Chickpeas: Many reasons to include these little legumes in your diet

chickpeasCultivated for as many as 7500 years, chickpeas or garbanzo beans are a staple in Mediterranean diets. In the past few decades they have become widely known in North Americans’ diets, invading 17% of kitchens.

Chickpeas are prized for their high protein content, having nearly 9% protein. They are good sources of calcium, zinc, magnesium, and several B vitamins. In fact a 100 gram serving contains 43% of the RDA of folate, a precursor to folic acid, vital for many functions, including fetal development.

Chickpeas can be cooked and eaten cold in salads, ground into flour, cooked in stews, ground, formed into balls and deep fried as falafel. Chickpeas are prevalent in Indian cuisine where the leaves are also eaten as green salads.

Hummus is the Arabic word for chickpeas, which are cooked, ground and mixed with tahini (ground sesame seeds) to form hummus, the dip/spread. Chickpeas are also roasted, spiced and eaten as snacks. Some varieties can even be popped like popcorn.

Chickpeas are high in fibre, low in fat and have very little taste of their own, making them ideal for “carrying” other flavours. Their high protein content makes them ideal for vegans, vegetarians, and even omnivores.

Recent studies have shown that garbanzo bean fiber can be metabolized by bacteria in the colon to produce relatively large amounts of short chain fatty acids (SCFAs), which provide fuel to the cells that line the intestinal wall.

Chickpeas contain antioxidants and are known to support the digestive system, reduce cardiovascular risks, regulate blood sugar, (preventing diabetes), and increase satiety and reduce overeating.

In short, finding ways to incorporate chickpeas into your diet is a smart way to bolster your health.

 

Here is my recipe for Hummus

Here is a recipe for Roasted Chickpeas: http://www.steamykitchen.com/10725-crispy-roasted-chickpeas-garbanzo-beans.html

Other chickpea recipes:

http://www.canadianliving.com/recipe-directory/main_ingredient/chickpeas.php

 

Sources for this article include:

http://www.whfoods.com/genpage.php?tname=foodspice&dbid=58

Wikipedia

Natural News

Confessions of a Lazy Gardener: Or Reasons to Grow Your Own Food

Growing food is a skill I think every human being should have.

Many people know nothing about growing food and don’t want to know because they perceive that it’s hard.

They’re wrong.

Growing food is easy. Case in point:

At the end of May when I should have been planting my garden, I was travelling. Upon my return we had a solid month of rain. I finally planted potatoes July 10, six weeks later than tradition dictates (last week of May in Calgary).

I hand watered my potatoes a couple times, basically tossing a few gallons of rainwater at them when it was really hot and dry. I handpicked a few weeds twice, spending a total of maybe 20 minutes on the entire patch all summer. I didn’t even get around to hilling* them. In essence I could not have done less to propagate potatoes. Plain lazy!

Our first killing frost arrived October 13. (A killing frost sets the potato skins so they’ll keep longer). A few days later I dug my potatoes. From one kilo of seed potatoes I harvested all the potatoes in this picture, about 12 kilos.

Lazy Gardener's 2013 Potato Crop
Lazy Gardener’s 2013 Potato Crop

There were dozens of marble-sized potatoes under each plant indicating that if the season were longer, they would have produced more. (They made perfect, melt-in-your-mouth roasted potatoes).

My potatoes are crisp and flavourful, despite a summer of neglect. They grew without the “benefit” of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and other noxious substances.

A friend of mine grew potatoes in PEI for a major food processing company. Following the company spray schedule was a condition of supplying them with potatoes. The farmer sprayed her potato crop for something every other day! Potatoes routinely appear on the Environmental Working Group’s Dirty DozenTM list of the foods most likely contaminated with chemicals.

Why are those potatoes so heavily sprayed when potatoes grow almost wild, without care at all, as my humble potato patch proved?

Michael Pollan, in his book, Botany of Desire tells us it’s because of our demand for the perfect long French fry. At least that’s what Big Food attributes to us.

Monocultures contribute to the problem. Huge tracts of one-species are like a TV commercial for a free buffet, attracting every bug and blight to which that plant is vulnerable. The modern solution is spraying.

Eventually the land is addicted to its drugs.  Just like pharmaceuticals, once you take one agricultural chemical, then you need another to combat the effects of the first chemical.

Chemicals wipe out all life around the intended crop including beneficial organisms like soil bacteria, earthworms, insects (good and bad), bees, birds, bats and other natural predators, not to mention, contaminating groundwater, lakes and streams.

There is no proof any of these chemicals is safe for human consumption, never mind the cumulative toxic effect they have on the body. Then add the chemical assaults from our homes, our cars, our clothes, our cosmetics; the list goes on. No wonder rates of cancer continue to skyrocket.

Food that is grown in living soil, rife with minerals and beneficial bacteria, food that isn’t sprayed with toxins (sometimes called organic food) benefits our health in many ways:

  1. It contains more nutrients, including vitamins, minerals, phytonutrients and antioxidants. Recent research shows plants produce antioxidants and other beneficial chemicals to repel insects and other marauders unless they’re doped up on agri-chemicals. This partially explains the nutritional differences between plants grown with chemical versus organic growing practices.
  2. Fewer toxins mean lower toxic load for the body to process, resulting in less “dis-ease”.
  3. We even benefit from exercise and sunshine we get from growing food, however minimal it is.  Gardening is the only exercise besides weightlifting recommended for the prevention of osteoporosis in women.
  4. Growing our own food helps heal the earth. Less fuel is used in production and transport, reducing pollution and other costs. Grass gobbles up a huge portion of synthetic fertilizers and fresh water in North America. Growing food instead is a better use of our resources.
  5. Growing our own food reconnects us to food and each other. Food made with human hands is often made with love. Factory food doesn’t contain love; usually you can’t pronounce what IS in it. Digging around in our own gardens spawns interest in others’ garden. Soon you have a community sharing resources.

