Fasting from Bread: My 15 Day Milestone

Fasting from Bread: My 15 Day Milestone

My fast from bread continues.  Last time I posted was at the 10 day mark, without bread, trying to follow the guidelines of the 80-10-10 diet proposed by Douglas Graham.  Graham, if you recall, says that humans are mostly like bonobos who evolved eating fruits and leafy green veggies.



Graham is the author of "The 80-10-10 Diet", and has several YouTube videos online, including this one, where he explains the diet, and this one where he details some of the reasons why people fail to thrive on his raw diet, where 80% of one's daily caloric intake should come from carbs.

At the last blog entry, I tallied my total intake for the day and discovered that I was substantially low on calories, and still not close to the 10% fat goal.  I was still losing weight, even though I wasn't hungry, and I was eating fruit enough to satisfy me.  But obviously it wasn't enough carbs.  I did realize that I wasn't truly following Graham's guidelines: I was juicing leafy greens, I was eating too much avocado, I was continuing to do a total fast twice a week, I was drinking hot herbal tea, extra water, etc.  But if you listen to some Graham tapes, he will blend up smoothies and salad dressings with nuts and seeds and avocados.  So is he himself really getting to 10% fat on a raw diet?  

In today's blog entry, I'm going to talk about something new that I've learned while fasting from bread on this raw diet.  As close to bonobos as we might be genetically, we are not bonobos with blenders.  Our diet is different.  We are different.

To recap: for this month, I have been fasting from bread, and existing on a mostly raw, whole food vegan diet (no grains, no eggs, no dairy, no alcohol, no processed foods) in an effort to get my fat intake down to 10%.  This is a record of some of my thoughts as I go on toward the 30-day goal of eating without bread.  Fair warning: I talk about what I learn, how I feel, and about the consistency of my stool, and other nasty stuff.

Day 12 Thursday

I've carted a lot of fruit to work today, and by the end of my shift, I'm starting to get tired of fruit.  The only veg I've brought has been some green juice, and an entire Romaine heart.  Plus, during the 12 1/2 hours I was at work today, I've had two rather large BMs that were somewhat loose.  Now that is new to me, usually they are formed, even with this amount of fruit.  It suggests to me that I am now overhydrating, that I might not require as much herbal tea (I always bring a thermosfull with me to work, because it is so dry here). But that wasn't my first thought: my first thought is, I'm not assimilating all that I'm eating.  This is the first day when I've seriously considered stopping this diet, because it doesn't seem like I'm absorbing the food I ingest.  I've had some terrible bread cravings today, too.  And cheese.  I long for cheese.  Perhaps I crave fat.  I'm starting to wonder whether the Weston Price Foundation people are right, that there is nothing wrong with a high fat diet, and the reason I crave avocados is because my body needs the fat.  Am wondering if the reason people gravitate toward a diet that is not 80-10-10, but rather 42/16/42 (the average for most North Americans, whether or not they are vegans, as reported on p. 75 of Graham's book) is because that is what is most natural for them.  I'm trying to talk myself into stopping this diet, that it might be dangerous for me.  But then, I think that perhaps it will take some time in the beginning for my micro-villae in the GI tract to rebuild themselves to be able to adsorb the amount of fruit and veg that I'm eating.  What if my several years of eating harsh Grain Bran has hurt my innards to the point where they can't catch this amount of fruit and veg that passes by?  I must still be in the stage of detox, so warned of by those who have attempted this diet before me.  I aim to continue this at least until 30 days.  That's the most immediate goal, and I'm almost half-way there.  I've only got this far because I've tried smaller goals: the first goal was to do it for 3 days, then the next goal was to do it for 7 days, then 10 days.  Now the goal is 30.  Still not sure whether I can do it for a full year.  I find the amount of food I am eating to be quite expensive.  I'm starting to look for discount fruit -- the fruit that is considered over-ripe, and that is 50% off in the store, because I know I'm going to eat it all in one day anyway.  And it takes a long, long time to masticate my green veg; if it were steamed, I could eat a whole lot, a whole lot faster.  Is it better to eat the kale, or drink the kale juice, or eat the kale whole but cooked, I wonder?  No wonder so many raw foodists use blenders and eat a lot of smoothies and cold soups.

Day 13 Friday

A fast day again for me.  Today while researching Dr. Joel Fuhrman's work on diets, I chanced to also learn of Dr. John McDougall's work in the US, on the west coast, for the first time.  McDougall believes that our natural diet as humans is starch-based (not starch exclusively, of course, but varied fruits and vegetables, with starch as the foundation).  

Fuhrman, author of "Eat to Live" has several videos online, but in my opinion (after watching several of them), I think his best video is probably "Steps to Good Health with High Nutrition Food"which can be found here in its complete form, or in smaller chunks elsewhere.

His main message seems to be to work on increasing the micronutrient density of your food, rather than worry about getting enough of the macronutrients of carbs, proteins and fats.  If you concentrate on getting more whole fruits and vegetables in your diet (especially the ones with highest levels of micronutrients -- Kale is often touted as the highest in Fuhrman's scales), you cannot fail to get enough of the main nutrients.  In fact, many of our diseases come from an overabundance of calories -- i.e. too many carbs, proteins and fats -- and not enough of the micronutrients.

His message is good, but it just didn't resonate with me.  On the other hand...

McDougall, author of "The McDougall Program" has been around a long time (and has written many books), and apparently has been very influential, so it surprises me that I've never heard of him before.  In my opinion he has much more to say than Fuhrman.

An earlier video ("The role of meat in the human diet") had Dr. John McDougall speaking to a Christian group, where he claimed he was not a vegetarian.  "I refuse to become a vegetarian until vegetarians become healthy," he said. He put a slide up that referred to vegetarians, and their unhealthy practices:

• No Fish/Chicken vegetarians
• No Lacto/Ovo vegetarians - "they are full of fat and full of cholesterol"
• No Dough-boys -"who live on sugar and white flour; and the wino dough boy vegetarians are drunks"
• No Soy-boys - "they live on fake foods, like fake bacon, fake cheese, fake ice-cream, fake everything."
• No Greasy Veggies
• No Raw Foodies - "They live on nuts and seeds and fruit, in other words, fat and sugar"

McDougall concluded, "I eat turkey every other thanksgiving in protest of being called a vegetarian."  He is also cognizant of the lack of vitamin B12 in the diet of strict vegans, and advocates a supplement for people who use his diet for over 3 years (That is much more responsible than Douglas Graham, in my opinion, who merely suggests that vegans don't require as much in their bloodstream, it is still in the body cells -- an untested assumption at best.  Curiously, neither of these authors look at the possible production of B12 by our intestinal flora, in a symbiotic relationship.  Perhaps that is because the flora argument is going to be hit-or-miss, and studies have shown that strict vegans do have B12 deficiencies over time).

McDougall therefore promotes a whole food diet that is less restrictive than the 80-10-10 diet, one which is not afraid of cooking, and one which is based on starch.  He actually claims in one of the videos that the amount of fat in his diet is around 8% -- less than that of the 80-10-10!  He can say that because the starches have very little fat, and most fruits and vegetables are between 7 and 10.

The most significant video I've seen by McDougall (who is a far better speaker for his cause than Fuhrman, who is far better than Graham, BTW) is his talk on "The Diet Wars."  Highly recommended.

He certainly cuts through the crap being espoused by the Paleo dieters.  And he points out the one problem with the 80-10-10 diet, without mentioning it specifically: there isn't enough starch in a raw vegan diet like the one espoused by Graham (Graham says that humans being arthropod don't grub in the dirt for roots like pigs.  So potatoes, sweet potatoes, jerusalem artichokes and other roots with starch are pretty much out of his diet.  Furthermore, starches are usually cooked (or in the case of Poi, beaten and mashed, ie. processed) to eat.  You wouldn't and shouldn't eat potatoes or rice raw).  But as the studies McDougall quotes show us, humans are starchivores.  And the very earliest record -- long before the Paleolithic era -- shows that humans cooked their food.  Here is a list of links from that one talk for McDougall's various sources, which show that humans have been eating cooked starch since leaving the equatorial forests where they evolved with their primate cousins on fruits and leaves:

• 105,000 yrs ago -- Science 2009; 326;1680-83 (Julio Mercader)
• 44,000 yrs ago -- Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 2011 Jan 11:108(2) 486-91 (Amanda Henry, et al)
• 30,000 yrs ago -- Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 2011 Oct 18 2010 (Anna Revedin, et al)
• 14,000 yrs ago -- Economic Botany 1987, 41(1):1727 (Donald Ugent, et al) 

In short, from before recorded history, and since recorded history, humans have risen to the heights of civilization only through the use of a major starch staple in their diet.

