If you’ve been reading this (sadly neglected) blog or the various sources we’ve cited, you’ll know the great benefits of coconut.  Here’s a quick recap, though.

Coconut is not only delicious, it’s a good source of medium-chain saturated fats.  Why are medium-chain fats good?  Because they can be absorbed directly instead of having to be broken down in the gut.  This is great for some quick, long-lasting energy and perfect for people who may have trouble digesting fats because of some digestive problems caused by a high-carb lifestyle.  Coconuts are 90% saturated fat- and who here doesn’t love saturated fat?  Saturated fat is used all over your body and improves your cholesterol, immune system and your general sense of well-being.  (This high amount of saturated fat is why coconut oil is solid at room temperature, like beef fat or lard.)  Coconut is particularly good for boosting your immune system because the main saturated fat in coconut is lauric acid (this turns into monolaurin in the body).  Lauric acid is antimicrobial and not only prevents pathogens from setting up camp in your body, it can convince them to high-tail it out if they have moved in.  Great news during flu season, right?

Of course, coconut also has good vitamins and minerals as well as a good amount of fiber.  It also tastes sweet but doesn’t contain a lot of sugar.  Coconut oil is an even better source of lauric acid than raw coconut.  Coconut oil is a great way to get some extra fat, because a paleo lifestyle should be a high-fat lifestyle.  But let’s face it, very few of us want to choke down a spoonful or two of room temperature coconut oil or even melt it in some tea and drink it.  I have found a solution that, if I may say so myself, is genius.  Read on.

There is a company, Premier Organics, that makes Artisana raw nut butters.  They make a coconut butter that is so dangerously delicious, it should be labeled as a controlled substance.  The coconut butter is nothing but 100% coconut- no added sugar, salt, or oils.  The only problem with this stuff is that it, like coconut oil, is solid at room temperature and with all the coconut solids in the mix, it can be as hard as a rock until it’s warmed up.  The butter is pretty good when it’s melted but personally, I like to eat the coconut butter on the solid side.  The butter then melts on my tongue and feels incredibly decadent.  After much thought, I have come up with the following recipe.  This recipe not only makes eating coconut butter easy, it’s portable and shelf-stable, it’s got extra coconut oil, and it’s fun!

If you like this recipe, this site sells the coconut butter in 8lb or 16lb buckets which is cheaper than buying individual jars.

Coconut Butter Bites

• Artisana Raw Coconut Butter
• Virgin coconut oil
• Ice cube trays (shaped ones are really fun)

Gently heat the coconut butter and oil until they are liquid.  I fill a large pot with water, put the jars in, and keep it on a low simmer until everything is melted.  You don’t want to cook the jars, just soften them.  A crockpot would work too, or a low-temperature oven.

Pour some of the coconut butter into a small bowl.  Add some coconut oil until the mixture is kind of thin. This isn’t a science- if there’s too much oil, the finished bites will be a bit oilier and if there’s too little oil, the finished bites will be a little drier.  I usually add about 1/3 as much coconut oil as butter (so if I have 1 cup butter, I add an extra 1/3 cup of oil- but I don’t really measure.)

Pour the mixture into the ice cube tray. The mixture will expand as it cools, so leave a little room at the top.  Gently tap the tray on the counter to bring any air bubbles to the surface.

Let set either at room temperature or in the fridge for a faster set.

Pop out of tray (with all that oil, nothing’s going to stick!) and enjoy.  I store my finished bites in glass jars in the pantry.  The bites can stay out of the fridge as long as your ambient temperature is below about 75 degrees F; any warmer than that and they’ll start to melt.

Coconut Crunch

Add dried, shredded coconut (unsweetened of course!) to the butter/oil mix.  I like to add a lot of shredded coconut for a serious crunch.  Once the bites set, the coconut adds a nice crunch, almost like a Nestle Crunch bar, as well as adding some fiber and more coconut taste.  You can usually get shredded coconut in the bulk section of natural markets for cheaper.

