Weekend Link Love
For you safe starch fans (or those who want to learn how to incorporate them in their diets), Sweet Potato Power is a fantastic guide to our favorite tuber.
Aussies – got plans May 12 and 13? You do now. Longtime reader and friend of the blog Suz has assembled leading Paleo and Primal experts from your neck of the globe, including That Paleo Guy Jamie Scott, Dr. Anastasia Boulais, Julianne Taylor, and Dr. Ron Ehrlich, to bring you the first annual Australian Paleo Weekend. Pick up your tickets before they run out. (Kiwis welcome, too).
How vegetable oils replaced animal fats in the American diet.
A recent study suggests that humanity’s meat-eating allowed us to wean earlier and helped make our considerable evolutionary success possible. The study’s author is, of course, quick to iterate that this “says nothing about what we should or should not eat today in order to have a good diet.” Whew! Close call!
Avoiding carcinogens used to be easy. You’d quit smoking, move away from the coal plant, switch out the lead paint and asbestos in your house, stuff like that. But how do you avoid light pollution?
12 experts’ top five desert island exercises, parts one and two.
Maybe don’t drink 8 liters of Coke a day. Just saying.
Recipe Corner
- If you’re having trouble getting enough greens in your diet, try them in smoothie form. And who doesn’t love a blog post written by an anthropomorphized smoothie?
- Sardines with mustard, fennel, and dill. Simple, satisfying, smelly.
Time Capsule
One year ago (April 29 – May 5)
- The Many Faces of Aquaculture: An Introduction to Fish Farming – From fish, to shellfish, to shrimp, to sea creature ranches, learn all about aquaculture.
- The Scattered Mind: Finding Focus in a World of Distractions – How to get stuff done and focus when everything around you (and in your brain) is trying to get you to do the opposite.
Comment of the Week
That is one happy kitty.
- Indeed, Nionvox. Unfortunately, the happy kitty wasn’t available for belly scratches.
Grab a Copy of The Primal Blueprint 21-Day Total Body Transformation and Start Getting Primal Today!
Posted By: Mark Sisson
The sweet potato book looks good, but read the one 3-star review. As this reviewer points out, the other reviews look like a marketing push, e.g. get all your friends to write glowing reviews.
I so need the “Scattered Mind” post. I’m certain if you google scatter brain my face would turn up.
Also I subscribed by email a few weeks ago and I noticed I don’t get your curent updates in my inbox. (I only get past posts.) I’m traveling the country in an RV so reading on my phone via email is the easiest way to keep up. Is there a way to get your posts via email?
Jenn, there’s actually a PB app that will keep you up to date. I use it sometimes.
I wish I could be at the Australian Paleo Weekend. I’m sure it will be a great time! Go Suz!
There’s nothing vegetable about vegetable oil. Could we change the name to ‘factory oil’?
This is a brilliant idea.
Coconut and olive oil are vegetable oils too after all…
More like fruit oils!
The public should never have been taught to think in terms of saturated or unsaturated fats; it has only increased confusion. The healthy dietary fats for humans are animal, nut, and fruit.
Animal fat should be organic, because animals store pollution in fat. Peanuts are not nuts. Olive, coconut, and avocado are good sources of fruit fat.
“Vegetable” oil is bad for you, and should be severely restricted, whether “hydrogenated” or “trans-fat” or not. I put vegetable in quotes because these oils are not from actual vegetables; peanut is a legume, corn is a grain, soy is a bean, etc.
Very, very, very well said.
+1
And the Cottonseed isn’t even a food, yet it is used as such… after gobs of processing of course.
Why is it always the Germans that come up with insanely clever, yet extremely BAD things…
“How vegetable oils replaced animal fats in the American diet.”
Those darn Germans I tell ya…
If I’m on a desert island…
1. one-armed pushups – an amazing whole-body test
2. one-legged squats (pistols)
3. pullups or climbing
4. sprints
and last, but not least,
5. learn to swim REALLY far
In conjunction with #5 you’d have to add #6: shark grappling.
“As surprising as it might be to hear, the fact that animal fats pose this same risk is not supported by science.” I’m glad the article was able to sneak this fact in. Don’t tell me that conventional wisdom may actually be changing.
On greens: a little earlier today I happened across a bunch of dandelions far from the road and figured I might as well eat a bunch of the leaves. They taste too bitter to me to be enjoyable plain so I covered up the taste by eating an apple and carrot with them at the same time. It was a nice salad.
I look at my site stats this morning and got a wee happy shock!
He was partially tame. But still, it was incredible.
