Low Carb Freedom

Best Low Carb Dessert -- Mascarpone Cheese

I thought I died and went to heaven when I found this low carb item: mascarpone cheese. I always want to pronounce this and spell this marscarpone cheese, with an extra "r".

Think of the center filling of a cannoli, which is the best part, only better and quicker.

You can buy mascarpone cheese at BJ's and Costco. Costco gives you two containers, BJ's gives you one container. But be CAREFUL! This stuff is packed with calories, and, despite what others tell you, calories do count. If you are looking to lose weight, you can't eat 4,000 calories a day. I make sure that I use a very small bowl and only eat this, at MOST, a couple of times a week on "special" nights. It is a good thing that this cheese lasts in the refrigerator for months.

Take 1 to 2 oz(s). mascarpone cheese, mix with your favorite liquid sweetener (I am currently using amaretto, but butter rum sounds like something I should try), put on a dollop of no sugar/low sugar whipped cream, and enjoy! This is very rich, and truly assuages any sugar craving you might have.

Furthermore, if you use Dr. Atkins' plateau buster method of eating lots of fat for a few days, this can certainly be added to the regimen to alleviate the monotony of cream cheese. (Although, since it is so heavy, it might take me months and months before I tried it again after that.)

The nutritional information is below, and I love the simplicity of the ingredients list.

If you have more low carb recipe ideas for Mascarpone cheese, please let me know!

Update: Karen told me that she uses Eggo Low Carb Waffles in place of the lady fingers to make tiramisu with the mascarpone cheese.

Another Update: Laura from Turtleway (a great blog) writes -- I LOVE mascarpone! It's true that it's rich, but perhaps due to that you can be satisfied with a small amount. Try it with a bit of vanilla, and unflavored sweetener mixed in atop some berries! (You may need to thin it out with a bit of water.) HEAVEN!!!!!

	Mascarpone Cheese by Belgioioso
Serving Size	1 oz.
Calories	124
Total Fat	13g
Saturated Fat	7g
Cholesterol	36mg
Sodium	16mg
Total Carbohydrates	.5g
Dietary Fiber	0g
Sugar	0g
Protein	2g
Ingredients	Pasteurized milk, cream and citric acid.

More About Kraft CarbWell (South Beach) Barbecue Sauce

I spotted Kraft South Beach barbecue sauce at Stop & Shop yesterday. It was the first time since last summer. It looks like they may just be branding it South Beach rather than low sugar. It is the best low carb barbecue sauce that I have found, and I stocked up, in case it was a fluke.

I have to tell you that the Kraft website absolutely sucks -- and I seldom use that term, but you can't find a thing on it. They don't have a main product locator, when you type in "buy barbecue sauce" in the search engine you get nothing. I KNOW they have information about their products, but when you click on brands, few products actually have links. It is just the worst thing for a big multi-national like Kraft to stymie their customer's search for knowledge. In the past, I have found the product locator for barbecue sauce and it didn't say that Stop & Shop carried it, only Market Basket, and I couldn't find it in my local Market Basket. So, this is what I don't know, was Stop & Shop carrying it a fluke because Kraft Barbecue Sauce is on sale this week or, now that the package has changed to South Beach, will we see a steady supply like the Kraft South Beach Carbwell cereal bars?

Another Doctor Being Villified for a Controversial Stance; lack of sun, vitamin D causes skin cancer

Everyone who has followed Atkins knows that he was villified for his controversial stance on carbohydrates. (More on that here and here.) Just watch how a doctor is being treated who holds a "controversial" stance on the sun and vitamin D:

Thirty years ago, Holick helped make the landmark discovery of how vitamin D works. Until last year, he was chief of endocrinology, nutrition and diabetes and a professor of dermatology at Boston University. Then he published a book, "The UV Advantage," urging people to get enough sunlight to make vitamin D.

"I am advocating common sense," not prolonged sunbathing or tanning salons, Holick said.

Skin cancer is rarely fatal, he notes. The most deadly form, melanoma, accounts for only 7,770 of the 570,280 cancer deaths expected to occur in the United States this year.

More than 1 million milder forms of skin cancer will occur, and these are the ones tied to chronic or prolonged suntanning.

