Olive Oil Buyer's Guide

Olive oil is one of the few good vegetable oils. It is about 10% omega-6 (n-6) fatty acids, compared to 50% for soybean oil, 52% for cottonseed oil and 54% for corn oil. Omega-6 fatty acids made up a smaller proportion of calories before modern times, due to their scarcity in animal fats. Beef suet is 2% n-6, butter is 3% and lard is 10%. Many people believe that excess n-6 fat is a contributing factor to chronic disease, due to its effect on inflammatory prostaglandins. I'm reserving my opinion on n-6 fats until I see more data, but I do think it's worth noting the association of increased vegetable oil consumption with declining health in the US.

Olive oil is also one of the few oils that require no harsh processing to extract. As a matter of fact, all you have to do is squeeze the olives and collect the oil. Other oils that can be extracted with minimal processing are red palm oil (9% n-6), hazelnut oil (10% n-6) and coconut oil (2% n-6). These are also the oils I consider to be healthy. Due to the mild processing these oils undergo, they retain their natural vitamin and antioxidant content.

You've eaten corn, so you know it's not an oily seed. Same with soybeans. So how to they get the oil out of them? They use a combination of heat and petroleum solvents. Then, they chemically bleach and deodorize the oil, and sometimes partially hydrogenate it to make it more shelf-stable. Hungry yet? This is true of all the common colorless oils, and anything labeled "vegetable oil".

Olive oil is great, but don't run out and buy it just yet! There are different grades, and it's important to know the difference between them. The highest grade is extra-virgin olive oil, and it's the only one I recommend. It's the only grade that's not heated or chemically refined in any way. Virgin olive oil, "light" olive oil (refers to the flavor, not calories), "pure" olive oil, or simply olive oil all involve different degrees of chemical extraction and/or processing. This applies primarily to Europe. Unfortunately, the US is not part of the International Olive Oil Council (IOOC), which regulates oil quality and labeling.

The olive oil market is plagued by corruption. Much of the oil exported from Italy is cut with cheaper oils such as colza. Most "Italian olive oil" is actually produced in North Africa and bottled in Italy, and may be of inferior quality. The USDA has refused to regulate the market so they get away with it. If you find a deal on olive oil that looks too good to be true, it probably is.

Only buy from reputable sources. Look for the IOOC seal, which guarantees purity, provenance and freshness. IOOC olive oil must contain less than 0.8% acidity. Acidity refers to the percentage of free fatty acids (as opposed to those bound in triglycerides), a measure of damage to the oil. Fortunately, the US has a private equivalent to the IOOC, the California Olive Oil Council (COOC). The COOC seal ensures provenance, purity and freshness just like the IOOC seal. It has outdone the IOOC in requiring less than 0.5% acidity. COOC-certified oils are more expensive, but you know exactly what you're getting.

Thanks to funadium for the CC photo

Real Food V: Sauerkraut

Sauerkraut is part of a tradition of fermented foods that reaches far into human prehistory. Fermentation is a means of preserving food while also increasing its nutritional value. It increases digestibility and provides us with beneficial bacteria, especially those that produce lactic acid. Raw sauerkraut is a potent digestive aid, probably the reason it's traditionally eaten with heavy food.

Sauerkraut is produced by a process called ‘anaerobic’ fermentation, meaning ‘without oxygen’. It’s very simple to achieve in practice. You simply submerge the cabbage in a brine of its own juices and allow the naturally present bacteria to break down the sugars it contains. The process of ‘lacto-fermentation’ converts the sugars to lactic acid, making it tart. The combination of salt, anaerobic conditions, and acidity makes it very difficult for anything to survive besides the beneficial bacteria, so contamination is rare. If it does become contaminated, your nose will tell you as soon as you taste it.

Store-bought sauerkraut is far inferior to homemade. It's soggy and sterile. Ask a German: unpasteurized kraut is light, crunchy and tart!

My method is inexpensive and requires no special equipment. I've tested it many times and have never been disappointed.

