I just moved and, in the process, let my levothyroxine prescription lapse. I missed four morning doses. I’ve been taking it long enough that I now recognize the difference – I get irritable, unmotivated, and tired. I finally refilled it today and took a tablet in the afternoon and bam I could feel the difference. I popped a pill on the way to the car, and by the time I got home I was feeling great.

This is all comparative, of course. If you hit yourself in the head with a hammer long enough, stopping is like cocaine – it feels incredibly good. But “good” in this context really means “much better than before.” I expect it’ll take me a few days to get back into the rhythm of the medication, but man… that was three crappy days.

I stopped taking it for over a month back a couple years ago and I actually felt really good at the same time — but I also changed my diet radically and was getting some good exercise. This time, the only thing that changed was the medication. Two years ago I did eventually start feeling pretty down and resuming the medication helped.

One of the keys of paleo dieting is using your own body as a testbed. People respond differently; some people can’t stand dairy, others have some problems, others have none. So it is with many other foods. The key is to test: stop taking (or eating) something for a while and see how you feel, then start taking it again. Try a new food for a couple weeks, then stop. It’s important to not make many changes at the same time.

That’s also true for convincing your doctor, family, coworkers, friends, and complete strangers. If you change ten things about your life, you don’t get to credit all improvements to your favorite change. If you do want to make many changes, then go ahead and change them all if you think they’re all good changes. But go back and test each one individually, and see if it really was a factor.

Anyway, I’m feeling a lot better tonight! I’m looking forward to the long weekend, and feeling good to have the time off and not just waste away in bed all weekend.

Happy 4th, America!

Grain Facts, Part II – Corn (ake Maize)

In part I, I discussed nutrition facts about rice. These pages are intended to be standalone, so there’ll be some overlap here. Corn and rice are both grains, but their nutrient & anti-nutrient loads are quite different, as is their standard forms of preparation.

Overview

Several varieties of corn

The food known as “corn” in the US and Canada is known as maize elsewhere. It gets the name “corn” from its kernels; the word ‘corn’ actually means grain, as in grain of sand. Corned beef, for example, has had grains of salt added to cure it. In English-speaking countries, “corn” or “sweet corn” is often used in culinary contexts while “maize” is used in scientific or agricultural contexts.

Corn is often considered a vegetable in American cuisine, but it’s actually a grain, like wheat, rice, rye, and barley. It’s the most heavily produced grain in the world, ahead of rice (#2) and wheat (#3), with barley a distant fourth. Originally cultivated in Mesoamerica, it spread rapidly throughout the Americas and eventually worldwide. About 40% of the worldwide supply of corn is grown in the US.

Unlike wheat and rice, the corn grain is typically eaten whole. Immature grains are soft but unpalatable, and so cooked usually by boiling. Corn on the cob and packaged corn kernels are these immature grains. In traditional preparations, the kernels are soaked in alkali water, a process known as nixtamalization. Cornmeal, polenta, and various fermented corn drinks & foods are made from unripe ears; dry, ripe kernels are used for popcorn. As corn ages, more of the sugar in the kernels turns into starch. Hence, “sweet corn” is especially unripe, picked while there is still a lot of sugar available.

Nutrients

Corn’s a good source of starch. What, starch isn’t a nutrient? Damn. Nevermind!

Anti-Nutrients

OK, actually I’m just trying to make a point here. There are nutrients in corn – protein, B vitamins, and many minerals in the hull of the kernel. But it’s not a nutrient-dense food. The presence of anti-nutrients means many of the nutrients in corn aren’t bioavailable; what use is it to eat a lot of vitamins or minerals if they wind up passing straight through your digestive system?

Let’s start with protein. Corn isn’t a complete protein source, however; it provides low levels of several amino acids, which is why it’s often combined with other foods (such as beans) in traditional diets. You couldn’t thrive with corn as your only protein source.

The fats in oil, like in almost all vegetables, are polyunsaturated. These aren’t the good fats. If you’ve spent some time in the paleo community, you’ve surely come across the admonition to watch your omega-6 to omega-3 ratio, and to keep it under 2 (or as close to 1 as you can). Stephan and Richard (head on over and search for ‘omega ratio’) have both commented often on the omega 6:3 ratio; the research they’ve dug up suggests that a low ratio is great, but avoiding both is even better. Either way, vegetable fats are double-plus ungood.

Except for Bs, corn isn’t a good source of vitamins. NutritionData provides a good summary, but one thing to note: the “vitamin A” in plant foods isn’t the same as what one gets from animal foods. Veggies contain beta-carotenes, which need to be converted into retinol. That conversion isn’t always 100%, and often minimal in people with many health problems. Conversion requires bile salts in the upper intestines, which means Vit A needs to be eaten with fats (like butter!), and requires thyroxine. Those with hypothyroidism (like me! I’m not going to get shit for retinol from beta-carotenes) and diabetes lack the hormones and enzymes needed to make the conversion.

Also, animal foods contain a whole complex of vitamins. The research that “isolated” vitamins identified only single molecules. Generally, foods high in that specific molecule tend to be high in other compounds, as well. For example, animal foods high in retinol are also high in retinal, retinoic acid, retinyl esters, and other retinoids. “Animal Vitamin A” is far more than retinol itself.

Like most grains, corn in high in minerals. Those minerals are in the kernel hull, however, and that hull comes with compounds that block uptake of those minerals by animal digestion systems. Grains don’t want to be eaten – they reproduce by spreading pollen, not by letting animals eat their seeds. Blockers like phytate and trypsin inhibitors in corn hulls reduce the bioavailability of those minerals, and as with many other grains cooking reduces but does not completely destroy these antinutrients.

