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In the mood for a little controversy today that doesn’t involve politics or morals? A controversy that goes so far beyond our political system — into the very heart of identity: food. At The Bitter Southerner, Sheri Castle — one of our favorite Southern voices — makes her case for the seven essential recipes of Southern cooking. Do you agree with her picks?
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Spiced nuts are a staple during the holiday season; whether you’re serving them at an upcoming gathering, or gifting a batch to your nearest and dearest, homemade spiced nuts are nearly effortless. Gather a variety of raw nuts and/or seeds and a few flavoring agents — like spices, zests, extracts, and oils — and you’ve got the ingredients to make some magic. We’ve got five creative recipes to take your favorite snack to the next level.
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‘Twas the night of the white elephant party, and all through the kitchen the tools were stirring. (Especially the wooden spoon.) Word on the countertop was that one of the RUTs — the Regrettable Unitaskers, for those who aren’t familiar with interior kitchen cabinet slang — was on deck to be that year’s giveaway, and tensions were high.
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A sous chef does not always come in human form; you can also get major kitchen assistance from frozen items, like ready-to-bake pie crusts, shredded potatoes, and today’s topic: frozen spinach.
Like a good assistant, frozen spinach will save time and effort. It usually comes parboiled and chopped, which means all you have to do is decide how to use it. Here are five ideas to get you started.
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With winter all but officially upon us, we might already be feeling the season, maybe even planning warm weather vacations. I venture most of us have wondered if we’re not somehow healthier during the summer months. Is it just a mental vitality from the additional daylight hours and relative ease of outdoor time, or is there something more at work? Does our health really take a hit in winter? For those who enjoy this brand of trivia, there’s an actual field of study devoted to this called biometeorology. And with the minutely detailed research into epigenetic activity, we’re getting a fuller picture all the time of astonishing nuances as well as big picture shifts. To a Primal mind, it all makes sense. Humans evolved within a seasonal context—without any of the modern accommodations that would buffer climate or weather influences. Why would our bodies not have adapted with responsive wiring?
With the span of modern research—everything from massive epidemiological analysis to epigenetic science—we’re seeing both the finer nuances and the global patterns in environment-biology interaction. One recent study earlier this year, for example, revealed the activity of nearly a quarter of our genes varies depending on time of year—with seasonality cues that are remarkably geographically specific. The shifts influence our immune function as well as the composition of our blood and even fat.
I’ll admit this is exactly the kind of thing you could get me talking about for hours, but let’s keep things simple and look at a few of the most common and significant seasonal health patterns. It might just have you rethinking your annual exam routine—or at least its place on the calendar.
It’s no one’s imagination that we see more cardiac deaths during the winter months. The seasonal blood vessel narrowing may push those with arterial build-up, for example, over the edge in terms of blockage.
Oddly, it doesn’t seem to matter how hard winter hits your region. One study followed the incidence of cardiac-related deaths in seven U.S. locations (ranging from Los Angeles County to Massachusetts. Both total and cardiac death rates rose during winter months at roughly the same (26-36% compared to summer deaths) across all locations. Researchers often speculate that people move less in winter, even in warmer climates, and that this discrepancy could be a major contributing factor.
Yet, there may be other factors at work, particularly for those who live in colder climates. Blood viscosity (thickness) increases substantially in cooler temperatures. In one study, viscosity rose more than 26% when temperatures dropped from 98 degrees Fahrenheit to 72. The thicker our blood, the higher our risk for stroke and ischaemic heart disease.
In response to the lower temperatures of winter, blood vessels constrict, which raises your blood pressure and, particularly for those with higher measures to begin with, puts added stress on the heart and circulatory system. The rise in blood viscosity and decrease in blood flow rate naturally requires a corresponding increase in blood pressure to compensate.
For anyone who’s been diagnosed with high or borderline high blood pressure during the winter months, it’s important to take into account the seasonal shift. Get your levels tested throughout the year to get a more accurate picture. You may have what’s called “seasonal hypertension,” which research suggests is more common in certain people. Knowing that your numbers vary during the year will help you make a more informed decision about any given treatment your doc might recommend.
Researchers studied a group of men and women over a twelve month period, recording biomarker results for each season and collecting records for diet, activity and sun exposure during the year as well. Results showed that total cholesterol peaked in winter (as did HDL). (PDF)
Women showed the greater increase in total cholesterol at 5.4 mg/dL (a January peak) compared to 3.9 mg/dL (a December peak) for men. Those who had higher cholesterol levels to begin with showed the biggest seasonal rise. The researchers found no overall significant difference in dietary intake among the seasons and attributed a substantial portion of the increase to seasonal shifts in relative blood plasma volume.