I urge you to grow even a small portion of your own food.  It doesn’t require much space or a great deal of effort or knowledge, as I have confessed. Usually, all you need to know appears on the seed packet.

Potatoes aren’t the only easy to grow food plant. Lettuce, spinach, carrots, beets, squash, and onions require little care and attention. Start a strawberry or raspberry patch with donated plants and eat fruit from them almost forever.  Rhubarb and asparagus are perennial too. Perfect for lazy gardeners like me.

Baked Fries recipe

                   

 

*Hilling potatoes is a “best practice” when it comes to growing potatoes. Soil is scraped into little mounds or hills at the base of the plants when the potato tops are six to twelve inches tall. http://www.wholerealfood.com/baked-fries/ prevents the tubers from peeking out of the ground and turning green, which renders them toxic. It also helps maintain moisture and coolness.

The Real Estate of Your Plate

realestateoriginally posted October 27, 2011, Revised Oct 2013

Think about your usual dinner. Look closely at the food on your plate.

How would you describe the real estate of your plate?

Is your plate one big ghetto of factory food?

Or is it an estate of whole real food?

Food is a huge issue in our society. Billions of dollars are made manufacturing food.

Basic commodities are heavily subsidized. We all would like to think those subsidies are going towards ensuring small family farms avoid what seems inevitable: extinction.

The truth is huge corporations receive most subsidies because they run most of the farming operations in Canada and the USA. The small independent farmer is an anomaly and the few left aren’t making a living on the farm nor can they compete with the large companies.

Heavily subsidized commodities like sugar, wheat, corn, and vegetable oils cost very little so they are ideal ingredients in factory food. What little nutrition these foods have is stripped in the manufacturing process. Synthetic vitamins are added but they’re usually not as effective as vitamins from natural sources.

Machines spit out food products en masse. In the end the packaging is often the most expensive part of factory food, and truth be told, often as tasty and nutritious as what’s inside.

Then there’s the marketing. Words like “light” and “natural” and even, alarmingly, “organic”, have been rendered impotent by food companies using every trick in the book to fool their customers into believing their food is good for them and that it is good value. Sadly most people believe their hollow claims.

If people only thought about what goes into that box of cereal and what they’re getting out of it for $6 or $7 a box, they would be outraged! So many products are nothing more than a handful of different sugars with chemical flavourings and colours.  So-called “kids” cereal is almost pure garbage; you might as well feed them candy for breakfast.

Then we have the diet industry, also worth billions, that strives to convince us their products will help us not be fat. Their food makes us sick and sick leads to fat. The body, in its desperation to partition itself from all the toxins, stores those toxins in fat cells. I also think that’s why we feel so terrible when we’re losing weight. It’s part of the reason diets don’t work; it’s hard to stay on them when you feel so toxic.

Back to the plate. For me learning how to eat healthy food has been a lifelong process, requiring basic knowledge of food, what’s in it and where it comes from, how food affects the body, and how the body feels.

When I was young I was ignorant of the impact food has on the body. I scoffed when people said eating candy could make me sick. I had a stomach of steel and thankfully, a young healthy body that could recover from the abuse of a candy binge.

I remember confiding to the older ladies at my first job that I routinely had Rice Krispie squares and root beer for breakfast. I argued I was getting cereal into my body and I wondered why they were horrified. (I haven’t had root beer or Rice Krispies in my house in decades.)

As I grew older, I figured out that certain foods caused certain outcomes. My first daughter was borderline ADHD so I educated myself and found the most probable contributors were reactions to sugar and chemicals, including colours, flavours, and preservatives.

Without being too much of a food nazi I limited my children’s intake of those substances and therefore I was more conscious of my own consumption. My children grew up to shun fake food.

The real estate of my plate has evolved to a minimum footprint of three-quarters plant- derived foods including at least one raw vegetable.

I’ve found I feel better when I don’t have many grains. The grains I do eat are always whole, never white or processed. I’ve eaten brown rice for over three decades. To me, white rice is tasteless, like eating the box and about as nutritious.

The older I get the more important it is for me to ensure that my portions are smaller than they were when I was 20. The fact is if you don’t change your portions, you’ll gain a pound a year after age 30.

Paying attention to how I feel is also an important part of assessing the real estate of my plate.  I like peppers but they don’t like me. When I eat wheat I bloat like a balloon. A quarter glass of wine puts me into a coma-like state. So I avoid these foods, rather than taking drugs to handle my indigestion, as we are so often encouraged to do by drug-pushing television commercials.

I often consume meat-free meals. My plate used to always include a huge portion of meat; growing up in a meat-and-potatoes family will do that. We only need 30 to 70 grams of protein each day but most people in the western world eat far more. A hamburger patty is 115 grams; many people consume two or three in one sitting.

While there’s no question that having adequate amounts of protein is beneficial, for some reason we think more is better. It’s not. Too much protein triggers minerals to leach from bones and stresses kidneys and adrenal glands.

