A coworker of mine is pregnant. And a vegetarian. And when her doctor suspected she might have gestational diabetes, she had to cut back on the bread and pasta, which didn’t leave much for her to eat except vegetables.

I mentioned the asparagus and shrimp salad I’d made before, and told her you could easily leave out the shrimp and it would be mostly asparagus and chick peas. She loves chick peas, but doesn’t like asparagus.

“Hmm,” I thought to myself, “I didn’t like asparagus either until I learned to roast it. Yumm. Then I tried blanching. Yumm again. Now I like asparagus, just not canned asparagus.”

So I told her I’d make some and bring it for lunch. She tried it. Now she likes asparagus, too.

Directions

Drain and rinse a can of garbanzo beans. You can soak your own dry beans if you want.

Prep 1-2 pounds of fresh — not canned — asparagus. Fresh-cut asparagus, you can just go ahead and start cooking. But if you buy it at the store the cut end will have started to dry out. You don’t want to eat that. By hand, snap off the dry bit and throw it out. You’ll feel that it’s tough and woody compared to the rest of the stalk. Then cut the rest of the stalk into bite-sized pieces.

Blanch the asparagus. What, you’ve never blanched? Bring a large pot of water to a boil. Prepare a large bowl full of ice water and set it aside. Working in small batches, boil the asparagus until just softened. Scoop the finished batch out with a slotted spoon and transfer to the ice water to stop the cooking process before the asparagus becomes mushy.

When all the asparagus is done, drain it and combine with the chick peas. Dice a quarter of a red onion and add that. (Yes, that’s white onion in the picture. I thought I had a red one, but I didn’t.) Add a couple of tablespoons each of olive oil and white wine vinegar. Season with salt and pepper and toss.

Join the undieters crew to download the printable recipe card.

Yes, I'm showing off. And I'm okay with that.

Side dishes are one of the tough challenges when you stop eating carbs. A previous generation was raised to believe it’s not a complete meal unless it’s got meat, a veggie, and a starch.

I hear people all the time — okay, I read people all the time — saying they’re getting bored with the same veggies or beans over and over with every meal. Apparently it’s so much less boring when you get to have mashed potatoes (from a box) and rice (instant, of course) every day.

After years of practice with rice and potatoes, we’ve each got several ways we like to do them. Now that I’ve started eating cauliflower and cabbage regularly, I’m developing variations with each of those.

The sautéed cabbage I’m showing you here came from a colcannon recipe. You make this cabbage, then mix it with mashed potatoes and bake the whole thing. I did it with mashed cauliflower, and it was okay, but not fabulous.

Before mixing it together, though, I tasted the cabbage on its own. Wow, that’s good. It took me a couple of weeks to get it back on the menu — Jenn isn’t as thrilled with it as I am. Winnie and I both loved it.

Everything you need to know is in that video, but if you want printed ingredients and step-by-step photos, you can go check it out on my other site.

Have you seen my post about how to make crustless pizza? Well, brush up on that technique, because I’ve got a few more ways to use it.

Sandwiches are cool, but when you don’t eat carbs during the week your options are sort of limited. Lettuce wraps are good, but sometimes you’re just not in the mood. Besides, the lettuce is just there to hold all the good stuff together, it doesn’t add much to the taste.

Fried cheese, though, that can hold everything together and add some killer flavor.

BLT

Cheese, lettuce, bacon, mayo, tomato.

Holy crap, I could eat these every day.

Meatball sandwich

This one is a little tricky. If the cheese has any holes in it the sauce will leak out. But it’s so good I didn’t mind at all.

Cheeseburger

Just cut the burger in half so it fits better.

What else would work?

I’m already planning to do a reuben on fried swiss next time I have some leftover corned beef. What else sounds good? Leave a comment with your ideas.

Sometimes I wonder if I lost my mind along with those 50 pounds. Then Jenn tells me about the conversation she just had and I realize it’s everybody else that’s nuts.

I’m getting tired of telling the truth. People look at me like I just sprouted a horn.

What ever do you mean, dear?

