the fat myth

Food research of the past years has revealed that food is healthiest when we eat it the way nature made it.  When food becomes a "product," meaning when it comes from a factory and they've done stuff to it, it's no longer so healthy and in many instances even harmful. There are a lot of food myths out there that we/our culture created from the ill gotten belief that man-made stuff would surpass what nature makes because it is based on science.  But the food industry pushes under the rug that it's really after the profit, not your health, and that's what they apply their science to.

So here goes the fat myth:

FAT IS BAD FOR YOU  - "lite products" are better for you.

Hence low fat and no fat everything, cheese, milk, yogurt.  The absurd and unhealthy culminations of this misguided belief system of course are butter substitute and margarine, not much nature left in those.  Hence also the French Paradox - why the northern French don't get fat on all their cream and butter and delicious camembert, and the southern French thrive on the olive oil rich Mediterranean diet.  Sally Fallon, one of my nouveau food idols, has all the scientific back-up information for the skeptics in her oft cited food myth debunker and cookbook Nourishing Traditions.

I switched our whole family back to full fat everything a few years ago (I am only a few steps ahead) and we have neither gained weight nor become sick; as a matter-of-fact, we are all very healthy, love to eat, and never spare a thought on the fat question. 

fermented foods and good bacteria

Looks like the mainstream is coming around to the fact that microorganisms are not only all around us but also all over our insides, and that that's not necessarily a bad thing (see Michael Pollan's recent article).  As a matter-of-fact, we are realizing now that bacteria are necessary to our gut health and a strong immune system.  So, antibacterial soaps and wipes and sprays weaken our immune systems because the lack of bacteria oversensitizes the body and removes the chance to interact with our environment; and doctors are becoming much more cautious in prescribing antibiotics for human consumption (now we just need the meat industry to come on board and stop feeding the animals preventative antibiotics, trace elements of which remain in  the meat, and which also end up in the water cycle, so ultimately this practice bites us in the behind).  The few times I was treated with antibiotics as a child our pediatrician stressed the importance of eating yogurt every day to replenish the gut bacteria destroyed by the antibiotics.  You may have read of the newest treatment for intestinal inflammations:  fecal bacteriotherapy, the deliberate injection of fecal bacteria from a healthy person to replenish a sick person's gut bacteria.

Turns out that most cultures have traditions of fermenting foods, foods that "turn" and develop lactobacteria, and when eaten regularly, keep replenishing our gut fauna naturally, foods and drinks such as yogurt and kefir, cheese, Sauerkraut and Kimchi, pickled vegetables (not made with vinegar but naturally fermented), beer and wine, cured sausage, sourdough bread and so on.  Consult Sally Fallons' anti establishment cookbook Nourishing Traditions on really easy recipes for fermented vegetables, as well as the new fermented food bible The Art of Fermentation from Sandor Ellix Katz.

Also refer to my recent post on loving your germs for a different facet of the same issue, and keep eating (raw milk!) cheeses, cultured butter, and all those other delicious fermented foods.

pill or self-heal, or the power of beliefs

We used to believe, truly believe, that the earth is flat and that we would fall over the edge if we went too close.  We also believed, truly believed, that we were at the center of the universe.   Heck, we even burnt someone at the stake for saying otherwise.  We believe other things now, but they are as firmly embedded in our minds as those from earlier times we now call silly.  One of them concerns self-healing. We currently don't really believe that we can self-heal, or let's say that we only believe it under certain circumstances (which makes no sense; it either works, or it doesn't).  Usually we quickly run for outside help, doctors, pills, tests, and so forth.  But think about this:  When you have a cold and eat chicken soup or drink tea to feel better, you don't believe that the chicken soup or tea actually heals the cold.  You understand that you/your body heals the cold and the tea or soup simply helps. When you break a leg and get a cast you don't actually believe that the cast is what heals the bone, you do understand that you/your body heals the bone and the cast simply keeps the limb from moving to aid the body in the healing process.  Under those circumstances we all actually agree that we self-heal and that tea, chicken soup and cast are aids or props.   But the belief system is shaky because we still need an outside "expert" with "expert" methods to help us heal more "serious" ailments.  When we take pills or resort to various treatments, we believe all of a sudden that they actually caused the healing. (Yet, when the treatment doesn't work so well, as is often the case, then we are at a loss - but we wouldn't doubt or adjust our belief system).

You may have heard of voodoo deaths, whereby someone actually ends up dying from a combination of their own fear and the combined energy of the village community that does the condemning.  You may have read about the study on placebo knee surgery for arthritic patients, that ended up treating pain as well as actual surgery (!).  The fact is - our beliefs are enormously powerful!  And when we don't heal, it is usually because negative beliefs or residual trauma are in the way and counteract the process (there are a few exceptions, such as afflictions we are born with).  When they get cleared, the body can heal itself.  Check out the recent book Use Your Body to Heal Your Mind by psychologist Henry Grayson to explore this subject further.