Animal protein is a good source of concentrated protein but it is hard for our bodies to digest, with many unfavourable “side effects” including making our body’s natural pH more acidic.  Some theorize that an acidic environment in our bodies contributes to many of our modern chronic diseases, like cancer, diabetes and heart disease. High protein diets may even increase the risk of osteoporosis and kidney disease.

Contrary to popular belief, there is protein in grain and vegetables. (All living cells are constructed of protein). They also contain fibre, vitamins and minerals, essential components of a healthy diet. Table of Protein Content in Vegan Foods

I urge you to pay close attention to the real estate of your plate. Hopefully it is dominated by a meadow of fresh raw plant food with no more than tiny enclaves of simple carbs (sugars and starches), meats and processed foods.

My observation is that unhealthy food or “Unfood” catches up with the human body eventually and that many aches, pains, diseases and conditions are preventable, treatable or manageable with improved lifestyle, including revolutionizing the real estate of your plate.

Believe me; living on an estate beats living in the slums!

 

Recommended Reading:  These are just some of the books about food I recommend.

Body for Life                              Harvey and Marilyn Diamond
Living Foods for Optimum Health            Brian R. Clement
Food Inc.                                  Karl Weber
Fast Food Nation                           Eric Schlosser
The Thrive Diet                            Brendan Brazier
The End of Overeating                     David A. Kessler MD
The Botany of Desire                       Michael Pollan
In Defense of Food                         Michael Pollan

 

Other sources:

 

http://exercise.about.com/cs/nutrition/a/protein.htm

http://www.vrg.org/nutrition/protein.htm

http://www.cornucopia.org

www.NaturalNews.com

Safe Food Handling: 13 Tips to Ensure Your Food Doesn’t Make You Sick

turkeyTurkey Day is fast approaching. Many people get “the flu” around holidays. In truths these flus are often cases of food poisoning from unsafe food handling practices. Adopt these 13 habits to avoid being sick on Thanksgiving and everyday.

There has been some talk of governments mandating the irradiation of food to prevent food-borne illnesses. We should all cry out against this ill-advised policy mainly because irradiation not only kills pathogens it also destroys vital nutrients. Our food supply is already nutritionally compromised from being grown in nutrient depleted soils, sprayed with a myriad of chemicals, and being bred for aesthetics and the ability to travel long distances.

In an effort to be healthy I try to choose as many fresh foods as possible. Irradiation will destroy the last life that’s left and it simply isn’t necessary. Despite occasional concerns, Canada has a safe food supply, much safer than almost anywhere else in the world, but food handling naturally comes with risks because what is food for us is also food for other creatures.

There is much the consumer can do to minimize risks of food spoilage, which leads to food-born illness. Fortunately, one of my high school jobs was in a hospital kitchen. They took safe food handling very seriously. I received training on everything from personal hygiene to storage and safe preparation of food. I take these things for granted now but I realize not everyone had the benefit of this training. Here are some ways we can minimize our risks.

1) Buy fresh food and be aware of the length of the shelf-life. For example, don’t buy ground beef Monday to eat on Saturday; it should be eaten within a couple days.
2) Use plastic bags to wrap meat so juices don’t contaminate other foods in transit.
3) Schedule your errands so groceries are last. That way cold items are less likely to begin brewing bacteria. I throw my cooler into my trunk for meats and dairy products if I know I can’t go straight home.
4) Put groceries away immediately. Now is a good time to remove any science experiments from the back of the fridge, throw away leftovers that are more than a day or two old (depending on the item) and wipe up any fridge-dried spills and debris.
5) Wash produce thoroughly, even if it says on the package that is has been washed. Many products are packed in the field by workers, who don’t have access to proper bathroom and washing facilities.
6) Always store meat at the proper temperatures. Marinate meats in the fridge rather than on the kitchen counter. Use meats within one or two days or freeze them immediately for later consumption.
7) While cooking and preparing, wash your hands frequently to interrupt germ highways.
8) Be aware of cross-contamination scenarios. Don’t use the same knife to cut vegetables after slicing a chicken breast. Cutting boards are germ playgrounds and should be sanitized between food groups. I prefer glass or plastic boards that can be washed in the dishwasher.
9) Cook foods to safe temperatures. It varies with the product so find out and use thermometers to check before serving. Serve immediately or hold at prescribed temperatures.
10) Leftovers should be packaged (air tight to prevent fridge tastes) and refrigerated immediately. Granted, nobody wants to move from the table after turkey, but there will be a lot fewer Christmas “flu”s from the mandatory midnight turkey bun if the turkey flies into the fridge after the last bite is swallowed. The same goes for the stuffing as soon as its presence is no longer required at the table and for goodness sake, don’t leave it inside the bird!
11) Kitchen surfaces and sinks should be cleaned with soap (not antibacterial) and dried to remove germs. Otherwise your kitchen is nothing more than a giant Petri dish.
12) Change your dishcloth regularly; I wash mine daily. Don’t use a sponge as there are many nooks and crannies for germs to hide. I often toss my brushes, cleaning pads, and sink stoppers into the dishwasher to be sanitized, especially if the machine isn’t quite full.
13) Finally, practice good personal hygiene. Cooking is physical and in many ways, intimate. It involves touching, massaging and tasting. And if you’re not clean yourself, your food will be contaminated.

Practice these easy steps to ensure your meals won’t make your friends and family sick.

The Dirty Dozen 2013 Edition

DirtyDozenHave you heard of the Dirty Dozen? It’s the 1967 movie starring Lee Marvin, Ernest Borgnine, and Charles Bronson, where a World War II US Army Major is assigned a dozen convicted murderers to train and lead into a mass assassination mission of German officers.