Summary

As with many foods not approved in a paleo diet, corn is a poor source of nutrients. If you’re starving, it’s got enough calories to keep you alive – but it lacks the protein, vitamins, and minerals to optimize health and allow humans to thrive. The “technical” amount of nutrients in corn (as suggested by the nutrition data on packaged corn products or given at a site like NutritionData) is misleading due to the anti-nutrients, and some of the anti-nutrients in corn are effectively like negative vitamins, in that they block uptake of the real thing hence increasing the demand for the real thing!

The calories in corn also crowd out other, better foods. A diet containing corn will be far less nutritious than an isocaloric diet containing animal foods. For the same nutrient supply, a diet containing corn will be a lot more calories, and that means weight gain. I won’t go into the evil of carbs, glycation, and insulin spikes here, although that’s another reason to avoid starchy foods.

In further installments, I’d like to cover wheat, other random grains, recipes & preparation, and provide a general overview of grains as a food source.

A few weeks back I made a post on selling on ebay & shipping internationally. Shipping domestically is much easier (and cheaper), and it seems sellers are much less likely to be scammed. In this post, I’m going to cover domestic shipping options, shipping-related seller shipping ratings, and how to avoid scams & loss.

Selling on ebay is easy, and there’s tons of guides to help you with that. It’s not hard even without a guide or a book. Likewise, shipping is cake. The question isn’t how to sell or ship, but how to avoid scams and reduce loss from damaged or lost items, and how to get the best ratings you can.

You might be thinking, what does this have to do with PaleoSnow? Well, eBay is one way that I’m making enough money to pay to live the snowboard bum lifestyle. It’s something I know and thought would be useful to share – stuff I wish I had known when I started selling.

Avoiding Scams

The most common buyer scams (from what I’ve seen surfing forums) are buyers that claim the item was never delivered, and buyers that dispute charges. A bit more rare are buyers that claim goods were damaged or not as described, or try to return goods that aren’t what you mailed.

The first two scams (i.e. the most common) generally fall under Seller Protection. If you have proof that the item was delivered, then buyers can’t run these scams. Also, only ship to confirmed addresses. Sometimes, an evil-doer will obtain someone’s paypal and ebay passwords, then use those to buy something and have it shipped to their house. Unless the address is confirmed, you’re going to be stuck; PayPal won’t help you. Yes, this sucks. But that’s life – someone is going to lose the money, and PayPal isn’t willing to foot the bill unless you take precautions to prevent such scams.

That means:

• only ship to confirmed addresses
• always ship with delivery confirmation
• for expensive items (over $200 or $300), ship with signature confirmation and insurance

If someone’s PayPal account has been hacked, buyers might purchase an item and then send you an email saying “we moved, can you ship to this new address?” Your answer is no. Not just NO but HELL NO. You are completely unprotected if you ship to a different address. If you manually address your envelopes, make sure you check the PayPal transaction first. If you print out postage online, you’ll go through PayPal and it will tell you what the confirmed address is. eBay and PayPal are owned by the same company so theoretically the information should be consistent, but I’ve found sometimes it’s not, and communication between the two sites can be spotty. So just spend the extra 30 seconds, log into PayPal, and look for the words “OK to Ship”, “Covered under Seller Protection”, and “Confirmed Address.”

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Adding delivery confirmation to first-class USPS packages is only 80c, and cheaper (or free) with the express services. This gives you tracking for domestic USPS packages and confirmation that the item was delivered. If the buyer wants to claim the item was never delivered, you’re protected – delivery confirmation means that it’s the buyer’s problem at that point! Note that having delivery confirmation does not mean that your item won’t get lost or damaged. To handle that problem, you need insurance. Delivery confirmation just means that buyers can’t claim it wasn’t delivered when it actually was!

Insurance, by the way, is something that protects the seller when things go wrong. According to eBay policy, you can’t charge buyers for insurance. Insurance protects you in case the item was lost or damaged during shipping. Think of it from the buyer’s point of view: you buy something, the seller says he shipped it, but it never shows up. Is that the buyer’s fault or the seller’s? According to eBay policy, it’s the seller. Until the item arrives in the buyer’s hands, it’s the seller’s responsibility.

What you can do is pass that charge along, usually by padding the shipping & handling fee or by increasing the cost of your item. Be careful though – if your shipping fees are too high, buyers might ding you for it (see Seller Ratings, below).

So the process is fairly simple. Before you ship an item, make sure that the PayPal transaction says the buyer’s address is confirmed, only ship to that address (not to some other address that the buyer asks you to send to), and ship with delivery confirmation.

Seller Ratings

Sellers are rated not just with the normal positive/negative feedback mechanism, but also through detailed seller ratings. There are four such ratings: accuracy of the item description, communication, shipping costs, and shipping time. I won’t describe the first two here, just the last two related to shipping.

According to eBay policy, the delay taken by the delivery service should not reflect on the seller. If you inform your buyers up front of the service you’re using, buyers should understand the delay. It doesn’t hurt to remind buyers – something I generally only do when I expect the package to take a long time to arrive. If you’re shipping a bulky or heavy item cheaply, that generally means a slow delivery method. That’s the time to tell your buyers in the item description itself about the slow delivery.

I generally ship via USPS first class. This is cheap, and when shipping domestically, shipping time tends to be on the order of days. If I get items to the PO quickly, buyers often receive their item three days after they buy it, sometimes four days. That’s generally not long enough for them to start getting antsy about whether you really shipped the item, if it got lost, if they got scammed, etc. But if you’re shipping parcel post or some other slow ground-delivery method, be upfront with your buyer. Manage their expectations ahead of time. Every time I ship an international item (which tends to be very slow due to customs), I send a personal note to help manage buyer expectations. If you ship a few items the slow way, personal messages might be the way to go. But if most of the items you sell will go out through parcel post or the like, then you should include a shipping-time disclaimer in your listing description.

Back to the seller ratings.

