cheese and red wine?

[FrederickSebastian]

Hi,

For the longest time, I've wanted to become a red wine connisseur and a cheese connoisseur as there are so many different types of cheeses and red wines and I love both so much. My question is: Do cheeses and Red Wine have any place in a CR diet? Could I, perhaps, have a slice of a different type of cheese every afternoon with crackers and a glass of red wine or would calories not permit this? Does anyone else eat cheese or drink red wine?

 

Also -- I absolutely love coffee but am trying to cut back. Does coffee have any place in a CR diet? The CR Way book advises against caffeine but I like coffee a lot and don't know if I could ever go without a cup or two during the day. Does anyone else here drink coffee daily? If so, how much and when? Do you think it would be okay to drink green tea during the day as well? Would this spike my sugar levels? I like to have a pot of loose leaf tencha every day in a teapot and sip it throughout the day. Green tea makes me feel amazing and I've heard so many good things about it. I honestly could see myself having a cappuccino early every morning then a pot of green tea throughout the day... Is this ok? too much caffeine, perhaps?

 

Advice would be much appreciated.

[mccoy]

Coffee is OK especially after waking up, much less so in the afternoon and evening, although you can have decaffeinated coffee at all hours (almost).

Red wine is OK but with a limit discussed in earlier threads, it's about 1 glass per day, depending on alcohol content.

Cheese is all right in moderate amounts but it carries lots of calories, so you should weigh accurately the slice, which should also be a little one., and eat a single cracker. Or sacrifice other foods for cheese.

Green tea is a great source of catechins, best to avoid it at night though.

[FrederickSebastian]

4 hours ago, mccoy said:

Coffee is OK especially after waking up, much less so in the afternoon and evening, although you can have decaffeinated coffee at all hours (almost).

Red wine is OK but with a limit discussed in earlier threads, it's about 1 glass per day, depending on alcohol content.

Cheese is all right in moderate amounts but it carries lots of calories, so you should weigh accurately the slice, which should also be a little one., and eat a single cracker. Or sacrifice other foods for cheese.

Green tea is a great source of catechins, best to avoid it at night though.

Alrighty... Help much appreciated!

[Saul]

Many of us are vegan, or at least non-eaters of dairy.  And many of us won't eat grains -- whole grains or not.  And in particular most semi-serious CRONies don't eat crackers or bread.

I suggest slowly weaning yourself from grains and dairy.  (E.g., eat fewer and fewer crackers, and less cheese, each week.)

  --  Saul

[Ron Put]

On 11/22/2019 at 4:08 PM, Saul said:

Many of us are vegan, or at least non-eaters of dairy.  And many of us won't eat grains -- whole grains or not.  And in particular most semi-serious CRONies don't eat crackers or bread.

I suggest slowly weaning yourself from grains and dairy.  (E.g., eat fewer and fewer crackers, and less cheese, each week.)

  --  Saul

Saul, do you mean all grains? I know that paleos don't eat grains, but to me, their reasoning is faulty. But I don't think you are a paleo adherent. 

I am not religious about it, but I rarely eat bread anymore. On the other hand, I eat milled flax, chia and often steel cut oats, and I and they help my fiber intake push in the 70g-100g range on most days. Great source of plant Omega-3, too.

[Saul]

I avoid all grains -- including whole grain oats.  Grains are too nutrient poor per calorie -- they're too full of starch.

  --  Saul

  

[mccoy]

11 hours ago, Saul said:

Grains are too nutrient poor per calorie

You should perhaps have written 'too micronutrient-poor per calorie'. But then we should not eat nuts and seeds as well, nor fatty fish probably and gorge on Kale, spinach, green collards, watercress and other very micronutrient-dense food, including zero-fat undrained yogurt.

I have my strong doubts on the validity of the micronutrient-poor-per-calorie philosophy, except in very low energy diets.

Edited November 25, 2019 by mccoy

[Ron Put]

For my purposes, I find flax and chia valuable and eat them virtually every day (steel cut oats maybe three times a week lately, but only like 10-20g per occasion).

Flax (40g on average) and chia (15-20g on average) are my main sources of Omega-3 and since about May, I've been striving to stick with close to 1 to 1 ratio for Omega-3 to Omega-6. As I noted elsewhere, I attribute this change to my total cholesterol dropping to close to 150 and the ratio of LDL to HDL being close 1 to 1 (tested late August).

Flax and chia are a bit protein-heavy (I often go to 120%-140% of minimum for protein, especially if I add legumes), which may be a factor in my IGF-1 being in the mid-180 range. But I just don't see how else I can get Omega-3 as a vegetarian (striving for vegan). Plus the fiber they provide is important, too.

As to coffee, I drink about two large cups every morning, before I eat. Coffee appears to promote autophagy, so I am hoping that drinking it about two hours before I normally eat my first meal helps get rid of a few more damaged cells.

Edited November 28, 2019 by Ron Put

[mccoy]

17 hours ago, Ron Put said:

Flax and chia are a bit protein-heavy (I often go to 120%-140% of minimum for protein, especially if I add legumes), which may be a factor in my IGF-1 being in the mid-180 range.

Maybe you should check methionine % RDA, and ascertain if proteins really do influence your IGF-1, at least theoretically.

[Ron Put]

10 hours ago, mccoy said:

Maybe you should check methionine % RDA, and ascertain if proteins really do influence your IGF-1, at least theoretically.

Here is my protein intake for the last six months, according to Cronometer. Of course, no matter how religious I am at entering foods, there is limited data available for some of the stuff I eat, so I guess my protein intake is higher still. Which is why I am not too concerned about lysine being at 90%.

I will recheck my IGF-1 in a couple of months (will try plasma IGF-1/IGFBP-3 ratio instead of just circulating IGF-1) and see if it has changed at all.

Edited November 30, 2019 by Ron Put

[mccoy]

Ron, your Methionine intake does not seem too high, so perhaps a direct influence of protein on the IGF-1 value may be ruled out.

Lysine is a known issue of vegans but it should be available in soy products like soymilk and tofu. I remember that by design I was able to be always above the lysine RDA.

If you want to be rigorous with food chemicals, you may try to create your own food by saving similar foods for which the EAAs quantities are reported, and change what else must be changed.

[Ron Put]

7 hours ago, mccoy said:

... Lysine is a known issue of vegans but it should be available in soy products like soymilk and tofu. I remember that by design I was able to be always above the lysine RDA.

...

Yeah, I've been thinking of getting tofu on the menu more regularly.

I also eat, daily, non-fortified nutritional yeast and brewer's yeast: As far as I know, both contain ample amounts of naturally occurring lysine, but unfortunately Cronometer's databases don't contain detailed data.

[Ron Put]

I just ran across an interesting article discussing fiber. What caught my attention was that sources of fiber seem to matter quite a bit, with grains being strongly correlated with reduced mortality, while fruits (the study doesn't specify what kind, it may be lumping orange juice with pulp in there) are on the opposite end of the spectrum.

 

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3513325/

[mccoy]

Ron, based on the plot, the results on fruit fiber are not statistically significant since the confidence interval lies both below and above HR=1.

I read the article quickly and while the results of a higher fiber consumption provide a distinctive advantage (even if the 5th quintiles displays values which are small in comparison to the amounts eaten by the users of this forum), the results of the single food groups do not appear to be very reliable.

The 24 hr recall food-questionnaire method used by the authors is not known as the  most dependable one.