Green Beans

grrenbean1
photo belongs to www.ShelleyGoldbeck.com

The lowly green bean, as a rule, is not a vegetable that inspires poetry. But it has many virtues that are virtually unknown or certainly unsung.

You can buy green beans but there is nothing compares to them just-picked from the garden! Green beans are easy to grow. After the last frost in the spring, simply sow them ½ inch deep and one to two inches apart. With water and warmth tiny plants appear within days. Magpies like just-sprouted bean seedlings so beware.

Within six weeks the plants are covered with tiny blossoms and bean pods appear a week or so later. The pods hide easily in the foliage so hunt carefully!

Green beans are best eaten when they are not too big, when the seeds are still small and the pod is tender. They are good raw, something I learned from my Grandtoys.

I like them steamed until tender and green, not too soft or cooked until they’re brown. They are best served with a tiny bit of oil: butter, olive oil, coconut oil or any nut oils are good choices. Many of the vitamins in green beans are fat-soluble. By eating them with healthy fats, you make it easier for your body to utilize those nutrients.

A friend of mine told me recently that they are really delicious roasted in a bit of oil and salted. I imagine them to be like edamame, only you can eat the pods! I will try them.

Green beans are also easily pickled. Choose long, mature pods. Stand them up in the jars, pour your pickling solution over them and process. In a few weeks you have crispy pickled beans.

I became attracted to green beans as a young adult riding the diet roller coaster. Calorie counting was an integral part of my early efforts to manage my weight. As it happens, green beans are very low in calories, with just 31 calories per 100 grams or about 44 per cup.

grrenbean2
photo belongs to www.ShelleyGoldbeck.com

Green beans contain substantial amounts of Vitamins A, B-6, C and K and minerals, including calcium, iron, potassium, silicon, and magnesium. They are a good source of fibre and contain healthy plant-based protein. Recent studies highlight the antioxidant capacity of green beans.

Eating green beans, preferably fresh, but as an alternative, frozen, can enhance your cardiovascular health, help keep your weight down, and help you manage blood sugar.

To me, they taste like summer.

 

 

If you want to learn more about all the nutrients found in green beans check out this site:

http://www.whfoods.com/genpage.php?tname=foodspice&dbid=134

Head-Lies: Headlines that Mislead

headliesLast week a friend sent me some links to a story trumpeting that vegetarians are not healthier than carnivores. She felt this story justified her meat consumption. I disagree.

I am not against eating meat. But I am against misleading information.

This story is a classic example of a Head-lie, a misleading headline: one that rings true but upon further investigation, it’s fishy.

First there are many significant studies that show otherwise, that vegetarians have lower rates of modern diseases like cancer and heart disease. In light of dozens of studies showing that reducing meat consumption brings health benefits, I would not change my life because of this one study.

In fact it wasn’t a study but a survey. Big difference. A study has a chance of following good scientific protocol, not that it automatically does; but a survey has little chance of being accurate.

Then there is the ambiguous definition of vegetarian. I once worked with a man whose wife was a “vegetarian”. When I met her I was surprised to see she was overweight and looked unhealthy in general, unlike the vegetarians I know.

I asked him about her diet. It turns out she was a vegetarian who hated vegetables. She lived on vegetarian pizza (hold the veggies!), cereal, Kraft dinner, frozen dinners, chips, crackers, soft drinks, milkshakes, ice cream and French fries.

No meat. But no nutrition. Grain-heavy, like feedlot cattle. Not “vegeta”rian, but simply a person who doesn’t eat meat! If the vegetarians surveyed ate like she did I don’t doubt the “study” is accurate.

I know vegans who shun animal products but they eat “fake“ meats like hot dogs and luncheon “meats” and fake cheese made with vegetable oils. They are full of chemical fillers, artificial flavours and colours. I call this stuff “unfood”.

