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EPUBLISHERCrossFit NorCal

COVERApril Winn

BACKISSUESBackissues are available at www.crossfitnorcal.com

THE PERFORMANCE MENUis published monthly and distributed exclusively to sub-scribers by CrossFit NorCal. Yearly subscriptions can be purchased for $25.00. Visit www.crossfitnorcal.com for more information.

CROSSFIT NORCALPO Box 5501Chico, CA 95927www.crossfitnorcal.com

All content copyright CrossFit NorCal and its respective authors. Unauthor-ized reproduction or distribution is strictly prohibited by law.

FEATURES

3 Introduction Introduction to this issue by Robb Wolf

4 The Paleo Diet An interview with Professor Loren Cordain of Colorado State University, author of The Paleo Diet

9 Power ToolsIf you think a campus board can help your performance, try a system board

REGULARS

12 Recipes for Health & Performance New ways to feed yourself for optimum health and athletic performance

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ISSUE 4 MAY 2005 3

INTRODUCTIONby Robb Wolf

A great Philosopher once said that CrossFit and in fact ALL good athletic and strength training is based upon empirical, observa-tional evidence, not Science. This should perhaps not be surprising given that science itself is based largely on empiricism. Why did that apple fall? Why do the stars circle the sky in a particular way? These are em-pirical observations that inspired theories and from these theories experiments were put forth to test if theoretical prediction matched observed results. It is perhaps in-teresting to note (or it may be very un-in-teresting, in which case many readers may cancel their subscriptions after this issue) that, although we have a fairly descriptive theory of why apples fall (The Universal Law of Gravitation), we still do not know WHAT gravity IS. Some physicists argue that gravity is a warping of space-time (yea, you know…those pesky 3rd and 4th dimen-sions that seem oddly wrapped together… space-time) while other physicists think gravity is the result of some interesting little particles called gravitons. OK.

So what does this have to do with health, longevity and performance? This month we have an interview with noted scientist Professor Loren Cordain of Colorado State University. He has written many papers on health and nutrition, and an excellent book, with another book on the way. Professor

Cordain has done what few modern scien-tists do: published peer reviewed literature across a variety of disciplines.

The peer review process is generally what people call “Science” and “Proof” (talk to Coach Greg Glassman for an interesting per-spective on the peer review process) but I like to point out that the idea for these “Proofs” came from empirical evidence, looking at hunter gatherers, both past and present and marveling at their relative good health.

Most research in the arena of health and fit-ness relies upon a reductionism that slices and dices the living organic process into sub-units that have no meaning in the real world. Half a mouse is not a mouse and ac-tually tells one quite little about mouseness. This reductionism is helpful in describing processes that underlie life, but only if one has a cohesive framework on which to hang the scraps of information this approach gen-erates. Professor Cordain and those research-ers who have wed theory and empiricism at the nexus of evolutionary biology seem ca-pable of remarkable leaps of understanding. Do these researchers have all the answers? Certainly not! Science has an annoying en-tropic effect that leaves one with more ques-tions than answers; just talk to Robert Pirsig about that. But then again, as Professor Cor-dain once told me, “If you have the answer, the question is easy.”

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ISSUE 4 MAY 2005 4

THE PALEO DIETAn Interview with Professor Loren Cor-dain, author of The Paleo Dietby Robb Wolf

Dr. Loren Cordain is a professor in the De-partment of Health and Exercise Science at Colorado state university. He is the author of over 100 peer reviewed scientific articles and abstracts published in journals such as American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, the British Journal of Nutrition, and the Euro-pean Journal of Clinical Nutrition to name a few, and is without question the foremost authority on the topics of Paleolithic nu-trition and hunter-gatherer life-ways. The Performance Menu would simply not exist were it not for his efforts. We would like to thank to Dr. Cordain for granting us this in-terview and for his endless enthusiasm for this topic.

Why did you begin looking at the diet and lifestyles of our ancestors for answers to modern diseases?

I have always been interested in health, fit-ness, diet and well being. Probably similar to you and many of your readers, over the course of my lifetime, I have experimented with various diets in an effort to improve my health as well as my fitness and athletic performance. During the 70s and 80s I had believed that the best diet was one that was low in animal foods, low in fat, and high in carbohydrates with plenty of brown rice, beans, and potatoes—similar to many veg-etarian and near vegetarian diets. Unfortu-nately, with this diet, I experienced chronic joint and back pain, many upper respiratory illnesses and could rarely train for extended periods without encountering some sort of musculo-skeletal injury.