Harvest Spice

Add some nutmeg, cinnamon, and quality vanilla extract to the mixture.  Add a little at a time and taste as you go to find the right amount of spices for you.  Unlike most applications, you can really taste the difference between average and high quality vanilla in these bites.  It’s worth a bit of a splurge.

Chocolate Divine

Add a tablespoon or two of raw cacao powder and quality vanilla to the mixture.  Depending on your cacao tolerance, you might need to add a touch of sweetener to mellow some of the bitterness of the chocolate.  I add just a small drizzle of honey when I make this one; remember that coconut is naturally sweet.  Don’t forget to taste as you add things!  This one tastes like hot cocoa to me; the more cacao you add, the darker the chocolate- add just a little for a milk chocolaty taste. 

Dark Chocolate Crunch

Add some shredded coconut to the Chocolate Divine and revel in the decadence of living a paleo lifestyle.

Mexican Chocolate Supreme

Add cinnamon and a little chile powder to the Chocolate Divine. (Go easy on the chile powder; it’s flavorful.)  This one’s Lowell’s favorite.

Chocolate Raspberry

Add some roughly crumbled freeze-dried raspberries (or other fruit; I like Just Fruit) to the Chocolate Divine.  The freeze-dried fruit stays pretty crunchy, but does add some trace carbs.  I might try this one with some freeze-dried bananas.  Try this add-in in the plain coconut ones too- coconut and strawberry is delicious!

Other ideas

Add food coloring to any of the above for a fun look or swirl together plain coconut and chocolate.

Add other flavor extracts, like hazelnut, lemon, coffee or peppermint.  I’m going to make some chocolate ones with peppermint soon.

Add a small amount of chopped dried fruit, like goji berries or cranberries, or maybe cacao nibs or espresso beans.  Remember that these will add some extra carbs and caffeine (nibs and beans).  I like the freeze dried fruit because they stay crunchy in the coconut and there’s no added ingredients.

Add finely chopped/ground nuts (someone suggested adding almond flour- sounds tasty!)

I have some silicon ice cube trays from Ikea that make flower- and fish-shaped "ice cubes."  I make all my plain coconut bites as fish and all my crunch bites as flowers.  I’ve measured the indentations and each one holds about a tablespoon of liquid, which is handy.  (I also use these molds when I make butter.)  The trays usually aren’t expensive- get a collection of fun shapes and go nuts with it!  I just found some penguin ones while getting that link; they’re in my shopping cart now.  Mmm, chocolate penguins…

I don’t blame the nurse this morning, but my conversation this morning was frustrating for several reasons.  She asked me what vitamins or supplements I was taking, and I told her I take 1 tablespoon of natural cod liver oil daily.  She gave me a weird look, and I explained that it is high in Omega-3s, Vitamins A, and Vitamin D (I didn’t want to confuse her further with types of A and D…).  So she wrote down Omega-3, Vit-A, and Vit-D on her chart.  She frowned, and asked about the Omega 3s, and if I had received the information on herbs and supplements to discontinue before my procedure today.  I said I had, and asked her if her concern was because she felt that Omega-3s would thin the blood and increase the risk of bleeding.  She (surprised I knew that) agreed and said that indeed that was a significant risk and she would need to consult with the doctor.  I, trying to be as non-confrontational as possible, noted that Omega-3s reduce platelet aggregation, but only in healthy ways, and certainly have never been shown to reduce healthy clotting or increase bleeding.  They restore healthy functioning and reduce inflammation, which can include reducing platelet aggregation from unhealthy levels back to normal levels… but won’t take it below normal levels.  It restores protection from abnormal clotting, and is no risk at all.

Anyhow, she left, and the final decision was that I hadn’t taken them in 23 hours, which was almost 24, so it was still safe to proceed.

I thought it would be useful to take an edited version of the current email I send out to folks with links to info (books, websites, etc) and share it here.  It’s a good wrap up of what I would consider to be the best sources and places to start learning about where we went wrong with regards to health and nutrition, and how to fix it.

Read on for the full mail and list of info.