Materials

• Wide-mouth quart canning jars (cheap at your local grocery store)
• Beer bottles with the labels removed, or small jars that fit inside the canning jars
• Three tablespoons of sea salt (NOT iodized table salt-- it's fatal to our bacteria)
• Five pounds of green cabbage

Recipe

1. Chop cabbage thinly. Ideally the slices should be 2 mm or so wide, but it doesn’t matter very much. You can use a food processor, mandolin or knife.
2. Put all the cabbage together in a large bowl and add the salt. If the salt is not very dense (sometimes finely ground sea salt can be fluffy), you can add up to 5 tablespoons total. Mix it around with your hands. Taste some. It should be good and salty.
3. Let the salted cabbage sit in the bowl for 30 minutes or so. It should be starting to get juicy.
4. Pack the cabbage tightly into the canning jars. Leave 2-3 inches at the top of the jar. When you push on the cabbage in the jar, you should be able to get the brine to rise above the cabbage. Try to get rid of air bubbles.
5. Put water into the beer bottles and place them into the canning jars. The weight of the bottles will keep the cabbage under the brine. It’s okay that some of the brine is exposed to the air; the cabbage itself is protected.
6. Let it sit for 2 weeks at room temperature! As the fermentation proceeds, bubbles will form and this will raise the level of the brine. This is normal. You might get some scum on top of the liquid; just check for this and scrape it off every few days. It won’t affect the final product. If the brine drops to the level of the cabbage, add salt water (1 tsp/cup, non-chlorinated water) to bring it back up.
7. Taste it! It should be tart and slightly crunchy, with a fresh lactic acid flavor. If fully fermented, it will keep in the fridge for a long time.

Here are some photos from making sauerruben, which is like sauerkraut but made with turnips:

Leptin

I've been puzzled by an interesting question lately. Why is it that certain cultures are able to eat large amounts of carbohydrate and remain healthy, while others suffer from overweight and disease? How do the pre-industrial Kuna and Kitavans maintain their insulin sensitivity while their bodies are being bombarded by an amount of carbohydrate that makes the average American look like a bowling ball?

I read a very interesting post on the Modern Forager yesterday that sent me on a nerd safari through the scientific literature. The paper that inspired the Modern Forager post is a review by Dr. Staffan Lindeberg. In it, he attempts to draw a link between compounds called lectins, found in grains (among other things), and resistance to the hormone leptin. Let's take a step back and go over some background.

One of the most-studied animal models of obesity is called the "Zucker" rat. This rat has a missense mutation in its leptin receptor gene, causing it to be nonfunctional. Leptin is a hormone that signals satiety, or fullness. It's secreted by fat tissue. The more fat tissue an animal has, the more leptin it secretes. Normally, this creates negative feedback that causes it to eat less when fat begins to accumulate, keeping its weight within a narrow range.

Zucker rats secrete leptin just fine, but they lack leptin receptors in their brain. Their blood leptin is high but their brain isn't listening. Thus, the signal to stop eating never gets through and they eat themselves to morbid obesity. Cardiovascular disease and diabetes follow shortly thereafter, unless you remove their visceral fat surgically.

The reason Zucker rats are so interesting is they faithfully reproduce so many features of the disease of civilization in humans. They become obese, hypometabolic, develop insulin resistance, impaired glucose tolerance, dyslipidemia, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. Basically, severe metabolic syndrome. So here's a rat that shows that leptin resistance can cause something that looks a whole heck of a lot like the disease of civilization in humans.

For this model to be relevant to us, we'd expect that humans with metabolic syndrome should be leptin-resistant. Well what do you know, administering leptin to obese people doesn't cause satiety like it does in thin people. Furthermore, elevated leptin predicts the onset of obesity and metabolic syndrome. It also predicts insulin resistance. Yes, you read that right, leptin resistance may come before insulin resistance.

Interestingly enough, the carbohydrate-loving Kitavans don't get elevated leptin like europeans do, and they don't become overweight, develop insulin dysfunction or the metabolic syndrome either. This all suggests that leptin may be the keystone in the whole disease process, but what accounts for the differences in leptin levels between populations?

