Coconut Oil

Coconut Oil has been a part of my diet for a few years now. I first heard about the benefits of coconut oil at Mercola.com. I recently revisited the topic by reading Eat Fat Lose Fat by Dr. Mary Enig and Sally Fallon. In the book the authors advocate a whole foods diet with substantially more healthy fats than advocated by most other current diet protocols. In addition to coconut oil, fish oil and olive oil are the everyday fats that they recommend, though they are not the only healthy fats. I'm writing this to summarize some of the tidbits of information that piqued my interest:

• Coconut oil promotes the assimilation and storage of essential fatty acids, so basically there is a synergistic effect with fish oil. Fish oil is brain food, in addition to its ability to lower inflammation in your body. Anything that amplifies such effects is likely to be very good for you.
• Coconut oil is perhaps the safest fat for folks with gallbladder disease or that have lost their gallbladder, as most of the fats in coconut oil do not require bile for digestion.
• Renowned cardiologist Dudley White is noted as commenting that he became a cardiologist in 1921, but did not see his first case of myocardial infarction until 1928. He attributed the increased incidence of MI since that time to increasing use of new polyunstaturated fats corn oil, which were replacing saturated fats like lard and butter.
• The phospholipids in your brain cells are made up of one saturated fat and one unsaturated fat. Avoiding all saturated fats per the current dietary mantra can lead to compromising your brain's chemistry.
• Saturated fats protect your liver from toxins like alcohol. Liver problems have become more common place - thanks to increasing consumption of alcohol and high fructose corn syrup - at a time when the public has been advised to avoid saturated fats.
• Saturated fats lower levels of C Reactive Protein, a marker for inflammation, which recent research implicates as a common factor in all degenerative diseases.
• The fatty acids in lung surfactant are normally 100% saturated. An adequate amount of saturated fat in critical to optimal lung function, and therefore is crucial to achieving peak performance on a bicycle!
• Coconut oil contains a medium chain fatty acid (MCFA) called lauric acid. Your body converts it to monolaurin, which helps protect you from a wide range of diseases. Being sick less means being able to train more, and decreased susceptibility to disease probably also translates into being able to train harder before pushing your body into a disease state.
• The MCFAs in coconut oil use up more energy when they are metabolized than they provide, and lauric acid is the most rapidly oxidized fatty acid (coconut oil is roughly 50% lauric acid). So coconut oil can actually help you lose weight, another critical issue for serious cyclists!
• Coconut oil has a thermogenic effect, meaning that it raises body temperature, resulting in a boost of energy and metabolic rate.

I suspect that most folks reading Eat Fat Lose Fat would have a difficult time in fully following any of the three dietary protocols suggested in the book, especially if they rely on food manufacturer's advice on healthy foods. But don't let that stop you from incorporating coconut oil and coconut products into your diet. I add one to two tablespoons of coconut oil to my steel cut oatmeal every morning and substitute coconut oil for butter or vegetable oils in cooking, and have started using more coconut milk as I've discovered new ways of using it in cooking.

Melanoma

I'm once again off-topic, since this post doesn't have a lot to do with food. But skin cancer is a real concern for cyclists, given how much time we spend in the sun. I happen to be a cancer survivor, having had a melanoma removed six and a half years ago, so this is a subject near and dear to me.

After my experience I looked high and low for anything suggesting any means of reducing the likelihood of a recurrence. For a time I bought sunblock clothing and special sunblock that left me pasty-looking, I even bought sunblock dye and dyed all of my regular clothing. Despite searching high and low there didn't seem to be much else that I could do. Things have changed a bit since then.

First off, hiding from the sun is probably the worst thing you can do, though avoiding sun burns is still essential. My feeling, based upon reading a few years back, is that it is best if you can start tanning early in the season and let your natural melanin protect you, with a light sunblock as extra protection when you anticipate long exposure on high UV days. To learn more about how sunlight and adequate levels of Vitamin D is thought to help prevent melanoma see this page on Dr. Mercola's website.

Second, cut back on sugar so that it is a condiment to flavor meals, rather than consumption of sugar for sugar's sake (i.e., cakes, candy bars, soda pop, etc). Sugar is implicated in all kinds of inflammatory processes, so there's no sense in adding extra fuel to cancer's fire. If you are going to eat sugar (and I do) it's probably best to have it with your meal, than as a between meal snack.

