at the mall. I'm sure it was loaded with scary ingredients and I don't think I have had one for at least 15 years. (Is that company even still in business?)

Pre-paleo I was very into green smoothies. I got out of the habit, in part, because in the winter the last thing I want is a cold drink, and partly because Robb Wolf is very anti-liquid food.

But now it's summer (well sort of-- in Seattle summer doesn't really come until July-- it's still rainy and 60 degrees here). I've actually been sick for the past few weeks (more on that in an upcoming post), M had strep throat, and going back to my last post about a Paleo "Template" I enjoy green smoothies, they are easy to digest and so they are coming back into rotation. If what works best for you is a very low fructose/low carb sort of paleo approach, then ignore the following recipe. If a bit more fruit and carbs are your friends then here is my Strawberry julius-esque recipe:

1 cup coconut milk (I used light)
1/2 an orange
1-2 cups kale
1-1/2 cups frozen strawberries (I didn't measure, so I'm guessing)

optional ingredients:
1 tsp sweetner (I used a few drops of stevia, honey would work or you could do without)
a pinch of citric acid-- (I know that sounds bizarre, but another nutritionist told me she adds this to her smoothies to make them a bit sour and I find it delicious. )
protein powder- this is not very paleo, but I like my smoothie to be a meal. If you are not dairy sensitive, whey protein is probably best. I can't tolerate dairy so I use pumpkin seed protein powder-- it's just the protein not the fat from the seeds so I'm not getting a bunch of omega 6s at least.
Cod liver oil/fish oil: the only way I can get this down is to mix it in my smoothie
Vitamin D: if you have a high powered blender or you use liquid vitamin D, might as well throw it in too.

So there's my recipe. It's only sort of paleo, but it works for me and it was delicious so I thought I'd share!

A Paleo "Template"

I just read and loved this post by Chris Kresser at the Healthy Skeptic. In it he talks about having a "paleo template" rather than a strict diet in which you can have some room to find out what works best for your body. There are a lot of variations out there in paleo-land, and a lot of people insist their way is the only right way. While I read a lot of blogs and other people's books on the topic, what I really appreciate about Robb Wolf is that he tends to be in favor of tweaking the diet to see what works best for the individual, and is willing to admit when new research comes out that he may have been wrong in the past about something.

I have always believed that there is no one perfect diet for everyone-- there are definitely elements of what is healthy and some foods are not good for anyone, but particularly in terms of macronutrient breakdowns, some people do really well on a lot of carbs, like my friend L, who is a distance runner, and has been a size 2 since high school-- clearly, what she is doing works for her. Other people I know really only thrive when they cut out most carbs from their diets. I'm somewhere in between-- I don't feel very good on an extremely low carb diet, but too many carbs is also a recipe for disaster. I do best usually around 100 grams of carbs a day, give or take a few-- assuming they are good carbs and not the high processed ones, which don't make me feel good, but yet sometimes I still eat them because they taste good!

Data Collection

I don't often talk much about my job here, but this week was a big one for me. I am the Project Director for a study on bone health in active duty soldiers. Wednesday, Thursday and Friday we were scheduled to collect data on 200 Soldiers.

What I mean by data collection is something like this:

Soldiers scheduled to arrive at 6:30 am (which meant I got up at 4am every day-- so much fun).
From 6:30-7:30 I would give a powerpoint presentation outlining what we are studying, what they would have to do, making sure they are eligible (they have to be about to deploy, 30 years old or under, and not have any current bone diseases or fractures-- oh, and if they are female they can't be pregnant, but normally pregnant women don't deploy so that wasn't too much of an issue). They also can just choose not to participate if they don't want to.

After that I spent about 20 minutes going over very basic nutrition information: i.e. soldiers rely on their bodies to perform, and the department of defense is very specific about how much body fat they can have etc. I talk briefly about the healthy plate model, how you can tell if a food is healthy (basically, the closer it is to how it came from the ground, the better. They all laugh when I tell them there's no such thing as a twinkie tree). Then I talk about bone health, how things like smoking, too much alcohol, not exercising and not eating properly is bad for their bones, and talk about both dairy and non-dairy sources of calcium. I wrap that up with some tips on making better choices in a fast food restaurants. It isn't very comprehensive-- just a baseline of tidbits. Fortunately I could talk about whatever I wanted so I didn't have to cover the food pyramid, but I also couldn't really do paleo-- it had to be somewhat mainstream and extremely basic, especially since these guys are really only going to have access to whatever is in the cafeteria when they deploy and most of them eat so much crap anyway that we are starting from an extreme baseline.