I do eat meat. I know my meat. I know my farmer. My small servings of grass-fed beef and lamb are far healthier than a vegan hotdog or most veggie burgers in restaurants or in the freezer aisle.

I’m not a great fan of labels like vegan, vegetarian, or carnivore. If I have to choose a label for myself it is “flexitarian”. I eat a variety of foods, as I believe our bodies were designed to secure nutrients from many available sources.

Apparently there are 80,000 edible real foods (I don’t think of processed foods as real or edible in the sense of nutrition). About 3000 of those foods are commonly eaten.

Sadly the average North American’s diet is derived 90% from only twelve foods, including wheat, corn, soy, and milk, incidentally some of the most modified and processed of foods.

Consequently we are deficient in micronutrients: vitamins, minerals, phyto-nutrients. The ensuing malnourishment leads to all kinds of mysterious conditions and diseases.

Because mainstream medicine refuses to see the food-health connection they blindly treat symptoms with drugs. Many people still are in god-like awe of their doctors, despite their ignorance of food and any “medicine” other than what they prescribe.

Media collaborates by running head-lies like this one. People don’t know what to believe and eventually give up trying to understand. My advice is:

1. Broaden your sources of information. We live in the Internet age. Snoop around. Go beyond the first Google page! Sign up for a variety of health newsletters. Find opposing views and information and weigh it yourself.

2. Don’t ever change your life or your diet based on one news story. Investigate.

3. Read widely about both (or many) sides of issues. Coconut oil was once vilified as a heart-disease-causing-saturated-fat. When evidence began to emerge that coconut is actually more beneficial than so-called-healthy-processed-vegetable-oils, I was skeptical. I began to research it for myself and found much evidence supporting the use of coconut oil.

4. Remember that there is no single right way to do anything. What works for me may not work for you. In fact pharmaceutical medicines are allowed on the market if as few as one third of patients realize desired results, often regardless of side effects. (The other two-thirds may have no benefit, but still suffer from side effects.)

5. Try things. Nothing crazy. But if you’ve been plagued with something and tried everything the doctor suggests, what have you got to lose by removing gluten or dairy or sugar from your diet for a month?

I tried coconut oil. Now I use it in my cooking and baking, on my skin and to oil pull (swishing oil in mouth to improve mouth/teeth health). I stopped using all processed oils like corn, sunflower and canola, regardless of their health claims, which I’ve learned are simply marketing tactics.

Articles like the one heralding unhealthy vegetarians are often designed to get out a message, an agenda, propaganda for a product or industry. In fact, they mention that the study authors are suspected of working for the meat industry.

Be cautious. Don’t believe the head-lies!

Besides eating does not have to be so complicated. Food writer, Michael Pollan says: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

I like that.

My policy is:

Eat the Food, the Whole Food and Nothing but the Food.

Links:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/vegetarians-are-less-healthy-and-have-a-lower-quality-of-life-than-meateaters-scientists-say-9236340.html

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

Unfood

no-junk-foodDefinition of Food:

1) things people eat.

2) things people eat that nourish, sustain or supply substances to sustain growth, repair and propel vital processes and to furnish energy.

Sadly Definition One is how most people think about food. If it’s edible, it’s food. Edible seems to mean if it doesn’t kill you immediately or in the short term, it’s okay to eat.

I prefer the second definition but if we use it as a ruler, the majority of what we eat falls short of food. We tend to eat a lot of what I like to call “unfood”.

Unfood is edible in that it doesn’t cause immediate death. Unfood is usually heavily processed and denatured of its nutrients. Unfood often includes substances created in labs to enhance, smell, taste, mouth-feel and shelf-life of the product. The body doesn’t know how to process these chemicals so it sequesters them into fat cells or reacts to them with aches, inability to sleep and other disorders.

Sadly, our first inclination is to reach for more poison: over-the-counter painkillers and sleeping pills, which further add to the toxic burden our bodies bear.

