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The Prize:

The full collection of Primal Kitchen® Bars…

12 PRIMAL KITCHEN Chocolate Hazelnut Bars: The PRIMAL KITCHEN Chocolate Hazelnut Bar is the coveted combination of chocolate and hazelnut we all remember and love, and it’s guilt-free to boot. Nutritional bonus: it’s packed with beneficial healthy fats, 15 grams of protein and low in carbs and sugar (only 3 grams). To craft the perfect high-protein, low-sugar bar, we’ve toasted our hazelnuts for sweet aromatic flavor and crisp, crunchy texture, and paired them with unsweetened chocolate.

12 PRIMAL KITCHEN Macadamia Sea Salt Bars: Who doesn’t love the distinctly buttery, sweet flavor of macadamia nuts with a hint of sea salt? PRIMAL KITCHEN Macadamia Sea Salt Bars were created with Mark’s favorite nut in mind and contain only 12 grams of carbs—the lowest carb bar in the PRIMAL KITCHEN lineup!

12 PRIMAL KITCHEN Dark Chocolate Almond Bars: Turkish almonds and roasted pumpkin seeds are enrobed in a dark chocolate, chewy, caramel coating with an added touch of coconut for a subtly sweet taste and mightily beneficial impact on your health. All PRIMAL KITCHEN protein bars are made with grass-fed collagen protein from Brazil. Collagen has been shown to help improve joint mobility, improve sleep quality, support skin, hair and nail growth, and enhance digestion.*

12 PRIMAL KITCHEN Coconut Cashew Bars: What do you get in a PRIMAL KITCHEN Coconut Cashew Bar? Monounsaturated fats for heart health, prebiotic fiber for digestive health, plus antioxidants, minerals and 15 grams of protein from grass-fed collagen. That’s more collagen than a cup of bone broth! Cashews, almonds and pumpkin seeds satiate with a nutty crunch, while coconut imbues our bars with a creamy, sweet flavor.

The Contest (an Oldie but a Goodie):

If you were alive in the mid-1990’s, you may remember comedian Jeff Foxworthy’s empire of “You might be a redneck if…” humor. Today I’m looking for “You might be Primal if…” jokes. Think one up and leave it in the comment board.

Examples:

• You might be Primal if you’ve been banned from your local grocery store for repeatedly violating the “No shirt, no shoes, no service” policy.
• You might be Primal if you’ve never used an elevator. Ever.
• You might be Primal if you prefer your apple with worms.
• You might be Primal if you accidentally broke your neighbor’s second story window with a kettlebell.
• You might be Primal if every butcher in America can recognize you on the spot.
• You might be Primal if you measure friends, relatives, and children not by the mettle of their character, but by how far you could throw them.
• You might be Primal if you’ve started to use Tabata intervals for dish washing, shopping, shaving, and dating.
• You might be Primal if you make guests take off their shoes before leaving the house.
• You might be Primal if you measure time by the number of cows you’ve consumed since an event occurred… “When did we take that trip to Portland?” “Oh, that was about 3 cows ago.”

Eligibility:

Anyone in the world can enter, though this prize may only be available to U.S. contestants. In the case of an international winner, substitute prizes of equal value will be shipped.

The Contest End Time:

Tuesday, June 18th, 2018 at Midnight PDT

How the Winner Will Be Determined:

I’ll pick a handful of my favorites and let all of you decide the winner through a reader poll.

Save

The post Contest: You Might Be Primal If… appeared first on Mark’s Daily Apple.

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Picking a kitchen paint color is difficult. It’s something you’ll live with for quite a while, so you want something classic. If you choose a white or neutral, however, you run the risk of it being too boring, or even too cold. Go the other way and indulge your love for color, and there’s a chance you’ll get tired of your choice.

Here’s a trick: go two-tone. It adds nice dimension and lets you explore a little bit of color, without overdoing things. Here are five great ways to add two colors — and ensure that you love the room for a long, long time.

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A significant number of my friends are real-life rock musicians, armchair rock musicians, or just music nerds, which is why I’ve been excitedly refreshing a Facebook post about which rock legends have played the same instruments for huge chunks of their careers.

You know, like how Charlie Watts, the drummer for the Rolling Stones, has sat behind the same Gretsch drum set for 40 years, Queen guitarist Brian May has played the same handmade Red Special since 1963, and, most famously, Willie Nelson has used “Trigger,” his worn-out, barely held-together Martin guitar since 1969.

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Like a lot of people, I have a small home kitchen and have to be very selective about what tools take up my limited counter, drawer, or cupboard space. I’ve been skipping the fancy cold brew systems in favor of a multi-purpose strainer and some cheesecloth that fits tidily into a drawer for my big batches of cold brew. That was until a very smart reader pointed me to a space-saving tool that has vastly improved my cold brew coffee at home.

