More than a pinch of salt

This article in the Irish Times suggests that the advice to minimise your salt intake may be incorrect. The number of people surveyed was 100,000 and the study went on over nearly 4 years. This may be another accepted piece of dietary advice that may have to go by the wayside. Along with these:

• Saturated fat is bad
• Sugar is just calories - you will burn it off
• Plenty of sunblock to avoid skin cancer - your vitamin D levels will be so low as to need supplementation
• Eat plenty of whole grains
• Eating meat causes cancer

and now

• Keep your salt intake low

It can be difficult to know what to believe with so many conflicting reports, but the results that most LCHF dieters see speak for themselves. It is the only diet I know of that gets easier with time. Rather then the starvation ones we are more used to.

The low carb breakfast

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This breakfast is pretty standard among low carb people. I had thought that making an omelette first thing in the morning was a bit of a hassle, but it only takes a minute or 2 to get this on the table and it is delicious and filling. I find I am not as hungry in the morning on low carb anyway, so sometimes I have a cup of tea and a bit of a read before I make this. We don't have eggs every day, but at the moment it is about 5 out of 7.

French omelette with fresh tomatoes

Ingredients

3 eggs
Large knob of butter
Salt and pepper
Tomatoes

Method

Place a small non stick frying pan on high heat and add the butter. As that is heating up whisk the eggs gently in a bowl. Season them. Once the butter foams up add the eggs to the pan. Immediately start to draw the cooked egg in from the edges to the centre. This moves the cooked egg away from the hot surface and so prevents it getting overdone. It also allows the raw egg to run down onto the pan and get cooked. When no more of the raw egg flows down gently fold the omelette over on itself. Give it another few seconds to cook through and you are done.
Serve with the tomatoes.

This keeps you full all the way to lunchtime with no need for a snack.

Grilled herrings with lime salsa

I picked up some herring fillets in the fishmonger in Howth last Friday. We'd never eaten herring before. It is abundant and caught in the North East Atlantic, so it is not like tuna or swordfish which gets hauled from the other side of the world. The fillets were only €1 each which is a very good price considering the labour required to get these off the bone.
It's the right time of year for tomatoes too. No point in eating them when they taste of nothing in the winter.

Serves 2 as a light lunch

Ingredients

3 fillets of herring
10 cherry tomatoes chopped
1 tbsp of capers drained
1 clove of garlic chopped
Juice of one lime
Salt and pepper

Method

Place the herrings on an oiled foil sheet and oil them on top too. A pastry brush makes it easy to cover everything with oil.
Season with salt and pepper.
Grill the herrings for about 3 minutes on each side or until just cooked through. I use the highest setting for the grill - 250 degrees C.
While the fish is grilling mix the rest of the ingredients in a bowl.
To serve place the fillets on 2 plates and top with the salsa and juice.

Blackberry season in Ireland

The blackberries are out in full force near where we live. Some low carb eaters avoid most fruit as it can contain a lot of sugar. Grapes for example are about 15% sugar (depending on who you ask). Guzzling a whole bunch won't do nice things to your insulin levels. Blackberries are more like 5%. This is probably why they taste nice and sharp. Don't be tempted to add any sweetener though - they are delicious as they are.

As with any fresh fruit or vegetable, beyond the sugar or carbohydrate content is the range of important micronutrients and fibre. Eating fresh fruit and vegetables (even grapes) will never equate to drinking Coke.

Best to keep this simple. Rinse and drain the blackberries and put them in a serving bowl. Core and slice an eating apple and layer it on top. Smother the whole lot with plenty of unsweetened Greek Yogurt and maybe top with a few almond slivers. The low carb gods will smile on you and it is delicious too.

Greek yogurt from Aldi is the best one we have found. The 1kg bucket from Lidl is just like normal natural yogurt, fine, but not as creamy as we like from a Greek yogurt.

Berries are only available in the wild for a very short part of the year. Don't leave them to the birds.

Low carb eating out at Fallon and Byrne in Dublin

The trick with finding a restaurant that suits LCHF eaters is to get one where when you leave out the food from your plate that you are not going to eat, there is enough left to satisfy you. Also we find that you just have to be a bit flexible and maybe eat a little bit of carbs - no point in ruining a night out by being too fussy.

We go to Fallon and Byrne a lot and they rarely disappoint. There are plenty of items on the menu which don't rely on carbs. Last Saturday we shared a starter of mixed meats and cheeses. There were grapes which are normally off our menu, but went great with the cheese (see what I mean about not being fussy?). There were also some slices of nice white french bread. We had a few small bits of this, but brought most of it home in a napkin for the kids breakfast. This was a good big starter to share and contains a good selection of delicious foods.

For main I had duck leg confit with smoked bacon on a bed of lentils and cabbage. It was delicious - plenty of flavour and lots of nice fat from the duck to make up the HF part of our dietary requirements :)

Emma had a fish stew. This is so paleo that there is even a picture of it (or something very similar) on the Wikipedia page for the paleo diet. This too was beautiful - although maybe microwave hot. I don't know why microwave hot is considered a bad thing and maybe they got it microwave hot without a microwave, but it meant there was a bit of sitting there looking at it and blowing while it cooled. V minor complaint - forget I said it.

We did not eat dessert of course. There are paleo desserts in the world (not necessarily in F and B though - we didn't look), but they are not really for us. Besides we were full and still had some nice red wine to finish off the meal. (opinion differs on the pros and cons of wine, but I don't really care. It is too nice to leave it out altogether).

