Category Archives: Coconut Oil & Fiber

Coconut Bark

Posted by on March 6, 2011 46 comments

Kindy’s son Matthias is on a ketogenic diet and she has been looking for ways to make coconut oil tasty:

I am trying to add coconut oil in every place I can think of but this is harder to do than one would think.  I want him to take 4 – 6 tablespoons a day so I can up his carbs a bit …

I am trying ‘hot chocolate’: heavy whipping cream, coconut oil, cocoa-plain, drop of stevia.  He likes it but will only take a few drinks before he is ‘full’.

Others have also asked for ways to make coconut oil palatable – for instance, Ian.

A lot of Paleo dieters have recommended coconut bark. So we thought we’d give it a try.

Ingredients

We tried several different combinations of ingredients; all of them worked well. This seems a fairly fool-proof dessert.

The basic ingredients are:

1)      coconut oil,

2)      cocoa powder or chocolate,

3)      nuts or nut butter, and

4)      a carbohydrate.

We prefer low-omega-6 nuts, and low-fructose “safe starches” and sweeteners such as rice syrup or stevia. We do eat fruits and berries, but generally avoid any other sources of sucrose or fructose.

For our coconut bark experiments, we tried macadamia nuts and almond butter as our nuts, and puffed rice and figs as our carb sources. Here are a few of the ingredients we used — puffed rice, unsweetened cocoa powder, 72% chocolate, and almond butter:

For a more ketogenic (therapeutic) bark, increase the coconut oil and decrease the carbs; for a more dessert-like flavor, add more carbs.

OK, here’s what we did. I would characterize these as dessert-like and only mildly ketogenic.

Chocolate, macadamia nuts, almond butter, puffed rice

Ingredients for this version (we used rather more coconut oil than is shown here):

Preparation is very simple. First, mix the ingredients over a low heat. We melted the coconut oil first, then melted chocolate:

Then we mixed in the almond butter and ground macadamia nuts, followed by the puffed rice:


Next, pour the mixture onto a shallow aluminum-foil covered plate, and put in the refrigerator or freezer to cool. We put them in the refrigerator for ten minutes, then sliced the bark into pieces while it was still soft, and then moved it to the freezer for ten minutes to finish:


Chocolate, macadamia nuts, almond butter, figs, raisins, cocoa powder

This differed from the previous mix only in that diced figs and raisins replaced the puffed rice, and the finished bark pieces were dipped in cocoa powder. Ingredients:

Freshly poured onto the plate:

Cooled and sliced:

Served:

Conclusion

Coconut bark is not very nourishing, micronutrient-wise, but it is tasty and it does supply the ketogenic fats of coconut oil.

I suppose one could mix in ketogenic amino acids, like leucine or lysine, to make the bark even more ketogenic.

Ketogenic dieters shouldn’t suppose that they need to exclude all carbs. The body needs a little bit of glucose, and the bark will still be ketogenic if the coconut oil content is high enough.

Neo-Agutak: “Eskimo Ice Cream”

Posted by on December 5, 2010 77 comments

UPDATE: Melissa has given this dish a great name: “Neo-Agutak,” after the Inuit dish Agutak or “Eskimo ice cream.”

Eating certain foods during a fast can increase its health benefits.

In the book we recommend coconut oil and fiber-rich calorie-poor plant foods. Our reasoning is:

  • Short-chain fats in coconut oil make the fast more ketogenic. Ketones have benefits for immunity, neuronal function, cancer suppression, and HDL production. They also reduce glucose requirements, making the fast less stressful.
  • Fiber in plants may be digested by gut bacteria to butyrate, a beneficial short-chain fat.
  • Anti-microbial plant compounds help fight gut pathogens and biofilms, shifting the balance of power in the gut toward commensal species.

Good food choices during a fast include green leafy vegetables, which are highly nutritious; traditional herbal spices, like oregano or turmeric, which have antimicrobial and anti-inflammatory activity; and berries, which are rich in antimicrobial compounds.

What I Ate During Today’s Fast

Baby spinach, cranberries, and coconut oil.

First, I put a layer of baby spinach in a bowl:

Next, I add cranberries and coconut oil:

Then, I heat them in the microwave for a few minutes. After the coconut oil has melted and the spinach shrunk, I add more spinach and cranberries. You can also add spices to taste. Then, another few minutes in the microwave so that most of the cranberries burst their skins, and let it cool. It will look like this:

This bowl has about 125 carb calories from a half-pound of cranberries, about 500 fat calories from coconut oil, and a host of gut-cleaning pathogen-disabling plant compounds. It tastes great (I think), and makes a passable Christmas decoration!

I started eating this about 1 pm. I had eaten 3/4 of it by 4 pm, when I added 3 egg yolks. It was finished by 6 pm. This was my only food before dinner.