In this more recent talk, McDougall is now more conciliatory toward other plant-based diet promoters and authors.  In a very telling series of photographs, he shows the effects of high protein, high animal diets on the bodies of the authors of books who promote low carb diets, side-by-side photos of those who advocate more plant-based diets.  The message is clear:  "People who promote those low carb high protein diets are themselves fat and sick."  He holds out an olive branch to the vegetarians who have up till now argued amongst themselves over relatively small issues, like whether or not nuts are acceptable: 

"Its time to align ourselves.  The people who believe as I do in the healthfulness of a plant based diet, we have to stop fighting among ourselves; instead we have to fight those who are destroying the planet for us, and making us sick.  That's the diet wars.  The battle lines are drawn.  And we're going to win."

Equally powerful is McDougall's video on the Perils of Dairy.  Very powerful stuff.

See also the Starch Solution and why Salt is a scapegoat.  Here are a couple of interesting tidbits I took from this talk:

"You are not going to survive on fruits -- I know some of you have tried.  But you're really not going to survive on fruits.  Essentially what the tongue is looking for are those storage organs that are concentrated in these starch granules…and you like these things, I know you do, that's why you call them comfort foods."

From this video, here is what he has to say about what a starch based diet did to humans (based mostly on the research of Nathaniel Dominy, PhD from Dartmouth College ; see the reportage of "We are What They Ate" -- or a link to Dominy's original article -- or a link to a YouTube video interview with Dominy uploaded by John McDougall himself).  Here's McDougall, from his lecture:

"The human primate makes 8-11x more amylase in his saliva than does a chimpanzee or a great ape.  Why do we have all that amylase and all those genes to produce amylase?  Because that's really one of the things that makes us human.  That's one of the things that makes us human.  That's one of the things that happened to us that allowed us to evolve from lesser primates -- from great apes.   You see, if you're a lesser primate or a great ape, you live on fruit, that's primarily your diet.  And where does fruit grow all year long?  Near the equator -- and that means you can't leave the equator.  Because if you migrate north or south, you don't have a food supply, because in the fall and the winter, you've got nothing to eat, because there's no fruit in the fall or winter.  So what happened according to Dominy, is that the primate  evolved to increase its ability to digest starch through multiple copes of the amylase gene.  And what this allows the human primate to do was to tap into a food source -- storage organs -- that had never been tapped into before, at least by any primate.  And these storage organs you dug in the ground to find them.  Tubers.  And then, you harvested them off in terms of various plants and grains, and these grains would store through the fall and winter, in the next season.  And actually they'll store even longer than that.  So this opened up a whole new food supply for the human primate.  And this allows us to migrate from the equator, north and south, and eventually conquer the entire world.  We had to have a food source.  That food source was starch.  Another thing he talks about in there, is that this is the reason the human brain evolved -- to a brain that is, by the way, 3x the size of a chimpanzee brain…"

His report on salt in this video is no less astonishing.  I admire this man.

Day 14 Saturday

The 2-week mark, without bread, on my raw food fast.

Today I spent the better part of the day watching many YouTube videos of Dr. John McDougall telling his story about starch and the evils of animal foods, including dairy.  I found a lot of repetition (after watching a dozen full length talks), but the science behind his theory is sound, and it certainly lends a different take to what I've been doing, moving to a mostly fruitarian diet.  As I'm beginning to suspect, this mostly fruitarian diet is unsustainable for me in terms of cost and variety, where I live in the north.  On my trip to the grocery store today, I spent about $50 in mostly fruits (I still had some green veggies from two days ago, so I didn't need much more of those).  And I spent a substantial portion of my day eating them, knowing that, if I were to figure out how many calories it was (as I did on the 10th day), it would be (a) not enough calories from carbs, and (b) still too high in fat (I ate 5 guavas).

But I had the foresight, based on McDougall's videos, to buy a single root vegetable, a sweet potato.  This is starch.  And I was wondering if I could eat it raw.

Some sweet potato varieties I bought

I sliced it up, and bit into it.  It was great.  And as soon as I did, I realized what I'd been missing on this raw diet.

But that night I tossed and turned before sleep.  I realized I had been force-feeding myself fruit all day in an effort to get my carbohydrate level higher, and I had tried to eat low fat fruits (although I had 5 guavas left, and they had to be eaten or thrown away today, a couple were going bad); I checked my weight before bed, and had gained only half a pound.  I felt a little bloated.  I was gassy.

I began to wonder if McDougall wasn't right.  It was not the bread that had been so bad for me, but what I had put on it, or what I had been eating with it, that had caused my weight to creep up over the years.  The bread itself had been beneficial, or benign.  The starch was my base, and that was good.  What was not good was the butter on each slice, the margarine on it, or the earth balance (a coconut based vegan oil spread that we had recently discovered), or the olive oil that I would use to make paninis.  The problem was the nut butters that were made with extra oil, salt and sugar.  The problem was the cheese.  The problem was the egg sandwiches.  Fat, fat, fat, fat, fat.

As I said, the problem with bread may not be bread per se, but what you put on it.  But bread so lends itself to serving up extra fat.  Could it be that there are actually better starches to use, other than bread?  The whole grains: rice, barley, rye, even wheat, unmilled -- could they be better used in a dish, steamed or boiled and eaten without extra fat, rather than milled into a bread?  The root vegetables: potato and sweet potato, squash -- wouldn't it be better to eat these instead of bread?  They are cooked foods, yes.  But it would appear that they can be eaten without as much potential for abuse, because they do not seem to lend themselves to extra fats so handily as bread.  You can add fat -- nearly everybody on a western diet does -- but you do not have to, to make them palatable or edible.

It makes sense to me: starch is the way to go.

Day 15 Sunday

But I spent a sleepless night last night.  Clearly, the diet I was on was affecting me negatively.  Was it the raw starch I ate, in the form of the sweet potato, that caused me to be gassy and wakeful?  I ponder the reaction of my body to the foods I've been eating.  The fruits and vegetables have been good, but I often feel hungry by mid-morning or mid-afternoon.  The amount of fruit I have been eating is incredibly expensive.  And I am rapidly tiring of it.  The raw veggies, mostly leafy greens that I've been eating has been quite time consuming, masticating.  But the raw starch I ate, although my mouth seemed grateful, my digestive system had some trouble with it.  It occurs to me that I would never have any trouble with it, if I had eaten it cooked.  But for now, I continue to eat as raw as possible, a slave to the 30-day commitment.

And as I do, I continue to investigate John McDougall's message, because he intrigues me.  Far more than Fuhrman, far more than Graham.

John McDougall is spearheading the fight against the meat and dairy industry which is causing a holocaust against our children.  There is no other way to put this.  McDougall's anger against this injustice is palpable in his talks.  You have to admire the guy for taking on these huge consortiums who have an unlimited purse.  It is the quintessential David vs Goliath story for our age.

So impressed have I been with Dr. John McDougall's work, I signed up for his free newsletter, at his web page, because I want to stay tuned to his fight.  It will be interesting to watch and see what happens.

I seriously began to wonder how I can get my mother-in-law and my parents to visit his Santa Rosa clinic for 10 days.

I know the kind of resistance my mother-in-law would give to the idea.  Give up meat? Dairy? Cream in the coffee?  As much as she complains about her gout pain, her arthritic pain, her type 2 Diabetes, her chronic renal disease, and the terrible side effects and ineffectiveness of the medications her physicians prescribe, she is loathe to make these kind of dietary changes, a habit of 80 years.  My own parents have fewer health issues: my dad has had bowel cancer fixed by surgery, and a heart attack fixed for the moment by angioplasty and exercise, and my mom has osteoporosis and a bit of forgetfulness that we hope is not the beginning of something awful.  But I know they would both benefit from dietary changes like this.  I expected the cost to be so much more than what is reported on his web site.  

But I know that our 80 year old elders would balk at making this kind of change.

