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foodtechhacker-blog · 8 years ago

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Moving The Needle: How to Make Research Links Fully Accessible to Everyone

“Moving The Needle” is a category of articles covering relatively simple things that could have a big impact if widely adopted. Small changes, huge results is the idea.

The Problem

Twitter is filled with fantastic and brilliant researchers. They frequently tweet exceptional research from peer reviewed journals. Unfortunately, the way they do this often makes it difficult or impossible for ordinary citizen scientists to read the article.

Let’s do a real world example.

Say you start out with this science direct link:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0278691517302818

Twitter shortens this link to:

https://t.co/X7W2c5b3uY

The citizen scientist clicks on the link, and this takes them to a page that looks like this:

Note how there is no clear unique identifying information about the article shown! Depending on the way the Twitter link is loaded, the citizen scientist will see one of two URLs:

https://t.co/X7W2c5b3uY

https://www.sciencedirect.com/user/login?option=ForceLogin&targetURL=%2Fscience%2Farticle%2Fpii%2FS0278691517302818

Either way, there’s no easy way for the citizen scientist to easily identify what paper you were trying to share! Not even an abstract! So if you didn’t adequately describe the paper you were trying to share, the average citizen scientist has no way of reading an abstract or getting the paper from sci-hub, assuming they even know sci-hub exists.

Basically, you’ve got numerous layers of accessibility issues here. And it’s no accident that sites like Science Direct make this process hard - they do not like sites like sci-hub and want to impair access to scientific knowledge to protect their profits.

The Solution

It’s remarkably simple to solve this whole problem. When you want to share research of interest, simply go to sci-hub (sci-hub.tv is working, wikipedia always has a full list of working domains), enter the article you want, and then share that link instead.

Presto, you are now giving citizen scientists instant and direct access to the full text of the article, and it literally takes only 30 seconds more of your time, but tears down multiple barriers to accessing knowledge for the citizen scientist.

So let’s say you want to share a science direct link. Start by going to:

https://sci-hub.tv

Then, paste the science direct URL into the search box.

Finally, copy and paste the resulting URL into your tweet. It looks something like this:

http://sci-hub.tv/http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0278691517302818

IT REALLY IS THAT EASY!

Interestingly, in most cases, you don’t even have to go to the sci-hub website to get a working sci-hub link. You usually can simply prepend “http://sci-hub.tv/” to the URL and then share that.

Keep in mind, this is easy for you because you have the source URL, but the combination of the way Twitter and the journal sites work makes it very hard for the citizen scientist to extrapolate the source URL.

That’s why it really matters for you to take an extra 30 seconds when posting to provide a sci-hub link. Every time. Please. The world will be a better place!

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foodtechhacker-blog · 8 years ago

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Adventures in Nutrition: Antibiotics, Preservatives and the Microbiome, Part 2

Several years ago, I had a situation play out where I was unable to access a healthy diet or supplements for several months. This culminated in a very serious ear infection - blood and mucus pouring out of my ear - which was in turn improperly treated, exhibited antibiotic resistance, and required extensive antibiotic usage to resolve the infection. This experience radically changed my understanding of the human microbiome and how what we eat affects our microbiome.

This three-part series explores my experience, how to use your own body to explore how diet affects microbiome, and the general conclusions of my personal experiments along with thoughts on areas for further exploration. I am writing this in segments to allow me to address questions along the way and to get the ideas out there faster - it takes a lot of effort to characterize complex experiences like this.

Introduction

If you haven’t read part 1, go back and read it now. Don’t worry, I’ll be here when you return.

The experience of wiping out my entire microbiome was nothing short of shocking. The idea that just a teaspoon of a benzoate-preserved sauce could diminish my microbiome enough to cause hours of nausea was pretty shocking. I thought preservatives were, at most, mildly detrimental to the microbiome. The idea that the microbiome could form the basis for what feels like the platform on which your brain operates was also incredibly powerful.

The problem is that I was sick, really, really sick during this experience. Even though the signal I got was very strong, I was in incredible pain, and profoundly ill, so the noise was very high too and my biology wasn’t operating normally. A doctor friend of mine later told me he would have recommended that I be hospitalized had he been my physician.

Over the next few years, I kept trying to figure out how to assess what affected my microbiome. It was incredibly tough. There were so many variables, every time I felt like I was getting signal, it would be overcome by noise. It would take moving to a new part of the country, new food products, and a radically altered lifestyle to finally work out a reliable pattern to get another clear look at the function of my microbiome. I felt like I was building LIGO-grade noise isolation and searching for gravitational waves in my own biology.

The Winning Combination

Earlier this year, I moved to Santa Cruz. It is truly a special place, sadly one that is hurting in so many ways, filled with shadows and gaudy displays of elist wealth. I found a kind of peaceful silence there at night, especially along the ocean, that I’ve never really reliably experienced before. It was so quiet, so still, so peaceful, so isolated feeling.

Somehow, it was like my biofeedback mechanisms went through the roof. Patterns I could never fully suss out laid themselves out in front of me plainly. I’m sure there’s more to this phenomenon than the location, but that’s another discussion. Around the same time, a new type of kefir became widely available, Dahlicious kefir, made with organic, grass-fed milk and containing 15 billion CFU per serving, 60 billion per bottle, a number not touched by any other products. Despite not containing any additives, the probiotics in the kefir had a very unique quality of increasing fecal volume, providing a fascinating indicator as to their activity.

I adopted a diet that consisted of exclusively grass-fed, organic beef or lamb and 32 ounces of unsweetened Dahlicious kefir each day, plus a few dietary supplements. I ate on a consistent schedule and trained myself to a regular bowel movement at a specific time of the day. I held this regimen steady for a little over 2 weeks. It was really surprising the amount of fecal bulk I had despite a zero fiber diet. I would pass over 1 kg a day of fecal mass typically.

Then I decided to mix it up. I replaced the grass-fed, organic ground beef with conventional ground beef. My fecal mass dropped by 17-39% depending on how you looked at the numbers. I tested a variety of different situations and basically concluded that grass fed or no had no impact on my fecal mass, but as soon as I consumed ground beef that was raised with antibiotics, I had a measurable and significant reduction in fecal mass. I did an experiment where I blended 1 cup of heavy cream into my kefir (against a backdrop of organic, grass-fed ground beef or lamb) and found that it could reduce fecal mass by up to 52% as compared to organic non-grass fed heavy cream.

I was also able to discern a significant effect from nitrate cured meats and benzoate preserved beverages. I did not test them as extensively as I did the cream and meats, but I can say the effect was material. Interestingly, I did not discern any significant effect from fat free or nearly fat free dairy products produced with antibiotics. I did not discern any significant benefit from organic grass fed dairy or meat as compared to strictly organic dairy. (Although I have seen other health benefits, the microbiome does not seem to care.) Cranberries did, however, seem to have a significantly negative effect on the microbiome activity.

This testing becomes very tiring personally, due to the extended amounts of time eating such a monotonous diet. A couple of months of this testing was as much as I could handle. Suffice to say, I believe I may have a model here that could allow other n=1 researchers to test the effects of various foods on their microbiome.

Possible Conclusions

My testing model basically uses fecal bulk - primarily bulk produced by and/or consisting of probiotic bacteria in the gut microbiome, since fairly little fecal bulk results from a zero fiber diet consisting of dairy - as a proxy for the activity of the microbiome. That means actual microbiome activity is probably reduced by moderately more than fecal bulk.

The big disappointment here is that it seems removing all antibiotics - not just those important to human health - from the entire food chain may be necessary. Given how economically valuable they appear to be to producers, especially dairy producers, this could be economically challenging. I know that this experience basically suggested that my grocery budget needs to go way up if I am going to eat an optimal diet for my microbiome!

My subjective experiences following this experiment do suggest that this example exaggerates total effect on the microbiome. Over time, it does seem the microbiome does adapt to a significant extent to the antimicrobial agents in your diet, but it probably does by altering the composition of bacteria. Given the amount of neurotransmitters produced by the microbiome, and how very specific bacteria may be responsible for them, it seems highly plausible that antimicrobial agents in our diet may be linked to mental health disorders for some segment of patients.

It seems like there could be quite a lot of opportunity to explore developing probiotics that are resistant to common antimicrobial agents. This does pose a risk of horizontal gene transfer if resistance to antibiotic important to human health is included, but resistance to benzoates and nitrates seems relatively harmless. (Most governments are trying to phase out the use of antibiotics important to human health, so this angle of resistant probiotics could become quite useful in many countries, especially the EU which is further down this road.)

My experiences do shed a great deal of concern on the data published by the USDA which claims most samples of meat had no detectable levels of antibiotics. Either they need to use more sensitive detection methods, or, more likely, there are antibiotically active metabolites present, particularly in animal fats, for which they are not testing. It seems these tests may need to be improved, or perhaps their sampling method is biased.

Given my experiences, I believe that removal of preservatives from the food system would be of great benefit, due to a wide range of issues, such as the well-studied link between nitrate-rich processed meats and colon cancer and benzoate releasing free benzene when in the presence of ascorbic acid. (The latter one is interesting because while some degree of testing has been done on beverages, but is is unclear the age of the samples, and benzoates are used in many non-beverage applications containing ascorbic acid such as fruit spread and sauces that are not tested.)

A Peek At Part 3

I have reason to believe that some probiotics may actually produce some sort of antimicrobial or antibiotics themselves, and represent a possible novel and proven safe mechanism for treating certain types of food poisoning. Interestingly, because they are already part of the food chain, if these compounds can be isolated and produced economically exvivo, they could be brought to market as a dietary supplement and bypass FDA regulatory barriers. I also have further chemistry on the specific action of benzoate that supports my hypothesis that benzoates have a bacteriostatic effect in our digestive system.

Further Discussion and Comments

Please find me on Twitter. I welcome questions and comments and pushback on these ideas. My hope is that my line of exploration will shape further research in this area.

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foodtechhacker-blog · 8 years ago

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Hypothetically Speaking: Modern Plant Breeding and Adverse Human Health Effects

There seems to be an uptick in food allergies all around us, primarily to plant-based foods. I have a slightly crazy theory to explain it that might just hold water - and if it does hold water, it could require huge regulatory and/or dietary changes in the Western world.

Something Seems to Have Changed With Wheat

Over the past 3 years, members of my immediate family have all independently developed and identified wheat sensitivities, mine clearly in the last year or so. While it is likely we all have a genetic predisposition, the degree of effects suddenly and abruptly intensified for everyone. We live in very different climates, locations, and VERY different lifestyles, yet all are experiencing the same effects.

Moreover, I’ve spoken with a lot of people who have reported they felt something has changed in recent years. Their timeline aligns closely with the timeline I’ve seen. They’ve also observed that European wheat doesn’t seem to have the same problems, in general.

What’s even more interesting is that certain types of wheat seem to be worse than others. Whatever wheat they use in the cookies sold in the whole foods bakery is VERY intensely bad for me, yet cookies from other places with the same ingredients list are dramatically less problematic. Given that Whole Foods tries to have high food standards, this is scary.

Exploring My Citrus Sensitivity

Let’s back up a few years.

I moved to the Bay Area almost two years ago from the Northwest. While I have been traveling to California since high school, I had never lived here before, and living here gave me unprecedented access to fresh citrus fruit right from the tree. I was fascinated by the diversity of varieties of citrus, far beyond anything I had been familiar with such as apples. I developed a definite taste for the tangy, essential oil-rich oranges of the Bay Area and I literally tasted every citrus fruit from every tree I could find, and given how much I walk, I’ve sampled hundreds of different varieties of citrus by now.

I was struck by how new varieties, especially cloned ones from nurseries, were very different from heirloom and seedling varieties. (I’ve even been out to Luther Burbank’s old farm many times.) It became really clear to me with just a quick inspection and taste whether a variety was new or old; the older varieties were less perfect, had tougher membranes, were smaller, less sweet, often more aromatic, had more and larger seeds, etc. At the time, I mostly thought this was a curiosity and nothing more.

