Saying "Hi" to Breakfast, Part II

Yesterday I began looking at what it was I was eating for breakfast.  I learned a bit about the USDA grading of eggs, and about the Colorado Proud logo on the egg carton.  I also had an interesting experience with respect to the old eggs.  Later in the day, I found a wikipedia article stating that old (floating) eggs should not be eaten because the enlarged air cell inside the egg is a result of bacterial activity.  I feel fine after eating the three eggs yesterday, but would rather not take my chances eating more bacteria (and their waste) than I have to.

Moving on to the next item in my breakfast, I had a piece of German rye bread with "Country Crock Shedd's Spread" and avocado, shown below:

I was introduced to German bread during my week visiting Berlin in early December.

So, let's check out the ingredient list for German "Whole Rye Bread" and see which ingredients I know and which are strangers.

Ingredients: whole kernel rye, water, wholemeal rye flour, salt, oat fiber, yeast.  This looks like a pretty simple ingredient list; 6 items and no names requiring a PhD in chemistry to understand.

Whole kernel rye and wholemeal rye flour both come from rye grain with various amounts of grinding, crushing, or other mechanical manipulation.  Water and salt, like them or not, are what they are.

Oat fiber is made from oat hulls, which are separated from the groats by centripetal acceleration (the hulls and groats are dropped onto a spinning surface, where the less dense hulls are separated from the more dense groats).  That sounds pretty cool, and a form of food processing that seems reasonably harmless to me.

Finally, yeast is a eukaryotic micro-organism from the Fungi kingdom that is commonly used as a leavening agent in bread.  From the wikipedia article, the 1,500 known species of yeast (as of 2006) were thought to be only 1% of the total existing species of yeast.  In addition to being used for baking and alcohol production, yeast are used for bioremediation and industrial ethanol production.

A little bit of reading on wikipedia revealed that most rye is grown in the European Union and consumed locally.  So, the rye in my bread was most likely grown in Germany, where the bread was produced.  Germany is the world's 3rd largest producer of rye, behind Russia and Poland.

The bread package declaires it contains no preservatives and no wheat.  Rye, though, is a close relative to wheat.  They are so close that the species can interbreed.  Whoa, interesting!

In reading about rye bread, I found another term which I had heard of before but not yet taken the time to understand: glycemic index.  The glycemic index of a food is a unitless ratio of two integrals.  Thinking back to high school calculus, an integral gives us the area under a curve.  In the case of glycemic index, the curve is a relationship of blood glucose versus time for a two hour duration, for a fixed amount of digestible carbohydrate.  This curve (and the corresponding area underneath the curve for a two hour duration) tells us something about the body's response ingesting a given carbohydrate.

Earlier I said the glycemic index is a ratio of two integrals.  The numerator of the ratio is the integral of the blood glucose response for the food in question, while the denominator is the integral for a control carbohydrate source (either pure glucose or white bread).  When glucose is used as the control carbohydrate, the ratio gives a value between 0 and 1.  The ratio is multiplied by 100, such that glycemic index values range from 0 to 100 when glucose is used as the control carbohydrate.  Using glycemic index with white bread as the control value can lead to ambiguity because there is no uniform definition for white bread, so the GI values can vary depending on the type of bread used.

Whole Rye Bread has a glycemic index in the mid to high-50's, which means it is a Medium GI food according to the wikipedia article on glycemic index.

Saying "Hi" to Breakfast

The other day, I was talking with some friends over at Boulder Indoor Cycling who expressed some concern that I wouldn't have anything to write about in my blog now that my UK and European adventures are over.  To that, I say, "Not so!"  I run into interesting things to look at, ponder, enjoy, and share all the time.

Magnetic metal balls are fun to play around with at tea time.

For instance, in December I went for tea at my friend Rob's new house in Redwood City, CA.  For Christmas, he received a toy that would tickle the fancy of any engineer.  The ball-bearing sized magnetic toys pictured above can be arranged into all kinds of interesting 3-d geometries.  In addition to making hexagons, I also arranged a string of them to make the outline of a whale.  Then I added a single string to turn the generic whale into a narwhal.

Changing topic a bit...

A little over a year ago, I joined Crossfit Roots, a Crossfit affiliate here in Boulder, CO.  In addition to teaching me how to maintain good form while lifting heavy stuff, skip double-unders, and do handstands, they are also a veritable treasure trove of information about nutrition.  Crossfit emphasizes the idea that nutrition is the basis for any kind of human performance.  As we like to say in engineering: garbage in, garbage out.

One of my resolutions for 2011 is to be more aware of what I eat. So, I thought that on this snowy Sunday morning, I would educate myself a bit about what I am eating and share it with anyone who cares to continue reading.

For breakfast today, I had the following:
3 hard-boiled eggs
Two slices of German rye bread with "Country Crock Shedd's Spread" and avocado
A grapefruit
2 Clementine oranges
Two cups of black tea
Two glasses of water

So, what do I know about these things already?  Eggs come from chickens, which in turn come from eggs.  This could get messy...  German rye bread is baked by Germans from rye grain flower, probably with some salt, sugar, and preservatives.  Country Crock Shedd's Spread said something on the container about being 40% vegetable oil.  Beyond that, I'd guess there is some salt and preservatives (based on the fact that the container is months, if not years, old) but I have no idea what else might be lurking in there.  Avocados grow on trees in southern California, among other places.  I'm pretty sure Colorado is too cold for avocado growing, but I'll find out more about that later.  Grapefruits and oranges grow on trees too, but I'm pretty sure also not here in Colorado.  Tea is made from submerging ground up tea leaves in boiling water.  The water comes from snow that falls in the Rocky Mountains, by way of the Boulder reservoir and the kitchen sink, and I think the tea leaves come from trees that grow in tropical climates like India, Asia, and Africa, but I'll have to look into that to be 100% sure.

