Good morning, everybody. Christmas is a busy time for me. Not with work or anything like that, but with family. With the important occupation of doing nothing productive save for enjoying your time with loved ones and simply being. So this will be a relatively quick Sunday with Sisson. I'm going to go over something I've been thinking about and trying, which you might find interesting. Stearic acid. I linked to the Croissant Diet blog post a few weeks ago. It was written by a man who's managed to drop some weight that wasn't coming off with keto by taking an unconventional approach: eating homemade croissants made with special stearic acid-spiked butter oil. As he puts it, these croissants are so filling that he often can't eat anything else. In the past, I've written about stearic acid. It's one of the saturated fats that has little to no effect on cholesterol. If anything it boosts HDL. It's one of the "good ones." Dietary stearic acid appears to cause "fusing" of our mitochondria—the power plants of our cells—and increase fatty acid oxidation. In other words, it's a potent boost to our ability to generate energy. That's a wholly good thing. I'll write more on this topic in the future as I give it more thought, but for now, here's how I've been experimenting with added stearic acid. I've been eating a lot of chocolate. One of the best sources of stearic acid is cocoa butter. I don't like straight cocoa butter by itself or as a cooking fat. I do, however, love dark chocolate, which is primarily cocoa butter. So, here's how I've been doing coffee for the past week. About half a bar of super dark chocolate (85% or greater cacao content), broken up into shards. Drop that in a pot with a couple tablespoons of heavy cream. Nest that pot in a larger pot with boiling water. Stir until the cream and chocolate are thoroughly mixed to form a bitter, cocoa-rich ganache. Add the ganache to your coffee. Drink. I'm not trying to lose weight. I'm simply curious about the effects of consuming a lot of stearic acid in whole food form. And I can say that this stuff is filling. I'll often wait until dinner to eat simply because I'm not one to force myself to eat if I'm not hungry. I passed the recipe onto a friend of mine, who reports the same thing. He's having trouble eating before dinner after drinking the ganache coffee. Give it a try and tell me what you think in this week's Weekly Link Love. It also happens to work great as a Christmas drink. Take care, everyone. Thanks for reading today. Enjoy your holidays. Best, |