Real Food for Real 'Patriotic' People

God bless America, let the healing begin! Finally the first governmental admission the red, white, and blue American diet is, one bite at a time, making us chronically ill and chubby, eroding the foundation of a great nation’s health.

For decades it’s been going in one ear and out the other, but our US Army who historically marches on its stomach recently determined creating quality recruits starts at the chow line with real, honest-to-goodness, genuine food. They’re presently training soldiers to make healthier, fresher food choices, since the foods soldiers were taught to eat the last eight decades sabotaged their health preventing them from being the best they could be. This too applies to the Esprit de Corp and health of aging veterans throughout life’s tour of duty.

What’s placed into the temple affects everything significant to American society: health, happiness, employment, productivity, education, and freedom. Fueled by a fixed diet of industrial rubbish, more turn to violent crime, bullyism runs amok and good folks are defenseless to health skirmishes. Fox holed with disease rates, education failures, and morally unacceptable health care costs bankrupting families, America’s life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness plummets.

Standard, meat-heavy American food fare lacks fiber and bogs down digestion causing constipation and flatulence, impeding bowel evacuation. Food additives like gluten, dairy and corn lead to allergies and fire-fights of flatulence. Toxic compounds entering your temple through factory feedlot animal husbandry and devitalized, processed grains hinder weight loss and increase the foe of inflammation, the cause of 70% of America’s diseases. Today, supermarket corn-fed meats are treated with carbon monoxide; not your grandpa’s happy, grass-fed cattle. When the temple can’t purge toxic waste through bowel movements, it rids food toxins through stinky pits and foul breath.

Courageous US troops are saying hello to fresh produce, granola, yogurt, beans, whole grains, guacamole and salsa and saying ‘hasta la vista, baby’ to unctuous biscuits and sausage gravy, cheese burgers with fries, white bread, and sugary beverages gurgling through their veins and arteries. While these foods titillate taste buds, they are IED’s to intellectual and physical health. In America 5000 die and 350,000 citizens become hospitalized, causalities of the American diet of, well, death. A diet allied to rapid aging, cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, obesity, diabetes, leaving troupes defenseless to invading disease. In the 20-year CARDIA study, researcher’s tracked habits of 5,000 healthy adults living in four American cities and found everyday fast-food consumption was directly associated with changes in body weight and insulin resistance, a warning sign for type 2 diabetes. You might feel stimulated after sugary, fat-laden fast-food breakfasts, but when your blood sugar crashes later, both your brain and your body will have trouble marching in step. American seniors suffer too many sick days wasting away in bed, an inability to focus, failure to learn, and lack creativeness. More than an inactive lifestyle, smoking, and consuming booze, processed and canned foods are un-friendly interlopers to human health.

Clearly no one deserves being attacked by the low-grade foods we’ve been trained to consume. If patriotic Americans don't speak up and demand immediate, honest, changes to Big Food’s scruples and fraudulent food propaganda, we won't survive. America will fall, brought down by the consequences of a nutritionally deficient, chronically diseased population. It’s not easy shifting hard-wired eating traditions. The University Of Minnesota School Of Public Health says the typical American repast preys on man’s primordial fondness for fats, salts, and sugar.

A friend with serious heart disease, a battle of the bulge, and no colon due to cancer, still opts to eat, “…by golly, what I dam well please. I fought in two wars so I could have free choice”. In these battle-worn cases, wave the white flag then love them with all your heart because you cannot change the mind-set of, “You gotta die from somethin’.” Or, get real and be part of the solution.

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Rum Balls and Christmas Memories

“Aw, pleeeese, just one?” we’d beg in unity.

“You kids stay out of the Christmas cookie tins till Christmas Eve”, Mom would chide, “or else, Santa won’t come”; the annual holiday admonition that falls upon deaf ears.

I remember the infinite variety of colorful holiday cookies prepared my Mom and her sisters in preparation of the joyous Holidays. Aunt Anna Faye excelled with her chocolate chip cookies, Mom, her fudge, and Aunt Bernie traditionally made Rum or Bourbon Balls, which, in particular, was an anomaly considering our teetotaler Christian fundamentalist family was taught if liquor touched thy lips, ye went straight to a blazing Hell riding the razor blade o’ eternal damnation. Odd considering Bourbon whiskey was invented in the late eighteenth century by Baptist minister Elijah Craig from Scott County, Kentucky.

Aunt Bernie’s ‘Demon’ Rum Balls were secreted in the cupboards high above the humming refrigerator. Well, we all have learned when you forbid a youngster to do a certain something; it instantly makes them desire it that much more. So, cousins and siblings teamed up, clandestinely scaled the countertops, found the tin of Rum Balls sequestered behind the cans of jellied cranberries, grinning at each other in satisfaction, we eagerly quenched our youthful curiosity by sampling three or four and proceeded to cop our first buzz; pleasantly blotto. I’ll forever remember the explosive mouth-burn of my first contact to alcohol, then feeling the liquor glide warmly down my esophagus into my belly. Whoa! I now understand why everyone took naps after their giggle-filled baking event that always ended up with the sisters robustly harmonizing upbeat, classic holiday carols. When cooking with liquor, remember the phrase, “Too many cooks spoil the broth”? Well, too much broth can spoil the cook, if you smell what I’m cooking; a little in the cookies, a snort for you.

Know what I’d like for Christmas? For everyone to keep their money, pay their bills, sit down together to enjoy a modest, wholesome meal and enjoy being part of a family. I want people to refuse manipulation by emotionally tinged commercials and midnight sales. I want people to put aside greed and status seeking, and the covetous adoration of materialism. Instead, I wish everyone would give each other hugs and be thankful for what they have.

Christmas, when the world falls in love, is about giving, so I’m sharing my recipe for Rum Balls. This no bake dessert’s alcohol content can be pretty raw and strong. If you do not want to use rum, use rum extract to taste. I learned the hard way one unfortunate Christmas not to serve Rum Balls if you have a recovering alcoholic in the house. Lesson learned.

Holiday Rum Balls

In this simple, traditional, not cook recipe, I use almond flour which is nothing more than almonds processed in your food processor or coffee grinder. It can be found at all whole foods grocers including Kroger. Kroger also carries a healthier version of Vanilla Cookies if you cannot use almond flour.

(Pssst! Don’t mention they’re healthy)

2 cups fine vanilla wafer crumbs or Almond flour (Kroger has a brand of vanilla cookies without all the sugar and trans fats)

1 ½ cups confectioners’ sugar

2 tbs. cocoa powder

½ cup walnuts, chopped fine (Omega 3 EFA’s)

3 tbs. ground flax seeds (Fiber and Omega 3’s)

¼ cup plus 1 tbs. dark rum

¼ cup Brown Rice Syrup (Low Carb)

2 tbs. organic butter, melted or Smart Balance

• In a large bowl combine the wafer crumbs or almond flour, ½ the sugar, walnuts, flax, rum, rice syrup, melted butter and knead together.

• Roll into 1 inch balls and then roll the around in the ½ cup of remaining sugar and all the cocoa powder till coated

• Arrange the balls on a baking sheet, cover well, and let set for 48 hours @ air temperature.

The Christmas Paradox-Gluttony is the Norm

Christmas season kindles treasured childhood reminiscence. Oozy feelings of undiluted love as I snuggled on the couch, enveloped in Mom’s heirloom afghan, suffused in the primal, amber-red glow of crackling timber, captivated by surreal, multi-hued petite lights, silvery tensile, and the scent of pine commingling with the aroma of freshly baked holiday goodies. My body tingled anticipating the arrival of jolly friends and family strung together like treasured holiday ornaments, decorating the house with delicious affection and joy, everyone eager for the Grandma’s prayer kicking off the abundant holiday dinner.

These ephemeral visions conjure humorous post-dinner negotiation for the Barcalounger, men folk napping, snoring with one eye open while watching the Detroit Lions, and the women folk ‘wired’ on caffeine and sugar, speed-talking as their tongues smoldered and swelled. Finally, there was the belt loosening competition, and subsequent bathroom marathon. “Hey, what are you readin’in there, War and Peace?”

With each family’s arrival, the 16 foot buffet table proliferated with time-honored foods like mashed potatoes oozing with heavy cream and butter, baked ham, roasted chicken, barn animal gravy, deviled eggs, sweet ‘taters feloniously assaulted with sugar and marshmallows, broccoli casserole with dried onion rings, green beans simmered hours with pork knuckles, psychedelic gelatin salads, yeast rolls with butter, cheese balls, pecan pies, cookies, candies, and, well the list is infinite, however, fresh vegetables were uninvited. Reflecting, I can’t recall anything resembling true nourishment. Actually everything was deliciously unhealthful, however we’ve become numbly oblivious these foods, in the end, like a rock star trashing a hotel room, trash our holy temple; Jesus’ abode. Happy Birthday!

I’m not trying to plop reindeer droppings into your Egg Nog, however, knowing your Holy Temple is God's earthly dwelling place, do you maintain an irreverent, slap-dash, careless, lackadaisical, "I am too busy to consider cooking healthier” attitude? Or might you consider being a more reverential steward this joyous season? Research reveals holiday food traditions damage the Temple, but we’ve blurred the notion food has nothing to do with poor health and that disease a just part of aging; God’s will. At 40, we’re considered old and ripe for late life disease.
Food has everything to do with personal stewardship and mental acuity. While celebrating Christ’s birth, our culture considers over-eating normal. Christians nowadays have forgotten they were charged at birth with the responsibility of stewarding their temple; God’s greatest creation, the only true home you’ll ever have. I refer to Corinthians 3:16 & 17. ‘Do you not understand that you are God’s temple, and that God’s Spirit has His permanent dwelling in you? If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy him. For the temple of God is holy and sacred to Him; and so you, as His temple, are also holy’. Verily I sayeth that’s severeth, but it’s in the Good Book. Just like coveting and gluttony, we’ve selectively censored heavenly commands.

Behold, I bring you tidings of great joy! By replacing head hunger with the will of God ‘yule’ transfer the urge for foods that cause heart disease, diabetes, obesity, and cancer for hungering and thirsting for righteousness and nutritional literacy. His message of faith, love, and compassion will challenge us in our strength and comfort us in our human weakness for un-holy food.