[A neighbor] said we both looked great and asked how we did it. I told her, “We stopped eating carbs during the week, and eat whatever we want on weekends.” She told me there’s no way that would work.

I was like, “No, I’m telling you that’s what we did. It already worked.”

I get this all the time. People just can’t believe that I really eat what I tell them I eat and still lose weight. It turns into an argument. Seriously, I’m done telling people what we eat.

I just said last week that carbs must enable time travel, because people who think you have to eat carbs keep insisting that what I have already done — in the past — can’t work. So they’re retroactively predicting failure.

Rock on, you crazy unbelievers. And hey, while you’re predicting the failure of things that have already succeeded, how would you like to take some Super Bowl XLII action? I’ll give you the Patriots and two points.

So there’s another study out that supposedly shows eating read meat will kill you. Specifically:

Red meat consumption is associated with an increased risk of total, CVD,[cardiovascular disease] and cancer mortality. Substitution of other healthy protein sources for red meat is associated with a lower mortality risk.

I’ll save you some time and admit that, because I think their conclusion is wrong, I’m assuming there are problems in the study design and methodology. Let’s look at it and see if I’m right.

What did they actually study?

We prospectively observed 37 698 men from the Health Professionals Follow-up Study[HPFS] (1986-2008) and 83 644 women from the Nurses’ Health Study[NHS] (1980-2008) who were free of cardiovascular disease (CVD) and cancer at baseline. Diet was assessed by validated food frequency questionnaires and updated every 4 years.

Right there I can stop reading. Do you know what a “validated food frequency questionnaire” is? Once a year they would ask people, “Over the past year, how often did you eat each of the following items?” Seriously, that’s what they base these studies on.¹

I can’t tell you what I ate last month, there’s no way I can give you a reasonable average over the past year. But for any study that uses data from the HPFS or NHS studies, that’s all they’ve got.

It’s not that bad is it?

Yeah, it is. Here’s their own support for using this data:

The reproducibility and validity of these FFQs have been described in detail elsewhere.^9-10

So they’re referencing two other articles. That’s cool, we should build on the work of others. It doesn’t make sense to keep reinventing the same basic research.

But what do those two references actually say about food frequency questionnaires? From the first one:

Results: Using factor analysis, we identified 2 major eating patterns, which were qualitatively similar across the 2 FFQs and the diet records. The first factor, the prudent dietary pattern, was characterized by a high intake of vegetables, fruit, legumes, whole grains, and fish and other seafood, whereas the second factor, the Western pattern, was characterized by a high intake of processed meat, red meat, butter, high-fat dairy products, eggs, and refined grains.

…

Conclusions: These data indicate reasonable reproducibility and validity of the major dietary patterns defined by factor analysis with data from an FFQ.

In other words, these questionnaires are good for identifying whether people eat a “Western” diet or a “prudent” diet.² These “diet patterns” are collections of multiple distinct variables, otherwise known as confounders. The correlation of these factors …

No, wait, I’m talking like a scientist. Let me say that more plainly: There’s no way in hell you can use that data to say anything about just red meat.

How about that second reference?

Mean daily amounts of each food calculated by the questionnaire and by the dietary record were also compared; the observed differences suggested that responses to the questionnaire tended to over-represent socially desirable foods.

Translation? People. Lie.

We all know what we’re “supposed to” eat. No one likes following the food pyramid, but we like saying we eat that way.

Why does this matter?

Some people like to do the right thing. They’re the ones who are going to “over-represent socially desirable foods”. They’re also the ones who are more likely to work out occasionally. Less likely to drink heavily. More likely to skip dessert. Less likely to smoke.

In other words, they’re more likely to avoid all the known risk factors. And as long as most of what they do is good for them, they’ll be healthier than people who do all the “bad” stuff — known to doctors as non-adherers.

Tom Naughton once described how this process could work to turn celery into diet enemy number one. Tell people celery is bad for them. All the adherers stop eating it. Twelve years later, the only people still eating celery are the ones who also smoke, drink, and sit on the couch eating pizza and wings.

And I can already guarantee the result:  people who eat a lot of celery tend to die younger.  This would, of course, prove that celery is a health hazard, right?