Look at the labels on the packaged food in your pantry. Are there words you can’t pronounce? I suggest you look them up online. Find out what other uses there are for these chemicals to determine whether eating them is a good idea.

Real food doesn’t require dozens of chemicals. Bread is a great example of how our food has been adulterated. Real bread requires five basic ingredients: flour, sugar, salt, water and yeast. Gourmet breads may include eggs, milk, and seeds.

But check out the label on your favourite bread. Subway has over 50 ingredients in its bread. A recent news story touted Food Babe’s victory in convincing Subway to remove one chemical from its bread. Big Deal. It’s a start but it seems rather like “lip service”. “We care about your health so we are removing X to lull you into forgetting about the other 40-some questionable ingredients!”

Chemicals are used to cover up the stench of processed food, which is often made with inferior ingredients. Pink slime, a lab concoction of proteins captured from slaughterhouse waste, is washed in ammonia before being added to patties, nuggets, sticks, and other forms of “pre-chewed” meats.

There is an entire industry manufacturing and marketing grain-based foods, most of which are corn-based. These foods are evil on many levels:

  1. 90% of corn in North America is GMO. In studies (except those conducted by GMO companies) consumption of GMO foods led to gastro-intestinal issues and higher cancer rates.
  2. Much of this corn is fried in GMO oils like corn, soy, canola and cottonseed oil. Frying creates acrylamides and other toxic substances and consuming them leads to Omega acid imbalances. (They’re all too high in Omega 6 vs Omega 3.) And they’re GMO.
  3. These foods are a major source of empty calories. Digesting food is an enormously energy-sucking process for the body. To achieve optimum health and reduce stress on the body, it is best to eat high-nutrient foods.
  4. Grain has been used to fatten animals for centuries, millennia. Why do we think a grain-based diet (which is the recommendation of the USDA Food Pyramid and the Canada Food Guide) is NOT going to make US fat?

There is plenty of unfood in our grocery baskets. Soft drinks are a significant portion of the family grocery budget but they do not nourish or sustain or supply anything. In fact they rob your body of calcium and other minerals. They are most likely loaded with GMO High Fructose Corn Syrup, an evil sweetener, which is manufactured using dry cleaning fluid and mercury. Even if they contain sugar, it is GMO if it’s made with sugar beets and all that sugar (9.5 tsp per can of Coke) steals vitamins and minerals from the body.

A lot of people assure me they’re fine because they avoid sugar, opting instead for artificial sweeteners. Little do they know that diabetes has skyrocketed, in part because of the prevalence of artificial sweeteners. The body simply doesn’t know what to do with these strange chemicals.

Before food gets to the factory (or supermarket) it can be contaminated with dozens of chemicals, namely pesticides, insecticides, herbicides and other substances designed to kill things. The Environmental Working Group releases a yearly list of the most polluted fruits and vegetables called The Dirty Dozen. These are the most heavily sprayed food crops and one is prudent to choose organic versions of these. They also have a list of the Clean 15, those foods least likely to be sprayed.

I’ve never understood the “out of sight, out of mind” mentality of ignoring the consequences of toxic chemicals in food. I also don’t understand consumers’ blind trust of the system and their tolerance of governments, obviously in cahoots with powerful food lobbyists. These organizations care about money, not the health and wellness of their customer.

Sometimes it all seems hopeless. 100 years ago all food was organic. Now we have to pick our way through food minefields. Tragically, most of us won’t know until it’s too late that we’ve been poisoned by our food.

What can you do?

  1. Grow as much of your own food as you can.
  2. Get to know your farmers.
  3. Buy ingredients, not products made with ingredients.
  4. Choose organic products whenever you can.
  5. Ask for organic products from your store managers. Create a demand for clean food.
  6. Vote with your dollars, supporting local, organic, and ethical food.
  7. Be prepared to pay more for quality food.

Moving away from unfood is a process. It won’t happen overnight. But your health and your world will reap the benefits of your intention to banish unfood forever.

