Concerning preservatives...

 

Okay, the above was last night's dinner, including some nice unfrozen baked scallops. They were topped with either a Cajun spice mix or crushed dill seed. There is some rather broken home-made mayonnaise there used for a tiny bit of dipping sauce. It is completely dairy-free, as is everything else you see here. Yes that is a 1-A-Day Men's Health Vitamin laying at 11 o'clock there. The greens there are Super-green Mix, and to the far left are broccoli and cauliflower florets.

Concerning Preservatives...

People tend to blame preservatives for just about everything these days, from cancer to skin problems. Nevertheless, there has been a huge demand for the convenience foods these chemicals are used to protect from spoilage. It is probably true that living on convenience foods is problematic; However, it is also likely true that preservatives get a bad wrap as people-killers.

Preservatives are anti-oxidants. Nothing more, nothing less. Most of them are not chemically synthesized or invented chemicals, but instead they come from plants and berries that have a long shelf-life to begin with, such as cranberries, blueberries, and rowanberries (shown below).

Rowanberries, the source of sorbic acid, poisoner of Twinkies.

Now the most commonly recognized packaged food preservatives are BHA and BHT. BHT, butylated hydroxytoluene, includes a benzene ring, which is not a healthy thing for people to eat in large quantities. It is certainly better than eating rancid fats or oils, the things it is most commonly still used to preserve. It has been found that ocean plankton can generate this chemical naturally. Butylated hydroxyanisole (BHA) is an antioxidant consisting of a mixture of two isomeric organic compounds, 2-tert-butyl-4-hydroxyanisole and 3-tert-butyl-4-hydroxyanisole. BHA also includes a benzene ring. But this one is a little more complicated, but is used mainly in packaging for processed foods or dried fruits. It has been replacing BHT since the 1970's in many packaged foods.

Sorbic acid is a natural preservative derived originally by distilling the oil from rowanberries, back in 1859. It is the only preservative that was used in the making of Hostess Twinkies. (Note: Most of the shelf-life in a Twinky came from the refinement of all of its ingredients. Sponge cake requires a particularly highly-refined cake flour to make.) From what we can tell, sorbic acid is completely harmless in humans at preservative levels of concentration. Sorbic acid is particularly effective against botulism bacterial growth.

Cranberries and blueberries are now being considered as sources of their fine anti-oxident chemicals, all naturally occurring, of course.

So before you go off about preservatives, get your story straight at least. It is highly likely that many of us simply would not be here if they'd never existed. If what you want is fewer people in the world, please exit this blog.

{The above uses quotes and pastes from Wikipedia, and will be updated with the sources later.}

Breakfast of champions: Scotch Eggs via Well Fed cookbook by Melissa Joulwan, p. 83. The previously-boiled eggs are wrapped in ground pork (no, that isn't breading!) and baked at 350/400 F until crispy brown. The rest of the stuff is just plain vegetables. The starch here is in the zucchini slices only. 

Mmmm-mm! A delicious-looking compilation of healthy foods put together for my Saturday morning brunch on Feb 15th, the night after Valentine's day. That would be Day 15 for me on my G-120 paleo diet. (It is not perfect enough yet for a Whole30, but it is the best I could do to this point, and I'm sticking to it.) My bull-headedness all but got me kicked off their website, so I'm logging my meals and opinions here, however caustic. I'm the one having to eat this stuff, and avoid the all the prohibited stuff, so it's my way or the highway, folks.

In all honesty, I'd messed up over an unmarked bottle of reconstituted lemon juice (the little plastic kind that looks like a lemon). Now it's one thing if I ate a fempto-scoop of iced cream, and quite another if I've grabbed an innocent-looking lemon bottle from my fridge, with some sulfites in it. Bring on the firing squad! Or maybe just cancel my account, and I'll forge onward here instead.

No hard feelings. Really.

At any rate, I can eat this while looking at a bowl of Sugar Pops, a stack of syrup & buttery pancakes, or even smelling naughty bacon, so who needs encouragement or scolding? Or a bunch of feeble-minded people chiming in against me an my determination, for that matter? "Yeah, Dale, we're all being perfect here (except for the things we didn't disclose on our personal logs.)"

Now it is Monday, and I had boiled beef shanks for breakfast with a few over-night-pickled beets, berries, and an avocado. And my meds, including 1000mg of Metformin. I'm good. Damn, I'm good!

Introduction

To whom it may concern:

The following represents a sincerely peaceful attempt to record the cooking and eating experiences of the author. This is for a modified Paleo diet, so those of you purists out there, this isn't your place to read. While I will have accomplished at least one 30-day period of pristine eating in the next 120 or so days, I didn't start off perfectly, but I'm continuing notwithstanding.

I'm a Type 2 diabetic. I want to reverse that, and eliminate the meds completely. This does not mean that I will ever go back to eating like I did before I had this condition, because in general diabetes never dies until you do. For Type 2, some people can block it out by loosing the extra weight. I'm 5'8" and 145 lbs. I can't just dump weight or fat and get rid of my problem. I need to gain some muscle mass and cut my carbs, apparently by a lot. So, it would seem that Whole30 and Paleo Diet would be a good choice. Lots of individuals swear by it.

Now my language and attitude are way too blustery for the W30 web site, since I essentially got kicked off there. I don't resent 'em for it, but I don't need any TLC or even encouragement. Or scolding for that matter. I'm furious at the state of modern nutrition knowledge; you can just about sell any arbitrary diet out there these days, and nobody can stop you. W30's draconian start-up phase rejects all additives in foods, and requires immediate restart every time you find something you ate had the wrong thing in it.

Well, I can't be bothered with waiting to get started until everything's perfect. I can read labels (if their still on the bottles) but I'm damned if I'm going to sit in the penalty box at all here. Good luck to the W30 folks, but I've got something serious started here for half a month, and I'm counting it all for myself and against my diabetes, thanks very much.

And just to show them up, I'm holding onto their specs for 120 days, not just 30. If not all 120 are perfect, lets just see if there are 30 contiguous days that are, in that period, and see who wants to claim credit for the improved or eliminated diabetes symptoms at that point, eh, mateys?

(I'll give the proper credit for the specifications, but this gold medal is mine, if I win it. I'll be doing it w/o their coaching.)

In all honesty, you have to keep an eating plan (aka "diet") stable for at least 90 days for the A1c measurement you get at the end to have any meaning regarding the efficacy of the specific food plan. While I could do a strict W30 only and then back off according to the canonical plan, but what would be the affect on the bloods? And which diet should I be following? I'd have to stay paleo at least, and who needs another W30 after all that? If the damn thing has to be so strict to begin with, why bother adding "banned" sulfites and preservatives, of all things, just to have the clean them out again, and hope you don't grab the wrong one. If the whole house did the Whole30, it'd be fine, but I don't have the space to dedicate to periodic purges. I figured I was being pretty damn careful when I found that damned unmarked lemon juice the first time!

Disclaimer
This is a dark blog, not intended for public consumption, which is being put up by a tank-cannerous show-off who fantasizes that someone beautiful will actually want to read it, and find it sexy. There, I've said it. So if you can't stand such a person, get the hell off my blog! Read further only at your own risk.

If you are post-modernist, a progressive, a feminist, a Democrat, a socialist, or anything but a classical liberal, you and I don't need to talk to each other. Go away. Your feelings are not a method of cognition. Either get it right, or get off my blog.

It's a shame to have to say that in this age. "It's earlier than you think!" - Ayn Rand