Want to know what I want for Christmas; for everyone to keep their money, pay their bills, and sit down together to enjoy a modest, wholesome, home cooked meal and enjoy being part of a family. I want to see people refuse to be manipulated by emotionally tinged commercials and 2 hour only sales. I want people to put aside greed and status seeking, and the love of all things material. Instead, I wish everyone would give each other warm hugs and be thankful for what they’ve got. I’m confident personal stewardship would be the perfect birthday gift.
Merry Christmas and a healthy New Year!

The American Diet has Failed; Just Ask the US Army

God bless America, let the healing begin! Finally the first governmental admission the red, white, and blue American diet is, one bite at a time, making us chronically ill and chubby, eroding the foundation of a great nation’s health.

For decades it’s been going in one ear and out the other, but our US Army who historically marches on its stomach determined creating quality recruits starts at the chow line with real, honest-to-goodness, genuine food. They’re presently training soldiers to make healthier, fresher food choices, since the foods soldiers were taught to eat the last eight decades sabotaged their health preventing them from being the best they could be. This too applies to the Esprit de Corp and health of aging veterans throughout life’s tour of duty.

What’s placed into the temple affects everything significant to American society: health, happiness, employment, productivity, education, and freedom. Fueled by a fixed diet of industrial rubbish, more turn to violent crime, bullyism runs amok and good folks are defenseless to health skirmishes. Fox holed with disease rates, education failures, and morally unacceptable health care costs bankrupting families, America’s life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness plummets.

Standard, meat-heavy American food fare lacks fiber, bogging down digestion causing constipation and flatulence, impeding bowel evacuation. Food additives like gluten, dairy and corn, lead to fire-fights of flatulence. Toxic compounds entering your temple through factory feedlot animal husbandry and devitalized, processed grains hinder weight loss and increase the enemy of inflammation, the cause of 70% of America’s diseases. Got B.O.? When the temple cannot cleanse toxic waste through bowel movements, it rids food toxins through sweat glands and breath. Today, supermarket corn-fed meats are treated with carbon monoxide; not your grandpa’s happy, grass-fed cattle.

Courageous US troops are saying hello to fresh produce, granola, yogurt, beans, whole grains, guacamole and salsa and saying ‘hasta la vista, baby’ to unctuous biscuits and sausage gravy, cheese burgers with fries, white bread, and sugary beverages gurgling through their veins and arteries. While these foods titillate taste buds, they are IED’s to intellectual and physical health. In America 5000 die and 350,000 citizens become hospitalized, causalities of the American diet of, well, death. A diet allied to rapid aging, cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, obesity, diabetes, leaving troupes defenseless to invading disease. In the 20-year CARDIA study, researcher’s tracked habits of 5,000 healthy adults living in four American cities and found everyday fast-food consumption was directly associated with changes in body weight and insulin resistance, a warning sign for type 2 diabetes. You might feel stimulated after sugary, fat-laden fast-food breakfasts, but when your blood sugar crashes later, both your brain and your body will have trouble marching in step. American seniors suffer too many sick days wasting away in bed, an inability to focus, failure to learn, and lack creativeness. More than an inactive lifestyle, smoking, and consuming booze, processed and canned foods are un-friendly interlopers to human health.

Clearly no one deserves being attacked by the low-grade foods we’ve been trained to consume. If patriotic Americans don't speak up and demand immediate, honest, changes to Big Food’s scruples and fraudulent food propaganda, we won't survive. America will fall, brought down by the consequences of a nutritionally deficient, chronically diseased population. It’s not easy shifting hard-wired eating traditions. The University Of Minnesota School Of Public Health says the typical American repast preys on man’s primordial fondness for fats, salts, and sugar.

A friend with serious heart disease, a serious battle of the bulge, and no colon due to cancer, still opts to eat, “…by golly, what I dam well please. I fought in two wars so I could have free choice”. In these battle-worn cases, wave the white flag then love them with all your heart because you cannot change the mind-set of, “You gotta die from somethin’.” Or, get real and be part of the solution.

I’m Coo-Coo for Coconuts

A long time ago, when wisdom ruled, coconut oil was in just about in everything you ate. What misfortune, since today, malleable Americans robotically condemn coconut oil because they were ‘told’ it was a saturated fat associated with blocked arteries. The truth is unrefined, raw coconut oil, a medium-chain fatty acid, does not negatively affect blood cholesterol, but actually protects against heart disease and a constellation of Western diseases.

What I consider most creepy is, using fear, Big Food Jerkonians intentionally urged a gullible population to embrace sinister hydrogenated vegetable oil, aka Trans fats. Other than injecting lard or tallow into your veins, hydrogenated oils are the most health-damaging, vile, dietary oils created my man’s self-serving attempts to upstage God. This illustrates how corrupt leadership and greed for the proliferation of degenerative disease and the inept health care system has taken part in trashing a patriotic nation’s entitlement of good health. We are the innocent victims of their appalling decisions fueled by the love of money. Sigh… Being American does not guarantee longer years. In fact, the United States has dropped from 24th in the world for life expectancy in 1999 to 49th in 2010. Critics say our alleged, best-in-the-world, most costly health care is the primary cause.

Virgin, unrefined coconut oil found in some groceries and all community health food stores is one of earth’s most remarkable, healing gifts. Its delicious fatty acids are rapidly converted in to energy rather than wiggly fat. Refined coconut oil, on the other hand, is unhealthy due to processing. Unlike processed grocery vegetable oils, coconut oil does not form harmful by-products when heated to normal cooking temperature.

Modern medical science has revealed veiled secrets regarding coconut oils numerous medicinal applications. Where coconut is abundance, in the South Pacific, natives enjoy remarkably good health, free from aches, pains and any degenerative disease such as heart disease, cancer, diabetes and arthritis. Health benefits of creamy coconut oil include hair and skin care. I use it as a shave cream and Sandi says my face looks like a baby’s bottom, which I trust is flattering. The diverse oil can be used for stress relief, maintaining cholesterol levels, weight loss, increase immunity, pesky toe fungus, proper digestion and metabolism, relief from kidney problems, heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, HIV and cancer, dental care, and bone strength. Phew, the list is too long. This is all attributed to its lauric acid, capric acid, and caprylic acid and its antimicrobial, antioxidant, antifungal, antibacterial mojo. The only other source of lauric acids and medium-chain fatty acids in such concentrations is in sacred Mother’s Milk. Rich and creamy coconut milk is super nutritious and brims with fiber, vitamin C, folate, selenium, minerals, and electrolytes.

Called ‘the tree of life’, one-third of the planets inhabitants depend on coconut oil and milk for food. If coconut oil is so good, why have we vilified it? It is simple; money, politics, half truths, and misunderstanding. You see, according to Bruce Fife, author of, “The Coconut Miracle,” the soy bean industry carefully orchestrated a 1980’s smear campaign against the coconut oil industry to profit from on the public’s fear of saturated fats linked with heart disease. Immature rubbish in view of The Weston Price Foundation saying ‘unfermented’ soy contributes to thyroid disorder, especially in women, promotes kidney stones, weakens the immune system, and contributes to food allergies and digestive intolerances. Estrogen-like compounds in soy foods can lower sperm count according a Harvard School of Public Health at the 63rd Annual Meeting of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine. The report by Jorge Chavarro, MD, ScD, reinforce concerns that soy negatively affects male fertility and testosterone. Bummer!

Abandoning unhealthful lifestyles and reverting to real, natural foods helps reverse many Western diseases manifesting in our bodies through the highly refined, biased diet of our modern society. You can do it.

Macho Doesn't Mean Mucho: Man up dudes!

Shopping recently, I came upon a stressed and bewildered gal examining the shelves of the grocery healthy foods section as if was from another world. Looking at me with pleading eyes, she solicited, “Do you know anything about these foods?” Like a famished cat offered a bowl of milk, she eagerly accepted my help.

“Well, my fat, stubborn, macho, diabetic husband refuses to eat anything but potatoes, red meats, butter, bacon, beer, sugar, and white bread,” she carped, “He thinks corn and green beans are the only vegetables on earth. His doctor warned if he doesn’t alter his meat and potato diet, he’ll stroke out and prematurely meet his Maker! I’m genuinely frightened.”

As a motivational speaker, nutritional literacy educator, and researcher, I hear this lament far and wide. Macho Men are resistant to change within their stereotypical masculine diet. Consequentially, loving wives live uneasily with the grim prospect of losing partners and providers. Over the decades, most men have been brainwashed that meat three times a day is macho and vegetables were not..

For 16 years our catering firm fed every NBA team coming to play the Pacers. I remember early on when he was a immature rooky, Reggie Miller entering the chartered 727 with a box of Milky Way’s, Ding Dong’s, and a quart of Mountain Dew, aka, Country Cousin Champagne. Slumped, metabolizing, and sweaty, the players ridiculed our buffet of fresh veggies, real sliced turkey breast, humus, guacamole, and boiled shrimp. Rik Smits entered the plane after four grueling quarters defending the hoop, then, to restore his energy, would pick up five baby quiche, sucking them down like a hungry python in a bunny cage. Players laughed, calling it sissy food. “Hey, don’t kill the caterer!”

Sixteen years later, menus tightly controlled, these same thoroughbreds demanded fresh vegetables, fruits, lean cuts of poultry, beef tenderloin, pork loin instead of chops, grilled salmon fillets without heavy cream sauce, and gave up ordering fried foods. They put on their big-boy pants, became real men, and transcended crappy food, recognizing the more real foods and less artery-lining gelatinous goo they ate, their mental as well as physical on-court performance plus their impending trade value dramatically improved. By the 2000 playoffs with the Lakers there were three vegetarians on the Pacers. The Lakers had nine. These enlightened ‘macho’ players learned that next to procreation, breathing and sleeping, eating is the most important thing you do to sustain your Temple. They opened their minds and realized everything about their entire being was the result of their daily food choices. Without learning to intelligently select more real foods, they may have never reached mental or physical perfection as our creator generously planned for His creations.

In addition, eating more vegetables normalizes blood pressure and promotes cardiovascular health. A recent study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine reported a diet high in vegetables, fruits, nuts, and whole grains improved blood flow and prevented damage to the cells that line the arteries in a group of men with high cholesterol. Vegetables also improve blood flow, the top secret ingredient of a happy love life since a healthy vascular system is required to prevent the heartbreak of ED.

After my grocery buddy and I talked a bit you could see the lights go on and the stress drain from her pretty face. To my thinking, it takes a manly-man to embrace plant foods and a real diet rather than continuing to suck down self-destructive foods. I totally agree with Zsa Zsa Garbor, “Macho does not prove mucho.” Game on, dudes.