I quickly discovered that I could peel, segment and freeze the oranges (and maybe a few lemons), then put them in my Cleanblend with erythritol, reb A, sucralose and thaumatin to produce something that, hands down, is the best orange smoothie anybody has ever tasted. It was like the best orange sorbet you’ve ever tasted, turned into a smoothie, with no sugar added. I found many of the older varieties with seeds and tough intersegment membranes went unpicked, but could easily be processed in my blender without issues. Lower sugar levels were also great, since I had a killer sweetening blend. The tougher membranes actually added more pectin to the smoothie, netting a better texture.

As I’ve blogged extensively, the Cleanblend is a powerful tool for ripping apart cellulose and releasing the active compounds in plant-based foods, be they good or bad. I quickly realized I was sensitive to the orange smoothies, but oh boy, they were so good I didn’t eliminate them completely. The primary symptom was systemic water retention which cleared within a day. (Yes, I love food a little too much. That’s how I ended up a size 52 pants. Thankfully I’m now close to 20 inches smaller and have kept it off for a decade.)

One of the reasons I did not move to eliminate the smoothies was because I did not feel they were consistently causing the same level of effects. It’s kind of like gambling, where the uncertainty of outcome motivates a given action. In this case, the uncertainty of feeling poorly after the smoothie combined with the delicious taste of the smoothie kept me coming back for more. Well, for a while.

I got my hands on a big batch of citrus fruit, including ruby red grapefruit and pink cara cara oranges. I made a delicious ruby red grapefruit smoothie, and promptly got very sick. No specific symptoms, but exhaustion and I gained approximately 20 pounds of water weight. Once I recovered, I got back to smoothie making and did a cara cara smoothie (the most heavenly citrus smoothie of my life) and got very, very sick again. That was it for me and citrus smoothies - it was clear they just made me too sick.

I began a process of retrospectively analyzing my experiences with citrus and trying to figure out why I got sick only sometimes. It became very clear to me - the more recent and intensively bred, the sicker I would likely get. (It wasn’t the anthocyanin related genes, as I had a long history of consuming blood oranges from an heirloom tree without many issues.) Old varieties were pretty gentle, new varieties not so much. I did more research and something fascinating emerged - ruby red grapefruit were the result of irradiation breeding, and cara cara oranges are a definite mutant (“the parentage is apparently uncertain enough to occasionally warrant the distinction of a mutation”) and may have been subject to irradiation and/or mutation breeding techniques either prior to or following discovery as the strain was refined. (Quite a lot of plant breeding is “black box” as there is no regulation of mutation breeding.)

Citrus: Possibly The Ideal Model for Exploring Mutations and Human Health

National geographic summarized the uniqueness of citrus very nicely. “Almost all citrus has the rare genetic combination of being sexually compatible and highly prone to mutation. Such traits allow their genes to mix, for thousands of years on their own, and eventually, at the hands of humans.” Basically, they interbreed and mutate like crazy naturally, and we take that even further by exposing the seeds to mutagenic chemicals and even radiation.

This makes them probably the absolutely most ideal model plant for studying the implications of plant mutations on human health. So much mutation, so much breeding, and a 40+ year history of commercially interesting irradiation and chemical mutation breeding strains. The trees are also very long lived and frequently cloned, so we can easily “time travel” to test varieties from the past. Best of all (or worst of all, depending on whether my hypothesis is right) is that citrus is widely consumed so this is a global experiment.

I am hypothesizing that random mutations in plants, potentially amplified through irradiation breeding and chemical mutation breeding, have a tendency to modify the proteins of the plants in ways that increase their inflammatory and irritating qualities. These negative qualities would tend to confer a survival disadvantage to the plant bearing them, so a natural equilibrium would tend to occur between the rate of these mutations occuring and them getting “ironed out” through mutations that reduce the inflammatory and irritating qualities of the involved proteins.

In citrus, the rate of mutation is very high, and amplified greatly artificially, then we bypass natural selection by cloning desirable plants and grow them in optimal agricultural situations that avoid the natural selection pressures that would quickly kill the plant in the wild - greenhouse or laboratory cloning, rootstock grafting, pesticides and fungicides, etc. (Interestingly, the most desirable of the ruby red grapefruit strains - something irradiation bred - fits the model of having poor survival rates perfectly.) This means that citrus should be an ideal example of how human breeding practices make it significantly more averse to human health.

And in my case… this seems to ring true. Do you think it is a coincidence that the first example of mutation breeding possibly having adverse consequences for human health that I would encounter also happens to probably be the single best example in the plant world? Maybe I’m building a model to fit the data, or maybe I’m using the data to derive the model.

My Biological Background

I am a healthy caucasian male. My genetic background is northern/eastern European. I never really considered myself to have food allergies until recent years when I got really intensive in exploring the subject, often resorting to extreme methods to test everything possible.

I’ve found I’m gluten intolerant (and really, to a very small extent, all grains), citrus sensitive, mango/cashew (urushiol) sensitive. I suspect that a double digit percentage of caucasians would find they are sensitive to all these things if they subjected themselves to the kind of rigorous testing I have. This makes me a pretty useful representative sample of someone who is probably not too far from average for a caucasian.

Applying The Model to Wheat and Beyond

I definitely have had a low level of wheat sensitivity my whole life, as near complete removal has yielded benefits for joint health I’ve never experienced in my life. But something has changed as I did not previously have issues with facial puffiness, and my family has had a similar uptick in a variety of different symptoms in recent years.

The first thing that comes to people’s mind is - well, it’s a GMO issue. False, there are no genetically modified strains of wheat in commercial use. Strangely enough, if I am correct in my hypothesis, it’s the market’s rejection of GMOs that is driving this problem. Mutation breeding is skyrocketing as plant breeders, mostly grain seed companies, seek to produce better and more resistant crops without the scary GMO label. Popular Science: “Irradiated Seeds Combat World's Most Serious Wheat Disease.” Chemical and radiation driven mutation breeding happens with no regulation, no oversight, no clear way to detect it in food, can be used with organic farming, and basically is the invisible and potentially dark force shaping our food system.

While early genetic engineering attempts were relatively crude and definitely did raise potential questions, new tools like CRISPR Cas9 and friends make hyper-specific gene editing possible and perfect edits will soon be possible if they are not already. Moreover, genetically engineered crops are subject to a strict regulatory and evaluation process which actually works, as evidenced by StarLink corn which was effectively rejected by the EPA because of a potential (yet never clearly demonstrated) allergenic property.

By contrast, mutation breeding, done at large scale as we are doing today, adds huge numbers of mutations that we cannot possibly begin to understand given current technology and all of this happens without even regulatory tracking! The crazy thing is that mutation breeders are finding ways to introduce things not previously imagined possible, like “non-GMO” herbicide resistance! I’d eat Roundup Ready crops any day over mutation bred herbicide resistant crops. One of them is tested, regulated and approved, making it a “known and tracked and labeled unknown” and the other is an “unknown untracked unlabeled unknown.”

Where To Go From Here

This whole subject goes way beyond my scope of expertise and passion. The problem is that it threw itself into my face and I felt like I had to write about it, especially in light of some mental health professionals reporting a huge uptick in issues that correlates nicely with this fall’s harvest hitting the food system. Honestly, I hope that I’m wrong about the safety of mutation breeding, because if I am right, we’re going to have to apply a ton more regulation and testing, the latter of which could really hurt small farmers and heirloom growers greatly. I hope some smart people out there are investigating this issue. A few people are starting to talk about this, interestingly highlighting citrus and wheat (I did not find this reference until the day I wrote this article, I swear my data and ideas developed independently.)

I also think a very probable outcome, if my hypothesis is proven correct, is going to be a lot more genetic engineering. We’ve been playing Russian Roulette genetically with breeding and we finally have the tools of a precision surgeon, and we are learning how to use and regulate them effectively and I like to believe that humanity can rise to the challenge to build better, healthier crops. Early surgery was very dangerous, but now we accept it when truly needed, I think genetic engineering is likely to go down that pathway.

In terms of my own pathway forward, I’m avoiding grains as much as I can and I see grain-free (not just gluten-free) as a key pillar of the new model for designing food that I am working on. I think the huge problems we are quite possibly creating in our plants also provide a good argument for increasing consumption of animal products, as they are fantastic natural detoxifiers and are much more complex organisms and do not lend themselves to mutation breeding techniques the way plants do.

I welcome comments, questions and honest, data-driven debate on my twitter feed. Please also check out my blog archive for other interesting posts by me.

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foodtechhacker-blog · 8 years ago

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Vegetable Oil: Past Performance Is Not Indicative Of Future Results

There’s a very common refrain among the more well informed doctors, researchers and people in the know: vegetable oils are one of the top sources of nutritional problems in the Western diet. Looking back at statistics and studies, this is remarkably accurate. But looking forward, there are a lot of reasons to believe this may not be the case and broadly demonizing or even just characterizing vegetable oils like many do today actually impairs the process of moving our society and food system towards healthier fats. Evolutionary Background on Vegetable Oils Historically, all the common “vegetable oils" - soy, corn, canola (rapeseed), sunflower, safflower - consisted overwhelmingly of polyunsaturated linoleic acid (omega-6) with relatively little monounsaturated oleic acid (omega-9) and negligible or zero polyunsaturated alpha linoleic acid (short chain omega-3.) The reason for this is simple. These crops were all bred from plants that are adapted to areas with cold winters. Polyunsaturated fats remain liquid even at relatively cold temperatures and when they do harden, they tend to more thicken rather than form large crystals like highly saturated fats such as coconut oil. This is important because the process of fat crystallizing can damage or destroy the viability of the seed by disrupting its internal structure. The degree of saturation of a fat approximates the melting point of the fat, and roughly speaking, fats with lower melting points tend to crystallize less when they do harden. (Yes, there are a lot of little exceptions but the overall trend is correct.) As a result, polyunsaturated fats have the lowest melting point and most oilseeds adapted to cold climates are very rich in polyunsaturated fats. Polyunsaturated fats are much more prone to oxidation than more saturated fats, but given the typical cool to cold winters the seeds are adapted to survive, this is not a problem as the seed remains quite cool and fats well preserved until germination. As a final consideration, the degree of saturation greatly affects the growth of the plant and seed. Coconut oil has a sharp melting point around 77 degrees and it rarely gets below 77 degrees where coconut grows. If the fat in an oilseed hardens every night during the growing season, it can disrupt the development process at night and even destroy the structure of the seed that is forming. Early Commercialization Efforts Early breeding efforts were focused on raising productivity of oil per acre. Issues with the instability of the oil were solved through hydrogenization. This tended to damage the oil some and create harmful transfers, but the end product was quite stable for frying and could even exhibit a melting point similar to saturated fats without the same degree or saturation. Trans-fats have been banned for some time in more progressive countries and the US is phasing them out. Modern Developments The rejection of transfats by the market and regulators combined with huge advancements in plant breeding have led to the development of high oleic (monounsaturated fats) strains of virtually every type of oilseed. They even have high oleic peanuts! Monounsaturated fats are much more stable for applications like frying but remain liquid in the traditional growing temperature range of oilseeds. The best strains of high oleic sunflower oil have higher levels of MUFAs and lower levels of PUFAs than olive oil! Many other high oleic vegetable oils achieve fatty acid profiles very similar to olive oil, and I do not think anybody can present compelling evidence that olive oil is not an extremely healthy fat. Varieties with new traits like high oleic oilseeds always fetch a premium on the market, as the seeds tend to be more expensive to obtain and often the earliest varieties incorporating a novel new trait have more demanding cultivation requirements or lower productivity. As varieties progress, these issues are typically overcome. The more demand in the market, the faster all these issues will be overcome. There are also efforts (with some varieties available today) to enhance the levels of omega-3s and saturates (particularly steric acid, named for “steer" - cattle - because beef is a leading source of this saturated fatty acid.) Although there will probably always be a role for tropical oils like coconut and palm for the richest levels of saturates, oilseeds are incredibly adaptable, have changed greatly in recent years and will continue to improve, driven by market forces. Where To Go From Here We have a huge infrastructure adapted to producing vegetable oilseeds cost effectively. We need to stop demonizing vegetable oils broadly because they are very adaptable. We need to talk about PUFA omega-6 as the problem, because that is the real issue here. If we focus on the real issue and push to change it, we can work inclusively with everyone from vegans to big food and agriculture companies towards positive changes. Vilifying vegetable oil wholesale pretty much shuts down dialog with some of the most passionate and most effective agents of change. We also badly need better nutrition labels. I'm slowly working towards a cohesive proposal on this front. Without better labels, we cannot create the market pressure needed to catalyze nutrional progress. (Right now, labeling PUFA content is optional, and things like sunflower oil can range from 80% PUFA to 80% MUFA, giving a single ingredient that is otherwise indiscernably identical a wide range of different health effects.) Please follow me on Twitter and direct comments there!