My current blog reading list continues to grow.  I’ve been using Google Reader for a while, and loving it.  I star items I find that are particular worth coming back to, and can search the entire back history of the blogs I follow for any particular topic of note and find all related posts.  If I want to see what all the doctors and other folks I follow have said about H1N1 or anything else, it’s incredibly easy.

I realized that if I was marking items with a star for myself it wouldn’t be to hard to hit the “Share” button on posts I think are particularly worth checking out for others.  So, I’m going to give that a try.

If you would like to keep an eye on any links I share, you can check them out here:  http://www.google.com/reader/shared/lowell.meyer.

Or you can even get an Atom feed of my shared links for reuse elsewhere:  http://www.google.com/reader/public/atom/user%2F00468051034282820935%2Fstate%2Fcom.google%2Fbroadcast.

I’m working on future posts myself on lab testing, and on hypoglycemics and primal/paleo/low-carb/real food.  Until then, enjoy some real food and be healthy.

Free the Animal linked to a blog I hadn’t read before called Primal Wisdom.  It looks pretty good so far, and for now I’ve added it to the 9 other health-related blogs I follow on a daily basis.  The author is a philosophy major, nutritionist, sports trainer, and has studied oriental medicine as well.  He’s currently the head of the nutrition department at a school in Arizona.  In addition to just sharing the link to the blog in general, I ran across the following post that (amongst the many others out there on the topic) does a great job of providing a very short but good intro to how UVB light and Vitamin D3 are incredibly important, and very few people get enough of them anymore:
    http://donmatesz.blogspot.com/2009/05/perils-of-indoor-living-skin-cancer.html

Mark (from Mark’s Daily Apple) has been posting reader submitted stories, and they’re great enough they deserve to be shared around.  Think a happy, healthy (and primal) lifestyle can’t work if you’re fat past a certain point, or have advanced diabetes, or are just very unhealthy?  Think again.  You might need additional medical help to resolve underlying clinical issues- and if so likely only temporarily- but in many cases all it takes is a primal lifestyle, and that’s easier than it sounds and feels great.

This is a spin on a traditional dish that is guaranteed to give the low-fat/low-calorie crowd horrible nightmares.  Eggs soaked in butter, garnished with bacon, and gently cooked until the whites are just set and the yolks are rich and runny.  Think soft-boiled egg or sunny side up, but ten times better.  And you don’t need toast to enjoy it.

  

I’m on the Greater Seattle Weston A. Price Foundation Yahoo Group (wow that’s a long name), and someone recently posted a link to the following video.  It’s basically just a 5-minute flash animation describing the Paleo/Primal diet and rationale in a nutshell.  It does a pretty good job, actually.  Obviously there’s a lot more to it, but it’s a fun intro for newcomers, and a fun refresher for the rest of us.

More on exercise below, after the jump, including some of my thoughts and another nutshell video.

I’m not going to post a full review now—might get to that eventually—but suffice to say I love Fat Head, a documentary that covers a large breadth of material from my favorite sources, and is fun and engaging as well.  I thought I’d post links to some of the official video clips for fun, and to provide more incentive to get a copy and watch it yourself.

Random tangential reminder: it’s not about being overweight, it’s about health.  Cancer and heart disease are more important than body fat.  Weight loss is just a nice side effect of doing healthy things.

Movie site: http://www.fathead-movie.com/index.php/about/

Amazon link: http://www.amazon.com/Fat-Head-Tom-Naughton/dp/B001NRY6R2/

And now… the fun videos:

I keep finding great blogs and sources out there—I thought I’d take a minute to share some.  There are far more experienced and prolific folks out there already fighting the good fight and spreading the word about nutrition, health, and wellness, and doing a damn good job of it.  I don’t 100% agree with all of them, but I think everyone would admit no one has all the answers yet—regardless of whether or not you believe that  modern soy milk is good for you (spoiler alert: it isn’t).  There’s so much misinformation out there it can be difficult for even the most dedicated individual; each of these sources has their quirks but on the whole seems to be right on track.

Check these links out.  Watch the movie.  Read the book.  This stuff is solid gold.  It’s your health and your future.