Just about every low-carb cookbook, carb-count guide, diet plan and blog has advice on eating out while limiting your carbohydrate intake. For instance, over at About.com, Laura Dolson maintains an extensive and helpful guide on Low-Carb Fast Food. And blogger and low-carb cookbook author Dana Carpender reviewed the Burger King Angry Burger, which she encountered while trying to buy a bottle of dark rum in southern Illinois on a Sunday. She disliked the burger, and didn't get the rum, either. … [Read more...]
Remembering my dad
My father was a Flint guy, Great Depression edition – blue-collar even when he was in management, hands-on, patriotic, optimistic, and altogether typical of his generation. As a young man, he played baseball, drank beer, smoked whatever cigarettes he could afford, and helped save the world for democracy. Like his father and his only brother, Dad was an autoworker. All three men worked for Buick, a General Motors division that at its peak employed nearly 30,000 people in Flint, Michigan. Buicks … [Read more...]
American teens’ drinking problem: too much sugar
A survey released by the CDC this week shows that U.S. high school students are getting plenty of carbs and calories in liquid form each day. More than 11,000 students were asked what beverages they had consumed one or more times per day during the previous week. Most news reports focused on the 25% of all teens who said they drank pop every day. But from the standpoint of obesity, 100% fruit juice and other sweet beverages are no better. … [Read more...]
Get Rosie a beer
Today, I washed down my frosted brown sugar cinnamon Pop-Tarts (made by the United Steelworkers) with two excellent union-made beers: Schell’s Zommerfest from New Ulm, Minn., a local farming community just under two hours from Minneapolis, and Leinenkugel’s, from Chippewa Falls, Wis. --Manny Herrmann, Choose Union: Raise a Glass for the Working Class, June 16, 2011. I'm not sure what disturbed me the most about this quotation from an AFL-CIO blog: that the United Steelworkers have been … [Read more...]
No-filler salmon patties
Before I started eating low-carb, salmon was a minor part of my diet. If I ate salmon at all, it was in the form of a grilled or broiled salmon steak, usually in a restaurant. I never purchased or prepared canned salmon. But that has changed. Now I look for sales on canned salmon, and try to always have a few cans in the pantry. Canned salmon is usually wild-caught fish, which has a better reputation for purity than farm-raised fish. It's typically sold in 14.75 ounce cans, each of … [Read more...]
Mind-sets
I call this site "Life after Carbs" because, of course, there were carbs in my diet at one time -- bucket-loads of carbs, for years on end -- and I'm sure that's true for everyone reading this. In our culture, and in the vast majority of cultures around the world, you don't start out eating a low-carb diet. Even the Inuit have flour and sugar, and diabetes and heart-disease. Like most Americans of my generation, I once believed that carbs were my friend and that saturated fat was my enemy. … [Read more...]
Can watching TV kill you? What if you just listen?
The web is vibrating today with the news (loosely speaking) that TV viewing can kill you. This is not a metaphoric brain-death that we are talking about here, folks; it is actual, stone-cold, stick-you-in-the-ground death. Consider the following headlines gleaned this morning from a variety of online media sources via Google News: Too Much TV Linked With Disease and Early Death Alice Park, Time Healthland. TV Time Linked to Diabetes, Death, Crystal Phend, ABC News. TV gives you diabetes and … [Read more...]
Major review says it’s time to embrace low-carb diets
An invited, extensive review of experimental studies published in the June 2011 issue of the journal Nutrition in Clinical Practice (vol. 26, no. 3) argues that it is "time to embrace" low-carb diets "as a viable option" in the battle against diabetes, heart disease and obesity, and concludes that "the shift in metabolism that occurs on a LC [low-carbohydrate] diet heralds a shift in our current dietary paradigm." An abstract of the review is freely available online. The following account is … [Read more...]
Petition to end war on fat
It's time to end the war on fat. Dietary fat, that is, not the fat around our waistlines. That's the message of an online petition at SignOn.org: To be delivered to: The United States House of Representatives The decades long war against dietary fat must come to an end. Starting with the McGovern Commission in 1977, we have been told that a healthy diet is low in fat and high in carbohydrates. Despite a lack of scientific evidence to support these claims, the message that fat is "bad" … [Read more...]
Cut carbs to reduce deep body fat, study says
For Public Release: A modest reduction in consumption of carbohydrate foods may promote loss of deep belly fat, even with little or no change in weight, a new study finds. Presentation of the study results will be Sunday [June 5, 2011] at The Endocrine Society's 93rd Annual Meeting in Boston. When paired with weight loss, consumption of a moderately reduced carbohydrate diet can help achieve a reduction of total body fat, according to principal author Barbara Gower, PhD, a professor of … [Read more...]