Diet and Nutrition

The Hacker's Diet

The Hacker's Diet: How to Lose Weight and Hair through Stress and Poor Nutrition book plus associated computer tools. You can read the book on-line on the World-Wide Web, or download a copy to read or print off-line in either PostScript or Adobe Acrobat PDF format. The WWW and Adobe Acrobat versions have hot-links for all table of contents items, cross-references, and index entries. A set of Excel spreadsheets which accompany the book (but are not necessary to use it) is also available for downloading, and the weight logging and management tools described in the book are also available for the Palm Computing Platform. New: Fourth Edition (2005) improves appearance, accessibility, and ease of navigation; it strictly complies with the XHTML 1.0 and CSS 2.1 standards.

FourmiFood

Illustrated, can't fail, easy-to-make delicious meals with all natural ingredients and minimal time and work to prepare at home.

Fractal Food

Fractal, or self-similar, structures are commonplace in nature, extending from the fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background radiation to the blood vessels in the human lung, but rarely do you encounter such perfection in structure as in Romanesco, a member of the plant species which includes broccoli, cauliflower, and cabbage. This document is a photo gallery of the amazing hierarchical structure of Romanesco, along with a discussion of how such patterns can arise from the very simplest of computer programs, suggesting that nature is, in some sense, performing a computation.

Reversing Myopia

Having been nearsighted and requiring strong optical correction all my life, I became accustomed ever since childhood to each eye exam calling for ever stronger glasses. I'd heard that the rate of change could be expected to decrease with age, but never that the trend could be reversed. Then, in 2000, I got separate reading and driving glasses, and found myself wearing the reading glasses almost all the time. Eight years later, it was obvious to me that the correction of both were too strong, and when I had my next eye exam in 2010, it showed the correction for both eyes was a full dioptre less. This document recounts my anecdotal experience and what it may mean for other nearsighted people.

Paleo Postings

This is a collection of postings from Fourmilog and documents on this site which relate to the paleo/primal/ancestral diet and lifestyle.

Relativistic Nutrition

The books gotta balance! The mass of the inputs and outputs of the human body, averaged over time, are equal. So where does the energy the body consumes come from?

SubMarie's: Reverse-Engineering Blue Cheese Salad Dressing

Ever since I moved from California to Switzerland in 1991, people occasionally ask, “Is there anything you miss?” Well, there is the salad dressing! One of my favourite culinary concoctions in California was Marie's® Blue Cheese salad dressing. It is now available throughout the U.S., but not in Europe, and I have found no vaguely comparable product on the market here. So, it's time to roll up our sleeves and engage in a little high-fat, high-calorie, thick and creamy reverse engineering! This document starts with the list of ingredients in the original and iteratively develops a simple to prepare substitute which I find perfectly satisfactory. Readers with well-calibrated palates and access to the commercial goop for comparison taste-testing are invited to further tweak this Open Sauce recipe and share their discoveries. New September 2007 update presents results from comparison tasting with the Real Thing and provides two new recipes which attempt to converge upon the flavour of the original.

FourmiPharm: Dietary Supplements to Combat Aging

Humans are omnivores and can eat a wide variety of food. However, modern diets which include refined and processed foods and too few fresh fruits and vegetables may result in shortages of “micro-nutrients” which can increase the probability of contracting a variety of diseases, reduce longevity, and impair mental and physical performance. This document presents the dietary supplements I have selected to avoid such problems. Every individual is different, and no single supplement plan is appropriate for everybody, so think of this list as a starting point for your own research into the topic.