The Steaks Are High

Heroin Wings

Heroin Wings Recipe
Why heroin? Because they're just that addictive. A great substitute if you're craving a crunchy, "breaded" taste.

Ingredients
4 pounds chicken wings or chicken drumsticks (I prefer drumsticks)
1 1/2 cups grated Parmesan cheese
3 tablespoons dried parsley
2 tablespoons dried oregano
2 tablespoons paprika
Fresh ground pepper, to taste
1/2 cup butter, melted

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

2. Combine the parmesan cheese and the parsley, oregano, paprika and pepper in a bowl.

4. Line a shallow baking pan/tray with foil. (Very important step unless you feel like scrubbing welded-on chicken skin off your pan for days.)

5. Melt the butter in a shallow bowl. If using a microwave, 2:00 minutes on 60% power does the trick.

6. Dip each chicken piece in the melted butter, then roll in the cheese and
seasoning mixture, and place on the foil-covered pan. If you have extra cheese mixture leftover,  sprinkle on top of the chicken pieces.

7. Bake for 1 hour.

This recipe appears in Dana Carpender's 500 Low Carb Recipes, on the CarbWire website, and in the recipe forum at Active Low-Carber Forums, and in the Eades Comfort Foods Cookbook (as "Angel Wings").

Won't Fat Make Me Fat?

The short answer: no. It seems pretty intuitive, on the face of it, that eating greasy, fatty food makes your body fat. If you want to avoid the lumpy fat around your own hips, shouldn't you just avoid eating that same substance?

The U.S. Surgeon General recommended in 1988 that, in order to be healthy, people should dramatically reduce their intake of fat. Since the spread of the low-fat approach, obesity across the United States, Canada, and the U.K. has ballooned.

Dr. Micheal Eades and Dr. Mary Eades make the very basic point in their book, Protein Power, that reducing one macronutrient group means an increase in another in order to get sufficient calories. Reduce fat, and you must increase protein and carbohydrates. The problem is that many protein sources also contain fat (red meat and eggs the most obvious), so low fat usually goes hand in hand with high carbohydrate intake.

High-carb, low-fat diets do not work for the vast majority of people. A recent study by Steve Phinney, M.D., Ph.D., and Jeff Volek, Ph.D., from UConn, compared two groups, one on a low-carbohydrate, high-fat diet, the other on a low-fat, high-carb diet. Dr. Eades discussed their findings on his excellent blog (Dr. Mike at Protein Power).

The subjects on the low-carbohydrate, high-fat diet consumed about three times as much saturated fat as those on the low-fat, high-carb diet. The results?

- Subjects on the low-fat, high-carb diet decreased the saturated fat content of their blood by 24%.

- Subjects on the low-carb, high-fat diet decreased the saturated fat content of their blood by 57%.

- Increasing dietary saturated fat threefold when taken as part of a low-carb diet reduced the amount of saturated fat in the blood by a factor of 2.

More measurements on palmitoleic acid (a marker for fat production inside the body) indicated that subjects on the low-carb, high-fat diet decreased the amount of palmitoleic acid by 32% whereas those on the low-fat, high-carb diet didn’t reduce their levels of palmitoleic acid at all. A more detailed explanation can be found here:

Saturated fat info at the American Society of Bariatric Physicians

The clear conclusion is that by decreasing carb intake, the body is better able to process saturated fat. Subjects following the low-carb, high-fat diet not only ate three times more fat and burned it off better than those on the low-fat, high-carb diet, but also produced far less fat than those eating the low-fat diet.

When I read study after study on the effects of low-fat diet, and see people struggling to lose a few pounds by eating tasteless crap, I feel glad and sad. Glad that there are people like Dr. Eades out there, providing valuable information to help people figure out a healthy diet, and sad that so many buy into the low fat path to failure.

I will be posting some great recipes here in the weeks to come, as well as sample daily menus. But one of the best things about eating low carb is the simplicity of menu planning. Just eat meat, fish, eggs, a little hard cheese, and your chosen fat source (olive oil, coconut oil, peanut oil, ghee, or butter).

Now, off to enjoy my juicy T-bone!

Isn't High Protein Dangerous?