Healthful Breakfast Food

Southsider K. L. tussles keeping her weight at a healthy level, has age-related health issues, and recognizes the Jerkonians from Big Food have scammed Americans into addiction to their quasi-edible food-like substances; aka the American diet. She e-mailed me inquiring what I normally eat for breakfast, lunch, snacks, and dinner, which will be the next several weeks’ topics.

Breakfast is indeed the most essential meal du jour. Skipping breakfast is common but not health chic. People believe they’ll lose weight skipping meals, but that’s not true; the body expects to be refueled with quality victuals a few times each day, starting with breakfast. In fact, people who eat a healthful breakfast are more likely to sustain a healthy weight

In The End of Overeating, Dr. David Kessler, retired head of the FDA, wrote how humans, much like Pavlov's dogs, have become hardwired to anticipate foods with fat, sugar, and salt that cause disease. The morally irresponsible clones from Big Food learned decades ago what human’s wanted, and are only too happy to give us what we crave. We become ensnared in an inhuman cycle of dopamine-fueled urges when we want food, and opioid releases when we eat it. Kessler says, “If dopamine and opioid sound familiar, it's because they play a major role in alcohol and drug addiction”. Kessler makes the connection between food's power over people, and the pull of alcohol and drugs.” It isn't a stretch to say, ‘I'm addicted to chocolate.’ Dr. Robert S. Harris, a professor of nutritional biochemistry at MIT, add, “Most people do not eat foods because they are good for them, but because the foods appeal to their appetite, to their emotions, to their soul."

In 1988 I weighed 300 pounds. My exercise was hoisting a beer and cancer stick repeatedly to my mouth. My favorite foods: KFC, Krispie Kremes, Poop Tarts, pan gravy, bacon, prime rib, cheeseburgers and fried anything I could outrun: pleasure my incentive. Vegetables and fruit were niggling addendums. Well, that didn’t work too well for me, so I ended up in the cardiac ICU with five masked strangers successfully performing life-support.

As Sandi and I slowly evolved, we abandoned Fruit Loops, deceptive Aunt Jemima, greasy fast food biscuits with sausage, eggs cooked in bacon fat, and instant Quaker Oats, then over time embraced even more innate, whole foods. Our breakfasts always contain fruit, protein and fiber. I mix breakfasts up since eating the same food day in and day limits availability and absorption of the 40 daily vitamins and minerals needed to heal, rebuild, and sustain the temple. We’ll eat Steele Cut Oats cooked in apple cider, cinnamon, and chopped apple one day, Kashi Go Lean cereal with walnuts, ground flax seeds, yogurt, and blueberries the next or toasted Ezekiel Bread with organic peanut butter. We also eat probiotic yogurt every other day. As a rule I don’t eat eggs, but if my temple urges me to eat one, I’ll eat one if, of course, only if it shot out of a hormone-free, local bird that ate its celestially designed diet of bugs, worms grass, and grubs. The disgusting ingredients in today’s feed are not what our creator planned.

Colon-cleaning fiber can be found in whole grains and fruits or ground up flax seed. Try a breakfast of a hardboiled egg, an orange juice and fresh cranberry blender smoothie. Sandi and I make a juice based smoothie every day to raise morning glucose levels gradually, not zoom, crash, and burn. Shun sugary, colored cereals, high fructose corn syrup, pastries, bagels, and white breads. They rapidly digest, spike insulin levels leaving you hungry and pooped in a couple of hours.

Outmaneuver Big Food terrorist by ‘breaking-the-fast’ with real, fresh, home-cooked, vittles, then only you control the ingredients. Add a teaspoon of love while you’re at it.

Thanksgiving-Romanticized Consumption

As outbursts of infectious laughter glide throughout the house like potpourri and all the family gathers round the richly endowed Thanksgiving table, every tiny inch covered with hallowed serving pieces abundant with mouthwatering tradition, the “clutching my stomach-about to explode” season gets underway.

Thanksgiving Day, our beloved American opiate, is a joyous event eagerly celebrated with heaping platters of love and gravy boats of gratitude that distract us from the folly of everyday life. It’s when relatives can still be friends and every heart is true, a sacred day when a gaggle of smiling family and friends rejoice, reconnect, kiss cousins, and hug babies, thus fortifying the family circle. The quixotic day fly’s by so swiftly, it seems just as we settled down it’s time to say good-bye. To some it’s a feast of horrors spending your day off stuffing your face till your stomach bursts, and then the nausea-inducing ride home over river, rolling hills, and woods with frequent potty stops, flatulence, and then quiet, inward contemplation on whether Aunt Sandi really lacks sensible thought or surreptitiously liquor drenched. Nothing today resembles the original Thanksgiving. Nowadays it’s a competition; who can consume the most and then deal best with leftovers doomed to die in anonymity in a corner of the fridge?

If you feast beyond your temple’s needs then food is wasted. U.S. residents acclimated to abundance are wasting food like never before. More than 40 million green bean casseroles are served on Thanksgiving, but a study finds about 40 percent of all the food produced in the United States is tossed out. Concurrently, about 1 billion people worldwide don't have enough to eat, according to the World Food Program. The journal PLoS ONE, indicates while Americans feast on turkey and fixings, a new study finds food waste per person has shot up 50 percent since 1974. Some 1,400 calories worth of food is discarded per person each day which adds up to 150 trillion calories a year. ScienceNOW, a publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science explains food waste in America accounts for more than one quarter of the total freshwater consumption and more than 300 million barrels of oil per year representing about 4 percent of the total U.S. oil consumption.

Flash back to 1621, when religious-separatist Pilgrims held a three-day expression of celebration, praise and prayer to rejoice for their generous harvest and safe ocean passage. Ergo, the nation’s first Turkey Day (TD). The celebration of gratitude which lasted for three days started out as a deeply religious happening, a time where God was lavishly thanked for plenty of harvest. The food included turkeys, geese, ducks, venison, cod, bass, corn, barley, and corn bread. There were games, demonstrations of skills, with bows and muskets, and lots of braggin’ and tall story tellin’. If our forefathers saw how we celebrate today, they’d be twirling in their savory pudding and stewed pumpkin. The first Thanksgiving was not a feast, but rather a time when Native Americans helped Pilgrims by bringing them food and helping them build off the land. Over the years TD has been corporately secularized and is celebrated today as a gluttonous competition.

Alas, gobbling too many victuals may lead to arterial ‘fowl’ play and abundant corpulence. If you’re moved with the urge to purge and wish to scrape gravy, stuffing, pie and plastic cruel Cool Whip from your hardening arteries, consider setting aside 12 1/2 hours of walking to burn off the typical 3,500 Thanksgiving calories you shoveled down, which on Thanksgiving, we can justifiably call, your Pie Hole.

Walk to, and then drop off appropriately packaged leftovers at a homeless center or church whose congregation supports the downtrodden. Be sure however, to refrigerate everything within two hours of setting it out or you’ll ruin the moment by giving everyone the unexpected gift of the Turkey Trots.





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Vegaholic's Unite!

Hello, my name is Geoff and I’m a vegaholic.”

“Hi Geoff!”

“No matter how hard I try, I can’t say no to the deliciously addictive sensation I get from eating vegetables, any vegetables; my green fix. For gosh sakes, they’re virtually everywhere, easy to score at back-alley farmers’ markets, salad bars and grocery produce aisles.”

His head falls in shame. “Out of sight, behind drawn shades, I greedily eat them with reckless abandon. Life without veggies isn’t worth livin’. I’m pathetic, but it feels so darn good; really, really good. You see, I’m addicted to the taste of life. Without vegetables surging through my veins, I will surely wither, withdraw and perish. My baffled family physician mistakenly assumes I’m avoiding him since I never darken his door. I can’t help myself; vegetable side-affects arouse my immune system. My meat-munching macho friends call me a weak sissy. But you know what? I couldn’t care any less. I’ve never felt groovier.” No one forced Geoff to become a tree-hugging, grass-eating, granola-crunching vegaholic. It just happened.

Is your Holy Temple whispering in your ear to dose-down your red meat intake? Like a hungry python in a bunny cage, are you sucking down processed foods seven days a week from the local convenience store, pushers of low-grade nutrition? That small, tugging voice is your freshly altered mind ‘Jones-ing’ for the enjoyable, addictive ecstasy of vegetables. Any veggie junkie will attest that there ain’t nothin’ like the real thing, baby. Our vegaholic friend advises, “Don’t buy the bogus genetically modified organism (GMO) vegetables, man. They’ve like, been stepped-on, man, and don’t give you the groovy health buzz. Get an organic connection, dude.” Participating in an intimate, codependent in flagrante with colorful vegetables, however, may be illegal in several states, but that’s a chance you must take.

Recently, a gentleman stopped to say he heeded plant-based eating advice and capitulated to ‘vegaholism.’ He’d lost 30 gut-busting pounds, rarely gets ill and has refreshed energy-stash of mind-blowing mental clarity. He was an altered man; a vegetable-dependant junkie glowing with health and self-esteem. Vegaholics live seven years longer than carnivores and have appreciably reduced rates of obesity, coronary heart disease, hypertension, type II diabetes, diet-related cancers and diverticular disease, constipation, rheumatoid arthritis and gall stones.

Personally I didn’t get it. Instead, ‘it’ got me. After surviving terminal heart disease, I began to score more veggies. It provoked me to crave more and more varieties of vegetables, instead of the stepped-on, industrialized, GMO foods which caused me a visit to the “ICU Flop House”. Vegetables were merely a bothersome obligatory addendum to a meal. Over time, however, I too became a veggie junkie.

Anatomically we are herbivorous. Our composition and digestive system demonstrate that humans have evolved for millions of years living on fruits, nuts, grains and vegetables.

Scientists concur early humans were fruit and vegetable eaters and throughout history our anatomy has not changed, but our low-grade American diet certainly has deteriorated. Man’s structure, external and internal, compared with that of the other animals, shows that fruit and succulent vegetables constitute his natural food.

As much as some folks detest the addictive ‘green’ stuff, all plant foods have an enormous impact on your temple. Get-off on these tips:

Most veggie junkies hook up with a ‘hoe’; and grow their own.

Farmers markets are veggie junkie ‘crack houses.’ You can always count on high-quality stuff.