Repeated sunburns - especially in childhood and among redheads and very fair-skinned people - have been linked to melanoma, but there is no credible scientific evidence that moderate sun exposure causes it, Holick contends.

"The problem has been that the American Academy of Dermatology has been unchallenged for 20 years," he says. "They have brainwashed the public at every level."

The head of Holick's department, Dr. Barbara Gilchrest, called his book an embarrassment and stripped him of his dermatology professorship, although he kept his other posts.

She also faulted his industry ties. Holick said the school has received $150,000 in grants from the Indoor Tanning Association for his research, far less than the consulting deals and grants that other scientists routinely take from drug companies.

In fact, industry has spent money attacking him. One such statement from the Sun Safety Alliance, funded in part by Coppertone and drug store chains, declared that "sunning to prevent vitamin D deficiency is like smoking to combat anxiety."

Here it is again, "consensus science." Every schoolchild and every adult in America should read this passage by Michael Crichton:

I want to pause here and talk about this notion of consensus, and the rise of what has been called consensus science. I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had.

Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.

There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period.

In addition, let me remind you that the track record of the consensus is nothing to be proud of. Let's review a few cases.

In past centuries, the greatest killer of women was fever following childbirth . One woman in six died of this fever. In 1795, Alexander Gordon of Aberdeen suggested that the fevers were infectious processes, and he was able to cure them. The consensus said no. In 1843, Oliver Wendell Holmes claimed puerperal fever was contagious, and presented compelling evidence. The consensus said no. In 1849, Semmelweiss demonstrated that sanitary techniques virtually eliminated puerperal fever in hospitals under his management. The consensus said he was a Jew, ignored him, and dismissed him from his post. There was in fact no agreement on puerperal fever until the start of the twentieth century. Thus the consensus took one hundred and twenty five years to arrive at the right conclusion despite the efforts of the prominent "skeptics" around the world, skeptics who were demeaned and ignored. And despite the constant ongoing deaths of women.

There is no shortage of other examples. In the 1920s in America, tens of thousands of people, mostly poor, were dying of a disease called pellagra. The consensus of scientists said it was infectious, and what was necessary was to find the "pellagra germ." The US government asked a brilliant young investigator, Dr. Joseph Goldberger, to find the cause. Goldberger concluded that diet was the crucial factor. The consensus remained wedded to the germ theory. Goldberger demonstrated that he could induce the disease through diet. He demonstrated that the disease was not infectious by injecting the blood of a pellagra patient into himself, and his assistant. They and other volunteers swabbed their noses with swabs from pellagra patients, and swallowed capsules containing scabs from pellagra rashes in what were called "Goldberger's filth parties." Nobody contracted pellagra. The consensus continued to disagree with him. There was, in addition, a social factor-southern States disliked the idea of poor diet as the cause, because it meant that social reform was required. They continued to deny it until the 1920s. Result-despite a twentieth century epidemic, the consensus took years to see the light.

Problem with Sending Low Carb Freedom Newsletter to AOL Accounts

Folks,

If you have an AOL account, you are not receiving my newsletters. They get returned to me. I have tried to contact them to get on their "whitelist" but so far no reply. I don't expect a reply for weeks since they are advertising that they are cutting back on unsolicited email. However, the procedure for AOL members to receive solicited email, especially from bloggers, isn't the best.

Bloggers don't count because we aren't massive organizations with static IPs, but we don't want to send each newsletter individually either, because we aren't that small. Maybe if I go to AOL headquarters with a freshly baked cake for the spam team they might do something?

So, I am appealing to you to contact AOL yourself to tell them that you would like to receive the newsletter that you have signed up for. Maybe if we work on this from both ways, receiver and sender, we might have a chance.

Just FYI, the only way to get on my mailing list is to request it, and within each email I send is a way to get off of the list, and I comply immediately. I don't sell the list and I don't abuse it. More details here:

• Weekly Email Newsletter Signup

Update: Hold the presses! This might not be AOL's fault. I had a long talk with Kerry from the Tuscon AOL call center (very nice lady!) who told me that the error message didn't sound as though it came from AOL: Permanent Failure: Other address status. It might have come from Comcast.

