The issue of meal timing is a dense thicket of conflicting advice, a mix of conventional wisdom dispensed from USA Today articles, broscience on Internet forums, and confusing physiological feedback from a dysfunctional metabolism. How can one wade through it all and stay sane? You’ve been told your entire life that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, but then you hear about intermittent fasting, Warrior Diets, and skipping breakfast while thriving. The buff/cut/shredded/ripped/insert-increasingly-violent-adjective-to-describe-one’s-leanness-here (what’s next, “flayed”?) dudes at the gym insist you should break up your eating into at least six small meals (and if possible, maintain a steady IV-drip of Muscle Milk throughout the day) to “boost” your metabolism. Some say three meals a day works just as well, while others say it’s even superior. Others try to simplify things. They suggest listening to your own body, to eat when hungry and fast when not, which makes sense, but what if you’re overweight and hungry all the time – can your body’s metabolic signaling really be trusted?
Posted By: Mark Sisson
Folks can’t help but vilify meat. I mean, it has large amounts of animal fat, especially saturated fat. It requires the death of cute, fuzzy animals. It tastes good, almost offensively so. It’s “immodest” and “indulgent.” Oh, and even the good stuff – pasture-raised meat – displaces the local corn and soy populations and comes from animals that have the audacity to fart (enough, apparently, to bring about a global climate catastrophe). At least it gives people a nice opportunity to be smugly satisfied with themselves while displaying modest levels of indignation. Plus, it gives them a chance to talk about that Jonathan Safran Foer book. That’s always a good move at parties.
We Primal and paleo people, conversely, find meat to be an absolute delight, and most of us eat a decent amount of it. But questions do arise, as they will with any divisive subject:
Posted By: Mark Sisson
People love shrimp. Its taut, delicate, firm, sweet flesh pops in the mouth and provides meaty texture to dishes, and, despite its distinctive taste, shrimp works with every cuisine. Rich Indian curries? Check. Intensely zesty Cajun stews? Definitely. Heck, even just a light sautee in garlic, butter, and white wine is a masterful way to prepare shrimp. Partly for those reasons, shrimp is the most eaten seafood in the United States – by far – and the most valuable aquaculture crop in the world. Intensive shrimp farming in Latin America and Asia supplies the world with plenty of inexpensive shrimp which we readily gobble up, because, like I said, people love the little critters. As of 2008, each American plowed through 4.1 pounds of shrimp a year, on average.
But is shrimp healthy? Is shrimp good for the environment? Are there certain kinds of shrimp you should be avoiding? Should you eat wild caught or farmed? Imported or domestic? Head on or peeled? So many questions. Let’s dig in…
Posted By: Mark Sisson
Liver confuses and confounds many of us. It looks weird, gives off an odd mineral smell, and has a unique texture. We try to reconcile our horrible memories of Mom’s bone-dry renditions of the stuff with all the ethnographic literature describing how hunter-gatherers share precious slivers of the raw trembling organ immediately after a kill. We appreciate and acknowledge the superior nutrient profile of four ounces of beef liver compared to five pounds of colorful fruit even as the shrink-wrapped grass-fed lamb liver direct from the organic farm sits in the freezer untouched. And then we wonder whether it’s even safe to eat, because, you know, it’s the “filter” – the only thing standing between an onslaught of environmental toxins and our vulnerable bodies – and filters accumulate the stuff they’re meant to keep out. See colanders, coffee filters, water purifiers. Liver, then, is many a Primal eater’s Everest. Tantalizing but fraught with seeming danger. Okay, the question:
Posted By: Mark Sisson
It’s another round of rapid-fire Q&A with reader questions this week. Ever wonder about olive oil in a spray can, or which meat to choose when dining out? Do you have joint issues, or questions about workout nutrition? These readers do.
Read on to learn my answers to these and other questions. And if you have your own pressing nutrition and fitness quandaries shoot me a line and I’ll try to answer them in a future “Dear Mark” post.
What do you know about Glutathione and what is your opinion of it?
Duane
Posted By: Mark Sisson
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