What is happiness?

Happiness my style is:

1. Waking up 6 in the morning fresh as a daisy after being used to wake up around 11 dead tired.
2. To be able to run for 8 minutes after having a record of 2 minutes.
3. When your special one texts "<3".
4. When your long friend decides to try that whacky diet of yours.
5. Sun in your face a Sunday morning.
6. The promise of a trout in my favorite river.
7. Losing 20 lbs in 6 weeks without dieting.
8. Eating everything you wanted to eat, but never could because it was too fat.
9. Seeing people protest against old and false dogma.
10. Not having to smoke again, ever again.
11. When you realize your self esteem is at an all time high.
12. When you realize your life has changed in a direction better than ever before.

Help me out here. :)

Many of the antimicrobials given to livestock are important in human medicine

Approximately 13.5 million pounds of antimicrobials prohibited in the European Union are used in agriculture for nontherapeutic purposes every year by U.S. livestock producers.

The European Union has prohibited nontherapeutic agricultural use of antimicrobials that are important in human medicine, such as penicillins, tetracyclines, and streptogramins. Total U.S. agricultural use of these banned antimicrobials is enormous.

  http://bit.ly/bqi478

They ain´t getting my money

- Did you vote for the new clean air bill?
- Sure.
- How did you vote?
- I voted for it.
- What? I voted against it.
- Why?
- Taxes, man. They ain´t getting my money.
- We live in a town which has had the worst air in America for a couple of years now.
- I don´t care.
- You have kids don´t you?
- So?
- Your kid´s health isn´t worth 7 dollars a year for two years?
- But...

Rushes off bright red faced.

Leg of lamb - heaven on a plate

Today´s dinner was absolutely delicious.

Rosemary and garlic marinated leg of lamb, cooked on the bone in foil, so no goodness escaped. The juice was the base of a sauce made of heavy cream, philadelphia cheese, mushrooms and sundried tomatoes. A side of green salad and fresh spinach.

Heaven on a plate. The lamb was so moist it melted in the mouth.

Did I tell you I am on a diet? A diet of natural food and heavenly goodness every day. :)

Food in America. A retrospect.

When I grew up I was very active, soccer and high jumping being my favorite sports. My proudest moment was being the best 13 year old in the Donald Duck Swedish Nationals or Kalle Anka as he is called in Sweden. I was a tall, lean teenager. When I moved to Gothenburg in 8th grade I started dancing and taking karate lessons as well. The years when I danced and did karate at the same time was probably the most fit years of my life. I felt good, I looked good and the world was my oyster.

I lead a very active life in my late teens and my early twenties. But things took a turn for the worse at one point in my life and I stopped being as active. A lot of bad eating habits combined with poor self esteem put me at 227 lbs (103 kg) when I was 25. I had been around 180 since my early teens. I am 6 foot 2, by the way.

I had a monster of an unintentional weight loss one summer when I lost around around 44 lbs (20 kg) in 2 months. By that time I was an avid fly fisherman, so I lost all that weight from eating wild brown trout every day. And living in a tent in the woods for two months at my favorite river in northern Sweden.

But all that lost weight came creeping back slowly but surely and by the time I was heading to America in 2001 I was weighing around 209 lbs (95kg), which was an overweight of about 22 lbs (10kg) for me.

I went to Utah, (No jokes about Utah, please. Its painful enough to live there) to study. My years in school were great, albeit with some strange educational rules forcing me to take classes like Statistics 101 and Human Development Across the Lifespan (which basically was a class on how to become a good mother.) The reason a lot of students took that class was it covered three requirements. 3 credits and 3 requirements. Strange but true.

I remember going to the supermarket for the very first time. Smith's on 400 East. I had never seen a supermarket that size before. You better not forget something from aisle 2 because it is a long way back from aisle 19. The first thing that struck me was that vegetables were so expensive. And the bread available was far from what I was used to. I ate dark or sourdough bread, so the hordes of wheat and sugary bread in the bread aisle was just not for me.

I was used to fruit juice, I didn't know any better back then, but couldn't find any juices without added sugar. I asked an employee and he confirmed they didn't carry non sweetened juices. I looked for mineral water, but real mineral water, like Perrier was a bit pricey for me, and sodas has never been part of my regular diet so I skipped that all together.