Since Atkins resurfaced as a so-called craze in the late 1990s, both the Atkins approach and low carb diets generally have been on the receiving end of some extremely bad press. In 2001, the American Heart Association Nutrition Committee came right out with it:

"Individuals who follow these [high-protein] diets are at risk for...potential cardiac, renal, bone, and liver abnormalities overall."

From a personal perspective, I've never felt healthier than while following a low carb plan. My hair is shiny, and my skin has cleared up incredibly. My nails are strong and grow at lightning speed (as does my hair...I think it's all the protein). My bad knee (botched surgery) swells up far less and joint pain has decreased significantly.

I used to get sick two or three times every winter. I'd always catch a decent percentage of all the bugs going round. Since I started low carbing three years ago, I've been sick twice. That includes colds.

I've also lost over 30 lbs, dropping my BMI from a whopping 29.5 (just .5 away from being officially classified as obese), down to 24.8 (sneaking in at the high end of normal).

But hey, any chump can witter on about shiny hair and a less chunky rump. On to the scientists!

In a paper published in the Sports Nutrition Review Journal in May 2004, Anssi H. Manninen of the Department of Physiology, University of Oulu, Finland, sets out to test the claims of the American Heart Association.

What follows is a summary of this paper. To read the original, scroll down for the link.

THE CLAIM: Increasing the amount of protein consumed above the recommended daily allowance will put excessive strain on the kidneys, causing kidney stones and eventually, kidney disease.

THE TRUTH:
1) There is no data to demonstrate that a healthy kidney will be damaged by increasing protein intake.
2) Kidney problems are rare to nonexistent in the bodybuilding community, in which high-protein intake has been typical for over fifty years.
3) From a comprehensive review on protein intake and renal function: "it is clear that protein restriction does not prevent decline in renal function with age, and, in fact, is the major cause of that decline. A better way to prevent the decline would be to increase protein intake...there is no reason to restrict protein intake in healthy individuals in order to protect the kidney."

THE CLAIM: Increasing dietary protein increase urine calcium excretion. It follows that the higher the protein intake, the more urine calcium is lost and the more negative calcium balance becomes. High protein diets would result in increased prevalence of ostepenia or osteoporotic-related fractures.

THE TRUTH:
1) A recent trail found no significant differences in mean urinary calcium excretion when comparing samples from graded levels of dietary protein.

2) Dietary protein increases circulating IGF-1, a growth factor thought to play an important role in bone formation.

3) The author of the most cited paper favoring the earlier hypothesis that high-protein intake promotes osteoporosis no longer believes that protein is harmful to bone. He concluded that the balance of the evidence seems to indicate the opposite.

THE CLAIM: High protein intake may increase blood pressure.

THE TRUTH:
A negative correlation has been shown between protein intake and systolic and diastolic blood pressures.

THE CLAIM: High protein intake may have detrimental effects on liver function.

THE TRUTH:
1) There is no scientific evidence supporting this contention.

2) Protein is needed not only to promote liver tissue repair, but also to provide lipotropic agents for the conversion of fats to lipoprotein for removal from the liver, thus preventing fatty infiltration.

THE CLAIM: 100g of carbohydrates per day is the minimum requirement to prevent loss of lean muscle tissue. (Also heard as: You're only losing muscle!)

THE TRUTH:
1) Catabolism of lean body mass is reduced by ketones, which likely explains the preservation of lean tissue observed during very-low-carbohydrate diets.

2) A study following subjects on a carbohydrate-restricted diet (8% carbohydrate) for six weeks found that fat mass was significantly decreased (-3.4kg) and lean body mass significantly increased (+1.1kg).  The control group (48% carbohydrate) showed no significant changes in body composition.

ADDITIONAL ADVANTAGES FOR DISEASE PREVENTION AND/OR MANAGEMENT:
Diabetes
The metabolic effects of a high-protein diet were compared to those of the prototypical diet currently recommended to people with Type 2 diabetes. The authors concluded that the high-protein diet lowers blood glucose after meals in Type 2 diabetics, and improves overall glucose control.

Heart Disease
Recent findings suggest that replacing carbohydrates with protein may be associated with a lower risk of ischemic heart disease.

The full paper, including specific numbers from all studies, may be found here:
High-Protein Weight Loss Diets and Purported Adverse Effects: Where is the Evidence?