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foodtechhacker-blog · 8 years ago

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The Fossil Fuel Industry’s New Trick: Shifting Responsibility To The Food System

The fossil fuel industry has a long history of denying and downplaying climate change. This strategy is failing, because entire towns are falling into the ocean and it’s harder and harder to deny the effects of climate change.

Their latest strategy? Try and make everyone else compensate for their pollution.

At first we were talking about “carbon emissions” but that got refactored into “greenhouse gas” which sounds good but opens a huge can of worms and new numbers manipulation game.

The issue at hand is methane. Methane is produced by all sorts of biological processes, with wetlands, ruminant animals, and rice farming being some of the more interesting sources. Methane is highly potent as a greenhouse gas (much more so than CO2) but it naturally breaks down in the atmosphere by UV exposure in about 10 years after release.

By contrast, CO2, once released into the atmosphere, remains there until a plant finally absorbs it and converts it into sugar, cellulose, etc. That takes about 100 years, although that is only an estimate and if something catastrophic happens to the biosphere, that number could be much higher. UV light and time doesn’t break down CO2 in any useful way.

The common dialog likes to talk about “greenhouse gases” and it is common to try and compare the effects of animal husbandry and rice farming - which produce methane - to the emissions produced by vehicles. The problem is that there is no way to directly compare the warming effects of methane and CO2 unless you define a time span. If you pick a time span of say, 5 years, it looks like producing food is worse than driving cars. But if you pick a time span of say, 200 years, is is clear that driving cars is a far bigger problem. Moreover, if the biosphere collapses before plants absorb the CO2, it could be even worse. There’s a lot of long term effect and risk in CO2 that usually isn’t properly considered.

Most of the shock and awe statements that make food production seem like it is a huge problem use very short time frames when doing the comparison. Moreover, they miss two huge key points. First, methane levels in the atmosphere aren’t rising (they’ve been stable for roughly a decade now) while CO2 levels are steadily rising. Second, methane emissions are basically biological inefficiency (capturing methane is profitable), while carbon emissions are an inherent result of burning fossil fuels and CO2 has zero value and is costly to capture.

Sometimes there is talk of carbon emissions from the food system, but let me be clear, 87 percent of human caused carbon emissions come from burning fossil fuels. So don’t let the fossil fuel industry get us fixated on any minor carbon emissions from the food system.

The real problem is, and always has been, burning fossil fuels. We need to stop. Or we need to find a way to permanently capture and store the carbon. Everything else is just a distraction.

I would greatly like to see the press stop talking about the climate change effects of agriculture, at least not without pointing out that while it could be improved, it’s not getting worse, while CO2 is getting worse. And we have a lot more time to improve methane since our emissions are quickly (about 10 years) broken down, while CO2 is a multi-generation problem once released. I even feel like the food system is playing into the hands of the fossil fuel industry by using the term “greenhouse gas” and when they do talk about how the food system can improve, they need to be pointing out that methane levels are now stable and CO2 levels are not projected to stabilize anytime in our lifetimes.

We are a planet desperate for healthy, nourishing food. We need to focus more on human health and getting healthier food into the hands of more people, and less on how to get farmers to compensate for pollution created by burning fossil fuels.

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foodtechhacker-blog · 8 years ago

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Adventures in Nutrition: Antibiotics, Preservatives and the Microbiome, Part 1

Introduction

Coming from a nutritionally compromised state, I developed a severe ear infection, to the point that blood and mucus was steadily flowing out of one ear and intermittently out of the other ear. In the process of treatment, I was (partially due to medical error, partially due to bacterial resistance) given a series of highly powerful oral antibiotics with overlapping dose timelines targeting gram positive and gram negative bacteria. The result practically sterilized my digestive tract - and gave me profound insights on the role of the microbiome and health.

Immediate Results

Within a few days of starting the final antibiotic, my ear infection radically improved. However, my digestive health took a nosedive. The only thing I could tolerate without extreme nausea was raw or cultured organic dairy products. On a diet of those, my fecal mass closely resembled that of a very young infant. I could drink raw milk freely (homogenized or not) without nausea, while even just 8 ounces of pasteurized milk (even organic and grass fed) would cause a mild sense of nausea - the kind of “pressure nausea” that you get from eating something you are not digesting fast enough, as if you had consumed a lot of high fiber food or something.

I do not consider myself to be lactose or dairy intolerant. I have a northern/eastern European genetic background, with identified sensitivities to all grains, citrus, mango, and possibly chicken. I do not have a history of digestive issues and my sensitivities to said foods are primarily in terms of systemic inflammatory response. In general, I have a history of not having particularly intense digestive responses to a wide range of antibiotics.

What struck me, however, was how consuming anything with antibacterial effect would cause intense nausea in a matter of minutes. Anything containing benzoate, even pure cranberry juice, made me feel very ill. The effect would fade within a few hours. (I did not have any productions containing sorbate only to test at the time, but many but not all of the benzoate containing products did contain sorbates.) It was striking just how powerful this effect was - just a few ounces of soda, cranberry juice, or even just a teaspoon of certain sauces would yield a powerful sense of nausea in under 10 minutes.

Interestingly, I found that non-organic cultured dairy products would initially be well tolerated, but did not seem to digest as well - I would have a mild bloated sensation, a bit like consuming too much chitosan from shrimp - which would take 12-24 hours to clear, roughly equal to my fecal transit time.

Because I am not an idiot, I quickly realized that I had an incredibly unique opportunity here - I was literally experiencing a total microbiome reset. I sought out raw cow, goat and sheep milk from virtually every farm in the area, consuming from over 2 dozen sources over the next 2 weeks, in addition to numerous different cultured products and soft ripened cheeses.

Medium Term Results

After about 10 days following cessation of the final antibiotic, I was able to begin consuming non-cultured, non-raw dairy products and then meats and eggs. I basically added into my diet foods in a pattern somewhat similar to how you would approach introducing an infant to regular foods. Interesting, the changes and progression of my fecal output closely mirrored that of an infant as it is introduced regular foods.

I am glad that I like dairy products a lot and tolerate them well, because if that was not the case, this would have been quite a miserable experience for me.

Long Term Results

My extensive use of numerous types of raw and cultured (even raw & cultured) dairy products ended up bringing me to a whole new level of digestive health that I had never experienced before. I didn’t experience occasional gas the way I had previously. It seems that a near total sanitization of my digestive tract followed by extensive natural microbe exposure worked.

The more interesting long term consequence of my experience was cognitive. It felt like my brain was operating on a new hardware platform. If you’ve ever cloned your old computer operating system, applications and data onto new computer hardware, that’s the closest analogy I can provide for you. I’m starting to really buy into the idea of the mind-gut connection and the idea that most neurotransmitters are produced in the gut!

Conclusions

My experiences here suggested that the human body and microbiome might be sensitive to common food preservatives and antibiotic traces in our foods. Unfortunately, I was very sick when I experienced these effects, which is not a good time to test such things. In my next article, I will explore how I was later able to create a highly sensitive microbiome context without the risks associated with antibiotic use and then explore preservatives and antibiotic traces.

I believe that the medical industry needs to be much more careful with their use of antibiotics. Simply properly using best practices today would have avoided the use of both gram positive and gram negative targeting antibiotics and not given me a total digestive wipeout. I also think there’s huge value to favoring intramuscular injection of antibiotics. In my experience, they work extraordinarily well - often faster than oral antibiotics, eliminate patient compliance issues and almost always with reduce digestive side effects - but most doctors do not even know which are available and on-hand at their location and are not comfortable prescribing them as a first line treatment. All in all, better practices seem to hold the potential to improve patient outcomes and reduce the occurrence of antibiotic resistance. (It is interesting to note that antibiotic resistance in the microbiome seems to transfer to pathogenic bacteria through horizontal gene transfer, and it seems like we should study whether IM antibiotics reduces this phenomenon.)

Look for part 2 of this series soon - meanwhile, please follow me on Twitter and direct any questions or comments there. I value input, ideas, opinions and lively debate!

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foodtechhacker-blog · 8 years ago

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Life Is Addictive, And That's A Good Thing, So Let’s Embrace It!

I’ll admit it, I love dopamine. Frankly, pretty much all of us does. If you don’t, chances are you don’t like life very much, because dopamine is what drives us to live so much of our daily life. To reject dopamine is to reject pleasure, motivation and drive. In simple terms, dopamine is a huge part of what makes us want to live and do things, so in a very real sense, you could say that life is addictive, and given that we generally reject suicide societally, it’s probably reasonable to say life is addictive and that’s a good thing!

Consumers naturally prefer products and services that trigger the dopamine system in our brains, and given the nature of a relatively free market, companies are going keep producing products like this and the nature of competition favors products becoming more effective at stimulating the dopamine system over time. This leads to an interesting conclusion; because the products and services that we like the best tend to stimulate the dopamine system most, they can probably be said to be addictive. It’s nearly impossible to draw a clear line between an enjoyable product and an addictive product.

The fact that products and services stimulate dopamine should not be seen as a bad thing; dopamine quite literally is pleasure. The problem is when those products and services are detrimental to the consumer, usually in terms of health, socialization or finances. Tobacco ands sugary foods are fantastic examples of products with huge health harms. Games, especially single player, are a good example of social harm. Gambling is a good example of financial harm.

Puritanism and the numerous ideas stemming from it such as temperance and abstinence hold the promise of providing health benefits to their adherents. Unfortunately, history has shown that neither temperance nor abstinence are sustainably scalable to a large population. Interestingly, despite the numerous potential physical health harms of alcohol, science has shown that the net effect on death rates is not what you would expect and may even be slightly beneficial, because of how alcohol enables a particular social and cultural dynamic.

On the abstinence side of things, research has consistently shown that abstinence only sexual education leads to higher rates of STDs and pregnancy among teens as compared to promoting safer sex. In other words, promoting abstinence appears to cause an increase in the very things it was meant to prevent! Moreover, as we embrace safer sex as a society, we are seeing the market respond with solutions that provide increasing levels of protection from the potential harms while maximizing the pleasure. Examples range from better condoms to prevention of HIV infection through a single pill and vaccines are even in the works.

Much of our current strategy for food still looks like the brainchild of the Puritan movement and John Kellogg. Drink water instead of soda, eat more vegetables, don’t eat anything sweet and skip the salt. We’re basically telling people to make less pleasurable choices in a variety of ways for decades now. Despite the fact that we are having some success in terms of specific things like reducing soda consumption, our overall health isn’t improving. Diabetes, obesity, and metabolic syndrome are still skyrocketing, despite people drinking more boring water and unsalted vegetables.

When you stand back and squint at the patterns in our current food system and food guidelines, it starts to look a little like abstinence only sex education. Abstinence only sex education succeeds at getting teens to have less sex, but the side effects of sex are worsened. Less pleasure, more harm. And when you look at how we are eating, the pleasure is going down, yet the harm continues to rise. That’s pretty damn dystopic.

Abstinence only sex education has pretty much gone the way of the dodo, so why are we will still taking a similar approach to our food? Simply put, nobody has ever presented a reasonably plausible model for eating and nutrition that seeks to maximize pleasure while minimizing harms and setting us on a course for better health. But that’s about to change.

Over the coming months, I’m going to be presenting you a comprehensive model that I believe holds the potential to give consumers the pleasure they crave while reducing harms in a way that could really move the needle on public health. While I can’t empirically prove that is works, I will be presenting compelling logic with supportive research to strongly back the validity of this model. The culmination of my work will be some sort of new venture advancing this model in the marketplace - the best way to make an idea perpetuate itself in our world is through the marketplace - even though I am to make the core model as public and “open source” as possible and hope to see aspects of it adopted all over our food system.

