Eating Bamboo

If you have been reading this newsletter for a while now you know that I am always looking for ways to create my favorite food items without using grains or sugars. Often I even take the next step and eliminate all carbohydrates from my diet. While eliminating carbs is not necessary for healthy people, it is the easiest way for those of us carrying around excess fat to burn that fat. However, there is a misperception in the low-carb community that eating lots of fat and thereby getting into ketosis more intensely will help you lose fat faster. This is a lie. The truth is every drop of fat you consume is a drop of your own stored fat that you are not going to be burning. It is also true that your body will not burn fat as long as it has carbs around to burn. So where does that leave us if we want to lose weight? Carbs are bad and fat is bad, but for different reasons.

The reality is that if you want to lose weight, food is contraindicated. Anything you eat will potentially prevent you from burning your fat for energy. That is why we have fat in the first place. It is our portable energy storage system for times of food scarcity. The real reason we get fat is we don’t have times of food scarcity anymore. For most of human history on this planet, there were regular times of food scarcity. Those times were called winter and spring. Once we started growing crops that could be stored then the elite class of folks in societies would have plenty of food year round, but the common folks still starved regularly. Year-round food is still a real concern in many parts of the world today.

I have written many times about using fasting as a way to replace those famine times that the human body was used to experiencing. Beyond weight loss, there are many health benefits from going completely without food for a while. This works well for the amount of weight one would gain normally during the summer and fall months if overeating — about 20 to 30 pounds. That is enough stored energy to keep you going if you have absolutely nothing to eat for 40 to 60 days. It is enough to carry you through times of food scarcity in most places. But our metabolism changes when we have gained weight for years and years and now carry more than 20 extra pounds. While fasting can work with this, it is not practical with our busy lives.

So what is practical? Overeaters Anonymous has had a system that has worked for many years that is about simply eating less. This has its challenges and its strengths. It requires a great deal of discipline but does teach long-term skills for keeping the weight off. Massive exercise programs to increase the amount of energy you burn also work, but only in the short term. Every person on the TV show The Biggest Loser gained their weight back after the show because they could not keep up that level of exercise. Additionally, as you exercise a lot, your muscles get much more efficient and need less energy to do the same work. For the normal population, exercise has been proven to be completely worthless in losing weight because as your exercise goes up, your hunger also goes up.

So what is left? Fasting, dieting, and exercise work for small losses — typically in the short term. What can work in the long term? The answer is a healthy diet that satisfies our hunger but also requires us to burn our excess fat to meet our energy needs. A carnivore diet does this quite well as it is highly satiating, enough so that you usually don’t eat as many calories as you usually would. The downside to the carnivore diet, and keto diets in general, is that they convince the body that you are in a time of scarcity and this triggers your body to lower your metabolism by affecting your thyroid hormones. To prevent this I recommend eating fruit, and maybe white rice a couple of consecutive days each week. For auto-immune conditions, folks use a carnivore diet of exclusively ruminant meat — cow, goat, and sheep usually. But for weight loss, you are better off using fish, seafood, and some poultry to lower the amount of unnecessary fat you consume. Also for weight loss fiber foods are excellent additions. Adding in plant-based foods has to be done selectively as most of them have various plant defense chemicals that are toxic to us. Each of us is different as to which plants we can eat without problems. The idea here is to find plants that have little to no carbs for the days we are eating low-carb. When enjoying a couple of carb days per week, we want to add in the non-toxic plant parts — their fruits. Plants want us to eat their fruits so that we will carry their seeds to other places. There generally aren’t any toxins in fruits and honey also appears to be relatively toxin-free.

This brings up the reason for the odd title in today’s article. I have found a new plant fiber food — bamboo! Yes, we are talking about the same bamboo that you make buildings out of as well as soft towels and sheets, and lots of other things. Note: Only certain species of bamboo are used for human consumption. The Dendrocalamus asper is the most common type of bamboo for eating. In bamboo-growing areas of the world, the local populations have eaten bamboo shoots for thousands of years. In the spring fresh baby bamboo poke their heads up out of the ground. You have to be quick to catch them as they can grow a foot tall overnight. It is during this first day that you want to harvest them as the flesh starts getting tough and woody very quickly. As I understand it, the outer layer is peeled away and after cooking, the inner flesh is allowed to dry. Once dry it can then be ground into a very fine flour good for baking. Why cook the shoots before drying them? Bamboo, like lots of other plant foods, contains cyanic glycosides which become cyanide in the body. Fortunately cooking such plants in their wet state destroys this toxin. What else has cyanic glycosides? Let’s try almonds, flax seeds, cassava, and about a hundred other foods we eat. Eating plant foods in the raw state can be tricky. You have to know your toxicology pretty darn well.

Like most gluten-free flours, bamboo flour has no stretchy gluten protein to hold things together. So you have to add things like egg white, xanthan gum, guar gum, and/or psyllium seed to hold your final product together. The great thing about bamboo flour is that it is 96% fiber, and it has no taste or grittiness to it! It makes a great flour replacement for baking that basically has no carbs, fat, or protein. The fiber in bamboo is an insoluble type of fiber, so it is great for providing bulk to move your bowels along and help rid your body of the toxic wastes dumped into the bowel by the liver and gallbladder.

I have been experimenting with bamboo fiber flour to try to create a good bread replacement. Bread is the number one item folks like me on a gluten-free diet miss. Since I recommend everyone avoid all grains, this flour can be a real diet saver. Here is the best recipe I have come up with so far:

1 ½ cups bamboo flour

½ cup almond flour

½ cup egg white powder

1 Tbs. Psyllium powder

1 Tbs. Baking powder

1 tsp. Xanthan gum

1 tsp. Baking soda

¾ tsp salt

mix well then add:

1 ½ cups water

2 Tbs oil (avocado or olive)

mix until well blended then let rest for 10 minutes

Line a loaf pan with parchment paper

Scrape dough into a loaf pan and smooth out flat

Bake at 350 degrees for 50 minutes

The result is moist and fluffy without being crumbly. It makes great sandwich bread, grilled cheese, and French toast! It is basically protein and fiber, perfect for filling up without pumping in a bunch of carbs, fat, or calories.

Enjoy,

David

Ellen 

This has been a pretty quiet week for Ellen. Her main focus has been on trying to get her blood sugars under control once again. We were doing great for a long time by staying on a keto diet, but about a month ago we started eating carbs again in the form of potatoes, rice, and fruit. We did one day of trying out the delicious gluten free cookies at The Caring Kitchen in Rancho Cordova and bam, both our blood sugars went crazy. Unfortunately gluten free does not mean sugar free. After fighting the sugar levels for a month we both decided that we have to go back onto a keto lifestyle. Some people that are in really good shape and get loads of exercise every day have been able to put some carbs back into their keto diet and still keep their blood sugar down. We are not in that group so no carbs for us. Boo hoo! Here she is showing off her continuous glucose monitor.