Expended fiber from juicing

Today I kept to the raw food challenge, and I continued to juice.  But once again I looked at the fiber that I was tossing out, either to the chickens or to the compost each day after juicing up a couple of glasses of green juice.  I wondered how much food value was left in there.  I decided to boil it, to make a soup of it -- not to eat it, because I was still doing the raw food thing, but just to see what happened.  I expected, to be honest, that I would end up tossing out the fiber, but perhaps keep the liquid, and after my 30 day challenge was up, I could use this as a non-salty soup stock. 

I kept it covered and on a low boil in the kitchen, and from upstairs I could smell it cooking, and even though all that juice had been removed, it still smelled appetizing.  I have nothing against cooked foods in principle.  As Dr. McDougall says somewhere, the enzymes that are destroyed in the food by cooking were in the plant to help the plant grow, not to help us digest them.  We make our own amylase, and we make a lot of it.  We make it to digest starch.

Do all starches form acid in the stomach?

One of my thoughts today: Graham says that starches are acid-forming.  He is, of course, thinking of bread and pasta, the processed foods of grains.  But does he also mean potatoes, sweet potatoes, cassava -- the staple starches of millions of people around the globe?  I wonder now what John McDougall would say about that analysis.  I begin reading "The Starch Solution" in earnest, to find an answer.  None yet.

But from the earlier chapters, here are a couple of paragraphs that spoke to me:

"A widely held myth holds that the sugars in starches are readily converted into fat, which is then stored visibly in our abdomen, hips, and buttocks.  If you read the published research, you will see that there is no disagreement about this whatsoever among scientists -- and that they say that this is incorrect.  After eating, we break down the complex carbohydrates in starchy foods into simple sugars.  These sugars are absorbed into the bloodstream, where they are transported to trillions of cells throughout the body for energy.  If you eat more carbohydrate than your body needs, you'll store up to 2 pounds of it invisibly in the muscles and liver in the form of glycogen.  If you eat more carbohydrate than you can use (as your daily energy) and store (as glycogen), you'll burn the remainder off as body heat and through physical movement other than sports, such as walking to work, typing, yard work, and fidgeting.  Turning sugars into fats is a process called de novo lipogenesis.  Pigs and cows use this process to convert carbohydrates from grains and grasses into calorie-dense fats."

I had a gut ache today, for the first time ever on this fast.  Was that due to the raw starch I ate yesterday?  Another thing that happened: my stool fell apart.  Was that due to the different texture in fiber in my gut?  I was incredibly gassy, as if all my flora were suddenly reproducing and having a party.  Was this all from one raw sweet potato?

I feel no extra energy so far on this raw diet, in fact, I feel lethargic.  I feel no extra brain power, in fact, I feel stupid, taken, duped -- as if I've been sold a bill of goods.

Day 16, Monday (Another fast day)

I actually look forward to these fast days, when I don't have to consume mass quantities of fruit.  The salads I don't mind, but the vast amount of fruit has been daunting.  

Since I'm fasting today, thank goodness I don't have to eat all this raw food

I've pretty much decided I will not continue with this fast beyond 30 days.  In fact, I may even cut it shorter than that, because one should always stop an experiment if one determines it is not ethical or it has been demonstrated to be harmful to any of the participants.

Durian: not for everybody

Yesterday I visited the grocery store again.  I took my family to the new Asian supermarket that had gone up near them and I introduced them to the durian fruit, which none of them had ever heard about.  Fortunately we found one that was ripe but didn't stink too badly.  My sister hated it, and refused to try more than the tiniest bit, but my mom and dad ate it with curiosity and seemed to enjoy the experience.  I spent another $50 on fruit and veg, mostly so there will be food in the house for when my wife comes home from her trip.  If we are both eating fruit and veg raw, this is going to be very expensive indeed.

My stomach still feels a bit off.  The lower abdomen is a bit tender.  I had a couple of BMs late last night, and since then the gut has improved somewhat.  Is that chunk of raw tuber I ate a couple of days ago now out of my system?

Today I'm looking up some of McDougall's sources for the links, and posting this blog; while Googling for references I found this article: Cordain comments on new evidence of Early Human Grain Consumption.

Cordain is author of "The Paleo Diet."  What I find most interesting is not so much that Cordain found it necessary to respond to the new evidence quickly, but that so many people are making profound dietary changes based on what they believe their extremely remote ancestors ate.  In other words, this ancient data matters to them: were ancient proto-humans grain eaters, or hunters?  For some reason, your next meal depends upon it.  Incidentally, Cordain poo-poos Mercader's archaeological evidence as inconclusive, but he does not in this reply address the genetic markers that Dominy used as clues.  This scholarly debate is being fought over the plates of the western world, as each of us tries to justify what we want to eat based on what we suppose a skeleton from the distant past might have eaten.  Weird.

Notes to Myself

• McDougall's slide on vegetarians really hit home to me.  When I first became a vegetarian, as I reported in this blog several times, I was a vegan for a year but found it very difficult.  Furthermore, it caused me to experience some disturbing skin problems for the first time in my life.  I assumed that my diet was deficient in some nutrient, and reintroduced eggs and dairy, and have been a lacto-ovo vegetarian ever since.  I admitted before that I didn't know what I was doing on that vegan diet.  At one time or another, I have tried each of his named vegetarian diets (except for the wine dough-boys diet, I have never had a problem with alcohol, so far).  I have never really tried to eat a low fat diet before this.  I can see after just half a month that I will not be able to do it on fruits and vegetables alone.  I must have starch -- and as McDougall shows, this is what the human diet should be.  I may continue past 30 days on a bread fast, but I will reintroduce starch into my diet, and that starch will be cooked, not raw.  Raw starch -- like the sweet potato I ate raw during these few days of this blog entry -- causes me no end of abdominal discomfort.
• The thing about "diets" is, you can certainly find one, out there in the marketplace, to justify your current bad habits or desires.  I have to be cautious that, if I choose McDougall's starchivore diet, that I am not simply justifying my bread craving.  I like the idea of choosing a starch that is not bread, so that I can continue my fast from bread beyond 30 days -- to be certain, before I ever return to bread, that I am not just letting my bread addiction make my food decisions for me.
• I don't have a blender.  For someone on a raw food diet, this is just not going to work.  Raw Foodists must have a workhorse blender, like a vitamix.  Everybody says so.

Ten Days In: Report on my Fast from Bread

My Tenth Day of Fasting from Bread

It is the tenth day of my fast from bread -- from all grains, actually.  

This is not the same thing as my other fasting.  In this blog posting, I'll be talking about 2 different fasts that I'm currently doing.  (1) Since I learned of Michael Mosley's report of the research on longevity I've been doing a total fast twice a week (usually Monday and Friday).  While I continue to fast twice a week, I am now also (2) fasting from bread, even on those days when I eat.  For the last 10 days I have attempted to eat no grains, and only raw fruits and veggies as well.  This means, I avoid all animal products, including eggs and dairy, and I avoid all caffeine and salt and sugar.  

And no alcohol.  (I had to add that last one.  It only occurred to me after writing most of the rest of the blog.  It never occurs to me to drink alcohol anyway, so I don't even consider it as something for me to give up).

Societal Pressures

I haven't entirely succeeded on the raw diet.  Last Saturday I attended a wedding, where the vegetarian meal I was served had cooked vegetables, over a bowl of rice soaked in soy sauce.  I scraped off the rice that was sticking to the veggies, since I didn't want any grain.  I wouldn't have eaten any of this veg, if I could have avoided it socially, but I was seated next to the mother of the bride, and I didn't want to offend her too much.  I pushed around the rice so it looked like I had eaten some but was just being picky.

I wasn't the only one who left food on their plate.  I noticed the meat eaters had left most of their vegetables on their plates when they were finished.  Incidentally, why do meat eaters get more veggies than vegetarians?  Seriously.  I would have been far happier with their plates, but without the meat, than I was with what I was served.  I also noticed that these same meat eaters were not sated by their huge slabs of blood-red beef and chicken.  Within an hour, they eagerly helped themselves to bowls of candies set in the foyer, filling bags with sugary mints and gooey jujubes.  "How could they still be hungry?" I wondered.

