December 26, 2014

Food Reward Friday

This week's lucky winner... Cheesecake Factory carrot cake!!


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December 22, 2014

Chocolate & Orange Popsicles

Okay, so I know putting 'popsicles' and 'hot' in the same sentence is kind of creating an oxymoron but these are in fact hot chocolate popsicles. Because you see I used this dangerously delicious vegan hot chocolate powder from Esamée Store that they were so kind to send me a while back. The only ingredients in this mix are organic coconut sugar, vegan coconut milk powder, organic raw cacao, organic cinnamon and maltodextrin. All you have to do is mix a couple of teaspoons with a cup of boiling hot water and voilà, there's a steaming cup of vegan hot chocolate for you. Yes, I am sold.

Also, chocolate and orange is a match made in heaven and I'm all about those divine flavour combinations. And there are only 5 ingredients so NO EXCUSES. You could even enjoy it in it's semi-liquid state as a beautiful chocolate milkshake!

Hot Chocolate & Orange Popsicles




Ingredients:

150 ml or 2/3 cup full fat coconut milk

150 g frozen bananas (about 1 1/2 medium sized)

1 tbsp Honest Hot Chocolate Powder from Esamée or 1 tbsp coconut sugar

1 tbsp cocoa or cacao powder

Zest from 1 organic orange

How to:

1. Slice the bananas and put them in an airtight plastic container in the freezer and leave it there for at least 8 hours to freeze.
2. Place the frozen bananas, hot chocolate powder/coconut sugar, cocoa powder and orange zest in a food processor and blend for about one minute.
3. Pour in the coconut milk through the hole on top of the food processor, little by little. Stop to scrape down the sides if necessary.
4. Divide the 'ice cream' in six popsicle moulds and freeze overnight.
5. Enjoy!


December 20, 2014

Vegan Macaroni and Cheese

Behold my attempt to veganize this good old classic loved and cherished by people all over the world. Here in Sweden it goes by 'Makaronipudding', which literally means 'Macaroni Pudding'.  I know for you English people that's something else but this is the kind of mac 'n' cheese that most people are familiar with; the savoury one. 

But how does one make macaroni and cheese without the cheese? Well, there's this wonderful little thing called nutritional yeast that can replace the cheese. I know, cheese addicts out there, this may seem hard to grasp. Because yeast? Doesn't sound so appealing. But it is! Since going vegan, I don't think a single day has gone by without me using it in at least something. It adds a cheesy, savoury flavour that is just too good for words. Another of the reasons why I love it so much is because one single tablespoon provides you with almost all of the B-vitamins that you need. One tablespoon!

So I hope I've convinced you to start incorporating this miracle ingredient into more of your meals. And vegans, this is especially directed at you. Buy it. Just do it.

Vegan Macaroni and Cheese


Serves: 1

3 oz./80 g uncooked brown rice pasta, preferably macaroni or fusilli (or pasta of your choice)

4 oz./110g silken tofu, firm

2 tbsp nutritional yeast

1 1/2 - 2 tbsp vegan cream substitute (such as Oatly iMat 15%)

1 tsp lemon juice

1 pinch nutmeg

Cherry tomatoes (optional)

Salt and pepper to taste

How to:

1. Boil pasta according to instructions on package.
2. Pre-heat oven to 200C
3. Put the remaining ingredients in a small bowl and blend with a hand blender until smooth. Season as you go, don't skimp on the salt but don't use too little either!
4. When the pasta is done, drain and pour it into the bowl with the 'cheese' sauce. Stir well and make sure that all the pasta is covered with sauce.
5. Pour the 'macaroni and cheese' into 1-2 ramekins or a small casserole like the one on the picture. Halve cherry tomatoes and put a few on top. 
6. Sprinkle with some additional nutritional yeast and bake in the oven for 25 minutes. Check it now and then to make sure it doesn't burn on top!
7. Serve immediately.