The modern mass assassination is even more insidious than in that old film, largely because the target is the most innocent among us: people who eat whole, real food in the form of fruits and vegetables. We know they’re good for us. Our grandmothers told us they were and the produce our grandmothers fed us WAS good for us. Usually it was grown in soils teeming with life and vital nutrients and bereft of toxic substances.

Modern agriculture has changed all that and rendered many of our most nutritious foods into enemies, largely through the application of chemical fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides. Unfortunately not all the pesticides used to kill bugs, grubs, or fungus on the factory farm wash off under the tap at home. Government tests show that many fruits and vegetables have a pesticide residue, even after washing.

Some pesticides are bred into the plant. An example is the insecticide Bt, which works by irritating insects’ stomachs. Bt is now bred into corn and there is evidence that humans may suffer from stomach ailments after eating Bt corn. A study of pigs fed GMO corn found they all suffered excess inflammation in their stomachs.

One alternative is to seek and eat organic foods but they are often appreciably more expensive than conventional produce. A good solution is to avoid the worst offenders or select organic and then buy regular versions of other produce.

Exposure to pesticides can be reduced by as much as 80% by avoiding the most contaminated foods in the grocery store, the modern Dirty Dozen, as revealed by the Environmental Working Group. Since 1995, the organization has identified which produce items have the most chemicals.

The EWG couldn’t pick just 12 so the Dirty “Dozen” is 14 for 2013.

1. Apples: In 2013, apples take the number one spot. In Michael Pollan’s book, The Botany of Desire, he explains that because we’ve lost much of the genetic diversity of apples they are disease and pest prone so the use of chemicals on them is deemed necessary. Up to 42 different chemicals are found in apples.

2. Celery: with up to 64 chemicals. Organic celery is often no more expensive than conventionally grown celery and in my experience it is far more flavourful. When I can get it on sale, I buy extra, chop it up and store it in bags in the freezer and use it in recipes where I would cook it anyway, like soups and casseroles.

3. Cherry Tomatoes: these are new on the list. It’s so unnecessary to spray tomatoes. They are among the easiest crops to grow in most climates.

4. Cucumbers: also new on the list. Also easy to grow without chemicals.

5. Grapes: 
Imported grapes (grown outside USA and Canada) make the 2013 Dirty Dozen list. Vineyards can be sprayed with pesticides during different growth periods and no amount of washing or peeling will eliminate contamination. Remember, wine is made from grapes, which testing shows can harbor as many as 34 different pesticides.

6. Hot peppers: Peppers have thin skins that don’t offer much of a barrier to pesticides.

7. Nectarines (imported): Up to 33 different chemicals are found on soft-skinned nectarines, making them among the dirtiest tree fruit.

8. Peaches: up to 62 chemicals. Their soft skins make them susceptible to chemical penetration.

9. Potatoes: The Botany of Desire exposes the growing methods of potatoes and reveals that our demand for the perfectly elongated French fry is largely responsible for the monoculture that leads to the poisonous growing condition of potatoes.  Potatoes can easily be grown in your home garden without chemicals.

10. Spinach: Spinach can be laced with as many as 48 different pesticides, making it one of the most contaminated green leafy vegetables.

11. Strawberries: up to 59 chemicals, especially out of season, when they’re most likely imported from countries that have less-stringent regulations for pesticide use. When organic strawberries are in season, they are often as cheap as the chemical-laden ones and their flavour is far superior.

12: Sweet Bell Peppers: May contain up to 49 different chemicals. Also thin-skinned and susceptible to absorbing chemicals.

+ Kale /collard Greens: Traditionally, kale is known as a hardier vegetable that rarely suffers from pests and disease, but it was found to have residues of organophosphates and other risky pesticides. That’s why they are on the Plus list for 2013.

+ Summer squash, domestically grown: tests found that some domestically-grown summer squash – zucchini and yellow crookneck squash — contained residues of harmful organochlorine pesticides that were phased out of agriculture in the 1970s and 1980s but that linger on some farm fields.

Incidentally, the Clean 15TM, according to the Environmental Working Group, the least contaminated produce items are Asparagus, Avocado, Cabbage, Cantaloupe, Sweet Corn, eggplant, grapefruit, Kiwi Fruit, Mango, Mushrooms, Onions, Papaya, Pineapples, Sweet Peas (Frozen), sweet potatoes.

 

Sources for this article include:

Environmental Working Group: http://www.ewg.org

Dirty Dozen Methodology: http://www.ewg.org/foodnews/methodology.php

http://www.NaturalNews.com

http://www.Organic.org

The Botany of Desire, by Michael Pollan

Garlic is Grand: 11 Reasons to Eat Garlic Everyday

garlicMany years ago a doctor on TV declared that the single easiest action we could all take for our health is to eat more garlic. If everybody ate it, he reasoned, the notorious garlic odor would be a non-issue and we would enjoy myriad health benefits.

The health benefits of garlic (Allium sativum), a member of the lily family, have been known for millennia. From the Egyptians to Hippocrates, from the battlefields of the American Civil War to the First World War, garlic holds an important place in health history. Even Western medicine acknowledges garlic’s ability to lower cholesterol and reduce the risk of further heart attacks.

Here are just some of the health benefits of garlic.

1. Control Blood pressure: Garlic is rich in sulfur compounds that give garlic its odor but also many of its health enhancing benefits. Garlic sulfides create hydrogen sulfide gas (H2S), which helps to dilate blood vessels. This dilation helps to keep blood pressure under control. Garlic normalizes high and low blood pressure but does not disturb normal blood pressure.

