Should You Eat Less Salt?

Vlog

I would love to have an albertnet podcast, but the fact is, I don’t know how. I would have to learn some new platform, and figure out how to make it available to the 4.3 billion users of the Internet, and I simply don’t have the time. Knowing that many people would rather passively listen to podcasts than scroll through large bodies of text, I’m providing the next best thing: a vlog version of the following post. If you aren't enthralled by the sight of me pretending not to read, just close your eyes. Or open another tab and look at pictures of Gal Gadot while you listen. Or bite the bullet and scroll down for the text. Your call.

Introduction

I am not a doctor or nutritionist, nor a scientist of any kind. I’m not in the business of making specific health recommendations to anybody. That said, I think blanket advice from nutrition experts to the population at large can be imprecise. This post examines the question of whether you, dear reader, need to worry about your salt intake. I don’t know who you are, of course, but I aim to slice and dice the question of “who” more finely than other sources you might encounter. I also review here the results of a simple survey I sent out to my cycling friends. You won’t (and shouldn’t) come away with a new approach to your diet, but perhaps with a few good questions and some (low-fat, all-natural, free-range) food for thought.

Why do I care?

Humans need salt. And so does food. As a dumb kid I thought salt just made food salty, but that’s wrong. Salt makes food yummy. As I learned to cook I was astonished at how you can have a dish 99% done and it won’t taste right until you salt it, and then suddenly it can go from edible to delicious. The end result doesn’t necessarily taste salty; it just tastes right.

Now, if salt were utterly, incontrovertibly bad for you, I might consider it a necessary evil. I’m not willing to go without it, despite being sufficiently health conscious that I’ve essentially given up bacon and other cured meats. But the amount of added salt needed for a complete gastronomic apotheosis doesn’t need to be large. Have you ever tried to eat unsalted peanut butter? It’s revolting. I’d rather eat my scabs. Hell, I’d almost rather eat your scabs. If salted peanut butter had twice the FDA’s recommended daily allowance of sodium in it, and cost twice as much as unsalted, I’d still choose it.

But you know how much sodium regular peanut butter actually has? A mere 140 mg, just 6% of the recommended daily value. (Note that trying to go lower than this wouldn’t necessarily be beneficial: humans actually need about 500 mg of sodium a day to conduct vital functions, as described here.)

So why does unsalted peanut butter exist, other than as a specialty product for sufferers of hypertension? I’ll tell you my hunch: many people who buy it are reacting to the vague sense that less sodium is always better for you. And peanut butter is just one example of this phenomenon. It breaks my heart that well-meaning people are eating inferior meals based on rule of thumb that may or may not apply to them.

[Above: this PBJ was such a work of art, my daughter asked for a bite and then made off with half of it. This never would have happened in my household growing up. More on this later.]

Does sodium actually increase blood pressure?

I won’t bother to provide a wide survey of the science on this, but here are the high points of an article from the Harvard Medical School, based on an interview with Dr. Nancy Cook, a professor of medicine there:

• On average, Americans eat too much salt
• Whether or not sodium is bad for everybody, vs. only those with certain risk factors, has been a matter of some debate
• There is a fairly undisputed effect of sodium on blood pressure, and it’s stronger in people with hypertension
• People respond differently to salt, one to the next

Regarding the mechanism of sodium’s effect on blood pressure, Cook explains, “When you eat too much salt, your body holds on to water in an effort to dilute it. This extra water increases your blood volume, which means your heart works harder because it’s pushing more liquid through your blood vessels. More strenuous pumping by the heart puts more force on the blood vessels. Over time, this increased force can raise blood pressure and damage blood vessels, making them stiffer, which increases the risk of stroke, heart attack, and heart failure.”

Now, I don’t know about you, but when I read that, I didn’t immediately have an “Oh, shit!” reaction. Perhaps my salt intake does cause water retention, but not for long because every time I exercise, which is generally around four times a week, I sweat a lot, and in fact after a particularly hard ride I’ll get these head rushes every time I stand up—a classic symptom of low blood pressure—until I rehydrate. Not that I expect Dr. Cook to base her guidelines on my particular case. Given that a fairly recent CDC study concluded that only 22.9% of Americans get enough exercise, it’s not hard to see why Dr. Cook would advocate for reducing sodium intake when addressing the general public.

Meanwhile, the CDC reckons that “Americans consume an average of more than 3,400 mg of sodium each day,” which is far more than the 2,300 that the U.S. Department of Health recommends. Clearly, overconsumption of sodium is a public health problem in this country.

But does this mean you and I and everyone should all cut down? I think that would be a problematic conclusion. If Americans by and large use too much petroleum and create too much pollution by driving giant SUVs, then yeah, I can try to mitigate the damage by driving a Prius. But if someone eats too much salt and doesn’t exercise enough, I can’t help him by lowering my salt intake. In other words, I may or may not be implicated in this public health crisis. (Again, I can’t fault the article; the safe bet when advising a wide audience is to advocate caution and restraint.)

As is so often the case, there’s a bit of a conundrum here: the people who are concerned about their health and go looking for dietary advice are often not the ones recklessly eating a lot of processed food, fast food, and salty snacks, and thereby creating frightening statistics around widespread hypertension. A good many conscientious folks may heed these general warnings about salt and reduce their consumption, thus depriving themselves of its goodness for no legitimate reason.

My own experience

In brief, I’ve been seeing borderline high systolic blood pressure readings since high school, while my diastolic numbers are always nice and low. Meanwhile, my blood fats (cholesterol etc.) are remarkably good, my body mass index is spang in the middle of normal, and my resting heart rate is in the low 40s. I’ve never had a doctor recommend a change in diet, and over time my systolic reading has come down a bit. I chalk this up to being less of a hothead than I used to be. In general I suspect the benefits of life balance, of stress release achieved through exercise or yoga, and of emotional hygiene such as self-compassion are underrated. Modern life has people working too much, exercising too little, over-consuming news and social media, and then trying to undo all the damage by eating less salt. Nice try.

My survey

I surveyed a bunch of my cycling pals, because they’ve always been an insightful and amusing bunch. Being cyclists, most of them seem to eat basically whatever they want, and they’re all pretty much fit as a fiddle. That said, they take their health seriously, which statement I base on a couple of decades of riding and eating together, and also on their reactions to a couple of articles that have come out about too much exercise possibly damaging your heart. I was curious about my cycling team’s approach to salt so I emailed them this simple question: Do you make any effort to limit your salt intake for health reasons?