The only thing time-wise under your control is how long you take to get the item to the delivery company (e.g. USPS, FedEx, etc). That’s what the “shipping time” option is. Managing expectations help. If you can get items shipped quickly, then mentioning that in the item description will help frame the buyer’s expectation of the transaction. Once a buyer pays for an item, communicating with them and/or marking the item as shipped will tell them you’re on the job. When I ship with tracking, I add that tracking number to both eBay and PayPal right away – generally this generates an email to the buyer that says something like “your item has shipped.”  Even if you just drop the item off in a mailbox, marking the item as shipped that day can impress the buyer. If you buy postage online and print out the shipping label, that can also help tell the buyer that you’re on the ball.

Buyers will know if you mark an item shipped but then wait three days to actually ship it. Making a habit of that might come back to bite you, and that will mean bad ratings, which will eat into your profits.

Which is the point here: having good ratings (and a minimum sales level) will earn you a discount through eBay. Since you’ve got to pay up to 12% to eBay in seller fees, plus the listing fee, plus the PayPal transaction fee, discounts can make a big difference in your bottom line. The biggest chunk of those fees is the Final Value Fee, and maintaining a high seller rating ears you a discount on that.

The second shipping-related detailed seller rating (DSR) is shipping cost. If you offer free shipping, buyers have no choice but to give you five stars. Since you need to maintain a 4.6 rating (out of 5) to maintain top seller status, a few 3s can seriously risk losing that status. In other words, you can’t get away with exorbitant shipping costs. It might be worth it to you, depending on how much you sell, to give up top seller status, or to not pursue it. I used to throw in a couple extra bucks for shipping on my items, because that’s how much it cost and because shipping costs aren’t included in the final value fee. But the amount I was saving was tiny compared to the discount, so I offer free shipping on most of the items I ship.

If the items you sell are expensive to ship, especially if that’s high relative to their sale price, then you’re kinda stuck here. The best thing to do is to be up-front with your buyers about the shipping costs, mentioning it in the item description.

Domestic Shipping Options

My favorite way to ship is through the US Postal Service. Counter service tends to be slow, but usually friendly and helpful. The main reason I choose them is because they’re cheap. If you print out postage at home, then you don’t even need to bother with the counter and you can just drop off the package in your mailbox. USPS offers slow service for packages (Parcel Post), fairly quick First Class service, Priority shipping, and Express shipping (typically overnight). There’s not much difference between Priority and First Class. Yes, Priority should be faster, but unless you’re shipping from New England to the Pacific Coast, most of the time it takes a package to get from seller to buyer is the first and last day – getting the package into the mail, and that last day of delivery. I almost exclusively use First Class – it’s cheap, fairly quick, and if I get items mailed quickly, it’s often just 3-4 days from sale to receipt.

Large, bulky items are a bit trickier to send. USPS Parcel Post can be very slow, while sending heavy boxes through FedEx and UPS can be very expensive. Feel free to look around, but I’ve found that FedEx and UPS are just too grossly expensive for what I’ve shipped. Buyers spend a week waiting for your auction to end – waiting another couple days for the package to arrive is usually worth saving the extra shipping time.

But that depends on the cost of the item. If you’re only selling a few, expensive items, fast & expensive shipping might make sense.

Generally, the best thing to do is to offer more than one shipping service. Pick the cheapest rate you can find, then find a faster service and offer that as an option.

Summary

A big part of making a profit on eBay is not spending too much for “friction” – buyer & seller fees, PayPal payment-processing transaction charges, and shipping. Finding a cheap shipping option is critical, especially when you decide to offer “Free Shipping” to attract buyers. Also, cheaper shipping means buyers can spend more on the item itself. Those Pak-n-Ship places can be convenient, but beware of what you might be paying to use them. Your best option is to go straight to the shipper – a UPS or FedEx store, or a post office itself. Print your own postage when you can and you can save even more.

Avoiding scams also protects you from losing out on a transaction. If you’re only making 10-15% profit on an item, losing the entire item to a scam can be crippling. Protect yourself with delivery confirmation and using confirmed addresses, and buying insurance for expensive items.

About a year ago, I went in to the doctor and my blood pressure was pretty damn high, about 170/100. I was surprised. I read up about it a bit and found that taking a reading while standing and while talking is a good way to get a high reading. The ‘normal’ numbers that everyone likes to see are easier to obtain while sitting quietly. Anyway, the number was still very high – and I was spooked.

Part of the reason I went into the doctor was that I felt ‘weird’, and wanted to get a new prescription for my thyroid medication. Hypertension is one common effect of untreated hypothyroidism (”patients with hypothyroidism have triple the risk of developing hypertension” from one source, or this paper listed in PubMed, or a study that looked specifically at the two), so I knew that not being on meds could be a problem. My first goal was to get back on thyroid meds, continue workout out, and continue losing weight. Not being on the medication was itself a gross mistake, one that I really only made because of the hassle of dealing with medical insurance. Moving on — I’m back on thyroid medication.

Strength training has sometimes been associated with higher blood pressure, but most of what I’ve seen in that regard says that it is while lifting weights that one’s blood pressure goes up. Nearly every source I’ve checked says that athletes have low blood pressure, mostly related to cardiovascular health & fitness. I don’t think that building muscle tissue should cause hypertension. That seems weird. So I didn’t stop strength training, especially since I was working on other avenues. Normally when one says “athletes” I think what comes to mind is runners, sports players, cyclists, and the like — people engaged in long-term cardiovascular exercise, who can exert themselves for hours at a sport or exercise. So running should help lower my blood pressure, although I expect that benefit to be slow and gradual as I step up my running.

Blood pressure is also correlated with weight loss. But I’m losing weight (on the paleo diet), so that should also be a continuing benefit, again slow and gradual as the weight comes off.

