Overcoming Multiple Sclerosis

Dear all,

I am relatively new to the program and the whole concept of dietary change. I've been going for about 10 weeks and I feel like I'm doing reasonably well. No meat, dairy or refined oil has passed my lips in that time. I am completely Vegan + fish, eating little if any refined product at all. I figure that I must be under 10g of saturated per day right? The point is, I don't know for sure really. What I wanna do is analyse exactly what I eat over a typical two-week period and work out some statistics based on that. This way I will know if I am hitting my 10g target or whether there is some more tweaking that I need to do.

If you aren't interested in what I am eating everyday then please just ignore this topic. Also feel free to join in, please post your own food diaries and help make this a collaborative project.

Example:
Wednesday 17th November
0800 400g Dorset Cereals Muesli + 50g dried Apricot
1000 Cup of tea with soy milk
1100 Apple + Home made cookie
1200 Glass of water
1300 Wholemeal pasta & pesto + soy yoghurt
1500 Glass of water + Banana
1700 Cup of tea + rice cracker with homemade chutney
1800 Smoked Mackerel salad + Fruit smoothie
1900 Lemon sorbet
2100 Soy milk & cocoa powder

I've never done food calculations before so I'm finding my way with that a bit. I'll add my calculations to the end of each days post. I don't know whether to put comments in a separate topic or not?

Monday 22nd November
0730 200ml Pineapple Juice
0730 1 Nakd Strawberry Bar (6g fat, 1g saturated)
0830 350 ml Water
0930 350 ml Peppermint Tea
1000 Wholemeal Vegan Muffin (7.5g fat 0.5g saturated)
1100 Apple
1200 Alpro Soy Yoghurt (2.2g fat 0.375g saturated)
1300 75g Wholemeal Bread (3.75g fat, 0.75g saturated)
1300 350 ml Water
1300 Cabbage, Carrot, Quorn, Sweet Potato stew (4.5g fat, 1g saturated)
1430 2 Large Satsumas
1730 Baked Haddock with Dash topping, Carrot & Sweet Potato mashed with Flax Oil, 50g Qinoa cooked in Stock (with chilli & mint) (19g fat, 1.5g saturated)
1800 330ml Soda Water
2015 6 Sundried Tomatoes in a little oil & herbs
2030 300 ml warm Soy Milk with cocoa powder 1 tsp unrefined sugar (6g fat 1g saturated


I make this < 7g for the day. This is a fairly typical day so it gives me confidence.

Great start Gareth, I am sure this will inspire others.

Gareth,

I didnt see where you calculated in your fish oil? I was just jotting down what I ate yesterday and it really does add up quickly. The fish oil and flax seed oil take up about 3 grams of sat. fat per day if I calculated it correctly. (when not eating oily fish). So I actually had 1 gram of sat. fat from fish oil caps, and 1 gram from flax oil, making it 2 g so far. Add in a piece of salmon, I'm already up to 4 grams. I also used evoo on my salad and with my roasted kale...another 4 grams right there(hard to calculate exactly; I made a bunch of Kale for the family and used 2 tbsp. evoo--I ate about 1/2 of the batch).. Then I had a very small amount of sunflower seeds and almonds, that brings me to 9 grams or thereabout.

Is it 10 g or under of sat. fat per day that we are shooting for??

Its not as easy as I thought. Especially with adding in the fish oil and flaxseed oil.

I don't take Fish Oil tablets. I eat loads and loads of fish so I've never seen it as a problem.

If you are referring to the haddock I had for tea, then I have made my calculation using this data:

http://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/fin ... cts/4060/2

Says that Haddock is 0% Sat Fat. Can you tell me differently?

Gareth

**Edit** Actually if you scroll down that page it says 0.3g Sat Fat. Still not high enough to wreck the day.

Breakfast:

Code: Select all

satfat   grams    satfat     food (brand)
  %      eaten    eaten  
7.1       20      1.5        Flax seed oil (Bonavita)
1.7       60      1.0        Mixed cereal (Dorset "honest tasty & real")
0.4       40      0.2        Shreddies
1.6       40      0.6        Raw oats   (Tesco organic)
0.2      350      0.7        Soya milk  (Alpro light)
20*        2      0.4        Fish oil caps (nature's aid)  *guess
                ------
sum:              4.6

So half day's ration of sat fat consumed before 6am.
(includes 3299kJ (789kcal) energy, 31.8 total fat).

And this on a day when (before winter set in) I'd run a 50min 10k a couple of times per week, mountain bike 18 miles in an hour twice per week, walk briskly for an hour twice per week.

My point is that George's advice (anyone's advice) to keep below 10gm satfat intake per day takes no account of body mass or average exercise. There has to be a big body and metabolism difference between a 100lb sedentary girl and a 180lb heavy exercising older man.

I suggest that Vegan or vegetarian recipes need checking in detail as they take no account of sat fat content.