Of the 23 responses I got back, 17 were some version of no (i.e., they eat all the salt they want) and 6 were yes (they limit their salt). Of course I got some interesting comments, too:

• No, but I’m also pretty naturally salt-averse. One of my most frequent complaints about restaurant food is that it’s too salty, and one of my family’s most common complaints about my cooking is that there’s not enough salt in it.
• No. But then again, I don’t really make any effort to limit my intake of anything. I’m a gluttonous hedonist. What could possibly go wrong with that philosophy???
• I double down on salt - I’ve got low blood pressure and find getting light headed when I stand up a bit irritating.
• How can a person cook without salt? It’s my understanding (possibly inaccurate) that salt is only a problem if you have high blood pressure, so not really an issue for healthy people with normal blood pressure.
• Switched to dry brining with kosher salt. Definitely healthier and tastes better but I cannot speak to any metaphysical benefit.
• I’m casually aware of salt intake but never limit myself vs. what tastes appropriate. I don’t buy potato chips very often but when I do I want ‘em salty.
• No. But I know when I’ve had too much and I don’t necessarily enjoy that feeling.
• No. Well, maybe. I salt liberally from the shaker/cellar, but I do try to be aware of how much sodium certain prepared foods contain, and err on the side of less is better there…
• Well, occasionally I think about limiting my salt intake but it doesn’t really happen.
• Yes and yes - Simply put, Salt= Hypertension, Sugar= diabetes. Controlling these substances through diet can extended the life of several organs. It’s no secret that food companies fill processed food with these as a preservative and as a sales angle. We don’t even realize how much is added … I haven’t added salt to anything in years.
• Several years ago, I went to the doctor and my blood pressure was slightly higher than it used to be, almost 140/70. (Getting older sucks...) Since then I’ve generally cut back on the Mexican and Korean foods, and now it’s back to 120/60. However, if I ride 4+ hours in the heat, then I’ll always reward myself with some Mexican food.

My favorite comments were from the two MDs in my survey:

• I maximize salt intake!
• Salt is not a major contributor to hypertension. The processed food that contains a lot of salt probably is. (I spent a 1/3rd of a course in college studying sodium.) However, from a public health perspective, telling the public to limit salt probably has beneficial effects.

Now, there are (at least) two conclusions I could draw from these results. One, I could assume that by not worrying about salt whatsoever, we are consuming huge amounts of sodium and yet somehow getting away with it. On the other hand, we could be well within the recommended range of sodium consumption quite by accident. Granted, we cyclists love us some big, rich meals, but we tend to cook them ourselves. I’ve never known any of these pals to eat fast food, and as health-conscious types we avoid processed food like frozen entrees, “lunch meat,” and snack foods, because of all the other crap in them (trans fats, nitrates, refined flour, artificial flavors, etc.) and because we’re frankly too epicurean. (I get frozen pizza for my kids a couple times a year as a guilty pleasure, and indeed, only the scarcity of it makes it a treat.)

Honestly, the Recommended Daily Value of sodium, 2,300 mg, seems pretty generous. I tallied up the amount of sodium I get from my typical lunch, and found no cause for alarm. Lunch is often my biggest meal of the day, and it’s invariably a big burrito (basically homemade but with canned refried or whole beans and store-bought tortillas). Look, here’s one now.

I just read some labels and have calculated that one of my big-ass burritos contains about 1,400 mg of sodium. Of the US Recommended DV of not more than 2,300 mg, that leaves just 900 mg free for dinner (since I don’t eat breakfast). This is probably okay because my wife does most of the cooking and seldom resorts to things like canned beans. Besides, even if I’m a bit over the guideline, I’m a big guy and my daily caloric intake is very high—some would say legendary. But I guarantee I’m far from the 3,400 mg of sodium that the average American takes in, without even trying … that is, without compromising the tastiness of my food.

According to the CDC, “Most of the sodium Americans eat comes from packaged, processed, store-bought, and restaurant foods. Only a small amount comes from salt added during cooking or at the table.” A Harvard medical school article concurs: “At least 75% of the sodium in the average American diet comes from processed foods, such as cold cuts and cured meats, pizza, burgers, and sandwiches.”

This makes perfect sense, of course. Food is big business, and if sacrificing the health of consumers is what it takes to ensure shareholder value, so be it. Take the case of Campbell’s soup: they were famously required by the FDA to desist using their old slogan “Soup is good food” because their soup had too much sodium to be called “good.” More recently, Campbell’s experimented with lowering sodium, but then reversed course when sales dropped. As described here, their new CEO announced at an investors’ meeting, “For me it’s about stabilizing [sales] first.” Campbell’s contends that “the proposed nutritional principles ‘describe products that manufacturers will not produce because children and teens will not eat them.’”

Obviously we can’t stake our health on the companies that pander to philistine tastes. But that doesn’t mean when we cook at home we should gild the lily and err on the side of blandness. If anything, that will just tempt us to eat out more. And with restaurants, of course, all bets are off.

Conclusion

Again, I’m not a doctor or a nutritionist, but I think I can you give this bit of advice: before you automatically seek to lower your sodium intake based on the general messaging we get from the FDA, CDC, etc., find out what your own blood pressure is and ask your doctor if you’re at any risk. And if you do have a need to keep an eye on your sodium intake, do so with precision, by reading labels and knowing what goes into your food. It could well be, for example, that a person with mild hypertension could still afford the amount of sodium in regular peanut butter, and doesn’t need to be shaking Mr. Dash on his or her dinner.

Appendix A – salt in peanut butter

I grew up eating a lot of PBJs. My mom was a great cook, but these sandwiches were atrocious. The bread was fine, and the jam (generally homemade) was great, but the peanut butter was awful. It was a brand called Deaf Smith, and as detailed here, it was the first organic peanut butter on the market. It came in a giant plastic bucket—it had to be at least a few gallons—and it looked like a cross between diarrhea and that old-fashioned Dijon mustard with all the seeds in it. It was a roiling, gritty, grainy, wet mess and we called it quicksand because if you lost your grip on the knife (which happened a lot because it’d get oily), the knife would quickly sink and you wouldn’t see it again until you eventually got to the bottom of the tub and there’d be like five knives there.

But you have to understand, my brothers and I were not picky eaters, and all this would have been completely forgivable if Deaf Smith didn’t taste so damn bad. It was just awful. We suffered through those PBJs because we had to—we were growing boys, after all—but it was just so gross. As soon as I moved away from home I switched to Skippy and discovered that peanut butter could be delicious.

A few decades later, though I’d moved on to natural, non-hydrogenated peanut butter, usually Adams or the Trader Joe’s brand, I was still totally digging it. And then one day my wife bought unsalted by mistake. The horror! It tasted exactly like Deaf Smith! Completely disgusting—I was right back in my miserable elementary school lunchroom! This was an epiphany. I realized that there had never actually been anything really wrong with Deaf Smith except the lack of salt. This omission was totally unnecessary and surely not why my mom chose that brand. She has always maintained that salt won’t hurt you if you don’t already have high blood pressure—it can only exacerbate it. She probably chose Deaf Smith simply because it was organic and available in bulk. So why did Deaf Smith eschew salt? Probably because they were a bunch of hippies and salt seemed evil to them somehow.

Postscript to this sad tale: a year or so later I mixed up a fresh batch of Trader Joe’s peanut butter (yes, this mixing is a pain in the ass and I do miss the hydrogenation of Skippy at times), and then made a PBJ. Yuck! Foiled again! Staring, enraged, at the label, wondering why my wife would poison the family again by buying more unsalted peanut butter, I realized this jar wasn’t actually labeled as unsalted. It was their organic variety, which had just 40 mg of sodium per serving, vs. 140 mg in the normal version. I guess they decided those who like organic food automatically want less sodium. I wrote an angry email to Trader Joes, which I’ve just found and reread. It ends, “When this jar is empty I will probably remove the label and burn it in effigy.” (In fairness, Trader Joe’s did apologize and gave me a refund.)