2. Safely lower cholesterol: studies have found garlic effective for lowering cholesterol levels. In one German experiment, volunteers taking an 800-mg garlic tablet saw their cholesterol levels drop an average of 12 percent over four months, as effective as cholesterol medications, without the deadly side effects.

3. Prevent/treat heart disease: controlling blood pressure and cholesterol are just two ways garlic works to prevent/treat heart disease. Raw, dried, aged, and macerated garlic as well as garlic oil have all demonstrated anti-platelet effects, further enhancing garlic’s heart protection.

4. Prevent/treat cancer: Epidemiological studies find that the ingestion of garlic reduces cancer risk. In a study of 40,000 postmenopausal women, those who had a consistent intake of garlic had almost a 50% reduction in colon cancer risk. Cancer cells are vulnerable to the allyl sulfur compounds present in garlic, which slows and even prevents the growth of tumors. Animal studies conducted at Penn State University concluded that garlic helps stop the growth of tumors and contains substances that actually destroy tumor cells and promote the invasion of immune cells such as lymphocytes and macrophages to the tumor site.

5. Garlic is a powerful, natural antibiotic: Garlic has very strong antibacterial, antifungal, anti-parasitic, and antiviral properties. The antibacterial action of garlic makes it an ideal substitute for dangerous antibiotics. Garlic helps to fight such illness as colds, flu, bronchitis, chicken pox, and urinary tract infections.

6. Garlic has micronutrients: Garlic is also an excellent source of micronutrients including manganese, vitamin B6 and vitamin C. It is also a very good source of protein and thiamin (vitamin B1), as well as phosphorus, selenium, calcium, potassium, and copper.

7. Garlic kills parasites: Soldiers used garlic as an antiseptic during World War I and also as an aid to kill parasites (worms). Hookworms, pinworms, roundworms and tapeworms perish in the presence of garlic.

8. Prevent and treat colds: Garlic’s antiviral properties make it a natural cold remedy.

9. Even more: Garlic is helpful for conditions including diabetes, allergies, toothaches, impotence, and MRSA.

  1. Save money: a one-month supply is a few dollars at your local organic market, a pittance compared with a prescription for blood pressure or cholesterol pills. Or grow* your own.

 

For garlic to be effective as a healing agent and general antibiotic, it needs to be raw. Crushing or chopping activates an enzymatic process that converts alliin into allicin, which is the component responsible for most of the health benefits of garlic. For maximum allicin activation, allow the crushed or chopped garlic to sit for ten minutes to complete the enzymatic process. If cooking, do not expose to heat for longer than five minutes.

 

When I make my own salad dressings I often include a crushed garlic clove. It’s an easy way to include garlic in my diet. I also make garlic butter to put on fresh steamed veggies or a slice of fresh-baked whole-grain bread, my favourite way to eat raw garlic.

 

I also cook with it. Garlic imparts such wonderful flavour and aroma to food, it’s a staple in my kitchen.

 

Whenever possible, I eat garlic with or followed by parsley. The chlorophyll in parsley combats the sulfur of the garlic. Cilantro works too, but I don’t care for it. We give our dog a clove of garlic everyday in her food, along with a few sprigs of parsley. She doesn’t have garlic breath.

 

I encourage you to add more garlic into your diet. It’s a small step you can take to leap into better health.

 

Sources:

Natural News

Wikipedia

Wake-Up World

Easy Health Options

Mother Earth News

 

*How to grow your own garlic:

http://www.motherearthnews.com/organic-gardening/growing-garlic-zbcz1309.aspx?newsletters=1&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_term=HE%20eNews&utm_campaign=09.23.13%20HE#axzz2fjGqUFRE

http://wakeup-world.com/2013/10/08/garlic-beats-best-selling-blood-pressure-drug-in-new-study/

http://wakeup-world.com/2013/10/18/how-garlic-can-save-your-life/

Change Your Oil Revised July 2013

oilchangeMany people think “healthy fats” is an oxymoron largely because fat was demonized in the eighties by many health professionals. Food manufacturers were quick to recognize opportunities to make huge profits and “low-fat” foods were created. The vilification of dietary fat is now suspected of contributing to the obesity epidemic partially because food manufacturers replaced fat with sugar, which comes with its own issues.

Furthermore, saturated fats were once believed to cause heart disease, thanks to a faulty study by Dr. Ancel Keyes, which was adopted by most health professionals as the word of dietary law.  This motivated health conscious people to switch to vegetable oils. Now there is evidence that switching from saturated fats to polyunsaturated fats, common in processed vegetable oils, has contributed to higher rates of cancer.

 

One reason is that polyunsaturated oils are highly unstable and vulnerable to oxidation and turning rancid.  Oxidation causes cancer. Oils that are rancid are highly toxic to humans (and pets. Sadly, most pet food is made using rancid fats).

 

To add to the danger, conventionally produced vegetable oils are processed using toxic chemicals like hexane, heptane, caustic soda, and other chemicals, the safety of which is unproven, to mask the rancid smell of processed oils.

In addition to the dangers of oxidation and rancidity, there are also concerns about the omega-6 content of polyunsaturated oils. A recent San Francisco study demonstrated that under laboratory conditions, omega-6 fatty acids could accelerate the growth of prostate tumor cells.  They are also suspected of contributing to breast cancer in post-menopausal women.

