Hunt

 Now that it's been over four years since I first heard about "paleo" diets, I have been reflecting on how such diets have worked for me. When I first heard about paleo, I definitely thought it was a solution to all my problems and it worked really well for most of them. The original bane of my life in the pre-paleo era, GERD, is gone. But my IBS symptoms were harder to fix and even now I find myself experimenting. In the beginning, I often thought the solution was more "purity" in my diet. I thought if I just were better at my diet, then my problems would go away. But IBS is too complex for that. And it doesn't seem to care about evolution all that much. While evolution can be useful for hypothesizing, my gut is the product of a C-section birth, a subpar diet for almost two decades, and many many courses of evolution. I think of my maternal grandmother who is in her nineties and claims to have only had a stomachache once in her life. Compared to her stomach, my own stomach is a rather unfortunate thing. 

So when I ate a pure "paleo" diet, what happened? My stomach problems got WORSE. 

Luckily I found the SCD (specific carbohydrate diet). It's really for people with worse problems than mine, but it clued me into some of the things that were going on, namely that there was something wrong with how I process certain carbohydrates. Well, not just me, but my own microbiome in my gut. They were taking something I was eating and having a party consuming it and belching out all kinds of bad things. Bloating, cramping, gas, bouts of IBS-C and IBS-D were the result. 

Unfortunately SCD is both too strict and not strict enough. The "legal" list of SCD foods, like the typical "paleo" list, contains foods I cannot digest properly. The specific carbohydrates I'm sensitive to are not the same as those that the SCD concerns itself with. I ended up just going carnivore for awhile, which helped with a great many things, but I had other symptoms on that diet (like extremely low blood pressure) and it is on the pretty extreme of restrictive. I also think that some products of carbohydrate fermentation are important.

I have no idea where I first encountered FODMAPs, which stands for 

• Fermentable
• Oligosaccharides (eg. Fructans and Galactans)
• Disaccharides (eg. Lactose), Monosaccharides (eg. excess Fructose) and
• Polyols (eg. Sorbitol, Mannitol, Maltitol, Xylitol and Isomalt)

But the theory is similar to the SCD, which is that for certain people, certain carbohydrates aren't processed correctly by the gut and end up feeding bad bacteria. But I think it was more useful for me because it breaks down the issue into a variety of potential baddies to experiment with. Lactose intolerance is the most famous type and all the other types are similar in that they can be dose-dependent. That's why I was so confused at first. Sometimes I'd eat potentially bad food X and feel fine and other times I'd feel terrible. Amount effects it, but that's the tip of the iceberg, because the context can affect it too. For example, with fructose, the amount of glucose ingested at the same time can affect tolerance. 

So far you can see where my experiments have left me vs. the typical paleo diet:

It seems I have some fructose intolerance, but my tolerance is comparatively high. I can eat an apple, but if I start eating a bunch of dried apples (more concentrated fructose), then I start getting into problems. 

Then there are foods that I can tolerate almost none of, such as brassica vegetables like cauliflower. Many "paleo" recipes use cauliflower in place of rice. I am much worse off if I eat that compared to real rice and in fact I've found that rice soothes my stomach quite nicely when it's upset, particularly when cooked in broth as a congee. 

I'm still torn about wheat. I think I've tried every possible type of wheat at this point, including wheat that was fermented to remove gluten and a variety of "heritage" wheats. I still didn't tolerate it, which makes me think that it was never about gluten for me, but about fiber. 

It's also pretty important to self-experiment and not just write entire foods off because they contain something that might be the culprit in causing you problems with another food. Onions are a major issue for me, but I've found I can tolerate them pretty well if they are cooked into oblivion (for example, in a sauce), which frees me to enjoy certain delicious Indian dishes. Tomatoes are only an issue for me raw.

I think this jives very well with the evolutionary idea that cooking was important in human evolution because it transferred digestion to the small intestine rather than the large. That seems to be exactly what is happening here. The large intestine is where fermentation takes place, so if fermentable carbohydrates are the issue, then cooking them to make them more available to the small intestine could help. Of course there is all kinds of fancy cooking science here I'm not getting into, which I need to research further. There is also the issue of tolerance improving if you manage to heal the gut lining and balance the gut bacteria somehow. I think that overall my tolerance has improved as I've eaten healthier. I used to not tolerate spicy food at all, which was practically a tragedy for me since I love it, but now I eat it quite often without an issue. 