Appendix B – fact-checking the Deaf Smith tale

I fact-checked the bit about Deaf Smith peanut butter with my mom, to confirm that lowering our sodium intake wasn’t her goal in choosing it. This she corroborated, but she denied that we ate it that much. “I got it from the co-op, and hadn’t tried it before,” she said. “I think I only bought it once, and had no idea it wouldn’t be salted. It probably just seemed like we got it a lot, because it took so long to get through that giant drum.”

I thought this might have been wishful thinking … after all, no mother wants to admit she tortured her offspring for a protracted period. So I asked my brother Bryan. He responded, “It was just for a time as I recall, we didn’t really like it because it was so natural, and it separated so badly that the last few gallons of it were like concrete.”

My brother Max had a host of other memories around the Deaf Smith. “As I recall, the Deaf Smith was from ‘the co-op,’” he told me (via text). “That’s where those ginormous cylindrical loafs of Colby and Colby-Jack cheeses came from as well. I think there was more than just one five-gallon tub of Deaf Smith that came through [our household]. The Deaf Smith was really good in rice crispy squares. I remember that! When we complained about the Deaf Smith mom would laugh … for some reason she just didn’t believe that we really hated it.

“Remember the story of how Deaf Smith became deaf? He was a San Francisco kid and he had to take the trolley to school. One day he was a little running behind, as they say, and the trolley was already taking off. He ran up to the trolley and a man, who was just trying to be helpful, used the young Smith’s ears as handles to haul him up onto the trolley and he was deafened.”

At this point I replied, “I do not remember that story. Is that from the archives or did you just make that up?” Max’s answer: “True story as I remember it. I recall feeling that we had to eat this peanut butter because mom felt sorry for Deaf Smith. It may have been that the man ‘boxed’ his ears to punish him for his tardiness. I remember asking Mom what that meant, boxing the ears. I guess it was common back then for men to box the ears of wayward youths. As she described it, boxing the ears involves essentially punching a kid in both ears at the same time with the fists turned inward so the contact with the ears is made with the fleshy part of the hand between the wrist and bottom knuckle of the pinky finger.

“I recall that she may have been unsure whether the man dragged him up by his ears or dragged him up and then boxed his ears, but either way it resulted in two sure things: Smith became deaf and there was nothing more for him but to make peanut butter.

“Everyone who buys this product feels a bit guilty and a bit absolved simultaneously. I always tried to like the Deaf Smith out of guilt for the human condition. I’d think about the trauma that that kid endured, having his life ruined by some a-hole on the trolley, and how he had to crush peanuts for the rest of his miserable existence.

“It had to have been a miserable existence. If he had made any sort of meaningful recovery, he might have put some sugar or at least some salt in the peanut butter. It was almost as though he accepted being boxed in the ears. As though he deserved it for being late. That peanut butter was practically a punishment. Austerity in a five gallon tub.”

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The Maple Syrup Relabeling Travesty

Introduction

In my last post, I lambasted modern razors, which are excessively expensive and fictitiously superior to what your dad or grandfather used to use. I should probably blog next on a completely unrelated theme, but I have stumbled onto another economic absurdity that is sticking in my craw. This time, though, I’m going to exhort you to possibly spend more than you may be now.

I’m talking about maple syrup. Don’t pretend you don’t care about this all-important foodstuff.

Grade A vs. Grade B

For somewhere around a couple hundred years, maple syrup—I mean the real deal, not that imitation stuff—came in two grades: A and B. Grade A was better and cost more. It’s the better product, that naturally rises to the top when maple syrup is boiled. Grade A syrup is to Grade B what cream is to milk.

Now, when I say Grade A is better, I’m not just basing this on it traditionally costing more money. After all, cheap razor blades are better than expensive ones, and cheap- to mid-priced Mexican restaurants are often better than the more upscale places (which are often just annoying). I’m basing my statement on having done a highly scientific blind taste test onsite at a maple syrup producing facility in Vermont back in 1994. Here is the result of my test, from the report I made right afterward:

[My wife and I] conducted blind taste tests comparing Grade A Fancy, Grade B, and our own Shurfine Imitation Maple Flavor Syrup [purchased for reasons of economy during an 8-month bike tour].  We both preferred Grade A, then fake, with Grade B coming in a distant last.  (After our Shur Fine ran out, we got some Maple Jack that's 20% real syrup:  that is, likely 20% Grade B, cut expertly in the lab by large corporations that know what tastes good.)

Here is photographic proof of this taste test:

My report included this tidbit:

I’ve heard people say, “I’ve tried real maple syrup, and I prefer the kind you buy in the store that’s artificially flavored.”  My theory about this oddity is that those who prefer fake syrup had been served Grade B at a touristy restaurant.  It makes sense for a restaurant to serve Grade B syrup since it’s not only cheaper, but will impress tourists more:  they’ll say, “Wow, that’s so different, oh, yes, this is the real thing, we’re experiencing the real thing, oh my, what a fabulous vacation.” 

In the last few years, however, Vermont—the top U.S. maple syrup producer—discovered that a lot of people actually prefer Grade B. Perhaps some of this is because it’s so obviously different from Mrs. Butterworth’s and Log Cabin. Maybe its stronger flavor just seems more authentic. Whatever the reason (and you can see the Appendix below for some theories), the Vermont maple syrup producers evidently realized they were leaving money on the table by using the phrase “Grade B.” Why admit something is inferior when you don’t have to? This brings us to….

The disappearance of Grade B

Last fall during a visit to my hometown of Boulder, Colorado I was shopping at an overpriced, Whole-Foods-y grocery chain called Vitamin Cottage when I discovered that their different grades of maple syrup were all called Grade A. One label said something to the effect of “formerly known as Grade B.” I asked the cashier about this but she was clueless. I decided it must be a Boulder thing. (My brother Max, who lives in Boulder, has always preferred Grade B syrup himself.)

Well, I’ve done some research and have discovered (click here for details) that Vermont has refined the gradation scheme for maple syrup. Now, all maple syrup is Grade A, even the Grade C stuff that wasn’t formerly available for retail sale (being used only in the manufacture of food). This scoring revision is a little like my daughters’ kiddie soccer teams that gave every kid a trophy, even the ones who never broke into a run or even attempted to kick the ball. Here’s a schematic showing the new nomenclature.

When you think about it, this just makes perfect sense. Why on earth would you badmouth a product with a derisive label like “Grade B” when you don’t have to? Why create a hierarchy that lowers the price of your lower-end product? I’ll bet the dairy industry is kicking themselves for using the word “milk” when they could call it “light cream” and charge more money for it.

But does the maple syrup industrial complex charge more for Grade B Grade A Dark with Robust Taste now? Well, it’s really hard to compare now, because not all manufacturers provide the complete label. Look at this stuff, which is as dark as crude oil:

Its label says, “Grade A 100% Pure Maple Syrup (from the Sap of Maple Trees).” You know, as opposed to “from the Urine of Pregnant Beavers” or “from the Runoff of Feed Lots.” All those extra words about what “maple syrup” means, but they couldn’t manage to fit in the “Dark with Robust Taste” part of the label, or—more likely—“Very Dark with Strong Taste,” whichever of the two it is. This incomplete labeling is certainly deliberate and opportunistic; it gives them the ability to charge $9 for a 16-ounce bottle of what would be Grade B or even Grade C syrup in the original, non-muddled nomenclature.

