live foods/dead foods

sprouts

I am currently researching live foods - and dead foods in juxtaposition. A lot of what you find at your local supermarket is dead food. Why such a horrendous name? Because food that's been manufactured (funny way to talk about food, no?) in a factory (yep, that's where breakfast cereal comes from, or processed cheese, or bottled dressing) has no life energy. Dead food is basically any food that comes in a carton and is sold in the center aisles of your supermarket. Food advocates have long recommended to shop the perimeter of your supermarket in order to eat better, where produce, fish and meat, bread and dairy are sold - although even supermarket meat (and fish), and supermarket dairy and breads are adulterated (which is a whole other chapter). So what are live foods? Food is created through a transformational process of sunlight into energy, photosynthesis. A raw green plant grown above ground is just about as live a food as you can get, as its relationship with the sun is so direct.  So, salad in other words, leafy greens and anything raw, hence the recent craze over the Raw Food Movement. A tub of I Can't Believe It's Not Butter, or Cheez Whizz, or Funny Frosting in a tub is just about as far away from sunlight energy as you can possibly get - zero, zilch, nada life energy, empty calories, no minerals and vitamins for sure. The further removed from sunlight a food is, the less life energy it has. Meat is two steps removed from sunlight because the animal eats grass, which in turn grew with the help of sunlight. Meat from predators is yet further removed from sun energy, which may well be the reason why humans don't usually eat it (there are some exceptions with some indigenous tribes, as far as I know).  Lion steak anyone?

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Some of the alivest (is this a word?) food is sprouts, and leafy greens for example have more direct life energy than say root vegetables. Have you ever thought about the fact that some of the largest animals on this planet are plant eaters? Elephants, rhinos, cattle, hippos, dinosaurs (the largest of them all) are all greens eaters, whether grass or leaves.  Wheatgrass and barley grass juice are some of the most healing potions you can ingest.  Take a look at what you currently eat and consider adding more greens and more raw foods to your diet.  It will increase  your energy level.

going paleo?

Is the Paleo Diet another one of those diet fads like the Atkins Diet or the South Beach Diet?   Come to think of it, there may be a bit more to it, indeed. The so called Western Diet, which is now traveling east and infecting Europe, India and China, is full of sugar and starches. Given that starches in the form of grains, and transformed into bread, pasta, pizza and cereals - our new daily staples, have only been in our diet since the advent of agriculture about 10,000 years ago, they seem to throw our million-and-some year old digestive systems for a loop. Add to the starches the addicting amounts of sugar we seem powerless to control because big food puts them into everything from pickles (why?) and mustard, mayonnaise (serious?) and bread (what's it doing in there?), to pasta sauce, breakfast cereals, soft drinks, and whatever else they can find, you may be in for a health mess unless you cook everything from scratch. And it (the health mess) shows - Celiac disease, diabetes 1 and 2, rheumatoid arthritis, gluten sensitivity in general, perhaps even cancer, too - all seem to point to the same evil - sugar and grains, and are on a drastic rise. I admit that I used to boast that my digestive system could handle all that grain, and what was it with all those gluten intolerant people.  After all, I grew up in the land of baguette and croissants, and was born in the land of the crusty breads.  Yet a recent diagnosis of Diabetes Type 1 in a close relative hit home and made me think again.

The Paleo Diet cuts those two culprits out - no refined sugar, no grains. Instead, meat and fish in small quantities, no or limited dairy (my homeopathic MD recently said dryly "dairy is overrated and usually adulterated" - unless you go raw), lots of vegetables (and preferably not the starchy kind - keep it green), some fruits, as well as nuts.   Stories abound of healing diabetes 1 and 2 (yes, both), Celiac and various inflammatory and auto-immune conditions by going gluten-free or following the Paleo Diet. I'm trying it.

crummy tummies

My daughter is in bed today after an afternoon and a night of feeling nauseous and being sick.   Today she has a headache and is resting. Lots of fluids, nothing to eat, rest and love and comfort. You may say that it's a virus, or a stomach bug, something is going around, or suspect that she ate something bad. Maybe yes, maybe no.