So can we have our cake and eat it too? Just maybe. Stay tuned.

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foodtechhacker-blog · 8 years ago

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The Slippery Saturated Fat Story: Why Current FDA Regulations Make It Virtually Impossible To Make Informed Choices About Saturated Fat

You need to read this if your cholesterol ratios are not where you want them and you are eating very much fat in your diet. Saturated fat isn’t all created equally and the FDA’s food system makes it nearly impossible to make informed choices.

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"

- Hanlon's razor

Introduction

I’m writing about our food systems and presenting a mixture of data-driven points and conjecture. I write this because I want to be able to test/prove my conjecture as time unfolds and foster discussion. I invite you to engage with me on Twitter (I have direct messages on if needed) if you have thoughts, input, or corrections. I have not extensively cited my writing, but I will do so if people begin to make requests, however you can probably use Google Scholar and Sci-Hub about as well as I can, so I would invite you to look into these things yourself and see not just cherry picked studies but the whole body of research.

Saturated Fat Is A Broad Classification

Saturated fat is a rather broad classification many dozens of different individual saturated fatty acids. And each of these fatty acids is going to affect your cholesterol differently. Fatty acids like lauric acid tend to raise HDL much faster than LDL, whereas steric acid tends to lower LDL more and leave HDL relatively unchanged. (These are broad characterizations, I could write a long article analyzing the various fatty acids.) Basically, some saturated fatty acids are going to improve your lipid profile, and others will worsen it, and in varying ways.

The tricky thing with saturated fats is that they cannot be simply grouped like polyunsaturated fats. Omega-3 and omega-6 essential fatty acids have distinct profiles, and tend to break down pretty cleanly - omega-6, plant-based omega-3 (ALA), animal/algae-based omega-3 (EPA/DHA.) Although there are other omega-3s and other omega-6s, they do not occur in meaningful quantities in most foods. The problem with saturated fatty acids is that there are simply far more different fatty acids out there, and for some people, there is a heavy need to personalize your intake to optimize your blood lipid profile.

Saturated Fatty Acid Composition Is Highly Unpredictable

Native, unmodified fats have a non-trivial degree of variation in saturated fatty acid composition, although you can usually do a reasonable job estimating animal product saturated fatty acid composition by looking at the animal and whether it was grain or grass fed. Cow dairy is fairly predictable using this model, but goat and sheep breeds may vary somewhat more as their dairy breeds are not nearly as standardized as dairy cows. Interestingly, capric acid (a saturated fatty acid) is a significant component in goat dairy and is a major part of what gives goat dairy a distinctive “goaty” organoleptic profile.

Where things start to get a little tricky is with plant-based oils. Most oilseeds have undergone intensive breeding programs and their fatty acid content can vary radically. Most of the swing is on the poly/mono side, but recent programs have sought to manipulate saturates more and more. It gets really intense when you get into GMO oilseeds where companies like Cargill actually genetically customize entire oil crops for big customers like McDonald's. (I once saw a fantastic advertisement where Cargill promised they could develop custom crops for nearly any kind of soybean oil, including high stearic soybean oil!)

Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here - Oil Fractionation

Even with outright genetic engineering, we cannot get plants to produce fatty acids in the right ratios. Matching the texture of butter and cocoa butter are particularly difficult challenges. In order to match the physical melting and thermal stability requirements required in a given application, the food industry uses a process called fractionation. Using physical processes (such as controlled cooling and melting, separating out fat crystals at varying temperatures) it is possible to separate any type of oil into fractions which are rich in certain saturated fatty acids and relatively low in other saturated fatty acids.

This creates a situation similar to petroleum distillation, where you have highly valuable outputs and less valuable outputs. Industry will find a home for them all. Virtually all palm oil is fractionated, although it does not need to be declared on the label as such. If you’ve ever had a very cheap pre-packaged doughnut or honey bun type product and noticed it is waxy, that is because they use a cheap/undesirable* fraction of the palm oil that is heavily saturated and has a very high melting point.

The problem is that practically speaking, if you see palm oil on the label, you have absolutely no idea what the saturated fatty acids in the “saturated fat” and little hope of making a meaningfully accurate estimate without scientific experts or costly lab tests. Even when you see virgin coconut oil, it may be fractionated. (Have you ever seen liquid coconut oil? Ever wonder how they make it stay liquid? They fractionate out some of the saturated fats! And yes, I double-checked, they do sell “virgin” liquid coconut oil.)

* Just because something is cheap and has an undesirable sensory profile doesn’t mean it is bad for you, depending on what objective you have with your blood lipids.

An (Almost) Hopeless Mess

Unless you are eating fat from whole foods, you really can’t be sure it hasn’t been fractionated. That said, native coconut oil has a pretty distinctive texture that indicates it hasn’t been fractionated. Dairy fat is very difficult to fractionate for a variety of reasons I won’t go into here, and cocoa butter is generally considered prime already. But beyond that, between fractionation and extensive breeding, unless your oil has an actual breakdown on the label, it’s really tough to figure out what the saturated fatty acid composition of your food is - and that’s a huge problem for both individuals and researchers.

On the research side, unless you control your subject’s entire food intake (and do so using very extensive methods) you cannot have an accurate picture of your subject’s saturated fatty acid intake. This increases the cost of any dietary study by at least 2 orders of magnitude. If you do anything less than full control of food intake, you can have two researchers conduct exactly the same study protocol on similar populations and get radically different results. This is why, while there’s clearly data suggesting saturated fat can be protective, honest and well-meaning researchers can still produce studies showing a surprising amount of harm. (See quote at the top of this post!) Creating a truly and reliably replicable study that shows the potential safety of many types of saturated fat in the diet is going to be very expensive.

On the individual side, you can’t test everything you eat, so a restrictive, whole food/whole animal fat diet gives you a starting point for getting a handle on what you are actually eating. If you are trying to achieve a certain blood lipid profile, it is also worth looking into buying pure or mostly pure forms of various fatty acids which can be used as a supplement in food. Be aware, most fatty acids have a strong flavor in free fatty acid form, so it may be better to look for a palm fraction rich in the fatty acids you desire.

Where To Go From Here

It’s clear that the food system our FDA administers simply doesn’t give us the information we need to make good choices and this has contributed to millions of deaths and untold amounts of suffering. I’ve already covered the problems with sugar and carbohydrate labeling, and I’m starting to make inroads on explaining the issues on the fat front. I believe the solution is going to be a huge reform to our labeling laws, and I’ve been actively working to design a better food label system, including a way that companies could voluntarily implement it within the current legal framework.

In the future, I intend to establish some sort of business in the food and nutrition arena. (I don’t tolerate bullshit well enough to get anywhere in politics, so building a business is probably the best way I can change the world in a meaningful and self-perpetuating way.) Obviously, I’ve had some experience there before, but I’ve taken a complete step back from any specific economic interest in this field to literally question everything and establish a cohesive vision and moral framework so I can properly position my work to help lead our world towards a more perfect way of eating. Stay tuned!

Please follow me on Twitter and forward any comments or discussion there. I will readily correct factual errors and amend as needed.

#lchf #keto #cholesterol #hdl #ldl #coconutoil #fda

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foodtechhacker-blog · 8 years ago

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Adventures in Nutrition: Rabbit Starvation

Rabbit starvation is a very peculiar metabolic state that very few fully understand, but with all the zero-carb, carnivore-crazed folks on Twitter, this is something people need to understand and to my knowledge, there is no good write up anywhere online that can be translated to your way of eating.

Etymological Introduction

Rabbit starvation refers to a very unique state of malaise that occurs when one lives exclusively off rabbits, which are a very lean meat. However, it can be induced from a variety of other causes and anybody exploring all-meat diets should understand this issue. It is sometimes called protein poisoning, but I do not accept that term because simply adding fat to the diet without lowering protein intake alleviates the symptoms in many cases.

Biological and Nutritional Background

Rabbit starvation is caused by consuming too high a percentage of your calories from protein without being dramatically calorie deficit. It seems to have something to do with the body having a finite ability to process protein and when you exceed that, your whole body gets very out of whack. No matter how much protein you consume, even to the point of feeling physically like your stomach is going to explode, you never feel satiated, and this gnawing hunger grows within you. Generally, it eventually leads to extreme cravings for fat.

Strangely enough, the symptoms of rabbit starvation ease if you simply eat less of whatever you were eating that triggered it. As you ease off from the limits of your body’s ability to process protein, your body switches to burning its own body fat stores which alleviates most of the symptoms. This is why a very low calorie, high protein diet doesn’t cause rabbit starvation. Dietary supplements don’t seem have a dramatic effect one way or the other. Carbohydrates also cure rabbit starvation, though not quite as “nicely” (subjective experience speaking here) as fat probably because the body can easily use them to synthesize lipids.

Personal Experiences

I used to get multiple deer in a typical year, so during the appropriate season I would have a diet that consisted largely of exquisitely dry-aged, personally hand-butchered wild venison. I found I tended to be in some of the best health of my life when I was eating that meat in generous quantities. The problem was that I would always feel a little, well, off, right around the point where the meat was at its peak of dry aged goodness and I was eating as much as possible before I had to commit it to the freezer. I began researching the subject, and quickly found that what I was experiencing was mild rabbit starvation.

Since then, I’ve induced it on a controlled basis using chicken breast and a relatively uncontrolled basis using certain other lean game meats and lean seafood. (I have an extreme love for game and seafood, so given an unlimited supply I am known to push the limits of how much I can eat, often because the unlimited supply is best fresh.) It typically takes 3-4 days for clear symptoms to appear, though it can appear in as little as 2 days if glycogen stores are low and protein levels are very high and fat is negligible. The two characteristic symptoms are a kind of gnawing, hard to satiate hunger which evolves into an extreme craving for oil and fat. (In one controlled trial, I drank a cup of liquid safflower oil at the end - it was the strangest and most weirdly satisfying experience of my life.)

Interestingly, not all proteins are created equally. It seems very hard to induce rabbit starvation using whey protein isolate, and relatively easier using meat derived proteins. It may have to do with the amino acid profile varying with different amino acids being glucogenic, ketogenic, or varying based on biological conditions. When it comes to a meat only diet, I have found that when you drop below around 7% of the meat weight being fat, you get into the range that can induce rabbit starvation, and there are a good number of cuts available at the typical store that fall into that range.

Basically, if you are eating quite a lot of meat every day, and it’s pretty lean, and you somehow don’t feel right, stop and make sure you are getting enough fat. Or if your goal is weight loss, cut back the total amount of meat you are taking in. Either can alleviate rabbit starvation. I suspect that a number of people experimenting with meat-based diets have had mild signs of rabbit starvation and ceased the regimen due to a hard-to-identify dysphoria that is mild rabbit starvation.

Please follow me on Twitter and direct any questions there! This article isn’t meant to be the last word, I am always open to correcting and ammending!

#protein #meatheals #bodybuildings #paleo #lowcarb #carnivore

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foodtechhacker-blog · 8 years ago

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Why “Sugar Free” and “No Sugar Added” May Be the Two Deadliest Terms Approved by the FDA

It’s nearly impossible to have a real and effective debate about sugar, carbohydrates, metabolic syndrome and modern food because the FDA has regulated the terms used on food products, effectively shaping our language and cutting off effective communication about important and highly complex issues. The FDA’s regulation of terminology has also had the effect of promoting high-glycemic ingredients while impairing the sales of healthful non-glycemic sweeteners. In order to make real progress on the largest addressable public health crisis since tobacco, we are going to need to develop new language, nutrition labels, and much more. “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” -George Santayana

Sugar Is A Nutritionally Meaningless Term

There is no such thing as sugar. There are only sugars. What I mean is that sugar doesn’t refer to a single molecule, it refers to a wide range of different molecules with certain chemical (but not biological or nutritional) similarities. Some sugars are very harmful to health, while others are actually quite beneficial.

Glucose has a high glycemic index so it quickly raises blood sugar levels, while fructose has a low glycemic index but raises triglycerides and promotes insulin resistance. Neither are particularly healthful. There are also countless simple carbohydrates that aren’t quite starch but aren’t quite sugar and can be present in corn syrup. Nutritionally, they are equivalent to glucose yet they aren’t considered sugars by the FDA. All of these are examples of what are basically bad sugars. (There’s a lot more I could write here, but this is enough for this article.)