When I try to compare two varieties of a single manufacturer’s product, I get nowhere. Looking at the Anderson’s products at Target, it appears the lighter and darker varieties cost the same, but I can’t be sure because it’s not clear how to put one or the other in your shopping cart. Looking at Amazon, I was totally buried in unhelpful labels and packaging options. Suffice to say, it’s no longer a straightforward proposition to get a lower-end product for less money. All has been obfuscated.

Expansion of relabeling opportunity

I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before other industries catch on and carry out relabeling campaigns of their own. Here are some examples of low-lying fruit:

• Grade A Beef for Strong Immune Systems
• Multivitamin for Those Preferring Vitamin C Only
• Chicken Breast from the Leg
• Whole Wheat Bread – Reduced Fiber Version
• Extra-Strength Tylenol in Low Dose
• MBA Degree in High School Equivalency
• SPF 50 Sunscreen for Indoor Use
• Express Mail Ground Delivery Option
• Black Belt in Karate – Beginner’s Online Tutorial Edition

Appendix – Is Grade B Grade A Dark with Robust Taste better for you?

Part of the popularity of the syrup formerly known as Grade B is that it’s been recommended for the “Master Cleanse” detox regimen, which consists of fasting except for drinking tea and lemonade made with maple syrup and cayenne pepper. The originator of this cleanse, a charlatan named Stanley Burroughs, advised in his self-published book that you should use Grade B syrup because it is “less refined.” (Charlatan? Yes. As mentioned in the MasterCleanse Wikipedia article, “According to the Harvard Medical School, the laxative component of the diet can lead to dehydration and electrolyte loss as well as impaired bowel function.”)

A self-interested purveyor of maple syrup, the Maple Valley Coop, promotes the Master Cleanse regimen and applauds Burroughs for recommending the syrup formerly known as Grade B, on the basis of it being less refined. But this other website explains that all grades of maple syrup are pure and unrefined. Can we trust this second website? Yep. My own tour of the maple syrup producing facility showed me that they produce all the syrup without adding anything … all they do is extract the sap and boil it. Here are the notes I took on this:

Tubes run directly from the trees to a giant storage tank, from which the sap trickles down (by gravity) to a giant open topped boiling tank that has many different maze-like channels in it.  The sap runs through the channels, driven by the current of the new sap flowing in, and by the time it makes it through to the final channel, it’s been boiled long enough that it’s the proper consistency and thickness of syrup:  that is, a gallon of it weighs 11 pounds (3 pounds more than a gallon of water!). Then, it’s separated into various grades by some process that was never explained to us very well  … something like fractional distillation, I suppose.  This yields the various grades, from Grade B (i.e., crude, and “suitable for cooking,” as they described it) all the way up to Grade A Fancy (the best).

Others have also claimed that Grade B is better for you. A website called “Nourishing Our Children” claims here that “The potency and richness of Grade B maple syrup amplifies its health benefits.” This is also nonsense; this Cornell University study concluded, “No research has demonstrated any differential health benefits related to this variation.” Meanwhile, common sense tells us that maple syrup is a damn condiment. Nobody should consider it a staple with which we nourish our children.

Speaking of which, I’m still a fan of the good stuff—the Grade A that has always been called Grade A—but you know what I gave my own kids when they were younger? Imitation syrup, like Log Cabin. Why? Because little kids are lame, and pour like a quart of syrup on a single pancake, leaving most of it behind on the plate. I refuse to waste my money on such behavior. Besides, they liked Log Cabin just fine—and why shouldn’t they have? I know firsthand it tastes better than Grade A Dark with Robust Taste.

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[Quasi-] South Beach Diet - Part II

Introduction

In this follow-up to my last South Beach[-ish] post, I offer reports from the trenches (my brother’s and mine); some arcana about glycemic index and glycemic load; the good news about the cool food you can still eat with this approach; some responses to a commenter on my last post; and the truth about alcohol. (I know that last bit implies that somebody has been lying about alcohol, and really nobody has, but I had to throw that in to bait you. Along those lines I will now include this phrase—what your doctor doesn’t want you to know about losing weight—because that seems a popular way to draw people in as well. Also, this weird little trick that helps you lose half your body weight in 48 hours!)

The trenches

Gosh, what a totally irresponsible metaphor “the trenches” is. Of course this is nothing like battle or real hardship of any kind. Feeling like you ought to lose weight is a real luxury, when almost 800 million people on this planet are malnourished. “I’m just not as svelte as I was in college!” Oh, boo-hoo!

Do you hate me yet? Good, good. Anybody who is doing well on a diet (or better yet, a new eating approach that is realistic for long-term benefit) ought to be hated at least a little. I love this New Yorker cartoon where two women are at the café at their tennis club and one announces, “I’ve only been gluten-free for a week, but I’m already really annoying.” (No, I’m not going to talk about gluten in this post. That’s a whole topic of its own. Suffice to say I myself never met a glutenous mass I didn’t like.)

So far, in the eighteen days I’ve been on this diet, I’ve lost nine pounds. That’s not so bad, especially because I’ve been cheating a bit. If I did Phase 1 (see my previous post if you haven’t already), I’m sure I’d see more results. My brother, in the same time span, has lost about six pounds. He’s not doing Phase 1 either … and in fact, he’s cheating regularly because one of his kids has discovered baking and is thrusting lemon bars, cream puffs, banana bread, and cobbler at him. Believe me, I had a great time ribbing him about that. At least he’s honest with his food log, and is trying to be good (“1.5 small blueberry cobbler pieces … two small cookies … very thin slice fudge…”). Of course this is the time of year when everybody becomes a glutton, but that’s no excuse for eating whatever junk you’re offered. I e-mailed Bryan, “Do we need to get you a sign that says, ‘Please do not feed the human ... when he is given people food, his nutrition is impaired and he loses interest in hunting’?”

It is almost impossible to have dessert and be on a South Beach(-esque) program at the same time. Not entirely impossible, though:

A plum can be nice and sweet, but still good for you.  I think that’s mascarpone and mint leaves below it.

My wife is doing well on quasi-South-Beach, especially in her main goal of keeping me honest. Here is a sample of our joint food journal, from the first day back on the plan:

The first thing you’ll notice is how messy this journal is. My brother’s journal is neatly typed and available online for me to peek at whenever I want, but I’ll bet it’s not quite as complete. A paper journal that lives in the kitchen doesn’t miss a thing. The second thing you’ll notice in the above snapshot is that my wife is using the “smiley face” technique of reinforcing dietary (and exercise) principles. This is probably healthier than my shame-and-fear-based system.

Another quick note: it can be helpful to monitor body fat if your scale supports it, but such measurements are probably not very accurate. That looks a bit like 16.8% above but it actually says 11.8%. Whatever my body fat percentage really is, I expect that number to go down as I continue my South Beach(-esque) effort.