Even worse, the salad I was given was drowned in oil.  Again, I wouldn't have touched it at all, except that the next chair was the groom's new mother-in-law, and she was paying for the catering, and I didn't want her to think that I wasn't being fed.  That salad didn't appeal to me in the slightest; but that should come as no surprise to those who know me.  I usually will order salad with no salad dressing, I always did.

One other thing I should mention, since it represents another societal pressure.  I've had to lie to my mother-in-law.  On mother's day this year, I had to work, but my wife visited her mom, her mom had a cake, and so she sent home a piece for me.  I was asked on the phone by my mother-in-law if I ate the cake.  I evaded the answer, and said, "Oh, right, you made that cake.  Thanks."  A little white lie.  Of course, I didn't eat it, I didn't even see it.  My wife gave it to my brother-in-law.  She knew I wouldn't have eaten it.

There will be other weddings, this summer.  I won't be able to realistically and slavishly follow this diet forever.  There has to be some flexibility in social situations in any diet.

How much fruit?

Other than that social episode, I've been able to follow this fast fairly well, although it remains a learning process for me as to how much food I am actually eating.  The amount of fruit I consume seems outrageous, to someone who has never eaten that much fruit and veg.

Still, it apparently is not enough.  Douglas Graham tells us that the amount required to sustain someone who is active and athletic is substantially more than what we in the western world are accustomed to eating, when it comes to fruit.  We actually have to train ourselves to eat enough raw fruits and leafy green vegetables, since we are not used to that amount of bulk.  We are instead, more accustomed to fat.

Raw whole food eaters say about 30 bananas a day is the appropriate amount of calories for a typical man who needs 2000 calories/day.  This gives you an idea of what might be expected, in terms of volume.  Broken up into the standard 3 meals a day, this is about 10 bananas per sitting.  Very few of us who were brought up on a western diet of high fat, lots of grain, would be able to conceive of doing this.  And so, one must transition into this volume of fruit.  But remember that 3 meals a day is just a convention -- and one largely invented for meat (and other cooked food) eaters.  If you ain't cooking anything, eating a banana is just a matter of peeling it, whenever and wherever you are.

The idea of a meal just changed.

WTFructose?

Although I still drink vegetable juices, and like them as a transitional diet modifier, I don't recommend fruit juices or smoothies.  One often hears the warning about eating too much fruit, that one's triglycerides will rise too high, because the liver has trouble with the high amounts of fructose in fruit.  Many slow-carb diet plans warn specifically about too much fruit, and fruit juices in particular.  For example, Timothy Ferris (author of "The 4-Hour Body") says you can have some fruit once a week, but no more than that.

Of course, Douglas Graham promotes the whole fruit, because the fiber of fruit can temper the release of the sweetness into the bloodstream.  Graham also says that triglycerides are only a problem in someone who eats a high fat diet, and this is not the case with raw vegans who eat primarily a fruit-based diet that is very low in fat.   He says the studies on raw vegan whole food eaters have simply never been done.  All studies about triglycerides done so far make the assumption that everyone eats a typical high fat, western diet.  All he can do is point to the anecdotal health of many athletes who have tried this diet.  

While this doesn't seem terribly reassuring, he makes a fair point.  Because of the well-known dangers of triglycerides adding to one's chances of increased cardiovascular disease, one ought to take this as a profound warning to those transitioning into this diet; you cannot eat a primarily raw fruit-based diet and continue to eat fatty foods like meat, eggs, dairy and processed oils.  Graham advises the use of whole fruits, not juices.  He doesn't like nuts and seeds, which contain a lot of hidden fat, and are often the staple of a  raw vegan diet.  And he even cautions against the overuse of fatty vegetables like avocados, olives and coconuts.

In his book "The 80-10-10 Diet" Graham gives an example of some of the non-whole food raw vegan recipes and diets and salads and analyzes the fat content of them.  In some cases, he says, the fat content of this diet can be far worse than that of a meat-eater's.  But (he maintains) you'll do all right if you stick to raw, whole foods, and the foods that you would eat if you found them in the forest -- meaning fruits and primarily leafy green vegetables (but no, or very little nuts and seeds, which are high in fat, and of course absolutely no cereals, no sugar or salt, and no processed oils).  If you can do that -- and perhaps not everybody can (I'm still not sure I can) -- you are virtually guaranteed to eat far less fat. 

Woah, Candida

It may not be easy to eat that much fruit, for other reasons: fruit contains a lot of natural sugar, and when one begins to eat this much, the candida in the bloodstream blooms and gives us trouble.  Douglas Graham suggests that the candida are doing us a favour: since the body's cells cannot consume that amount of sugar, the yeast take care of it and systemic balance is restored, without causing undue stress on the pancreas.  But here's the thing: the only reason our own cells can't use all the sugar is because we have eaten too much fat to begin with: the fat lines our arteries and other blood vessels, and pervades our body, blocking the glucose from entering the cells properly.  Our bodies do their best to clear away the glucose, but when it can't get into the cells fast enough, the candida take what we can't use.  The usual remedy for candida flareups would be to go completely off anything sweet, especially fruit, and make up those calories with more fat -- but Graham says that would be a terrible mistake.

Still, some transitioning has to take place.  If one can't go cold turkey into the 80-10-10 diet, because of candida flair-ups, or other problems, one should not abandon hope and return to a high fat diet.  Graham always said that this ratio he proposes is a target, a direction, not a recipe.  I personally didn't have problems with candida when I began this fast from grains, but realize that I've been fasting twice a week on my standard lacto-ovo-vegetarian diet for about 6 months, and have lost some weight.  Now, before this 10-day fast from bread and my undertaking a raw diet, my weight seemed to have stabilized.  I hadn't lost any more weight for the past couple of months (except for a few pounds during a fast day, which was likely water, and which I gained back again when eating the usual bread fare; see this blog entry for details).  If I had to suggest something for someone who was having a candida problem and unwilling to try this mostly-fruit diet, I would suggest trying what I did.  Or if you found twice-a-week total fasting difficult, you could drink nothing but green vegetable juices on those fast days, twice a week.  

Then, like me, you could try a 3-day fast from bread, and see how you feel; and if you feel better, you are almost half-way to a full week away from bread; try that.  And if that makes you feel better, try 10 days without grains on a raw diet.  And if that seems possible to you, then consider a month.  And if that's okay, then consider Douglas Graham's challenge of trying the raw bonobo diet of fruits and leafy greens for an entire year.

If even the prototypical exorphin junkie can do it, you can do it too.  But let's take this one day at a time.  I've only managed 10 days, so far.  And I still call this a fast, not a diet.

How Much Better Do I feel after 10 days?

Here are a few things that I've noticed.  Warning: I mention a couple of nasty things.