 

http://www.ewg.org/

http://foodbabe.com/

Ritz Crackers are Not Grain: They Aren’t Even Food!

Ritz towerIn a recent news report a woman was fined $10 for not sending a grain in her child’s lunch, even though it had fresh vegetables including potatoes and carrots. The child’s lunch was supplemented with Ritz Crackers, under the pretense of providing the child with a grain.

This story appalls me on many levels.

First why was THIS child’s lunch the focus of persecution? What about the kids with fruit roll-ups, aka, sugar and food colour!?!?

What about the kids with white bread (stripped of its nutrients), slathered in margarine or mayonnaise, (hydrogenated “edible” oils, not food, but edible) and cancer-causing processed meat? That such a sandwich qualifies as food and fits nicely into the food pyramid is ghastly!

What qualifies a Ritz cracker as a grain?

Let’s examine the ingredients in a Ritz cracker.

Wheat Flour, (some labels say “enriched wheat flour”) Partially Hydrogenated Vegetable Oil (Soybean or Cottonseed), Sugar, Raising Agents (Ammonium and Sodium Bicarbonates, Disodium Diphosphate), Salt, High Fructose Corn Syrup, Soy Lecithin, Barley Malt Flour.

 

The main ingredient is wheat flour. It doesn’t say whole wheat so it means they’ve taken the whole grain, removed all

the nutritious parts and the fibre and left the starch. The law states they must replace some of the nutrients, namely niacin, iron, thiamin, riboflavin, folic acid. Sounds good until you realize that they add synthetic substances, and the body doesn’t necessarily use them in the same way as it does naturally occurring vitamins and minerals.

Grains in their whole state have fewer nutrients, pound for pound, than almost any whole food. Sure they have calories, but few of us have difficulties getting enough calories.

Our bodies need micronutrients like minerals and vitamins; we need fibre and proteins and healthy fats. Grains are not the best sources of any of these nutrients.

The next ingredient is vegetable oil (on some labels), soybean oil and cottonseed oils (on other labels). Soybean and cottonseed oils are most likely genetically modified, as 90% of North A

merican fields of these crops are GMO. GMOs have not been proven safe for human consumption and have been associated with severe environmental issues, including an increase in chemical usage, the creation of super weeds and super insects resistant to pesticides, destruction of soil ecology, and loss of biodiversity.

Ritz crackers info

In addition, the oil in a Ritz has been hydrogenated (adding hydrogen to convert liquid to solid) to give the food the right texture and mouth-feel and a significantly longer shelf life. Hydrogenation converts oil into a poison, as our bodies don’t know what to do with the resulting strange substance: trans fats.

Sugar is the next ingredient. Sugar is another poison in our food supply, contributing to over a hundred conditions and diseases. If it comes from sugar beet (as opposed to sugar cane) it is likely GMO and again, not proven safe for human consumption.

Then there’s baking powder and salt, and then more sugar, in the form of high fructose corn syrup, a sugar known to contribute to obesity and food addictions and usually GMO too. Food manufacturers often use several types of sugar so that they can list them separately and keep sugar from showing up first on all the labels. It’s a trick to keep us from realizing we are overdoing sugar.

About the only food value in a Ritz cracker is in the calories, which have been stripped of what little nutrients were in the grain and combined with unhealthy fat, sugar and salt.

What is really scary is that according to government-sponsored surveys, Ritz Crackers are the #1 perceived snack food in America.

If Ritz crackers are a staple in your diet, I suspect your body is starving. In North America we consume copious amounts of food but we are always hungry.

It’s because real food is so much more than calories or carbs, fat and protein. Real food is about the micronutrients that we can’t get from a processed food product like Ritz crackers.

After examining the evidence, what do you think?

Is a Ritz cracker a grain?

Is it even food?

Does it belong in your kid’s lunch?

My philosophy: Eat the Food, the Whole Food and Nothing but the Food.

