Hi ,

As most of you know, I live a paleo-keto lifestyle most of the time, and have for over twenty years.  Right now I am playing with a variation that involves cyclic green fasting – 3 to 4 days of eating just greens followed by 3 to 4 days of high protein and a touch of carbs in the form of root vegetables and fruit.  I generally stay in nutritional ketosis all the time, even with the days that include a piece or two of fruit.  Why do I do this?  Honestly it is because I want to have a functional brain as I age.  That means lowering the inflammation in the body and keeping simple carbs completely out of the diet.

If all those grain-based foods and sugars only affected things like obesity, heart disease, arthritis, and the like, then I would not be so invested in staying off those foods.  But I draw the line at my brain health.  I still have the capacity to be happy and aware with simple body diseases, but a damaged brain destroys my capacity for joy and awareness.  That is not an acceptable consequence.

But that all said, that does not mean that those foods don’t call out to me with their delicious promises of tastiness.  As a result, I am always making up recipes for replicating my favorite flour and sugar confections without the four and sugar.    I use my Dr Dave Double Sugar as my sweetener replacement (erythritol and stevia) and I use alternative flours such as almond flour, coconut flour, flax meal, psyllium powder, nut flours, small amounts of cassava flour, de-fatted peanut flour, green banana flour, and whatever other low carb flour I can find.  I even tried ground cricket flour a couple times.  Cooking with alternative flours is tricky because the absence of gluten makes them crumbly and hard to work with.  This is helped a bit by adding gums like xanthan gum found here and guar gum found here.  These natural gums help the dough hold together and be more stretchy.

I used to use flax flour quite a bit 10 to15 years ago – a bit too much.  I eventually developed a food sensitivity simply through over exposure.  This can happen with any food, hence the reason why variety is a central feature in any healthy diet.  Generally these will calm down if you avoid the food for a few months to a year.  I think I emotionally grossed out on flax as well as it has taken me this long to start using it again.

Flax is the perfect paleo-keto food.  Check out its nutritional profile!  It is almost completely omega 3 fat, protein, and fiber.  The ratios are perfect keto food ratios.  It has a glycemic index of 0!  That is right, no impact on your blood sugar levels at all.  Its amino acid profile rating is 92 out of 100.  Compare that to wheat flour with a glycemic index of 92 and a protein score of only 50.   Flax is about 21% fiber compared to wheat’s mere 3% with 2/3rds of that fiber being insoluble to broom out your insides and 1/3 being soluble fiber to feed your good guy bacteria.  Each muffin from the recipe below has about 2 tablespoons of flax meal, so that means about 5 grams of insoluble fiber. Once you add in the fiber from the avocados, you get about 3 grams of soluble fiber per muffin.  That is an amazing 8 grams of fiber per muffin.  Compare that to the 2.5 grams of fiber in a same sized wheat or oat bran muffin.

Flax is one of the oldest cultivated crops for humans.  Flax was harvested from the wild for its fibers to make clothing over 30,000 years ago.  Linen is made from flax.  Records show it was cultivated in the middle east 9000 years ago.  It was a staple in the Egyptian culture and was picked up by the Romans and spread all over Europe.  Flax fibers are about 3 times as strong as cotton, but modern methods of agriculture have made cotton cheaper to produce.  Flax oil is called linseed oil, and is used in paints and varnishes.

What is the downside to flax?  The high omega 3 fat and protein levels leave it prone to easily going rancid.  New cold rolling processing techniques have helped solve this problem recently.  Rancidity was a major issue back when I was using a lot of flax previously, and is still now an issue when I buy the more common brands of flax meal.  You must be careful to keep the meal tightly sealed and kept in the freezer to extend its life.  The newer products like these will stay fresh 6 to 10 months.  My bag won’t last that long.

So anyway, last week I was experimenting with creating a flax muffin without the usual levels of added oil to the muffin mix.  Usually any bran muffin mix involves at least half a cup of added oil or more.  This helps the bran slide down your throat without sticking.  This is not a problem with wheat flour muffins as they have so little bran in them.  But if you have cooked with high fiber flours like coconut or flax, you know this can be an issue.  Well I seem to have found a way around this problem by using ripe avocado as my fat source.  Yes avocado has fat in it, but not as much as you might think – only around 14%.  I replaced the half cup of oil in my typical batch of muffins with one ripe avocado and just 1 tablespoon of avocado oil.  Here is my recipe:

2 cups of cold rolled Flax meal
½ cup Almond flour
½ cup Dr Dave Double sugar
1 ripe Avocado
1 tbsp. Avocado oil
1 tbsp. Black strap Molasses
2 large free range eggs
1 tsp. Balanced salt
1/2 tsp. Xanthan gum
1 tsp. Guar gum
1 tsp. Baking soda
1 tsp. Vanilla
1 cup Almond milk or Coconut milk, or even water 

optional: ½ cup tart dried cherries, raisins, or cranberries

Use a mixer to blend all the dry ingredients before adding in the wet ingredients.  
Mix in wet ingredients and mix on high for 1 minute to fully mash in the avocado.
Spoon into paper muffin cups and bake at 350 degrees for 20-25 minutes.

Personally I check the internal temperature of the muffins with a digital cooking thermometer like this one to be sure it reaches 165-180 degrees, then I take them out.  This way I know they are cooked on the inside but won’t be too dry.  As you can see from the pictures, this recipe makes 18 muffins.  If you add the dried fruit each muffin will have about 2 to 3 grams of carbohydrates.  Without the fruit each muffin is about only 1 gram of carb – very keto and paleo.  The avocado makes the muffins very moist - too moist for Ellen.  If you like a more cake like muffin omit the avocado and replace it with 1/4 to 1/2 cup of olive oil, avocado oil, or melted butter.  These muffins can also be enhanced with yummy spices like ginger and cinnamon.

Now a good keto or paleo eating plan is all about eating tons of low carb vegetables.  Veggies are where the life saving nutrition is found.  But I also know that a lot of people jumping on the keto paleo bandwagon find it hard to get even 2 servings of vegetables in a day, much less the 8 to 10 servings a good keto or paleo plan calls for.  I can appreciate the attraction to eating a pound of bacon and a cube of butter a day along with the steaks and chops, but as many folks are finding out, this ends up producing a lot of constipation.  These keto muffins will help with that part of the problem.  The bigger problem is that all that protein will mostly be turned into sugar and then into fat.  This says all that expensive protein really goes to waste – or more accurately to waist.  The same result with the high fat intake.

If you are engaging keto or paleo eating for health or weight loss, then 80% of your food consumption by weight should be low carb vegetables.  You don’t need to be afraid of fats, but every gram of fat you eat is a gram of fat you are not going to lose.  The high protein levels are really just a hidden way of eating sugar.  You only need 60 to 90 grams of protein a day unless you are young and growing or old and not digesting protein well.

Enjoy these healthy sweet treats.  They are good for you in so many ways.

Take care,

David       

 
Ellen update:    

This last week has been slower for Ellen seeing clients, so she has stepped out into unfamiliar territory - painting for fun.  Since her cat Zeal passed, she has wanted to create pictures showing how no one is ever lost, just harder to see.  They might turn up anywhere - on a park bench with an umbrella or riding the range watching for snakes.