A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

I would like your best recs for in-depth articles, studies, or books on the most cutting-edge current knowledge about nutrition, body weight, and health.

I am NOT interested in basic articles about very well-known ideas like fat will kill you, carbs will kill you, meat will kill you, anything your grandma wouldn't recognize as food such as everything but cabbage and turnips will kill you, etc.

I am also NOT interested in articles with a primarily political bent (i.e., "pushing diets on women is based on sexism/capitalism not science;") I agree with that, but I'm looking for stuff where the meat is science and the politics is the side dish rather than the reverse.

I'm looking for more in-depth, up-to-date information on topics including but not limited to...

- Do we actually know anything about nutrition, given the every-five-year swings between "eggs are cardioprotective/eggs are a heart attack on a plate," "fat is the Devil/carbs are the Devil," etc? If so, what is it and how do we know it?

- What is the actual science on grains (and no, I don't mean Wheat Belly)?

- What is the best and most cutting-edge knowledge on gaining strength?

- What is the actual science on the causes of Type 2 diabetes, why its prevalence has risen so much, and its association with obesity?

- What is the actual knowledge of the diet and health of "cavemen?"

- What is the actual science on being fat, thin, and in-between in terms of health? For instance, is it better to be fat and active than "normal weight" and sedentary? (I know the answer but I'm looking for something that goes into this in-depth.)

- What is the deal with "calorie reduction makes you healthier and live longer" vs. "dieting is bad for you?"

I'm already familiar with Michael Pollan, Barbara Ehrenreich, Mark's Daily Apple, Diet Cults, Body of Truth, and The Starvation Experiment. And lots more but those are the things I get recced a lot already.

Layla and I went to Northridge for breakfast at an ube-centric restaurant, Ninang's Cafe (GREAT - more on that later.) While we were in the neighborhood, we noticed a bunch of orange trees growing on the sidewalk, laden with bright fruit.

I invoked the principle of usufruct (use the fruit, i.e., you can pick fruit on public property or limbs overhanging into it or your property, so long as you don't damage the tree) and we pulled over. However, the fruit within easy reach had been thoroughly foraged already.

But we were undaunted! And also, I had not one, but TWO pairs of crutches. And there was a handy fire hydrant for me to lean on...

Truly, fruit foraging is a deeply womanly art going back to the time of the cavewomen, in which brave women warriors set out to pluck the mammoth-fruit. I felt deeply connected to the ancient roots of this hallowed feminine tradition when I clambered from my car just as women once leaped from the backs of their trusty riding-zebras, swinging boldly on my crutches as did the wounded women fruit-hunters of yore.

Behold! The valiant fruit foragers!







The mighty hunters pose for a triumphant shot with their quarry:





We got three. Alas, most were either too high or too small to be grabbed by crutches.

They were delicious.

I was recently very inspired by a post Layla made on creating new habits. Rather than making New Year's Resolutions, each month she picks a new thing she wants to do and gives it a try for a month. If it sticks, you continue with it but add a new habit the next month; if it doesn't, you gave it enough of a try that you know whether or not it's something likely to work for you.

This struck me as both fun and more likely to make new habits stick, so I gave it a try. My January choice was "tidy up a little every day." As you have seen, this was incredibly fun and very likely to stick, and I am still at it.

February's habit was "wear something I like that is either a piece of jewelry, or an item of clothing I don't normally wear." I stuck to this one less, largely because of the weather: it was not only quite cold, but I actually got snowed in for a while! (Most of my wardrobe is for warm-to-hot weather, and jewelry gets unpleasantly cold against my skin in cold weather.) But when I did do it, it was a lot of fun, so that's something I'll keep trying.

My upcoming March habit is something I'm very excited about. It's not something I plan to continue in its original form permanently, but rather a month-long challenge that I'd ideally like to continue in a modified form. It's to eat only food that's either already in my pantry, or food I buy at the farmer's market.

I will make exceptions for milk, which is highly perishable and not sold at the market, and food people offer me, like if someone invites me over for dinner or to a restaurant. I'm also going to buy some essentials in advance and replace them if necessary, but only ingredients for cooking, not snacks. (i.e., whole wheat flour.)

I got this idea from a book which I found in a backpack stashed in a closet while tidying up, Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally, by Alisa Smith and J. B. MacKinnon. They're journalists living in Vancouver who were disturbed by an article they read about the length most food they eat travels, which causes a lot of pollution. So they decided to spend a year only only what they already had in their pantry and food which came from no more than 100 miles away from where they lived. MacKinnon was a very skilled amateur chef and they owned a cabin in the woods, so they had a lot of resources many people don't. But it was a fun read, and it got me thinking.

