It’s impossible to find gluten-free pastistio (the proper pasta for this dish) so you pretty much have to find a gluten-free bucatini, rigatoni, or penne.  I like the corn-based pasta better than the rice flour pasta, because the rice flour version gets gooey in a hurry.  I was in a hurry so I just used the Target brand gluten-free Fusilli.  It would have been better to go with a tubular pasta because when you serve a square of the final product, it doesn’t fall apart on the plate.

The Pasta Layer

10 oz bucatini gluten-free pasta

3 tbsp melted real, actual butter
1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese
1/3 cup milk
1 egg, beaten

The Meat Sauce

1 lb ground beef

1/2 cup chopped onion

1/2 cup drinkable white wine

1/2 cup milk

10 oz can of whole tomatoes

(or save time using tomato paste)

1 tsp salt

1/2 tsp ground cinnamon

1/8 tsp ground nutmeg

1/8 tsp fresh ground pepper

The crema (béchamel) sauce

4 tbsp butter (2 oz)

4 tbsp rice flour

¼ tsp salt

2 cups milk

1 egg, beaten

1/2 cup parmesan cheese

1.  Pasta. Boil the pasta in water until it is al dente.  Most pastitsio I’ve had in restaurants has pretty soggy pasta.  Maybe that’s on purpose.  When the pasta is cooked, toss it in a colander to drain it.  While it’s draining, toss 3 tbsp butter into the pan on medium and melt it.  Add 1/3 cup milk and mix it together.  Add the pasta back in and stir until the mixture is hot enough to melt the Parmesan cheese.  Turn off the heat, add the parmesan, and a well-beaten egg.

2.  Meat Sauce. While the pasta is boiling, take a nice broad enameled pan or skillet, and cook the ground beef and onion until the meat is barely done and the onion becomes transparent.  Don’t cook it on high heat because it oxidizes the fats, just let it cook on medium until it’s ready.  Go back and finish the pasta mixture while it cooks.

3.  Add the half cup of wine and reduce it, stirring occasionally, until it is evaporated.  While this is simmering, jump to step 7 and work on your cream sauce.

4.  Add the half cup of milk and reduce it, stirring more frequently, until it is evaporated.

5.  Add 1 teaspoon salt, cinnamon, nutmeg and pepper.  Some versions I’ve tasted go nuts on the nutmeg.

6.  Stir in the tomatoes.  I like to use canned whole tomatoes and crush them up as they cook.  The whole tomatoes are always better quality than the crushed tomatoes or tomato sauce.  Simmer the sauce, stirring it occasionally, until the water content is reduced and the meat sauce is about the thickness of spaghetti sauce.  You can save a lot of time here by substituting a small can of tomato paste, which immediately leaves you at the desired consistency.  But the tomato sauce will hugely benefit from a slow, four-hour simmer.  You won’t believe the flavor it picks up.

7.  Crema. While your meat sauce is simmering, get out a saucepan and a whisk, and pour out two cups of milk and have it handy ahead of time because when you need it, you will need it in a hurry. You can’t get distracted at this phase or you will end up with a burnt, pasty mess, so if you have someone else to stir your meat sauce, you will be thankful.

8.  Now, melt 4 tablespoons of butter on about medium heat, a bit lower if this is your first time.  Whisk in all the rice flour and 1/4 teaspoon salt.  Something amazing will happen, which is that you will get a very thick yellowish paste.  Slowly pour in a quarter cup of milk and whisk it in.  It will get completely absorbed by the yellow blob.  Let it heat up but not burn.  Repeat adding one quarter cup of milk at a time, whisking it in, and letting it heat almost to a boil, before adding more milk, until you get a thick creamy sauce.  Cook that sauce for about a minute.  It will continue to thicken as long as you keep cooking it, so when it’s about ready, almost like thin yogurt, remove it from the heat.

9.  Beat an egg in a small bowl, then pour it into the cream sauce, and mix it just enough that it’s dispersed in the sauce.  Don’t overdo it.

10. Toss in the 1/2 cup Parmesan cheese and mix it until the cheese is melted into the homogenous mixture.

11. Layer half the pasta mixture in a 11″ x 7″ (or 2 quart) baking dish.  Putting more shredded Parmesan here doesn’t hurt, and it helps knit the pasta together.