Next we collect their blood to measure things like blood calcium, thyroid hormones, vitamin D and a few other markers of bone turnover.

Then in groups of 10 they go through the following stations:
-filling out 2 surveys on exercise and diet, which are extremely long
-getting their height/weight/waist circumference measured
-body fat measurement
-measuring their resting energy expenditure using an indirect calorimeter-- a small device you breathe into for 10 minutes and it uses how much oxygen you expel to estimate how many calories you burn at rest.
-Heel Bone density, which is measured with a machine that takes an ultrasound of the heel (my bone density is not good, by the way! Likely from years of absorption issues. I have mild osteopenia, which is apparently common in people with gluten intolerances/celiac.)

At the end of all this they get a gift card for $25 and are sent on their way. When they return from deployment we will do it all again. Half of them will receive online diet coaching by yours truly for the year they are deployed. The other half will not. At the end of the year we will be able to see if the coaching made any difference in their health.

The first day everything went beautifully. The 50 soldiers we expected showed up, on time, only 4 were ineligible, all of them returned when I told them to (since we could only handle 10 soldiers at a time they were assigned to come back at various points of the day). I had a great team of my boss, two co-workers, four army nurses, four dietetic interns and their instructor helping run all the teams. It went perfectly. Unfortunately the next two days we only had 20 soldiers show up each day, late,-- Thursday we expected 50 and Friday we were supposed to have 100! So that was disappointing-- I thought we would be totally done by now, and instead we have to do another group in a couple of weeks to get enough participants.

It was absolutely exhausting. I didn't really have any way to refrigerate anything and I was staying in a hotel since my house is quite far from base and I had to be there at 5:30 in the morning so my food options were not great. I mostly ate trail mix to keep me from passing out and then after we finished for the day I'd go to Panera or Chipotle and get some kind of chicken salad. I had wished I'd brought beef jerky, but didn't think of it-- next time I definitely will.

Fortunately this week will be much more mellow and I can get back to my normal routine.

The new food "plate"-- not perfect, but much better!

First of all, I would just like to say a big thank you to Jenn at Girl Heroes, who featured me on her blog this week. I am honored and delighted to be part of her girl hero series!

As for the new food "plate" model:

The good: it is much, much simpler than the food pyramid, which was nearly impossible to understand and was far too heavy on grains. This one takes grains back to a more modest 25% of the plate, leaving 50% of the plate for fruits and vegetables, which is a significant improvement. Also, using a plate is a lot easier to visualize then a pyramid-- Great Britain has used a version of the plate for many years, which I always thought made more sense than the pyramid. I was taught to educate people via the "healthy plate model" which looks very much like this, and I would often draw it for patients during their appointments. It is visually very easy to grasp.

The bad: in trying to make it simple, it leaves a lot of unanswered questions (as my friend asked me when I posted this on facebook-- where's the pie group?) There is no category that discusses sugar or fat, types of fat etc (which is just as well since the current recommendations are backwards anyway). Dairy alternatives aren't suggested, and most of all-- it implies that the only thing that counts as starch is grain, which means conceivably you could have beans, a potato, a cup of white rice, lettuce and a banana, and it would all fit on the "plate", but you would have a huge dose of refined carbohydrates and almost no fat or protein.

What I would change: grains should be changed to "starch" (so grain, or starchy vegetables would fit there) and I'd make that square a little smaller, or even optional. I would change the fruit/vegetable parts to just saying fruit AND vegetables, with an emphasis on green veggies. If you are getting lots of non-starchy veggies, fruit is not as important. And of course, no adult needs dairy-- some people do okay with it, many people don't-- it does not need to be a staple of the food recommendations.

I've seen a lot of paleo people bashing this as being no different then the food pyramid, ("just the food pyramid in a circle!") but I do think it's a step in the right direction. Given the amount of conflicting information in the main-stream and the difficulty in explaining nutrition simply to the general public, this is a great stride in helping people understand what foods are appropriate in what amounts.

Low fat propaganda

I've been a student member of the American Dietetic Association for three years (last year I was still a student when the new membership was due, even though I became an RD a month later!) This year, I will not be renewing my membership, largely because of things like this:



I get fun little bits of dietetic propaganda or advertising (as the ADA shamelessly shares my contact information with all kinds of food producers) in the mail at least once a week. My favorite one was a couple months ago promoting eating eggs-- little did they know I have an egg factory in my backyard so I get them for free:) Today's fun little number was made available by the sub-group I belong to called SCAN, which stands for Sports, Cardiovascular and Wellness Nutrition, which I thought would be a group to discuss sports nutrition, but doesn't seem to do much at all (as opposed to the Dietitians in Functional Medicine group I belong to which is actually useful-- I will be sorry to see that one go).