CAM

CAM is short for "complementary and alternative medicine" and covers all healing modalities other than the Western allopathic model, or "conventional" medicine (at least for us). Western allopathic medicine is based on a mechanistic model of the human body, where the different body parts can be treated independently from one another by specialists (i.e. the heart by a cardiologist, the kidneys by a nephrologist, the feet by a podiatrist, the mind by a psychologist or psychiatrist).   Diagnosis is based on detailed examination of all visible parts of the physical body.  Treatments are geared towards eliminating or reducing symptoms; they are not geared towards healing the root cause of the matter, because that is not part of the belief system.  

Treatments range from cutting out diseased tissue, to injecting or administering substances that reverse the symptoms (but also usually have side effects - undesirable for the most part).  This is similar to bringing your car in for a check-up and having its oil and windshield wiper fluid checked and refilled, the tire pressure verified, and the spark plugs exchanged.

This model is successful in emergency medicine (accidents, broken limbs) and for acute illnesses, where no time is to be lost to save a life.   It is not so effective for afflictions that have a connection with the psyche (most of them) - did you ever consider that heart disease might have to do with matters of the heart (not the organ, but the emotional heart)?  Here, the model of one-standard-treatment-cures-all does not work so well, as we can see from the varying successes of treating cancer, heart disease, psychological and psychiatric disorders, diabetes, auto-immune diseases and on and on.

CAM works with a different model of the body.  In this model the body is more than a sum of its physical parts, it is a mind-body-spirit entity that exists in an energetic universe.  Some examples of CAM modalities are homeopathy, healing with herbs, acupuncture, reiki, Ayurveda, but also massage therapy, music therapy, yoga and meditation.    These methods all help to rebalance the underlying energy system of the body.  It has been said that about 85% of all illnesses are due to emotional imbalances, which means that the underlying emotional blockage or psychological conflict needs to be resolved to dissolve the physical symptom without reoccurrence.  It has already been acknowledged that lifestyle changes can do wonders - regular meditation reduces stress, a better diet and more exercise give you more energy, and less stress and more harmony in life are beneficial in general.  That's all spiritual stuff.  There is definitely more to our bodies than what we can see.

Please also read my older related post on Healing as a Balancing Act.

the meat quandary - last installment

That meat eating has become a potential ethical dilemma indicates a change in our awareness.  As we can see from the Inuit (who eat mostly fish protein) or the Masaai (who subsist mostly on the meat, milk and blood of the cattle they raise) on the one hand, and the Hindus, most of who have been vegetarian for a few millenia, there is a cultural context to any diet that arose in no small part from the geographical surroundings and inherent food potentials. As we have been struggling with the health implications of the big-ag industrial diet that makes for-profit "products," not food, (remember, they don't make this stuff for your benefit, but for theirs: $), and which are made out of geographical context altogether, we have wrestled with the "diet of the day" out of confusion.  The Atkins Diet, the South Beach Diet, the Paleo Diet, the Mediterranean Diet, and what not, have all been hailed as an epiphany at one point or another.

In my view diet has to be considered not only within an ethnico-cultural-geographical context, but also in the context of consciousness evolution.  What I mean by that is that a diet reflects our current understanding of things, our beliefs, our culture, our state-of-affairs.

I believe that it is perfectly ok to eat honey and eggs and some meat and some fish If we live in a context of respect and mutual benefit for all. Check out Sally Fallon's "Nourishing Traditions" for a well researched reversal on some of our common food myths.   Most important is to eat real food - the rest is up to your personal convictions, state of mind and stomach (listen to your body; when you exit a fast food place or a steakhouse and feel heavy and stuffed and as if you couldn't eat anything for the next 24 hours, maybe that food wasn't so beneficial for you).  Food should energize you, physically and spiritually.

Your views and diet evolve as you become better informed, mine continually do.  And if you believe from the bottom of your heart that a candy bar is really really good for your body  (not just to fulfill an emotional need), then it will be.

Please see installments 1. and 2. for the complete picture on the meat quandary.

the meat quandary - in 2 more installments

2. on eating produce Will Tuttle in his World Peace Diet, and the China Study, among many, are fervently advocating vegetarian and even vegan diets.  The two main arguments are that the industrial meat industry's carbon foot print, in combination with continually increasing demand for animal protein due to a still growing (and ever more affluent) world population, is disastrous to our environmental health (which it is), and that  meat eating contributes to, or causes, cancer and other civilization diseases (which it only does under certain conditions, some of which I mentioned in my last post).

Yet, the fact that the vegetarian/vegan movement is becoming so prominent points to a shift in awareness (of the abominable industrial meat industry, its contribution to global warming, and of the unhealthiness of industrial meat and cornfed beef).  Michael Pollan's famous advice to  "eat food, not too much, mostly plants" is good advice for most of us, indeed.

On another vegetably note, the basis for our existence is light, water and soil.  Produce is closer to light energy than meat is.  As we all know, plants grow through direct conversion of sunlight to energy.  When we eat plants we take in sun energy just one step removed.  When we consume meat, we are one step further removed from that light energy because we eat the animal that fed on plants that fed on sunlight.  And incidentally, humans don't usually eat predator meat because that is yet one step further removed from sun energy than meat from vegan animals.