There are also good sugars. A prime example is tagatose. The body has almost no ability to convert tagatose into glucose, so it has essentially zero impact on blood sugar, but because it is still a sugar, it has several fascinating metabolic effects. Because most of it remains in the digestive tract, it slows the activity of sucrase and amylase enzymes (they attempt to bind to tagatose, making fewer of them available to break down sugar and starch) thus lowering the glycemic index of sucrose and starch rich foods. The bulk of tagatose goes unabsorbed in the intestine and acts as a prebiotic. The small amount of tagatose absorbed by the body enters the fructose metabolism pathway and basically jams it up, helping to reduce insulin resistance and triglycerides. Basically, tagatose is the anti-sugar, anti-starch, anti-fructose sugar. It’s definitely a good sugar.

There are also more neutral sugars. For example, alluose is a sugar, yet it is basically non-glycemic because it is absorbed and then peed out largely unchanged. It hasn’t been researched nearly as much as tagatose and I haven’t read every last piece of research, but in effect, it is basically a neutral sugar, not adding calories or much of anything to the body.

I’ve evaluated a wide range of novel and rare sugars and I can tell you that there are many more which have properties similar to tagatose and alluose. The primary issue is identifying an efficient way to manufacture them and then investing into the facilities at scale to get the cost down. Improvements in biotechnology (mostly involving enzyme production by genetically engineered bacteria, nothing that leaves the lab or ends up in the product) are making it a lot easier to find ways to enzymatically produce these ingredients using a process similar to that used to product high fructose corn syrup. (Continuous flow immobilized enzyme bed reactor process.)

The Term Sugar Free Promotes High Glycemic Ingredients while Impairing Low Glycemic Alternatives

There are a lot of virtually non-glycemic ingredients available that make fantastic alternatives for sugar in a wide range of foods. The problem is that most of these are difficult or impossible to use in foods that have the sugar free label. If more than 0.5 g of sugar (including allulose, tagatose, or traces of sugar from other ingredients) is present you can’t call it sugar free. This is impractical while using any meaningful amount of tagatose, allulose, and many prebiotic fibers like inulin, FOS, and polydextrose contain trace sugars.

On the other hand, ingredients like maltitol, polyglycitol syrup, and hydrogenated starch hydrolysates (“maltitol et al”) are basically corn syrup that’s been modified so it’s not technically sugar, yet has most of the functional and sensory characteristics. Unfortunately, they are all relatively high in calories and glycemic impact. In many people, maltitol can even exhibit a higher glycemic response than sucrose, as maltitol is a sugar alcohol with two glucose molecules, whereas sucrose is a sugar with one fructose and glucose molecule.

It gets even worse, maltitol et al has a high degree of variability from person to person how they are metabolized. This creates a very harmful case of averse self-selection among consumers. The consumers that do not metabolize maltitol et al are the ones that benefit from it nutritionally - it has little impact on blood sugar. Unfortunately, failure to metabolize it means it has a powerful laxative effect, so those consumers quickly learn to avoid those products. By contrast, consumers who do metabolize maltitol et al effectively have no digestive issues, but they also get almost no nutritional benefit from it as compared to simply consuming conventionally sweetened products.

I don’t really know how else to describe maltitol et al except as insidiously evil. It looks like it might be nutritionally useful because of the FDA’s labeling regimen, then glycemic index, calorie and glycemic load studies say “well, so so, maybe it is half as bad” then when you understand how it basically gets eaten only by the portion of consumers it doesn’t help, you realize maltitol et al basically should not be used in food, yet it is, and the FDA’s rules effectively promote it over healthier options like tagatose, allulose, etc.

“No Sugar Added” Is Another Vortex of Problems

If you add any amount of even beneficial sugars like tagatose, you can’t use the term “no sugar added” yet you can add an unlimited amount of crystallized grape juice or apple juice concentrate, both of which are basically pure sucrose/glucose/fructose blends. This makes absolutely no nutritional sense and raises the product cost, hurting consumers by making them pay more for a product that is not meaningfully more healthy.

I would strongly suggest you read my write-up on Corn Syrup 2.0 to better understand how the FDA’s support of terms like “no sugar added” and our fear of corn syrup and sugar have created a whole wave of new ingredients that are no healthier, but sound better, and often generate larger profit margins for the companies involved. Unfortunately, companies like Whole Foods have, though intentional ignorance, have been complicit in effectively promoting Corn Syrup 2.0 products. Watch for a write-up on the concept of intentional ignorance as one of the most harmful themes in modern business and governance, and a direct debunking of John Mackey/Whole Food’s plant-based whole foods diet.

The Danger of Healthy Sounding Labels, Worsened by B.S. Labels

It is well-documented that simply implying that something is healthier to consumers causes them to consume more of the product than if it were conventionally positioned. This makes it hard for healthy products to really provide a significant advantage to the consumer, unless the product is dramatically healthier than the traditional version.

Combine this with the fact that label terms like “sugar free” and “no sugar added” are bullshit* labels, and you quickly see how products with these terms are probably causing a lot of consumers to eat a nutritionally worse diet. And as usual, these terms appeal most to people who are in the poorest of health, making them doubly evil by effectively preying on the weakest among us.

* I am not one to use coarse language in scientific debate, but sometimes the word bullshit is the only useful word. There are no other good words in our English language to refer to a collection or group of things that are mostly functionally false or untrue, yet cannot wholly be claimed to be false. Thanks to Pen and Teller for inspiring my use of this language, quoting Wikipedia on the subject:

At the beginning of the first episode of the first season Penn points out that the series will contain more obscenity and profanity than one would expect in a series dealing with scientific and critical inquiry, but explained that this was a legal tactic because, "if one calls people liars and quacks one can be sued... but 'assholes' is pretty safe. If we said it was all scams we could also be in trouble, but 'bullshit,' oddly, is safe. So forgive all the 'bullshit language', but we're trying to talk about the truth without spending the rest of our lives in court."

Where to Go From Here: Rethinking Our Language and Labels

We are going to need to take a fresh approach to the words we use when we are talking about sugar, carbohydrates and healthier alternatives. We probably also need to take a new approach to how our products are labeled, because the current labels are simply unable to communicate what consumers need to know.

I am in the process of writing a follow-up article that explores better terms and how we could even begin to implement these without regulatory changes. Readers can only digest so much per article, and frankly, this kind of writing represents many, many hours per article because you need to very carefully choose your words to accurately characteristic incredibly large, complex and powerfully maligned systems. Even with all the time I spend, I’m sure my writing contains various errors and I invite you to contact me if you feel anything needs corrections. Please follow me on Twitter and direct any comments there.

#sugarfree #fructose #lchf #keto #diabetes

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foodtechhacker-blog · 8 years ago

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Adventures in Nutrition: The Unexpected Problems and Dangers of Plant Foods

We are surprisingly ineffective at digesting many plant-based foods, causing their nutritional value to be overstated and if we could fully digest them, our definition of what is edible may have to change.

Breaking a Biological Barrier Better than Evolution

The quest to break down cellulose in foods in a controlled way has fascinated me for over a decade now. My early attempts in this area had limited success and resulted in a early morning raid of my home by a narcotics task force. (No narcotics were found nor were there any charges pressed, but that is a story for another blog post.) Suffice to say, cellulose is an incredibly robust molecule and the techniques involved in breaking it down are pretty extreme.

Even with billions of years of evolution, nature hasn’t been able to find a way to readily break down cellulose, and I wanted to solve the problem in what is comparatively the blink of an eye. And being the compulsive experimenter that I was, I soon would find a way to break down cellulose, and this time without attracting the attention of the police! Unfortunately, it would end up making a number of people rather sick in totally unexpected ways.

My focus turned to physical approaches to attack cellulose, as enzymes required a relatively narrow and low pH range to be efficient, often low enough to damage other organic compounds in the food. Acid based approaches destroyed all the other organic compounds. So physical was definitely the best route, and it seemed like a blender would be the way. My target model was trying to make a perfectly smooth wild blueberry smoothie, because most blenders didn’t come close and it was obvious in the restroom there was a lot of antioxidants going unabsorbed from typical blenders.

After extensive testing and side by side (and a lot of product returns) I settled on the Cleanblend as the most powerful blender available for general purpose smoothie-type blending applications. Honestly, I feel this blender is really only on the edge of unlocking the world of plants for our digestion. Starting with deeply frozen berries, I would usually have to run it to the point of them being fully melted and even slightly warm from the mere friction of the very sharp stainless steel Japanese blades. Sometimes, even that was not enough, and I would freeze the smoothie into ice cubes and repeat, or I would let it keep going, even as the friction would heat the slurry to a rolling boil with steam gushing out.

Although it was a struggle, I was able to cross a barrier that had been pretty much out of reach previously. I was able to actually rip apart celluose and lignans to a useful degree, breaking down plant structures so that we could fully absorb their constituents. Moreover, because I did this through physical action, and in many cases without significant heat, it would largely leave all the other complex organic compounds intact and fully available to the human body. And the end result would be totally smooth, so one could consume even things goats might not like very much, such as blackberry vines.

Basically, I succeeded in augmenting the human digestive system so that it could access pretty much everything in plant based foods.

The Good

Fully unlocking berries for digestion has been an almost universal win. Combined with non-glycemic sweeteners, a powerful blender makes wild blueberries and cranberries a truly delicious smoothie drink. The blender would reduce the seeds and skins down completely, yielding a smoothie that has a texture more like a peach or mango smoothie. The high levels of mostly water soluble antioxidants were quickly and easily absorbed, and the smoothie would provide a distinct energizing effect almost like a cup of coffee.

Overall, experiments using berries came out universally favorably. Generally speaking, the more you would blend, the better it would taste, the better you would absorb it, and the better you would feel. The distinctively stimulating levels of antioxidants was really unexpected and visual fecal monitoring verified that virtually all of the anthocyanin antioxidants were being absorbed. I also loved the effects on acai puree, paired with wild blueberries I could actually create a smoothie that could keep me awake at night if consumed too close to dinner, simply from so many antioxidants.

Many vegetables also responded well to blending. Most antioxidant rich solanaceae “vegetables” (tomatoes, peppers, etc.) were extremely delicious blended down and definitely seemed to be a bit more energizing when eaten. Squash were pleasant tasting, but did not exhibit any apparent digestive or nutrition absorption alterations. Onions were very nice too. Celery was unremarkable but added a pleasant mild taste. Typically, I woulds make a hot soup with vegetables, although cold V8 style drinks were quite nice too.

Some unexpected greens turned out to be very nice in savory soup applications, such as onion greens and blackberry vines. Blackberry vines, if pre-blended, actually had a slight berry note and mild flavor and made a nice addition to cold fruit smoothies. They seemed to have something beneficial as the smoothies seemed more satisfying, complete and energizing.

The Weird and Bad

Using a blender to extend the digestive tract demonstrated that we are not very effective at absorbing a lot of nutrients. For example, I can eat dried goji berries until my stomach is physically full without any upset. It’s clear that I’m missing a lot of the lycopene by the effect on fecal coloration. But in a smoothie form, there is much less fecal color effect, yet I can only handle a few ounces dried goji in a sitting - any more and I get a characteristic “mineral upset stomach” effect. This suggests that despite the high levels of minerals and antioxidants in gojis are, we can only absorb a relatively small fraction of them without the assistance of a blender.

The whole brassica family is rich in indigestible sugars, encased in plant cellulose. Also encased in the plant cellulose is their purportedly beneficial compounds. Blending definitely did an incredible job at releasing the indigestible sugars, causing gas to a degree I had never experienced before from modest servings of said vegetables. This suggests that typical ways of eating brassicas fail to give us access to most of their beneficial compounds.

Now, most of this stuff - we suck at absorbing nutrition from a lot of the best “superfoods” out there - won’t come as a surprise to people who have studied our evolution and physiology. What may come to a surprise is just that some food we eat can be downright dangerous if we fully digest it. The best example is the common mango.

