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The Staff of Life

I started baking bread over the holidays. Growing up I don’t even know that I was aware you could buy bread, because we never had anything in our house other than fresh bread my mom baked every couple weeks. In the winter, she’d tweak her recipe a little bit and make julekake which is a Norwegian bread that is slightly sweeter and has candied fruit in it, which is weird because we have zero point zero Norwegian heritage in our family, but I digress.

I had watched Michael Pollan’s incredible Cooked series for the third or fourth time, and I decided I was finally going to undertake sourdough bread baking. That entire series is fantastic by the way, if you haven’t seen it. My good friend the gentleman butcher and guest writer of the recent hunting article, Aron, is a co-owner of the butcher shop featured in the Fire episode. Anyway, I digress again.

So for the past week it’s been sourdough starters and flour explosions in the kitchen almost every day. And I’ll tell you what it’s damn good bread already, even if there is room for improvement. Easily better than anything you could buy at the store.

If it seems weird that a fitness guy would be so hype on bread, I’d like you to consider the following:

One of my overarching nutrition principles for figuring out what is best for you is to look at your genetic heritage AND your environmental circumstances for the previous generation or two. Lots of bread in both those for me.

Next, I think it’s important to look at what historically has been an important staple. Aside from eastern and southeastern parts of Asia, it’s pretty difficult to find a place or time in human history where bread hasn’t been an absolutely critical component of sustenance. It’s literally called the staff of life because it’s so important.

You can tell me that we’re all gluten intolerant now and we have wheat brain, but I’ll tell you that for some five thousand plus years humans have been thriving on bread so the logical conclusion is not that bread is bad but as they say YOUR bread is bad.

Modern commercial bread is a monoculture that suffers from the same deficiencies that monoculture organics like plants suffer from.

Did you know that the banana, as we know it, is probably going extinct? Because we thought it would be a good idea to reduce and control the variability in the organism down to what is now an unsurvivable species. But I digress, again.

The first iterations of modern bread were so devoid of nutrition that they actually made people sick on an epidemiological scale. Hence the advent of fortified and enriched bread – with nutrients added back in. Keep in mind this was supposed to be an “improvement” over technology that provided sustenance for over five thousand years, and it required spackle to fix the problem that the improvement created.

Bread can be a major source of calcium, but most modern bread is completely devoid of it. Chances are you’re not getting enough calcium as it.

So, bread produced in the old way using wild yeast and however much time is necessary for the process to complete without adulteration passes my second test.

Ultimately having passed two of the other principle tests the most important test is how does this actually work for me? I can’t point to any noteworthy ill effects when I eat bread, so it definitely passes.

Beyond the nutrition side of things, this is another way to develop a useful skill that further improves my family’s autonomy – which is never, ever a bad thing. People think making bread is hard and complicated, and it’s really not, just follow the steps. But that’s another topic for another day.

So that’s what I’ve been up to. If you’re interested in pursuing sourdough bread, I found this post very helpful as a starting point.

by david Leave a Comment

Men, You Should Give Blood Tomorrow

This one is for the men in the audience. While I will admit that I made the subject slightly attention-getting on purposes by framing it in terms of gender, the reason why will make sense in a moment.

At some point some crafty health researchers asked the question, why is it that pre-menopausal women have lower mortality rates from heart disease as compared to men of the same age? Further to that, why is it that in post-menopausal women the rates start to get closer to men’s and further to that, why is it that in cases of hysterectomy (relevant part here is no more menstruation) the rates in those women rise towards those of similar-age men?

Which is to say, does losing blood through menstruation have something to do with rate of heart disease?

Why jump to this theory when there are certainly myriad other differences between men and women, pre and post-menopause?

Well, you see, while iron is absolutely a crucial element for good health and proper metabolic function, as with any element the hormetic zone is a curve – too little is bad, and too much is bad.

Now to speak in absolute generalities that are not at all useful on an individual level but can be useful to see which bucket you might fit in generally women tend to have more issues with not getting or keeping enough iron, and men generally tend to have the opposite issue. Anemia is bad, but so his hemochromatosis. I am not a doctor, this isn’t medical advice, and you should get your blood levels checked.

Without getting into a graduate level systems biology lecture the likes of which I’m unqualified to give and you don’t want to listen to so suffice to say having too much iron in the blood is Real Bad™. Getting enough iron from dietary sources is pretty easy: use a cast iron pan for some of your cooking, eat some red meat (especially offal), some beans, dark leafy greens and you’re probably good. Getting rid of iron is a real problem for men, given that the body has no mechanism for doing so – except blood loss.

(One thing to note, they will check your ferritin level the day you give blood, so you’re basically getting a free iron check and it should prevent you from donating if you’re low.)

Which is where giving blood comes in. Hopefully I don’t have to convince you of the benefits to others of giving blood. If someone ends up in a hospital and needs blood, they will die if they can’t get a transfusion. There’s no substitute, no synthetic alternative, and you can’t pump someone full of Hawaiian Punch. Blood transfusions are definitely one medical procedure that indisputably saves lives.

But what most people don’t consider is the benefit to themselves. So check this out:

In a Finnish study following almost 3000 men for a decade literally one man in the group had a heart attack – he was a blood donor. The rest of the cohort? 316 non-donors had heart attacks. In a statistical model probably no one understands blood donors had an 88% reduction in risk of acute heart attack compared to non-donors.

In another well powered study of people with peripheral arterial disease the group that participated in iron reduction (basically, they gave blood) saw significant differences in new cancer, and an overall 37% reduction in cancer incidence.

