Know Thy FOOD

Being vegetarian isn't right for every one. In fact, from the pure perspective of a nutritional physiologist, I am not a great advocate of vegetarianism or veganism.  I support a great many people who choose this diet as part of their life style for various reasons, but I seldom meet vegetarians or vegans who know what I mean when I ask them "are you balancing your proteins".  It is especially true of folks who are vegetarians and vegans for political or ethical reasons (something I admire greatly by the way) People caught up in the "cause" are not necessarily nutritionally educated at a level where they are meeting their essential nutritional needs for optimal health.  It is difficult to properly nourish yourself at the cellular level on these diets without being very aware.  For those vegetarians and vegans who are aware, and educate themselves about essential amino acids, vitamins and minerals in the diet and the source of those nutrients, these diets and life styles can be, and often do, work very well and are extremely rewarding for the individuals who follow them..

But for those of us who maintain animal products in our diets, I believe it is important to be very conscious of where our food is coming from and how it is being raised.  These are living creatures after all.  Like us, they have nervous systems thus they experience pain and stress.  Like us they get ill. The better, healthier and more natural the environment they are raised in, the higher the quality of the nourishment they ultimately provide for our bodies.  It behooves all of us to care a great deal about the animals that provide us with essential nourishment and how they are cared for in the course of their lives.

So get to know your local farmer, buy locally, buy chicken, eggs and meat from friends, like my husband and myself who raise our animals with care and compassion.  Some of our friends would comment that a little too much love and compassion is expended when they find lambs in the kitchen or cuddled in front of the TV watching National geographic adventure with the kids and some newly hatched chicks.  Alternatively, raise some of your own.  Sending them off on market day is always heart wrenching, but knowing that the animals lived a good, free-range, well cared for life, and that you carefully selected the slaughter facility because they manage and handle the animals individually, in small batches, in a manner designed to alleviate stress, brings peace of mind to the dinner table down the road.

For those of you who aren't zoned agricultural and can't even raise a laying hen in your back yard (I am so sorry because it is so much fun, especially for children) join a CSA or drive out into the country and meet a farmer and buy into a free range beef cow, so you know the meat in your freezer at the end of the season was free, range, grass fed, and you know where it lived and with whom.

At the end of the day its better for your physical and mental well being to be closer to the source of the food you eat.


Check out this video

http://youtu.be/rEkc70ztOrc

In The Spirit of Nature

 Dear Readers,


Being healthy, obtaining optimum health and staying healthy involves more than just taking care of what you eat.  You really have to take a holistic approach to your life and take care of all the components that make you the complete person you are or should be.  Most of us, are not complete.  We are not connected with ourselves - the me, myself and I.  We are also not sufficiently connected with our soul and our spirit, with our dreams and our desires, with our emotions and emotional health.  We do not live balanced lives.  To obtain optimum health we have to make completing our individual life circles part of the process along with caring for our bodies through nutrition and exercise.


Many of us have lost is the ability to connect with, or feel the connect between ourselves and others, and ourselves and the natural world.  My cousin had an awful year, he nursed his father and dutifully sat vigil for months until my uncle's recent passing. And yet, despite his grief, my cousin was able to send me this beautiful new year's wish, demonstrating his ability to connect with me, with the natural world and his high degree of emotional well being.  He passed it to me and I pass it to you - May you all be the best you can be in 2011

May Te Spirit of the Whale be With You

There was a front-page story in the San Francisco Chronicle a while back
about a female humpback whale who had become entangled in a spider web of
crab traps and lines.

She was weighted down by hundreds of pounds of traps that caused her to
struggle to stay afloat. She also had hundreds of yards of line rope wrapped
around her body, her tail, her torso and a line tugging in her mouth. A fisherman spotted her
just east of the Farallon Islands (outside the Golden Gate) and radioed an
environmental group for help. Within a few hours, the rescue team arrived and determined
that she was so bad off; the only way to save her was to dive in and
untangle her.

They worked for hours with curved knives and eventually freed her. When she
was free, the divers say she swam in what seemed like joyous circles.

She then came back to each and every diver, one at a time, and nudged them,
pushed them gently around as she was thanking them.

Some said it was the most incredibly beautiful experience of their lives.
The guy who cut the rope out of her mouth said her eyes were following him
the whole time, and he will never be the same.

May you, and all those you love, be so blessed and fortunate to be
surrounded by people who will help you get untangled from the things that
are binding you.

And may you always know the joy of giving and receiving gratitude.

I pass this on to you in the same spirit.

Best wishes for a wonderful New Year filled with love, laughter, and
gratitude. I hope that 2011 finds you well and in the company of good
people, doing great things.

If It's White It's Not Food Unless...

Happy New Year everyone!  I love the New Year because it is a time of fresh beginnings for me.  Not only does the calendar change it’s numbers but I change my age too.  This allows me to start fresh with the fresh year, every time.  I never make New year’s resolutions because they result in guilt of resolutions unfulfilled and guilt is just a false man made creation that we heap on ourselves and each other.  So to avoid the whole trap, I skip the resolutions and go with the appealing approach of a fresh start.

A wonderful way to start the New Year is to refresh ourselves and our bodies by realigning our food choices and the way we “feed” ourselves with what our bodies really need to be healthy and fit from the inside out.

It really isn’t rocket science, yet there is a whole science and multimillion dollar industry that has built around the way we eat that we rely on heavily.  Throughout the year, I will write on important nutrition issues in terms everyone can understand that will take us all back to basics and educate us about how our bodies use food and why they need a good variety of nutritious food products to function as the lean, mean wonder machines they were meant to be.

I’m going to start the year with this simple premise – 

if it is white – it probably isn’t food to your body.