Of course, the doctor wants to give me pills for the hypertension and then pretend the problem is solved. She didn’t know of any pill that I could take once that would cure the problem, so the “only option” is lifetime medication. Blech! I didn’t want that solution. I want to be healthy, not just have “healthy numbers.” A really high BP reading is actually a serious condition; it’s correlated with stroke. As for the cause… dunno. Does having a high BP cause stroke? Or is the underlying cause shared? Anyway, I didn’t want to take meds and their scary side-effects (which tend to be things like… stroke!).

Thyroid function is harder to restore, I know, as Hashimoto’s is an autoimmune disease. I expect to continue to be on thyroid medication for a long time. Some people have been able to reverse autoimmune diseases after fixing their gut (by removing lectins such as WGA and other stessors from their diet) and eating nutrient-dense food, but all the anecdotes I’ve read about it says that it takes a year or more for your body to restore itself to health. I’m not sure B-memory cells every go away; if the continuing presence of foreign proteins will continue to cause Hashimoto’s, or if I’ve trained my body to kill my thyroid from now until eternity.

Some relief can be found immediately depending on the specific auto-immune disease, but hypothyroidism doesn’t cause pain or other severe effects like some of the others. I would like to restore my thryoid to normal functioning; I don’t want to be on that medication for life. But that depends on how damaged my thyroid is, and if removing antagonists will eventually convince my immune system to leave my thyroid alone.

After eating better and jogging for months, my blood pressure numbers have been coming down. I’m through the pre-hypertension range and into normal, around 110/70. I bought a BP cuff to use at home shortly after the high reading at the doc and I’m using that to track my BP – a few times a day at first, then mostly daily, and now about once a week. Although my diet’s fluctuated in the past year, it’s been mostly paleo. The high BP reading was enough to convince me to be more consistent in my workouts (running every other day, strength training every four — until I started snowboarding, at least, and then until the crash). The high BP has also been a motivator to stay on the diet.

I’ve lost over 60 pounds so far. I figure strength training has helped me put on some lean mass, but I haven’t been tracking body fat % so I can’t really judge that. At some point I’ll post my weight and BP readings, probably in one big chunk, for those that would like to see hard numbers.

Normally, when doing a scientific test, you only want to change one variable at a time. For example, if you change a half-dozen things about your diet and your weight plateaus, what caused your weight to stabilize? It’s much easier to find what works by doing one thing at a time; cut out this food, eat more of that, etc.

Except the problem in diet studies is that food isn’t simple. Eating more bananas (say) means not just getting the potassium and other nutrients from the fruit, but also getting more fructose and more calories. Replacing one food with another is better, but still a non-trivial change. Was the old food good or is the new food bad? Is it calories? Sugars? Micronutrients? Or even something you’re not paying attention to — like the fact that you’re eating breakfast now? Or eating carbs early in the day rather than late?

If you’re working out at the same time, a change in workout or diet might produce a change in body composition — more fat & less muscle, or more muscle & less fat, or maybe you’re gaining water weight, or all that fiber is just sitting in your gut.

Blood pressure is a bit easier. It’s just a number. And my goal is really to get that number to go down.

A few things I’ve learned:

* Taking several measurements throughout the day has shown me how crazily volatile BP is. If I take a BP measurement then wait a few minutes and take it again, that second number can be much lower. I don’t usually take two readings, and I think I’ll start to — and use that to see how the minute-to-minute volatility changes with time of day.

* Taking a measurement first thing in the morning is great for consistency. My morning routine is the most consistent time of my day and I think that reading (even though I’m normally in a rush out the door and don’t have time for a second reading) has been the most consistent.

* I don’t think I’m salt-sensitive, but I might be. I think that’s genetic and runs in African gene lines. Cutting out the salt didn’t have a big effect on my BP, but adding it back in seemed to send it up. So I went very-low-salt again for a couple weeks to check – no noticeable effect.

* Walking on a consistent basis (five or six times a week) has helped my heartrate a lot, and my BP some. Jogging increased the benefit, and long and fast runs pushed the benefit further.

* Alcohol and working out will both push my BP and heartrate up; alcohol for maybe a day, while sometimes just an hour after working out those numbers will normalize.

* Being sick does crazy things to the numbers. I don’t recommend internal trauma.

After a few months from that first reading, at least at home when I can sit down and rest for the few minutes it takes to get a couple readings, my numbers got back into the prehypertension range: around 135/80, plus or minus 10 points for both numbers. My heartrate also come down, from the high eighties to 70, sometimes in the 60s.

After a year, my BP has stabilized to around 110/70, and my heartrate has been fairly stable at 70. I’d like to improve that further but right now recovery takes the upper hand.

I’m going to keep my diet goals the same: no sugar, no grain, no fructose, and walk/run five or six times a week.  It’s worked so far, I’m still burning off weight, and the hypertension is gone!

It’s simple, sit on your butt and surf the internet.

That’s what I do. Sidelined from snowboarding – I can’t even walk to the store if there’s snow on the ground and danger of falling – I’m spending my day surfing the net, reading, writing, and watching some movies. And cooking!

Yet I’m still burning about 1/2 pound a day. That’s 1750 calories worth of fat, beyond the ~3000 calories a day I’m eating.

The key is to eat right, and that means taking into consideration the hormones that drive fat storage and burning. I’m actually still eating carbs, but non before noon and no caffeine (which means no soda) after 5pm. I figure every 90 minutes that I go without carbs, I burn off another ounce of fat. Thinking of it that way, it’s easy to decide to skip the caffeine with breakfast and just eat my bacon, or eggs, or sausage. Lunch is usually a hunk of meat with a rich sauce (and maybe a coke). Dinner is the same, but without the coke.