December 16, 2014

Is Meat Unhealthy? Part V

In this post, I'll examine the possible relationship between meat intake and type 2 diabetes.  Type 2 diabetes is the most common form of diabetes, and it is strongly linked to lifestyle factors.

Non-industrial cultures

Non-industrial cultures have an extremely low prevalence of diabetes, whether they are near-vegan or near-carnivorous.  This is supported by blood glucose measurements in a variety of cultures, from the sweet potato farmers of the New Guinea highlands to the arctic Inuit hunters.  Here is what Otto Schaefer, director of the Northern Medical Research Unit at Charles Camsell hospital in Edmonton, Canada, had to say about the Inuit in the excellent book Western Diseases (Trowell and Burkitt, 1981):
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December 14, 2014

Gingerbread pancakes with a Vegan Frosting

We're continuing with the Christmas theme here on the blog and next up is this basic recipe for gingerbread pancakes with a vegan lucuma-vanilla frosting... yum! I usually make my pancakes with a mix of coconut flour and buckwheat flour but I've been suspecting for a while now that it's the coconut flour that make the pancakes go all soft and gooey inside, big no-no if you're not into eating raw batter! So I completely omitted it and these turned out perfectly moist and fluffy, just like they're supposed to be. A perfect start to any winter day.

Gingerbread pancakes with a Vegan Frosting


Pancakes:

1/2 cup (70g) buckwheat flour

1/2 tsp baking powder

1/4 tsp baking soda

1 1/2 tsp gingerbread spice mix (cinnamon, ginger, cloves)

1 chia egg (1 tbsp ground chia seeds mixed with 3 tbsp water)

1 small banana, mashed (approximately 80 g)

3-4 tbsp almond milk

1 tsp apple cider vinegar or lemon juice

How to:
1. First, prepare your vegan 'buttermilk' by mixing the almond milk with the apple cider vinegar. Set aside to curdle.
2. Now prepare your chia egg: Grind one tbsp of whole chia seeds either by hand or in a coffee grinder, then mix the ground seeds with 3 tbsp of water. Stir well and let sit on the side for a few minutes to swell.
3. In a small bowl, mix the buckwheat flour, baking powder and baking soda well until they're evenly divided. 

4. Mash the banana with a fork or blitz it a couple of times with a hand blender if you don't want any clumps whatsoever left.
3. Pour in the chia egg, mashed banana and 'buttermilk' and stir until the batter is completely smooth. Let sit on the countertop for a few minutes (the batter should be THICK)
4. Fry in a spoonful of coconut oil (unless you have a non-stick frying pan) on medium heat for a couple of minutes on each side.


Vanilla-Lucuma Frosting

4 oz/108 g silken tofu

1 tbsp lucuma powder

1 pinch vanilla powder

2 dates, pitted and (if you want) peeled

1 tsp melted coconut oil (optional)

How to:
1. Blend all ingredients with a hand blender until smooth. Place a spoonful of frosting between each pancake, save a dollop for the top and serve with fresh fruit!

December 12, 2014

Lemon-Lime Snowball Truffles

Christmas recipe alert! It's been a while since the last time, as per usual. But hey, no sad faces. Christmas is just around the corner and if you haven't made my Rocky Road Fudge yet then it's definitely time to warm up (chill down?) with these über cute snowballs. Aww. I was actually tempted to build a tiny little truffle snowman out of these but we had a plumber working in the kitchen so... Yeah. One has to know when such weirdness needs to be constrained. But once you've had your first taste I promise you'll be just as obsessed as I am!




The citrus notes in these marry perfectly with the mellow coconutty taste and make one hell of a flavour combination if I may say so myself. It's just one of those meant-to-be combos, like banana and peanut butter, strawberries and cream, chocolate and anything...