Score seasonal fresh fruits. It’s cheaper plus gets you-off-better on head-spinning nutrition; a natural high.

Make a plan with your closest enablers; get-off together so you won’t feel so guilty.

Open your mind, arteries and mouths to the heavenly buzz of the Universal Apothecary; plant foods. It’s not so much that we are what we eat, but what our Holy Temple absorbs from the pleasurably addictive veggies we were designed to consume by Creation.

In Fall and Winter, We Dwell Within

In spring, summer and fall, mingling friends and neighbors engage in affable tete-a-tete. With its arrival, cinereal winter evokes a sacred privacy which no other season presents. Only during the chilly austerity of winter can one take pleasure in lengthy, hushed stretches to savor what’s truly significant to the soul and our shared planet. In winter there’s so little to do, you can permit yourself the luxury of fertile contemplation while percolating earthly lessons. As the garden peacefully slumbers, enumerable activities occur deep within the musky, sustaining soil. Just like humans, gardens use this time to process and stow away knowledge from previous seasonal experiences; a time for rebuilding, reinforcing root systems, and for restoring cosmic vitality.

Most Americans still believe we have no alternative to the food contrived by agribusinesses Raptors who care as little about our ecosystem and family’s health as they do about the health of the barn animals so tightly packed in pens and cages on factory farms that the floor is scarcely visible, and covered in wastes. If we are to survive, we must adapt and affect change. Every living thing was designed to cope with environmental factors like clean air, water, soil, light and temperature.

For emerging seekers yet to blossom, daily life goes on in complete disconnect from the adverse impacts their daily choices and activities have on the third star from the sun and the holy temple, our original home. Our collective minds harbor blind spots blocking our ability to see the fallout of contentedly suckling from the teats of Big Food and our dietary support of agribusiness eco-terrorists; a crisis of culture that has a gargantuan impact on all of the planet’s flora and fauna; beauty beyond human portrayal. Happily, many developing greenies are growing more conscious how their beige behavior impacts how people live to the far corners of the earth.

At the commencement of the twenty-first century, society lost touch with what may be the singular sensibility fundamental to our survival as a species; a green, reverent, sustainable culture. Might winter be the time to consider how ‘modern’ life has diminished our innate, heavenly skills and wisdom? As the temperature drops, the days get shorter, animals, bugs, and plants have gone to sleep, the sun appears so low in the sky it appears as though it will never return. In peace-filled darkness, we become more conscious of the wondrous unknowns of life, loss, death, rebirth, and the natural rhythms of life on Earth.

Stoke a warming fire, sit next to the summer plant you befriended and brought inside for the winter, then reflect on how our species threatens to consume and befoul the natural world at a rate far exceeding our planet's carrying capacity; scrutinize your life habits as you continue the voyage of greening your life and home. Before the Industrial Revolution, our lives were intimately tied to the seasons, and we developed traditions to express these transitional times in unique ways. Each season had its own customs represented in symbols created for the celebrations; spring was about the rebirth of life on earth, summer about cultivation and fruitfulness, autumn about harvest and spiritual attunement, and winter was about the return of light in the midst of darkness. Dig into the reserves you accumulated during the year; a perfect occasion to bask in the glow of your imagination. Grab grandmother’s afghan and curl up with your Kindle, drift off to your favorite tunes, or journal your reflections perchance to discover your soul overflowing with clarity, like stars painted onto the infinite, cobalt, frost-polished heavens.

Why it's so expensive to eat healthy

What’s the true cost of eating the typical American diet; a witch’s brew of heartrending, wallet-busting diseases, and incapacitating obesity? No one possesses the stones however, to cop to the naked fact that we support the health care crisis with our unfocused dietary choices; pure and simple. Food illiteracy simmered with our addiction to Big Food’s twaddle is the stone we should overturn. Our nation’s health care crisis is not a shortage of quality hospitals, doctors or nurses. It is a crisis of culture – a culture where it’s deemed perfectly acceptable, almost Patriotic to spend money on dead nutrition then eat it sedentarily whilst vegetating in front of computer or TV screens, foregoing any semblance of physical exertion.

Most everyone suffers from the dreaded Italian disease, Mafundsalow and descend on cheap foods like paparazzi onto Paris Hilton. Due to disproportionate costs, poor folks and the middle class struggle mightily to eat healthy. It’s mind-bending that this can happen in the greatest country on the earth. Pure, fresh food should be freely available to everyone, not just the Fat Cats. If you only have $3, you want the most for your wrinkled dead president. We’ve seen the ad for a complete meal consisting of a artery-clogging burger, fries and coke for only 2.99. Then Meijer, Marsh, and Kroger executives pat themselves on the back because they offer diabetes and obesity causing low-grade ‘white boxed’ food on the cheap. Alas, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Eating healthy can be, but doesn’t need to cost more. The problem lies in the fact that scores of folks loathe cooking and end up buying pre-made health foods, which are costly because you paid someone to cook it, package it, and then ship it hundreds of miles to your microwave. Cooking from scratch is the joyous answer. For example, you could by 2 medium sweet potatoes for the same $1 you spend on small French fries from a burger joint. Or you could procure 2 red peppers brimming with heavenly antioxidants for the same amount you pay for sugary soda pop that causes triglycerides to soar. You could enjoy a healing bowl of Steele cut oatmeal for $2 or a chow a bag of oily chips. A large bag of oatmeal is $3.50, or 4 chocolate bars. Six chicken breasts can cost $10, or what you’d pay for a sub combo from a fast food shack. Or how about $3.50 for 18 local farm fresh eggs up against a $5 dead bovine burger. Two salmon fillets can cost $15; the same as a large pizza. Consider homemade chicken or tuna fish salad verses a $3 box of cookies. It’s all about perspective; being honest with yourself.

As empty calories get cheaper, the healthy fruits and vegetables that protect the temple are becoming more and more expensive; become luxury goods. Calorie for calorie, junk foods not only cost less than fruits and vegetables, but junk food prices are less likely to rise as a result of inflation. The Center for Public Health Nutrition found a 2,000-calorie diet would cost $3.52 a day if it consisted of junk food, compared with $36.32 a day for a diet of ‘real’ food. Of course choosing to eat dead calories over nutritious food might save money, or “fill you up”, but the true cost ends up being repaid through bad health and shorter life expectancies. So, realistically, it’s more expensive to eat lousy disease-causing food since ultimately, you pay the medical bills.

As one who has been devising and publishing healthy recipes for years, I honestly feel if we slow down and return to the joyous act of cooking, we will most certainly overcome our plagues of illness. There’s absolutely no reason why we cannot eat in a healthy fashion just as cheaply as we can consume the chemical stodge that ultimately destroy us. Life is really not that hard; we reap what we sow.

Tag: Follow Wendell Fowler on Twitter with your questions and concerns

The Amazing Curative Apple; Forbidden Fruit?

How ‘bout them Forbidden Apples?

Eve had a devil of a time persuading Adam to eat forbidden fruit, however, since their ensuing expellation, the apple has reigned supreme. In ancient Greece and Rome, apples were a symbol of love and beauty. Cleopatra was rumored to have placed one in Caesar’s chariot lunch box before battle. Apples were so prized armies took cultivated apples with them into England and then proceeded to make applesauce out of the country. About 1629, both the seeds and trees were brought to America by John Endicott, an early governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Johnny Appleseed promoted apples as he carried seeds with him wherever he traveled, and planted then in thinly settled parts of the country; mostly for distilling strong-drink. In 2010 America, the apple remains sovereign.

Most Americans consider the white meat most delectable. Apples contain a gargantuan 30 thousand protective antioxidants; paradoxically, the skin contains bushels of the heavenly, healing nutrition. Orchards of studies prove a daily diet of real, not GMO (Genetically Modified Organism) contain .78 grams of pectin per 100 grams of edible fruit, ranking them fourth in pectin content among twenty-four common fruits and vegetables tested. This only applies when one leaves on the skin, which settles the debate, ‘to peel or not to peel’? So put on your big boy pants; the skin stays on. The apple’s soluble fiber reduces the amount of cholesterol produced in the liver, slows digestion, and the rise of blood sugar, making it ideal for diabetics. Adding two large apples to your daily diet is shown to decrease total cholesterol. Apple's insoluble bran-like fiber gloms on to LDL cholesterol giving it the bums rush.
Eating un-peeled, albeit washed apples reduces risk of colon, breast, prostate, and ovarian cancers, heart disease, type II diabetes, obesity, and tooth carries. A study on mice at Cornell University found that the quertecin in apples may protect brain cells from the kind of free radical damage leading to Alzheimer's disease, a.k.a., Mad Cow disease.

Apples that rust have the most curative powers. Have you observed how apple these days don’t brown? It’s because today’s commercial apples have no semblance to the apples our universe created. That’s because they are GMO (Genetically Altered Organism) ergo, missing original heavenly components. What happened to Winesap, McIntosh, and Rome apples we relished in our youth? Royal Gala, Fuji and the new generation of apples are man’s egotistical manipulation of God’s gifts to us. The National Cancer Institute reports the antioxidants in apples may reduce the risk of lung cancer by as much as 50%. A Cornell University study indicated apples inhibited colon cancer cells reproduction by 43%, and A Mayo Clinic study indicates the quertecin in apple’s skin prevents oxygen molecules from the damage that encourages growth of prostate cancer cells.

For your temple to absorb the biggest bang-for-your-buck, choose locally grown varieties which brown easily, such as puckery Granny Smiths. I gently encourage you not to substitute insipid, sugary apple juice for raw apples. Grocery store sugar-laden apple juice contains next to none of the beneficial pectin, potassium, antioxidants, quertecin and colon-cleansing fiber. Instead, forage seasonal, un-pasteurized apples from your local orchard. However, ask the grower if they wash, sanitize, and filter the nectar to prevent E. coli or salmonella. Some orchards make use of the fallen apples because they are sugary ripe and easy to harvest, but pathogens lurk. One bad apple can spoil the whole bunch, girl.

Apologetically, the true ‘forbidden’ ones, Caramel Apples don’t count. Add sliced apples briefly cooked in Smart Balance and cinnamon to your morning Steele cut oatmeal which you’ve cooked in apple cider, not water. Chuck in some walnuts, fibrous flax seed, and fruit, and your colon will return the a,..umm…favor.