Coming from a spiritual approach to healing it helps me to associate the symptom with what may be going on in the mind, as I do believe that mind and body inform each other.   In homeopathy, for that matter, afflictions are not named, only symptoms defined and treated.  The most common childhood ailments have got to be tummy aches (that's where the solar plexus is, through which all kinds of energies get sucked in to us), headaches ("too much stuff right now for my little head"), and earaches ("I don't want to hear it").  Along those lines of thinking the body's inability to digest food properly might be linked to an inability to deal with/digest something that is going on in the mind. And the headache may be a result of information overload or issues the child is going through. Some more traditionally and some more spiritually oriented pediatricians have observed that children go through a noticeable maturation process when they work through a major illness.

In our busy world the needed rest to pause and digest properly, in mind and in body, especially for children, may only be possible by spending a day or two in bed.  Also revisit an earlier related post: "the difference between cause and effect in healing."

balancing act

        Each yoga session is different for me.Some days I'm more flexible than others.Some days I balance better than others.The flexibility has more to do with the time of day - stiffer in the early morning, more flexible as the day goes by and I move my body more.The balancing ability, on the other hand, has everything to do with my state of mind, how balanced I am internally, how focused I am.Some days, when I try to do tree pose I can only get my leg to ankle height, and still I wobble and have to put my toe down periodically.Other days, as if by magic, I get my leg all the way up to rest against my thigh and I stand in suspended stillness.

The more scattered or agitated I am, and the less balanced my state of mind, the more difficult the balancing poses are.The more calm my state of mind, the better those poses work.  Most important, I find, is to let go of straining or willing myself to get somewhere.Instead, I pick a neutral focal point in mid-distance, maybe a nail on the wall or a light switch, and use this to keep focused on the pose instead of watching my thoughts galloping through my head.  The less I strive to create a perfect tree pose and simply follow wherever my body takes me, the better.Then it becomes like a meditation in action.

the color of life

I find the color Green very soothing. It seems restful to my eyes. I love when vibrant green begins to mix into the drab gray browns of winter and slowly takes over by the end of May. I can look at an expanse of thick juicy green grass for ever and feel peaceful. Walking in the woods I enjoy staring at the dense green tree canopy.            "Green, the result of photosynthesis, which creates all of our food, is the color of life," says Petra Fromme of AZSU. The NY Times reported in a recent article on the color green that blue and green are the world's favorite colors. Our vision is optimized for green, says Bevil Conway of Wellesley College.

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Not only our mind, but our body, too, thrives on greens, whether in the form of leafy green vegetables, that miracle healer wheat grass juice (2oz of it provides as many nutrients as 5lbs of raw vegetables - wow!), that other super healer chlorella algae, and various other mineral rich sea vegetables.

As Popeye already said.....

grass fed is best

I used to think that the most important improvement to our dairy consumption was to buy organic milk, butter and cheese, what with the grow hormones and antibiotics they feed the poor cows these days (and that make it into our body and into the groundwater). But I have had to adjust my thinking. Buying organic butter, and cheese and milk, only assures that the cows were fed an organic (grain - gulp) diet (which is unhealthy for the poor animals and makes them sick).  That meat from grass fed cows (their natural diet) is healthier for us than from grain fed or grain finished cows has gradually trickled into mainstream awareness (less fat, more healthy Omega-3, higher in various other micronutrients).

But the same is also of course true for milk, cheese and butter from grass fed cows - much higher levels of vitamin K2 and Omega-3 fatty acids, which actually promote heart health (yes, eat more of it!).   Studies have shown that countries where cows are mostly grass fed (Ireland, Australia) have much lower levels of heart disease!

Organic butter really does not buy you much, butter from grass fed cows does.

a new medical paradigm

What if it weren't necessarily the microorganism that made us sick, but that healing depended instead on the condition and resilience of our own immune system, our constitution, our circumstances and how our body handles strains to our wellbeing? Liise-Anne Pirofski, infectious disease specialist at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, clarifies that a particular microorganism can harm one person and leave another unharmed. Too often, Dr. Pirofski says, we simply try to combat a certain microorganism with antibiotics or vaccines. Yet, we have not found vaccines against tuberculosis, malaria, herpes or fungal diseases. Instead, Dr. Pirofski suggests, as reported in the German news magazine Der Spiegel, researching how to strengthen the host. In essence, Dr. Pirofski proposes a radical paradigm change, away from the pathogen-as-culprit and towards understanding instead how to strengthen and heal the person. This goes against the grain of the Western medical paradigm that treats the perceived pathogen, and is more in line with the thinking of CAM, complementary and alternative medicine, that treats the whole person.