12. Put the meat sauce in a layer on top, then cover it with the remaining pasta.

13. Pour the cream sauce over the top, to cover it completely.

14. Bake, uncovered, at 350F for about 40 minutes, or until hot and lightly browned.

15. Remove from the oven and let it cool down for about 15 minutes.

16. Serve!

Red meat (unprocessed beef, pork, and lamb) showed no association with cardiovascular disease or diabetes mellitus.

Each 50g daily serving of processed meat, such as bacon, hot dogs, deli meats, and sausage raised the risk of heart disease by 42% and diabetes by 19%.   Processed meat was defined as any meat preserved by smoking, curing, or salting, or with the addition of chemical preservatives.

Both types of meat had similar amounts of saturated fats and cholesterol, the big difference was in sodium (4x more), and 50% more nitrates.

So salt and preservatives seem to be the whole cause of the problem.  Other studies always treated all meats as equal, so healthy red meat was inadvertently included on the ‘bad’ list.

Go out and eat that hamburger you always wanted!  Though, don’t have a fast food burger full of preservatives, just grind up a steak.  And skip the bun since the grains will kill you.

Another good article link here.

This news is alarming, particularly because I advocate people eating a huge amount of whole foods like fruits and vegetables.   If you look at the rate of pesticides appearing in frozen processed fruit, like frozen blueberries, you can see that saving some time and money versus eating reputable organics is no longer worth debating.

Poison Butter, front view

Pediatricians don’t generally recommend your feeding poison to your children, but a lot of parents do just that every time they spread peanut butter and jelly between slices of bread and feed it to their children.  There’s precious little nutritional value whatsoever to the peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and we can take apart the ingredients and explain why.

The first reason is TRANS FAT!  You need to search the world over for a peanut butter that is free of evil vegetable oils (all of which contain trans fat and oxidized unsaturated fats).

The second reason is SUGAR!  Much more deadly than cholesterol, and more vicious than small-particle LDL, we pack sugar in everywhere to make the poisons go down easier.  The spike in your insulin levels contributes more than almost any other factor to atherosclerosis, stroke, cancer, and diabetes.  Sugar is packed into in the slices of bread (2g), the peanut butter (4g), and the jelly (12g), the equivalent of more than a half can of soda.  With a total carbohydrate dose of 61g, subtracting the 9g of good fiber, is 52g of worthless carbs (208 calories).   That’s the same as one and a half cans of soda!

The third reason is wheat, which human beings have only been eating for (depending on your race) between 400 years and 8,000 years.   That’s more than 1.76 million years of evolution spent without grass in our diets (that’s 0.45% of our time on the planet).  Before that time, animals ate the grain since they are evolved to digest it and we aren’t, and then we ate the animal to get the advantage of the vitamins they consumed.  Wheat is a poison to our species but for some reason it’s made its appearance at the base of our food pyramid, which was pushed on us by the U.S. Department of Giving Money to Agribusiness.  By eating this poison we show the classic symptoms of malnutrition and starvation.   We have to mill grains like wheat and throw away the nutrient-dense husks, which we can’t digest, in order to get at the starchy white flour.  Add to that the fact that 40% of all processed flours have neurotoxic pesticides in them, you’re better off staying with something that is organic and can be identified as food for humans.

Content of a dose of poison butter

So let’s look specifically at my first claim, that of trans fats.  My goal is to get people to read the nutrition labels and to run in fear.  This label says there’s less than 2% of hydrogenated cottonseed oil in the peanut butter.  If you see the word ‘OIL’ in an ingredient list, you should put the food down and pick up some organic fruit or even a steak instead, because you take your chances with any oil.  The pesticides used in the cottonseed are transmitted directly to you in the expeller process, which uses hexane and other industrial solvents to extract every last ounce of oil from the seed.  Oils banish the antioxidents and vitamins by separating them from the seed, so you get none of their benefit (if you had been able to digest them properly in the first place).  In general, it’s best to consume the whole food rather than its oil.  So, eat olives instead of olive oil.  Eat peanuts rather than peanut oil, and so on.

But just in case you don’t know what cottonseed oil is, there is a product called Crisco that has been poisoning people for 100 years, and it stands for “Crystallized Cottonseed Oil,” and in this sense Crystallized is a sort of euphemism for “hyrogenated” or in other words, made into a faux-saturated fat, or in other words, a Trans Fat.  If the producer chooses to lie on the trans fat part of the label, you can bet that 50% of the weight of the fats are in the trans configuration.  So if less than 2% of the peanut butter is cottonseed oil, 1% of the final product is trans fat.