However, as long as we keep subjecting our crops and soil to synthetic fertilizers and chemical pesticides (and killing the bees along with the birds in the process), and monoculturing our produce crops, and not demanding GMO labeling (which has already happened in Europe, Japan, Russia and many other industrialized countries), we are not achieving that much with vegetarianism/veganism.  We'll keep subjecting farm workers to the health dangers of working in chemically laced fields, big-ag will keep doing its thing with produce, Monsanto & Co. are still on the loose, and we are still ingesting mineral poor and poison sprayed food grown in depleted soil that had to be artificially enriched.  So, going vegetably must mean going organic/sustainable/biodynamic to have meaningful impact on body and environment.

to be continued...

the meat quandary - in 3 installments

1. on eating meat Humans have been eating protein forever, some ethnicities more of it, some less of it, depending on geographical circumstances.   Sustainable farming and animal husbandry have been practiced in conjunction since we humans became sedentary, using the animal manure as fertilizer for the crops, feeding the animals leftovers and scraps, and eating some (not lots!!) of them, all in a pretty balanced cycle.

The picture only became horrific in the last 50 years or so when we began to produce (!!) meat.  The plight of the animals in CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations), modern breeding aberrations, the realities of modern abattoirs and subsequent meat processing practices (documented ad nauseam (literally) in Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals) are nightmarish. One would not want to eat such meat!

The other problem is that the percentage of meat in our diet has reached addictive proportions with the decrease in meat prices, something that is not good for our body either (unless you were Inuit or Maasai, and then you wouldn't eat industrially produced meat).

Lastly, from an evolutionary perspective, increased meat consumption has been linked to increased brain growth (although I am thinking that our brains may not have grown in proportion with the increased meat consumption of the past 50 years, otherwise we might not be where we are at environmentally).

Dirt Magazine has a brief presentation on meat vs. produce in their May-June issue (article not yet online).  However, the two opinions are too simplified.  So please reserve judgement until you have read all 3 installments.

to be continued...

don't frack our future

Instead of digging into our earth, chopping it up, fracking it and injecting chemically laced water into it, carving some out of it, plundering it, hollowing it out, throwing our trash onto it and burying trash into it,

making a mess of it, plundering and raping it,

let's respect our earth, appreciate it for what it gives us, honor it, cooperate with it, and understand it.

spiritual farming

Huh, you might ask?  Yes, there is such a thing, and it is called biodynamic farming.  The Biodynamic Farming & Gardening Association’s website defines it as a “spiritual-ethical-ecological approach to agriculture, food production and nutrition.”  Fred Kirschenmann, author of Cultivating an Ecological Conscience, explained in his 2010 keynote address at the conference of the association, that the present big-ag paradigm of maximum efficiency is geared towards short-term gain, and is only possible through specialization and simplification (the small picture, immediate gratification).  However, he says, farms need to be run more like organisms (the Gaia principle), in sync with nature.

We need a new agricultural paradigm, what with the bees dying, crop varieties diminishing (Tom Standage reports that “of the 7,100 types of apple (!!!) that were being grown in America in the 19th century…6,800 are now extinct.”  WOW!), monocultures that discourage insect and bird variety and promote disease, and GMOs and pesticides as misguided solutions to increasing production with short-minded profit in mind.  While there is so much more to say about the deficiencies of the present paradigm, I’d rather look towards the future and better solutions.

Organic agriculture, sustainable agriculture,permaculture, and biodynamics are all promising alternatives, of which the first is the most profit and least nature oriented (yep).  The term permaculture comes from the contraction of permanent and culture and agriculture (there is indeed no culture without agriculture).  Permaculture is a completely sustainable agri/culture practiced in symbiosis with local nature and without waste.  Biodynamics incorporates more lofty principles.  Just like permaculture it works with the farm in a symbiotic wasteless cyclical organism-like relationship.  In addition, though, it takes into account our embeddedness in the larger cosmic picture, and considers the planetary influences on seeds, crops and soil, and works with “homeopathic” soil enhancements since the health of the soil is first and foremost in growing minerally rich produce, the ultimate aim of agriculture.

healthy soil = healthy food = healthy body

safe skincare products

Ingredients in skincare products (anything from shampoos, to lotions, to make-up) are not regulated through a government oversight, which means that companies are supposed to comply on their own - with what, though, since there is no oversight, no standard? In recent years a lot of ingredients in such products have turned out to be toxic - as carcinogens, hormone disrupters, or endocrine system disrupters.  Here are two websites to begin your research on the products in your bathroom cabinet:  www.ewg.org/skindeep/ and www.goodguide.com. 

I know that it can be quite overwhelming to begin reading labels, and finding out that many, most, or even all of your products are on the “bad list.”  But instead of throwing up your arms and the entire content of your bathroom cabinet out, research and substitute one item at a time, as you run out of something.  That makes it a lot more manageable and a lot less expensive.

Between my food coop, Trader Joe’s, and my Shaklee friend I can usually find a reasonably priced and readily available substitute.  Within a year’s time you’ll have replaced your skincare products without too much effort with something that won’t harm you or your family.