Fatty acids are constantly moving from the blood into and out of adipose tissue. The rate of each leg is determined by hormones, primarily insulin and glucagon. For three hours after consuming carbs, those carbs work their way into the bloodstream and cause the pancreas to secrete insulin (but no glucagon). Insulin helps speed the process of storing fat. It’s also a signal to the body to conserve energy; except for the sugar-rush spike after ingesting food, a constant high-carb diet means the body won’t use its energy stores (i.e. fat) to full activity; if you don’t have blood sugar, your body won’t want to do anything. That’s why runners bring carbs with them; their bodies aren’t adapted to using the fuel it already has.

After fasting, blood sugar stabilizes and insulin drops. The pancreas starts producing glucagon instead, especially in response to a high-protein meal. This hormone helps mobilize all that stored fat, ready to be used by cells for energy. Both ketones and glucose can feed into the Krebs cycle that drives cellular energy; your body doesn’t need to convert fat into sugar before it burns it.

The system is complex, and it takes a while to stabilize on one method or another. The human body is full of homeostatic systems – that is, systems that try to maintain balance. If you’re not used to burning fat as fuel, you’re going to spend a couple weeks fuzzy-headed until your brain figures out how to burn ketones. And your digestive system, too, might not be ready for it. Fatty diets are best eaten in meals, not by grazing; eat two or three times a day, not more. Once a day works, too.

Probably the best way to burn 5000 calories a day is to get sick. I spent five days in the hospital recently after my spleen ruptured, and I didn’t eat at all the first 48 hours, and only barely after that. In addition to my normal metabolic needs, my body also needed some heavy-duty repair – and that means energy. Recovery, too, is best fueled with fats. I was in misery for nearly a week, and that’s damn good motivation to eat better. If you’ve suffered from any of the ailments of Western Civilization, avoiding its foods – grain, sugar, and frankenoils – is the best medicine.

I’m sometimes dehydrated, but I haven’t yet worked out the causes. If I go out for a night and have several drinks, I’m usually dehydrated for the next day or two; alcohol is an obvious cause. Caffeine will do it, too. But I’m not yet a teetotaler, and I do drink tea fairly often, so I’ve got several recurring sources that might be drying me out.

Is there anything else in a low-carb diet that can contribute to dehydration?

Glycogen Loss

From a comment by Peter on his blog: “there is a marked release of water from the liver as glycogen is lost, but this drops straight in to the circulation. It seems to be the excretion of this excess water through the kidneys, to maintain fluid balance, which takes potassium out with it.”

Glycogen is a storage form of glucose; it is how glucose is stored in the liver and in muscle cells. The glycogen stored in muscles can’t be extracted to be used by the body in general; it’s locked in there for the muscle alone. If you want to burn off that glycogen, you need to do exercise, and ensure you’re not stuffing any more glucose in there — which means keeping your blood sugar and insulin levels low. Liver glycogen is the result of some carb digestion; both alcohol and excess carbs will be stored as glycogen in the liver. But… this glucose storage isn’t really a big deal. As long as you’re not overloading the liver with either alcohol or carbs, the glycogen stores aren’t a health hazard.

When you burn off that glycogen, the water that glycogen binds to is released into the blood stream, as mentioned in the comment linked above.

This isn’t dehydration; this is the loss of excess water when one first switches to a low-carb diet. If you take a cheat day (I recommend one every two weeks), you’ll build up some glycogen stores that you’ll need to burn off, too. Dehydration is when there is a low volume of water in the blood; the loss of this glycogen-related water is just restoration of your normal plasma levels. Dehydration is having too little water in the blood, and that’s generally caused by something stripping water out.

Essential Fatty Acids (EFA)

From a page on Chris Masterjohn’s cholesterol-and-health site: “Arachidonic acid is necessary for growth, proper hydration, healthy skin and hair, gut health, and fertility.” Chris points out (in another page) that he’s concluded that only Arachidonic Acid (AA) and DHA are the only true essential fatty acids. EFAs are important in cell growth, and hence important to growing children, pregnant women, bodybuilders, and people recovering from injury, and needed in lesser amounts for general repair.

EFA concentration is highest in liver and giblets, especially of grass-fed beef and organically-raised pigs and fowl. This is one important reason to cook your own foods using organic, grass-fed meats; protein is protein, but the important vitamins contained in animal fat will vary significantly based upon the diet of the animal. I aim for grass-fed and organic meats not because I care about the lifestyle of the cow, but because I care about the quality of my food. Getting a good balance of fatty acids will help ensure your body’s hydration-level mechanisms are all running smoothly.

Poly-Unsaturated Fatty Acids

From that same page on Chris Masterjohn’s site: “When total PUFA intake or EPA intake is very high, however, the EPA may interfere with arachidonic acid metabolism and contribute to deficiency symtoms such as growth retardation, dehydration, flaky and scaly skin, hair loss, gastrointestinal syndromes, or infertility.”

The importance of the omega-3:omega-6 ratio is something that has reached the mainstream media. However, a number of researchers in the paleo community have argued that if you’re not consuming a lot of omega-6 fatty acids, then you don’t need so much omega-3. If you avoid PUFAs from vegetable oils, you don’t need to obsess about getting omega-3 eggs or eating the right other vegetable oils. Just stop eating fried food, fake queso and “cheese” sauces, and soybean oil-based salad dressings; and don’t cook with industrial vegetable oils. Butter and coconut oil are fine for pan-frying and sauteeing, and olive oil & vinegar are good choices for topping your salad (if you don’t create your own salad dressings).

Excess PUFAs have the effects listed above — including dehydration and flaky skin. Instead of worrying about getting enough omega-3 fatty acids, avoid the omega-6 acids. (Arachidonic Acid is an omega-6, by the way, but if you’re eating liver once a week, it won’t be a major component of your diet, as it is for people who eat a lot of fast food or use heavy amounts of industrial vegetable oils.)