In 1987, I read Boyd Eaton’s now classic New England Journal of Medicine paper on Paleolithic Nutrition (Eaton SB, Konner M. Paleolithic nutrition. A consideration of its nature and current implications. N Engl J Med. 1985 Jan 31;312(5):283-9.) and it made a lot of sense to me. I read everything I could get my hands on about the topic and start-ed to collect and organize scientific papers related to the topic. Within a year or two I found myself with thousands of papers that started to form patterns about human health and well being. I also experimented with a modern day Paleo diet that was high in lean animal foods and devoid of grains, dairy products, refined sugars, salt and processed foods. Wonder of wonders, I began to feel better, and my chronic back and joint pains disappeared. Also, in my late 30s, I could train harder and longer with few injuries. In the ensuing 15 years or so, the study of Stone Age diets and their relevance to con-temporary people became my passion.

You have published research on a wide va-riety of topics, ranging from ophthalmol-ogy to dermatology to autoimmunity. This is unheard of! How do you do it?

If you would have asked me 10 years ago if I were interested in dermatology, the answer would have been a flat out no. But as I stud-ied the Paleo diet more and more, certain ar-eas of inquiry led to others. It was a lot like hopping from stone to stone as you cross a low river: you kind of keep your head down as you step and don’t realize where the next stone will lead you. The ophthalmology question came about as I realized that non-westernized people rarely develop myopia (near sightedness). Similarly, in my readings I came across Dr. Otto Schaefer’s writings of tending to the health of the Inuit people in the far North as they made the transition

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from the Stone Age to the Space age in a single generation. He noted that they had no acne when they lived and ate in their tradi-tional manner. This observation became the impetus for my work linking diet to acne.

Would you give an overview for our readers of what the Paleo Diet is and is not? What are some common misconceptions regard-ing the Paleo Diet?

First off, it would be almost impossible for any westerner to exactly replicate a true hunter-gatherer diet. Most of us do not have access to wild game on a year round basis and most of us would be unwilling to eat the entire carcass (brains, kidney, liver, mar-row, gonads etc). Similarly, we do not have access to wild, undomesticated plant foods nor the time to collect them on a daily ba-sis. Additionally these plant foods would be barely edible to our cultivated palates. The thought of eating a crab apple when you are used to eating Golden Delicious apples would be a bit hard to stomach for most of us.

However, despite these shortcomings, we can substantially improve our diet by elimi-nating or severely reducing dairy products, grains, legumes and processed foods and re-placing them with lean meats, fish, seafood, and fresh fruits and vegetables.

Many of our readers follow the Zone by Barry Sears using Paleo friendly foods to fill the nutritional prescription advanced by the Zone. My nutritional requirements, according to the Zone (5’9”, 170lbs, 5% body fat), are as follows: 117g protein, 144g carbs and 144g of fat. This is a macronutri-ent ratio of 20% protein, 25% carbohydrate and 55% fat. Would you comment on the amounts and ratios from a Paleo Diet per-spective? Do you see any way to improve on the Zone ratios?

Barry Sears is a friend and I think that his message is a good one overall in that he is on board with the notion that our current

day nutritional requirements were deter-mined by our ancestral past. I don’t believe that there was a single “Paleo Diet” for all pre-agricultural humans but rather a range of diets that varied by geographic locale, season and food availability. Consequently there was no single macronutrient ratio that would have encompassed all Paleolithic people. However, that being said, if one contrasts the range of diets which were pos-sible for Stone Agers to the current western diet, the protein intake would have always been higher than the current western value (~15% energy) and the carbohydrate con-tent would have always been lower than in the typical U.S. diet (~50% energy). I rec-ommend that your readers visit my website, www.thepaleodiet.com, and download my scientific paper (Cordain L, Brand Mill-er J, Eaton SB, Mann N, Holt SHA, Speth JD. Plant to animal subsistence ratios and macronutrient energy estimations in world wide hunter-gatherer diets. Am J Clin Nutr 2000, 71:682-92.) for more information on this topic.

The “Thrifty Gene” hypothesis states obe-sity and related modern diseases are the re-sult of adaptations by our ancestors. These adaptations, it is assumed, were in re-sponse to an inconsistent food supply and thus the ability to store fat efficiently was a survival advantage. In light of your re-search it appears that our ancestors seldom suffered from a lack of food and in general consumed an excess of calories. Does the “Thrifty Gene” hypothesis need to be re-vamped?