You’ll find a recipe lurking in my entry, for Mexican(-ish) rice. Here’s what you do: glug some olive oil in a pan, dice a whole onion and simmer it a while, then add some cooked, cut-up meat. I used leftover turkey white-meat from Thanksgiving because a) white meat, aka breast meat, is really good for you, and b) I hate it. (My favorite part of the bird is the skin.) Frying up the meat makes it way tastier—it’s worth the oil, I think. I shake a bunch of Chef Paul Prudhomme’s Poultry Magic on there and a bunch of ground cumin, which is like magic. I sear that mixture on high heat, then throw in a can of stewed tomatoes. I simmer that a bit, then throw in cooked rice. I use brown rice because it’s better for you—it has almost six times the fiber of white rice. (White rice is useless. Don’t eat it. I used it with this batch because it was all I could find.)

I have a burrito practically every day made with beans, this rice, cheese (I don’t skimp on this, actually), and really good salsa. Pound for pound I think the salsa I get is more expensive than heroin, but it’s much better for you. These burritos rock. The deal is, when you put rice and beans together, you get a complete protein. (Click here for details.) Also, the fiber in beans, helped out by the cheese and by the bran in the brown rice, help that burrito burn slowly. That’s good because it means you won’t snack.

Also, because a burrito is a modular food, you can control the size and thus your intake. I either use a soft-taco size tortilla or half a regular tortilla. That’s a big enough burrito even for a big guy like me who works out a lot. Of course, the flour tortilla is complete crap, nutritionally. But what good is a diet that makes you want to kill yourself? Whole wheat tortillas should be banned.

Note, in the journal snapshot, my wife’s apple, raisins, and blueberries, and the zucchini, peppers, and cherry tomatoes we both had with dinner. Of course we should have had more vegetables (we were just easing into this South Beach thing). Note also the peanut butter. Sure, it’s pretty caloric (as a commenter on my last post pointed out) but it greatly helps with a feeling of satiety. This is crucial. If you try to cut down on calories without addressing satiety you’re going to be miserable. The point here is to reduce calories while still feeling satisfied. Hard boiled eggs are also good for satiety. I eat one of them then and I’m basically in no mood to eat for many hours.

How can we tell what foods will burn slowly?

Foods burn slowly according to how hard they are to digest. Obviously. Fiber slows down digestion, so it’s great. Meat also burns more slowly. I think cheese does too (and I’m not going to fact-check that because if there’s anything bad about cheese, I don’t want to know). What’s really cool is that slow-burning foods can actually slow down digestion of fast-burning foods consumed in the same meal. So the meat and beans in your burrito make the tortilla burn more slowly. That’s why when you eat a big burrito at a taqueria you don’t need to eat again for like four days. (Damn, I just drooled on my laptop.)

Here is one of my typical burritos. You can see a bit of cilantro creeping out the front. This will keep me going all the way until dinner, even on days that I work out.

There’s a numeric scale that describes how slowly a carbohydrate source will burn. It’s called the glycemic index (click here for details). It goes from 1 to 100. Anything over 50 is bad. Anything over 70 is really bad. You can download charts from the Internet. The digestive process, it turns out, is actually pretty mechanical. Chewy stuff takes longer and delivers its energy more gradually. (This is why I allow myself to eat gristle even when I’m trying to lose weight.)

Interestingly, the glycemic index (GI) of spaghetti is 46 (not very good), but the GI of al dente fettuccine is only 32. This isn’t too bad except that it’s impossible not to overeat with pasta ... a bite or two in, your eyes roll up into the back of your head and you abandon all pretense of self-control. You tell yourself things like “They’re just love handles!” and “Fat people are funnier, like Seth Rogen and Jonah Hill!” and “I would look great in a double-breasted suit!” and “I can do this, I’m an athlete!” And that’s just your average joe. Pasta is especially dangerous if you have “baggage” like I do, such as my teenage tradition of eating all-you-can-eat pasta—usually 5 or 6 plates at a sitting—once a week for years.

But consistency isn’t everything. What makes food choices a bit more complicated is that it can be hard to predict how caloric a food is. Soba noodles, for example, are made of buckwheat flour, which is somehow relatively lo-cal. Buckwheat is not really wheat ... it’s a grass. No, wait, I just fact-checked and it’s not a grass. It’s a “pseudocereal,” related to quinoa, sorrel, knotweed, and rhubarb. (What is knotweed? I don’t know, but it’s probably like knothead, and you are what you eat, so be careful!) One great thing about buckwheat soba noodles is that  they have one calorie per gram, which makes it easy to measure your intake, plus that’s 32% fewer calories than semolina noodles.

The other good news is that the Huffington Post calls buckwheat “one of the healthiest foods you’re not eating.” This statement is arch and snotty, and Hufffpost is hip and modern, so you can see buckwheat has all kinds of cred. The bad news is that buckwheat soba noodles have a glycemic index of 59, which is on the not-so-good end of the spectrum. (Still way better than a baked potato at 111.) You know those so-called “glass” noodles? They’re made of sweet potatoes and have a GI of 39-45. And they confer the same groovy Asian-ness that soba do. So they’re a better choice.

So if glycemic index isn’t everything—due to variances in how caloric one substance is over another—what else do we need to consider? Well, for what it’s worth, there’s a separate scale called glycemic load. This scale, based on some formula the food people have devised, factors in the number of calories. These numbers don’t fall in such a nice range as GI, but suffice to say anything over 20 is bad, and single-digit numbers are the best. (Again, you can download charts online.)

For example, watermelon (as you might guess) has a high GI: 72, to be precise. This would be a good food for somebody with no teeth left. But we can have all we want, because it’s practically bereft of calories. Its glycemic load is just 4. Have at it!

Prunes have a nice low GI (29) but they’re also pretty sweet, so their load is 10 (which is still rather good). Carrots have a load of 3.5, which makes them a great “closer”—that food that is still sitting in a bowl on the table after you’ve eaten your little portion of indulgent goodness and are fantasizing about having seconds. After you munch down a few carrot sticks you might decide you’re not actually that hungry, per se ... maybe you were going to eat out of boredom but now you’re bored of the food itself. Congratulations! You’re going to dream about food all night and wake up ready to go toe-to-toe with that bathroom scale!

Glycemic load isn’t everything, but it does help us put certain foods in perspective. For example, the person who commented on my last post needs to be corrected. She said to avoid nuts because “they’re ‘healthy fat’ but a handful of nuts has, like 800 calories.” I think she was exaggerating for comic effect; it’s actually more like 170 calories. Still a lot, but the glycemic load of peanuts is a mere 1. That’s fricking amazing. No wonder they’re so satisfying. Last Saturday I rode my bike 70 miles, with 6,000 feet of climbing, but (after my modest glycogen window snack, a cup of honey-sweetened yogurt and a weird persimmon cookie), I just wasn’t that hungry so my lunch was just two handfuls of peanuts and 4 or 5 prunes. (When your body isn’t all fouled up by lots of sugary calories, it can burn fat like a motherfrockle. This is why distance athletes—whose bodies get especially good at this—are so freaking thin.)

So, if we don’t want to deprive ourselves of the foods we love, we just need to work on portion control, which is doable if for every part starchy, yummy goodness you make yourself plow through two parts bulky, low-glycemic-load vegetables. Cabbage is great for that. Yeah, it’s not the tastiest stuff, but that’s kind of the point. After eating a bunch of it you’re asking, “Could I be full?” rather than “Could I push past the pain and eat even more?” (Raw cabbage, I’ll concede, is almost inedible, except perhaps on a fish taco. Cabbage is better cooked, and the smell of cooking cabbage helps you lose your appetite—a win/win!)