Some restaurants just don't lend themselves to this sort of picking and choosing, but Fallon and Byrne definitely do.

Asparagus with poached eggs and smoked salmon

Asparagus has come down in price a lot in the last few years and is now much more widely available. Most of it is brought in from a long way away, but this means we can eat it over a much wider season and at an affordable price.

Smoked salmon used to be a luxury reserved for Christmas and special occasions, but like asparagus is now more affordable. It forms an important part of our Low Carb High Fat diet.

These two ingredients along with some poached eggs are all you need for a delicious weekend lunch.

Ingredients

1 bunch of asparagus, ends snapped off
1 small packet of smoked salmon
2 eggs
lemon juice
Salt and Pepper

Method

This could not be simpler. Get a griddle pan hot and drizzle a small amount of oil on. Place the asparagus along the lines of the griddle to fry. Turn them occasionally. While that is cooking, poach the eggs - they need to be reasonably fresh or they will just wash away in the simmering water. Delia has details here.
Plate it all up with a squeeze of lemon juice and some salt and pepper.

This is a classic LCHF meal. Plenty of fat from the salmon and no carbs except a little in the asparagus. It will leave you feeling nice and full and your insulin level will stay where it should :)

Dealing with the low carb naysayers

This seems like an odd thing to write about, but since my wife and I started on a low card diet we have been getting a lot of flack. This diet is quite unusual in most people's eyes, especially in Ireland. First people close to us were just bemused. Behaving as if this is just another one of their phases. But gradually some of them started to get more annoyed by our behaviour. So we made a decision about a month ago not to talk about the diet unless we were asked. We don't want to be boring anyone with stuff they are not interested in. It's not like we were going on about it much anyway, but now it is definitely off the table.

This is fine for most people, but there are a few who still get annoyed when they see us having eggs for breakfast or skipping dessert. We have had great results on this diet and most people who have been on diets have not had great results. Maybe in time everyone will get over this. We'd like to think that in time they will give it a try.

Cereal Killers the movie

Cereal Killers follows Donal O'Neill as he changes his diet from normal - and what would be considered freakishly healthy - to Low Carb High Fat - the idiots choice as far as many people are concerned :(

He was inspired to make the switch following scary health outcomes for both his dad and his uncle. They were both GAA stars in their youth and they still lead model lives from an activity and nutrition stand point. Donal set out to make sure the same thing did not happen to him.

I am not spoiling the plot to say that it worked out pretty well for him. He found the solution to many serious health problems and made a very enjoyable film in the process.

Cereal Killers is a movie that you watch online. It is $4.99 to watch. About Xtra-vision money for a new release. It is well worth your money and it is one of the most accessible ways you can find out some of the good things about LCHF.

Where to buy nuts and seeds

Nuts and seeds are a key part of a low carb high fat diet. They are one of the indulgent healthy foods that Kris Gunnars lists is this article on Authority Nutrition. They are great for filling you up when a regular meal has not satisfied you and also for snacks.

We keep a large selection of nuts in the press and make sure to turn them over regularly. Certain types go off pretty quickly and taste very bad when they do - walnuts in particular. Once you have opened a bag of nuts fold the bag closed tightly and seal it with a clothes peg (a lot handier than fiddling around with a bag sealing clip).

We buy most of our nuts in Lidl. We don't do the main shop here usually - that's Aldi, but the selection of nuts in Aldi is not good. Especially if you are looking for raw nuts - not fried and not salted. More about why we get raw nuts later.

These are the ones we buy in Lidl:

• Cashews
• Brazil nuts - now in larger packets
• Pistachios in their shells
• Walnuts

Remember to check the baking section of wherever you shop too - not just the nuts section beside the crisps and snacks. You can get whole unblanched almonds here - like eating marzipan - and sliced almonds which are really great toasted on a dry pan. Toasting like this benefits most nuts, although you should only do it when you are using them as it makes them go stale more quickly. The nuts in baking section seem to be cheaper than those in the snack section for some reason.

We also get these seeds:

• Sunflower
• Pumpkin
• Sesame
• Linseed

The reason why we don't usually go for the salted and roasted nuts is that we end up overdosing on salty snacks. This can make you uncomfortably thirsty, especially before bedtime. In addition, sunflower oil is usually the fat that nuts are cooked in. There is information here on why sunflower oil is not a good idea.

Where to get coconut oil in Ireland

If you follow Authority Nutrition you will have read about the benefits of using coconut oil for cooking. You can read about this here and here. It was not always easy to get this in Ireland with the exception of health food shops.

It is now becoming much more widely available. About a month about I noticed they had it in Dunnes Stores, but just last week I went to buy some there and they now have about 4 different pack sizes and a lot more shelf space. So it seems that there is a lot of interest in the benefits of cooking with this stuff.

Here is the pack I bought and the image below is the nutrition information. This cost just under a fiver and it is organic, extra virgin etc. I saw a similar sized pack in a health food shop for over 10 euro recently.  It smells nice and is great to make an omelette. It does give a taste of coconut to your food, so it is not ideal for everything, but makes a good alternative to butter especially for things like curry.

The last time I bought coconut oil was in an asian market and it was the authentic Indian stuff. It had been processed by drying the coconut over fires made of the coconut husk. The smokey flavour of the oil was nice, but very strong. Not suitable for any except strong tasting foods like curry. Also it came in a squeezy bottle. This is no doubt the right container in India where the oil would be liquid at room temperature, but in Ireland this was solid pretty much all the time and so had to be scraped out of the bottle.

So Dunnes wins for coconut oil. This oil is also available in Super Value.