This small upgrade is cheap, fits in a drawer, and eliminates a big step from my brewing process. And chances are some of you already have one in your kitchen. Here’s the one product that will change how you cold brew coffee this summer.

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Guacamole is so easy to make that it’s almost silly to buy it from the store. But sometimes you just don’t have 10 minutes to chop and mash your way to homemade. Maybe you’re heading straight to a party from work, or grabbing some snacks on the road while heading for the beach, or maybe you’d rather focus your efforts on making an entrée and not an app? Besides, you can’t always get your hands on perfectly ripe avocados right when you need them.

That’s why store-bought guacamole will always have its place. Every supermarket has a few brands to choose from, tucked away near the hummus or salad dressings. But which one tastes the closest to homemade? Clearly we needed to put them to the test.

I rounded up all the brands I could find (and a bag of chips), asked my guac-averse husband to set up a blind tasting.

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Raise your hand if summer heat — and a lack of central air — has ever brought you to the point where you lie on your kitchen floor in utter defeat, overheating and cursing and wondering if you’ll ever have the gumption to light a stove burner again.

You too? Well, give me that hand. Let me help you up off the floor … and lead you outside to the grill. As one of the many air conditioning-challenged, fixer-upper-owning cooks out here in the American suburbs, I have suffered one summer too many in my sweatbox of a kitchen.

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Shopping for fresh fruits and vegetables at the grocery store is one of my favorite chores for the entire week, and no, I’m not even kidding! (I like to say it’s my equivalent of being a kid in a candy store.) All the bright and pretty colors — so full of nutrition! — are simply irresistible to me. And I actually think it’s fun to hunt for all the best prices on fresh, organic, and frozen organic produce. Because, despite what so many people think, you don’t have to spend a fortune to eat well.

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Kitchn’s Delicious Links column highlights recipes we’re excited about from the bloggers we love. Follow along every weekday as we post our favorites.

I’ve been on a taco kick lately. I make them at home, order them in restaurants, and even buy them from food trucks or street fairs when the weather gets nice. Since tacos are so incredibly customizable, it’s a hard food group to get sick of. (Yes, I just called tacos a food group.) Load them with seafood, veggies, meat, and eggs in virtually endless combinations for breakfast, lunch, or dinner. This recipe from Chelsea’s Messy Apron is the next variation I want to try.

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For today’s edition of Dear Mark, I’m answering several questions drawn from the comment board of last week’s post on fasting vs carb restriction. First, how do I square my recommendations with the successful reports of potato dieters losing weight on a high-carb tuber diet? Second, is Leangains optimal for mass gain? Third, how do I use extra virgin olive oil, butter, and ghee? Fourth, could exogenous ketones help a man with dementia, MS, and seizures? Fifth, how should a woman with stalled weight loss integrate fasting?

Let’s go:

Walter Sobchak asked:

If “carbs” are so bad, how do people eat only potatoes and lose large amounts of weight? Andrew Taylor (SpudFit.com) and Penn Jillette (Penn & Teller) are two high-profile people, but there are lots more. Of course, I wouldn’t recommend an unbalanced diet of only one food, but the point is that potatoes are a natural food and are not inherently detrimental.

I agree that potato-only diets are a quick weight loss hack.

Potato-only diets work well because they’re so monotonous. When your only option is a plain potato, it’s extremely hard to overeat. It’s the combination of fat and carbohydrates that’s so easy to overeat, and that causes the most metabolic problems.

Potatoes are surprisingly nutrient-dense. They have complete protein, containing all the necessary amino acids. You won’t be bodybuilding on all-potatoes, but there’s enough protein in there to stave off muscle loss for a week or so.

Cooking and cooling your potatoes converts some of the glucose into resistant starch, which feeds your gut bacteria and cannot be digested by your body. This lowers the effective glucose load.

I could recommend the potato-only diet, ditch the keto/low-carb/Primal talk, and people who listened to me would still lose weight. But they’d miss out on all the other benefits, not least of which is the delicious food. In short, the potato-only diet isn’t the worst thing out there, but I wouldn’t recommend it as a long-term strategy.

Check out what I’ve written about potatoes in the past. You might be surprised.

Mattias Carlsson asked:

I have a question for advice if someone know. According to most sources I find the so called anabolic window persist at least 24 hours after resistance training. How can then an intermittent fasting with 8 hour eating as in lean gains, from what I understand, be optimal on training days. It seems to me that a bit of overeating on carbs and protein during all this time would be most beneficial?

I don’t know that it’s optimal for sheer mass gain. But it does seem to strike a nice balance between “gains” and “staying lean.” You may not bulk up as quickly as you would cramming food in your gullet. You will gain lean mass without gaining so much of the squishy mass that normally accompanies what passes for “gains.”