Snacking Alternatives to Dead Food

We spend over-busy days scurrying around in cars running numerous errands or becoming one with the computer. It is here that humans continually nibble on whatever’s within reach. There are umpteen reasons why we snack: comfort, boredom, a quick energy fix, or just because of the desperate 'I want it now or I’m gonna rip someone’s face off!' feeling.

With beguiling vending machines every 10 feet, fast food and convenience stores of bar-coded death at every stop light sucking the life right out of you, it’s easy to be brought over to the dark side of American nutrition, or the lack there of. If you intend to compete with the pink Duracell bunny, it’s very important to eat foods that supply decent fuel. A new study carried out by researchers from the University of Michigan Medical School concluded that vended, prepackaged foods and sugary, faux colored beverages may be linked to diabetes, obesity, cancer, ADHD, ADD, and coronary artery disease. OMG!

Could we be squandering a golden opportunity to endow our family health equity? One way or another, everything we place into our Holy Temple affects health. As sure as I’m never going to have hair again, you’ll not find whole, restorative, socially redeeming fresh foods at a convenience store. I’ve seen freckled bananas, wrinkled oranges, and pulpy apples at the checkout of a few of them, but their existence depends on the demands of the local culture. Remember when they used to sell just gas?

May I turn you on to my fast food connection? Whenever the munchies attack, I head for the local grocery, waltz past the prepared hot food, then make a bee-line to the produce section where I grab containers of cut up fresh fruit or vegetables. You may want to cut your own the night before to avoid the MSG used to preserve them. Ack!! Then I truck to the deli for a container of humus, tabbouleh, sushi, guacamole, marinated olives, salsa, and some whole grain chips or crackers. One day I might snag a small bag of dried fruits, bulk granola, pistachios or walnuts to keep within arm’s length at work or in the car. Read labels, however, since some granolas have nefarious added fats. "All natural” fruit juice drinks and sodas, a meaningless term, can be saturated with sugar, which is a colossal contributor to the health care disaster. I’m wondering when moral authorities are going to connect the dots between chronic disease and the foods we worship.

In short time you’ll gain confidence as you note there is vastly more variety at the grocery store plus you’re getting up off your expanding, gelatinous, glutious maximus. Find strength within yourself and waddle past the potato chip, gooey thingies, cookies, and fried bits. If you take time to read labels, you’ll discover that major grocery stores carry healthful versions of your favorite treats. You’ll acquire increased energy and mental clarity. Science has deduced that eating junky, processed foods makes us ‘stoupid’.

Besides what I’ve already mentioned, my favorite snacks are raw veggies spritzed with low-calorie salad dressing, Kashi Go Lean cereal, Boca burgers instead of dead cow burgers, almonds, soy cheese and Wheat Thins, banana bits dipped in dark chocolate then frozen on a sheet pan lined with wax paper. Zip-lock them up for a sweet treat reward because you’ve been so good. God forbid you make popcorn from scratch. After all it’s so exhausting having to shake that darned pan while the colonels pop and ping against the lid.

Obesity: Public Enemy #1

Sandi and I take pleasure in entertaining out of town friends. Besides feeding them fresh, local Farmer’s Market foods, we shanghai them into the car; hold them hostage while flaunting Indy’s beauty. Straight away, they notice our conspicuous preponderance of obese men, women, and kids. “What’s with that”? I elucidate Hoosiers innate resistance to change; a mysterious reluctance to let go of macho meat and potatoes, gravy, and a god-like devotion to convenience, and rampant covetousness for deep-fried bits of meat or cheese dipped into of a vat o’ Ranch Dressing.

It’s no mystery why nearly 65 percent of Americans are corpulently porky; the American diet. The estimate, including direct medical costs only, not costs such as missed work, is higher than the annual medical bill for smoking. In other words, becoming obese is causing the same health care costs everyone’s bitching about to increase even more. Get it?

Obesity is the #2 cause of preventable death in the United States. You’d need to be buried under a pile of Little Debbie’s wrappers not to know obesity ramps-up the threat of breast cancer, coronary heart disease, low self-esteem, type II diabetes, knee-replacement, sleep apnea, gallbladder disease, osteoarthritis, colon cancer, and hypertension. So, why can’t Midwesterners wrap their taste buds around the simple concept? Is it predatory marketing and baffling labeling or do we just lack self control? America’s dollar-driven marketing gurus have mastered the concept that the human appetite is elastic: give them more and they’ll eat more; keep them fat, sick, and come back for more. In many ways we can also blame the obesity epidemic on the impressionable advertising footprints left on our brains.

Humans have a natural proclivity for full-flavored, yet highly caloric, easy to digest foods. Just as it it’s natural for gorillas to love leaves, it’s innate for human mammals to love funnel cake. Americans eat more processed dead foods than any other country. When eating machine cuisine, the temple doesn't have to work as hard to digest the food’s energy. Add the socially acceptable sedentary work habits of Americans and people will naturally store additional pounds for energy. If Hoosiers ate rawer, harder to digest, whole, unprocessed foods and added more movement to their everyday lives, they could lose the excess chunk in their proverbial trunk.

At nearly all of my lectures, someone expresses only the affluent can afford to eat healthy, which leads me to conclude poverty causes obesity. The fact that more and more American families can't afford fresh fruits and veggies or good cuts of meat could be part; another component is sloth. Short-sighted authorities have taken PE out of schools and don't send children out to play for 15 minutes in the nurturing sun, fretting they might become victims of skin cancer. No one needs reminding of the low-grade food served in the public school system; a prescription for weight gain, diabetes, and undernourished, foggy little brains

The only home you have, the holy temple, works pretty simple. There are a certain number of calories your temple requires every day for it to maintain its current weight. If your diet is made up of fewer calories than this maintenance level, you’ll lose weight. If it's made up of more calories, you’ll gain weight. It's really simple, actually.

Remove all bar-coded foods from your house and desk at work to control junk food cravings. It works for my weaknesses if the dead, caloric food is not in sight, because you’ll be less likely to craving it. Out of sight; out of mind.

Don’t beat yourself up. You’ve had some help from Big Food. Follow any "cheat" meal with at least five healthy meals and snacks. That ensures you'll be eating right more than 80 percent of the time. If you make a mistake, remember, you are above all, human; and a groovy, worthy one at that.

The 'White' Cause of Diabetes and Obesity

How can anything white be wrong?

Our arduous eating journey and future health blueprint begins early in life deeply rooted in cultural dietary traditions. Americans are unknowingly eating an unbalanced diet high in snarky saturated fats and low in fresh fruits, vegetables, and grains, but plum full of icky processed high-carb white foods.

Growing up a preacher’s grandkid, life revolved around after-church dinners on filigree-topped dining room tables moaning under the mass of chicken fried in shimmering pork fat, macaroni and cheese, stuffing, au gratin potatoes, potato salad, mashed taters, warm cloverleaf rolls, iced cakes, cookies; a carbohydrate blitzkrieg. Salt, flour, sugar, gravy, lard, shortening, white bread, white rice, marshmallows, Alfredo sauce, full-fat ice cream, half and half, and high butterfat cheese like Brie, mayonnaise, and mayo-based salad dressings chip away at the crispy edges of your family health equity. You know why they call it shortening? It shortens your life. 911! 911! Thud!

If you have a death wish to see the ‘white light’, white foods exacerbate diabetes, obesity, cancer, and heart disease. My admonition doesn’t suggest avoiding these white foods, but a gargantuan family of foods derived from the nefarious white stuff. The Price is Right host Drew Carry recently lost 80 pounds and got his diabetes under control by eating nothing but lean protein and fresh vegetables; no carbs at all.

It’s more coo-coo than Coco-Puffs to believe we can totally dodge harmful ingredients lurking virtually everywhere in the food system. Big Food made sure of that. However, one excellent way to hedge these dead foods to remain healthy and energetic is to embrace edibles from nature, not a factory assembly line.

For decades, red meat’s been worshiped as a deity for its white marbling. Each year the average American gulps down more than 50 unctuous pounds of gushy fat. Less in this case, is more. Iconic Uncle Ben had good intentions when he ‘perverted’ his instant rice. Paradoxically, the bran and germ he removed are outstanding sources of minerals, fiber, and vitamins. Instant white rice lacks even the essential nutrients after “enrichment.” This doesn’t mean to completely avoid white rice. Try taking 15 minutes of your time and learn to cook Basmati rice.

Fizzy soft drink lovers may or may not be conscious that the fructose portion of refined sugar is a building-block for cholesterol, obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. Also, just 10 teaspoons, the amount of sugar in one soft drink, incapacitates your immune system by an astounding 33 percent. Thirty teaspoons shut down the immune system for a day. Abundant sugar in your temple sends out chemical signals that attract bacteria like moths to an open flame. It’s been recently discovered that high fructose corn syrup is cancer cells favorite food. Charming, eh?

Salt overkill increases the risk of high blood pressure, stroke, heart failure, kidney disease, diabetes, cataracts, brittle bones, asthma, dementia, and early death. The American Heart Association says one teaspoon a day is the maximum.

Studies explain Alloxan, the chemical that makes all purpose white flour look clean and beautiful destroys beta cells of the pancreas encouraging diabetes. White bread, an uber-refined wheat product, has been plundered of 11 known vitamins, half a dozen nutritionally significant minerals, as well as essential fatty acids. It’s a ‘wonder’ anyone buys it. Way back in 1943, the erudite editors of Nutrition Reviews were distressed at the government’s decision to proceed with enriching flour; a startlingly bad decision.

Even too many good complex-carbohydrates like brown rice, millet, grits, oats, quinoa, and barley can be a factor. Reduced-fat dairy products, probiotic yogurt, and fortified rice milk are cool in moderation. When you add beans, white-fleshed fish, skinless chicken, ‘real’ turkey breast, and fresh fruits and vegetables to the menu, you’re hitting stride.

Be unyielding and don’t give up. You can do it one step at a time. With the heartening progress I see Hoosiers making, I’m truly excited about the future.

Condiments: Illusory Foods not so Innocent

How Long Should I Hold the Mayo?

Would you sacrifice quality of life to defend your right to dollop hollandaise over asparagus or to asphyxiate crisp, steamed broccoli with molten cheddar cheese sauce? Since ancient times, Chefs created sauces and condiments to display their talents. Once a savvy chef presented me with a point to ponder, “Why would anyone wish to disguise the true taste of perfectly cooked food?”

