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.