First of all, this helpful "resource" was sponsored by Promise/Country Crock/I can't believe it's not butter-- i.e. makers of scary non-food butter substitutes made of refined vegetable oil and tree fiber. Lovely. "Keep the taste, lose the saturated fat! Swap butter for a delicious soft spread!" it claims. 1. Margarine tastes nothing like butter 2. Butter is REAL FOOD your body can recognize as opposed to the scary crap in the margarine and 3. Believing saturated fat causes heart disease is so 1994! Even the ADA national conference made mention that saturated fat isn't as bad as they once thought-- why do they continue to spout this nonsense? Oh right, because they are sponsored by makers of margarine (other sponsors include Diet Coke and Hersheys-- wonderful).

The pamphlet lists 10 simple steps to make the new 2010 Dietary Guidelines work for you and your family:

1. Size your servings right:
While I agree generally that people tend to eat too much, I think the issue has more to do with poor food choices-- are you really going to overeat salmon, salad and fruit? Probably not.

2. Switch out the saturated fat
Come on people! So many other bloggers have covered this well, Gary Taubes has written a two books on the topic-- saturated fat does not cause heart disease. It just doesn't.

3. Make good habits more delicious at home: simple recipes for a healthier lifestyle
This section features a bunch of protein/veggie recipes that would probably be pretty good if you used a good fat instead of scary Country Crock.

4. Fit fruits and vegetables into your diet
No complaints here in general, though the specific recommendations, like to add fruit to pizza was ludicrous. (I'm healthy because my pizza has pineapple on it! Please).

5. Eat less salt
I have mixed feelings on this one. I don't think we need to be getting salt from processed foods-- if you cut out processed crap you will automatically eat less salt. But only a small portion of the population has salt-sensitive high blood pressure. Most people do fine with some sea salt in cooking-- salt brings flavors together in cooking and makes things taste better.

6. Watch out for solid fats (isn't this the same as #2?) and added sugar
First of all, margarine is a solid fat, so there goes that reasoning! But naturally occurring solid fats are very heat stable so they are your friends for cooking! Nasty vegetable oils tend to go rancid and turn to trans fat pretty quickly. I concur on the added sugar though-- keep that to a minimum.

7. Enjoy more seafood and choose a variety of protein foods
The title is fine-- I like fish a lot, and I agree with a variety of protein foods, however on the detail page they go on and on about low-fat, drain off all fat, fat phobia that is ridiculous. They also don't mention that while fish is awesome, you also have to limit consumption due to mercury toxicity.

8. Make half your grains whole
This is just stupid. Let's ignore the fact that many people don't do well with grains at all. If you believe that whole grains are superior as the ADA does, given their lack of processing and fiber content, why would you only push for people to make HALF of them whole grains? Given that the food pyramid wants you eating 6-11 servings of grain a day, that means you could be eating 4-5 servings of white bread a day and be totally within their recommendations. Oh, and you could put margarine on it! SO STUPID.

9. Keep your food safe
Tips on food safety-- no complaints here, lots of people have sinks full of salmonella. I probably do too.

10. Move More!
I think we are all in agreement that more moving, less sitting is good.

Between the inappropriate corporate sponsorships, the endless propaganda like this I get in the mail, and the useless "research" they publish in their journal, I don't seem much point in spending $200 a year for a membership, though I still have to do "approved" continuing education courses. I'm trying to figure out a way to get credit for the Robb Wolf Seminar I'm going to in July!

How does your garden grow?

After a month of saying every weekend that we really need to get our garden planted, we finally did it today. In the past I've started some or all of my vegetables from seed but this year we just bought starts. We aren't very good gardeners, mainly because after we first get it planted we tend not to be super consistent with maintenance, thus the purchase of starts because it doesn't involve thinning out the plants. (Last year I never got around to thinning out the lettuce and it was a huge mess).

The whole garden-- the stuff on the ground is hay, to try and combat the weed problems we had last year-- it rained all summer and we had out of control weeds!

We started out the day at the best nursery ever: Flowerworld. If you live in the Seattle area I highly recommend Flowerworld, even if you aren't gardening. The store area alone is 3 acres, and they also have chickens, peacocks, geese, swans, goats and sheep you can visit, along with nearly every kind of Northwest growing plant you can think of. It's one of our favorite places.

We just recently put up some heavy duty net fencing to keep the chickens out of the garden-- they dig everything up and love rainbow chard in particular so much that there's never any left for me! They were very frustrated watching M dig in the garden and not able to get in to "help."