But as I said earlier, you should eat peanuts rather than peanut butter.  A dry roasted peanut is 49.66% fat, whereas this peanut butter is 53% fat.  So the extra 3.33% is very likely due to the added trans-fat-laden cottonseed oil.  It’s an extra 1.1g, of which probably 50% is trans fat.  That’s very close to the 0.5g limit over which the producer is required to list that half gram of trans fat on the label.  So they squeezed the portion size down to 2 tbsp, exactly what would be needed to sneak a half gram of poison into your diet.

How many tablespoons of peanut butter do you put on a peanut butter sandwich?  You should measure.  You could be getting a gram of trans fat.

You should consume less than a half gram of trans fat in a week.

The verdict:  POISON!

A study just published in the Archives of Internal Medicine (Arch Intern Med. 2010;170[7]:640-647) implicates white carbs in heart disease (in Italian women).  White carbs are highly processed carbohydrates that are digested very quickly and cause spikes in your blood sugar.

In the study, women with the highest glycemic load had 2.24 times the risk of heart disease as women with the lowest glycemic load.

The study didn’t show such a correlation for men, but noted that it is probably not the highest of the risk factors for men.

I applaud the study’s results, which seem to prove exactly what we already know:  that carbs without fiber are poison.  However, in reading the results of the study I have a bone to pick with these people running the study.

First of all, I participated in several studies when I had my heart attack and the ones I hated and doubted the most were the ones where someone interviewed me about all the foods I ate.  These sort of studies are nutritional surveys.  People ask you what foods you ate in the last week, two weeks, month, and six months.  They don’t do it by asking what you ate yesterday, measured in grams, then what you ate Monday, then Sunday, then Saturday, all the way back to six months ago.  They also don’t give you a diary to fill out where you tell exactly what you ate.  Instead they ask you if you can remember “how many times in the last week you ate chicken?”  Then they repeat the question for beef, fish, fruits, candy, bread, eggs, cheese, milk, cream, and so on, which leaves out all the good stuff you might have eaten like avocadoes, celery, broccoli, nuts, spinach, and so on.    Then they use this data to extrapolate where your calories come from, and analyze those results across all participants of the study to asses some sort of risk.  It sounds good on paper, but this is the crappiest science I’ve ever heard of.  I can’t remember exactly what I ate in the last two weeks.  I ended up not remembering everything that I ate over the previous six months (who writes this sort of thing down?) and sort of said “yeah, I eat beef.  I eat chicken.  I eat cheese.”  On one of the studies I made them copy the survey for me and the results I came up with were that when I tallied the servings of fruit, vegetables, chocolate, meat, and other things that I reported eating, I found that I consumed something like 8,600 calories a day, more than 80% of which was meat, cheese, and dairy.  When I log precisely what I eat, my figures are substantially different.  So, the dietary survey leaves out foods, especially important ones containing huge amounts of secret hidden trans fats like flour tortillas, cookies, biscuits, rolls, and doughnuts.

How can you trust a study where people report what they ate, unless you capture every ingredient eaten for 8 years (the length of this study) and its weight in grams, and then do an analysis?  How accurate do you think their occasional nutritional questionnaires are?  I know that Jennifer, the young woman who asked me the questions about nutrition, was scorching hot, and I didn’t want to admit to her that I’m addicted to Hostess Sno-Balls.  But she didn’t ask about them, so there was no need.  I estimate my survey answers were about 5% accurate, and I was trying to remember and do a good job.

So when you read that a study did a survey of what someone ate, be wary.  I hate to be so suspicious of a study that’s so obviously correct in its conclusions, but this one proves absolutely nothing.  Nice try though.

Think about the cost of going to McDonald’s for a $6 combo, and getting some 9.5 grams of trans fat.

Let’s take a look at the statin debate from a personal finance perspective.  Just one of my statin pills costs $5.33.  Statistically, swallowing a statin is a bit like buying a lottery ticket.  There’s a slim-to-none chance it will do you any good.  It will lower your cholesterol, but it won’t keep you from dying of a heart attack, make you thinner, give you more energy, lower your blood sugar, cure your diabetes,  or lower your inflammation.

