Celebrate Life with Real Food
Teetering and sipping his sixth Eggnog, Uncle Jimmy slurred, “Isn’t life glorious? I’m so ‘bleshed’ to be alive to share this-hiccup-special day with my loving family”, as he and his Chicken Liver Rumaki ingloriously kerploped into a heap on the gift- wrap strewn floor.
Do you brawl with nutritional self-control? Who doesn’t during the holidays? We’re human. Do you have heart disease, diabetes, Crohn’s, RA, cancer or superfluous tonnage? Consider the grand-daddy of ironies; we celebrate meaningful life events by eating poor quality foods which slowly sabotage the privilege of pure health.
By now readers of this column are privy to valid scientific research signifying the most common ingredients humans worship; sugar, AP flour, animal fat, butter, kayo, cream, cheese and salt, are literally addictive. Yep, just like crack. Eating noxious, factory-refined foods stimulate the holy temple to produce the opiate Dopamine, the feel-good drug. Combine with addictive coffee, soft drinks, cigarettes, alcohol and pharmaceutical drugs, clearly we’re been molded, not by choice, into dead-food junkies. It’s not your fault, however. You simple trusted Betty Crocker and Ronald McDonald to be responsible. We can take down the ethically malnourished, out-of-touch corporate Fat Cats by ignoring their products. They don’t own you. Impractical and idealistic? Time has come today to challenge the twisted paradigm of factory produced food and to rejoice in our gift of life by returning to a more natural, preordained, non-suicidal, wholesome and sustainable way of eating and living. There are too many largely preventable chronic diseases here in America. Responsible scientists tell us these Post Industrial Revolution diseases are created by bogus, man-made food-like substances; main-stream brand name foods we consider our best buddies. Think before you eat. Carefully reflect upon your health-enhancing efforts thus far; remember eating consciously now yields handsome dividends as you age.
There are many ways to be a good steward of your temple. Avoid plastic food. In 2010, focus on foods of plant origin. Fruits, vegetables, beans, legumes, grains, nuts and seeds are not only good for you but their production requires fewer earthly resources. Selecting nutrient-rich living foods maximized healing nutrition and makes your food dollars count. Fat, sugar, high-fructose corn syrup, MSG, food colorings and salt-laden choices take up much shelf-space in today's supermarkets. Spending on whole food rather than excessive processing and packaging is smart money.
Think globally, eat locally. Every dollar spent on local foods is an investment in local agriculture and farmers. Keeping land in agriculture helps assure food security for future generations.
Reduce "food mile" intake. The mileage on your dinner plate represents fossil fuels burned and carbon dioxide emitted. Long distance food and beverage distribution means wear and tear on vehicles and infrastructure, eventually requiring dwindling natural resources to restore.
Spice up your kitchen with local products. Change the family your diet from season to season according to what’s available from local farms. Tender greens, asparagus, and new potatoes in spring provide delicious prelude to a cornucopia of summer fruits and vegetables. Fall heralds in an abundant harvest of hearty roots, apples, pears and gourds that store well.
Go old school. Buy just what you will eat and don't squander food. When cooking in larger batches, freeze half. Ninety-Eight Million pounds of good food gets tossed out into the trash each year. That represents 44 billion dollars. We can do better.
Yes, I’m besmirching decades of hallowed American eating traditions, however, there comes a time one must ask oneself, especially if you’re chronically ill, “Gee, how’s that working out for ya?”
Happy New You!
.
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
Monday, December 14, 2009
Slim Fast Skullduggery
If you’re snug and comfy with malnutrition and tossin’ your cookies, sugary Slim-Fast, the expensive glucose-laden, nutritionally bogus milk supplement is for you. Actually, take it back to the store ASAP.
Ten million cans of Slim-Fast are currently on recall due to the presence of Bacillus cereus, a common, soil-dwelling bacteria scuba-diving inside the cans.The cause: human oversight. Bacillus cereus is the only living ingredient in Slim-Fast’s otherwise palled, dead ingredients which have been pasteurized, processed, tweaked, refined and cooked, void of any redeeming virtues. Any drink touted as a weight-loss tool made chiefly from processed, refined sugar-water and milk should be prohibited from being sold. Slim Fast’s careful not to make specific claims of weight loss, but the beverages are clearly marketed as a weight-loss tool. Apparently they deem Americans badly informed and gullible.