Lemon-Lime Snowball Truffles



Yields: 12 bite-sized truffles

Filling:

3/4 cup oats/oat flour (75g)

6 pitted dates (85g)

2 tbsp desiccated coconut (15g)

1 1/2 tbsp coconut oil (21g)

2 tbsp plant based yoghurt (40g)

Zest of 1/2 lemon

White Chocolate Shell:


2 tbsp cacao butter (could sub for coconut oil but not recommended)

2 tbsp coconut cream (the thick layer on top of a can of coconut milk that has been chilled overnight in the fridge)

1 tbsp lucuma powder (Or coconut sugar if you want it sweeter)

Desiccated coconut (as much as you like) and the zest of one lime

How to:

1. Put oats, lemon zest and desiccated coconut in a food processor and blend until a fine flour forms.

2. Place the remaining ingredients for the filling into the food processor and blend again until smooth. (Skip the first step if you already have your oat flour ready)
3. Roll the dough into approximately 12 small balls and place in an airtight container in the freezer for a least an hour to firm up.
4. When the truffles are (freezing) cold, prepare the 'white chocolate' by melting the cacao butter over a hot-water bath and stirring in the lucuma powder and coconut cream. You could adjust the ratios to your own preferences here, feel free to play around!
6. In another bowl, mix the desiccated coconut with the lime zest. This will go onto the truffles once they have been coated with chocolate.
7. Keep the white chocolate in a warm bowl to stop it from setting, then take one truffle and pierce it halfway through with a wooden skewer. Dip the truffle into the chocolate and make sure it gets an even layer all the way around.
8. Sprinkle with as much of the desiccated coconut-lime zest topping as you want.
9. Secure the skewer in an upright position. This can be a bit tricky but a styrofoam board will work amazingly! I usually balance mine in the toaster (truffle-side up!) but be creative... Repeat this process with all the balls.
10. Once the coating has set enough to allow for the truffles to be removed from the skewers, place them in an airtight container and store in the freezer.

Enjoy!

Food Reward Friday

This week's lucky "winner"... Pumpkin pie!!


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December 08, 2014

JASON: The Great American Experiment

The distinguished JASON group of anonymous scientists and academics that provides consulting services to the U.S. government on matters of defense science and technology, just published a sequel to the 2013 best seller, “A Robust Health Data Infrastructure”. The new report is titled “Data for Individual Health”, and it has two purposes. The first and foremost purpose is to backtrack on the searing criticism leveled at government efforts to promote health information technology, which evoked much angst and indignation earlier this year. The second purpose is to expound upon the exact nature of personal data required to feed the robust infrastructure laid out in the first JASON report, complete with illustrations and examples of breakthrough benefits to humanity, such as helping city planners design bicycle paths. Yes, bicycle paths. And if you didn’t know that the number one health care problem in this country is the layout of bicycle paths, then you are a Luddite, and luckily your generation will soon be dead.

After dutifully observing that only a tiny percentage of Americans use medical services of any kind, JASON is informing us that the government agencies that funded its work “specifically” asked the group “to address how to bridge, on the national scale, to a system focused on health of individuals rather than care of individuals” [italics in the original]. It seems that the overdetermined triple aim of health care reform, better health for populations, better care for individuals, at lower per capita costs, is finally being reformulated into a solvable optimization problem by removing the unprofitable constraints on caring for the sick.

As was the case with the previous JASON report, the group was briefed by a diverse array of researchers and technology experts, including the great new hope of health, our most beloved, innovative, tax evading, and slave labor supported, Apple Inc. The content of briefing sessions is not available to mere mortals, but one in particular is rather enlightening in its title: “Disrupting the Status Quo: Putting Healthy People First”. Never since the dawn of medicine, from Hippocrates, to Florence Nightingale, to Mother Teresa and today’s Doctors Without Borders, have we experienced greater disruption in the status quo.

Similar to the first JASON report, the second offering is chockfull of technical recommendations for the “collection, assimilation, and exchange” of quantifiable “data streams” emanating from living things, whether in traditional medical surroundings or as people go about living their healthy lives. There is nothing earth shattering in the JASON findings or recommendations, but some finer points may be worth mentioning anyway.