Of course not.  All it would prove is that health-conscious people had heeded the warnings and were dutifully avoiding celery.  Or, to look at it another way, it would prove that people who choose to ignore the dire warnings about celery are what doctors call non-adherers … or what I call people who don’t give a @#$%.  It would prove absolutely nothing about the actual health effects of celery.

If the warnings about red meat are wrong, but all the people who care about their health stop eating it, who would be left eating red meat? That’s right, people (like me) who think the warnings are wrong; and people who don’t give a @#$%.

But just for the sake of argument …

(Damn, I sure do seem to say that a lot when talking about food survey studies.)

Let’s suppose the food surveys are accurate. How big a difference did they say it makes that you eat red meat? You can read the dry statistical analysis …

We estimated the associations of substituting 1 serving of an alternative food for red meat with mortality by including both as continuous variables in the same multivariate model, which also contained nondietary covariates and total energy intake. The difference in their β coefficients and in their own variances and covariance were used to estimate the hazard ratios (HRs) and 95% CIs for the substitution associations.⁴

And on and on and oh dear God that is boring! Or for a good summary we can turn to a comment when the study was reported in the Sydney Morning Herald:

The death rate of people under 40 years in the US is about 150 per 100,000 (and that’s all deaths not just health related). So according to the article about 30 of these people died because of meat consumption. Or 120 per 100,000 instead of 150 per 100,000. An difference of 0.03% in the death rate. But that sounds so much less exciting than 20% chance …

That’s what all this comes down to. If we all give up red meat, the death rate might go down by 0.03%. Even if the study proved that (it didn’t) is it really worth giving up steak for that?

And what about how they define red meat?

How is this even a question, right? Red meat is just … red meat, right?

Of course not. First, did you know pork is a red meat? The National Pork Board might disagree with that, but that’s what this study said. Did all the survey respondents know that?

And they didn’t distinguish between lean cuts or fatty, just whether it was “processed” or not. So it was a hot dog or it was a steak. Did the fat content matter at all? Who knows?

So of course they didn’t ask if it was grass-fed or grain-fed, even though the nutrition profile of the two kinds of beef is pretty radically different. Short version: Cows aren’t designed to eat corn, but we feed it to them anyway, and load them up on antibiotics to keep them from dying.

Once we finally decide exactly what they mean by “red meat”, that still leaves the question of …

What did they replace it with?

If I suddenly stopped eating red meat, either I’d start eating a whole lot of something else in its place or I’d be really freaking hungry. So for all these non-meat eaters, what were they eating instead? Somehow I doubt they all ate the same “something else”.

And finally, back to …

The statistical analysis

Remember that paragraph back near the middle where I pointed out how boring the statistics were? I suppose I should go ahead and critique their analysis and look for flaws.

Except no, I shouldn’t. Why? Because if you ask the wrong questions, the answers don’t matter:

A Type 3 error “is the unintentional error of solving the wrong problems precisely.”

“In sharp contrast, the Type 4 Error is the intentional error of solving the wrong problems.”

• Type 3 errors are mistakes
• Good information sometimes fixes mistakes
• Type 4 errors are tend to be done for two overlapping reasons:
• There is money in solving the wrong problem.
• Someone is making money/getting elected keeping people from thinking about the right question.
• People making Type 4 errors fight correct information and resist change.

That’s the great shortcut to evaluating nearly every nutritional study you see reported in the press. Are they asking the wrong questions? And does it look like a Type 4 error? If the answers are “Yes” and “Yes”, you don’t even need to bother with the boring statistical part.

1) By the end they were doing the food survey once every four years. I swear I am not making this up.

2) The word “prudent” isn’t being used as an adjective. That’s “The Prudent Diet”, like “The Zone Diet” or “The Biggest Loser Diet”. So what is The Prudent Diet?