 

Other studies show that improving the omega-3 to omega-6 ratio can lower the risk of certain cancers. Specific recommendations vary, but most experts suggest a ratio of between 1:1 and 1:4 at most. The average modern diet has an omega-3 to omega-6 ratio of 1:20 or more!

 

The rapid increase of vegetable oils in our diets during the past century is largely responsible for this imbalance. While some vegetable oils do contain small amounts of omega-3 fatty acids, for the most part, they consist of omega-6. Some experts recommend increasing omega-3 consumption, but it is more effective to reduce omega-6 intake, by eliminating or drastically decreasing polyunsaturated oil consumption, including canola, soy, corn, and sunflower oils.

 

Further compounding the unhealthy fat issue is the hydrogenation of vegetable oils.  Hydrogenated oils and any foods made with them are the leading cause of heart disease and a major contributor to neurological disorders. Simply put, hydrogenated oils (or trans fats) are poison in the human body. They accelerate the buildup of plaque in the arteries and are suspected of causing cancer.

Food producers create hydrogenated oils for the convenience of food producers, primarily so that those foods taste good and can sit on the shelf for months without going bad. Therefore they significantly contribute to profits.

High-fat, low-fat, saturated fat, hydrogenated fats, polyunsaturated fats, omega 3, omega 6; it’s all very confusing. So what are we supposed to do?

 

First we need to recognize that healthy fats are an integral part of a complete diet. Avoiding fats actually causes chronic disease. Your brain is made of fat and it needs saturated fat. Even brain-friendly omega-3 fatty acids can’t be utilized without ample saturated fat. In addition, saturated fat facilitates nerve signals and hormone production. All of these systems rely on saturated fat to function, and to keep you healthy and ultimately, alive.

 

A diet rich in saturated fats protects your heart. Saturated fat reduces Lp(a), which is associated with increased risk for heart disease, and contributes to higher levels of HDL (good) cholesterol, which keep your heart healthy. In traditional cultures saturated fat was revered and even coveted as a source of vital energy.

Many nutrients are fat-soluble and failure to include healthy fats in meals results in many of the nutrients consumed not being absorbed by the body. Beta carotene, Vitamin D, and Vitamin E are three nutrients that require fat in order to be absorbed and used by the human body.  We need saturated fat to transport calcium to our bones, which is why dairy products naturally contain both calcium and saturated fat. Calcium supplements don’t do much good if saturated fat is lacking in our diet. By consuming fats with nutritional supplements, the effectiveness of the phytonutrients in supplements multiplies.

It doesn’t take much fat to aid the absorption of important vitamins and nutrients. Eating just five or ten nuts, or one-fourth of an avocado, provides plenty of dietary fat for transporting nutrients and aiding their absorption.

Saturated fats also boost our immune systems because they contain specialized fatty acids, which are naturally antifungal, antimicrobial and antiviral. These important fatty acids include lauric acid, myristic acid and caprylic acid. A diet rich in these beneficial fats provides the body with essential building blocks to fight pathogenic substances.

 

It is vitally important to choose the right kind of fats for your diet and the right amount because fats are high in calories. Healthy fats include real butter, (ideally from grass-fed cows), virgin (meaning cold-pressed) coconut oil, extra-virgin olive oil, flax seed oil, hemp-seed oil and other fats from plant sources such as nuts, seeds, and avocados. These healthy fats should be consumed with every meal. Oils from fatty fish like wild salmon are also beneficial. Even the fat in beef can be called healthy if eaten in moderation and if those animals were grass-fed, not grain-fed.

It is advisable to give up cheap fats such as low-cost vegetable oils. To do so requires the abandonment of most processed foods as they are almost always made with cheap, usually hydrogenated, vegetable oils. Say good-bye to crackers, deep-fried foods, baked goods, indeed, the entire snack aisle of your local grocery store.

Healthy fats are more expensive than unhealthy fats but this is one case where spending extra money significantly protects your health.

Finally, use oils appropriately. For example, extra-virgin olive oil is ideal for salad dressings and dishes that will simmer because it has a low flash point (or temperature at which it begins to burn). Flax oil should never be heated. Butter, coconut oil and peanut oil can stand higher temperatures and are more appropriate for cooking at high temperatures. Ideally, it is best to give up fried foods, because all fried fats contain trans fatty acids.

Sadly most people are more careful about the condition of the oil in the engines of their cars than about the oils they consume to fuel their bodies.  Changing your oil is an integral part of maintaining good health.

Sources for this article include: www.NaturalNews.com, www.Wikipedia.com, www.totalhealthbreakthroughs.com, www.alive.com

Eggs: Eggscelent or Evil?

chickens

Photo from ShelleyGoldbeck.com

Are you confused about whether you should eat eggs?

Your confusion is justified.

Eggs have been called ‘the perfect food”. Although, so has milk.

When Ancel Keyes’ flawed hypothesis that cholesterol causes heart disease became “common knowledge” in the medical community, eggs became villains.  Too much cholesterol.

Doctors warned their patients off eggs, despite their having other essential nutrients like protein, omega 3 fats, and various vitamins and minerals. To learn more about egg nutrients see: http://www.eggs.ca/eggs101/view/22/egg-nutrition and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_(food)

It was a sad time when the doctor insisted my grandma eat no more than three eggs each week. She had eaten a boiled egg nearly every day of her life, at that point, over eight decades.

I told her that eggs have components to help the body metabolize cholesterol. They have other beneficial nutrients. There was as much reason to eat them as not.

But who was I? The doctor surely knew better than I did.