When Sandi and I converted to the green side, it required condiments on vegetables to make them appetizing. Eventually, we learned to dig the clean, fresh taste and texture of produce in its God-given state. If you’re the boss of your health destiny, then you know at home or away, condiments present a dietary challenge. Everyone’s favorite is mayonnaise composed of a fatty emulsion of oil, raw egg, vinegar, and spices. For me, switching to mustard was a huge health-plus. Commercial condiments explode with sugars, wheat gluten, phantom calories, high fructose corn syrup, MSG, and trans fats directly connected to heart disease, diabetes and obesity

Ever-present condiments are illusory foods which innocently appear as insignificant addendums to any meal, but realistically, they’re subtle delivery systems for massive amounts of calories to sneak into the temple. The word "sauce" is French meaning a relish to make food appetizing. Gravy, the grand-daddy artery-clogger of all, is generally derived from greasy pan renderings and supposedly makes foods look, smell, and taste better. Before the advent of refrigerators and preservatives, as a necessity, sauces and condiments were created to cover up the smell of rotting meat. Today we still see this practiced in grocery meat and fish counter ‘Petri dishes’ brimming with colorfully decorated, albeit aging raw fish, chicken and kebobs with alluring monikers. They take this economic risky measure to rid their inventory of ‘old’ meats.
Don’t insult a verdant salad with goopy bottled salad dressings burdened with less-than-ideal ingredients. Select vinegar or lemon juice, and EVOO. I recently praised my plump lunch companion’s choice of salad bar; however, I was astonished watching her decant a cup of blue cheese dressing onto the crisp, nurturing greens. (The ‘broccoli and cheese sauce’ syndrome). To flourish, you don’t need sauces compromising your health, such as Alfredo Sauce, sugary ketchup, BBQ sauce, mysterious sandwich spreads, chicken nugget dipping sauces, or flavored coffee creamers.

Like placing kerosene into a gas tank, you can only dupe the Temple so long. By existing on un-holy, factory foods, you put the pedal to the metal on the aging process and destabilize your birthright of good health. Give serious thought to returning to nature, and then begin to prepare your own ‘scratch’ food. If your home-made foods need condiments, perhaps you should consider a cooking class. As a family learn to enjoy the real flavor and texture of foods in their God-given state.

Tips:

• Top baked potatoes with plain low-fat yogurt, low-fat sour cream, or salsa

• How about a crowning a baked sweet potato with Smart Balance and a drizzle of real maple syrup, not Aunt Jemima which is pure HFCS.

• Hot sauce can be added to a variety of food providing big flavor.

• Honey is an excellent alternative to sugar

• Soy sauce is associated with Asian cooking but can be used in everything from Mexican fare to traditional French.

• Salsa is an excellent alternative to crappy nacho cheese.

• Hummus is a delighful veggie dip

• Avoid foods named au gratin, Alfredo, gravy, creamed, or sauced

• Make scratch salad dressings. Regular salad dressing is expensive and has about 120 calories per tablespoons.

• Use flavored mustard or yogurt-based dips for chicken strips.

• Try Meijer’s Organic Peanut butter

• Have low-fat cottage cheese with a drizzle of honey, sprinkle of ground flax or chia seeds, and cut-up seasonal fruit.

• And finally, try a Honeymoon Salad: Lettuce alone with no dressing, but I really, really, digress.

The Power of Produce

In 1988 an emotionless cardiologist uttered in monotone, “Get prepared, Mr. Fowler, you’re going to die…soon”.
Two decades ago, my diet was KFC, double-cheeseburgers, and Krispie Kreme’s flushed down with beer and ciggy-butts; a 300 pound poster child for self abuse. Fruits and vegetables were interlopers necessitating gravy to make them edible. Slothful, under the influence of cozy family traditions and repetitive advertising, I’d squandered the first half of my life eating foods not intended to enter the temple.

I nearly paid the ultimate price. Using produce to sustain health was not programmed into my Midwestern mindset. Since childhood I’d been encouraged to eat specific comfort foods. Over time, like most Americans, I was shanghaied from the path of nutritional righteousness by Betty Crocker, commodity brokers, bankers, and repetitive advertising that left tiny footprints on my malleable mind. Advertising frequency exerts a mighty influence over what you choose to eat. It generates awareness, creates interest, and arouses taste buds. I’ve pondered if the mass confusion, conflicting headlines, contrary opinions and such is by design. I'm a seeker of truth not a conspiracy theorist, but, keep in mind, it’s highly profitable to keep people fat, and sick, and coming back for more.

Motivated by the proposition of death, I began eating more fruits and veggies containing essential vitamins, minerals, and fiber and less man-made nonsense. Subtly, new skills surfaced. Not feeding my temple the innate heavenly diet designed for humans had blunted my God-given skills. The American Cancer Society, the CDC, National Kidney Foundation, American Heart Association, American Diabetes Association, and scores of health authorities are screaming in unison, “American must increase the fruits and vegetables they currently eat”. Produce from the celestial apothecary contains substances called phytonutrients; defenders of human health that battle cancer, heart disease, GI inflammation, diabesity, and blood pressure.

A vast body of research fruits, vegetables and plant foods were on the original menu of foods the Universe designed for its creations. Genesis 1:29. Instead, Americans are corporately swayed to consume synthetic creations from man’s inventive mind, brewed in his laboratories, having no counterparts in nature, ergo the health care catastrophe. Fruits and vegetables are your heavenly source of sustaining energy and give the temple the nutrients needed to ‘have your health.’ Alas, only one-third of Americans eat two or more pieces of fruit per day and 25 % don’t eat vegetables at all.

Forage for foods natural to your evolutionary lineage; fresh foods most apt to promote health. Today, a nation drools when offered health destructive foods; foods that diminish your fitness and quality of life. The Five-A-Day program recommends five to nine servings of fresh fruits and vegetables per day to ward off diseases. That’s 2.5 cups, friends. One trip to the salad bar could take care of that in a jiffy; nevertheless summon the strength to resist the urge to asphyxiate the green salad in copious amounts of Ranch or Bleu Cheese Dressing. Opt for Olive oil and either wine vinegar or lemon juice.

• Support your community Farmer’s Market. Ask questions then shake the hand of the hard working family farmer

• Pre-cut vegetables into small portions then place in the refrigerator for easy access. Make vegetables as convenient as any other snack food and you’ll eat more of them

• Create a home-salad bar with healthy dips and vegetable you cut into interesting shapes. Dips include low fat salad dressing, guacamole, humus, low-fat cottage cheese, and salsa

• When serving cow burgers, Sloppy Joes, cheesy pizza or any other kid-pleasing fare, sneak in shredded carrots or broccoli. Just a small amount will blend into a red sauce and boost the nutritional value

• Grill kabobs. Cut bite-size pieces of vegetables and grill them on skewers or alternate with chunks of lean cuts of dead animal meat. Add a tasty marinade.

A nickel's worth of fresh produce beats a five dollar doctor visit on any day.

Soy Is a Con Job

Recently l had occasion to study with and Ayurvedic Indian doctor. In Ayurveda, diet is the keystone of one’s mental and physical health destiny. I prepared him classic Indiana kitcheri and added Edamame to the dish. As he quietly ate, he turned his head towards me, looking into my eyes and said, “Soy is slow suicide,” while gesturing at the green orb with his fork. Truth seekers since the 50’s have been warning us regarding our excessive intake of soy isoflavones.

Soy-a-holics robotically suck down anything made from soybeans, which is not the boulevard to health, especially when soy is GMO. (Genetically Modified Organism) Big Food and Pharma terrorists have trained America to eat Morning Star faux-meat, TVP, Boca Burgers, soy nuts and cheese, Edamame, soy milk, Smart Dogs, and concentrated soy protein pills.

Warnings appeared in the Washington Post: “You have to be ‘soy’ careful: Tofu and similar foods may be beneficial, but some experts fear that too much could be unsafe.” New York Times health columnist Marian Burros published a comment on isoflavone supplements, which provide 50-100 mg isoflavones per capsule: “Against the backdrop of widespread praise, there is growing suspicion that soy, despite its undisputed benefits, may pose some health hazards. Not one of the 18 scientists interviewed for this column was willing to say taking isoflavones was risk free.” The easily swayed FDA totally disregarded studies beginning in 1953 demonstrating adverse effects of soy isoflavones. Book em, Danno!

It’s paradoxical soy protein is aggressively prescribed as treatment for diabetics, considering soy feeding in infancy is linked to diabetes. The American Academy of Pediatrics advised against the use of soy formula due to diabetes risk. Memo: according to our creator, Mom’s milk is eternally best. Unfortunately, some mothers are unable to produce milk for infants; however there are more sensible alternatives to soy. Reviewing feeding histories of 95 diabetic children, twice as many kids with diabetes received soy formula in infancy compared to children in the control group. (Fort, 1986) Again the FDA put their hands over their ears loudly sing-songing, “La-la-la. I caaaan’t hear you.” In 2006 the American Heart Association chimed in to cast their doubts on the magnitude of soy’s benefit in cholesterol busting.

It’s been argued high levels of soy isoflavones genistein and daidzein in Asian diets protect them from breast and prostate cancer in women. Straight up? Soy is linked to increased estrogen in males and increased breast cancer in women. The estrogenic effects are caused by the presence of phytoestrogens and estrogen mimicking compounds found in soy. Because of these estrogenic compounds, infants in particular can be harmfully affected from exposure to soy, including premature development in girls and underdevelopment in boys.

Soy, especially processed versions rather than fermented, promotes hyperthyroidism, thyroid cancer, and infertility. The Weston Price Foundation warns phytic acid, trypsin inhibitors, toxic lysinoalanine and highly cacogenic nitrosamines are all highly present in soy products. http://www.westonprice.org/

Search on-line for the Poisonous Plant Database of the FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition. It’s in black and white: 288 studies since 1953 focused on the toxic properties of soybeans. The FDA possessed this information but chose to ignore it…again. It’s tear-jerking to think of the human suffering that could have been avoided had the FDA listened to their scientific advisors…and their hearts.

Locavor-The Next Revolution

The Next Revolution?

Accepting mans’ imperfect humanness, everyone struggles letting go of deep-seated rituals. At the grocery, we instinctively reach for expedient sources of food because life’s too busy to cook. Given we’re a malleable bunch; Americans have become reliant on Big Food to prepare their meals. Consequently we’ve morphed into an aggressive species due to their deviant food-like substances.