I refer your readers again to my website and this paper for a detailed answer to this ques-tion: (Cordain L, Miller J, Mann N. Scant ev-idence of periodic starvation among hunter-gatherers. Diabetologia 1999; 42:383-84). Basically, we believe that for most hunter-gatherers there was a seasonal waxing and waning of body weight as food sources became more and less available; however whole scale starvation rarely occurred be-

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cause hunter-gatherers were not dependent upon a single crop or foods source. With the Irish potato famine, starvation killed an enormous amount of people because they were almost entirely dependent upon a single crop for the majority of their food calories. In contrast hunter-gatherers utilize hundreds of plant and animal food resourc-es and simply move on as they become de-pleted. We believe that built into the genes of vir-tually all pre-agricultural humans was a ge-netic adaptation to a high protein, low car-bohydrate diet. When dietary carbohydrates are restricted, these genes are an asset in that they conserve glucose for the brain and placenta, which preferentially use glucose as an energy source. When dietary carbo-hydrate is available in virtually unlimited supplies (i.e. after the advent of agricul-ture), these genes now become a liability in that they tend to promote peripheral insulin resistance and its associated diseases and maladies (obesity, type 2 diabetes and the metabolic syndrome).

Our readership tends to be from the strength athlete arena and it is not diffi-cult to get them to eat more protein. You however have influenced some of the best minds in endurance training, in particular triathletes, to adopt a higher protein, higher fat, and lower carbohydrate diet. How did this happen and what have the results been thus far?

I guess it initially happened because of my own dietary experiments in the early 1990s. I have been a runner throughout my entire adult life. Following adoption of a diet with more protein and less refined carbs, I actual-ly noticed an improvement in my recovery from runs as well as increased freedom from upper respiratory illness and musculo-skel-etal injuries that allowed me to train with greater intensity. I introduced these concepts to Joe Friel, the U.S. Olympic Triathlete coach in 1995 who

was quite skeptical at first. The following passage represents Joe’s feelings about this type of diet for endurance athletes:

“I have known Dr. Cordain for many years, but I didn’t become aware of his work until 1995. That year we began to discuss nutrition for sports.As a long-time adherent to a very high-carbohy-drate diet for athletes, I was skeptical of his claims that eating less starch would benefit performance.Nearly ev-ery successful endurance athlete I had known ate as I did, with a heavy em-phasis on cereals, bread, rice, pasta, pancakes, and potatoes. In fact, I had done quite well on this diet, having been an All-American age-group du-athlete (bike and run), and finishing in the top 10 at World Championships. I had also coached many successful ath-letes, both professional and amateur, who ate the same way I did.

“Our discussions eventually led to a challenge. Dr. Cordain suggested I try eating a diet more in line with what he recommended for one month. I took the challenge, determined to show him that eating as I had for years was the way to go. I started by simply cutting back significantly on starches, and re-placing those lost calories with fruits, vegetables, and very lean meats.

“For the first two weeks I felt miser-able. My recovery following workouts was slow and my workouts were slug-gish. I knew that I was well on my way to proving that he was wrong. But in week three, a curious thing happened. I began to notice that I was not only feeling better, but that my recovery was speeding up significantly. In the fourth week I experimented to see how many hours I could train.

“Since my early 40s (I was 51 at the time), I had not been able to train more than about 12 hours per week. When-

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ever I exceeded this weekly volume, upper respiratory infections would soon set me back. In Week Four of the “experiment,” I trained 16 hours with-out a sign of a cold, sore throat, or ear infection. I was amazed. I hadn’t done that many hours in nearly 10 years. I decided to keep the experiment go-ing.”

“That year I finished third at the U.S. national championship with an excel-lent race, and qualified for the U.S. team for the World Championships. I had a stellar season, one of my best in years. This, of course, led to more ques-tions of Dr. Cordain and my continued refining of the diet he recommended.”“I was soon recommending it to the athletes I coached, including Ryan Bolton, who was on the U.S. Olympic Triathlon team. Since 1995. I have writ-ten four books on training for endur-ance athletes and have described and recommended the Stone Age diet in each of them. Many athletes have told me a story similar to mine: They have tried eating this way, somewhat skepti-cally at first, and then discovered that they also recovered faster and trained better.”