• I'm losing weight.  I thought that I had finished losing weight, on my bi-weekly fasts, but on this raw mostly fruit diet, I continue to lose pounds.  Now I have no idea where I'll end up.  I might end up being quite skinny, if this keeps up.  I'm starting to think about doing some weight training again, to stress my muscles to build some strength.  I may have to rethink my bi-weekly fasting.  Douglas Graham doesn't recommend it -- although he does recommend periodic water fasts of lengthier duration (I think I've heard him mention as much as 23 days of fasting from everything except water, somewhere).
• Some people wonder if I'm sick.  Most people who lose as much weight as I've been losing are in fact sick and full of cancer.  No one asks me directly, but my wife gets approached, and my co-workers get approached; people who remember me overweight (but I was never obese) are asking: "Is he all right?"  Actually, I feel fine.  However, on a fast day, my face can look quite gaunt, the lines fairly deep, the wrinkles more noticeable.  I force myself to drink water on a fast day, but over the day the loss of water is substantial, and it is most noticeable on my old wrinkled face.  When I eat fruit, the lines on my face are less noticeable.  I have had people tell me I ought not to lose any more weight.
• Mango fibers get stuck between my teeth, when I nibble the fruit from the rind.  I'm going to have to floss more.  This suggests to me that the claims that raw dieters have no teeth problems is not completely accurate.
• The base of my spine may be developing skin problems -- again.  I remember when I was a vegan for a year, when I first became a vegetarian, and I developed something like psoriasis.  Coccyx, elbows -- these were the spots that became raw and itchy first, as I recall.  If it is happening again, I will have to stop the fast right away, and return to some egg or dairy products.  Is this raw spot (no pun intended) on my spine an early indication of a developing deficiency?   Or is it just a bit of "yoga burn" from my last yoga session?  I'm not as padded on my ass as I used to be.  I guess I'll have to wait and see if its a nutritional deficiency.
• I feel the cold more.  A cool day causes me to be quite chilled.  Is this because my metabolism has changed?  I definitely don't burn as hot as I used to.  I like to sleep naked, and oftentimes under the blankets I'm quite cold now, especially in my fingers and feet, whereas before I was quite hot.  I may have to consider wearing pj's.  This is a concern for me; I was thinking that, if I cleaned up my capillaries, my bloodflow would be better.  But my extremities are not as warm as they used to be.  Does that mean they are less perfused?
• Some people don't like it when one alters one's diet this drastically.  Everybody wants to get their nose into my business, and tell me I'm crazy, especially those who normally wouldn't give me the time of day.  I suspect this is one of the things that makes us human.  It is a primate thing that defines us.  We share food.  When one of us breaks from the usual fare, one is immediately classified as an outsider.  A suspect.  A traitor.  
• I don't wake up with a bad taste in my mouth, but wake up with fresh breath.  The one exception to this, during these 10 days, was the morning after I ate all that salt and oil at the wedding.
• My poo is greener than ever before.  I suspect that this is the green juices I've been consuming.  There is a substantial amount of fiber in it, but it is quite different in texture than the fiber I've been eating with my whole grain breads.  It is not ripping up my insides when it passes.
• I can bounce upstairs without any ache in my legs.  I could always bound upstairs, but there was always a tiny ache in my femur.  I've already mentioned in a previous blog, after only 3 days into this fast, that my hips don't hurt; now I notice my legs don't hurt.  I'm not talking about muscular aches, which come and go, but rather deep bone aches that I was not even aware of, until it went away.  Curious that these larger bones feel better: it makes me wonder if these are the bones that the body was drawing upon for its calcium?  The raw food gurus all say that calcium levels are depleted through the ingestion of grains and cooked foods.   It makes sense that the body would scoop some calcium from its largest store in the larger bones first, if there was a need for calcium because the bran was drawing it from the body through the bowels.  Ever wonder why so many elderly people fall and end up hospitalized with fractured hips?  Ask yourself whether the fracture is the result of the fall, or the cause of it.  Years ago, I stopped running because my knees hurt.  I'm now thinking about running again.
• After working all day in the hospital, when I come home I don't have boogers in my nose if I've been eating a lot of fruit all day.  I think my bloodstream is better hydrated, my body is not all dried up.  It used to be, there was a lot of stuff in my nose that had to be cleared out.  I've tried many things to keep the nares free of stuff, because I hate to have impeded airflow.  I'm sorry to have to report that fingers seem to be the best choice.  (Don't worry, I'm a nurse, I also wash my hands.  A lot.).  I've noticed my coworkers are often stuffed-up when they work on our unit too.  It seems to be quite a toxic environment.  We all do our best to keep hydrated, but it is so very, very dry.  Is it all the more dry for those whose food is generally cooked (dried out), and laden with salt and fat?
• My spine feels more flexible.  I suspect that this is due mostly to the better hydration of my internal organs, perhaps because of the loss of visceral fat around those organs.

My son says that some of these healthful effects I mentioned to him may be little more than the placebo effect.  He also added, "but don't forget, the placebo effect is real."  I wonder if he thinks I expected to feel better, on this diet.  But in fact, I had no idea that I would.  I rather suspected I would be hungry all the time, and never satiated without bread.  I suspected I would be weaker, not stronger.  I thought that 3 days would be torture, bread free.  I thought 7 days would be torture without bread.  I thought 10 days was only doable after I completed the 7 days.  I'm still not sure about a full year on this diet, but I'm starting to think it might be possible.

My brother-in-law says what's the point of fasting and avoiding foods you like?  What's the point of life if you are not enjoying it?    This is the same argument of a person who is never able to buy a house or any other major purchase because they are always renting and spending their money on frivolous things that distract them.  Never able to put money away to be able to afford a down payment on the big purchase, they can't see beyond the present moment.  I hasten to add that this is certainly NOT a description of my brother-in-law; I've seen him ridicule those who have no self-discipline in buying things that aren't needed, but who can't afford important stuff.  But he doesn't see the same lack of self discipline when it comes to eating.  Here's what I mean: let's imagine that your old age is your big purchase.  You have to save something to be able to afford it.  So you avoid purchasing too many little things -- candy, bread, cooked foods, meat and dairy -- until you have enough health stored so that you can have the coin for when you get to the point of your big purchase -- when you arrive at old age.  Listen to me: people are living longer now, and you definitely don't want to live the second half of your life without your health.

I do enjoy life.  I'm learning to avoid bread because clearly I'm addicted to it, and I suspect that it is draining me of life.  I wish to experience more life.  I'm trying to save some health.  I see so many people with chronic diseases who linger on into old age, debilitated.  I'd like to avoid that scenario, if I can.

I still occasionally crave my bread.  I may always crave it, I don't know.  For now, these moments pass quickly when I eat a piece of fruit, or drink some fresh vegetable juice, or eat some celery or lettuce.  I suggest others try the same thing: eat some fruit or veg first, and then if you are still hungry, then and only then, if you are transitioning into this diet like me, eat some bread as a last resort.  Or better yet, some steamed rice.  But stay clear of the fats you want to put on these cereal carbs for taste.  Keep as close to the 80-10-10 diet plan of 80% carbs, 10% each of fat and protein.  Don't get sucked in to eating fat.  Try to avoid cooked, salted or otherwise processed foods -- and that pretty much means all cereals, and all those oh-so-clever vegan recipes that use dehydrators and blenders.

For now I am calling this my fast, rather than my diet.  I'm clearly not sure whether it is going to be completely sustainable for me.

What I actually eat, while on this "fast from bread"

The book "The 4-Hour Body" by Timothy Ferris makes a couple of interesting suggestions, about dieting.  "Take a snapshot before opening your mouth," he writes.  That becomes a way to measure your progress, and any measurement will have positive effects on your choices.  I have just finished taking a picture of each bread that I made for the last 4-5 years, and posting it on this blog, so this should be a fairly easy thing for me to do -- take a picture of everything I eat -- at least for one day.  

I chose today, as today represents for me a goal reached that twelve days ago I would not have thought possible for an exorphin junkie to reach.  It's also not a very active day for me.  I can relax and take as many photos as I need without pressure to do other things.  I can use this photo record to determine how much fat is in my diet, and how many calories.  I won't do this on a regular basis, it is far too time consuming.

Today is Tuesday, the 10th day of my fast from all bread and grains, on a raw diet inspired by raw food guru Douglas Graham, author of "The 80-10-10 Diet."  Note that I'm not too worried that I failed to implement all of Graham's suggestions.  I still drink fresh vegetable juice.  I still drink water.  I still drink hot herbal tea.  I eat a whole avocado if I want to.  At least I'm trying to eat low fat, with a target of 10%.  

At each sitting, I eat until not hungry.

Breakfast ~0500

A glass of green juice, made from the following veggies.  This amount of veggies made 2 glasses, and the second glass was refrigerated for my lunch:

• 1 full stalk of Kale
• 1/3 of a celery, about 5 stalks
• 3 med carrots
• 1 cucumber
• all the petals of 1 artichoke (which doesn't give much juice, by the way)

In addition to the juice, I ate these fruits:

• 6 guavas (never eaten guavas before.  They have  a lot of seeds, not that much food value.  Probably a fair amount of fat.  Texture of pears, when you can find a bit of seedless flesh)
• 1 banana
• 2 mangos (these are cheap right now, so they must be in season somewhere.  I love mangos, and took one to work this week, even though they are somewhat messy to eat.  One of my co-workers said she "hates mangos" and I was astonished.  "I've never met anyone who doesn't like mangos" I told her.  Mangos are like the prototypical fruit that humans evolved with.  See "The Nature of Things" TV series on "The Fruit Hunters, part 1" to learn that there are over 600 varieties.  I only see two varieties in my local grocery store, ever -- if I'm lucky.)