For this opulence, there’s a somber mind / body tradeoff. Before Fat Cats created the ethically malnourished Industrial Revolution, American communities, bartered, shared, canned fresh food, constructing supportive, peaceful communities centered on local family farms bursting with sustainable sun-blessed produce, dairy farmers, bee keepers, and livestock fed the preordained celestial menu designed by the generous Universe. Eating food fare shipped from a source 2000 miles away was unthinkable.

One-hundred years ago everyone knew local farmers by their first name, shaking their calloused milking hand as they greeted. An ecologically centered community which knitted itself together with threads of peace and friendship through the sharing of home-made foods simmered with loving energy. There is a full-blown movement in NYC of diverse artisans organizing, sharing, and returning to a pre-industrial revolution mentality. It’s truly rooting here in Indiana; a total disconnect from Big Food and Factory Farms where animals are treated inhumanely, vegetarian cows are turned into cannibals, and food is genetically altered into unholy nothingness.

For millennia, man has contemplated and practiced changing his self-defeating eating patterns, yet sustainment has proved elusive. To transcend today’s food zeitgeist, we’ll need to establish new peaceful relationships with food and eating; learn intuitive eating skills for long term results; results that encourage emotional, spiritual, and physical well being; the root of earthly peace. An unconnected, malnourished mind and sickly body is not the best place to cultivate a peaceful heart. Although most Americans believe the steady diet of violence in the media is leading to a more violent world, in reality it’s the steady diet of heavy metals, food colorings, animal husbandry chemicals, and pesticides that send bullying bosses and wilding teens over the edge.

Because anxious families have discovered how the food they eat was grown, home food preservation is experiencing a genuine revival. Were the barn yard animals handled humanely? Were vegetables genetically altered by a chemist? Discouraged by proliferating dead foods, the energy crises, and a growing awareness of environmental and social impacts of industrial agriculture and the globalization of food production, home gardeners are returning to the sacred traditions of the ancestors, growing, canning and sharing their own food fare. The Industrial Revolution was a major turning point in Earth’s ecology and humans’ relationship with the earth’s environment, dramatically changing all facets of lifestyles from human development, resource wars, food purity, health, longevity, and social conveniences. Like ripples in the proverbial pond, its destructive impact would not hit the shore of the nation’s collective psyche pond until the 1960s counter culture movement.

Change in the way we eat cause changes in others. Without doubt, the sustainable seed of green, Locavorism and a peace-filled community has been re-planted. Over the coming years, Americans will transcend misguided eating behaviors and enter a new era of lucid sustainability and a nonviolent world.

Blueberry's VS. Blueberry 'Poop' Tarts

At my monthly holistic health fair, a sweet gal told me her friend watches my WISH TV segment and reads Anti-Aging in the South Side Times. She claims I’m against everything, which is partially true. My heart is against watching good people, under the cloudy assumption all foods are safe, poison their Temple with processed, GMO and extruded dead food rather than health sustaining Universal Apothecary provided by Creation.

Vacationing with my grand kids in Michigan during blueberry season, a mother at a road-side market was asked by her child, “Can I have blueberries mommy? Mom replied, “No, honey, we have plenty of Blueberry Pop Tarts at home.” Considering, ‘Poop’ Tarts have the nutrition value of road kill, it‘s a heartbreaking commentary on today’s obesity crisis and your loving families health. Remember our State Board of Health’s announcement this will be the first generation of children who will be outlived by their parents? I mean, substituting the ethereal glories of the noble blue orb for a Poop Tart is, well, child abuse; like smoking carcinogenic cigarettes inside the car when kids are on board. Lazy mom and dad role models, listen up; one Blueberry Pop Tart is 212 empty calories; 62 from fat and grease. They contain one-half ounce of immune-system-blunting sugar, diabetes inducing white flour, 7 grams of fat, and one frail gram of fiber. No mortal can improve our Creators gifts, but when one arrogantly tries, the process perpetually renders the once vibrant food lifelessly devoid of the groovy vitamins our Temple requires to remain mentally and physically vigorous; hence our largely preventable pandemic of obesity, diabetes, cancer and heart disease.

Juicy, sweet blueberries are indigenous to the US of A. Native Americans used the berries, leaves and roots for medicinal purposes. Blueberries were used as a fabric dye and combined with meat into a nutritious dried jerky. Recently, Tufts University analyzed 60 fruits and vegetables for their antioxidant capability or ORAC level. Blueberries came out on top, rating highest in their capacity to destroy free radicals called anthocyanidins. Blueberries deactivate free radical that damage the collagen matrix of cells and tissues leading to cataracts, glaucoma, varicose veins, hemorrhoids, peptic ulcers, heart disease and cancer. Researchers found fresh or frozen blueberries protect the brain from oxidative stress and may reduce the effects of age-related conditions such as Alzheimer's disease or dementia. The Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry show that phenolic compounds in blueberries can inhibit colon cancer cell proliferation and programmed cell death. A Poop Tart can’t do that for your holy temple.

Blueberries were created with a tasty flavonoid called kaempferol. Research calculating flavonoid intake in 66,940 women enrolled in the Nurses’ Health Study between 1984 and 2002 revealed women whose diets provided the most kaempferol had a 40% reduction in risk of ovarian cancer, compared to women eating the least kaempferol-rich foods.



Make a morning smoothie with blueberries, real orange juice, a piece of carrot and banana. What a great way to drink, not chew your daily dose of heavenly medicine that protects your temple from disease. Remember, when you cook blueberries into a pie, jam, or pancakes, all the nutrients and energy are destroyed in the process. Eat ‘em raw by the handful. We brought back a 10 pound box, placed them on sheet pans; put them into the freezer till hard like blue marbles; bagged them in zip-locks then back into the freezer. For breakfast try Kashi Go-Lean cereal, plain yogurt, walnuts, and ground flax seed crowned with a cup of berries; the “Colon Pow!” of your digestive tract

When everything God gives us to remain healthy is right under our nose, it’s tough to grasp why the 44 % of obese Hoosiers continually and tenaciously defend self-destructive, albeit time-honored Midwestern food fare with such eagerness. Armed with nutritional literacy, love of family and steadfastness, you can do it. Your body is your buddy.

Who Put the Squeeze on our Orange Juice?

Orange Juice holds position in the hallowed American pantheon of traditional breakfast foods. Each year 620 million gallons of orange ambrosial cure-all are consumed in the US.
Ads pitching today’s version of the pulpy juice tell us, wink, wink, it’s pure and natural so we blindly buy the citrus au jus for the sentiment. Nevertheless, the majority of your American tradition comes, tell-me-it-ain’t-so, from sunny Brazil and uneasy Mexico. Horney toads! That’s downright un-Patriotic.
As an OJ drinker you’ve been misinformed about what you’re actually drinking. Most folks get ‘juiced’ when they learn big brands marketing their product as “pure and simple” add flavor packs to revitalize it and make it fresh; once more. “From concentrate” and most “not from concentrate” orange juice undergo processes that strip flavor and nutrition. The largest producers of “not from concentrate” or pasteurized orange juice keep juice in million-gallon aseptic storage tanks to ensure a year round supply. Aseptic storage strips the ethereal juice of oxygen, a process known as “deaeration,” so the juice doesn’t oxidize in the “tank farms” where the aging juice sits for as long as a year.
Flavor packs are fabricated from the chemicals that make up orange essence and oil. Flavor and fragrance houses, the same ones making high-end perfume, break down orange essence oils into their constituent chemicals then ‘reassemble’ the individual chemicals in configurations resembling nothing in nature. Delicious Ethyl butyrate is one of the charming chemicals found in high concentrations in flavor packs. Flavor engineers discovered it imparts a fragrance Americans dig and associate with a fresh squeezed. A con job.
Wrong on so many levels, Tropicana reformulated their healthy heart juice adding fish oil, sardines, tilapia, and fish gelatin for the Omega 3 craze. This makes as much sense as lighting yourself on fire and running naked through a Meth Lab. Eating fatty fish, ground flax seeds and walnuts is more rational.
Orange juice is celebrated as a healthy drink but few realized it contains the same amount of sugar as cola. In the world orange juice market, the leading brand is Tropicana, owned by PepsiCo since 1998. In April 2008 the Journal Diabetes Care studied diets of 70,000 women as part of the Nurse's Health Study. They found unlike daily consumption of fresh fruit and vegetables associated with an 18 per cent reduction in the risk of diabetes, consumption of fruit juice even in small daily amounts, was associated with an overall 18 per cent increased risk for diabetes.
Vitamin C and its potent cancer protection, is the most easily destroyed vitamin there is. It is destroyed by exposure to oxygen and heat (above 70 degrees) Processed, pasteurized OJ (145 º) is a pitiable surrogate for fresh, sun-blessed orange juice, squeezed at home from cooperative whole oranges. Pasteurization obliterates most of the juices health sustaining phytonutrients, including anti-cancer nutrients. Heat alters the molecular structure of OJ, creating higher acidity during digestion. Acidity sets the Temple up for cancer and inflammation. And that's not to mention the enormous natural resources used to process, concentrate, transport and reconstitute.
If you’re the sissy who protests pithy parts, for the love of God and your caring family, get over it. You’re a responsible adult now, in charge of your health destiny. That’s where all the nutritional goodness lurks, so ‘orange up’, dudes and dudettes; fresh squeezed OJ tastes deliciously natural and supermarkets do sell it. They charge too much, however. Go back to a pre-industrial revolution mentality. Find family time to juice you own. It’s vastly cheaper and your Temple will definitely groove from the purity, hearty nutrition, and wholeness.
No bottle of self respecting vodka would even want to cozy up to this abomination of Gods gifts to us. If you can’t gather the gumption to squeeze the orange, frozen, unsweetened OJ concentrate contains a lot of vitamin C and was not heated. If half the world does, it, why can’t we?