Phenotypes - After providing us with a crash course in genomic sequencing and the workings of RNA and other protein molecules in the first report, JASON argued that the “biomedical research community will be a major consumer of data from an interoperable health data infrastructure”, hence the government “should solicit input from the biomedical research community to ensure that the health data infrastructure meets the needs of researchers”. In the second installment, JASON is reiterating its obviously very strong interest in genotype-phenotype relationships and their assimilation into the IT system they are recommending we build. Luckily, some of the JASON briefers happened to hail from academic centers renowned for grant funded genomic research in general, and efforts to “develop algorithms and methods to convert EHR data into meaningful phenotypes” in particular.

In Vivo - I have to admit that compared to run of the mill interoperability papers, which deal with unconscious patients in the ER, or people irritated by having to fill out paper forms, the JASON report is much more interesting. Here is another supercool futuristic development that we absolutely must consider when creating an IT infrastructure to collect data for health related research, which is essentially the main concern of the JASON group. It seems that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is working on in vivo nanoplatforms. Something about “ultra-small scaffolds inserted directly into the body” and “fluorescent nanospheres that are functionalized to detect biomarkers of interest”. The purpose seems to be “continuous physiological monitoring for the warfighter”. We do of course want to support our troops, so these cute little nanites must also be part of our robust health data infrastructure.

FHIR - In this report JASON is taking an unequivocal stand behind a new HL7 standard for clinical information exchange, the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR), which is actually pretty neat, and has been in development for approximately three years. FHIR is envisioned as a replacement for the C-CDA, which replaced the CCD, which replaced the CCR, which replaced an array of HL7 2.x messages. JASON is recommending that government “policies should make it advantageous for one or more leading EHR vendors to be the first to propose such standards”. Lo and behold, two days after the JASON report was published, a group of leading vendors and institutions, several of which briefed JASON, and some who are helping the government implement JASON’s recommendation, launched the Argonaut Project for precisely this “advantageous” purpose.

FDA - For some reason the JASON report is engaging in a lengthy and strangely passionate litigation of the 23andMe (a DNA analysis service) tiff with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) from a year or so ago, concluding with a recommendation that the FDA should take a “more nuanced approach” to its regulation of apps that could be construed as “practicing medicine”. The FDA regulatory authority over medical software has been in the crosshairs of corporate lobbyists (tech, pharma, telecom, etc.) for a couple of years now, with a variety of bipartisan deregulation bills introduced, or almost introduced, unsuccessfully in Congress. Coincidentally, two days after the publication of the JASON report, Senators Bennet (D-CO) and Hatch (R-UT) introduced the MEDTECH Act, the most serious attempt so far to restrain the FDA’s regulatory abilities.  

Non-profits – JASON is recommending that non-profit organizations, either those that are disease specific or general in nature, “should be encouraged to assess their goals with respect to health data streams, and to provide “stamps of approval” for applications (apps) and other consumer tools”. In other words non-profit organizations should leverage the trust of their communities to monetize their members’ health data. JASON also recommends that private foundations should help the government by creating cash prizes to entice entire communities into participation in data wellness games. This is brilliant thinking, which leads me to hypothesize that at least one of the JASON members must be a Nobel laureate in marketing.

In this era of “transparency”, where every dollar from every pharmaceutical company or government agency, paid to every doctor and hospital, comes under relentless public scrutiny, why should JASON be exempt? Shouldn’t the JASON reports be accompanied by full disclosures of conflict of interest, both for JASON members and the various briefers whose pet projects populate every page of every report? Where is the media when a group of secretive researchers and private corporations are steering almost 20% of our economy towards endeavors immediately beneficial first and foremost to themselves?