Your readers may be interested in knowing that Joe and I have completed our book “The Paleo Diet for Athletes,” which explains fully how to implement the diet and why it works from a scientific perspective. Our book will be published by Rodale Press and is scheduled for an August 2005 release. You can purchase it online at Amazon right now.

Your updated website has excellent infor-mation and resources available (www.the-paleodiet.com). Two of my favorites are the discussions of acid base balance and lipids. Would you explain why acid base balance is of concern and how the Paleo Diet ad-dresses the issue? Regarding lipids, would you help our readers to understand saturat-

ed fat as it relates to cardiovascular health and its dietary role from a Paleolithic per-spective?

Acid base balance is a topic that is either unknown or barely known to the typical reg-istered dietician (RD) or physician because it is rarely addressed in text books on nutri-tion, despite hundreds of articles written on the topic in scientific and medical journals.

In a nutshell, all foods report to the kidney as either acid or base. Meats, grains, cheese, legumes and salt are all acid yielding, where-as all fruits and vegetables are base yielding. The typical U.S. diet produces a slight met-abolic acidosis, which, over the course of a lifetime, can cause or exacerbate a variety of illnesses and diseases including hyper-tension, stroke, kidney stones, osteoporosis, gastrointestinal tract cancers, asthma, exer-cise induced asthma, insomnia, airsickness, high altitude sickness, age related muscle wasting, renal insufficiency and Meniere’s Syndrome (ear ringing).

Dietary saturated fats tend to promote the artery clogging process known as athero-sclerosis because they cause LDL cholesterol levels to increase in the bloodstream. At one time, it was thought that saturated fats were virtually the sole cause of atherosclerosis; now we know that there are other dietary, environmental and genetic elements that are as important or more important in eliciting this disease process. Chronic inflammation is absolutely essential for atherosclerosis to occur and may be even more important than dietary saturated fat in causing athero-sclerosis. High glycemic load carbohydrates are associated with total body markers of in-flammation (C Reactive Protein or CRP) and they also negatively influence blood triglyc-erides and HDL cholesterol, two additional blood lipid particles that are important in the development of atherosclerosis.

There is no doubt that Stone Age people rel-ished the fattier portion of the carcass of any animal they brought down. However, as we

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have pointed out in a recent paper (Loren Cordain, S. Boyd Eaton, Anthony Sebas-tian, Neil Mann, Staffan Lindeberg, Bruce A. Watkins, James H. O’Keefe, Janette Brand Miller. Origins and evolution of the western diet: Health implications for the 21st cen-tury. Am J Clin Nutr 2005;81:341-54. ), satu-rated fat in wild animals waxes and wanes seasonally, and there simply was not a year round source of saturated fat in most hunt-er-gatherer diets.

You have worked with some well known and highly respected researchers and cli-nicians including Dr. Boyd S. Eaton (The Paleolithic Prescription) Joe Friel (The Tri-athlete’s Training Bible) and Dr.’s Michael and Mary Eades (Protein Power:Lifeplan). What are some of your current and future projects?

I am currently focusing my efforts on the link between diet and acne. We believe that the typical western diet promotes acne via its high glycemic load, its low level of omega 3 fatty acids and it’s insulin promoting dairy products. At my website, you can download a few papers I have written on the topic. I am also working on a paper explaining why hunter-gatherers abandoned their foraging

lifestyle for agriculture and another paper explaining why Paleolithic hunters risk life and limb to preferentially kill megafauna like mammoths and other large dangerous animals.

In the past, seasonality and locality would have greatly altered the amounts and types of foods available. In climates above 40* latitude north or south, winters would have greatly reduced the amount of carbo-hydrates available, at least in forms such as gourds, fruit and many edible greens. Do you feel it important to emulate this sea-sonal change using modern foods? For ex-ample, more meat, nuts and greens in the winter, with summer and fall being heavier in fruits and other plant material?

I do believe that these issues would have been part of the environment that shaped the human genome. However, I do not know how their adherence or lack thereof would influence fully modern humans attempting to emulate a Paleo diet with contemporary foods. I do know that in contemporary pop-ulations, people tend to gain weight during the winter months. Perhaps reducing car-bohydrates during this period could prove useful for some.