And in addition to the juice, I also drank:

• 1 glass of water

MidMorning ~1000

• 4 apricots
• 1 apple
• 1 glass water
• 1 glass cold lemon-ginger tea (made yesterday)

Lunch ~1230

• 1 glass of vegetable juice.
• 1 Romaine lettuce heart
• 1 red grapefruit
• 1 banana

MidAfternoon ~1600

• ~8 strawberries, with the mushy parts pared out (these were cleaned thoroughly but although I began with 10 of them, I stopped from eating the last two.  They weren't organic, and to me they tasted off - bland, unripe, and too much like chemicals.  I tossed some out)
• 2 apricots, in place of the strawbs that I tossed
• some hot licorice yogi herbal tea

Dinner 1730

• 1 Romaine lettuce heart
• 1 tomato
• 1 avocado
• 1 mango
• 3 cups of hot herbal tea

Snack 2200

• 1 banana

Weight Update:

A couple of blog entries ago, I commented on my weight fluctuation following a fast, and determined that it must be all water, and that the fiber in the bread bran that I was eating, or possibly the salt, was drawing water from the cells of my body to join it in its pass through the colon.  I was now curious about my weight after 10 days of fasting from bread, following a day of total fasting.

As usual, I did a total fast on Monday.  My weight is now somewhere around 170lbs, not 180lbs as reported just 10 days ago.  I'm not doing this for weight loss, but the weight loss still seems to be happening.  Not sure yet where it will end up.

	Fast Day 1	Commentary
am weight	172	After 10 days of mostly raw fruit and veg, my starting weight seems to be a couple of pounds less (remember, 10 days ago, I said my weight was 180lbs, or slightly less)
pm weight	169	Even though I continue to push myself to drink on a total fast day, I still lose a bit of weight in water.
	Following Day	(This is the day that this blog is about, the 10th day of my raw food fast)
am weight	168	Overnight I've only lost a pound, far less water/weight loss than I used to on the bread diet.  I think it shows that the fiber from the fruit I am eating is far more hydrating than the bread and cooked foods which used to dry me out.
pm weight	168.5	After eating everything listed in this blog in one day following my fast, I have regained about 1/2 a pound, over the day.  I've eaten until I didn't want any more food, at each sitting, and have snacked on fruit during the day.  I'm not hungry.  I can fall asleep without craving bread.

Here is the full tally of things I ate this day.  I have had to struggle through the databases at the usda for this info, and I might have made several errors, but its the best I can do.

Quantity	Food	Calories, Carbs, Proteins, Fats (each)	Calories, Carbs, Proteins, Fats (total)
1	apple	Calories=72; Carbs=19.06;Proteins=0.36;Fats=0.23	TotalCalories=72; TotalCarbs=19.06;TotalProteins=0.36;TotalFats=0.23
6	apricots	Calories=17; Carbs=3.89;Proteins=0.49;Fats=0.14	TotalCalories=102; TotalCarbs=23.34;TotalProteins=2.94;TotalFats=0.84
1	avocado	Calories=34; Carbs=2.22;Proteins=0.63;Fats=2.85	TotalCalories=34; TotalCarbs=2.22;TotalProteins=0.63;TotalFats=2.85
3	banana	Calories=105; Carbs=26.95;Proteins=1.29;Fats=0.39	TotalCalories=315; TotalCarbs=80.85;TotalProteins=3.87;TotalFats=1.17
1	grapefruit	Calories=(52x2)104; Carbs=(13.11x2)16.22;Proteins=(0.95X2)1.9;Fats=(0.17X2) 0.34	TotalCalories=104; TotalCarbs=16.22;TotalProteins=1.9;TotalFats=0.34
6	guava	Calories=37.4; Carbs=28.3;Proteins=4.7;Fats=4.4	TotalCalories=224.4; TotalCarbs=169.8;TotalProteins=28.2;TotalFats=26.4
2	romaine heart	Calories=(2X20)40; Carbs=(0.33x20)6.6;Proteins=(0.12X20)2.4=;Fats=(0.03X20)= 0.6	TotalCalories=80; TotalCarbs=13.2;TotalProteins=4.8;TotalFats=1.2
3	mangos	Calories=124; Carbs=31.01;Proteins=1.70;Fats= 0.79	TotalCalories=372; TotalCarbs=93.03;TotalProteins=5.1;TotalFats=2.37
8	strawberries	Calories=((4+6)/2)5; Carbs=((0.92+1.38)/2)1.61;Proteins=((0.08+0.12)/2) 0.1;Fats=((0.04+0.05)/2) 0.045	TotalCalories=40; TotalCarbs=12.88;TotalProteins=0.8;TotalFats=0.36
1	tomato	Calories=22; Carbs=4.78;Proteins=1.08;Fats=0.25	TotalCalories=22; TotalCarbs=4.78;TotalProteins=1.08;TotalFats=0.25
1	water	Calories=0; Carbs=0;Proteins=0;Fats=0	TotalCalories=0; TotalCarbs=0;TotalProteins=0;TotalFats=0
5	herbal tea	Calories=0; Carbs=0;Proteins=0;Fats=0	TotalCalories=0; TotalCarbs=0;TotalProteins=0;TotalFats=0
2	vegetable juice	Calories=?; Carbs=?;Proteins=?;Fats=?	TotalCalories=?; TotalCarbs=?;TotalProteins=?;TotalFats=?
-	-	GRAND TOTALS:	TotalCalories=1365.4; TotalCarbs=435.38;TotalProteins=49.68;TotalFats=36.01

Notes on this table:

For calories: https://www.ars.usda.gov/SP2UserFiles/Place/12354500/Data/SR25/nutrlist/sr25a208.pdf
For carbs: https://www.ars.usda.gov/SP2UserFiles/Place/12354500/Data/SR25/nutrlist/sr25a205.pdf
For protein: https://www.ars.usda.gov/SP2UserFiles/Place/12354500/Data/SR25/nutrlist/sr25a203.pdf
For fats: https://www.ars.usda.gov/SP2UserFiles/Place/12354500/Data/SR25/nutrlist/sr25a204.pdf

For grapefruit, I doubled it, because the database only provides amounts for 1/2 grapefruit.  For lettuce, I'm guessing there are 20 leaves in the romaine hearts.  For strawberries, I take the average of the two berries provided in the database.  Unknown how many calories, carbs, proteins and fats are in my juice.  No info on guava in the database.  Guava info in my table comes from nutritiondata.self.com

You can see by the daily total of calories that, without knowing what's in the vegetable juice, I am a bit low on calories.  I should have almost 635 MORE calories to reach 2000 calories on this day, and I doubt very much whether the vegetable juice provides that much.  Had I managed to eat that quantity of leafy greens that I put into the juice, perhaps it would have.  But frankly, eating that much leafy bulk would have added a long time for meals.  Perhaps cooking was invented by humans as a way to save time chewing all that raw veg!

Because I'm not eating enough to sustain my weight, the extra days of fasting are going to cause my weight to drop even further -- and that, of course, is what I'm seeing.

I did not use Graham's Appendix D in my efforts to figure out the ratios of this day's meal, which succinctly explains the complicated Atwater method of calculating the calories per gram of each macronutrient.  Instead, I used the usual formula, i.e. that Protein is about 4 calories/gram, fat is about 9 calories/gram, and carbs are what's left over (100%-protein%-fat%).  

With that method, today's food gave me 61.7% carbs, 14.55% protein, and 23.7% fat.  So I'd have to do a lot better to hit Graham's ratio of 80-10-10.  No more avocados or guavas; fewer mangos.  I think it also shows that hitting these targets is going to be pretty challenging, even for a raw vegan.

I'm not sure how long I can keep it up, or even if I should, for any length of time.  Or is that just the junkie in me talking, and saying to myself, "how nice it would be to have a whole wheat bread with cheese right about now?"

I'm going to keep this fast up a bit longer, and see if I can hit the target of 80-10-10 ever.