If we’re going to be realistic here, napa cabbage is more charismatic than regular. It doesn’t have much flavor, but bulks foods out nicely (instead of bulking us out not-nicely). A cup of nappa cabbage has just 13 calories. It’s like the perfect thing to stuff yourself with. Best of all, you can spell it with either one “p” or two ... your choice! (I mixed and matched here, just to be more Google-query-friendly.) I have actually put nappa cabbage in a burrito, just to give it that realistic heft you get at taquerias. You wanna know the glycemic load of cabbage? It’s an infinitesimal 0.58! Amazing!

So ... what can I still eat while South-Beaching it?

The good news is, you can still eat anything with this approach, once you’re in phase 3 ... at least, the way I do it (and it’s working pretty well). But you can’t eat everything. That is, you need to figure out a few indulgent, non-South-Beach foods you just can’t live without, and keep eating them—but only occasionally, as a treat, and in small quantities with gobs of vegetables on the side. Other starchy or sweet foods will just have to go—you gotta choose your battles. So as much as I go on about pasta being too irresistible to mess with, I know I can never totally give it up. But if I’m going to occasionally submit to it, I better be pretty strict about desserts, white bread (like sourdough and baguettes, which I adore), and pretty much all baked goods. Oh, and I barely get to have pizza. Maybe this summer I’ll start riding Mount Diablo every weekend like I used to, and can cheat more.

But drinking ... that’s another matter.

What can I drink?

I’ll make this simple: don’t drink anything that isn’t a) water, or b) a drug delivery mechanism. Juice is all the sugar from fruit and none of the fiber so unless you’re actually trying to get fat, just skip it. If you have a reasonably balanced diet (such as South Beach) you’re getting plenty of vitamins without needing any juice. (“Vitamin water,” meanwhile, is sugar-water for morons.) Soda should be banned, but with a special dispensation for endurance athletes.

A commenter on my last post advised that you can “add splenda to all sorts of liquids and you can guzzle diet sodas.” I totally disagree. Diet soda confuses your body and triggers an insulin response, meanwhile dulling our senses to naturally sweet food, leading to the abuse of other sweets, according to this article and others. Splenda (sucralose) has long been thought safe, but recent studies (click here) link it to changes in intestinal microbes, altered glucose and insulin levels, and possibly cancer. Sure, we could debate the veracity of these studies, but why bother? Why defend chemicals designed to fool Mother Nature, just for the sake of justifying unsophisticated pleasures? If you have a constant craving for sweet drinks, you should try to figure out why. Shouldn’t you have cast off that childish fixation long ago?

Coffee (without cream or sugar) is completely fine. Drink up. Caffeine can even be an appetite suppressant, but be careful ... don’t be tempted to skip meals (which confuses your body, fouls up your energy levels, and creates diet-jeopardizing cravings). I don’t consider coffee a food, because it’s practically calorie-free. I think of it as a drug (and a very safe, useful one).

Alcohol is also, to my mind, also more of a drug than a food. But it’s a whole different deal from coffee because alcoholic beverages are highly caloric, in direct proportion to the amount of alcohol they contain (so don’t bother trying to count the carbs in this or that beer). And calories are only part of the problem. Because alcohol is a toxin, when you drink your body shuts down its normal metabolic processes (like burning fat) until it’s dealt with the alcohol. Meanwhile, mixed drinks often involve sugary mixers or Coke, and drinking lowers your inhibitions so you might lose some of the discipline you’ve been trying to have about your eating. (Click here and here for details.)

(You think it was possible to resist that fourth helping of fries after drinking Belgian beer? It was not, nor was it possible to resist dipping the fries in mayo, Euro-style. But that was a special occasion.)

It kills me that there’s a whole website, Get Drunk Not Fat, dedicated to worrying about the number of carbs or other fillers in alcoholic beverages, when moderation alone is the way forward.

Does all this mean you shouldn’t drink at all when trying to lose weight? I don’t think so. Statistically, moderate drinkers are less likely to be overweight than teetotalers. Meanwhile, alcohol can be a great way to hide from your problems. (That was a joke.) The question of whether or not to drink should certainly involve not gaining weight, but weight is only one component of this bigger lifestyle choice. I think that where this South Beach[-esque] dietary approach is concerned, drinking should be treated like one of those carefully selected indulgences you might decide to allow yourself from time to time. But you better not allow too many of these indulgences, and you better indulge sparingly, if you’re serious about losing weight.

The result so far

Today my wife said to me, “You’re starting to get gaunt. You’re starting to look like a bike racer again.” This isn’t really a compliment. In fact, it’s almost a warning. I think the subtext was something like, “Watch yourself ... don’t do too good a job with this South Beach thing.” I’m happy to report that if things continue on this trend, I’ll be around or below 170 pounds for the hill climb bike race I have planned for January 1. Following that, I might just take my eating habits back in a more northerly direction, secure in the knowledge that I’m not at risk of becoming the next Humpty Dumpty.

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For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

What Shouldn't Cyclists Eat?

I recently blogged about what cyclists eat when training for long races.  What I didn’t get into was whether any food or drink is off-limits to cyclists.  So, here goes.

First of all, the pros eat differently from amateurs.  Pro cyclists really watch their weight, because being anything other than freakishly emaciated disrupts the absurd power/weight ratio that makes them competitive.  That said, their diet isn’t exactly restrictive.  As reported in cyclingnews, world champion Mark Cavendish decided this year to trim down for the Olympics:   “I’ve stopped candy, soft drinks and ready meals.” 

It’s also worth pointing out differences between the Europeans and Americans.  I understand they eat a lot of horse meat over there.  Much of the Euro approach strikes Americans as unscientific, being based on tradition and mythology.  For example, in the 1980s the French castigated Greg LeMond for having the audacity to eat ice cream—which was obviously terribly detrimental to his fitness—during the Tour de France, especially while he was in the lead.  To the French, LeMond’s decadence was an insult to the yellow jersey.  At the time, I figured, “Heck, LeMond is burning a lot of calories, he can get away with it.”  After all, I’d watched plenty of Coors Classic racers in Boulder strolling along the outdoor mall eating ice cream.

As it turns out, LeMond’s ice cream wasn’t just a treat.  I found this out in summer of 2000 when I happened to encounter him at the Nevada City Bicycle Classic, where we were both spectators.  It was either my birthday or his—we’re off by just a day—so he bought me an ice cream.  I reminded him of the flak he’d taken during that Tour for his ice cream indulgence, and he said, very seriously, “That wasn’t an indulgence, that was crucial.  When you’re racing at that level you’ve got to replace the calories.”  It turns out ice cream is an excellent sports recovery food:  plenty of protein and much-needed calcium.

My friend John, who stepped up his training this year in anticipation of the Everest Challenge, told me recently, “These days I eat massive amounts of ice cream.  If I do a good ride, I’ll eat a pint of Ben and Jerry’s (about 1200 calories), guilt free!  Heck, I eat that much ice cream even on days when I don't ride!  But I weigh less now than I have in decades.” 