It may actually be Comcast that has the block for sending too many email messages to AOL because when AOL first implemented their spam blockers, they blocked the whole ISP and not just the individuals -- so Comcast may have put this up as a defense. More on this as I know more. Of course, since I use comcast to email out, I can't get on AOL's whitelist. It didn't take weeks and weeks to reject me, just 12 hours!

Update to the Low Carb Discontinued Product Watch

I made a few updates to the Low Carb Discontinued Product Watch for Heinz Low Carb Ketchup, Kraft Carbwell Barbecue Sauce, and Moove over Carbs Yogurt from Stonyfield Farms.

Diabetes Association on the Take?

According to Adrants:

While we don't pretend to be a medical expert, we've certainly heard sugar has a little something to do with a disease called Diabetes. Well, after sugary soft drink marketer Cadbury Schweppes entered into a three-year, multi-million dollar alliance, American Diabetes Association Chief Scientific and Medical Officer Richard Kahn seems to think otherwise and told Corporate Crime Reporter, in an interview, "What is the evidence that sugar itself has anything to do with diabetes? There is no evidence."

Now, at a miminum, eating sugar alone like that will spike your blood sugar, which is certainly not good for people who already have diabetes. However, I hate to say that it is proven that sugary drinks cause diabetes, because there are some very educated people who have looked at the evidence and have some doubts, especially about the contention that it increases the risk of diabetes by 80%.  Cadbury Shweppes may also have some products that don't have sugar.

However, I have had questions about the ADA for a long time, you can see my post about that here. Well, it seems that there is a split in the recommendations for how to treat diabetes, and the ADA doesn't like dissenters. 'Bout time there was some rattlin' from within. Of course, the rattlin' from without has been around on the net for a while.

Lap Band versus Gastric Bypass

Here is a good article summing up how lap band works. It also quotes stats as to the complication rate:

The low risk is why Dr. Svein Holsaeter and Dr. Tim Eldridge started performing the surgeries. Holsaeter said he is one of a number of physicians who were looking for a safer way to help patients lose weight.

"The risk of dying from bypass surgery is one in 200," Holsaeter said. "The risk of having a fatal event from this is one in 2000.

"We don't make big incisions. We make incisions that vary from about an inch down to one-eighth of an inch."

Eldridge explained the procedure with the analogy of a pouch. He said that the band actually restricts the amount of food that can enter the stomach, which means the patient has to make some changes to his or her lifestyle.

As always, try the low carb diet first, because after any type of weight-loss surgery, you will be on a low carb diet afterwards. And for the best description of the aftermath around, read Living After WLS .

Diet Coke with Splenda

Longtime reader Connie writes:

Hooray!!!!!! Today I got my first Coke in many years. The new Diet Coke with Splenda has 0 carbs, 0 sugars. It tastes like the real thing with no after taste.

I haven't seen it yet... but I'm sure that Diet Rite soda isn't too happy with this development. This was their one "chemical" advantage, so to speak.

Low Carb May Be Looking Up

I had been so dispirited by the low carb backlash that I had stopped looking at the store circulars. No low carb products were being introduced and our low carb favorites were being discontinued. I had saved a bunch of coupon circulars and managed to find the time to look through them the other day. I was heartened.

First, there are many more sugar free products ice cream products available -- especially popsicle type products -- and more sugar free maple syrups, light fruit punches, coffee creamers, and some South Beach Diet Products.

It seems that the manufacturers have picked up on the "sugar is bad" meme, but don't agree that the carbs or some sugar alcohols are a problem. (Or, they may agree, but just feel that it is too costly to produce food products without them, the margin isn't good enough.)  If we can educate the populace that it isn't just sugar, then we might have a fighting chance. Medical studies are also ongoing.

We can still stay one a low carb diet and not just eat "soy and bark." Keep your eyes open and your hands on the keyboard when you find good products to let all of us know.

Does sugar make you hyper and how much water to drink

John Stossel always likes to look at issues and find out the evidence rather than just accept talking points from a political group as gospel. He has a great article on sugar that states some facts that low carbers certainly know, and he also has some things to say about water. Now, I've written about water and dieting before, and the WSJ article that I talk about may have had the same source. (The WSJ articles are not available online for free.)