Back home I always had yogurt for breakfast. Yogurt is a bit of religion in Sweden. In the US I did find "low fat" or "fat free" yogurts like Dannon, but they all had a lot of sugar added. And the ingredients were shady to say the least:

Dannon Activia Strawberry yogurt: 

Cultured grade a reduced fat milk, strawberry, fructose syrup, sugar, contains less than 1% of fructose, whey protein contentrate, corn starch, modified corn starch, kosher gelatin, natural flavor, carmine (for color), sodium citrate, malic acid 

(Contents are normally written in upper case, but I converted it to lower case to make it easier to read. Graphic designers know ALL UPPERCASE WRITING IS HARD TO READ. Is this intentional by the companies? Of course it is.)

First of all, anything with reduced fat is compensated with sugar or artificial sweeteners. If you remove fat from milk and add nothing to compensate the milk will  be tasteless. Ingredients are listed proportionally, most of the ingredient, first to last. In the above example, the least of total content is malic acid and reduced fat milk the most.

Natural flavor is a tricky one. The flavors and aromas are so concentrated they seem like a small part of the ingredients, but it only takes a very small amount to achieve the desired result. Think of it as perfume, the most concentrated one. Big Food does this to save on real flavor, in the above case strawberries.

A very recent study about fructose claims fructose could be a reason behind child diabetes. MD Robert Lustig's, UCSF Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Endocrinology lecture about sugar and fructose is excellent for anyone interested. If you know of additional studies showing dangers of HFCS, please post them in the comments or mail them to me. For more information on high fructose corn syrup and corn in general, do watch the movies Food Inc. and King Corn.

Let's move on to the confusing nutrition facts. Illustrated by the below comparison of US and European nutrition facts. I have used Wonderbread to illustrate the differences.

Now, if all products where based on 28 gram portions it would be easy to compare products, but of course they aren't. A few examples:

• 113 grams - Dannon: Activia Strawberry Yogurt
• 177 ml - CapriSun: Fruit Dive 6 Oz Pouch 100% Juice
• 12 oz - Tropicana: Pure Premium - Some Pulp Orange Juice
• 84 grams - Tyson: Oven Roasted Diced Chicken Breast
• 28 grams - Wonder Classic White Bread

Below are the nutrition facts of Swedish whole milk.

Click the image for larger version

Now let's assume you want to buy bread for breakfast. You find three kinds of bread which are to your liking:

• Portion size: 28 grams - Wonder Classic White Bread
• Portion size: 38 grams - Thomas': Cinnamon Raisin Swirl Breakfast
• Portion size: 85 grams - Western Bagel: Original Recipe Blueberry Bagels

Now you want to find out which one is more healthy. Based on the information available in the nutrition facts, how do you figure out which has the least i.e. calories? Unless you have a calculator with you or you are a savant with mad math skills, you can't. I used an Excel spreadsheet to calculate the facts I used in the illustrations.

My point? All food in Europe is marked the same, per 100 grams. No matter if it is a liquid or solid food. So when you compare two products you compare per 100 grams, not by portion size.

The politicians in EU are however trying to make Guideline Daily Amounts (GDA) standardized in Europe. Big Food are having a blast of course. An example was OLW Chips, a Swedish brand of potato chips. One of their chips packages said the chips had 135 calories based on a portion size of 25 grams. 25 grams is about 13 pieces of chips. Do you know anyone who eats 13 chips and then says:

Thanks, I'm good. 

Me neither. The Swedish FDA approved OLW's portion size. However if you eat the whole thing, 300 grams of heart attack artery clogging goodness, you consume about 1500 calories. 135 vs 1500. No wonder Big Food hearts GDA.

Since nutrition facts have been like this for a long time, people have gotten used to them and have accepted them. Why does the FDA allow this?

Some time ago the FDA changed the limits on how much trans fat a product could contain in order to use the words "Trans Fat Free" on the packaging. Big Food of course was annoyed by this, but they are ingenious, so they found a solution very quickly. Change the portion size to a smaller one. Trans fat fell below the limit with the new portion size and voilà - it's legally Trans Fat Free, without changing the actual trans fat content of the product.

Ok, I got way off topic there. Back to my retrospect of American Food. As you can tell, the culture shock was severe. I tried eating healthy, but it was hard. And once school was seriously under way late nights in the studios became more and more common. Late nights mean hunger, means food, means available food, means vending machines. My sweet Jesus, I ate a lot of junk food during those late nights. Coke, candy, chocolate bars, burritos heated in the disgusting microwave used by everyone and not cleaned since before America put a man on the moon, hamburgers, Powerade, cookies, pop tarts, pies, chips, pizza and tons of the watery crap called coffee. The coffee did have a very vague flavor of the real thing and it did wake me up, so I suppose it had caffeine in it and got the required job done...