For today, I'm going to learn something about the eggs...

I purchased the eggs came from King Soopers, the local supermarket down the street from where I live.  The carton bears "USDA Grade AA" and "Colorado Proud" markings.  From the USDA website, the USDA Grade AA marking means the eggs meet various standards for how the eggs are handled after exiting the chickens and that the eggs meet various aesthetic standards with respect to the shells, whites, and yokes.  It says nothing about how the chickens are treated, fed, or medicated.  That means (maybe?) the chickens could be raised on a diet of corn and ground-up chicken brains (yikes!), regularly injected with all sorts of chemicals, and perhaps waterboarded daily (ok, that's not very nice, likely, or economical).  "USDA Grade AA" doesn't say anything about the eggs' environment before being laid.

How about the Colorado Proud logo?  According to the Colorado Department of Agriculture, the Colorado Proud logo means the food is "Better for you.  Better for Colorado."  Or more specifically, it means it is grown, raised, and/or processed here in Colorado.  I like the sound of local growing, raising, and/or processing, but it still doesn't say anything about how the chickens are fed and treated before the eggs are laid.  In other words, it says something about the geography or the "where" of the food chain, but no specifics about the "whys" or "hows" in said food chain.  I have some more homework to do here to better understand my eggs. 

12 eggs were old, 6 were new.  Can you tell which were which?

This morning I hard-boiled 18 eggs.  12 of them came from an old carton (late September, before I took off for my multi-month adventures) and the other 6 from a new carton I bought on Friday.  Upon filling the pot with water, I immediately noticed that the 12 old eggs floated while the 6 new eggs remained on the bottom.  A little bit of searching on the web indicates this is normal.  The air pocket in each egg enlarges as the egg ages, through some combination of air seeping in through the shell, water seeping out, and gases from bacteria building up inside the shell.  I didn't know that before.  Cool!

At any rate, while some folks on the internet advise against using old eggs.  I don't automatically believe everything I read on the internet (someone wrote that old eggs float so that they won't drown) and am against wasting food, so figured I would boil all these eggs anyway and find out for myself if they are acceptably good or not.

One of the eggs had a hairline crack that I failed to notice before boiling.

After boiling the eggs, I noticed that one (pictured above) had escaped through a hairline crack in the shell.  This was one of the old eggs from late-September.  It looked pretty weird, but smelled fine, so I gave it a go.  It tasted just like any other egg, but had a softer (almost fluffy) texture, after being squeezed through the tiny crack in the shell.  Bits of the white became detached from that egg while the boiling, and ended up resembling little pieces of Styrofoam in the pot.  They were perfectly edible, and tasted just like hardboiled whites from any other egg.


After eating the portion of the egg that had evacuated the shell, I cracked open the shell and found it was mostly full of water and there was no egg white or yoke material left inside at all.  Interesting!

The next two eggs were from the late-September carton, but also seemed fine when I ate them.  Check back in a couple days to make sure my opinion hasn't changed...

Next time, I'll learn about some of the German rye bread.

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year everyone!

Since the last posting, I've done a handful of fun things, a subset of which, in no particular order are:
-Watched the new Tron movie
-Hung out with friends at the Dutch Goose and in San Francisco
-Built up a new computer
-Had a small jump rope disaster/incident

The new Tron movie didn't make much sense from a technical standpoint, but that's not the point of the movie, right?  My main question after watching the movie is, since all the bad guys had yellow, orange, or red glowing lines on their clothes, why didn't the protagonists use some camouflage instead of decorating their clothes with white glowing lines?  Perhaps wearing red, yellow, or orange glowing lines could have allowed them to avoid the confrontations and violence with the "bad guys".  Oh well, that might have made for a rather uninteresting story...

What trip to the bay area would be complete without a journey to the Dutch Goose for some beers with my high school friends?  I think the short answer is: none.  That's why I've made it over to the Goose pretty much every time I've been back since 2000.

Around Christmas, I decided to build up a new computer.  This is an endeavor I have not tried in earnest since about 2002.  It turned out well, though, as I now have a small form-factor PC running Ubuntu Linux that should consume less than 30 watts of power (the 20" monitor, with snazzy LED back-lighting consumes about 25-watts, which I am not counting in the sub-30-watt power requirement for the PC).  I should have a real measurement of the power consumption sometime this coming week.  Anyway, new PCs are always exciting and so far this one fits the bill.

On Sunday afternoon, my parents and I were out in front of the house.  My mom was doing yard work and my dad and I were getting ready to make a trip to the electronics store.  I took out my old beaded jump rope and started doing some skips.  Then, I started doing double-unders, where the jump rope takes two trips around for each jump I do.  After about three double-unders, the rope broke, and beads went flying all over the street.  We did our best to clean them up, and I think we picked up most of them.  The aftermath is shown below.

A rope break while doing double-unders with a beaded rope makes for an exciting moment as beads fly everywhere!