I've already been trying to buy most of the animal products I cook at home from the farmer's market, as I can afford it, for ethical and taste reasons and to support locally owned small businesses - I'd rather eat less of them but have them be of higher quality. I've also already been trying to buy more produce there, ditto though in that case I'm trying to eat more rather than less. I'd also like to eat down the stuff I already have rather than letting it sit forever, degrading in quality. So this will be more of a ramping up rather than a sudden change.

My long-term intent is not to keep this going forever - I love restaurants and am certainly not taking them out of my life for good - but to eat more locally, cook more, and get better at cooking. So I am basing it on "farmer's market" rather than "transported no more than 100 miles" in the interest of not going insane or driving the vendors insane. Also, it's "any farmer's market," not just the two I normally go to, because I think it will be fun to check out some new ones.

I'd also like to try baking my own bread, which I have never done. I will start with commercial yeast, but also attempt making my own sourdough starter. The bread was inspired by a Michael Pollan book I read while snowed in, which I will review separately later as it was both inspiring and accidentally hilarious. (Sneak preview: cooking techniques which Pollan particularly enjoyed learning are ineluctably masculine, and ones which he liked but not to that degree are feminine. Bread baking is a very very manly pursuit, no doubt perfected by manly manly cavemen.)

I shall pretend that I am snowed in, with my only snowplowed path leading to the farmer's market.

I am going to try to chronicle this daily, ideally with photos.

Have any of you ever done anything similar? Any advice or simple bread recipes? I don't at all mind spending lots of time kneading - I used to do pottery and very much enjoyed that part, plus I had great grip strength - but the fewer separate steps, the better.

For reasons that really don't bear rehashing, I spent the last two years getting told to go on diets. Every kind of diet. No "nightshades." No acid. No gluten. No dairy. Low-FODMAP (bans dairy, gluten, soy, legumes, and half of all fruits and vegetables.) Low-fat. "Eat nothing but bone broth that you made yourself, and if you don't simmer it for six hours, it's no good." "Microwaving food destroys its nutrients." At one point I had successive doctors tell me to go on a low-fiber diet and a high-fiber diet.

Every single diet-pusher, whether doctor or rando, said or implied (usually explicitly said), "If you don't do this, you'll never get better. Don't you want to get better?"

This was especially infuriating given that I was so underweight that I had symptoms of malnutrition. And also that in two years of dieting, there had never once been any indication whatsoever that my illness was caused by diet or that changing my diet was helpful. I eventually came to the conclusion that Americans are fucking insane about food and that a primary manifestation of sexism is controlling women by controlling what they eat.

Anyway, I am not dieting now. But now that I am slightly less likely to hit NEON RAGE APOCALYPSE at the word "diet," I clicked on a link and fell into an internet rabbit hole of diet advice. Like the evolved forager that I am, I bring you my findings for amusement, analysis, and mockery:

- A comparison of wild fruits and vegetables with cultivated ones, concluding that eating fruits and vegetables is unhealthy because they are unnatural and not what the cavemen ate.

By that reasoning there is literally nothing we can eat unless we get air-dropped into some untouched stretch of rainforest to forage for wild bananas.

- Eating fruit makes you fat.

- Humans did not evolve to eat fruit.

We're PRIMATES. Monkeys love bananas.

- Corn causes Oppositional Defiant Disorder.

- Corn causes ADHD.

- Corn causes autism.

- Corn causes cancer.

- Broccoli causes cancer.

- Hot water causes cancer.

The last one, from a study saying that drinking hot beverages can cause cancer, had the best response: David Spiegelhalter, a professor of the Public Understanding of Risk at Britain's University of Cambridge, said: "In the case of very hot drinks, the IARC concludes they are probably hazardous, but can't say how big the risk might be," according to the Australian Financial Review. "This may be interesting science, but makes it difficult to construct a sensible response."

- A Breatharian – as defined in the book A Year Without Food – is a person who chooses to live mostly, or completely, from Pranic nourishment. Israeli author Ray Maor claims that once Breatharians have trained their body to absorb this energy from the air and sunlight, they are no longer dependent on food. Many of them continue to taste food for enjoyment, but do not need it for survival, he says.

Umm.

- Brian J. Ford has suggested that ketosis, possibly caused by alcoholism or low-carb dieting, produces acetone, which is highly flammable and could therefore lead to apparently spontaneous combustion.

The Atkins diet will make you burst into flame!

- Our ancestors NEVER ate a carb. They ate meat and fat and that was it. On that diet, they grew, improved their lot, invented the wheel, survived in caves and hinted in groups.

Bad history aside (even in the Arctic, people ate seaweed and lichen), anyone who's ever lived in a small town or attended school knows that a major human activity is indeed hinting in groups.