As the researchers note, these differences have been demonstrated in other studies and suggest that seasonal shifts should be considered in medical testing. In other words, if you get your cholesterol tested in July and then in December, your numbers have a greater chance of looking “worse.” If you get them tested in December and then in July, they’re more likely to show “an improvement” when all that’s happened is natural seasonal shift. Obviously, these varying numbers would probably influence your doctor’s recommendations.
In a less expected twist, much has been made of the so-called “brown fat” that can convert fat into heat to warm the body. The more brown fat we have, it appears, the more adept we are at regulating our blood sugar, the more insulin sensitive we are and the better we are at burning our fat stores. Researchers have discovered how the body has an innate ability to convert typical “white” fat into “beige” fat when exposed to cold temperatures (a process hampered in obese people).
It may be one of our body’s innate bits of genius, but unfortunately the process may not be the completely seamless miracle you might think in our modern age. The activation of brown fat, it appears, causes more fat to be stored into the blood. Because vessels are constricted in cooler temps and cold can make atherosclerotic plaque less stable, the end result can be a greater risk for cardiac events, particularly in those with a history and propensity for atherosclerosis.
Our innate responses to our environments without question served our survival thousands of years ago. Today, they still serve our basic biology but not necessarily the ways modern life has skewed our daily behavior toward unhealthy diets and relative inactivity. Winter, I think few of you in the northern regions will doubt, imposes physiological stress on our bodies—the kinds of stresses we were designed to be able to incorporate and match with our own adaptations. The colder season, if you’re healthy, can make you that much healthier with some Primal behaviors (and vitamin D supplementation) Grok and his crew would’ve participated in. If the winter season is, instead, highlighting our current health limitations, we can consider it a call to live more, not less, in tune with the challenges our Primal roots were designed to anticipate.
Thanks for reading, everyone. Share your thoughts and questions in the comment board, and enjoy the end to your week.
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In previous podcasts and articles on this site Chris discussed some of the factors to consider when deciding if intermittent fasting is the right approach for you. While the decision to use intermittent fasting as a strategy to improve or optimize health should be considered carefully, it is a powerful tool when used appropriately. In this article, I want to discuss some of the potential benefits offered from intermittent fasting.
Intermittent fasting is a general term used to describe a variety of approaches that change the normal timing of eating throughout a day, with short-term fasts used to improve overall health. In other words, the one consistent theme of intermittent fasting is that individuals periodically fast for a longer duration than the typical overnight fast.
Some approaches to intermittent fasting include skipping one meal of the day, extending the duration of the overnight fast to anywhere from 12 to 20 hours. This may also be referred to as time-restricted feeding because it shortens the feeding window. Some people prefer whole-day fasts that usually involve fasting for 24 to 30 hours, performed anywhere from once to twice per week to just once or twice per month. Most of the research on intermittent fasting more specifically uses alternate-day fasting, where participants fast for 24 hours every other day, alternating days of eating without restrictions (1).
Several studies have shown that intermittent fasting is associated with weight loss (2, 3, 4, 5, 6). While many of the patients I see are more concerned with overall reduction in weight, I also see a lot of patients who want to gain weight, specifically lean body weight or muscle mass. And some of these patients express concern that intermittent fasting may lead to a decrease in muscle mass. Fortunately, research shows evidence that intermittent fasting causes a favorable shift in metabolism that preserves muscle.
Here’s why …
During the most common fasting duration of about 18 to 24 hours, our cells shift from using glucose as their primary fuel source to using fat (7, 8, 9). This means that our fat stores, namely triglycerides, are broken down and used for energy. The breakdown of proteins for fuel does not begin until the third day of fasting. Thus, intermittent fasting remains an option for optimizing health even in those wanting to maintain or gain muscle mass.
Without going into too much of the science here, the shift in metabolism from glucose to fat may be most pronounced after about 18 hours of fasting, suggesting potential benefit from occasional whole-day fasts (8).
Several studies show intermittent fasting may lead to a reduction of total cholesterol by about 20 percent (7, 2, 4, 5, 10). This becomes even more impressive when we look at the breakdown of the effects on LDL, HDL, and triglycerides.
The following is an over-simplification, and Chris has written extensively about cholesterol and lipids in the past, but for the purposes of this article:
Since the total cholesterol on a blood panel is derived from a formula including LDL, HDL, and triglycerides, we want to make sure that a decrease in cholesterol comes from reductions in LDL or triglycerides, and not lowered HDL.
Not only does LDL decrease by about 25 percent after eight weeks on an alternate daily fast, but even better, we actually see a decrease in small LDL particles (10, 11, 12). And remember, small, dense LDL particles are associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular disease when compared with an equal number of large, fluffy LDL particles. (Note: small, dense LDL is best viewed as a proxy for LDL particle number, which, as Chris explained here, is a more significant risk factor for heart disease than total or LDL cholesterol.) Thus, intermittent fasting favorably shifts LDL both by decreasing total LDL and also by decreasing the small, dense LDL particles.