Booze: The Elulsive 5th Food Group

Booze: Satan’s drink or the elusive 5th food groupPublished June 24th, 2010
By Wendell Fowler


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“Give strong drink unto him that is ready to perish, and wine unto those that be of heavy hearts. Let him drink, and forget his poverty, and remember his misery no more.” Proverbs 31: 6-7

Shhay there, you; … hiccup, stagger, did you know that ten, ‘pardon me,’ burp, ten out of four people drink booze?” Today, as a transformed alcohol over-user, I look into the mirror of my past, flinching when in public, I recognize someone’s values’ dissolving into an excessive slurry of ice cubes chilling their fourth Scotch whiskey; “I don’t care about my new shoes, urp, blurp, splat. Taxi!”
Since ancient times, ardent spirits have played roles in religion, economics, sex, politics and all aspects of society. Abe Lincoln, when told General Grant swilled whiskey while leading his troops replied, “Find out the name of the brand so I can give it to my other generals.” Presidents conspired with demon rum, a social lubricant, to procure votes and eager Federal judges interrupted proceedings to partake. G. W. Bush snorted and soused his way through college. Nixon habitually imbibed Scotch and soda, and a snockered LBJ cavorted about his Texas ranch in an open convertible whilst imbibing scotch and soda. Perhaps this is why he insensitively picked up his pet Beagles by the ears and considered it entertainment.
Nurtured by guilt-based fundamentalist religious literalism, I was brainwashed if demon alcohol met my inquisitive lips, I’d go directly to a blistering hell on a razorblade only to kersplash into a vat of stinging alcohol. As a repressed teen it was incumbent to investigate and lay hands upon the proverbial wet paint. Religious repression eternally backfires so I spent the next 20 years rebelling in a boozy stupor. Theologically ironic considering bourbon takes its name from Bourbon County, Kentucky where it was first produced by a happy Baptist minister in 1789. Ask any hotel room service attendant and they’ll attest in-room liquor sales soar when these groups hold conventions; an innocent illustration of our humanness. Protestant groups, Episcopalians, Lutherans, and Presbyterians consider moderate use tolerable but frown upon drunkenness that punches the ticket to eternal agony. Roman Catholics tend to be more accepting of a wee bit of the grape. References to alcohol in Jewish writings are to moderate wine consumption. In much of France, Germany, Scandinavia, and Italy, from childhood, wise people thought of wine as a food, so liquor was not such an enthralling curiosity.
Alcohol as medicine has been recorded throughout history and is mentioned 191 times in the Old and New Testaments. If you drink moderately, there’s ‘proof’ alcohol improves health while tranquilizing your frenetic everyday life.

Moderate drinkers tend to have enhanced health and live longer than those who are either abstainers or booze hounds.

In addition to having fewer heart attacks and strokes, moderate drinkers are less likely to suffer hypertension, high blood pressure, peripheral artery disease, Alzheimer’s disease and the common cold.
Commonsensical consumption appears beneficial in reducing or preventing diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, bone fractures and osteoporosis, kidney stones, digestive ailments, stress and depression, poor cognition and memory, Parkinson’s disease, hepatitis A, pancreatic cancer, macular degeneration, angina pectoris, duodenal ulcer, erectile dysfunction, hearing loss, gallstones, liver disease, Alzheimer’s, the common cold and poor physical condition in elderly.
A Harvard study found the risk of death from all causes to be 21 percent to 28 percent lower among men who drank alcohol moderately compared to teetotalers. Loathe hangovers? Try drinking a glass of alkaline Smart Water every two or three drinks to get fluid into the Temple before the end of the night. When you wake up with a big head and your liver quivers, consider adding Milk Thistle, a restorative liver tonic, to your daily vitamin regimen everyday for a month whilst not drinking. You’ll feel a lot better, even after drinking is resumed; in moderation, of course. Cheers!

How Alcohol Affects Overall Health

"Give strong drink unto him that is ready to perish, and wine unto those that be of heavy hearts. Let him drink, and forget his poverty, and remember his misery no more." Proverbs 31: 6-7

Shay there you; …hiccup, stagger, did you know that ten, pardon me, burp, ten out of four people drink booze? Today, as a transformed alcohol over-user, I look into the mirror of my past, flinching when in public, I recognize someone’s values’ dissolving into an excessive slurry of ice cubes chilling your fourth Scotch Whiskey; “I don’t care about my new shoes, urp, blurp, splat! Taxi!

Since ancient times, ardent spirits have played roles in religion, economics, sex, politics and all aspects of society. Abe Lincoln, when clued General Grant swilled whiskey while leading his troops replied, “Find out the name of the brand so I can give it to my other generals." Presidents conspired with demon rum, a social lubricant, to procure votes and eager Federal Judges interrupted proceedings to partake. G. W. Bush snorted and soused his way through college. Nixon habitually imbibed Scotch and soda, and a snockered LBJ cavorted about his Texas ranch in an open convertible whilst imbibing scotch and soda. Perhaps this is why he insensitively picked up his pet Beagles by the ears and considered it entertainment.

Nurtured by guilt-based fundamentalist religious literalism, I was brainwashed if demon alcohol met my inquisitive lips, I’d go directly to a blistering hell on a razorblade only to ‘kersplash’ into a vat of stinging alcohol. As a repressed teen it was incumbent to investigate and’ lay hands’ upon the proverbial wet paint. Religious repression eternally backfires so I spent the next 20 years rebelling in a boozy stupor. Theologically ironic considering Bourbon takes its name from Bourbon County Kentucky where it was first produced by a happy Baptist minister in 1789. Ask any hotel room service attendant and they’ll attest in-room liquor sales soar when these groups hold conventions; an innocent illustration of our humanness. Protestant groups, Episcopalians, Lutherans, and Presbyterians consider moderate use tolerable but frown upon drunkenness that punches the ticket to eternal agony. Roman Catholics tend to be more accepting of a wee bit of the grape. References to alcohol in Jewish writings are to moderate wine consumption. In much of France, Germany, Scandinavia, and Italy, from childhood, wise people thought of wine as a food, so liquor was not such an enthralling curiosity.

Alcohol as medicine has been recorded throughout history and is mentioned 191 times in the Old and New Testaments. If you drink moderately, there’s ‘proof’ alcohol improves health while tranquilizing your frenetic everyday life. Moderate drinkers tend to have enhanced health and live longer than those who are either abstainers or booze hounds. In addition to having fewer heart attacks and strokes, moderate drinkers are less likely to suffer hypertension, high blood pressure, peripheral artery disease, Alzheimer's disease and the common cold.
Commonsensical consumption appears beneficial in reducing or preventing diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, bone fractures and osteoporosis, kidney stones, digestive ailments, stress and depression, poor cognition and memory, Parkinson's disease, hepatitis A, pancreatic cancer, macular degeneration, angina pectoris, duodenal ulcer, erectile dysfunction, hearing loss, gallstones, liver disease, Alzheimer’s, the common cold and poor physical condition in elderly.
A Harvard Study found the risk of death from all causes to be 21% to 28% lower among men who drank alcohol moderately compared to teetotalers. Loathe hangovers? Try drinking a glass of alkaline Smart Water every 2 or 3 drinks to get fluid into the temple before the end of the night. When you wake up with a big head and your liver quivers, consider adding Milk Thistle, a restorative liver tonic, to your daily vitamin regimen everyday for a month whilst not drinking. You’ll feel a lot better, even after drinking is resumed; in moderating, of course. Cheers!

'Green' Tea and Sympathy

Wherever I wander, friends jest on the subject of my ever-present mug-o-tea. Tea’s my morning java, diet coke fix, and cocktail; my ‘longevi-tea’. The simple, focused act of brewing tea touches our souls. Tea is a ceremony; a stand-up performance in simplicity.

After decades in the wacky food industry, I corroborate food servers consider tea drinkers pains in the tea bag because serving a proper cup of tea requires more attention than simply topping off a steamy cup-o-Joe. The bag needs refreshing, the water needs to be kept hot; topped off, and, “Would it kill you to warm the stone-cold cup with a bit of hot water first?”, I queried as the waitress ‘s eyes rolled back into her head. I accept I’ve morphed into “one of them”; the needy nerdy. Yes, I am a tea-junkie; snob sounds too severe. For if I am too cold, tea warms me up; if I’m too heated, it will cool me down; if I’m depressed, it will cheer me up, and if I’m excited, it will calm me down. After water, tea is the most consumed beverage in the world. Green tea has always been, and remains today, the most popular type of tea from China where historians and botanists believe the plant originated.
Good news! Green tea drinkers appear to have a reduced risk for a wide range of diseases, from simple bacterial or viral infections to cardiovascular disease, cancer, stroke, periodontal disease, glaucoma and osteoporosis. Might it be due to the fact one cup of green tea provides 10-40 mg of polyphenols and has antioxidant effects greater than a serving of broccoli, spinach, carrots, or strawberries?
Tea contains antioxidants that mop up the free radicals before they trash the Temple like an attention-seeking rock star. Green tea contains heavenly-gifted catechins; powerful antioxidants created to mop up free-radicals. According to the U.S. National Cancer Institute, in laboratory studies using animals, catechins scavenged oxidants before cell damage occurred, reduced the number and size of tumors, and inhibited the growth of cancer cells. White tea is said to be even more effective. Smell what’s brewing?
The Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry reports the antioxidants in green tea are absorbed into the lens, retina and other eye tissues. They speculate the antioxidant catechins in green tea protect the eye proving that eye structures can absorb significant amounts of catechins that reduce harmful oxidative stress in the eye for up to 20 hours. Hootchie Momma! Visualize your good health if you drank 5 cups a day.

If you have the propensity to clot a lot, green and black tea act like aspirin by blocking the formation of thromboxane A2, hence reducing the risk of heart attack and thrombotic stroke. If you take Coumadin, don’t fret, just be consistent and inform your phlebotomist.

Recently, the Journal of Preventive Medicine published a study revealing the correlating between tooth loss and green tea consumption. Those who one to two cups daily had 18% less risk of losing teeth, and those who drank five or more cups daily faced 23% less risk.
Regarding the glittery caffeine conundrum, a 5 ounce cup of coffee contains 80 milligrams; a 1 ounce bag of black tea 40 milligrams; Oolong, 30 milligrams and one ounce of green tea a paltry 20. The reason I say this is because some of us with heart concerns, including me, cannot let their heart become over-stimulated for we will roll into arrhythmia.
In the book, The Green Tea Book, “Despite a high percentage of smokers (75% of adult men), Japan has an astonishingly low rate of heart disease. It seems possible the polyphenols in black and especially green tea cause the same paradox that polyphenols in red wine lead to. An encouraging Japanese epidemiology study concluded drinking eight to ten cups green or black tea per day can positively affect cholesterol levels whether you smoke, drink are overweight or obese.
Armed with these nutritional nuggets, it shouldn’t be too long till you’re brewin’ Oolong.
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