I have no idea how much sugar I consumed the first few years, but after 2 years I had gained 37 lbs (17 kg) and had become officially obese. By that time I had pretty much given up. I didn't really care how much I weighed anymore. Given it is socially accepted in Utah to be obese, nobody else really cared either. Strange thing is I didn't gain more as far as I recall. Maybe part of it was I starved myself long periods of time. I simply didn't eat.

Recalling the vending machine food, I don't really want to know how much sugar I consumed. Out of sight out of mind.

My staple food was Domino's, Burger King, a local Mexican joint, which was infamous for all food poisonings, Chili's, an Indian place, Subway and occasionally the local diner for a "regular" warm dinner. I never cooked at home anymore. Not that I really ever had.

I recall visiting home during those years. My friends were kind enough not to say anything, but I could tell. Their eyes said:

"Peter , what on earth have you done with yourself?"

I  had no answer for them. I knew. There was nothing to say. No excuses. I had officially become a fat guy.

Looking back at it today, I could have eaten low carb in America and stayed in shape. I eat what a lot of Americans eat for breakfast i.e. Bacon and eggs, sans the bread.

Unfortunately I wasn't aware of low carb then. Upon returning to Sweden I fought with my weight until last Christmas. Then I decided to change my habits. And it sure has paid dividends. Reading contents and nutrition facts requires some practice, but boy is it worth it.

So you think you're a night person

Since I changed my diet I´ve been having a harder and harder time to maintain my self image of being a night person. I think one thing - my body another. I am losing the battle. Last night I fell asleep at ten.

The time is 6.58 a.m. I woke up about half an hour ago. The sun is barely rising. I would not get up at half past six on a Saturday earlier, even if I got paid. Now I am starting to like it. Everything is quiet and peaceful.

Within a not too distant future the ice will be gone and the snow will only be a memory. The time to dig out my equipment will have arrived. The best time to fool a silver bullet is sunrise and sundown. A silver bullet is a sea trout. If you never had spring sea trout, you are missing out. A delicacy.

Sean Croxton of UndergroundWellness.com speaks a lot of sleep and hormones. Below I´ve posted a video of his about sleep, stress and cortisol. Your body produces cortisol naturally in the morning. It´s to get us started and wake us up.

In the evening melatonin is produced. It´s to make you sleepy and to put the body in sleep mode. The best way to stay awake in the evening is to drink caffeine or eat carbohydrates to raise your blood sugar levels. You force the body to stay awake when you do that. Of course, it´s not healthy to counteract your natural need to sleep. It didn't matter if I slept 5, 8 or 10 hours before. I would wake up tired no matter when I got up or how long I slept. Since I changed my diet I sleep less and wake up energized. Energized in a way I haven't felt in a very long time. It's a wonderful feeling. I feel 20 years younger.



Have a great weekend everyone. :)

Truffle oil? No such thing.

I am reading a book called "The Secret Chef" (Den hemlige kocken) by Mats-Eric Nilsson.The book has not yet been translated into English.

What we think is balsamic vinegar, in fact is, ordinary wine vinegar blended with grape juice and brown caramel color. That would be Aceto balsamico di Modena. The real deal is called Aceto balsamico Tradizionale delicious and very expensive.

Truffle Oil, a popular oil added to a lot of dishes in many homes, is not truffle oil. You can not produce truffle oil at all. The only thing that would happen if you put truffles in oil is they would eventually rot. This is because the truffle does not contain essential oils which can be extracted. Thus, it is impossible to produce truffle oil. Truffle oil is an oil with chemically produced aromas which mimic the taste and smell of truffles.

Zeta, a major oil manufacturer writes on their product page: 

"Olive oil flavored with truffle aroma. Like all the best truffle oils it gets its flavor from thoroughly tested aromas. The white truffle aromas are volatile and difficult to resolve in oil."

In plain English? Chemists made flavors which taste and smell like truffles, but is everything but truffles.

The Secret Chef is an incredible eye opener. Japanese researchers have found a way to extract vanillin (one of the ingredients of real vanilla, but far what gives vanilla its characteristic flavor) from cow dung. The cow dung vanillin is supposed to go into production sometime this year. It will probably not be used for food production since you have to state the source of origin with food, but it will be used for perfumes and skincare products.

Smoked ham of lesser quality is not smoked at all.  It has never been near smoke. It gets its smokey taste from smoke aroma. The world leader in smoke aromas is Red Arrow.