I started making these amazing mango smoothies. Everyone loved them. They were buttery smooth, made with fully peeled frozen organic mango pieces. Then people started breaking out in rashes. I even developed mild rashes. One person got severe rashes and itching, to the point it made it nearly impossible for him to sleep and he sought extensive medical evaluation at Stanford. It took over 4 months to fully clear up. Nobody would believe me it was my smoothies, as many had eaten huge amounts of mangos at various times in their lives, but I’m absolutely convinced it was in fact my smoothies.

Mangos are related to poison oak and poison ivy and contain urushiol. Generally, the levels in the fruit are considered negligible, but I’ve never seen an analysis. All I know is that once I began blending the fruit down like crazy, people started getting rashes. And the rashes went away after I eliminated my mango smoothies, even though they protested. The rashes also responded to treatment protocols for urushiol-related autoimmune skin reactions.

I also had some interesting experiences blending citrus - I had a severe bloating and gained over 20 pounds of water weight temporarily, when I had never exhibited a significant allergy prior. What was different? I blended the peeled fruit whole super extensively.

After the mango and citrus incidents, I pretty much decided it was time to stop blending new plant-based foods, especially fruit. Even seemingly common foods seem to hide harmful compounds. I shudder to think what might have happened if I started blending grains…

Where To Go From Here

Most of our nutritional assumptions about the nutritional value of plants are probably significantly overstated, as they rely on absolute chemical analysis and do not factor in absorption which is clearly relatively poor. I also believe that many plant-based foods harbor allergenic / inflammatory compounds that are not sufficiently recognized but probably contribute to health harms over the long term similar to gluten’s inflammatory effects.

More research is clearly required here, but I have no idea who would fund this kind of thing. There is no “anti-fruit” lobby. There is no specific industry that stands to benefit from reduced fruit consumption. These are hard questions with uncomfortable answers for the status quo.

Direct comments and discussion to my Twitter.

#plantbased #cleanblend #blender #adventuresinnutrition

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foodtechhacker-blog · 8 years ago

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Adventures In Nutrition: Intentionally Overdosing Myself on Omega-3s

I have a unique quality of taking things to a whole new level when I’m trying to answer a question or solve a problem, and people seem to always underestimate what I’m willing and able to do. It’s had some pretty fascinating results that I’ll be writing about over the coming months in my Adventures in Nutrition series of blog posts. Today, by popular Twitter request, I’m going to be exploring the experience of overdosing on omega-3s.

Biofeedback Basics

I’ve always had a unique ability to extract patterns from my own personal biological experiences. For example, when I was younger, what got me interested in dietary supplements was when I noticed an interesting effect where my skin quality (particularly pimples) seemed to be improved when I had increased sunlight exposure, particularly in the summer (very pronounced in the Northwestern United States where I grew up) and I noticed that this effect occurred even on parts of my body that were never exposed to the sunlight. I quickly realized this must have been from vitamin D synthesis occurring. I began taking vitamin D3 supplements at a healthy dose and found I got most of the benefit year around without sunlight exposure.

From there, my desire to closely at my own body and its responses to refine my understanding of diet, nutrition and biochemistry has exploded. Over the years, I developed a wide range of different techniques to be able to see ever finer biochemical details. I’m not immune to placebo effect, but I definitely am pretty good at canceling out noise like that over time through a variety of techniques. I’ll be be covering these concepts in more depth soon.

A Deep Curiosity in Omega-3s

I attended The Evergreen State College, an extremely progressive liberal arts school that had a huge focus on interdisciplinary study. The school is architected in such a way that everyone is pretty much forced to take full time programs each quarter - a single interdisciplinary program co-taught by approximately 3 faculty in rather different areas of focus with a single theme. Students are then encouraged to take a deep dive into a subset of the larger program theme, culminating in an end-of-quarter project or paper much like a mini-thesis. When I was in the program “The Science of Fat” my focus was omega-3s.

My work familiarized me with some pretty shocking realities - how our omega-3/6 ratios have radically skewed over the past few hundred years, primarily due to the wide scale cultivation of “vegetable” oils in northern climates. I quickly began to think about the n-3/n-6 ratio as being far more important than the exact amount of n-3 in the diet. I learned about the hugely therapeutic potential of omega-3s, especially for autoimmune and inflammatory issues, such as rheumatoid arthritis. I learned about the difficulties mammals have in synthesizing long chain n-3s from short chain ALA, and the issues in getting plants to synthesize long chain n-3s.

Since then, I’ve applied this learning extensively and seen remarkable benefits to human health by deploying high doses of omega-3s in people’s diets. One of the most remarkable examples was the complete reversal of rheumatoid arthritis in my mom, when she began consuming hot flax meal for 2 of her 3 meals per day. Her experienced chiropractor had never seen anything like this in over 20 years of practice. I also tested high doses of chia and flax oils* in myself and found there wasn’t really any discernable way to significantly overdose on omega-3s simply because they have a top ratio around 4:1 n-3/n-6. (I would say there are slight negative effects after a while from that, but they aren’t significant.)

*At the time I had access to drums of flavorless, odorless flax and chia oils, making it relatively easy to replace virtually all the fat in my diet with those oils.

Overdosing on Long Chain Omega-3s

Naturally, being hypercurious, I decided that I needed to embark on a new test to explore the limits of omega-3. I decided to use fish-based oils this time, as it provides exclusively long chain omega-3s, and has almost incredibly low levels of n-6. (I hesitate to state the ratios because variance in methods and source seafood, but they are something in the range of 10:1 to 20:1 n-3/n-6 - roughly a complete inversion of the typical American diet.)

Because I absolutely love seafood*, I decided I would simply eat as much low-mercury, high-fat** seafood as possible until I achieved an overdose. This took roughly a month of eating mostly the highest fat canned fish as my primary caloric source, red salmon (49 g fish oil per ~15 oz can) and chub mackerel, including drinking all the fish oil in the water broth in the can. (I did eat a variety of other seafood, especially shrimp, for variety. The key was all wild whole seafood.) Canned seafood includes the skin and does not lose any of the oil during processing, making canned red salmon significantly higher in omega-3s than skinned fillets. (It also retains the bones, providing other valuable minerals in much higher quantities.)

* If you would like to kill me, just give me an endless supply of highly marbled swordfish steaks. I would probably eat that for every single meal until I died of mercury poisoning or went completely insane. (This assumes I’m not already completely insane!)

** When it comes to seafood, except for marine mammals, it is very hard to find anything with the majority of calories from fat. If anybody could provide me with a safe source of high-fat marine mammal meat, I would gladly repeat this experiment. Unfortunately, I am not a Native American and thus the US Marine Mammal Protection act largely makes this impossible.

It took roughly a month to achieve a clear overdose. I generally felt very good, improving health overall, for the first two weeks. It leveled off after that. Around 3 weeks, I noticed that foods seemed to taste more bitter, especially potassium rich foods and I felt a little bit off from my peak, but not too much. In some ways, it felt a little like when you take a high dose NSAID for a long time, you don’t feel bad necessarily, but you can kind of feel that your body is just a little bit off from its normal homeostasis with maybe a touch of dysphoria. I also began to have this bizarre intense craving for foods rich in oleic acid, which is something I’ve had never experienced prior or since.

Around the 1 month mark, I was out for an extended mountain bike ride and had a big fish lunch packed. I stopped to eat it, and kept riding for another hour or two, then stopped and had a drink of a beverage sweetened using high intensity sweeteners including acesulfame potassium. It was so potently bitter. Given that I’ve filed a patent in the arena of sugar replacement, I’ve tasted this ingredient and blend a hell of a lot of different times and it never tasted like this to me. It was like a light began flashing in my head - what in the world caused this? The effect was so pronounced, even years later, I can see the exact spot deep in the hills of southwest Washington where I was when I had this experience.

I went home and decided to experiment around. I tried different beverages and foods and it was clear that somehow I had massively amplified my sensitivity to potassium bitterness. I surmised it was the first clear and overt sign of serious omega-3 overdose. Over the next week I experimented around, and I found I was on some sort of nonlinear biological line, and I could inch myself one way or the other with a relatively small dose of omega-3 or omega-6. I consumed soybean oil rich mayonnaise to back off my ratios, and used molecularly distilled fish oil to push myself back across the line. (Using molecularly distilled fish oil allowed me to be sure it wasn’t some other nutrient or impurity in the fish oil responsible for the effect.) It took maybe 10-15 g of either and 12-24 hours to go back and forth across this discrete nonlinear line to potassium sensitivity.

I later conducted a fair amount of research into this subject and found a lot of studies that linked omega-3 long chain fatty acids to various potassium ion channel systems in the body and it makes a good amount of sense what I experienced. I really would need to invest some serious time to fully understand all the mechanisms inside the body here and am hesitant to cite research that I really do not fully understand. However, for the curious, searching on Google Scholar and using Sci-Hub to get any papers not readily available as free fulltext will yield a lot of interesting and very dense reading. If anybody wants to provide further understanding on this front, I will gladly update this post.

Conclusions

It is exceptionally hard to overdose on omega-3 fatty acids and basically saying “as much as possible” is probably not an unreasonable suggestion for most people in the real world, especially given the huge bodies of research showing benefits for heart, brain, autoimmune, triglycerides, some forms of cancer and much more.

The narrower range of biological effects of ALA and lack of sources extremely high in ALA but with negligible n-6 makes it largely impossible for most people to overdose on plant source omega-3s, even on extreme diets as followed by my mom to reverse RA. Interestingly, because of the slightly lower molecular weight of ALA compared to long chain forms, the lower cost of plant based sources, and the ability to produce completely odorless, flavorless forms of flax and chia oils at affordable prices makes it an interesting therapeutic target for autoimmune and inflammatory issues, but it largely lacks the heart and brain health benefits as these organs appear to use long chain n-3s functionally and structurally.

The ability to overdose on long chain n-3s from whole seafood sources is interesting and actually surprised me. I did not expect dramatic effects like the altered taste. I was mostly expecting something like an upset stomach or overall feeling of being unwell, but any dysphoric sensation was incredibly limited. I would like to study this further in the context of native Alaskan/Inuit diets. It seems that some of their diets might sometimes get enough long chain n-3s to induce the potassium ion issue I experienced, but my best guess is that their marine mammal fat sources may have saved them.

That said, it is exceptionally hard to imagine one overdosing on fish oil from supplements - I consumed around 100 g a day of fish oil on this regimen, and even if we distilled pure n-3 and gave people 1000 mg per softgel, that would be around 30 soft gels per day, which is pretty hard to imagine. Additionally, that would be additive to a normal diet, whereas I replaced virtually all oils with fish oil, so it would take even more soft gels to overdose on fish oil. I strongly feel that a whole diet approach needs to be taken to get enough n-3.

Further Discussion

I was surprised when a number of people expressed interest in reading about my experiences with omega-3 overdosing, so I’m not really sure how much depth is of interest here. I can sketch approximated curves of experiences, do more calculations of my intake, and provide more detailed accounts of the experiential component if people are interested. Reach out to me on Twitter with questions or further discussion of this subject!

#omega3 #salmon #sockeye salmon #fishoil #omega3s #AdventuresInNutrition

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foodtechhacker-blog · 8 years ago

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Corn Syrup 2.0

Customers have been conditioned to avoid corn syrup, especially high fructose corn syrup, like the plague. But the food industry has largely responded by replacing corn syrup with a plethora of substitutes that can only really fairly be referred to as Corn Syrup 2.0. Keep reading for a deeper understanding of corn syrup, sugar, and better possible futures.

What is Corn Syrup and Why Do Food Companies Love It?

There is the obvious - it’s cheap, and it’s a liquid, so it can be instantly mixed into any sort of dough, batter, liquid, or spread - no need to worry about whether it is fully dissolved as you would with sugar. But to fully understand corn syrup, you need to understand how it is made and how it actually functions in the foods produced by agribusiness.

Corn syrup really isn’t just one ingredient, it’s a wide range of ingredients with varying sensory and functional characteristics. Consumers only know of two types of corn syrup - plain “corn syrup” and then “high fructose corn syrup.” But each of these types of corn syrup come in a wide variety of grades, with important differences.