IF ITS WHITE IT IS NOT FOOD UNLESS…. 

 

1.     it's a root vegetable

2.    it's  a cauliflower

3.   it's  a mushroom or

4.   it's  milk

 

In general foods that are white are processed.   

Yes even the most delicious pasta dish and a mouthwatering platter of delectable cheeses, warm breads and crackers.

So what do I mean when I tell you white food isn’t food?

Almost every white food that is not on the list above started its life out as a whole food or grain of another color.  Take wheat for example, don’t we all love a good loaf of bread? Most cultures on our amazing planet live on wheat, in one form or another, as a staple in their diet.   

SO...Let’s take a closer look at wheat shall we?

Wheat is a grass that is cultivated in almost every part of the world today.  It is the grass seed that we process and eat. By 2007 wheat was the most heavily produced cereal grain in the world after corn and rice and the second most consumed grain by humans after rice.  Except for corn, wheat and rice are also some of the most highly processed cereal grains in our food supply today. 

And here is an astonishing piece of information. Globally, wheat provides the major source of vegetable protein for humans today.  Yes, WHEAT ! not beans and not meat ! It has a higher protein content than either corn or rice.  Stop to think about this a moment.  Wheat is a primary food source for most humans on the planet, serving as their major protein source.  We live in a world of dire need and poverty despite the overabundance of food we experience here in the USA.  Yet, around the world the trend is to process and bleach out the major nutrients from wheat.  White wheat products are more desired and more favorable over whole wheat products even by those in need of a better nutrient base.

Wheat is a staple food that we use to make flour for breads, biscuits, cookies, cakes, breakfast cereal, pasta, noodles, couscous and for fermentation to make beer and other alcoholic beverages as well as some biofuels.

OK, so lets take a closer look at wheat !  The seed is made up of three parts: husk on the outside, the kernel on the inside and the endosperm at the core.

   

When wheat is milled into white flour, the husk and the kernel are carefully separated out. This process effectively removes the bran and the wheat germ from the resulting flour.  The wheat germ is the embryo portion of the wheat kernel and is an especially concentrated source of vitamins, minerals, and proteins. The endosperm is the starch storage area of the seed that is effectively the “energy” source that sustains the seed as it germinates and grows.  Therefore the process of milling wheat into white flour effectively removes the most nutritious part of the grain.

Now lets compare Whole Grain Wheat Flour with Bleached, White Wheat Flour:

Nutrition  Information/100 g	Whole Grain Wheat Flour	Bleached, White Wheat Flour	Level
Calories	339g	366g
Total Fat	2 g	1g
Total Carbohydrate	73g	76g
Dietary Fiber	12g	2g	ß
Total Protein	14g	10g	ß
Calcium	3%	2%
Iron	22%	7%	ß
Magnesium	138%	6%	ß
Selenium	101%	21%	ß
Zinc	20%	7%	ß
Potassium	12%	4%	ß
Phosphorus	35%	11%	ß
Thiamin	30%	3%	ß
Riboflavin	13%	4%	ß
Niacin	32%	6%	ß
Vitamin B6	17%	2%	ß
Folate	11%	8%	ß

Sourced from SelfNutritionData: Know what you eat: at

http://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/cereal-grains-and-pasta/9257/2

Without doing an exhaustive study, this table shows how processing a whole wheat seed into whole grain, whole wheat flour versus bleached white flour reduces the nutrient value of the foods produced from it.  Pay special attention to the significant reductions in FIBER, MINERALS and VITAMIN B’s.

Now take the thought process a step further.  Consider all the additives, preservatives and artificial ingredients that are then added to turn this wonderful wheat into pasta, pizza’a, breads, cookies, cakes and a host of other processed foods we eat daily.  Not convinced ? Just take any processed wheat based product you regularly consume out of your kitchen cupboard and read the label.

The combination of milling the wheat, which is BROWN, into WHITE FLOUR and then processing it into donuts, pretzels, bagels and all those other yummies I love to indulge in, is simply a recipe for plugging up our bodies and inhibiting optimum functioning and therefore optimal health. 

It is not my goal to tell you what to do and how to live your lives, but rather to educate you by providing valuable information that will allow you to make your own informed decisions towards obtaining your goals for optimal health and body function.  Trust me, it would have been impossible for anyone to convince this Italian, Jewish girl, raised in the kitchen with he mother, grandmother and aunties that the white, gluten rich dough that formed the basis of all our core foods; pasta, breads, pastries and the white rice for the Risotto was not optimal food for me.  But like I said, its not rocket science.  A simple analysis like the one I've just done for you was all it took to convince me to slowly start blending whole brown rice with the white rice until I switched over entirely because I began to enjoy the nutty flavor of the the brown rice so much and felt good about the nutrition I was providing my family.

In my next blog, I will discuss additives and preservative used in food processing.  If you stop to consider the two together, you may well come to the same conclusion that I did...  

IF IT IS WHITE IT IS NOT FOOD unless it is:

1.     a root vegetable

2.     a cauliflower

3.     a mushroom or

4.     milk

 

Sources: 

1. Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheat
2. Washington Wheat Commission 
3. Grundas ST : Chapter: Wheat: The Crop, in Encyclopedia of Food Sciences and Nutrition p6130, 2003; Elsevier Science Ltd
4. Vaughan, J. G. & P. A. Judd. (2003) The Oxford Book of Health Foods. Oxford University Press. p. 35. ISBN 0-19-850459-4.
5. USDA National Nutrient Database for Standard Reference. 
6. SelfNutritionData: Know what you eat: at
   

          http://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/cereal-grains-and-pasta/9257/2

External Links:

• Photos of wheat fields
• Wheat Foods Council Est. 1972
• NAWG—Web site of the National Association of Wheat Growers