I did get to belly scratch a panther though, once
I went to a privately owned exotic animal zoo once that one of my cousins used to work at. One of the animals was a big black cat. I can’t remember if it was a jaguar or panther – I think a panther. Anyways, there was nothing between it and me but the rickety door of its cage and as soon as I got close it was growling, snarling, and throwing itself against the door. It was an awe-inspiring experience. If that door wasn’t there I’d have been torn apart and eaten but I was able to stand a few feet away in relative calm watching a big, vicious predator go berserk, an extremely primal experience yet one I probably never would have in nature. Afterwards the owner of the zoo fed the cat by hand and pet it.
One of my other more vivid memories of that visit was crouching beside a little monkey’s cage and picking and handing it weeds that it ate, then sticking my fingers into the cage so it could hold on to them, and it squeezed them and wouldn’t voluntarily let go. I had to pull my hand away when we moved on to see the other animals but I wish I could have stayed for a while and hung out with it without a cage between us. It was a very cute monkey.
I used to live near an old abandoned house often occupied by raccoons and once went in and saw three babies lying together but no adult around so I took one of them, intending to make it my pet. It clung to my shirt and I had to walk around half a km to get back to my house. When I was almost there I examined its teeth closer and realized it probably couldn’t chew food yet and I began to doubt that I’d be capable of feeding it properly and then I put it down on the ground, I forget why but I had some reason, but it started making squeaks of distress so I picked it back up again, which made it go quiet, and then when I tried to put it down again it clung to my shirt with its claws. I walked back to the house and left it with its two siblings, though I was worried it would be rejected by its mother because of my scent. Much later I returned and there were three young adult raccoons that ran into a hole in the attic wall once I got up the stairs so I guess it was still taken care of.
This one was a rescue cat, in a wildlife park in Australia. He had been injured, he’d never survive wild. The rangers were taking him for his morning walk on a rather deserted side of the park. Pretty cool experience. He was plainly still wild, but used to humans, as long as you were respectful.
http://www.sott.net/articles/show/244756-Rice-Potato-Tomato-May-Be-As-Inflammatory-As-Wheat
P.S. Worker Bees, I assume it is you who check all the links, long overdue thanks for doing so.
That is in the tomato leaves, not the fruit. Many plants have a component that is poisonous; e.g., you can kill yourself by eating apple seeds.
Oh hey! That’s my smoothie recipe. Calls for 5 cups of spinach but add more if you have them available!
I’m really shocked that none of those 5 movement choices included stretching. I’m a yoga instructor and not a cross-fitter, and i abhor The Gym, but still! Not one single stretch? I think if i were to pick five exercises, at least three would be yoga movements, assuming we’re not including getting from one place to another. At first thought, they’d probably be… well, a sun salutation, actually! A balanced movement series that strengthens AND stretches, can be cardiovascular, connects you to your breath and clears the mind.
So that’s… a forward bend, lunge, plank/pushup, upward dog, downward dog, repeat!
There was a time I would’ve agreed with you, but after reading some new perspectives on stretching, I’m not so sure. I’m in the middle of Frank Forencich’s Exuberant Animal, and he talks about how stretching is actually detrimental to joints and how they function, which makes sense in light of all the injuries I’ve racked up over the years in yoga. I once even briefly dislocated a hip at the age of 29. No more static stretching for me.
YES! Thank you Mark for the sardine love
Mmmm greasy little omega-3 bombs. If only I can get my husband on board…
Just made lard for the first time today! Thanks to my friend for sharing her pork fat. My house smells like bacon. yummm!
Australian Paleo convention, yes! Wombat spit roast, emu-egg omelette and kangaroo lasooing; i’m there.
How to avoid light pollution? Wear some blue blocking glasses in the evenings. I got some from a company called Low Blue Lights. The glasses may make me look like a dork, but they help me a lot with my insomnia. They approximate the light you would see if you were living outside in nature. They block the blue wavelengths of light that suppress melatonin production.
I bought the Sweet Potato Power book on kindle and I can’t put it down! I have to highly recommend it. I’ve done a lot of research and consider myself well versed in the way insulin and carbohydrates are used by the body, but this book lays it out in a whole new way and it flows so well. I’m thrilled to be learning more than ever in a new context! Read this book, it is more than worth your time.
And I swear, I don’t know the author.
I’m in the Netherlands and I like to try sweet potatoes. Is there a difference between sweet potato and yam?
First: search, then ask.. I’m sorry. Just found a great post from Mark that answers my question. Thank you Mark.
Mark, why don’t you write a review of Phinney and Volek’s “The Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Performance”?
Great article on how Crisco came to replace animal fats in the American diet, it sent shivers down my spine. “If man made it, don’t eat it.”~ Jack LaLanne
Will durianrider be at the Aussie primal fest? Lol.
Check out this article:
http://lewrockwell.com/orig13/yackery1.1.1.html