Sorry all if I've only made it more complicated. But the good news is that I'm working on a satfat calculator (specifically to help everyone here) with Marcus. And meanwhile there are other diet calculators out there.

Gareth,

Sorry...I didnt realize you didnt take fish oil---I was just trying to be helpful..I just thought you forgot to add it to your calculations....

Looks like your doing great!!

This is exactly the kind of debate that I want to provoke by having this topic. I hadn't noticed the 0.3g of Sat Fat on the Haddock so thanks for making me check.

Hey MP, welcome to the topic. Ill be glad of your expertise here. Please correct me if I am wrong but I am assuming that there is no saturated fat in all fresh fruit and vegetables (not seeds) except Avocado. Is this correct. I am also interested in Omega 3 and Omega 6 balance. To calculate this, do I need to weigh every portion of sald leaves/vegetables that I am consuming?

Day 2 will be posted soon.

Gareth

Tuesday 23rd November
0700 200ml Apple Juice, Eat Natural Bar (14.4g fat, 2g saturated)
0830 300ml Water
1000 Wholemeal Vegan Muffin (7.5g fat 0.5g saturated)
1000 300ml Water
1100 Apple
1245 300ml Water
1300 Smoked Mackerel Salad with Pumpkin Seeds & Balsamic Dressing (29g fat, 5g saturated)
1400 Alpro Soy Yoghurt (2.2g fat 0.375g saturated)
1500 1 Large Satsuma, 300ml Peppermint Tea
1900 400ml Water, 1/2 Banana (0.3g fat 0.1g saturated)
1930 Baked Cod in Tomato & Basil sauce with boiled potatoes & peas
(3.26g fat, 1.05g saturated)
2200 Cup of tea with 30ml soy milk (0.6g fat 0.1g saturated)
2200 Home made cake (3g fat 0.25g saturated)

I Make that < 10g again. I thought I might struggle today after that salad came out at half my daily intake. Who would have thought it from a salad? My wife made a beautiful low fat tea though so I just scraped under the target.

Gareth wrote: [...] I am assuming that there is no saturated fat in all fresh fruit and vegetables (not seeds) except Avocado. Is this correct. I am also interested in Omega 3 and Omega 6 balance. To calculate this, do I need to weigh every portion of sald leaves/vegetables that I am consuming?

I think that assumption is on track, almost every food has some trace of saturated fat but levels can be considered insignificant in almost all fruit and veg. I don't have a full analysis in front of me, but some figures include olive flesh 1.8%, stoned dates 0.9%, chickpeas 0.3%, kidney beans 0.06%, parsnip 0.2%, dried figs 0.15%, dried prunes 0.1%, passion fruit 0.06%, dried goji berries 0.1%, ... satfat.

Trying to simply: if a food has 1% satfat, then a bowl filled with 200 grams (7oz, 0.44lb) will have 2 grams of satfat. Or the other way around, for our day limit of 10 grams of satfat, we could consume 1kg (2.2lb) of 1% satfat food.

I don't think it is appropriate to assume that any food satfat figures are definitive (percentage or grams per 100 grams etc.), but should be considered more a rough range. And fruit or veg that has some level of satfat when raw, will see an increase in satfat % when water is removed (by drying or cooking). And there can be great variation in fruit and veg species, variety, preparation and cooking.

By "seeds" I take that as meaning grains, cereals, nuts, beans, peas, pips, stones, ... and derivatives (hence soya milk from soya beans etc).

On weighing "safe" fruit and veg (that is fruit & veg which has satfat content less than 0.5%), I don't think that's necessary. I thought that I read that Terry Wahls recommends eating 3/4kg of kale per day, but I can't find any mention of kale on her site now. If one did eat that, then 750gm @ 0.09% = 0.7gm satfat. We might have a belly like a gorilla, but we'd be sooo satfat starved! Ie. IMHO there's no need to weigh leaves.

I'd like to include automatic Omega-6/3 ratio in my satfat calculator, but I'm not sure if that is just getting too complicated and confusing for most people.

My sense is that we can get a bit too focused on just a few aspects of food, although George specifies figures on sat fat and Omega 6/3 ratio, these are generalisations, and are only a part of what constitutes a good MS diet. Perhaps for minds that are drawn to measuring and calculating things (mia culpa) the very act of working things out can be a plank in our recovery program, giving us focus, a sense of purpose, resolve and drive. But that very process might be demoralising or nerdy to others.

Just waking up to the danger to us in the likes of palm oil, coconut, chocolate, etc ... and becoming wary of most "sociable" food is a start.

I assume we all have a range of standard satfat busting recipes that we use, but afaict we don't yet have any repository of shared knowledge that we can draw on. I'd like to have access to such a database, or help build one. But I don't sense any groundswell of need for such a thing. At the moment everyone seems to be ploughing private furrows re. their diet. Or maybe it is still early days. It is not as if there is any money in this (praise be), so the usual driving force is missing.

Talk about furrows, I've defocused again.

Good points Gareth.