Blend the eggs with dairy (Starbucks uses pureed cottage cheese, for example,) or set your muffin tin in a bain marie.
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I’ve started reading “This Is Your Brain On Food” by Uma Naidoo, a nutritional psychiatrist. While I don’t agree with some of her points, they are referenced in detail from articles in quality journals. If you are interested, I’ll let you know my opinion after I finish. It talks about the microbiome in moderate detail and is easy to understand.
I have an interest in longevity medicine and recommend Jason Fung’s easy to understand “The Longevity Solution” which covers the basics. He has a decent cookbook called The Obesity Code Cookbook, but it is more for diabetics than lifters. T-Nation alumnus John Berardi has some decent cookbooks.
I own the first three cookbooks listed, and plenty of different ones by Bittman, but not the last one. Personally, I like Serious Eats and Kenji’s books. Bobby Flay has recipes I want to eat. I have twenty years of Cooks’ Illustrated, many of their books, plus a plethora of ethnic cooking books as well as books by guys like Bocuse, Pepin, Troisgros, Boulud or Bourdain. But I still use The (Original) Moosewood from time to time and like the newer New York Times stuff.
Well you are off to a great start!
Fuck both those guys, but for different reasons.
Yup. One of the best things to learn from.
I’m curious, what do you have against Serious Eats?
That’s the site that got me into food blogging and I still use them as a resource for new techniques
I want to fight Alton Brown.
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Don’t know any of those ones. Might check some of them out.
@Brant_Drake that story about you turning yourself into a still was incredibly interesting!
What are your favorite “no-excuse” meal prep techniques/ tools?
Send me all of the shitty brown crust. Thats my favorite part of eggs. Burnt albumin. 
!
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Can you specify what you mean by no excuse? I want to give you a good answer, but I’m interpreting this, like, six different ways.
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Ha! Totally fair.
I mean what we mostly whine about: time. What gives you the most bang for your buck in terms of batch cooking or is super quick/ easy to make on its own (or some combo)?
Uma Naidoo is a Harvard doctor specializing in nutritional psychiatry. Her writing is clear and well referenced - big studies and good journals. Like any doctor, or human, she suffers from biases. Weightlifters might not like all of what she has to say, but she does point out when her opinion differs from research. It gives a reasonable introduction to the gut microbiome and what might work for specific problems.
The parts folks won’t like:
- she clearly sees all bodybuilding and especially competition as a form of body dysmorphia (and is horrified her patient is trying to reduce his body fat to 5%)
- She quotes a big study showing red-meat does not cause significant problems, yet she still believes that it does. (The WHO warns it might cause a risk of increased cancer due to the liver P450 system but fails to identify this risk as slight: an important qualifier! A trivial “increased risk” is not remotely the same as a large “increased risk”.)
- She does not like artificial sweeteners. It is true eating less sweet stuff (other than fruit) is probably better, but you have to meet people where they are. Far more studies show sweeteners are safe than not, and there are few doubts too much sugar can cause harm
- still lots of useful information and advice
A lot of nutrition studies are very poorly done. This book has good info on new things. I learned some stuff and some of it is news I can use (good info on polyphenols, neurology, neuroinflammation, the brain-gut axis and seotinins, the powers and pitfalls of glutamine, and so forth) . But some parts reflect author opinion rather than research. That might not be avoidable, given the sorry state of many studies, so I would recommend it, with some slight hesitation.
(Other Harvard guys were responsible for “fat is unhealthy and sugar is no problemo” mindset that caused people to think Snackwells™ were healthy.)
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That was a really thorough, clear and helpful analysis!
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Thanks.
For anyone who’s interested in more information on pre- and probiotics here’s a great summary on the topic and of the research that’s been done. Tagging @Andrewgen_Receptors because I said I would!
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And here’s another really great breakdown of the different probiotic brands and where they’re the most useful.
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That looks like a decent review on quick glance. Thanks for that.
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I’m sorry I missed this, thank you for your patience.
I think for cooking it’s not making the food, it’s all the prep and cleaning that eats up time. Just like you have a gym bag ready to go to the gym, you need your mise en place to make things faster and more convenient.
So start off with this.
Actually do a meal prep hour for the week. I remember reading a story about how some guy got hired as some kind of a machinist and they took orders as they came in, but because of that, they had to reconfigure their bench between orders, so the daily record was 8 orders. He organized the jobs by equipment configuration and knocked out 30 on his first day. Think like that.
Use deli containers to keep all your stuff compact, labeled, and stackable. You can wash them if you’re penny-pinching, but throwing them away is a big time saver. Using a separate cutting board for meat makes it easier to wash without cross-contamination, and having a bench scraper (that not-knife thing) makes moving food and cleaning your board much easier.
Next step is to have your setup easy to access for ergonomical reasons. Water, olive oil, salt, pepper, spice mixes, whatever you need in a pinch (ha!)
Now they are all on a 4th pan, which are pretty cheap but a workhorse. You can see it’s lined with parchment paper, since it’s faster to change that then clean a pan every time I spill something.
Then take your other 4th pans and make several different sheet-pan meals - nothing fancy. Assemble some for a few days worth of meals, wrap and put in the fridge (they stack easily,) then pull them out when you need them. Foil for the easier clean up.
I hope that helps. I’ll chime with more ideas when I think of them.
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If I eat 2.5 lbs of salmon, some high fiber bread, and a bag of vegetables every day for a few weeks will I die?
Correct: that food will not make you immortal
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