SCD legal Caesar dressing

Great recipe for Caesar dressing from the Minneapolis Real Food Lover blog.

Some great stuff gets mentioned in this post -- like how canola and soybean oils are still considered good for you by major so-called "health" food manufacturers. Yuck.

Stick with olive oil, and look for sardines packaged similarly (or in water). Use whatever SCD legal cheese you like as well. I'm no purist when it comes to cheese. Whatever works.

Sorry for the lack of recipes. I have them scrawled in my notebook, even with photos that are saved on my computer! But I've been so busy writing and trying to find a job, they are languishing a bit. I'll have to rectify that situation soon.

Saturated fats (oh my!)

So a few blogs out there have mentioned a new meta-analysis that exonerates saturated fats.

I'll break this down for you all.

A meta-analysis is when a researcher (or, in this case, a doctor) reads a bunch of medical studies, and then draws conclusions based on all of the studies together.

Here's the abstract (or summary, for those of you who are not medical editors)

And what did this meta-analysis find?

There was no relationship between heart disease/stroke risk and saturated fat consumption.

So grab a stick of grass fed butter (cow or goat, your choice) and head on over to the Fat Head blog. Tom Naughton does a pretty great breakdown of the study's results here. He also includes another meta-analysis that basically shows the same thing.

Enjoy, and have a wonderful weekend!

Agave nectar

Food Renegade wrote a FANTASTIC post on agave nectar. Man, I'm jealous. I wish I'd written it. But here we are.

Some highlights:

--There is nothing natural about agave nectar
--It is not safe for diabetics
--It can massively raise your triglyceride levels
--Half the carbohydrate content is from highly indigestible inulin, making it SCD illegal.

Read all about it here.

Low fat diets

A few interesting posts on low fat diets caught my attention.

The first is Tom Naughton's low fat diary from 1995. Look familiar to anyone?

And lest we think diets high in complex carbohydrates are healthy, Dr. Davis disavows us of this notion with some pretty hard science.

He also has another post on wheat intolerance that's worth a look.

I know there are still SCDers out there fretting about how they can't be healthy without grains.

You can. In fact, you'll be healthier than your grain-eating brethren. Promise. :)

Happy new year!

I hope you all had a great holiday. Mine was pretty good!

At the last minute, I decided to make Clark some cookies for Christmas. They were with almond flour, and they were egg free. I thought that there was no way this silly recipe would work, but it did. The cookies stayed together when cool as well!

I got the recipe from Comfy Belly's section of SCD legal recipes. I recommend you check it out.

The recipe for EGG FREE ALMOND FLOUR COOKIES.

My son doesn't tolerate cinnamon well, so I should have left it out. He had red spots around his mouth for a day or two. Oopsie. Next time, vanilla!

Enjoy!

omega-6 fats

OK, so, here's what you need to know about fats.

Our ancestors ate a lot of fat. A LOT. Most of this fat came from animals, as we have been hunter gatherers for far longer than we've been growing grains.

It's important to note that most of the fat in question was from WILD animals. In the tissue of any animal, you'll find both omega-3 fats and omega-6 fats.

Omega-3 fats are anti-inflammatory. Omega-6 fats are pro-inflammatory.

The ratio of omega-3 to omega-6 in grass fed cows is around 1:2. That is, there's roughly double the amount of omega-6 when compared to omega-3 in an animal eating the diet it's supposed to be eating.

But take that same cow and feed it a diet of grains, and you end up with quite a different ratio. Something around 1 part omega-3 to TWENTY parts omega-6.

That's not so good, especially when you have an inflammatory illness -- illnesses such as rheumatoid arthritis, colitis, Crohn's, heart disease, and more.

Dr. Briffa's blog has an article here explaining a bit about this relationship, and how polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs) are a rich source of omega-6 fats.

So if you are already eating a diet of grains and grain-filled meats, you have a skyrocketing amount of pro-inflammatory omega-6 fats in your diet.

OK, so we can't all afford that grass fed cow. But we can reduce the amount of polyunsaturated fatty acids in our diets with other steps.

The first step is easy -- don't eat grains. And reduce the amount of omega-6 fats from other sources.

So what are other rich sources of PUFAs? The richest source in the human diet is from linoleic acid. Let's see what Wikipedia has to say about that:

Dietary sources of linoleic acid (high in omega 6):

If you'll notice, the highest sources are oils from seeds. Guess what grains are? Yep, seeds. Nuts tend to also have a high percentage, so limiting those (and their oils) is often a good idea as well.

You'll notice also that almost everything from canola oil on up cannot be obtained without heavy processing methods. And when oils are heavily processed, whatever omega-3 benefits they might have had are often destroyed. Think about it. Would a caveman be able to produce corn or canola oil? Of course not. They're unnatural foods.

There's a good article from Mark's Daily Apple about why you shouldn't eat canola oil, so check that out as well.

And what's at the bottom of the list, with the lowest amount of inflammatory omega-6 fatty acids? Real, natural fats that people have been eating for generations -- fats like coconut oil, butter, and even lard!

These fats are real food -- and far better for you than you probably thought.