HoldTheToast! by Dana Carpender

T. Colin Campbell's book The China Study has been widely touted as the ultimate proof that animal foods are bad and plant foods are good. I have remained unconcerned, but if the foofooraw about The China Study has given you pause at all about your low carb, animal food-heavy diet, you need to read this long but truly wonderful critique by Denise Minger.

Would you like to make That Nice Boy I Married very sad? Then you're a horrible, evil person, and I hate you. No, wait, sorry. That's just a knee-jerk reaction to the very notion, because I adore him, and seeing him sad breaks my heart. I meant to say, "throw away an egg yolk." To make him really, really sad, throw away all your egg yolks.

If there is one perfect food, eggs are it, and the yolk is a major part of that wonderfulness. Let's take a look at the nutritional value of eggs, shall we?

A reader who goes by healthgal asks: Dana, some, such as myself, have higher cholesterol numbers due to the high sat fat content of some recipes. I would love to see some recipes that are lower in sat fat and higher in good fats.

Health Gal, the problem is that for many, perhaps most, of us saturated fats are the good fats; I deliberately favor them because I think they're the natural fuel of human kind, and because, unlike vegetable oils, they are not inflammatory.

That said, everyone is different, and I'll keep this in mind.

In the meanwhile, a few thoughts:

Recently I wrote about a frightening development in California agriculture -- the advent of methyl iodide, a hideous poison, as a permissible pesticide on strawberry fields. I thought I'd like to follow that up with some good news: The produce that you don't have to worry about. On the website Focus Organic, I found a list both of the "Dirty Dozen," the produce most likely to be loaded with pesticides, and the "Clean Fifteen," least likely to have pesticide residues.

Today That Nice Boy I Married and I drove to Bardstown KY -- about two hours either way -- to buy a used deep freeze. Since we already have a big upright deep freeze, a small chest deep freeze, and a spare refrigerator with a freezer compartment, this may seem excessive to you. However, we've been wanting to buy a side of locally raised grass-fed beef, and will need the extra freezer space for that. Plus, we've got four meat-breed chickens that need to be, uh, processed; they're the size of Thanksgiving turkeys!

Hold the Toast Press and CarbSmart are proud to announce the upcoming internet radio show, Dana Carpender's Low Carb For Life. We're debuting the show on Labor Day, Monday, the 6th of September, to coincide with my fifteen year anniversary of low carbing. We'll be announcing the winner of our contest, such as it is. (Please, go try recipes and vote, so I can give away the Zevia!)

I'm still working on the whole notion of making my own sugar-free chocolate, partly because the stuff I like best -- Valor, from Spain, is not cheap, and partly because, as you are no doubt aware, commercial sugar-free chocolate makes one, er, socially offensive. You know about fat-free products, of course; I've started referring to my home-sweetened chocolate as "fart-free" chocolate.

Time is running out to submit your comments regarding the USDA Nutritional Guidelines. I just submitted mine; they read:

The modern grocery store sometimes seems to be only tangentially a purveyor of foodstuffs. Much of the time it seems more like a huge biochemical experiment, with the general population playing the role of the hapless guinea pigs. Here, just as examples, are five cases where real food not only has fewer chemicals than the processed stuff, but substantially fewer carbs, too:

* Real Seafood versus Imitation Seafood

Ah, yes. Another day, another reason diabetics should rely on a low carb diet instead of on ever-increasing doses of hypoglycemic medication.

Turns out that metformin, aka Glucophage, can cause malabsorption of vitamin B 12, and can therefore lead to B 12 deficiency. Since Glucophage is one of the most commonly prescribed diabetes medications, especially in obese diabetics, this potentially affects thousands, maybe millions, of people.

I'm working on 100 new recipes to put in a revised and expanded edition of 15 Minute Low-Carb Recipes, and I need to know from those of you who already have and use the original edition: Which of the recipes are most useful to you? What does the book need more of?

* Main dishes
* Skillet suppers
* Main dish salads
* Side dishes -- veggies and the like
* Side salads
* Soups
* Desserts

Something I'm not thinking of?

Do you want more fish and seafood recipes? Burgers? Pork? Beef? Egg dishes?

Several people have recommended FitDay to me over the years, and in the past few days I've started using it. I've used MasterCook to track my food intake in the past, and of course I'm using it to analyze the recipes I'm writing for the expanded edition of 15 Minute Low-Carb Recipes.

Just read an important article on Mark's Daily Apple -- the American Academy of Pediatrics is now recommending aggressive cholesterol screening and statins for kids as young as eight. I think statins are dangerous and useless for the vast majority of people on them; I've mentioned here before that my doctor and I have an agreement that if she ever wants to lose me as a patient, she'll try to get me to go on statins. But this!

Made this up today from stuff I had on hand. The combination occurred to me, and it just sounded good. It was! I had this cooked and eaten before the timer beeped for 15 minutes.

Creamy Chicken-and-Noodles In A Bowl

1 package tofu shirataki (I used fettucini)
1/4 cup diced roasted red pepper
5 kalamata olives
1 scallion, sliced, including the crisp part of the green shoot
1 tablespoon minced parsley
3 tablespoons chive and onion whipped cream cheese
3 ounces precooked chicken breast strips (mine had Southwestern seasoning)
salt and pepper to taste

Is it just me, or are the ads for stuff the food-and-drug conglomerates are trying to pass off as healthful even more annoying than the ads for outright junk? Is it just that I'm both a nutrition freak and an ad man's daughter that these commercials get under my skin?