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POWER TOOLSIf You Think a Campus Board Can Help Your Performance, Try a System Boardby Bill Fox

Campus boards—gently over-hanging, no-feet “ladders”—became popular after Wolfgang Güllich invented one to train for Action Directe. Now Alex Huber has intro-duced the system wall to mainstream climb-ers. The latest tool in the search for greater power, the system wall overhangs more than a campus board—generally at least 30 degrees—and utilizes the feet. Huber feels this configuration pro-vides all the benefits of a campus board, all over your body. As he says, “One’s muscles extend all the way to the toes.”

Despite what you may think at first glance, the system wall is not designed just to make you stronger. Strength is more efficiently built with heavy re-sistance training. In-stead, the system wall is designed to teach and prepare your body to move with power. Many improvements gained on the system wall are neuromuscu-lar, so the quality of your session is much more important than the quantity. A little work, done with con-centration and a goal in mind, goes a long way.

To understand why the system wall works, you must first look at the relationship be-

tween power and strength. Which additional factors influence a climber’s power besides his or her maximum strength?

Perhaps the single most important addition-al factor in the power formula is the nervous system’s role in coordinating movement. In examining any complex athletic movement, we find a high level of skill. The brain, work-ing though the nervous system, controls the actions of the muscles that produce the main forces for movement (agonists), the muscles that are involved in stabilizing and coordi-

nating the movement (synergists), and those muscles that try to in-hibit movement—the body’s self-protection mechanism (antago-nists).

Changes in the ner-vous system that op-timize control over these complex move-ments account for a large portion of the initial increase in performance for that specific movement. This is why working a given route or boul-der problem is effec-tive. Your muscles are not getting stronger in one day; your nervous system is getting more

power to the rock by teaching your body how to perform specific movements more efficiently.

A climber must also activate certain “high-threshold” motor units (groups of muscle fibers that are more difficult to access) in or-

Build it yourself

You can build a simple system board in one afternoon for around $50. Use ¾-inch plywood for the backing; a 4-foot by 8-foot piece costs about $20. Choose either 2x4s filed to round the edges, or lengths of banis-ter wood to form the rungs. Space the rungs about six to eight inches apart from the top to the bottom of the board. You may wish to alternated larger and smaller rungs; large rungs should protrude ¾ inch to 1 inch, and smaller ones should protrude about ½ inch.

Pre-drill holes for your drywall screws. Pre-pare the screws by dipping them into very soapy water, and back them up with liquid nails. Place the wall at a 100-to 120-de-gree angle. If you already have a wall at this angle in your home gym, you can skip the plywood-backing stage and place the rungs directly onto the wall.

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der to create maximal power. Most experts agree that the ability to access these units in-creases with explosive training. In addition, a motor unit can “fire” at different rates. The faster the rate, the higher the force output of that unit. High-threshold units tend to have high “pulse rates,” thus creating great force relative to their size. As the link is developed between these high-threshold units and the nervous system, power can increase with-out an increase in muscle size, a real benefit to climbers seeking an optimal strength-to-weight ratio. The system wall, through its demand for sudden bursts of power, can help train the nervous system to recruit high-thresh-old fibers. And, because it forces you to use your feet, the system wall prepares the whole body to per-form on rock by forcing the climber to maintain ten-sion through-out his body while train-ing.

Just as you can develop m a x i m u m power on the wall, you can increase the speed at which you can reach it. Almost in-stant activa-tion of peak power is necessary to latch onto a small hold after a dynamic movement. It is generally believed that most of the adapta-tions needed for this specialized movement are neuromuscular; if you drop repeatedly onto your fingers while training on a system

wall, the nervous system learns how to de-velop power quickly, because if the power doesn’t come, you fall off.

The body has many built-in mechanisms to protect itself from injury. Physical and ner-vous system adaptations can push back the point at which these protections kick in, thus allowing the climber to access more of his or her peak power. The golgi tendon organ, for example, is a sort of emergency brake located between the tendon and muscle. If the golgi senses too much tension developing in the tendon, usually caused by a high demand on the attached muscle, it tells the muscle

to quit before it becomes in-jured. Theory has it that if you thicken the tendon through re-peated explo-sive loading, it will take more and more force to cause the tendon to de-velop enough tension to shut down m u s c u l a r contraction, thereby en-abling you to access more of your mus-cles’ power.