We also see decreases in triglycerides by as much as 32 percent below levels measured prior to implementing intermittent fasting (2, 7, 10, 13).
And, as hoped, with intermittent fasting, there is no significant decrease in HDL (14).
A study published this month investigated the effect of intermittent fasting on a marker of inflammation, specifically looking at NRLP3 inflammasome activation (15). The results indicated a decrease in this measure of inflammation with fasting.
Another study evaluated the effect of alternate-day fasting in adults with asthma and found a decrease in symptoms along with striking decreases in markers of oxidative stress and inflammation (7).
One interesting study published earlier this year investigated the effect of intermittent fasting on motor coordination skills, protein, and DNA damage in specific regions of the brain in middle-aged rats (16). This study also measured markers of cell metabolism, cell survival pathways, and synaptic plasticity (you can think of synaptic plasticity as a measure of the ability to learn).
The findings indicated that intermittent fasting was associated with improved motor coordination and learning response and a decrease in oxidative stress (think of oxidative stress as what we often consider “normal” age-related change). So, intermittent fasting may improve healthy aging of the brain and decrease the cognitive decline that is generally considered a normal part of aging.
Chronic neuroinflammation is increasingly associated with neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and mood disorders such as depression. One study published earlier this year looked at the role of intermittent fasting on markers of neuroinflammation in rats and found that this dietary approach actually changed gene expression to allow for an adaptive response (17). These results suggest that intermittent fasting may have a beneficial role in conditions associated with neuroinflammation.
While there are even more potential benefits to intermittent fasting, like improving insulin sensitivity and promoting a normal migrating motor complex (important in preventing SIBO as discussed here), I’ll have to save further discussion for another post to prevent this one from becoming too long. But hopefully at this point it’s clear that intermittent fasting can provide a number of measurable benefits.
There can be risks associated with intermittent fasting, and I would strongly recommend that it be pursued with the guidance of a qualified healthcare provider or nutritionist who understands the risks and benefits and can help determine if it’s right for you.
Intermittent fasting should always be avoided during pregnancy and breastfeeding and should generally be avoided during times of increased stress that contribute to Adrenal Fatigue Syndrome, or more precisely, hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis dysfunction.
Additionally, there are health risks associated with diets that are too low calorie, including concerns of nutritional deficiencies, electrolyte abnormalities, and potentially more serious risks if extreme diets are undertaken without appropriate supervision. Intermittent fasting can be a great strategy for weight loss and overall health during the right time for you and when approached cautiously.
Now I’d like to hear from you: Have you found any benefits from intermittent fasting? What type of intermittent fasting works best for you?
About Amy: Amy Nett, MD, graduated from Georgetown University School of Medicine in 2007. She subsequently completed a year of internal medicine training at Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital, followed by five years of specialty training in radiology at Stanford University Hospital, with additional subspecialty training in pediatric radiology.
Along the course of her medical training and working through her own personal health issues, she found her passion for functional medicine, and began training with Chris in June of 2014. She subsequently joined the California Center for Functional Medicine to work with patients through a functional medicine approach, working to identify and treat the root causes of illness. Similar to Chris, she uses nutritional therapy, herbal medicine, supplements, stress management, detoxification and lifestyle changes to restore proper function and improve health.
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Madeleines are my favorite cookie. I love their delicate flavor and distinctive shape and texture — they taste more like a mini sponge cake than a cookie. When I was a kid, my mom would take me to a coffeeshop a few blocks from our house. She’d get her latte and I’d get hot chocolate and a madeleine pulled from the old-fashioned lidded candy jar that sat on the counter.
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Let’s talk about how to gain some good old-fashioned work capacity, potential work productivity, horsepower, strength endurance, stamina, or whatever you call it. Just don’t ask me to discuss semantics. Some people like to argue about semantics (i.e., “I’m training. Oh wait, maybe I’m exercising. No, it must be working out.”), but I couldn’t care less.
Originally Posted At: https://breakingmuscle.com/feed/rss
Let’s talk about how to gain some good old-fashioned work capacity, potential work productivity, horsepower, strength endurance, stamina, or whatever you call it. Just don’t ask me to discuss semantics. Some people like to argue about semantics (i.e., “I’m training. Oh wait, maybe I’m exercising. No, it must be working out.”), but I couldn’t care less.
http://www.thekitchn.com/feedburnermain
Salads are the unsung hero of my winter. Often overlooked — it’s too cold for salad! There are no tomatoes! — a winter salad challenges my creativity; surprises me with possibilities; and lifts my spirits on short, gray days and long winter nights. Yes, we have those in California where I live. Truth is, a refreshing winter salad is the essential counterpoint to hearty soups and braises.
For now classes are 6pm and 640pm at 2840 Wildwood st in the Boise Cloggers studio.
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