Notes to Myself

• While I wrote this on the 10th day of the fast, it took me some time to get together the data on the foods that I ate, to determine their fat and calorie content.
• I really like Romaine hearts.  I can buy a bag of 3 that are organic.  I can wash an entire heart, leaf by leaf, without tearing it apart for a salad, and shake the excess water off it.  I can transport it like this to work in a bag.  I can nibble away on those leaves and make it a meal.  Who cares if my co-workers are laughing at me?  "Plates?  We don't need no stinkin' plates."
• Follow the breath.
• Is this a blog about bread?  Or is that changing?  Is this becoming my diet, or is it just a fast?
• Here's a YouTube video about someone who challenges the healthiness of the 80-10-10 diet

The First Bread I Never Ate: 23.5% Rye with Wheat Sprouts

 23.5% Rye with Wheat Sprouts

I made this bread, but this is the first bread I ever made that I didn't also eat myself.  I gave one to my friend, and my wife ate part of a loaf, before I could explain the reasons behind my fast.  She may not finish it.  The chickens might get the rest.

about a cup of wheat berry sprouts

steeped dough

• 765g wheat berries
• 235g rye kernels
• 160g wheat sprouts
• 200g sourdough starter
• 18g salt
• 770g water
• 50g water with salt
• 50g water with sprouts
• 50g water to steep

She says it tastes fine, but you can see that there is a tiny spot of crumb where the bread didn't fully develop where the loaf sat on the stone.  Perhaps the stone wasn't hot enough, who knows?

The Lost Tale of Star Trek

When I was a young boy, I was a big fan of Star Trek, the original TV series, and someone gave me one of the early books for my birthday.  I read "Mission to Horatius"  by Mack Reynolds several times.  This  book is sometimes known as the "lost book of Star Trek", because it was originally published by Whitman Books, not Pocket Books, the company that published James Blish's novels based on the series.  Pocket Books later released a facsimile edition of "Horatius" with an introduction by John Ordover.

"Mission to Horatius" was never made into a TV show because it rambled on about an illness infecting the crew of the starship Enterprise called space cafard, which derived from the boredom of living in a tin can among the emptiness of interstellar void.  It didn't really make for an exciting tale.  Considered a kid's story, "Mission to Horatius" can be found online now.

However, the online version does not contain the forward to the story -- perhaps I had the facsimile edition, so I'm not sure whether this was written by Ordover.  This forward explained a brief and thrilling history of humans and their leap to the stars, in the Star Trek universe.  I remember a line in that preamble said something like, "with the invention of faster-than-light warp drive engines, suddenly the word 'parsec' came into common parlance."  I remember the word 'parsec' sent me to the dictionaries.  There was no Google then.

One thing Reynolds (or Ordover) said in the forward to the book I found quite unsettling.  I found I couldn't actually come to terms with it, when I read this, even as a youngster.  Reynolds said that humans had shown amazing adaptability, and had discovered ways to thrive in every environment -- and now, that included space.  That didn't sit well with me.  

I reflected that, as far as earth environments were concerned, this seemed to be true.  Humans had covered the globe.  They could live in just about any environment on earth.  Beduins could live in the desert.  Hawaiians could live on a lush Island.  The Inuit survived and thrived in regions of the earth that were inhospitable.

But outer space was another matter entirely.  There is no air, no water, no food, in space.  The temperature is not conducive to life as we know it.  Dangerous cosmic rays travel through space and when we leave our protective planet's atmosphere, we are unshielded.  Is it truly adaptation to build environments like starships that replicate earth gravity and earth atmosphere?  To me, even as a young teenager, that did not seem to show "humans adapting to an environment", but rather "humans adapting their environment to suit them."  As a young child, the only way I could reconcile this dilemma was by thinking, "perhaps he means that our intelligence allows us to adapt the environment to make it livable.  Perhaps the intelligence of humans allows for a more generalized adaptation, one not tied to a specific environment. "  

But I still didn't feel as if this were the whole answer.  Was Reynolds (or Ordover) using the right word?  He knew words that I didn't -- words like 'parsec' -- but his use of the word 'adapt' seemed just plain wrong.

I looked around at my own home.  The winters were hard here in Canada.  Without this house, I couldn't live here, year round.  I wasn't adapted to this environment, like the deer, or the coyotes or the raccoons in the forest.  Even the Inuit were not truly adapting to the extreme north, although they'd lived there for generations beyond counting: without those furs which they stole from other animals who had truly adapted, they wouldn't last more than a few minutes naked on the snow in the depth of winter.  "Is adaptation different for humans than it is for other animals?" I wondered.  Just because we can survive somewhere, and we change the environment to make it somewhat hospitable, does that mean we have adapted to it?  Or has our intelligence merely allowed us to live here temporarily in an environment that we could never adapt to?

Our Home and Native Land

As an adult, I have been dabbling in organic gardening in my backyard, in the hopes that I can someday, somehow, provide a substantial part of my diet from my own property.  

But winters are extremely problematic for me.  Half of the year at least, I can expect no produce from my own garden (and the other half of the year, I'm not really self sufficient, as much as that might once have been one of my goals).  I can't really grow enough on my tiny residential lot to feed myself and my wife.  So even though we've put down roots, we are not entirely indigenous here, and never will be.  We're not natives to this lot we live on.  And that disconnection from the earth is troublesome to me.  This is the place where I was born and raised; this is the home of my ancestors, going back six or more generations.  Although that is nothing in evolutionary terms, it is important to me.  But now I'm wondering if I truly belong here.  To adapt to this environment, I have to be able to feed myself.  And what if I am not fully able to adapt to the food that is available to me?

How does any of us become indigenous where we live?

The Provenance of Hygienists Ideas 

I've been thinking about all this recently since I learned of the work of raw food proponent Frederic Patenaude.  Recently I blogged about Patenaude, from whom I first learned of the Bonobo diet; and after reading some of his work, I've been going back to his sources, and I'm beginning to unravel the thread of history that makes up the alternative health theories of the "Natural Hygienists."  Patenaude has been deeply influenced by Douglas Graham, who was influenced by T.C.Fry* (who likely originated the idea that the primal human diet -- the one we evolved with -- most closely resembled the Bonobo diet); Fry in turn was influenced by Herbert M. Shelton.  Shelton's influences were Isaac Jennings, Sylvester Graham and Thomas Allinson, but it was Shelton's extensive work on fasting and raw food that consolidated this alternative, natural medicine of prevention, and it was he who named it orthopathy.  Not all of the proponents of these ideas have been doctors; some have been chiropractors, some nutritionists, some have had no degrees at all.  Some have had great success from their own experience (e.g. Nathan Pritikin), without apparently being directly involved in this chain of influence, or idea transmission.  Unravelling the influences seems almost as pointless as discovering the provenance of an idea from an early Star Trek novel.  

Orthopathy (a name which apparently hasn't caught on -- mostly people use the term "Natural Hygiene" instead) doesn't seem to be an organized hierarchy or accredited field, after all, but rather an ideal to which some people aspire.  Virtually anyone who claims that eating a healthy diet can go a long way toward preventing disease and illness falls under its umbrella, but there is a wide range of opinion over what a healthy diet actually is.  Some, like Patenaude and Shelton, have refined their thinking over their lifetime: Patenaude was eating raw veg for many years but used dehydrators and complicated raw recipes before changing to a raw diet that was simpler, and based on whole foods (mostly fruits, leafy greens, some vegetables), like Douglas Graham.  Shelton gradually gave up dairy products over his lifespan.

Today's authors have even changed some of the core ideas of some of the founders, but the field is still vibrant.  One of the more respected modern authors who work in "nutrition-based treatments for obesity and chronic disease" is Dr. Joel Fuhrman (who can be seen in interviews in Joe Cross's movie, "Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead" -- but whether Fuhrman follows the chain of influence I've outlined here remains to be seen.  Eventually I'll get around to Fuhrman's books, I suppose.  I say he is 'respected: I'm sure he's drawn some criticism, but I haven't found anyone out there who is working to destroy him, the way some of these other earlier natural hygienists were.

In the meantime, many interesting books in this field, from all of these older authors, are available online in the repository currently housed at The Soil and Health Library.  I'm dipping into them as I'm able, but there is a lot there.  And because many authors changed their ideas as they aged or developed their thinking, a lot of work would be required to sift the wheat from the chaff.  

Horne's Pain

As an Exorphin Junkie who has been fixated on bread for the last few years, I found this book in the repository to be most interesting to me:  Horne, Ross (1988) Improving on Pritikin: you can do better. Happy Landings Pty. Ltd. Australia.

It may be that my own thinking on whole grains, the last few years  -- my absolute steadfastness in baking whole grain breads, in the face of an entire bread baking culture that refused to make it the way I wanted it -- has been influenced by Pritikin.  I may have read some of his books (or perhaps Ross Horne's other book, an early version of "The Health Revolution") when I was quite young and impressionable, the same way I read Star Trek books and anything else that was within reach.  I seem to recall one of his books in my hand when I was a teenager, and I must have absorbed some of his ideas.