Michael Levin wondered:

Question: EVOO, Ghee and grass-fed butter–which to use when and for what?

EVOO: salads, marinades, sautéing. It’s actually far more resistant to heat than most people think; the polyphenols protect against oxidative damage.

Ghee: Indian cooking, Thai cooking, high heat searing.

Butter: Cooking eggs and other breakfast items, melted with broccoli/shrimp, finishing steaks and reduction sauces.

Beth Olson asked:

What are your thoughts on exogenous ketones? My dad has MS and dementia and seizures way too often. Should we try adding these?

I can’t give your dad any medical advice. You can talk to his doctors, however, and show them this study where exogenous ketones reduced seizure activity in mice. You can show them that coconut oil and MCT oil—two other routes for generation of ketones—have shown efficacy against cognitive decline in patients with Alzheimer’s or dementia.

I suspect exogenous ketones can help. I also suspect they’d be far more helpful on top of a low-carb, high-fat diet with plenty of healthy lifestyle modifications.

That’s the thing with dementia: there isn’t a pill that fixes everything, or even a single intervention. In the one study that actually got major results, researchers had Alzheimer’s patients undertake a dramatic diet, exercise, and lifestyle shift. Here’s what each subject did:

1. Eliminate all simple carbs and follow a low-glycemic, low-grain (especially refined grains) diet meant to reduce hyperinsulinemia.
2. Observe a 12-hour eating window and 12-hour fast each day, including at least three hours before bed.
3. Stress reduction (yoga, meditation, whatever works for the individual).
4. Get 8 hours of sleep a night (with melatonin if required).
5. Do 30-60 minutes of exercise 4-6 days per week.
6. Get regular brain stimulation (exercises, games, crosswords).
7. Supplement to optimize homocysteine, vitamin B12, CRP levels.
8. Take vitamin D and vitamin K2.
9. Improve gut health (prebiotics and probiotics).
10. Eat antioxidant-rich foods and spices (blueberries, turmeric).
11. Optimize hormone balance (thyroid panel, cortisol, pregnenolone, progesterone, estrogen, testosterone).
12. Obtain adequate DHA to support synaptic health (fish oil, fish).
13. Optimize mitochondrial function (CoQ10, zinc, selenium, other nutrients).
14. Use medium chain triglycerides (coconut oil, MCT oil). You could possibly use exogenous ketones here too.

Bring that study to your dad’s doctors and see what they have to say. If they aren’t blown away by the possibilities and open to give it a try, I’d be shocked. Hopefully your dad is game. I’d love to hear how it works.

Lisa Chupity asked:

I went Primal/Paleo back in March of 2012. I lost the 15 pounds I wanted to lose. In 2015, 7 pounds crept on, and for the life of me, I can’t lose ‘em! April of this year, I went Keto. I track my macros, and do my best to keep my carbs to 20 grams per day, tho I don’t beat myself up if I have 24. I haven’t lost an ounce! I’m going to have to do the IF thing, I’m sure. As it is, my breakfast is bone broth (1 1/2 cups) and a mug of Coffee with Brain Octane in it. Lunch is yer basic “Big Ass Salad”. Dinner is good, too, and within Keto guidelines. I try to keep my caloric intake to ~1600 calories/day.

To add to the mess, I have Multiple Sclerosis, so stuff like Cross Fit is outta the picture. I can manage some stationary cycling, and some Pilates, with lighter modifications. Any advice?

If you try IF, do the “early restricted feeding” rather than late. You’re already doing a kind of “fast” in the morning, just drinking broth and coffee with MCTs, and it doesn’t seem to be working.

Eat some fat and protein for breakfast with a few carbs. Eggs and bacon with a side of cantaloupe or berries. An omelet with spinach and onions and cheese. Steak and greens and half a banana. Emphase whole-food fat and protein. Have coffee and broth, too, if you like. This and lunch should be your biggest whack of calories.

Eat your Big Ass Salad for lunch. Drop dinner, or make it really light and no later than 5 or 6 PM.

Terry Wahls has a great Primal-friendly MS protocol. Check out her Ted talk and go from there if it interests you.

Good luck and keep us apprised of your results.

That’s it for today, folks. Take care, be well, thanks for reading and writing!

The post Dear Mark: Potato Diet, Lean Gains, EVOO/Butter/Ghee, Exogenous Ketones, and Early IFing appeared first on Mark’s Daily Apple.

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“Resting time” in recipes is the bane of my existence. I’m a big fan of instant gratification, and I’m constantly forgetting to leave time for things like letting the meat rest or waiting for the cake to be completely cool before attempting to frost it. My puddings are always full of little fingerprints because I’m constantly poking them to see if they’re set yet, even though the recipe says they’ll need another three hours. (I always think they’ll set early. They never do.)

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