Another the-ory, but much more contro-versial, states

that explosive or high-velocity movements cause muscle fibers to become activated out of order. Usually, a muscle activates the smaller, slow-twitch units first; it access-es the larger, fast-twitch units as needed. Some believe that the muscle can learn to

Sample System Board Workouts

When adding the system wall to your training program, proceed with extreme caution. Any adaptation—be it in gross physiol-ogy, the thickening of a tendon, or nervous system and inter-muscular coordination—that allows the body to work closer to its limits creates a serious risk of injury. This (and other training regimens) can lead to tendonitis, tendon tears, muscle tears and arthritis. Warm up gradually, and increase difficulty incre-mentally. Start with one session a week, and never exceed two. Always rest the day after a workout. Do your workouts fresh, and stop before you’re wiped out. Listen to your body!

Now that you know what you have to gain, get to it. Watch out, Alex.

Beginner (5.11+) Match hands on middle rung, and climb as you would a ladder, using larger rungs. Repeat five times maxi-mum.

Intermediate Keeping your feet stationary, experiment with two- or three-rung jumps, moving one hand at a time. Mix smaller and larger rungs. Do laps to build power/endurance.

Advanced Keeping your feet stationary, as above, go for max-imum distance and speed with your hands—try moving both at once. Try catching with three or even two fingers.

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violate this rule when presented with a sud-den large load, preferentially firing the fast-twitch units first.

It has also been suggested that, over time, the nervous system maximizes the efficiency of all the muscles involved (agonists, syner-gists and antagonists) in a complex move-ment. By preferentially recruiting the mus-cles in the most efficient manner possible, including lessening the inhibiting action of the antagonists, more power can be focused in the final complex movement. The system wall may then work by slowly teaching the body to move powerfully with less inter-muscular inhibition. And, by utilizing the feet, the system wall helps to strengthen the multitude of small stabilizing muscles in

Bill Fox is an Assistant District Attorney in Phil-adelphia. Recently he won the Masters divi-sion of the Philadelphia Kettlebell Meet and has been a personal train-er, fitness author, yoga instructor and martial artist for over twenty years.

the torso and throughout the body, muscles that can often be the weak link in a climb-er’s power.

This article appeared previously in Rock & Ice issue 72. Reprinted with the author’s permission.

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RECIPES FOR PERFORMANCE

DAVE WERNER’S BREAKFAST SHAKE

Editors Note: Perhaps our most frequent request is for snacks and/or “quick” food. This can be a challenge if one is keep-ing true to Paleo foods and minimum pro-cessing. That considered, Dave Werner’s (dave@crossfitnorth.com) Breakfast Shake is a great idea. One can use the basic recipe and substitute Bioplex Simply Whites Egg Protein for the yogurt and whey and add a bit more fruit in place of the oatmeal for a great Paleo alternative.

For me breakfast is the hardest meal of the day to get right. I really felt the difference, though, on those rare occasions when I did manage to get a good Zone breakfast. Clearly I needed a way to make the Zone breakfast a regular occurrence. “No Time for breakfast” wasn’t going to cut it any longer.

The solution presented here is portable, tasty, fast and easy to prepare in advance, and highly nutritious: a breakfast shake. Obviously there are many ways to make a breakfast shake, so I will share the rea-

BEEF: IT’S WHAT’S FOR BREAKFAST!

OK, we know it seems odd. Beef doesn’t strike many as standard breakfast fare. Us-ing leftovers from the previous evening however, one can make a tasty breakfast in no time flat. A recent beef breakfast:

Time: 10 minutes

Ingredients:

. Cooked London broil chopped into small pieces

. Tomatoes, chopped (or use halved cherry tomatoes)

. Cilantro, chopped

. Garlic, minced

. Olive oil

Heat skillet with a little bit of olive oil. Mince garlic and add to skillet first, allow-ing it to infuse the oil for 1-2 minutes. Next,

add the chopped meat and allow it to cook for about 1 minute. Add tomatoes and cook for 2-3 minutes or until they begin to break down. Finally add the chopped cilantro, sauté for one minute, then serve.

Zone blocks:

It’s easy! London broil is one block protein per ounce cooked. Tomatoes: ¾ cup = 1 block carbohydrate. 1/3 tsp olive oil = 1 block fat. Add additional vegetables or a side of fruit to balance carbohydrates if necessary.

Be creative: there are numerous variations on this theme! Changing the variety of meat and/or the spice selection creates an im-pressive variety of quick and tasty morning meals. One can use El Pato sauce (see the April PM for more on this) for a spicy kick, or change up the flavor dramatically with a bit of allspice or garam masala. Experiment and let us know what you cook up!