Big Food’s marketing behaviorists subliminally train Americans to lust for convenience, the IED-embedded path to healthiness. The Slim-Fast diet plan is mind-numbingly simple. Open a can and drink it, “…and we pray to the money gods you don’t have the awareness to decode the ingredient label.” The four main ingredients of the junk-food beverage are skim milk, sugar, fructose and cocoa. Further ingredients include various vegetable oils, emulsifiers and a worthless stew of pharmaceutical synthetic vitamins our cells don’t comprehend. Artificial vitamins, cheaply manufactured and peddled in supermarket pharmacies, lack the essential molecular structure of the absorbable cold-processed food versions (Usana is #1) and are ineffectual and unlikely to improve the body’s cells; hence the idiom “Dead Food.” Because it’s sold in a can, the vessel’s internal lining is likely loaded with plastics containing Bispheol-A (BPA). Research links BPA in canned foods to infertility, prostate and breast cancer. What a mess.
If you honestly want to lose weight properly and become more energetic, beautiful and healthy, focus on calories-in versus calories-burned. However, this means the quality of your food choices become vitally important. It’s not rocket science that most contemporary chronic disease would vanish if Americans ate preordained, healthy whole foods from the generous Cosmic Apothecary.
However, humans diminish the quality factor of calories choosing artificial flavor and instant gratification over nourishment. Staying healthy requires nutritional literacy, effort and possibly sacrificing one of your favorite dead foods for a living version.
You’ve got a potentially explosive predicament when attempting to lose extra chunk in the trunk with this depraved liquid nonsense. Eat less; focus on fresh, pure and clean foods and drinks; exercise and say farewell to short-term Snake Oil. You’re smarter than that. Evoke the “if it sounds too good to be true” rule.
The truth can be ugly and elusive. I express regret for pooping in your cereal, but there are no weight-loss miracles. With nutritional literacy you won’t need Big Food manipulating your health equity or waist-line.
Ten million cans of Slim-Fast are currently on recall due to the presence of Bacillus cereus, a common, soil-dwelling bacteria scuba-diving inside the cans.The cause: human oversight. Bacillus cereus is the only living ingredient in Slim-Fast’s otherwise palled, dead ingredients which have been pasteurized, processed, tweaked, refined and cooked, void of any redeeming virtues. Any drink touted as a weight-loss tool made chiefly from processed, refined sugar-water and milk should be prohibited from being sold. Slim Fast’s careful not to make specific claims of weight loss, but the beverages are clearly marketed as a weight-loss tool. Apparently they deem Americans badly informed and gullible.
Big Food’s marketing behaviorists subliminally train Americans to lust for convenience, the IED-embedded path to healthiness. The Slim-Fast diet plan is mind-numbingly simple. Open a can and drink it, “…and we pray to the money gods you don’t have the awareness to decode the ingredient label.” The four main ingredients of the junk-food beverage are skim milk, sugar, fructose and cocoa. Further ingredients include various vegetable oils, emulsifiers and a worthless stew of pharmaceutical synthetic vitamins our cells don’t comprehend. Artificial vitamins, cheaply manufactured and peddled in supermarket pharmacies, lack the essential molecular structure of the absorbable cold-processed food versions (Usana is #1) and are ineffectual and unlikely to improve the body’s cells; hence the idiom “Dead Food.” Because it’s sold in a can, the vessel’s internal lining is likely loaded with plastics containing Bispheol-A (BPA). Research links BPA in canned foods to infertility, prostate and breast cancer. What a mess.
If you honestly want to lose weight properly and become more energetic, beautiful and healthy, focus on calories-in versus calories-burned. However, this means the quality of your food choices become vitally important. It’s not rocket science that most contemporary chronic disease would vanish if Americans ate preordained, healthy whole foods from the generous Cosmic Apothecary.
However, humans diminish the quality factor of calories choosing artificial flavor and instant gratification over nourishment. Staying healthy requires nutritional literacy, effort and possibly sacrificing one of your favorite dead foods for a living version.
You’ve got a potentially explosive predicament when attempting to lose extra chunk in the trunk with this depraved liquid nonsense. Eat less; focus on fresh, pure and clean foods and drinks; exercise and say farewell to short-term Snake Oil. You’re smarter than that. Evoke the “if it sounds too good to be true” rule.
The truth can be ugly and elusive. I express regret for pooping in your cereal, but there are no weight-loss miracles. With nutritional literacy you won’t need Big Food manipulating your health equity or waist-line.
Friday, December 4, 2009
Fiber: Roto Rooter of the Digestive Tract
My friends take delight when Sandi and I cook holiday dinners for them. Although, more than once, I’ve received a next-day thank-you call accompanied with the observation, “Wow, dinner was great, but things came out of me this morning that I ate when I was 6.” TMI!
The point being, their diet was so deficient in fiber, when it was introduced the colon did what comes naturally: Peristalsis. Now that the holidays have arrived, human nature diverts from the road of nutritional righteousness. This season, evade disease and extra tonnage by decorating your bowls and bowels of sugar plums with more fiber. Let me explain.
