Savvy Eating: Diets, Coffee, Chocolate Avocado Pudding and more …

Let’s start with coffee, as lots of us start the day with coffee!

Study: The More Coffee You Drink, the Longer You Live was reported by Dr. F. Perry Wilson, 2/ July 2018. The principal biologically active ingredient in coffee is caffeine. If greater caffeine exposure prolongs your life, then coffee-drinkers would live longer.

But those who metabolize caffeine more rapidly would not be benefited by coffee as much – they’d burn it away before it did all its good stuff. The link between coffee and survival would not be as strong.

This study did not show that effect.

In fact, the benefit of coffee was pretty similar whether you drank instant coffee, ground coffee, or decaffeinated coffee – which is, to quote David Letterman, just useless warm brown water.

The authors conclude: “These findings suggest the importance of non-caffeine constituents in the coffee-mortality association”.

In other words, it’s not the caffeine, it’s other compounds in coffee that give it this great effect.

And a strange one: Back to Butter in my Coffee and Increased Productivity was presented by Joanne French (www.innovuse.com) for Medium.com, 30 July 2018.

I want to tell you about Bulletproof coffee, a productivity and health hack for those who might have missed it or thought it was too ‘out there’ to try. It’s been a game-changer for me in many ways.

Quick background, David Asprey, a hacker turned biohacker, and a man who wants to live to 180, started Bulletproof in 2015. In short, this guy bio-hacks productivity, longevity, and health through diet. It’s clean eating and butter in your coffee folks. No gluten, dairy or sugar. High-quality food and good fats.

Bulletproof coffee is basically coffee for breakfast. It takes more time to make. And yes, you put a tablespoon of butter, the grass-fed ghee variety, in it and blend. Sounds gross. But it tastes good with a little Stevia in it.

Here’s what a little butter in my coffee did for me (immediately) last summer:

1- No hunger until noon. This breakfast keeps you full. The best part is that you don’t think about food until you actually need it. Hunger, thinking about what to eat next, was a MAJOR distraction for me.

2- Less brain fog and more energy. Total energy boost without the crash later. This, combined with no hunger, has increase my productivity. Meaning more crossed items off my to-do list.

3- Weight loss. No joke. You’re going to lose weight (on Bulletproof coffee alone) unless you plan on eating pop tarts and a pint of ice cream for lunch and dinner. Seriously, I lost a pound a day but plateaued after losing 10 pounds.

4- No dairy changed my life. This lifestyle is about more than coffee. Eating clean means no dairy. I freaking love cheese and ice-cream. Giving this up was hard for me. Very hard. Yet, after three weeks san dairy, this lifelong sinusitis sufferer to the max could breathe. Warning, if you have sinus problems and you give up dairy, your sinuses are going to drain. You’ll feel very sick for week. You might wonder if you have the flu. After that, you will feel absolutely fantastic. And yes, I know butter is dairy, but the good kind has lots of health benefits without the dairy side-effects.

5- No creaks, clicks or clacks. For years, my knees, ankles, and hips creaked. Embarrassing. I started putting collagen and bone broth products in my Bulletproof coffee and no more creaks. Hot damn. I’m a well oil-machine!

If you want the complete article and recipe for Bulletproof Coffee, please send your request to joanne@thesavvydiabetic.com.

All about DIETS!

All About Whole30, the Diet Taking Over Your Instagram was an interesting piece by Lisa Ryan on The Cut on Medium.com, 3 January 2018.

Whole30 is a 30-day program that eliminates certain food groups from your diet, with the goal of pushing “the reset button with your health, habits, and relationship with food”. Or, as registered dietitian Brigitte Zeitlin explains to the Cut, Whole30 is intended to help you reevaluate how you eat and better understand how different foods make you feel. “But it is an incredibly restrictive diet,” she cautions, “so it is not a long-term lifestyle plan.”

On the Whole30 diet, you can’t have: dairy (say good-bye to cheese), legumes (so no beans, pea, chickpeas, lentils peanuts or peanut butter, soy sauce, tofu, and anything else soy-related), grains (wheat, corn, rice, oats, barley, and even gluten-free grains like quinoa, buckwheat, and amaranth), added sugars (from Splenda to maple syrup), alcohol (no wine!!!!!), and junk foods or baked goods.

The Whole30 diet wants you to focus on “real foods,” which means lean proteins like meat, seafood and eggs; vegetables; some fruit; natural fats like avocado; and herbs, spices, and seasonings.

Is it actually a good idea to go on this diet? Well, it depends who you ask (and what your goals are). A recent panel of health experts listed the Whole30 towards the bottom of a new ranking of the best diets of 2018 by the U.S. News & World Report, saying it’s one of the “worst of the worst for healthy eating.” And Zeitlin told the Cut, “It’s an excessively restrictive diet and you might be setting yourself up for failure. Either you’ll give up mid-30 because it’s too hard to adhere to, or you’ll make it all the way through and then you’ll binge.” But registered dietitian Amy Shapiro said the diet could be a good idea for someone hoping to become more cognizant of their eating habits. “It’s a month of focusing on your food and having to cook a lot more,” Shapiro said. “It really makes you think about what you’re putting in your body.”

And if you made it all the way down here, a FABULOUS RECIPE!!! The VERY BEST Chocolate Avocado Pudding Recipe from Jill Anenberg Lawrence, 10 July 2018. Jill is a board certified health coach, vegan, dog lover and health consultant … and she’s really funny! Enjoy!!!