But, David, don’t you usually heavily criticize and virtually dismiss this type of long-view epidemiological science?

Yes, I do when there’s an attempt to ascribe a level of risk to a single factor. Like let’s say the studies that purport to draw a connection between cured meats and cancer. When you’re trying to tease out a single factor for a risk in the negative are basically saying “Give up this thing for this potential benefit.”

What you have here is essentially the opposite though. What most of the studies show is that there seems to be significant benefit to donating blood, and there are some potential mechanisms for why that might be. So there’s no discernible downside, and a lot of potential upside. In finance terms this is an option you take every single time.

It may very well be that actually removing a pint of blood isn’t the factor that renders the benefits, but we can’t ignore that they’re highly associated and you can reap those rewards just by giving blood.

For example, it’s entirely possible that the benefits of blood donation have nothing to do with iron and instead are related to the ramping up of erythropoietin production.

One more thing. Phlebotomy is a practice that spans cultures and several thousand years. Lots of dumb things that have no benefit or are harmful could be described in the same way, but I always pay a little more attention when something shows up almost universally and has stood the test of time. If nothing else those give us good starting points of things to examine more rigorously and removing a pint of blood once a quarter or so seems to pass that examination – so far anyway.

So make that appointment today gents.

by david 7 Comments

Wild Game Hunting: Inhumane or The Most Humane?

This is a guest post by a very good friend and long time online coaching client Aron Woolman. For the past five years I’ve spent a weekend in late January in southern Texas hunting hogs and raising money for the kin of fallen special operations forces thanks to Aron’s involvement in the Silent Warrior Foundation. In the wake of one hunt, Aron shared a photo of his freezer filled with meat from this year’s hunting season (including hunting back home in North Carolina). The following was in response to someone criticizing Aron and questioning the morality of his mode of procuring sustenance. His response was so cogent, and so important to understand that I asked if I could post it as a guest post.

I’d like to address your comment about my refrigerator. I am not a trophy hunter, and most hunters do not fall into the category of hunting mainly or completely because of a desire to kill animals. I view hunting as a way to connect on a very intimate and personal level with nature, our own animal instincts, and with my food.

I accept that some people adopt a vegan lifestyle for both ideological and scientific reasons, and I will not argue the scientific merits of that diet here. I also will not try to convince a vegan that his position is ideologically incorrect, and don’t expect a vegan to (successfully) argue that my life as a hunter is ideologically incorrect.

Most Americans are neither vegan, nor hunters. And I can confidently say that my lifestyle as a hunter is ideologically and morally superior to most non-hunting meat eating and vegetarian or pescetarian Americans. I know that is a bold statement, so let me explain.

The meat you eat doesn't come from a scene that looks like this - unless you hunted it. — The meat you eat doesn’t come from a scene that looks like this – unless you hunted it.

Most agricultural animals in this country are raised in CAFO (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation) environments, where they are forced to live their lives in close quarters, standing and covered in their own feces, and eating unnatural diets. Pigs and chickens are often kept in large, long buildings with no sunlight, and are bred under conditions that we would think of as being derived from SAW-style torture films. These situations are unnatural, and immensely cruel. Even organic operations, which often market their products with cartoonish pictures or silhouettes of farms, are not living on the farms that we see in the pictures. Cage free chickens can never see the sunlight and be kept in a chicken feces filled warehouse and remain cage free. “Pastured” animals often live in the same environment, but in a building with a door and a small fenced outdoor area. If the animals can find the door, maybe they can spend sometime outdoors. Still, the majority of their lives will be spent indoors, and this is for the animals being raised for premium products.

For those who forsake animal flesh, their store bought butter, milk, and eggs still come from these sources, as well as the foods that are made from these ingredients. For those who do eat meat, every time you buy food with meat in it from a fast food place, or even a high end restaurant that gets it’s food from a large distributor, you are voting with your wallet to support this industry of cruelty. Think about that. Every time most Americans eat, or buy animal protein at the grocery store, they are making a choice to support animal cruelty. The only way around this is to buy from farmers or a farmer cooperative/aggregator, raise animals yourself, or hunt.

Although I am guilty of eating out at restaurants and occasionally buying ingredients that are sourced from CAFO’s, buying from farmers and hunting severely decreases our support of that system. We are lucky here in the Triangle of North Carolina to have great access to farmer’s markets. My wife and I have made a commitment to each other and to our children not to bring meat into the house that doesn’t come from animals we have hunted or from farms we have visited. These animals are raised in the environments that fill the pictures of meat and produce sections of the supermarkets, environments that are where these animals are meant to be. They live happy, unrestricted lives.

When I shoot a deer (or pig, elk, bison, bear, turkey or game bird), that deer has lived its life in a natural environment up to that point in time. It has experienced less stress than any CAFO animal, and will almost certainly die a quick death. (Part of responsible hunting is only taking shots that you are confident will not maim an animal – there’s no maybe or hey lets wing it.) That meat gets processed by a butcher, and fills my freezer. This year was a particularly successful year in terms of harvested game, and as a result my family will be able to eat from that animal protein for much of the year. My children will not have to worry about antibiotics in their meat, and our food will not be recalled because of e-coli outbreaks at one of the 4 food large food processors in the United States. The fat and chemical composition of the game and farm raised meat we eat is highly superior to even the best USDA Prime cut of meat, because it was fed what that animal naturally eats, not a source of abundant grain caused by illogical farm subsidies.

From time to time, people tell me that hunting is cruel. I argue that eating conventional food is much more cruel. Just because you don’t witness the suffering does not mean that it does not happen. The system is set up to remove you from those thoughts, to remove you another step further from your food.