Lectins

Lectins might induce diarrhea, by pulling water into the intestines; hence dehydration. Food poisoning can also lead to diarrhea and dehydration, so … yeah, avoid that, too. It’s the same basic mechanism, and why you’re encouraged to drink a lot of water if you have diarrhea — obviously you’re losing a lot of water, and you need to replace it.

I wish I had some good sources for the lectin-diarrhea link; I’m hunting up some links so that I can make a post specifically about lectins.

This is one concern that recommends a paleo diet instead of just a low-carb diet: beans, often eaten in great quantities by people trying to go low-carb, have a lot of lectins. Many cases of “food poisoning” are actually cases of eating under-cooked beans. Avoid beans, and definitely skip the grains, as both contain lectins and can lead to diarrhea.

And one last quote, which I need to move some place better:

“roughage — which includes beans — help people stay ‘regular’ by causing more cell tears, which enables more mucus to escape from cells, essentially greasing the GI tract” — PloS Biology in 2006

Conclusions

Saying “dehydration isn’t caused by not drinking enough water” misses the point. Dehydration is caused by losing too much water and not replacing it. If you’re participating in an activity that causes water loss, then yes you should replace that water. Drink when you’re outside on a hot day, for example after a long hike or bike ride, or mowing the grass. But if you’re not actively doing one of these dehydrating activities, then you shouldn’t be losing that much water.

Dehydration is an imbalance in the blood, and is caused by digestive problems, the lack of vitamins, or overactive kidneys (such as from caffeine!). If you’re losing water from one of these sources, then you need to drink more water. Don’t drink water just because some dood on TV said so; drink when you’re thirsty, or if you think you’re losing excess water from one of the ailments listed above, drink some extra — but if you’re not thirsty, don’t bother.

Why would our body require us to drink water when we’re not thirsty? Sometimes I do get very thirsty, and I obey that signal and drink as much water as I can. If I’m not thirsty, I don’t worry about it. When I switch from high-carb to low-carb, I’ll try to drink water whenever I get cravings for food; drinking something helps distract me from the hunger. Otherwise… just when I’m thirsty.

My skin is much softer when I’m taking levothyroxine (the generic form of Synthroid, due to my hypothyroidism) and also Vitamin K2, and I usually use skin dryness as a measure of dehydration. My skin has been much softer these past two years, and the major differences are going paleo and taking K2, A, and D. Caffeine and alcohol are drying me out, so I’m trying to cut out the tea and cut down on drinking. I think I’m doing pretty good, and I’m glad for the changes!

The essence of the paleo diet is to eat foods that the human digestive system is evolved to thrive on. We’re not just looking to avoiding death, but to thrive. Humans have only lived with agriculture for around 10,000 years and are not well-adapted to eating grains; hence the focus on animal foods in the paleo diet. Fruit, nuts, and berries also play a part, but are generally seasonal — we’re adapted to eat them, but generally don’t get them year-round.

Salt is something else we’re not adapted to consuming a lot of. I bet you’ve seen plentiful mentions of how high-salt the Standard American Diet is; whether it’s potato chips, microwave burritos, breakfast cereals, processed meats, french fries, whatever — it’s got a lot of salt. And yet our bodies need salt. What’s going on?

Salt and Potassium

Salt and Potassium work together in the body to assist in moving nutrients into and waste out of cells, as part of the sodium-potassium pump. We need both in our diets, as some of these electrolytes are routinely lost in the urine.

High sodium levels cause thirst; drinking water will dilute the blood and restore normal sodium levels. Very high levels can cause confusion and then lead to paralysis, seizures, or a coma. You’re unlikely to every experience very high sodium levels unless you’re gorging on salt, so I’ll move on.

Low sodium levels (hyponatremia) is a more common ailment. Drinking too much water, without replacing lost sodium, thins out sodium levels in the blood. There’ve been a few highly-publicized cases of teens or young adults dying from taking recreational drugs like ecstasy — these are actually cases of hyponatremia. They feel very thirsty, essentially overdose on water (dihydrogen monoxide is a killer!) and drop their sodium levels, which leads to confusion, drowsiness, muscle weakness, and seizures. Sports drinks contain sodium to replace the salt that you lose through sweating to help prevent this. Water is great, but if your exercise leads you to sweat alot, you need to maintain your sodium levels, too.

High and low potassium levels are much less common. Unless you’re on a diuretic or other drug that dramatically alters potassium levels, chances are you won’t run into very high or low potassium levels. If you’re eating real foods, from berries to  beef, your potassium levels should be solid & stable.

A Taste for Salt

Most paleo foods are high in potassium and low in sodium. Beef, chicken, and pork all contain solid levels of potassium, and many fruits, such as bananas and especially avocados, have very high levels. Paleo man got all the potassium he needed from his diet, but didn’t get much salt.

Salt was rare in the ancient world, and I’d guess in the paleo world, too. Our word “salary” reflects this history — it comes from the Roman practice of paying soldiers their wage as salt. It’s easy to see that humans might have evolved a “salt tooth” to encourage them to seek out salty foods since they’d otherwise get so little of it. (Similar speculation suggests that we have sweet tooths for the same reason — that high-energy fruits were rare to paleo humans, and if we run across some, we should grab as much of it as possible.)

Salt and the Paleo Diet

The Standard American Diet, in addition to high levels of sodium, comes with heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and stroke. High levels of sodium contribute to high blood pressure and stress the kidneys, right? One of the cornerstones of the Cholesterol Theory of heart disease is that eating high-cholesterol foods (like meat) increases serum cholesterol, and high serum cholesterol levels are associated with heart disease – but the missing component is whether eating animal foods leads to chronic high cholesterol levels, or if the spike just happens after a meal. Since cholesterol levels are regulated by the body, it seems weird to assume that chronic high levels are just a byproduct of what we eat. So it is with sodium: sure, serum sodium increases after eating sodium-containing foods. But does it lead to chronic high levels?