But people are always asking me to do an IBS post or series. And I kind of can't because it's been just all one weird experiment of me trying to figure out what I can tolerate and at what level. That's why I'm such a huge proponent of self-experimentation and not such a huge fan of dietary dogma. 

 When I first moved into the college dorms, one of my favorite meals was Special K (with those freeze-dried "berries") floating in tan-colored soy milk. It was healthy and I thought it tasted pretty good. Looking back I shudder because it was quite clearly the culprit in many of the stomach issues I had, as it was rich in the dreaded Fermentable Oligosaccharides, Disaccharides, Monosaccharides and Polyols (FODMAPS). 

Once I realized that soymilk was one of the major causes of the bloating and other fun stuff I struggled with, I never bought soy milk again. 

But I've never been anti-soy. In fact, I can't imagine life without the culinary treasures of soy sauce and miso. For me, changing my diet was about shifting staples, not clamping down on the margins. I'm only willing to do that if absolutely necessary. I don't think soy is a problem unless you are getting a large percentage of your calories from it. 

And through my explorations of Asian cuisine I've come to appreciate soy for what it, which is a potent substrate for fermentation. That's why soy milk upset my stomach so much. But luckily, long ago someone figured out how to ferment it outside the body, creating rich salty flavors that characterize miso and soy sauce.  

It's by no means a recent food. There is new evidence that humans were using wild soybeans 9000 years ago and that domestication occurred 5,500 years ago.

American vegetarians embraced Asian soy products a long time ago, but it wasn't until I started actually eating authentic Asian food that it struck me on how much they were missing out on. In Asian cuisine, soy is an extender of animal and seafood products, creating potent health and flavor synergies. 

If you think tempeh is just some bland crappy paste-board-like soy concoction, you need to fly to Amsterdam and have homemade tempeh in a rich briny fermented shrimp and black pepper sauce. I've never ever had tempeh like that in America.

And I've found that even unfermented soy doesn't really bother my stomach. Oh, but only when it's served in a Korean restaurant that makes broth from scratch, boiling animal bones for days to achieve a creaminess, then boiling fresh homemade tofu and chunks of ox blood in the broth. It's digestible and much more delicious than it sounds, particularly when you pour some of the homemade kimchee into the broth.

Another unsung hero in Korean cooking is fermented soybean-red pepper paste, Gochujang, which makes sriracha seem bland. It works so well with beef that it's heresy to put it on some vegetarian brown rice gunk. It almost always contains barley though, so stay away from it if you don't eat wheat, though I'd wonder how much of it could be harmful because fermentation can destroy gluten. 

And really, there is nothing like liver or beef belly marinated in soy sauce. I know some folks use coconut aminos because they think they are reacting to soy sauce, but I don't think there is much in most soy sauce to react to, except for amines, which are present in coconut aminos too. 

But Asian food hasn't been immune for the industrialization of soy products, which leads to general mediocrity and upset stomachs all across the globe. The latest issue of my new favorite magazine, Lucky Peach, has an amazing article about miso. There are a great many types of miso, but the miso that most Asian restaurants serve is a powdered, pasteurized, fortified, bleached concoction that barely deserves to be called shinshu miso. But it's bland, ships easily, stores easily, and requires no skill to make into soup. 

The same thing has happened to broth and many other traditional foods. It's hard to find a restaurant that makes its own broths with bones rather than a powder containing MSG and other assorted non-food additives. Many Koreans now make a Gochujang that isn't fermented at all. 

The only good trend is the post-WWII trend of combining butter with miso or soy sauce. You can create some incredibly rich and wonderful sauces this way. I just now enjoyed some scallops with a soy-sauce browned butter glaze. 

For me the fascinating thing about soy sauce and miso is how deep and rich the flavors are, yet they do not compel me to overeat. I think it's a function of their complexity. They are delicious, but have an underlying funkiness. It's important, like fish sauce is to SE Asian cooking, but you definitely don't want to overdo it. 

Siberian wrestlers, 1901

A problem with reconstructing diets from the past is that people often forget to fathom the amount of information and cultural diversity that has been lost. Lost to cultural change, to habitat change, or simply to nature's rising oceans or lava flows. 

Often you only have pale glimpses of what was lost in the form of archeological remains or the writings of passing travelers who probably did not realize that they were witnessing things that few can even imagine today. 

When most people today think of the arctic or an ice age, they think of people clad in skins subsisting on wooly mammoth. But the truth is that arctic peoples of the past and of today rely on a huge variety of plants as well. I have written about the excellent book called Plants That We Eat, which describes the amazing and diverse plant foods of the Inuit. Most of their plant foods were leaves and berries, but they also collect tiny roots from the stores of mice, which provide a small amount of starch.