When you read the JASON reports back to back, you are left with the impression that the group’s overarching goal is to create an international distributed repository of genetic materials tied to individual, environmental, behavioral and disease specific manifestations for all people on this planet. There is no doubt in my mind that a structure of this type and magnitude can facilitate an infinite number of perhaps beneficial research projects, and maybe even an IPO here and there. But if taxpayers are expected to fund the infrastructure for such expansive research, shouldn’t they be asked, or at the very least clearly informed?

And why rob the President of the United States of a legacy-defining “We choose to go to the moon” speech? It could go something like this: My fellow Americans, by 2025 every American will have his or her DNA collected and catalogued, and by 2025 every movement and every breath of every American man woman and child will be associated with their genomic sample, launching the grandest experiment in the history of mankind. From the ashes of the Great American Experiment, we will bring you more than freedom, more than liberty and more than a futile pursuit of happiness. We will bring you, Health. Download it for free from iTunes today.

In 1802, Thomas Jefferson wrote in a letter to David Hall: “We have no interests nor passions different from those of our fellow citizens. We have the same object: the success of representative government. Nor are we acting for ourselves alone, but for the whole human race. The event of our experiment is to show whether man can be trusted with self-government. The eyes of suffering humanity are fixed on us with anxiety as their only hope, and on such a theatre, for such a cause, we must suppress all smaller passions and local considerations.” Whatever.

December 05, 2014

Food Reward Friday

This week's lucky "winner"... Pizza Hut Doritos Crunchy Crust Pizza!


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December 03, 2014

Is Meat Unhealthy? Part IV

In this post, I'll address the question: does eating meat contribute to weight gain?

Non-industrial cultures

I'll get right to the point: humans living in a non-industrialized setting tend to be lean, regardless of how much meat they eat.  This applies equally to hunter-gatherers, herders, and farmers.

One of the leanest populations I've encountered in my reading is the 1960s Papua New Guinea highland farmers of Tukisenta.  They ate a nearly vegan diet composed almost exclusively of sweet potatoes, occasionally punctuated by feasts including large amounts of pork.  On average, they ate very little animal food.  Visiting researchers noted that the residents of Tukisenta were "muscular and mostly very lean", and did not gain fat with age (1, Western Diseases, Trowell and Burkitt, 1981).

!Kung man gathering mongongo fruit/nuts.
From The !Kung San, by Richard B. Lee.
Another remarkably lean hunter-gatherer population is the !Kung San foragers of the Kalahari desert.  The !Kung San are so lean that many of them would be considered underweight on the standard body mass index scale (BMI less than 18.5).  Average BMI doesn't exceed 20 in any age category (The !Kung San, Richard Lee, 1979).  Is this simply because they're starving?  It is true that they don't always get as much food as they'd like, but on most days, they have the ability to gather more food than they need.  The fact that they are able to reproduce normally suggests that they aren't starving.  Richard Lee's detailed work with the !Kung San indicates that approximately 40 percent of their calories came from animal foods during his study period in the 1960s.  This was mostly meat, with occasional eggs when available.

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December 01, 2014

Recent Interviews

For those who don't follow my Twitter account (@whsource), here are links to my two most recent interviews.

Smash the Fat with Sam Feltham.  We discuss the eternally controversial question, "is a calorie a calorie"?  Like many other advocates of the low-carbohydrate diet, Feltham believes that the metabolic effects of food (particularly on insulin), rather than calorie intake per se, are the primary determinants of body fatness.  I explain the perspective that my field of research has provided on this question.  We also discussed why some lean people become diabetic.  Feltham was a gracious host.

Nourish, Balance, Thrive with Christopher Kelly.  Kelly is also an advocate of the low-carbohydrate diet for fat loss.  This interview covered a lot of ground, including the insulin-obesity hypothesis, regulation of body fatness by the leptin-brain axis, how food reward works to increase calorie intake, and the impact of the food environment on food intake.  I explain why I think proponents of the insulin-obesity hypothesis have mistaken association for causation, and what I believe the true relationship is between insulin biology and obesity.  Kelly was also a gracious host.  He provides a transcript if you'd rather read the interview in text form.