We planted a few sweet peas, and corn (though in 4 years we have never had a successful corn harvest-- the squirrels tend to get it all), rainbow chard, several kinds of lettuce, bell peppers, tomatoes, and collard greens. They did not have the kind of kale I like at Flowerworld, probably because it's more of a cool weather crop, so we skipped that. When it gets warmer I want to plant some basil in a pot by the back door-- last year we had a cold summer and all the basil died-- the deck gets warmer so perhaps we'll be more successful with a pot.

A few random updates

Ack! It's been 10 days since I updated my blog! Terrible. Work has been really busy lately and I'm going through a weird phase of not being able to sleep in when I have time so I've been tired. I wake up at 6am whether I am going to work or not. Maybe because it's getting lighter outside-- I need to look into blackout curtains.

I am still eating the autoimmune protocol for the most part-- I'm definitely avoiding eggs and nightshades-- I admit nuts may have slipped in a couple times.

I'm kind of in a food rut this week-- I've been eating tons of ground beef and canned fish. Today I'm making pulled pork so maybe that will shake things up a little.

Things I'm working on:

I've been slowly making my way through Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes for the past few weeks-- I will attempt to do a full review when I finish. It's an amazing piece of work-- over 400 pages of extremely detailed analysis of how we came to believe some of the things we do as a country about health (fat is bad, high cholesterol = heart disease) and whether those ideas actually have scientific evidence (hint, they don't). It's so dense I can only read a little at a time in order to process the information and I already feel like I need to read it again, and I'm not even finished!

I just listened to this podcast over at the Healthy Skeptic about the intimate neural connections between the brain and the gut and loved it-- I need to contemplate this and listen to it again when I'm not driving in pouring rain to get all the nuances of what Chris is saying but it's so fascinating!

My friend Stevie is helping me out with a webpage for private nutrition practice, but I'm stumped on what to call it. Any ideas? I was considering Paleo RD, but I kind of want something more generic so as not to put off people with predisposed negative ideas about paleo.

My husband has gone off the deep end this week eating almost exclusively gluten and dairy (sandwiches, cake and pizza) and I've been too tired and busy to fix it. Ack! Last night I did get him to eat eggs and yams for dinner at least.

I'm officially now obsessed with this stuff: Kevita is cultured coconut water. I used to be into Kombucha, but ever since they reformulated it after the recall it hasn't been the same. This stuff tastes better to me-- it comes in several flavors but all except original have sugar in them and taste too sweet to me. We did a tasting with some of my nutritionist friends a couple weeks ago and they all preferred the lemon ginger to the original. M thinks they all taste disgusting as he hates anything fermented. They are expensive though, just like kombucha-- over $3 a bottle! I'm going to try and make my own-- I had success in the past with kefir grains in coconut water-- I'm going to give that a try again.

Finally I have a recurring issue with my IT band. In case you didn't take anatomy or it's been awhile, "The iliotibial band is a thick band of fascia that extends along the lateral thigh from the iliac crest to the knee" in otherwords, in runs from the hip to the knee down the outside of your leg in that indent between your quad and your hamstring if you are fortunate enough to have that kind of muscle definition:

My right hip is really tight, or maybe even one leg is longer causing my right hip to get bunched up. At any rate, it's actually very noticable and has been that way for awhile--whenever I get a pair of pants hemmed the tailor comments on it because they are not the same length and when Jesse (awesome trainer at Lynnwood Crossfit) was teaching me to deadlift it was so obvious my right hip was higher he told me not to max deadlift until I get it sorted out and then called another trainer over to look at how messed up I am. Anyway, that wouldn't be a big deal, except that when your hip is tight, it pulls on that fun IT band we just talked about, which pulls the knee out of alignment which hurts. When I hurt my knee a couple weeks ago doing medicine ball squat cleans I thought it was just because I had been sloppy in my form, or that it was combined with running (which often makes my knee hurt). But then on Monday we did a workout with those squats again and I was very cautious, had Jesse show me again how to do it properly and STILL my knee hurt so much the next day I couldn't hardly walk up the stairs in my house and my right hip felt tight while sitting. Using a foam roller along that side helps some, but it's getting really annoying having to miss crossfit for several days after every workout because I keep hurting my knee. So for now, I'm foam rolling the heck out of it, avoiding those specific squat cleans and avoiding running in hopes to sort this out, but I kind of think I might have a structural issue since I remember as far back as 6th grade when they test you for scoliosis being told one hip was higher, which makes me think it's more complicated than a slight muscle imbalance. Of note, however: M. pointed out that I pretty much always sleep on that side, which might be contributing, so I'm trying to sleep on the left to see if that helps.