Sabzbag May 2020: Protein prelude I Newsletter
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Protein in the dock
In the court of nutrition and health discussions, protein sits on the throne - or stands handcuffed in the dock - depending on our upbringing and affiliations. So our investigative team of data scientists - under close guidance from our resident medical expert - a doctor who happens to be an Assistant Professor of Pediatric Hematology & Oncology, will bring forward many witnesses to reveal the story and get us all a bit closer to the truth.
Before, we bring the witnesses though, a short course in how to evaluate what they say to you is necessary. We are all pretty good at telling a good pizza from a bad pizza: and in the case of my aunt when critiquing Indian food, she is a veritable culinary Sherlock- the restaurant chef will definitely hear about the slightly overcooked the cumin (among the 10 other spices) in an otherwise excellent dish, and God help you if you serve her Rasmalai (an Indian dessert) out of a can. If we could be half as good at consuming information about health, we would be a lot less confused.
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Thus one of our goals is to develop a better information compass as we navigate the vast academic literature where apparently most published papers are false, and popular press that can be confusing (NYTimes: "coffee may reduce cancer" and coffee drinkers need cancer warning, judge rules...). We also need to calibrate our own self-experimentation ("argh I am eating like Gwenyth Paltrow but...") and anecdotal information ("but my cousin lost a lot of weight eating only cashews and howling like a wolf for 14 days straight").
In our own varied professions (medicine, quantitative trading, game design, computer vision) such a compass is a professional necessity: we crunch complex and noisy data for a living and must read academic papers who have generally tortured the data or "p-hacked", ever optimistic industry "white papers" that promise the moon in scientific language, and deal with our own confirmation biases (recalling only favorable information) to go towards the truth. So in the next issue we will share our pooled best practices towards consuming information intelligently and the goal would be for you to listen to these witnesses stories with constructive skepticism.
- (Forthcoming June issue) Acquire the information compass: How to read nutrition (and other research based) articles ? And the issues from July will focus on the 4 main protein questions:
- Can the type of protein we eat affect the risk of "diseases of the rich" like obesity and cancer?
- Can the type of protein we eat affect the "diseases of the poor" like malnutrition?
- Can the type of protein we eat affect athletic performance?
- Practically, can we include these healthy ways of eating in our daily life in a tasty and easy way?
New features coming soon!
We are expanding and are super excited about our new features: Farsi and Hindi translations and a "Recipe Calendar" where you can browse tasty and healthy recipes in a comics book format and get recommendations like Netflix. We will also start distributing content on Whatsapp in the next few months so sign up below!
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Flourless High Protein Crepe from India |
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Chilla is a very common dish in India. It's primarily made of flour and lentils. For this recipe we eliminated the flour and made it just with lentils and some herbs. Check out the comic strip below to make it yourself! It's yummy.
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Serve it with a salsa of tomatoes, cucumbers, shallots, mint and mango along with an relish or pickle you like |
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Podcast: How Mr. Jain lost 20 Kg without losing his mind
Our special guest Mr. L.K. Jain tried many things: 8 day fasts (with 0 food), and "treatments" at places that had 14 rules for how to eat food! He would get some short term success but the weight always came back and he did not feel any healthier.
Then he came to the Sabzbag way of the simple 0 junk -1 grain-2 lentil- 3 vegetable framework, daily monitoring, and community support. He succeeded in reducing his weight by 20 Kg. , has held it off and is enjoying himself! So let’s hear it from him!
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A Matter of Convenience
A few months ago I moved from India to Canada and my protein consumption took a nosedive. Amongst the many changes in my lifestyle this one would have slipped under the radar had it not been for the habitual combing of the health data that the group generates.
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At first I found it puzzling and then obvious. Mom! When I was in India my she used to soak a variety of lentils and beans overnight to ensure that almost everyday I had multiple servings of at least one of over 500 varieties of legumes that can be found. On my own however, I consider myself too busy to soak or plan things and as a result my intakes of legumes decreased dramatically, despite my best efforts (accurately pictured below).
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Okay, so deep-fried vegetables in chickpea batter (pakoras) do not count as protein servings. But surely, I couldn't be the only one with this problem? I turned to my brothers for solutions or rather I looked into their data - pictured below and found that though they're better than me they suffer from a similar problem. |
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Convenience foods: low protein for vegetarians and junky for meat-eaters
We are all creatures of convenience: as we can see in the graph above, our protein servings and the average health score declines over weekends. Our majority vegetarian group starts out well, but when tired resorts to convenient, junkier and lower protein meals. For meat eaters, the problem is somewhat reversed: their junk food such as a chicken nugget or a big mac contains protein but comes with a heavy dose of ultra-processed foods.
Case in point is my go to comfort dish of Ramen. Traditionally it's done with pork, mine as a vegetarian one is done with tomato and potatoes. What is needed to avoid this protein crash is a bunch of tasty, fun, recipes that do not take up more than 10 minutes of our precious time to concoct.
So we are putting our heads together to pool up hacks and recipes into the Recipe Calendar mentioned in the editorial. Easy, tasty, convenient dishes from a variety of plant based sources, coming soon (and no it is NOT two scoops whey isolate poured into your oat milk!). Watch this space and stay safe. |
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