So ... is diet really “anything goes” for us freedom-loving American cyclists?  Well, as I was reminded quite recently:  no. 

Last Friday, I did a double-Diablo (digging myself into a deep calorie deficit), and then spent Saturday picnicking at a winery in Sonoma with a bunch of old cycling friends from SoCal.  While training for the Everest Challenge I don’t drink any alcohol—I figure my liver is working hard enough as it is restoring muscle glycogen—but I made an exception and had a teensy bit of wine.  More problematic were the lack of water (they were selling it, bottled, and I’m cheap) and the big bag of chips and other junk I ate all day.  My plan was to meet up with other friends in the area and go out for a giant Italian dinner to true up my stomach.  Instead, my friends served dinner at their house.  It was take-out dim sum.

Now, I don’t want to complain.  I love dim sum and my hosts bought tons of it, being familiar with my oversized appetite.  Meanwhile, I teach my kids to eat whatever they’re served and I have to lead by example.  Plus, it was delicious.  It must be said, however, that dim sum is no way to carbo-load.  By the time you’ve eaten three or four thousand calories of it, you’ve taken on a ton of salt and grease.   By the time we’d driven home from the wine country, my normally invincible stomach was in turmoil.

I looked in the bathroom mirror:  a disturbing, and yet fascinating, sight.  I could see my ribs (being a cyclist, after all) but also this crazy sphere of bloat pushing out over my waistband, like I was a boa constrictor who swallowed a soccer ball.  In all my years of overeating I’ve never seen anything like it.  All night I was up chugging water, tossing, turning, roiling.  At 4 o’clock on Sunday morning I couldn’t be in bed any longer.  I got up and prepared for my ride:  another double-Diablo.

Guess what?  I didn’t feel so hot.  Actually, I was miserable from the first pedal stroke and it got worse from there.  I thought about just going home—but I’d feel lousy there, too, so what was the point?  I met up with my friends and clung desperately to the back of the group all the way to the base of Mount Diablo.  Once the climb started, I got dropped so abruptly I didn’t even have a chance to tell them not to bother waiting at the top.  My stomach—a stalwart ally, the linchpin of my cycling ability—was livid to have been so abused.  As the climb dragged on, my system exorcised most of the evil, but my energy stores were empty, closed, all boarded up.

I ended up doing both Diablo assaults alone.  Many times I thought of cutting the ride short.  After all, each climb was optional.  Heck, the whole ride was optional—in fact, the whole sport is optional!  But I didn’t quit, because here was an opportunity to turn this poor dietary choice into a positive.  If I could stave off despair and continue pedaling under such duress, for no good reason, I’d give my psychological mettle a real test in advance of the big race.  The Everest Challenge is grueling, sure, but at least I won’t be riding it on rice flour and fatty pork alone.

After the ride I spent a good while lying on the living room floor.  I slept really well that night.  Once again, I dreamed of food:  I’m at my daughter’s soccer game coveting the snack somebody’s mom brought, which is a large bowl of cooked lentils.  “Could I have some now?” I beg.  “No!” the soccer mom replies.  “You can’t have any now or later!  It’s for the kids!”

Nutrition for Endurance Cycling

What does an ultra-endurance athlete eat?

I can speak for the cyclist who does really long training rides.  How long?  Well, lately I’ve been training for a two-day stage race, the Everest Challenge.  My favorite weekend ride these days is the “double-Diablo,” which is close to a hundred miles long with 11,000 feet of climbing.

It’s tough to convey, to the layman, and even to the typical cyclist, what “11,000 feet of climbing” really means.  Consider this:  a staircase rising 11,000 feet would have around 18,000 steps, would be about four miles long, and would take you to the top of a 900-story building.

I have it on good authority that the stomach of a well-trained athlete can handle about 200 calories an hour during intense exercise.  By calories I mean carbohydrates—protein and fat aren’t nearly as useful.  Any sugar will do:  energy bars, energy drink, energy gels, fruit.  I find fruit hard to carry and bars hard to eat.  So I try to drink a bottle of energy drink (160-180 calories) every hour, and eat a gel (110-120 calories) about every 90 minutes.  (I bring drink mix in baggies.)  The gels have caffeine, which speeds the metabolism and aids in fat burning.

So, during a 6½-hour double-Diablo, I’ll have five or six large bottles of energy drink and four gels.  That’s pretty disgusting:  1,300 to 1,500 calories of pure sugar.  (Don’t let anybody tell you there’s nutrition in energy drink.  Sure, these drinks contain electrolytes, but that’s not really nutrition.  There are only two electrolytes:  potassium and sodium.  Six bottles of Gatorade—about a gallon—provides, in total, just 270 mg of potassium, a mere 6% of a person’s daily requirement.  You can get that much potassium from four ounces of orange juice, or half a banana.  Four gels provides a total of 80 mg potassium—about as much as a mouthful of V-8 juice.  As for sodium, I don’t think that’s an elusive part of any American’s diet.)

The worst part of this forced gluttony?  It’s that I don’t even have a sweet tooth.  My kids are envious that I get to have so much sweet stuff, but I really don’t enjoy it.  The good news is, my stomach tolerates it pretty well—which puts me at an advantage over lots of riders, especially during a six- or seven-hour road race.  An envious teammate joked to me recently, “You have a Protour-caliber stomach.”  It’s true—my stomach is the one part of my body suitable for the Tour de France.

What would happen if a cyclist drank only water during rides?  Well, on a short ride he’d be fine, though he might not go as fast.  (Recent studies—click here and here and especially here for details—show that a sweet drink increases power output, even if it’s spat out instead of swallowed.)  On a long ride, though, the sugar-free rider is doomed.  He’s a time bomb:  he can be hammering along just fine one moment but will suddenly crack, and then barely be able to turn the pedals.  It’s pretty spectacular, but also sad, to watch.

How you eat after a long ride is also important.  For about half an hour after hard exercise, sugar taken in goes directly into replacing muscle glycogen instead of being absorbed the normal way.  In other words, you’ll recover more quickly if you consume carbs during this “glycogen window.”  So, right after my ride, when I’ve already had a whole gallon of energy drink, guess what I get to do?  Have some juice, maybe some sweetened yogurt, a few Girl Scout cookies.  My kids flock to the scene like pigeons, looking for handouts. “Did you just ride six hours?” I snap.  (I do leverage the glycogen window as a parent.  My older daughter will ride for an hour on the indoor trainer just for a half-dozen jelly beans.)

Refueling doesn’t end there, though.  A cyclist can burn a thousand calories per hour on a hard ride, so it takes many meals to catch up.  After a really long ride I dream about food all night.  As with any dream involving appetites, satisfaction is never achieved.  On Saturday night I dreamed I’d locked myself out of my office:  no wallet, no keys, no train ticket … thus no food.  The dreamscape shifted:  now I was stuck at a boring lecture.  Just as I tried to sneak out, the speaker asked me to come onstage.  At that moment I discovered my hands were full of noodles.  I ran for the door but dropped the noodles.  Could I eat them off the floor?  Everybody was watching.

On Sunday night I dreamed I was at a barbecue and just before I got to eat, my brother showed up and needed a ride to the airport right away.  The next morning my wife said I was talking in my sleep about “some sauce, Florentine I think.”