Your inner ecology is a labyrinth of pipes. Like all pipes and fixtures, keeping the distance between point A and point B in good shape requires, if you’ll excuse the disturbing visual, a plumbers snake. Maintenance. To stay healthy and active, everyone needs to keep the colon rolling along like White River in the spring. The human body is truly remarkable, but it has limits. Growing up, we were taught our innards could handle whatever we fed it. I’ve learned, however, our temple simply cannot handle the types and amounts of meats and processed plastic foods we feed it without traumatizing the colon — the largest organ, which houses 80 percent of the immune system.
Due to a lack of fibrous foods containing soluble and insoluble fiber, meals take forever to exit, setting up a deadly milieu. Most fiber-less folks carry about 10 meals backed up; fermenting, stewing and releasing methane while brewing toxins inside the dark sanctity of the holy temple. The average fiber-less American has roughly 10 to 15 pounds of concentrated poo and undigested food seething in the bowel. Beginning to grasp the odoriferous implication of a fiber-less diet?
Elvis Presley died of a heart attack and a drug overdose whilst sitting upon his throne, but he still made it onto a stamp. Elvis’ fiber-less diet included mashed taters and gravy, unctuous meats, gobs of bacon, sausage gravy, fried anything-that-moved and sweet potato cream cheese pie. Macho? I think not. It takes much more courage to eat a fibrous, nutritionally dense vegetable. During his autopsy doctors made a startling discovery: The King’s colon weighed close to 60 pounds! The average human colon weighs around four pounds. Thankyouverymuch!
I hesitate haranguing your tastes in food, but the average 50 year old meat-eater has up to eight pounds of indigestible food in their bowels. This decaying food is the common cause of what many people mistakenly think of as the “price of good living” — soaring rates of colon and pancreatic cancers by the age of 50 or 60. How charming.
Humans wouldn’t require such snaking if they’d regularly include fresh fruits and vegetables, nuts, seeds, beans, ground flax seed, quinoa, steel-cut oats, wheat germ, rice bran or oat bran in their dally edibles. If you’re fraught with holiday constipation and resort to Ex-Lax, a toxin which artificially stimulates your digestive tract to release a log jam, be sure it’s not the same night you take a sleeping pill. Enough said.
The point being, their diet was so deficient in fiber, when it was introduced the colon did what comes naturally: Peristalsis. Now that the holidays have arrived, human nature diverts from the road of nutritional righteousness. This season, evade disease and extra tonnage by decorating your bowls and bowels of sugar plums with more fiber. Let me explain.
Your inner ecology is a labyrinth of pipes. Like all pipes and fixtures, keeping the distance between point A and point B in good shape requires, if you’ll excuse the disturbing visual, a plumbers snake. Maintenance. To stay healthy and active, everyone needs to keep the colon rolling along like White River in the spring. The human body is truly remarkable, but it has limits. Growing up, we were taught our innards could handle whatever we fed it. I’ve learned, however, our temple simply cannot handle the types and amounts of meats and processed plastic foods we feed it without traumatizing the colon — the largest organ, which houses 80 percent of the immune system.
Due to a lack of fibrous foods containing soluble and insoluble fiber, meals take forever to exit, setting up a deadly milieu. Most fiber-less folks carry about 10 meals backed up; fermenting, stewing and releasing methane while brewing toxins inside the dark sanctity of the holy temple. The average fiber-less American has roughly 10 to 15 pounds of concentrated poo and undigested food seething in the bowel. Beginning to grasp the odoriferous implication of a fiber-less diet?
Elvis Presley died of a heart attack and a drug overdose whilst sitting upon his throne, but he still made it onto a stamp. Elvis’ fiber-less diet included mashed taters and gravy, unctuous meats, gobs of bacon, sausage gravy, fried anything-that-moved and sweet potato cream cheese pie. Macho? I think not. It takes much more courage to eat a fibrous, nutritionally dense vegetable. During his autopsy doctors made a startling discovery: The King’s colon weighed close to 60 pounds! The average human colon weighs around four pounds. Thankyouverymuch!
I hesitate haranguing your tastes in food, but the average 50 year old meat-eater has up to eight pounds of indigestible food in their bowels. This decaying food is the common cause of what many people mistakenly think of as the “price of good living” — soaring rates of colon and pancreatic cancers by the age of 50 or 60. How charming.
Humans wouldn’t require such snaking if they’d regularly include fresh fruits and vegetables, nuts, seeds, beans, ground flax seed, quinoa, steel-cut oats, wheat germ, rice bran or oat bran in their dally edibles. If you’re fraught with holiday constipation and resort to Ex-Lax, a toxin which artificially stimulates your digestive tract to release a log jam, be sure it’s not the same night you take a sleeping pill. Enough said.
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