Recently I found out she didn’t even have a cholesterol problem. It turns out she never fasted before her lipids blood test. To Grandma, skipping breakfast was intolerable. She needed to eat!

And of course eating an egg an hour before the test will skew the results.

When the lodge withheld her breakfast before the tests, all was normal.

She deprived herself of her morning egg for many years for nothing!

That’s not the end of the egg debate.

You see, the egg you eat today is not the same egg she ate.

Hers came from a family farm, where the chickens have access to grass everyday. They have fresh air and sunshine.

They exercise, poking around looking for insects. They fly up in terror when a fox strolls by their secure enclosure.

They have nest boxes so they can lay their eggs in privacy; (they seem to like that).

They aren’t confined to a space smaller than a sheet of paper, with their coop mates in their faces 24 hours a day.

Their feed consists of grain, lots of green grass and weeds, the odd insect, and plenty of assorted kitchen scraps.

My grandma would say that they are happy chickens. She believed happiness was a vital condition for healthy chickens.

The egg she ate was fresh, perhaps two days old. It had a golden yolk with a firm, jelly-like white that didn’t cover the entire frying pan when cracked. The egg she ate may have been fertile. It most certainly had more nutrients than the anemic orbs in the grocery stores today.

The eggs we buy in supermarkets are up to two months old before we buy them.  The Egg Marketing Board says it’s okay. The egg white is almost liquid, the yolk is anemic, and it just doesn’t taste fresh.

The conditions in which factory farm hens live are appalling. Their diets are garbage: waste from food processors, the carcasses of their colleagues, antibiotics, arsenic, and other unnatural substances. There is no happiness. There is much illness and despair.

Lately I’ve noticed commercials on TV for egg farmers. They have a catchy tune, “I’m an egg-man….” And they show pictures: a farming family, bucolic pastures, red barns, soft morning light dancing through the leaves.

Not once do they show a chicken.

They know we wouldn’t be singing the happy tune if we saw the chickens.

It’s like almost everything else on TV. It’s not real.

The reality is the commercial egg business has such slim margins that farmers are cornered into factory farming and its accompanying tortures.

Besides being cruel, the end product is inferior. Sick animals produce sick food. It’s that simple.

Even so-called Omega 3 or Organic eggs are suspicious products. I recently helped an elderly friend with her grocery shopping. She wanted organic eggs. I opened the carton to check them for cracks. They looked like they had been dyed. The shells were an unnatural, almost glowing orange. I would be leery of eating those eggs, despite their organic label.

Ideally, you have a few chickens in your backyard coop. It’s legal in some jurisdictions.  Before Calgary changed their by-laws I had a backyard coop with three little red hens.

We had the freshest eggs possible plus the enjoyment of caring for other creatures, observing their habits, and being connected to our food. My hens composted my kitchen scraps faster than any compost system. They provided hours of entertainment for the dog, the grandchildren, and even the grandpa to those children. He loved checking for eggs as much as they did.

If you can’t manage having your own chickens, find a neighbour or a farmer with a few.

If you have access to healthy eggs from happy chickens, I recommend you eat eggs. In moderation, like everything.

If you can’t get real eggs, I suggest you eat them sparingly or not at all.

 

Breaking news: The US FDA is campaigning to outlaw organic eggs. See:

http://www.motherearthnews.com/homesteading-and-livestock/no-more-organic-eggs-zw0z1309ztri.aspx#axzz2epVodpjP

Another article to read here

The Joy of Fresh Vegetables from the Garden

freshveggiesIt may seem geeky but my favourite food is fresh vegetables from the garden. People think I’m weird but there is truly nothing as surprisingly succulent as that first crunch of a baby carrot that you’ve cleaned by wiping it on your pants.

Steamed baby carrots with a whisker of melted butter epitomize simple, real, delicious food. The taste is sweet; the texture, firm, yet tender. If you’ve ever eaten a garden baby carrot you will agree that it should be illegal to refer to the others as baby carrots. How can they possibly have taste when they are nothing more than old carrots, peeled to a “baby” shape and dipped in bleach to preserve them? Yum! Bleach!

If you’ve ever sat in a pea patch on a hot August afternoon, gorging on the fruits of the vines, you know exactly how I feel about fresh vegetables. In fact, eating peas directly from the shells is a surefire way to get kids to eat their veggies. Contrast those tasty morsels with pureed baby-food peas or ordinary canned peas and it’s not hard to understand why kids often despise vegetables. If more kids were turned loose in a pea patch, I’m confident more kids would love veggies.

Admittedly some vegetables need help. I like turnips and parsnips cooked with a little brown sugar.  It’s how my mom and grandmothers served them. My kids thought they didn’t like turnips so I used to cook them with carrots and puree them with a little butter and brown sugar. They loved them!

Tell me; have you ever had asparagus just picked from the garden? The flavour is like none other, almost like eating the smell of freshly cut grass, sweet and green. Sometimes you’ll find spears as slim as licorice string with a tassel at the end. I suggest eating them raw and absorbing their fresh pea taste or very lightly steaming them.

Fresh garden vegetables contain trace minerals that are largely absent from vegetables grown in commercial operations.  Those minerals are vital building blocks for many processes performed by a healthy body and are undoubtedly the key to fresh vegetables’ explosive taste.

Ideally home-grown vegetables are not subjected to chemicals to make them grow or to kill insects and weeds; these poisonous substances may cause more damage to our health than we receive from eating vegetables.