I want healthy cells. I want my cells to perform as best they can in exercise, during training, and during competition. That means restoring electrolytes after exercise, sure. The rest of the time, I’m not convinced high-salt is a bad thing. Especially given studies that showed that dramatically cutting sodium intake levels only marginally decreased blood pressure levels – like 3mg! 120/80 to 117/80? Who cares? Sodium isn’t the boogeyman that popular media makes it out to be.

As I reported earlier, I ran into a tree about a month ago. I was diagnosed with a ruptured lung (pneumothorax) and a couple broken ribs. The treatment was a chest valve to help the lung reinflate, and 4-6 weeks off the slopes to let the ribs heal.

At first the ribs hurt like hell, especially the first couple days. But after 3 weeks they had mostly healed, and I started walking further. My ankle hurt a bit, something else I had injured in the crash, but it was getting better. At 4 weeks, I went out on the hill, stuck to the bunny slopes, and I didn’t seem the worse for wear.

A week after that, I went out again on a couple days. My ankle was bothering me, so the first day I didn’t do much, coming home after about 90 minutes on the slopes. Two days later, I stayed out a bit longer – about three hours.

Two days after that – my stomach started hurting, around 2pm, a couple hours after lunch. At first the pain was minor, but it continued to escalate. After 20 minutes I called it quits and my roommate took me to the hospital. Checks in the ER didn’t reveal anything, including a portable x-ray. It took a CT to diagnose the problem.

Turns out my spleen started bleeding. The timeline is weird – normally the spleen starts bleeding after trauma, not after trauma then a couple days of rest.

That night sucked ass. If you’ve ever had trauma like this, or maybe dental surgery, you know they ask how the pain is on a 1-10 scale. Mostly my pain was at 4-5, even on pain meds, but I had short bouts of pain that were much worse. My first horrid attack was at 10pm – excruciating pain that lasted for about 20 seconds. I continued to have these short attacks of bad pain. Sleep wasn’t really possible, just short naps while the meds blocked out some of the pain.

I was better on Sunday, with only a few bad attacks. One on Monday, none on Tuesday or later. I walked around a bit, gradually got off pain meds (Dilaudid) and muscle relaxants (Valium), etc. On Sunday I could barely breath in half a liter, on Tuesday I could do 2-3L in a breath.

One of the pains that I had when I went into the emergency room was shoulder pain. I didn’t know if this was an old injury resurfacing or what; turns out, if your spleen ‘hurts’, your body registers it as shoulder pain.

Now shoulder pain freaks me out. I drove to the grocery store today, and closing the car door sent a jolt of pain through my shoulder. Too much extension on the shoulder? Or did leaning over compress my spleen enough to cause pain? Trying to nap brings up similar issues: does my shoulder hurt because of the way I’m resting on it, or am I compressing my spleen again?

Plus my stomach hurts. Gas pain? Constipation? Pressure due to blood pooling in my abdomen?

I’ve been miserable for a couple days. The pain isn’t bad; fear of pain is crushing. Every little pain spasm brings the fear that I could have aggravated the rupture again. The “upside” is that most of these symptoms should resolve in a week.

If you like snowboarding (or skiing) through the trees, I suggest you take a look at my post on snowboarding dangers. When they say there’s a chance for serious injury or death, this is one thing they’re talking about. (Plus tree wells.) Risks can be managed, and I did a poor job of managing risks that day. Take a lesson, don’t ride when fatigued, work up to denser trees, and ride with a friend.

According to the dust jacket and reviews, Christopher McDougall’s Born to Run is about the Tarahumara Indians and a couple ultra-marathons. But it’s not. Oh, sure, those things are described in the book, but the theme of the book is something different.

You know those comedies and dramas where the protagonist has this crazy idea that everyone thinks is impossible, but he doesn’t care, and he tries, and does it anyway? That’s Born to Run.

Everything thinks running marathons is crazy impossible. Only insanely fit people do it. Running is painful, causes injuries, and requires huge amounts of dedication, right? And the limit of human endurance is 26.2 miles, right? Wrong.

Born to Run is about superathletes; people that do what others think is impossible. There’s some of that in the biography of famous scientists, like Richard Feynman. I think there’s two parts here: (1) once you know it’s possible, trying and achieving become easier, and (2) it’s the shoes.

Making the Impossible Possible

People don’t try the impossible because, obviously, it’s a foolish waste of time. But what lots of other people are doing? Sure, try it! Tons of people run marathons. Even overweight people that aren’t in shape. Knowing it’s possible, they read blogs and forum posts and news articles and books about it. The do the training that others suggest. They study the success (and mistakes) of others and do it themselves. Following in others’ footsteps is much easier than laying first tracks.

Most people don’t know about ultra-marathons; most people don’t know that hundreds of overweight, unfit people train and complete marathons every year. Knowing it’s possible moves it into the realm of consideration. It becomes an option, and sometimes a goal.

Born to Run makes marathons seem easy, actually. It makes ultra-marathons seem possible to already-fit athletes that want to go further.

It’s the Shoes

I think mainly, though, Born to Run is about shoes – or the lack thereof. McDougall’s quest started with wondering why his foot hurt. In the process, he finds out why jogging shoes are evil. He finds a reclusive tribe where everyone runs long distances – and no-one wears fancy jogging shoes. I think there’s a huge correlation.

I wish I remembered where I heard the quote “no athlete performs at 100%” because it’s such a good quote. I want to use it here again. Most runners suffer some sort of running-related injury each year, and that injury rate is proportional to the cost of their shoes — even after adjusting for miles run and speed. Imagine if running wasn’t so likely to break something to the point where you couldn’t run? Finishing a marathon would be that much easier. And attempting an ultra-marathon would be possible, too.