A cyclist can’t eat right.  What I mean is, he can’t eat the same things that ideally healthy people eat—he needs more calories than that.  Sunday night I offered to make dinner:  “I can make gnocchi with gorgonzola, or tortellini.”  My wife replied, “How about neither?  I mean, we’ve got all this produce….”  I thought of a dog, starving after chasing a ball all day, hearing its master say, “I could give you this Alpo … but then, we’ve got this nice chew toy!”  If I eat “right,” meaning lots of vegetables and fiber, I’ll feel sated but never catch up on calories.  Distance athletes have to eat wrong.  They need massive plates of pasta.

Sugary drinks aside, do I enjoy this abnormal caloric need?  Well, sure!  I laugh when I see a food product labeled “guilt-free.”  The only guilt I feel, when I eat a fatty-starchy calorie bomb, is that I might be setting a bad example, or making other people jealous.

From the Archives — King-Size Snickers Lost

Introduction

This little tale, from my archives, needs little introduction. I wrote it while a student at UC Santa Barbara. I was living in Isla Vista, the student community of UCSB. I did a lot of training rides on US 101. I ate a lot of junk food while riding. I was broke.

King-Size Snickers Bites the Dust - November 12, 1988

Today I rode up to Buellton, a nothing town 35 miles away, which has (as its only claim to fame) a restaurant called Andersen’s which is famous for pea soup. Billboards span the entire coast from north to south advertising Andersen’s. Other than that, Buellton has nothing special to offer, except that it makes a good destination for a long solo ride.

Not feeling like a piping bowl of pea soup upon arrival (it was 85 degrees and sunny), I went to a mini‑mart, the same one I always go to. I got my usual Buellton meal—a pre‑packaged beef and grease burrito, an apple, a super‑duper‑size Coke, and a King‑Size Snickers Bar—for the trip home. I could have eaten something more healthy, I suppose, but just as you don’t buy a hamburger at a Mexican restaurant, you don’t buy good food in Buellton. There is no better place to get junk food; I consider it part of the culture of the town. Besides, the dreaded bonk (whereby a rider completely runs out of energy and can hardly make it home) serves as incentive to give myself something with some calories.

Ninety minutes later, I could’ve been one of those guys in the Snickers commercial: “Well, after a couple of hours of turnin’ ‘round those pedals, boy, you know you’ve been workin’! I take a break, kick back, think about playin’ ball tonight, and then go for a Snickers. It fills me up. I’m no longer hungry. It gets the job done. I can go back to work. Look at all those nuts. You ever see so many nuts?” Then the music would pipe in, “Snickers really saaaa‑tisfies you!”

Of course, in my life, it’s never that easy. You can’t just whip that baby out and start eating; to consume a Snickers bar on the road takes careful planning. Since it’s been in my jersey pocket long enough to melt, the empty wrapper has to go in a baggie so it won’t smear my jersey pocket with melted chocolate. But the baggie I brought along wasn’t empty, yet. It was full of Wheaties.

Why Wheaties? That’s a fair question. Wheaties is not a particularly good fuel for cycling because it’s not sugary enough. It’s just that I had to use them up. I’d bought them for the box, which featured Doug Smith, the first cyclist ever on a Wheaties box. On the back of the box, it explains that the whole Wheaties/Schwinn team is counting on Wheaties Champion Nutrition to help power them to victory. [More than ten years later Lance Armstrong was featured on a Wheaties box, and magazines said he was the first, but of course they were wrong. It's also worth noting that Wikipedia is wrong about this, too. I could point this out to them but I’d rather lord my superior knowledge over them.]

I feel a particular connection to Doug Smith because I beat him in a race once. It was July 13, 1986, and the event was the Maglia Rosa Bicycle Classic in Denver. I was only a junior, and he was a pro, but we raced together in the Slow Race at the end of the day. In this event, the last rider across the line wins. Doug Smith and I were among of the last people left standing, and he came over and tried to take me out. The fool! I swung the back end of my mighty Team Miyata around and knocked his tires out from under him. I do not recall what breakfast cereal I’d eaten that morning.

So anyway, before eating the Snickers I had to finish off the bag of Wheaties. They were good. Then, I carefully unwrapped the bar of brown gold. Meltage was at a minimum, and through intense concentration and effort I was able to remove the wrapper in one piece. Then I successfully put the wrapper in the baggie, which I stuffed in my jersey pocket. I had to keep my eye on the road, of course, so as not to run over an old car tire or something. Meanwhile, I had the Snickers lightly clenched in my teeth, acutely aware that if I bit too hard I could sever it and I’d lose most of it to the road.

Finally, I had it made: the Snickers was in my hand, I was savoring the first bite, and all the trash was taken care of. Nothing to do now but enjoy the complete bliss of a King Size Snickers Bar, letting that satisfaction drain through my body. I wished I could think about playin’ ball tonight.

I chewed the first bite slowly, while gazing fondly down at the rich milk chocolate and peanuts in peanut butter nougat. Then, tragedy: I hit a pothole, the bike bounced, and the King Size Snickers was knocked right out of my hand. Since I was fighting to stabilize the bike, I was powerless to save the bar as it plummeted towards mother terra, hitting my leg on its way down, before slapping the asphalt like a dead fish, flattening its virgin end grotesquely. For a split second, I was so startled and alarmed by the sudden tragedy that I just froze. Then, the denial stage set in: no, that didn’t really happen, I didn’t really just watch my entire King Size Snickers bar bite the dust. No. This only happens to other people. Then, the anger stage. “Damn the State of California! I’ll sue those bastards for letting their highway get this rough! A whole bar!” Then, the final, inevitable stage, remorse. “Nooo! Noooooooo!” I began weeping openly at my loss. “Sni‑sni‑sni‑snickers, noooo! Waaaaaah! K‑k‑k‑king size! Aaaaaugh!” I beat the handlebar with my fist. “Oh, god, how could this happen?”

You’re wondering how I could be so distraught over something which isn’t good for me anyway. But look at it this way: the Snickers bar is actually a weight loss tool. Without it, I would certainly bonk, which would mean riding the final fifteen miles in agony, thinking only of food. I’ve even hallucinated, thinking I’ve seen food, after the dreaded bonk. Then I would get home and lay waste to the refrigerator, and then pass out and be worthless for the rest of the day. No, the Snickers bar is an integral part of my training. Besides, they’re so tasty!

I thought of going back. It was a big bar; maybe some of it was still good. But deep down, I knew I was just fooling myself. A passing truck served as a painful reminder that I was on the southbound leg of Highway 101, a freeway, and there was no going back. Besides, the candy bar was dead. The word echoed in my brain. Dead, dead, dead, dead, dead. I had seen it spill its peanuts‑in‑peanut‑butter‑nougat guts all over the asphalt.

I remorsefully wiped up a piece of peanut that it had left on my leg in a last ditch attempt to cling to me. Suddenly, I didn’t want to go on. I didn’t care if I ever reached Isla Vista. I didn’t even want to find a 7‑Eleven. No, a new Snickers would never be the same. But I had to go on, to forget this tragedy. It wouldn’t be easy. It never is. I resorted to drowning my sorrows in flat Coke.

dana albert blog