Another advantage to eating home-grown produce is it doesn’t have to travel for hundreds or thousands of miles; instead it can be picked and eaten when ripe. The eater gets to enjoy all the benefits of the food with fewer of the costs, both monetary and environmental.

There is nothing so satisfying than to walk through the garden with a bowl in hand, planning lunch based on what is ripe and ready. A handful of fresh leaves with a home-made dressing, a few baby potatoes sautéed in butter, and a mess of beets and greens provide the basis for a meal that simply cannot be bought.

If you have a chance to grow and/or eat fresh vegetables from the garden, I urge you to do it. Your taste buds and your body’s engine will thank you.  If you have no clue how to raise your own garden, it’s not as difficult as you might think.  Here are some resources to get you started:

One Million Gardens http://www.onemilliongardens.com/

Garden Planner http://www.growveg.com/Default.aspx,

Documented Experiences of a Home Gardener: http://www.albertahomegardening.com/

Book Review: Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser edited Aug 2013

fastfoodnation“What the All-American Meal is doing to the World”

Fast Food Nation is a shocking expose’ on the various players in our food supply system

A glaring problem is that a handful of gigantic corporations control most of the links of our food chain, from seed grain to fertilizers and pesticides to feedlots to meat processing plants.

The book closely examines the relationship between big food companies like McDonald’s and their suppliers. The author also explores the large government regulators like USDA and FDA and their influence on the nutrition and safety of the food in the USA

McDonald’s corporation is the largest customer of beef and potatoes. Therefore they heavily influence their suppliers as well as government agencies.

As with all publicly traded companies, fast food companies are motivated by quarterly profits and immediate Return on Investment. Pressure is always on to improve efficiency and lower costs.

That leads to many problems, among them compromised animal rights, human rights, and the health of consumers.

The system is geared to churn profits and can’t seem to slow down to ensure the health of farm and plant workers who are routinely exposed to harmful chemicals, hazardous conditions, risking limbs and ultimately their lives.

The most powerful statement in the book comes at the end of a section on meat.  After examining several e-coli outbreaks, why they happened and how the industry reacted the author concludes that the bottom line is “There’s shit in the meat.”

Not to mention human body parts and rats. Some will claim “bullshit!”  I say, “Exactly!”

I believe it’s true. I once worked in a supermarket. The ladies who worked in the meat department never bought the hamburger. They always bought chuck or blade roasts and ground them into ground beef. They obviously knew something.

For several years I have purchased beef directly from a farmer I know. When I’m out of “good” meat and I’m forced to buy it in the store, I can hardly stand to cook the hamburger, never mind eat it. It stinks!

The book tells how conditions in packing plants are often inhumane both to animals and humans. The big processing companies pay politicians to pass laws so they can police themselves. Since this book was published, laws have been proposed to make it a criminal offense for journalists or anybody else to take photographs of or report on the conditions on factory farms and at processing facilities.

The cry of the big industry players is “We’ll police ourselves. Don’t worry!  But you can’t check up on us. Trust us!” And their friends in government say “okay” and turn a blind eye.

What are the solutions?

I’ve long agonized over the sources of food for my family. I grew up on a mixed farm where we raised our own beef, pork, chicken, goose, duck, turkey, eggs, vegetables and berries, in addition to the grain we grew to feed our animals and for sale. We ate nothing from a package.

When you grow up eating whole real food, factory food doesn’t taste right. Several years ago I learned to make my own salad dressings. Now I can’t eat dressing from a bottle. It tastes like chemicals. I find most restaurant food too salty, too greasy and tasting like chemicals.

It’s not feasible for us all to have our own sources of all the foods we enjoy. But there are ways we can get back control over our food.

The best is to grow your own food. When you plant, weed, water and harvest before you wash, slice and cook and eat it, you have a real connection to and vested interest in your food.

Granted, gardening isn’t for everyone but if you have a patch of grass in your yard, it’s easy to dig it up and throw in a few potatoes, tomatoes, salad stuff, green beans, beets, carrots, zucchini etc. Most of these vegetables practically grow themselves. It’s a small step towards controlling your food.

Learn how to prepare your own whole, real food and keep it simple. I am astounded by the hoards of people who are helpless when it comes to feeding themselves; that’s why there is a market for factory food.

Another option is to seek relationships with local growers, especially for meat, since we can’t have chickens or a steer in our city backyards. You might find local growers online or at farmer’s markets, although most of our markets are not populated with local farmers but the same wholesalers that supply the supermarkets. Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) groups are popping up all over the continent.

Choose organic options wherever possible. It’s tough to do. Big industrial food companies regularly buy out small organic producers so they can get in on the growth of the organic sector. Unfortunately, they industrialize them, bastardizing organic principles and misleading their customers.

For example a recent report by the Cornucopia Institute exposed cereal manufacturers, claiming natural and organic, but when their products were tested, they were found to contain genetically modified organisms, which are not organic, and other so-called natural ingredients that don’t belong in organic foods. See link below.

As consumers we need to read books like Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation to inform ourselves.  Once we’re informed we can notify politicians that we want responsible oversight of our food system. Let them know our food should be nutritious, safe, and ethical, not merely profitable.

Mostly, you can vote with your dollars. McDonald’s made exactly zero dollars from me last year, as did all the other fast food outlets. General Mills, Coca-Cola, and other food manufacturers also made no profit from me.

http://cornucopia.org/cereal-scorecard/docs/Cornucopia_Cereal_Report.pdf

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_Food_Nation

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_Food_Nation_(film)

Learn more by searching Google for Factory Farms