This theory [the lipid hypotheses] was tested in 1957 when Dr. Norman Jolliffe, Director of the Nutrition Bureau of the New York Health Department, initiated the Anti-Coronary Club. With great media fanfare, a group of businessmen, ranging in age from 40 to 59 years, were placed on the so-called Prudent Diet. Prudent Dieters used corn oil and margarine instead of butter, cold breakfast cereals instead of eggs and chicken and fish instead of beef. Anti-Coronary Club members were to be compared with a “matched” group of the same age who ate eggs for breakfast and had meat three times a day. Jolliffe, an overweight diabetic confined to a wheel chair, was confident that the Prudent Diet would save lives, including his own.

The results of Dr. Jolliffe’s Anti-Coronary Club experiment were published in 1966 in the Journal of the American Medical Association.² Those on the Prudent Diet of corn oil, margarine, fish, chicken and cold cereal had an average serum cholesterol of 220, compared to 250 in the meat-and-potatoes control group. However, the study authors were obliged to note that there were eight deaths from heart disease among Dr. Jolliffe’s Prudent Diet group, and none among those who ate meat three times a day. Dr. Jolliffe was dead by this time. He succumbed in 1961 from a vascular thrombosis, although the obituaries listed the cause of death as complications from diabetes.

If you’ve spent any time on the internet, you’ve discovered some people can get a bit … testy when they feel anonymous. There’s a name for it, but I try to stay PG-13, so you’re going to have to follow that link if you’re interested. (Don’t say I didn’t warn you.)

Before the internet, this type of behavior was mostly confined to road rage. There was no audience of cheering morons, but even the sweetest granny can turn into a finger-flipping, foul-mouthed hellbeast behind the wheel.

It turns out some people don’t need anonymity to be a complete tool. They just need to believe the people they’re talking about can’t hear them.

What’s this got to do with food?

Government agencies get together with industry leaders every now and then to come up with great new ways to screw us improve the state of society. If you read the notes from these meetings, you can tell whether it was for public consumption. The one I just found clearly wasn’t.

Back in 1997 the Federal Trade Commission looked into the claims coming from the weight loss industry to see if they counted as false advertising. Their report could use some editing, which you can see just from the title: Commercial Weight Loss Products and Programs; What Consumers Stand To Gain and Lose — A Public Conference on the Information Consumers Need to Evaluate Weight Loss Products and Programs.

Did you get that? Information consumers need to evaluate weight loss products and programs. So what do we need? And where can we find it?

Before the conference, the Center for Science in the Public Interest and other parties alleged that commercial weight loss programs typically failed to provide information that consumers need to evaluate the suitability of the weight loss programs. This information gap was said to include information in the following categories: (1) the cost of the program and its duration, (2) the qualifications and credentials of program staff, (3) the risks associated with the program; and (4) program outcomes in terms of both weight loss achieved and weight loss maintained short term and long-term. At the conference, most consumer group representatives reiterated the unavailability of this information and its importance to consumers. Significantly, the commercial firms at the conference did not take serious issue with the allegation that providers of treatment options for overweight/obesity need to be more forthcoming with relevant information. Providers indicated general willingness to disclose information in the first three categories, but cited obstacles such as costs and the difficulty of collecting data to making other information disclosures, especially those concerning outcomes.

In other words, “You’re right, we don’t provide the information people need. Especially information about what actually works.”

You’d think when the FTC is deciding if you’re guilty of making false claims you’d at least try to claim you’re telling the truth. Nope, not these guys. They just come right out and admit that they’re not providing any useful information.

So why don’t they provide the information?

The panel cited several barriers to providing consumers with weight loss and weight maintenance statistics. Cost was a primary deterrent, but concern about delivering a potentially negative message to dieters about their ultimate success was also mentioned. Barriers to providing outcome information included the following:

• Collecting the data, particularly maintenance data, is difficult and expensive.
• Inasmuch as long-term outcome results are likely to be poor, disclosing those results may discourage persons from attempting to lose weight.
• The definition of “successful weight loss” is unresolved.
• There is a need for a “level playing field” so that all products and programs are subject to the same guidance.

Let’s take these one at a time.

It’s expensive

Yes, and proving that a new drug does what it’s supposed to do is also expensive. But companies do that testing anyway, because there’s so much money to be made.

If someone could prove that their program or product really did lead to weight loss, don’t you think they’d make more than enough to pay for the testing?