Turns out that further-south Arctic cultures in the past probably exploited starches more extensively. In Siberia they called the starchy bulbs of flower "sarana", but as this interesting paper shows, the word probably applies to several types of flower bulbs, mainly in the Lilly (Liliaceae) family. 

Like John D. Speth's excellent book, the paper relies extensively on sources written in German, many of which have not yet been translated to English. I was already aware of the use of lily bulbs among the Native Americans of North America, but was not aware that Siberians ate them as well. 

Apparently, sarana was eaten by many Siberian tribes:  Shor, Tofalar, Tuva, Altai, Buryat, Selkup, Itelmen, Aleut, Evenki, Ket, and Khanti are mentioned in the paper. Of course, all these different peoples had very different lifestyles. Some like the Buryat and Evenki are nomadic pastoralists and others like the Itelmen and Aleut are closer to hunter-gatherers. Use of sarana varied in different regions. It was a staple in some and more of a treat in others. 

The accounts of travelers in the area mention that sarana was:

• used to make spiced milk puddings
• dried and used to make flour for "bread"
• mixed with animal fat and stuffed into intestines to make a type of sausage for journeys
• dried and stored for the winter
• made into a thick porridge
• boiled and "eaten like rice"
• dried and put into fish and meat stews
• packed into fish flour dough and fried or made into pancakes
• steamed and served with berries
• cooked and served whole with fish or birds
• used as offerings to spirits alongside spruce and labrador tea

It was mainly gathered by women, who made special tools to dig it out. When it was too cold to dig it out, they could also find large high-quality stores in vole (or other rodent) nests, making sure to leave something in return so that the voles would survive the winter and be able to harvest again next year. Georg Wilhelm Steller, who witnessed this in the 1700s, noted that it resembled a form of trade.

Sarana bulbs could also be steamed and served with berries. According to Krasheninnikov this was the best and foremost dish in Kamchatka. In his view, it was “both sweet and sour at the same time” and it filled the stomach well. “It can be consumed every day, which makes one almost forget the lack of bread”,
says Krasheninnikov (1819: II: 314)... The taste of cooked sarana has been compared to sweet or baked chestnut. Adolph Erman found the taste of sarana delicious. He describes sarana bulbs as excellent food (Erman 1848: III: 161). According to Karl von Ditmar, who calls it “pagan food”, the taste is similar to potato… Bread did not belong to the traditional diet of northern Eurasia. Ditmar correctly observed that the local people did not even miss bread. Bread was (and still is) in comparison extremely important in the European diets and was only partly replaced by potatoes in the 19th century. The lack of bread, potatoes and other familiar food seems to have bothered many of the travellers in Siberia. They were not capable of enjoying the local diet except for some dishes. The boiled bulbs of sarana and other plants were seen as more or less exotic, “pagan”, disgusting, strange or, in rare cases, surprisingly tasty. In general the travellers held a distanced attitude towards local food, which made them unable to correctly estimate the significance of sarana for the Kamchatkan diet.

In many areas of Siberia, game is pretty low in fat. If you've ever tried to eat mainly fish and lean game, it's very much understandable why sarana was so worth the trouble. 

It's also understandable why such traditions have died out, as there are many flower bulbs that are quite poisonous and gathering them was probably a skill passed down through the generations.  

Unfortunately, many traditions like these died out before people could really study them, which is a real shame. I've met arctic people who believe that wheat bread is a "traditional" food. But the remnants cast skepticism on the idea that arctic or ice age diets were just a bunch of big game. 

I'm not big on making desserts, but for special occasions this is a great quick recipe and I think it's quite a fun project for kids. It's also very filling and makes small servings, which makes it an ideal treat.

It's simple: just halve a Lara Bar of your choice and either use a silicone cupcake mold or your hands to make it into a "cupcake" shape. Then I made some icing with mixing some coconut manna/butter with a dash of honey, lemon juice, and vanilla. Then I mixed some delicious Kelapo Fair Trade coconut oil into that until it was the right texture to ice. I decorated with coconut flakes.

I got this idea from an excellent raw vegan blogger, who made an even more impressive version. 

If you want to try the excellent Kelapo Organic Fair Trade Coconut Oil, I have a coupon code you can use for 20% off! It's HGL20 and it's valid until Dec 18th.