Hydration: Attempt Only Under Medical Supervision

I've noticed how the word "hydration" has crept into the popular lexicon in the last decade or so. Before that, we were so primitive, we just "drank water". Now you need a PhD just to put a glass to your lips. I'm not sure I'm qualified!

I've been hearing so many people, including health professionals, tell me to drink 8 glasses of water a day for my entire life. In my middle school health class, I was told by my hydrophilic teacher that I should be urinating every hour and my urine should always be clear. For my whole life, I've thought it was nonsense. Yet the message has reached people. Walk around any college campus and you'll see undergrads faithfully carrying around their endocrine-disrupting plastic-water everywhere they go.

You see, our bodies have this very sophisticated mechanism to ensure water homeostasis. It's called thirst. If we need so much water to be healthy, why aren't we thirsty more often?

I skimmed through a paper today in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology that reviews the evidence for health benefits from drinking more water than your thirst demands. Their conclusion: there's no evidence to suggest it helps anything. Water is just a nice harmless placebo.

The term "hydration" has helped fuel a whole industry to satisfy our need for hydration technology. Gatorade claims it hydrates better than water. It must be the high-fructose corn syrup and yellow #5... And make sure to bring your "hydration pack" when you go on your 20 minute jog; you might get lost and end up in the Kalahari desert!

I actually think the water craze isn't totally harmless. Drinking large amounts of water with a meal interferes with digestion by diluting digestive enzymes and stomach acid. Drinking a tall beer does the same. Wine is better because it tends to be a smaller volume.

As far as I'm concerned, with minor exceptions, the only thing to drink is water. I'll have an occasional glass of wine, beer or whole raw milk, but 99% of what I drink is good old-fashioned dihydrogen oxide.

The only time I drink a large amount of water without being thirsty is if I'm about to do vigorous exercise or spend time outside in hot weather.

Thanks to Snap for the CC photo.

Low-carb Review Article

The other day, I came across this nice review article from the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. It gives a thorough but accessible overview of the current state of research into carbohydrate-restricted diets, without all the fatophobic mumbo-jumbo. It points out a few "elephants in the room" that the mainstream likes to ignore. First of all, the current approach isn't working:

The persistence of an epidemic of obesity and type 2 diabetes suggests that new nutritional strategies are needed if the epidemic is to be overcome.

They claim that preagricultural diets were low in carbohydrate:

In contrast to current Western diets, the traditional diets of many preagricultural peoples were relatively low in carbohydrate (1, 2). In North America, for example, the traditional diet of many First Nations peoples of Canada before European migration comprised fish, meat, wild plants, and berries. The change in lifestyle of several North American aboriginal populations occurred as recently as the late 1800s, and the numerous ensuing health problems were extensively documented (3-5). Whereas many aspects of lifestyle were altered with modernization, these researchers suspected that the health problems came from the change in nutrition—specifically, the introduction of sugar and flour.

But of course, many of them were very high in carbohydrate, and these cultures seemed in fine health as well.

Carbohydrate reduction leads to a normalization of appetite:

It may also be that the mere lowering of serum insulin concentrations, as is seen with LCDs, may lead to a reduction in appetite. In support of this idea, several studies have found that insulin increases food intake, that foods with high insulin responses are less satiating, and that suppression of insulin with octreotide leads to weight loss (27-29).

I can't believe it; all that fat isn't going to clog my arteries??

Several outpatient diet studies have shown reductions in CVD risk factors after an 8–12-wk LCKD, during weight loss, and during weight maintenance (21, 60-62).

The last paragraph is a zinger:

We emphasize that strategies based on carbohydrate restriction have continued to fulfill their promise in relation to weight loss and that, contrary to early concerns, they have a generally beneficial effect on most markers of CVD, even in the absence of weight loss. In combination with the intuitive and established efficacy in relation to glycemic control in diabetics, some form of LCD may be the preferred choice for weight reduction as well as for general health.