Pure, native, unmodified corn starch is simply a bunch of glucose molecules linked together and looks like a white powder when dry - basically the stuff you find at the store in yellow boxes. To transform corn starch into corn syrup, food processors use amylase enzymes to break the starch glucose molecules apart, so that instead of an insoluble powder, you have a thick syrup. If you break the starch apart fully, you get pure glucose syrup, which is a sweet, sugary syrup. But it is possible to also not quite break it down all the way, which produces a syrup that can have very little sweetness.

This magic ability to lower the sweetness of the syrup while still having a sugary texture makes it possible for corn syrup to be used to replace fat in baked goods, ice cream and other products, while raising the carbohydrate levels. It’s basically an invisible, super easy to use and super cheap source of carbs. And while these less sweet corn syrups aren’t technically or legally pure sugar, they are so easily broken apart by our stomach acid and digestive enzymes that they are basically the nutritional equivalent of sugar. Companies love this since their sugar levels on the nutrition label stay modest, and calories and cost both decrease compared to the full fat version, fitting the FDA’s model of “ideal nutrition” perfectly.

The issue with corn syrup is that even when corn starch is fully broken down into glucose, the resulting syrup isn’t a very good replacement for sucrose. Glucose produces a more dull sweetness that doesn’t bring out flavors (especially fruity flavors) very well as compared to sucrose, and as you add more glucose, the dullness of the sweetness becomes more pronounced and a slight harshness emerges, so it’s hard to replace sucrose with with glucose syrup in anything that requires a lot of sweetness.

In order to turn corn syrup into something that can really replace sugar, it is necessary to take it through a next stage of processing by exposing the glucose (corn) syrup to an enzyme called fructose isomerase. This converts a portion of the glucose into fructose, which is much sweeter than sucrose and solves the problem with pure glucose having a kind of dull, lackluster sweetness, making it a viable replacement for sugar.

Creating Corn Syrup 2.0

The key ingredient for corn syrup is corn starch. But there countless other sources of starch available in our food system, and the same basic process can be applied, and the results will be functionally and nutritionally identical. Ever seen “brown rice syrup” or “tapioca syrup” in a product? These are perfect examples of the corn syrup model being applied with different starting starch ingredients. There’s no reason an even wider range of starch sources couldn’t be used, including potatoes, peas, and other “healthy” sounding things.

Moreover, it is my understanding that the FDA does not require any declaration whether the syrup is high in fructose, so these syrups could in theory be high in fructose, and there is no way to tell. I am not able to speak to this matter beyond stating that to my knowledge there is no regulation against using a fructose isomerase enzyme process without declaration provided that it isn’t corn syrup being processed. If anybody can provide hard evidence as to the legality or real world implementation of this matter, I will update this article.

That said, there are plenty of ways to get fructose into your product. For example, agave syrup is up to 90% fructose, and most fruit juice concentrates are rich in fructose. They even have crystallized grape juice into basically pure fructose. So, now you can replace “high fructose corn syrup” on the label with what appears to be “whole grain” (brown rice syrup) and fruit (“apple and grape juice concentrate”) without actually making the product any healthier! Thank you, agricultural industrial complex!

What About Good Old Sugar: Sucrose vs. Corn Syrup

There are a lot of myths around the health of corn syrup vs. sugar and why companies have taken to using corn syrup so widely. Interestingly, as a raw ingredient, sugar actually is cheaper than corn syrup. But a whole bunch of factors make corn syrup the ingredient of choice for companies, especially here in the United States of Diabetes.

Functionally, corn syrup has a lot of benefits compared to sugar. You can’t use sugar to replace fat like you can corn syrup - the result would be disgustingly sweet. Corn syrup can also be tuned to increase or decrease the browning properties of baked goods and many other subtle characteristics, at little to no cost. Also, the fact that corn syrup is already dissolved into a liquid greatly simplifies large scale manufacturing, especially for beverage makers. Overall, it can be tuned as needed and is cheap and easy to use.

The issue of high fructose corn syrup vs. sucrose is especially interesting. Sucrose is a disaccharide, which means that it is a molecule of fructose and glucose are linked together. High fructose corn syrup contains a roughly 50/50 blend of glucose and fructose which approximates the same sweetness as sucrose. However, because there are twice as many molecular particles of sugar in the food, it does a better job inhibiting bacterial growth, retaining moisture, and preventing ice crystallization as compared to sugar. (Slurpees pretty much don’t work when made with sucrose.) The downside is that this tends to have a harsher, less smooth sensory profile as compared to the same product sweetened with sugar. Additionally, the US government imposes a high import tariff on sugar which makes HFCS slightly less expensive than sugar, providing another incentive for use.

All around, most people do find that sugar really does taste better than HFCS, but most of the fears that HFCS is somehow worse for you than sugar are relatively unfounded - or based on studies that are poorly setup and not very useful in the real world. A huge portion of the question around HFCS revolves around what HFCS you use - “high fructose” simply means that the corn syrup contains some level of fructose, as fructose isn’t present in regular corn syrup. Commercially, HFCS can be up to approximately 90% fructose, but most is around 50% fructose.

By contrast, sucrose is 50/50 glucose/fructose. Dr. Robert Lustig has done a really good job at driving home the dangers of fructose, so it’s pretty easy to see how you can make HFCS look better or worse by simply selecting a grade that is higher or lower in fructose. It’s like a dial - do you want the study to make HFCS look better or worse? Aside from in the paper itself, I’ve virtually never heard it spoken of in nutritional debate the fact HFCS comes in many fructose levels.

In the real world, economics dictate that virtually all high fructose corn syrup is somewhere around 50% fructose. Glucose syrup isn’t sweet enough to be cost competitive with sugar, but glucose isomerase has limited effectiveness converting glucose to fructose (as is inherent to any isomerase enzyme) and concentrating the fructose levels through fractionation gets expensive as you push to higher levels. So the sweet spot economically is right around 50%. (For the technically curious, HFCS-42 - 42% fructose - and HFCS-55 - 55% fructose - are most common commercially.)

Now, some would suggest that the fact sugar requires time for the body to break it down into glucose and fructose provides some sort of metabolic advantage, but glycemic index studies comparing HFCS and sucrose generally suggest the amount of time required for the body to digest sucrose is marginal at best. (Excepting for those with sucrase-isomaltase deficiency - Google it for an interesting look into our pre-agricultural genome.)

Despite all the evidence that sugar isn’t much better for you than HFCS, that hasn’t stopped companies from switching back to sugar from HFCS. In fact, they’ve even found creative ways to make plain old sugar function remarkably like HFCS. Liquid sugar is sugar that’s already been pre-dissolved so it can be handled like HFCS, and invert sugar [often liquid] actually has the exact same molecular composition as HFCS-50. There are also no regulations that I’m aware of that would prevent a company from fractionating invert sugar to increase the fructose content just like HFCS-55 or even HFCS-90, all without declaring it on the label. (Please correct me if I am wrong here.)

Where To Go From Here?

It should be pretty clear that the core problem here is too many glycemic carbohydrates, especially fructose rich ingredients, not matter where they come from. Banning HFCS entirely from the food supply would do almost nothing to fix the problem, and the possible technical gyrations companies can do to make labels look better is pretty incredible.

I am of the opinion that we need to shift our approach to food processing. It’s highly unlikely we will get everyone to make the radical changes towards diets rich in meats, nuts, seeds, lower carbohydrate dairy, vegetables, etc. that we need to really make a big impact on public health. Instead, I believe we should look very closely at how food processing can be done properly so it’s not hurting public health like it has with the invention of corn syrup.

For example, glucose syrup is used to feed yeast which produce erythritol, a virtually zero-calorie, non-glycemic natural sugar substitute. Glucose syrup can also be used as feedstock for producing a variety of probiotic fibers like polydextrose and some types of inulin, as well as is the base for producing allulose. (I need definite sources on that last one - open to corrections.) In my opinion, these are vastly safer alternatives to sugar and if integrated intelligently into the food supply could really make an impact in public health without asking people to make very radical changes to their dietary experience.

Positive forward motion is about figuring out where you are, the pieces you have at play, and figuring out how to best put them together to make the next step happen. Complete rejection of our vast agribusiness infrastructure and cultural expectations of taste simply isn’t reasonable to do on a large scale in a reasonable amount of time, at least not in this country!

Please direct comments to http://twitter.com/foodtechhacker

#hfcs #dietsweeteners #fructose #sugarfree #lowcarb

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foodtechhacker-blog · 8 years ago

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Concluding a Carniverous Conondrum

The question of the ethics of eating meat has dogged me at some level since I was young. I’ve raised, killed, butchered and eaten all sorts of animals, and living that experience did not feel wrong, yet I never felt like the picture was complete. Now I do. Here’s my story.

The Case for (My) Human Carnivorousness

I have raised all sorts of animals for their products, including meat. I’ve fished, I’ve hunted, I even killed a deer with 4 broken legs with a tire iron out of mercy. I’ve done the entire process of aging and butchering myself, even with animals that weigh more than I do. The process always felt intuitively right, like I was doing what I was meant to do as a being. (Not to say that doing the right thing is necessarily easy… it’s definitely a messy, intense experience.)

In the spring of 2017, I moved to Santa Cruz for several months. Some combination of that place and where I was in life at the time caused my biofeedback to go through the roof. It was the biochemical equivalent of being able to hear a pin drop. I became aware that I was sensitive to all grains. Complete grain removal had the profound effect of reducing my shoe size from 13 to 12 (US shoe size) in just a matter of weeks.

At the same time, I increased my consumption of animal products, focusing on grass-fed, antibiotic-free choices. I better than I had ever in my whole life. Muscle mass increased without any changes to my daily regimen. New cognitive capabilities began to emerge. It was so clear that my biology does the best when provided an animal rich diet. Comprehending Superintelligence

After Santa Cruz proved not to be a viable place to live over the long term, I moved back to Silicon Valley and my mind shifted more from the biological to the technological. I’ve been closely following the semiconductor industry for a long time because I see nearly every “hard” problem in our world as something that is bound by computing power. As a simple example, we can already “print” viruses and peptides; with enough computing power we could print just the right peptide or virus to cure any cancer or infectious disease with essentially zero side effects.

Something profound came across my radar recently. The cost of originating chip designs has been rising exponentially as process complexity rises with shrinking feature sizes. The whole industry has been seeing fewer and fewer players in the new chip design market and projecting that the latest 7/10 nm processes would have only a handful of customers. Instead, it looks to be into the dozens of customers. Why? Artificial intelligence. Moreover, 7 nm is hitting just a year after 10 nm, 5 nm is already being built and 3 nm is already in the pipeline. This acceleration is bucking all the blunted progress trends the industry had been projecting for years.

Then it hit me. This is the beginning of the technological singularity! AI is literally driving up the rate of technological advancement for the first time in human history. It’s not hard to see how this is going to progress towards creating a superintelligences within my lifetime. My mind quickly turned to the question of how a superintelligence would relate to humans as we know them today. (If the concept of superintelligence is foreign to you, start here.)

The next wave of revelation. Superintelligences will probably relate to us the way we relate to animals. More on why this matters in a moment.

Responsible Humanism In the Face of Transhumanism and Superintelligence

As a secular humanist, I believe it is very much reasonable to promote and responsibly pursue the consumption of a diet that is aligned with one’s biology and evolutionary history which provides one with more optimal health. For many, that means an animal-rich diet.

But there is a key phrase here - “responsibly pursue”

Over time, it’s going to become possible to eat what is equivalent to an animal-rich diet, without causing harm to animals. It’s going to take several generations of cultured meat and a nutritionally fortified food supply, but I can see us getting there very easily within my the coming decades. The meaning of “responsibly pursue” will change quickly as this happens.

Thus while I am an enthusiastic carnivore myself today, and I believe it to be ethically acceptable today, I recognize it won’t always be appropriate as it becomes possible to “responsibly pursue” the kind of diet that allows me to thrive without causing harm to animals. Moreover, as a food innovator, I have a special duty here. I see it as my role to help move the needle and help make it possible for us to eat an optimal diet without imposing cruelty or death on animals.

We need to have acceptance and compassion for humanity as it exists today, while enthusiastically pursuing progress and realizing that our sense of compassion will need to transcend towards lower beings as much as reasonably possible. The arbitrary line between us and animals will begin to look blurry and probably vanish as we build greater intelligences and/or extend our own intelligences and pursue our transhuman future. As I said, humanity as we know it today is going to look to superintelligence the way animals look to humanity today.