Diet plays a part as well; cramming yourself full of sugar every 30 minutes just to be able to run is a view made possible only by the fact that the Standard American Diet is sugar and crappy, artery-clogging vegetable oils. I usually ride every day, throwing my 215 pounds through turns and sometimes crawling through foot-deep fresh snow, on an empty stomach. On 12 or more hours of fasting, usually. I bring along water, but not snacks.

It Makes Me Want to Run

What I enjoyed most about the book is that it made me want to run. It encouraged me to stay on my diet. This book (actually an earlier article by McDougall) is part of the reason I bought Vibram Five Fingers and run in those.

My favorite books are the ones that make their subject sound so fun and rewarding that I want to run out and do them. Kitchen Confidential made me want to be a cook and got me to cook more at home. 4HWW (and a talk at a social dynamics seminar six years ago) is part of why I left the dayjob behind to come out and spend six months snowboarding. Born to Run encouraged me to run, and it makes me want to complete a marathon.

Running shouldn’t be a chore, and I think the main reasons it is to many runners are shoes and diet. As paleo guys, we like science. Not the crap that scientists say we should believe, but the evidence that they gather. McDougall does a great job of gathering and presenting the evidence on shoes. If you’re in doubt, go to a bookstore and read chapter 25 (page 168 in my edition). After reading that chapter, you should want to buy the book – and then go buy a pair of vibrams, and then go out and run five miles. Or fifty.

Rice is probably the least harmful of the major grains, but the benefits and risks depend on the type of rice and how it’s prepared. It’s the second-most heavily produced grain (after corn) and so feeds a huge number of people. It’s not as common as corn or wheat in the US but still a frequent component of the Standard American Diet. Other than the common variety that shows up in markets worldwide, there are many other regionally popular cultivars including red and black rice.

Rice Kernels

Raw rice is first milled to remove the chaff, the outer husks of the grain. What remains is brown rice, what might be called “whole rice”. If the brown rice is further milled to remove the bran and germ, it produces common white rice. Most of the nutrients in rice are in the bran, however, so two common methods are used to add those nutrients back: parboiling, which moves some of the nutrients into the grain itself, and fortification, which is common in the US.

Antinutrients

The antinutrients in rice are also mostly in the bran. Although rice in a non-gluten grain, the bran does contain phytate, trypsin inhibitors, and various lectins.

Phytate is a common antinutrient in grains. Phytate binds to minerals, preventing them from being absorbed during digestion. Hence the stats you might read at NutritionData or on a food package aren’t the bioavailable amounts. Does it matter to you how much calcium is in your stool? Don’t be fooled; if you can’t absorb minerals into your bloodstream, it doesn’t matter how much is in the rice.

Like phytate, trypsin inhibitors are also present in other grains. Trypsin inhibitors are chemicals that bind to trypsin, an essential enzyme in human nutrition. Most proteins are huge, and digestion is generally a process of breaking down such huge molecules into bits small enough that they be transported across the intestinal wall into the bloodstream. (Amylase is the enzyme that breaks down starch into sugar molecules, and the absence of a similar enzyme for cellulose is why humans can’t digest cellulose.) The inhibitors in rice that block trypsin, therefore, block the uptake of protein. Luckily, the trypsin inhibitors in rice are in the bran, and polishing rice into white rice removes that bran and hence the inhibitors. I would guess that parboiling brown rice moves not just nutrients but also antinutrients into the grain itself, hence parboiled rice would contain more trypsin inhibitors than non-parboiled white rice.

The presence of tryspin inhibitors introduces another anti-nutrient quality: the blockage of trypsin can lead to an over-production of the enzyme and the loss of the sulfur-containing amino acids needed to produce the enzyme. Furthermore, the inhibitors themselves are typically sulfur-containing – and aren’t digested. Trypsin inhibitors don’t just block protein uptake; they also lead to a higher demand for protein.

Rice bran also contains the protease-inhibitors oryzacystatin I and II. The chemicals act similarly to trypsin inhibitors, but they block a specific class of proteases – cystein proteases. (Trypsin is a serine protease.) Although I’ve seen mention of oryzacystatins as antinutrients, cystein proteases are typically non-digestive in nature, involved in apoptosis, inflammation, and cell mobility. Although I’m including mention of oryzacystatins here, I’ve found little discussion of their effect on digestion and nutrient bio-availability.

Possibly the worst antinutrients to be found in plant foods, lectins, are also present in rice. Rice lectin, like many plant antinutrients, is concentrated in the bran but also present in the grain itself.  Lectins are one source of allergies; although not common in the US, rice allergies are found in countries where there is a lot of rice consumption. Lectins interfere with digestion by binding to intestinal villi, and cause immune reactions if they are admitted into the bloodstream.

Cooking breaks down many of these anti-nutrients, but not all of them. Definitely don’t eat raw brown rice. But even cooked white rice will contain some antinutrients. The question, then, is: What is the benefit of eating white rice?

Nutrition

Rice is colloquially considered a nutritious food. I’ve asked friends about it, and a common answer is that rice is “good for you,” and that there are “a lot of nutrients in brown rice.”

There are nutrients in brown rice, especially in the bran. However, these nutrients are not as bioavailable as they could be due to the presence of anti-nutrients. They’re also not present in great quantity; potatoes, starchy vegetables (e.g. beets and squash), berries, crucifers (like broccoli) and green leafy vegetables all have more vitamins and minerals. Not to mention animal-based superfoods like liver! Compared to these other foods, white rice has very low mineral and vitamin content, and is handicapped by the residual presence of the antinutrients mentioned above.

Summary

If you’re eating low-nutrient food, it crowds out higher-nutrient food that you could be eating instead. The carbs in white rice come with very little to recommend them; more colorful veggies & berries provide much more bang and also don’t carry the caloric load. Rice generally isn’t very flavorful, either. It’s used as a filler; something to keep starving people from dying, or to provide energy to people engaged in intense physical labor.