Gluten, Peanut Butter, and Gains

"To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest success."

- Emerson

This is how I view nutrition. You have to find your own way, yet if you are going to be successful you also have to follow some rules and start with a clean slate. Below are three insights that may help you stay on the path, whatever your path may be. If you are not on a path start down one with me as I will get into that towards the end.

1. The Protein Digestibility Corrected Amino Acid Score (PDCAAS) – is the best estimate of how useful a protein source is to the human body. It combines the amino acid profile and the true fecal digestibility of a certain protein source. Now if we are trying to augment performance, growth, pure human awesomeness why would we feed athletes or anyone peanut butter sandwiches on whole wheat bread. That’s right we wouldn't.

Yet, insufficient calorie consumption is the number one nutritional problem in D1 athletics. I went to a talk in Kinesiology and the head of NSCA research gave Peanut Butter smothered Bagels as his bottom line solution to this problem. I puked in my mouth.

I don't have time in my life to argue the legitimacy of a gluten - it is has nothing to offer and is like arguing with a three year old why they can't live off lollipops and macaroni and cheese. I believe in human optimization and shitty protein (and carbohydrate) sources just don't fit into that equation.

*the PDCAAS does not take into account anti-nutrient content so the numbers for grains and legumes are actually probably much lower. Reminder - peanuts are nut a nut, they are a legume. And nuts have a plethora of anti-nutrients despite what the paleo culture would like you to believe.

2. And now for the flip side of this, the homies who think that we evolved to thrive on a ketogenic diet and that they can fuel a high intensity lifestyle on coconut oil, coffee, and ground bison and not crash...hard.

“Glucose preceded fatty acids as a fuel source for living organisms by a very long time, and it is the building block of foods that have the longest evolutionary history of use by mammals like humans. The fact that glucose can be broken down in the body from protein is often used as an argument that we don’t need to eat glucose. But rather than viewing this as evidence that glucose isn’t important, we might view it as evidence that glucose is so metabolically essential that we evolved a mechanism to produce it even in its absence in the diet.”

-Chris Kresser L. Ac

*glucose is sugar. Well not really, sugar is sucrose which is a dimer of fructose and glucose. Let's just say glucose = carbs (which isn't really true, but kind of true enough for the depth of this post)

3. And finally for all you crazies out there that think you can gain weight and watch girlish your figure.

“To put on muscle and keep it is a very costly proposition for your body. It takes a tremendous amount of energy and resources and the body is very reluctant to add muscle, especially past a certain point. So you must convince the body that food is not only available but overly abundant.”

-Pavel Tsatsouline

I get blasted with nutritional questions every week. They are mostly about generalizations and I always try to bring the focus back to individualization. I have no idea how you will respond to whey protein or brown rice. That is for you to figure out. But some become frustrated and want to know all the answers right now. But that is just not how this game is played.

I recently had a client enter a session super pumped. She exclaimed, “I figured it out! I can’t eat as much fat in one sitting. It just doesn’t work well for me and fires up my GI symptoms.” This is a very high level tweak. This person has gone through an extensive elimination diet and is just starting to add things back in. She gets to play with not only food items but also amounts because she has earned it. She now gets to figure out how her body really responds to certain items. Without an elimination diet you are always guessing. You have to clear the slate for 30-90 days.

A provocation or elimination diet is still the gold standard for identifying Food Sensitives. We can run a Metabolic Reactivity Test (MRT) which is a blood test that looks at whether your body mounts an inflammatory reactions to over 150 food items but this is costly and for those with a lot of GI symptoms it probably will result in some false negatives and positives. Therefore, over the next 30 days I will be going through an elimination diet combined with a carb back loading protocol based on my individual blood glucose levels. I have not done this type of diet in two years and felt it was time to get back after it.

I invite you to join me on this journey and I will post what I eat every day to ApacheAthlete.com as I am not going to blow the TAE library up with all these posts.

Rules:

No grains, legumes, seed oils, dairy, sugar, artificial sweeteners, chocolate, or alcohol.

If your first response is well what about…? Stop it. You are not ready and that is ok.

If you want more information on this I would recommend the Paleo Cure by Chris Kresser. He is one of my favorite and sanest voices in the field and I know you will enjoy it.

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