Moreover, if superintelligences are going to emerge from our own society, culture and values - remember that AI is all about learning, and perhaps it would even be explicitly modeled from the human brain or be created as a result of extending our own brains - we must change the way we relate to animals, lest we end up creating a superintelligence that views humanity as something that can be raised and harvested like factory farmed chickens.

Adam Lindemamnn @adlin had a fantastic post on Twitter recently. “I believe that as far as possible intelligence and power in all its forms must be used in the service of love of life.”

If we ourselves as a society cannot achieve resonance with what Adam said, how can we expect to create greater intelligences that will respect our own existence as we know it today?

#veganism #vegetarianism #lowcarb #paleofood #superintelligence #meat #grassfed

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foodtechhacker-blog · 8 years ago

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Thinking Clearly About Our Sweet Problem, Part 1

People are buzzing about the health implications of both sugar and sugar substitutes. One recent study even tested some common artificial sweeteners in capsule form and found the led to negative health outcomes like impaired glucose tolerance. So this means that artificial sweeteners are bad and should be avoided, right?

Well… it’s not that simple.

First, let’s look at the language we are using to talk about this subject. Historically, people have used the term artificial* sweetener to talk about the kinds of highly potent sweeteners that are most commonly used in beverages, and historically, it was reasonably accurate as the only high potent sweeteners in common use were artificial*. However, in recent years many natural* but extremely potent sweeteners have emerged on the market, with stevia and monk fruit (lo han guo) being the most common examples. Therefore, I will use the term “high intensity sweetener” to refer to this whole category.

So, back to the question - are high intensity sweeteners harmful?

I am of the belief that high intensity sweeteners are both good and bad, and they can be used in a way that makes them a net benefit to most people’s health. This may be seen as a somewhat controversial viewpoint given the waves of evidence against these ingredients, so let me introduce a new framework for understanding this issue.

It is widely recognized that sugar is a drug. It stimulates the opiate system, much like heroin. Humans have an innate craving for sweetness from birth. It’s hard wired into our biology. So when we look at high intensity sweeteners, we need to study them like a drug. Studying them in contrast to a control group that receives a placebo is not going to generate very much useful data. It’s like studying the side effects of a drug in patients who do not need the drug; it is essentially guaranteed to generate negative information and fails to assess the net impact on human health.

Instead, we need to study high intensity sweeteners as compared to an equivalent amount of sugar. Moreover, it must be consumed in a relatively realistic setting (e.g. beverage form) and not in some sort of capsule. Critically, if a beverage is used, it should be as neutral as possible (e.g. clear, non-carbonated beverage with only natural flavors) - many studies have looked at diet soda, but there is tons of evidence that the artificial colors, preservatives and possibly even the carbonation all have negative health effects. To my knowledge, no studies exist today that have used a suitable realistic but neutral food/beverage setting.

I believe that in this sort of setting, we’ll find that most high intensity sweeteners are something on an order of magnitude safer than sugar. In my opinion, that would make them a clear net benefit to health for most people who use them as sugar substitutes. Given how addictive sugar is, I think this is not that different than advocating kratom, subutex, suboxone, etc. for opiate addicts. These are generally seen by the medical field as safer alternatives.

I also theorize that many of the negative effects of high intensity sweeteners will fade over time. When I began working extensively with high intensity sweeteners and consuming non-glycemic sweets routinely, I found that my craving for sweet tastes actually diminished. I suspect the psychological association between sweetness and glycemic effects weakened over time leading to a reduced craving for sweetness. Due to that hypothesized effect and several others, I suspect that longer term studies will yield more positive results than short term studies.

Moreover, I believe that high intensity sweeteners can be used wisely to enhance their net benefit to your health. There’s a smoothie I absolutely love that uses frozen wild boreal blueberries and frozen organic cranberries. It’s incredibly low in sugar, and loaded with antioxidants, to the point it actually has an energizing effect almost like a cup of coffee. The problem is that it’s so intensely sour and somewhat bitter it’s unpalatable, until you add high intensity sweeteners. Then it’s a delicious smoothie you could serve at Jamba Juice.

In a situation like this smoothie, a modest amount of high intensity sweeteners makes it possible for you to consume a huge amount of healthful nutrients you couldn’t easily get any other way. There may be a tiny bit of harm from the high intensity sweetener, but there is a huge amount of benefit from the berries and their antioxidants. This is a perfect example of using high intensity sweeteners responsibly as a lever to enhance the quality of your overall diet while still making it absolutely delicious!

I strongly believe that high intensity sweeteners are significantly safer than sugar and can and should be leveraged wisely to create a healthier, pleasurable diet that is sustainable and realistic for the average person. When I begin to introduce product concepts, this is a theme you will see strongly in nearly everything I do - I see delicious taste as the carrier for powerful nutrition. If you present science disproving my core premise here, please contact me, as a scientist working in an area where scientific consensus is still emerging, I definitely want to make sure I have as much evidence as possible and definitely don’t want to advocate a position that is not in the best interest of health and wellness in a real world context.

Alright, that is it for now. Watch for part 2 soon when I will delve deeper into exploring how high intensity sweeteners may have an impact on health even when they are not metabolized and explore how and why not all may have the same degree of health effects.

* The terms natural and artificial have no clear scientific or legal meaning in the United States but I am using them as commonly accepted by the vernacular. Watch for an upcoming blog article discussing this matter in great depth soon

#stevia #aspartame #dietsoda #diabetes #sugarfree #lowcarb

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foodtechhacker-blog · 8 years ago

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The Digestibility of Sugar Alternatives

This post is way more technical than I was imagining for so early on in my blogging, but there seems to be some interest in this subject on Twitter and as I said, I’m here to engage!

I began experimenting with pretty much every sugar alcohol and rare sugar I could find in the mid-2000s, and I’ve sampled them out to all kinds of different populations and in different contexts. I can tell you that the “studies” on digestive tolerance do a poor job really informing one how to use sugar alternatives in practice.

Sugar alternatives have a handful of different digestive modalities. They can pass through unchanged or largely unchanged, which works well if they are very high molecular weight, but works poorly for low molecular weight sugar alcohols - their low molecular weight causes them to be a potent osmotic laxative and possibly prebiotic. They can be absorbed and excreted through the kidneys, which works well up to a certain point, at which point they fail to be absorbed and quickly act as a potent laxative. Or they can be metabolized towards glucose or fructose and then absorbed, which largely defeats the whole point of them being a sugar alternative.

Historically, maltitol has been an incredibly popular sugar alternative because it has very similar properties to sucrose and thus is a nearly perfect drop-in replacement. Maltitol, however, is simply evil. Some people readily break maltitol down into glucose then absorb and metabolize it, which basically means it offers little health benefit. Others don’t break it down, which means it causes a powerful laxative effect and usually gas due to excess prebiotic effects. This creates an adverse selection effect among consumers, so the people who buy and consume maltitol products are the ones who net very little health benefit. That’s why I say it is an evil ingredient! It has almost no practical health value!

Newer ingredients like erythritol and allulose (also known as d-psicose) follow a modality where they are absorbed, and then excreted, without being metabolized down to glucose. This means they don’t really have the ability to be “evil” like maltitol, but it does mean that a laxative effect is possible if the body isn’t able to absorb and excrete the ingredient fast enough. When you look at studies of the laxation threshold for allulose and erythritol, they look really good, but in practice, those thresholds are probably far too generous for real world product design and consumption planning.

You can think of the human body as a giant osmotic pump. You eat food, and then your digestive system pumps it into your bloodstream and then your kidneys pump out the waste. If your body can’t pump erythritol and allulose out of your gut fast enough, it’s going to be a very powerful laxative. It’s easy to setup studies that pretty much look at ideal circumstances for the human body pumping erythritol and allulose out of the gut, but it’s a lot harder to see the edge cases where it’s going to fail, and people on Twitter have been asking me about those.

One edge case is that some people appear to have genetic mutations which means they have little if any uptake of erythritol and/or allulose. There isn’t a lot you can do about this population, but they are very small, probably less than 1% of the popular based on my experience. In some cases, 5 g is enough to trigger a powerful laxative effect in a short period of time.

For the rest of the population, edge cases are a function of the condition of the consumer’s body’s state and the context in which the sugar alternative is eaten. I’ve found that consuming very much erythritol and/or allulose blended into mucilaginous fiber (e.g. flax, chia, psyllium) tends to yield a very powerful laxative effect as the digestive system seems to be unable to quickly remove the sugar alternative from the fiber matrix. The combination is so effective, I suspect one could market it as a sort of colon cleanse, because the whole fiber matrix basically passes through the gut unchanged and acts like a sponge cleaning out the gut!

The amount of food that was consumed prior to the sugar alternative also makes a huge difference in the laxation threshold. Giving a sugar alternative to someone who has been fasting or eating low fiber/low residue foods for 24-48 hours prior will yield a dramatically lower laxation threshold.

The osmotic state of the body plays a role, too. Someone who is dehydrated cannot osmotically “pump” the sugar alternative nearly as well as someone who is properly hydrated. Kidney issues and blood pressure medications play a role too. Also, single dose one-time laxation threshold can be higher than daily dose laxation threshold for some, as it takes the kidneys some time to fully eliminate the sugar alternative and the more that is floating around in your blood stream, the less quickly your gut will be able to pump it into your bloodstream, and if it’s not fast enough, you’re going to see a laxative effect. And once you get a laxative effect once, you’ve got less mass slowing down digestion so you are more prone to laxative effect again if you don’t wait a few days before you consume the ingredient again.

It’s also interesting to note that consuming a lot of liquid with the sugar alternative tends to lower the laxation threshold, as does consuming a lot of lactose or especially milk (which has both lactose and potassium, both of which tend to slow uptake of the liquid.) There’s just so many different and small ways that the osmotic pumps can be slowed leading to a laxation threshold much lower than the studies suggest.

On top of all these edge failure cases, people often consume a lot more than the serving size of a given product. There have been countless studies showing that “desirable” products perceived to be “healthy” will be consumed in greater quantities than identical products which are not perceived to be healthy. (e.g. the organic labeled cookies get eaten twice as quickly as the not organically labeled cookies, even though they are the same product.) So if you market your product as healthy, you need to be proactive about declaring it “high in fiber” or the like and careful to plan for multiple servings to be consumed at once.

It only takes a single bad experience for a consumer to be turned off from a product permanently. The evolved instinct to avoid foods that cause diarrhea even once is a pretty strong survival instinct in humans. They will also often tell others. So even a relatively low rate of adverse laxation effects can pose a huge drag on the success of a product in the market.

As a result, I find that you really need to keep the per-serving levels of kidney-excreted sugar alternatives in the single digits per serving if you want a product that is well-rounded. You can add a small number of grams of a nondigestible sugar that stays in the digestive system without much negative consequence if you keep the kidney-excreted sugar alternatives low enough. Beyond that, however, you need to find other ways to replace the bulk of sugar.

This is where I’ve done a lot of work, finding creative ways to use higher molecular weight fiber category ingredients, as well as other product-specific strategies to replace the bulk of sugar with ingredients that do not add to the glycemic load or the digestive tolerance issue. In the future when I introduce products you will be able to see a lot of interesting strategies that I’ve developed to these ends. It’s definitely not an easy problem to solve.

For average consumers, the take away I can give you from this is to be careful when you are using ingredients like erythritol and allulose. For reasons of both digestibility and cost, you definitely should be blending them with other high intensity sweeteners like stevia, monk fruit, sucralose, etc. Especially in things like beverages, you really only need a little erythritol or allulose to ��round out” the rough edges of high intensity sweeteners.

All this said, I view sugar replacement as only one of the building blocks of the kind of healthful, delicious products that I’m passionate about. It’s not enough just to take away the “bad” sugar from a product, you need to make sure that your product is rich in nutrition and really adds positively to one’s eating.

Please direct comments to my twitter feed - https://twitter.com/foodtechhacker

#sugarfree #erythritol #allulose #maltitol #stevia #monkfruit #splenda

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