Third, Curcumin (found in Turmeric and Curry) has generated a lot of excitement for what appears to be its ability to block a pathway for the development of melanoma, as well as other cancers and degenerative diseases. For more on that, see this Science Daily article. Turmeric is available in supplement form. I take a couple of capsules per day for it's anti-inflammatory effect and for the possibility that it may keep future melanomas at bay.

Racing Weight

I just finished reading Racing Weight by Matt Fitzgerald. When I first started this blog I was looking for a way to document what I'd learned about ways of eating that would keep me lean and thus improve my power to weight ratio for bicycle hill climbs. So it was hard for me not to want to see what Matt had written.

The subtitle of Matt's book is "How to Get Lean for Peak Performance: 5-step Plan for Endurance Athletes." And while endurance is an aspect of my hill climbing, it is not the determing factor - I'm looking to go faster, not longer since there are no longer climbs in my neighborhood. While my training rides last from 2 to 3 1/2 hours, the all-out climbing part lasts from between 35 minutes to an hour and fifteen minutes. So I'm not interested in the four hour plus slogs that are the focus of his book.

With that said, I think Matt has done a great job of organizing his information and explaining his sources and reasoning. I was more than a bit disappointed that the main recommendation was for people to count calories, though in his defense he made the recommendation as a way to help folks understand where the excess calories are coming from that keep them from getting as lean as they'd like to be. I feel things could've been a lot simpler: animal proteins, nuts, fats and cheese are energy dense foods (they have a lot of calories in relation to volume), most fruits and vegetables have low energy density. Both contribute plenty of nutrients to support long term health. The main point should be portion control for the most energy dense foods (i.e., a serving of lean meat no larger than the palm of your hand, 1 of 2 tablespoons of nuts, modest amounts of good fats, etc).

Another point is that nutritionless foods (those containing lots of sugar and white floor) should be minimized as much as possible, as they'll actually destroy some of the nutrients that you consume from high qualilty sources.

And a final point is that what is marketed as healthy food isn't necessarily healthy. For instance, fruit juices are no better than soda pop due to their high fructose content, even though they do have some additional nutrients. And pretty much anything baked, even using whole grain flour, is very calorie dense but pretty much nutritionally empty - certainly there is very little bang for your nutritional buck there.

So save yourself some time and money and invest in a good anti-inflammatory diet program. It'll save you weeks or months of counting calories. Once you're on that, if you're still looking to get down to your absolute optimal racing weight, then you'll want to count calories. But just remember, this is more art than science. The calories listed on packages are averages, not absolutes. And if you are avoiding processed foods to maximize your health, good luck figuring out the caloric values of all the different ingredients that go into a meal (that's why pro teams have their own nutritionists - so the riders don't have to burn a zillion brain-calories figuring this stuff out).

The bottom line is that Racing Weight is fantastic if going long in cycling, running, skiing, or swimming is your thing. But if you are interested in speed over distance, then there's a lot less there that will be of interest to you.

Sugar

I ran across a new alternative health newsletter a couple of days ago, the New England Health Advisory. It appears to have started up last month. They've published a brochure entitled The Truth About Sugar that was interesting to read. I'd seen most of the information before, mainly from Dr. Mercola's website and his 76 Ways Sugar Can Ruin Your Health.

The most interesting bit is a discussion of the differences between Glucose (including plain old table sugar or sucrose) and Fructose. Fructose is the sugar found in most fruit and in it's natural form, when eaten as a fruit, it's pretty much harmless, due to the fiber that slows down the digestion of the sugar. But straight fructose, as a processed food (derived from good old industrial agricultural corn), is a whole other deal.

It turns out that from every 120 calories of glucose consumed, on average, 1 calorie is stored as fat. But for every 120 calories of fructose consumed, on average, 40 calories is stored as fat! And significantly more of the fat is inter-abdominal fat, the worst possible kind.

It seems that fructose is metabolized very differently than glucose. Glucose is broken down in the body's cells, whereas most of fructose is broken down in the liver, much like ethanol (alcohol). And the way it stores the fat can lead to non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. Now the liver isn't one of our bi-lateral redundant organs (like our kidneys), meaning we have only one, so we can't do without it. So processed fructose should be nowhere in our diets, yet its in most processed foods!

An interesting sidenote is that by all accounts the obesity epidemic in America started in the late seventies. Just coincidentally this is when processed fructose, which is cheaper than sugar, started entering our food supply in significant ways. In particular, this is when most soft drinks changed from formulas based on sucrose to ones based on fructose (as High Fructose Corn Syrup).

Talk about a smoking gun...