food health

A photo Staffan sent me, showing him  weighing a Kitavan man as part of the  Kitava Study. I recently heard the sad news that Staffan Lindeberg, MD, PhD, lead researcher of the Kitava Study, has died. Staffan was a dedicated researcher and physician at Lund University in Sweden whose work was inspired by the evolutionary health principle.  After reading Boyd Eaton and Melvin Konner's seminal 1985 paper on Paleolithic nutrition, in Staffan's words, "it gradually dawned on me that John Harvey Kellogg, a vegetarian zealot, had more influence on dietary advice than Charles Darwin had" (Staffan Lindeberg. Food and Western Disease . 2010).  Long before it was en vogue , he adopted a Paleo-style diet and saw his own chronic disease risk factors, such as body weight and blood pressure, decline. Shortly thereafter, Staffan organized the Kitava Study-- an investigation into the diet and health of one of the few remaining cultures scarcely touched by industrialization.  A...

Country Chicken 500 grams Onion 3-4 Curry Leaves Cloves 4-5 Cinnamon 2 sticks Elaichi 3(seeds only)

I've written twice before about the Instant Pot, an electronic pressure cooker that helps make healthy food in a time-efficient manner ( 1 , 2 ).  At some point, I'll write another review of my Instant Pot, but the gist is that it still works flawlessly and looks sharp after more than four years of frequent use.  Here are a few of the reasons why I like it so much: It increases my efficiency in the kitchen, especially with beans, beets, artichokes, and bone broth.  It's automatic, so you can do something else while it works. It's durable.  The inner pot is stainless steel without a nonstick liner, and the gaskets are silicone.  The whole thing has a solid, quality feel. It replaces multiple bulky kitchen items.  It isn't just a pressure cooker, but also a steamer, slow cooker, and rice maker.  The latest version is also a yogurt maker. Today only, Amazon is offering the Instant Pot on deep discount.  If you're considering getting one, today is the...

Image credit: Evan Amos Thanksgiving is a special time in the United States when we gather our loved ones and celebrate the abundance of fall with a rich palette of traditional foods. Yet a new study suggests that the 6-week holiday period that spans Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year�s Eve accounts for most of our country�s weight problem ( 1 ). Understanding this fact, and why it happens, gives us powerful insights into why we gain weight, and what to do about it. Elina Helander, a postdoctoral researcher at Tampere University of Technology in Finland, and her colleagues set out to answer a simple question: how does a person�s body weight change over the course of the year? To find out, they used internet-connected scales to collect daily body weight data from nearly 3,000 volunteers in the United States, Germany, and Japan. After crunching the data, a striking pattern emerged: no matter what you celebrate, at any time of year, the holidays are likely to be your period of grea...

A popular argument holds that the US Dietary Guidelines caused our obesity epidemic by advising Americans to reduce fat intake.  Does the evidence support this idea, or is it simply a fantasy? To read the rest of this post, please head over to my new website !

If we want to understand the accumulation of excess body fat, it's tempting to focus our attention on the location that defines the condition: adipose tissue.  Ultimately, the key question we want to answer is the following: why does fat enter adipose tissue faster than it exits? It follows that if we want to understand why obesity occurs, we should seek to understand the dynamics of fat trafficking in adipose tissue, and the factors that influence it.  Right? I don't think this is right, and here's a metaphor that explains why. The speed of a car depends primarily on the force that its wheels exert on the asphalt below them.  If we want to understand why cars move quickly sometimes, and slowly at other times, we should seek to understand the dynamics of how force is transferred from the wheels to the asphalt, and the factors that influence it, right? As you may have already surmised, that wouldn't be a very effective way of understanding car speed. To understand car sp...