It’s discouraging

This one should have been the one that got them thrown in jail. “We know this crap doesn’t work. But if we told them that, they’d stop buying it.”

Go ahead, explain to me how they didn’t mean exactly that. I’ll wait …

It’s undefined

We don’t know what “successful weight loss” means? Really? Okay, let me help you out on this one: I was fat. Now I’m not.

We clear now?

It’s unfair

The current “level playing field” is that all their stuff is crap, and they all lie about it. If they have to start telling the truth, people might stop spending money on stuff that has never worked.

This pisses me off

It’s insulting. They know they’re selling snake oil, and they’ll come right out and say it when they’re at a government/industry conference that they know most of us will never hear about.

You should be pissed off, too. They think we’re all stupid.

Don’t believe me yet? Here’s what they had to say about their customers.

• All the dieter cares about is the quick fix or the magic bullet.
• The typical dieter is experienced and wary, knowing by experience what works and what does not.
• The typical dieter has grown cynical and does not believe the information that is provided.
• Dieters will be discouraged if they are provided with realistic outcome data.
• Dieters are motivated to do better when outcome results are periodically provided them.
• Many dieters are successful in losing weight and keeping it off.

So you see, it doesn’t really matter what their ads claim. Because after all, none of us really believe them, and we’d be discouraged if we did, except we don’t listen because we already know what works, but we don’t care because we want a quick fix, and we’re successful anyway — even though we don’t know what “successful” means. (Shh, you weren’t supposed to remember that.)

You know what would make me feel better right now? A thick, juicy steak. Yeah … health food.

How can you see this breakfast and not be happy?

That’s all.

In the history of the world three stupid decisions stand out as the most obviously stupid:

1. New Coke
2. Invading Russia in winter
3. Telling your wife she needs to lose weight

Don’t believe me? Next time your wife asks, “Do these jeans make my ass look fat?” tell her, “No, honey. That half a cheesecake you had for lunch makes your ass look fat.”

No one wants to be told they need to lose weight. I don’t care how great you feel now that you’re back into the same size pants you wore when you got married, you don’t get to tell another adult what they should do.

However …

If your wife — or anyone else you know — asks you how you lost all that weight, don’t pull that false modesty crap. You decided to do something to improve yourself. You found a method that works. You stuck to it. Go ahead and say so.

What’s really handy, when it’s your wife, is that she’s already seen what you’ve been doing. Maybe she’s even tired of making two side dishes every night because you won’t eat the potatoes.

Vegetarians, Jews and anyone else with specific dietary restrictions have known for a long time how hard it is to live with someone who doesn’t eat the way they do. It’s especially hard when the person doing most of the cooking isn’t the one with the special rules.

Expect to be on your own

Friends and family will tell you that low carb is bad for your heart. Or your kidneys. Or your breath. (Yes, vegetarians bring this up all the time.)

You’ll get crazy resistance from all angles, even after it starts working. “Well you’re just setting yourself up for problems in the future.” Right, because I’m lowering my weight, and my blood pressure, and my triglycerides, and my blood glucose right now, obviously something very bad will happen in the future. That’s just good science.

Don’t go around trying to convert people. When they’re eating their whole-grain bagels with fat-free cream cheese and strawberry jam and bitching about how they can’t seem to lose any weight, just nod sympathetically and go back to your steak and salad with creamy Italian dressing, and smile.

Grab your opportunities

Jenn and I started eating low-carb at the same time right after New Year’s. She did better than me at first, then plateaued while I kept going down. Then she found out she was pregnant. Well hey, that explains why she’s not losing.

So for the next seven months she ate mostly the same way as I did. Still gained weight, of course. I kept going down pants sizes, she kept going up. By about the eighth month, she had decided she never wanted to see “fat clothes” again.

Then she had Luna. Two weeks later she had lost 20 pounds from her immediate pre-delivery weight. Three months later she’s down another 25 pounds.

When I started eating this way, I think she joined me to be supportive. This time, she means it. It’s for her.

Born 10/2/2011 @ 1:15 p.m.

Luna Hope on YouTube