Instead of paying $5 for a pill, I could eat $5 worth of very high quality fruit like blueberries, raspberries, and I could have a statistically certain, credible gain to my health and as a side effect, I will have lower cholesterol to boot (if that even matters).

It doesn’t matter which diet was used, low-carb or Mediterranean, both showed a 5% regression in Atherosclerosis after 2 years.

Compare this regression to the 5-year JACC study of a statin drug, which found no regression and no reduction in inflammation markers (C-reactive protein).

So,  you can keep eating crappy food and popping statins like SweeTarts, or you can get the sugars and refined white carbs out of your diet and see a dramatic difference in your life.  You decide.

Avoid large amounts of polyunsaturates in your diet;  74% of all fatty acids in atheroma blockages are these dangerous and unstable unsaturated fatty acids.

And so by definition we must be very suspicious of any polyunsaturates, or to be more accurate, we must be very aware of how these deadly polyunsaturates have been treated in processing, before we eat them.

Of course, we need polyunsaturates in our diet (especially the omega-3 variety), but we should look at the healthy form they take in nature.  Let’s take seeds and nuts as an example.  Seeds and nuts have a dark-colored skin, to keep sunlight from oxidizing the fats.  Seeds and nuts also contain a dose of healthy antioxidants to protect the fats from oxidation.

Tragically, the crystal clear vegetable oil you buy at the store is expeller pressed from the seeds and nuts, and then the remaining oil is removed using industrial solvents like hexane.  Then the oil is bleached and clarified so that it’s sparkling and attractive, and the sum of these processes removes all the antioxidants and synergists from the oil.

The best thing you can do of course is to get these fats from the whole foods that contain them, since you get the full benefit of antioxidants, vitamins, and other healthy compounds.  However, if you must purchase and use vegetable oils, then, follow these simple rules:

1. Purchase Cold-Pressed Oils.  These are more expensive because it’s not possible to extract as much oil using this method.
2. Avoid Light.  Purchase only oils that you find in dark containers (that don’t let in the light), the darker the better. Store them in a cool dark place.
3. Avoid Heat! Don’t overheat polyunsaturated fats.  In particular, don’t cook with fats that are polyunsaturated, as it increases oxidation of these fats.  You should be cooking with saturated fats (ghee! coconut oil! lard! tallow!) since these will not oxidize as readily.  You should be cooking at a lower temperature anyway, so as not to exceed the smoke point of the oil you’re using.
4. Avoid Aging! Purchase oils in small quantities, such that you would use them in a couple of months.  Avoid the urge to save money by buying oils in bulk; they will go rancid and kill you.

The study found the following affects of replacing carbohydrates with fatty acids:

1. Saturated fats increase your HDL the most.
2. Mono-unsaturated fats are next; and
3. Poly-unsaturated fats increase HDL, but only about half as well as the saturated fats do.
4. Trans fats lower your HDL (those EVIL trans-fats!)

Unfortunately they come to some highly suspect conclusions when you look at their data, and you’ve got to be suspicious of the conclusions of any study that cites Ancel Keys in its references

Some other pearls of wisdom:

1. Increasing your HDL will lower your risk of coronary artery disease (CAD).  The ratio of HDL to total cholesterol is an important indicator of CAD risk.
2. Replacing carbohydrates in your diet with fats (saturated, mono-unsaturated, and poly-unsaturated) increases your HDL (good!) and decreases your triglycerides (also good!).
3. Saturated fats have gotten a bad reputation since they increase total cholesterol.  However, most of this increase is due to an increase in the HDL (good) cholesterol.
4. Replacing saturated fats in your diet with unsaturated fats will actually lower your HDL cholesterol (that’s bad).
5. Omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids will reduce your triglycerides.  Omega-6 polyunsaturated fatty acids will increase your triglycerides.
6. Lauric Acid (saturated) showed the best ability to raise HDL for its corresponding increase in LDL.  You can find this in coconut fat.
7. Stearic Acid (saturated) was the best of the saturated fats, though, because it both lowered LDL and raised HDL. (You find this in beef fat and cocoa butter–chocolate!).  Your body just converts stearic acid into monounsaturated fats anyway.
8. High Carbohydrate diets lower your HDL, increase your triglycerides, increase your risk of heart attack, but also shift your lipid particle size to be smaller and denser (which causes the fats to ooze into the arterial intima of your blood vessels).
9. Trans fats were worse than carbohydrates at increasing HDL, increasing LDL, and increasing triglycerides.