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sons for choosing these particular ingredi-ents. Feel free to use this recipe “as is” or as a jumping off point for your own perfect breakfast.

The quantities given are for a 6-block shake; this allows a 4-block breakfast and a 2-block snack later in the day—with no extra work!

ZONE BLOCK BREAKDOWN1 Shake = 6 Zone Blocks

Place first six ingredients into a blender jar; blend until thor-oughly mixed. Add berries and blend again until shake is creamy. The whole thing usually fits into a 1 liter bottle.

The shake takes about 15 min-utes to make, including clean up. To further streamline your morning, make it the night before and stick it in the refrigerator. Now you can get a reasonable breakfast as you drive to work or right after your workout.

Let’s discuss the ingredient choices. Remem-ber, these ingredients reflect my goals and prejudices so adjust according to your own needs. Most of my choices come from Barry Sears’s book “The Top 100 Zone Foods” .

At its core this is a protein and berry shake. The protein sources are whey protein pow-der and yogurt. I’ve chosen whey powder because it tastes better than other types, has little effect on insulin and may stimulate the immune system. Yogurt is in the mix be-cause it tastes good, provides the right mix of protein and carbohydrates, is an excel-lent source of calcium and potassium, and helps maintain a healthy digestive tract. Whenever possible chose yogurt with live cultures. You will screw up everything by using brands which contain fruit or other flavors—stay away from that.

The carbohydrates in this meal are provided partly by the yogurt, as already discussed; the balance of carbs comes from berries and a little bit of oatmeal. Berries, such as blueberries, blackberries and strawberries, are nutritional superstars. These extraordi-nary fruits are high in anti-oxidative capac-ity and loaded with other good things. One

cup of blueber-ries has a mere 80 calories yet contains nearly a third of the RDA of vitamin C. One cup of strawber-ries provides an impressive 140 percent of the daily vitamin C requirement. These fruits are rich sources of flavonoids, po-tassium, fiber

and lots of helpful phytochemicals. Oatmeal is also thrown into the carbohydrate mix for its protein containing, cholesterol lowering, high fiber goodness.

No Zone meal is complete without the fat, and the fat in this meal comes from Flax seed and olive oil. Udo Erasmus in his book “Fats that Heal, Fats that Kill” has this to say regarding Flax seeds: “Flax Seeds pro-vide good nutrition in the form of protein,

2 Cups yogurt, plain non-fat1 Scoop whey protein 1/8 Cup slow cook oatmeal, uncooked2 Tbsp flax seed, freshly ground2 tsp extra-virgin olive oil1 Cup Blueberries3/4 Cup Strawberries1 tsp cinnamon¼ Cup Water, to adjust thickness

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oil containing lecithin, phytosterols, and other valuable minor ingredients, miner-als, vitamins, soluble and insoluble fiber and lignans.” The fresh oil of Flax is the best-known source of alpha-linolenic acid (LNA), which is an omega-3 fatty acid es-sential in our diet and not widely avail-able in our food. Flax protein contains all the amino acids necessary to human health. Flax seeds are also a rich source of muci-lage, a soft water soluble form of fiber which sooths intestinal lining, prevents reabsorp-tion of bile acids, decreases the absorption of cholesterol, and is nourishing to benefi-cial bacteria in our gut. Pretty good for a fat source, no? “The Anti-Inflammation Zone,” Dr. Barry Sears’ latest book, calls olive oil a rich source of monounsaturated fat that is low in pro-inflammatory omega-6 fatty ac-ids. The real benefit of extra-virgin olive oil, however, comes from a unique phytochemi-cal it contains called hydroxytyrosol that is found only in olive oil. “Hydroxytyrosol ap-

pears to be an inhibitor of the enzymes that produce pro-inflammatory eicosanoids.” In other words, think of extra-virgin olive oil as liquid aspirin.

Do not waste your money on flax oil: it quickly goes rancid (rancid flax oil is called linseed oil and is used to paint furniture), and has been stripped of most of the vita-mins and all of the fiber naturally present in the whole seeds. Flax seed is cheap and easy to store. Buy an inexpensive coffee grinder and grind your flax seeds fresh as you use them. Extra-virgin olive oil is worth the ex-tra money; only it contains hydroxytyrosol.

There are many substitutions for the ingre-dients I’ve suggested. One and a quarter slices of pineapple in place of the oatmeal and blackberries instead of blueberries are two possibilities. Use your imagination and have fun.

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