Resources:

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2013/11/19/ritz-crackers-fine_n_4303073.html

http://www.snackworks.ca/en/products/Ritz.aspx

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

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/

Butter vs. Margarine

butterpicRevised July 2013

Margarine is the generic term used for butter substitutes. Its history goes back almost 200 years to the discovery of margaric acid from whence margarine derives its name. Over the years various ingredients have been used to concoct a less expensive spread than butter including beef tallow, whale, seal, and fish oils, vegetable oils and sometimes even a little butter.

Both butter and margarine are water-in-oil emulsions; they have similar calories, depending on the amount of water in the margarine or “spread”. Sadly, most people erroneously think they are interchangeable.

Margarine consumption surpassed that of butter in the late 1950’s when some scientists proposed a correlation between the consumption of saturated fats and blood-serum cholesterol levels with heart disease. Doctors began advising their patients to use margarine instead of butter.

Many people still believe in this supposed cause and effect but the explosion of heart disease in our society would suggest otherwise. Food manufacturers seized the opportunity to increase profits by using cheaper inferior ingredients while proclaiming the health benefits of their products.

Margarine is a manufactured “food”, generally accomplished by passing hydrogen through (often) inferior quality oil in the presence of a nickel, cadmium, or palladium (all toxic heavy metals) catalyst. The addition of hydrogen to the unsaturated bonds results in saturated bonds, effectively increasing the melting point of the oil and thus hardening it.

This process creates trans fats, which the body does not recognize as food and ironically are now known to contribute to heart disease and other diseases like cancer. Furthermore, the oil is extracted at high temperature, which damages the oil and destroys the vitamin E in it. The advertisements and the packaging for margarine are usually deceptive lies, stating it contains ‘polyunsaturated oil’, when the processing saturates or partially saturates the oil.

Butter has many nutritional benefits, where margarine has few. Butter contains antioxidants, which help offset free-radical damage to cells. It is a source of vitamin A, D, E, and K, calcium, selenium, and conjugated linoleic acid, which helps maintain lean body mass, prevents weight gain and may reduce certain cancers. Butter fat helps the absorption of certain vitamins and minerals. And it tastes better.

Although many people are sensitive to cow’s milk dairy products, often butter is well-tolerated because butter is almost a pure fat, and does not contain many of the allergens found in other milk products.

 

One issue is the treatment of dairy cows. They are often pumped full of antibiotics and hormones which naturally land in the milk.

 

The argument that margarine helps control cholesterol is a myth as most cholesterol is manufactured within the body; a maximum of about 4% of all cholesterol comes from the diet.  Cholesterol is the raw material for the adrenal stress hormones and the sex hormones. The body often reacts to stress by producing more cholesterol allowing the body to make more stress-fighting hormones. Therefore it is quite likely that the consumption of trans fats stresses the body to produce more cholesterol.

 

The human body is not designed to consume manufactured food but thrives on a diet of whole, real food. Butter is a natural food and one of the best sources of important fat-soluble vitamins. You will pay more for butter, but nutritionally, for its purity, and its taste it is well worth it. Just remember, all things in moderation; the body is not served by eating any fat, including butter, by the pound.

 

 

Sources for this article include:

http://www.naturodoc.com/library/nutrition/margbutt.htm

Aviva:

http://www.healthcastle.com/butter-or-margarine.shtml

http://www.homemakers.com/health-and-nutrition/nutrition-and-diet/margarine-vs-butter-the-debate-continues/a/27133

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/002114.htm

This site is sponsored by margarine producers who proclaim the “debate is over”.  It is included in this list in the interest of balance:

http://www.choosemargarine.com/latestSpread_marg_vs_butter.html

http://www.drlwilson.com/Articles/butter.htm

http://www.chatham-kent.ca/community+services/Public+Health/keeping+you+healthy/healthy+eating/Butter+or+Margarine.htm

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