Horne was a Pritikin devotee for many years, but eventually he came to speak out against what he felt was wrong with the Pritikin diet, and the Macrobiotic Diet and many other diets.  In principle, these diets saw health-giving results because they were on the right track away from the Standard American Diet (SAD) of cooked meat, high fat, high protein, low fresh fruits and greens.  However, Horne found that cooking itself, and excess intake of grains was ultimately detrimental to human health.  "Improving on Pritikin" was Horne's attempt to fix what he saw were some of the more subtle problems of the Pritikin diet.

Horne, more than any other author on the subject who has written on this, has convinced me that cooked grains (and what is bread, but that?) are ultimately unhealthy for humans.  As Douglas Graham said in his booklet "Grain Damage," "In an orchard of ripe fruit, you could eat to your heart's content.  In a ripe field of wheat, you would starve to death."  We did not evolve eating grains.  As Horne says, "grains are for the birds."  

Humans have tried to adapt grains to our use as a food source -- using our intelligence and many ingenious devices to plant, nurture, grow, harvest, grind up, and cook them -- but we haven't really evolved to use them efficiently, and they end up hurting us.

Horne writes, "Grains are not vegetables, and a person who eats them is technically not a true vegetarian."  He cites Shelton, who said, "The advocates of whole cereals in preference to the de-natured kinds, did their work too well.  Vegetarians are usually great eaters of cereals.  They would receive less harm from moderate amounts of meat."  Horne suggests: "abandon grain products completely for a week or so and see what happens."

For me, it didn't even take a week.  On the fifth day of my fast from bread and dairy products, I began to realize that I had been carrying a small chronic ache in my hips when I walk, something which I was unconscious of, until it disappeared.  On my fast from bread and dairy, this chronic ache is now gone.  Why was the ache there?  Was it the beginning of arthritis, or osteoporosis?  Could it have been due to calcium being leached from my bones to make up for the calcium that the extra bran was scooping from my GI tract?  Was it because I was now simply better hydrated, or that more minerals were being absorbed via my diet?  I don't know.  All I know is the tiny ache I wasn't even entirely aware of, is now gone.  In short: I'm healthier.  I can already tell.

Is it possible, in Canada, to eat year round Fruits and Leafy Green Veggies?

Horne says, "Good quality fruit costs a lot more than bread or oats or spaghetti but you will find in the long run it is money well spent."

The Bonobo diet -- a raw food diet that is mostly fruit, some greens, and a few vegetables (concisely detailed by Graham in his book "The 80-10-10 Diet") goes back even farther than the recently popularized "Paleo Diet" in human history.  Sure, prior to the advent of agriculture, when we first started eating grains in abundance, members of our human tribe were hunter gatherers, and cookers of flesh, subsisting on wild game and whatever fruits and leaves we found along the way.  But we didn't evolve as hunter-gatherers.  We evolved like the other primates, eating mostly fruit and leafy greens.  So before we were ever meat eaters, before we ever cooked our food, we ate a raw fruit and leafy green and partial vegetable diet.  And that is all we ate for millions of years before the paleolithic humans changed it all.  So the raw food eater following Graham's diet returns to food that can be eaten without cooking, yes, but also without processing of any kind.  Throw away your juicers, your dehydrators, your fridges, your stoves and ovens.  All you need is fruit, a few leaves, a few veggies, and a water source.  You should be eating 80% carbs, 10% protein and 10% fat -- that is a target, a direction -- and you get that when you eat mostly fruit and some greens (according to Graham).

Humans seem to have adapted to other meal plans besides raw fruits and veggies as they began banding together in tribes to hunt.  When wild game and foraged food became scarce, they began banding together in towns, surrounded by fields where agriculture was first tried, and as soil depleted they moved out over the earth, terraforming, until now we have humans banding together in cities, surrounded by a rural landscape of monoculture grains, which largely sustains millions upon millions of us.  The adaptation hasn't been entirely successful, as our bodies are still designed to eat raw fruits and vegetables.  And so, when we eat cooked meat and grains, we will end up with chronic diseases and acute illnesses because we eat too much protein, too much fat, and we denature all of our food.  On meat, dairy, grains, and processed foods (what most of us eat), we automatically get too much fat, too much protein, and too much that is toxic to our bodies, with not enough micronutrients.  Our bodies "adapt" to this diet by making us overweight and sick.  

I have seen so much cancer, so much heart disease, so much death.  I have watched families ripped apart as they struggle with the fading personalities of their loved ones who have succumbed to Alzheimer's Disease, or the physically debilitating Lou Gerig's Disease, MS or other chronic degenerative diseases.  In nursing school we were taught to look upstream for the causes of these ailments, to stop the holocaust at the source, not downstream where we find the dead bodies floating toward us.  The cause has to be diet and our environment.  It has to be.  We are poisoning ourselves.  We are not adapting. We don't have another billion years to evolve.  We have to start now and eat the way we were meant to eat.  

How far back do we have to go to achieve the diet we were meant to eat?  Do we go back to Paleohumans, who killed game and foraged for fruits and veggies?  Do we go back to the Mango groves, where bonobo-like proto-humans first evolved?  Or do we go back even farther than that?  Were our evolutionary ancestors more like the Colugos (a herbivore) before we defended from the trees?  What were those ancestral Euarchontoglires eating, before we became differentiated?  Has the eating of meat or grains changed our brains, given us more intelligence, caused us to somehow become self-aware?  Would that adaptation be worth the chronic diseases that cooked meats and grains have also given us?

If humans insist on eating cooked foods, grains, meats, will we eventually adapt to this diet?  What will it take to adapt to a diet?  How many millions of years before cancers and heart disease and immune diseases are eliminated as natural selection finally does its work?  Will our intelligence learn to transform our foods to what we need, or will we evolve into a species that is able to live entirely on these things?  What will be the cost in terms of individuals who never make the transition?

How many extinct species of mammals never made it because their food source was obliterated while we terraformed our way to a world of monoculture grain?

My Journey
Everyone says eat more vegetables and fruit.  When will we?  How can we get more?  By removing the more harmful things -- the meat, the dairy, the grain.  For me, I had already given up meat.  The dairy and grain have been much much harder to give up.

Today is just the sixth day of my fast from bread and dairy, almost having completed Horne's challenge of going one week grain-free.  Already I'm considering taking up Graham's challenge of doing this for one year.  Already I'm wondering if I can sustain this diet here in Canada, where fruit and leafy greens simply do not grow year round. Transporting them here is prohibitively expensive, even in ecological terms.  Humans don't really belong here.  But pretty soon, they won't belong in the greenhouse-gas superheated equatorial orchards where proto-humans evolved, either.  I'm afraid we're screwed, as a species.  We don't have time to adapt.  We'll never make it to the stars.

All I know is, on a personal level, I'm already starting to crave fruit and naked lettuce.  Have I broken my bread addiction?  Will I be able to afford expensive fruit and veg year round?

For now, the Exorphin Junkie is signing off.  Today, I'm throwing out my sourdough starter that I've kept viable for bread-making these last five years.   As of today, it is compost.

I think I'm becoming a frugivore.  

But like any junkie, I'll have to just take this one day at a time.  

Bye-Bye, Bread

The Final Crumb Shot

Unbaked spot: the final imperfection

Notes to Myself

• * Since he seemed to be an original thinker, I was most curious about T.C. Fry who believed we evolved like the Bonobo, eating similar foods, but there is no longer a wiki about him.  T.C. Fry is most well known for his book, "The Great AIDS Hoax," (Here's a YouTube Video about it) but he has also written "I Live on Fruit," "The Miracle of Living Foods: The Curse of Cooking," "Program for Dynamic Health: an introduction to natural hygiene: the only true health system" and "Laugh your Way to Health."  Apparently towards the end of his life, he believed he was uncovering details of the shadow government behind the New World Order.
  
  Fry, along with Herbert M. Shelton, was also a mentor to Marilyn and Harvey Diamond, who wrote "Fit for Life."
• See Kass, J. (2013) The evolution of brains from early mammals to humans. Wiley Interdiscip Rev Cogn Sci Jan 4(1) ;; 33-45 for info on where primate brains came from.