Ask not what makes you sick but how you can heal.

relish your eggs, yolk and all

         Egg whites sans yolk became the virtuous thing to eat in recent years because of the misguided cholesterol scare (I recently wrote about the fat myth). I find egg whites by themselves bland and love my yolks. Rather, I live for the yolk and eat the white just because it happens to come with it, although egg whites do have their place in chocolate mousse and meringues. The deep yellow oozy yolk, warm and runny, is just soooo delicious (see a post on my soft spot for soft boiled eggs). Egg yolks were vilified by a culture that was quick to believe one-sided and misinterpreted scientific tests, and valued scientifically engineered food products over what nature made. The food industry saw a quick profit in our fear of cholesterol (take a look at information from the Weston Price Foundation on the misguided cholesterol myth). Hence those egg white omelets, and egg products like desiccated egg white powder, substitute egg mix, and liquid egg whites in a carton.

         Not only are eggs one of the healthiest foods on earth, they are also a brain food, provide one of the highest levels of protein, and are an excellent source of vitamin D (eat more of them in the wintertime when you don't get out into the sun as much) and minerals. The much bigger problem is the low quality of eggs coming from industrialized mass egg productions and the egg products made from them. Do eat eggs, but buy them from a local farmer who lets the chickens roam and eat grubs (see a blog post on that as well).  If you want to save food $ consider cutting back drastically on your meat consumption and getting more of your protein from the best quality eggs you can find.

In the end, we are better off looking at the causes of cardio-vascular and heart disease from an emotional perspective, which merits a blog post in itself, rather than making cholesterol the culprit.  So - have your eggs and eat them too!

love your stress

Love your stress?? I'm not kidding.  Stanford University health psychologist Kelly McGonigal has put forth a radically different understanding of stress, which could not only save your life but also that of thousands of others.   The broader implications are in sync with what has been called "the biology of belief" (as in Bruce Lipton's namesake book), which says in a nutshell that your beliefs fundamentally shape your body's well- and illbeing. This is radical because it means that if you can change your belief you can heal your ailments (also see an earlier blog post about this). In alternative medicine this is actually not such a new concept. Deepak Chopra and Henry Grayson are just two of a long list of doctors and psychologists who profess just that. But back to stress in particular. In her TEDTalk McGonigal bases her theory on two studies about stress that run counter to what we have been hearing all these years.

The first point is that stress is not what makes you sick, but rather your beliefs that stress is harmful. Instead, she explains, the pounding heart simply prepares you for action, while the faster breathing brings more oxygen to your brain. The study showed that the blood vessels only constricted - and this is the potentially harmful reaction - if the subject believed stress was harmful. When the subjects did not believe that stress was harmful the blood vessels remained relaxed, like in moments of joy! McGonigle is telling us to see our stress response as helpful, not harmful, and knowing that stress is "your body helping you rise to the challenge."

The point from the second study is that stress makes you social because oxytocin, the cuddle and relationship hormone, but also a stress hormone, is released during a stressful situation, nudging you to seek support and surround yourself with caring people. Oxytocin protects your cardiovascular system because it helps to heal the heart cells from any stress damage. "Stress opens the path to the heart!"

Sooooooo: a. your beliefs transform your stress experience and b. relationships create stress resilience.  Wonderful news!

it doesn't get better than that

The looming holiday season fills many of us with stress and dread and a sense of obligation, especially if we are the one hosting. My mother-in-law used to have between 35 and 45 people for a sit-down Thanksgiving dinner every year. The preparations for hosting so many people are daunting for sure, and sometimes she would say "never again" the night before Thanksgiving.   We, of course, oblivious at the time of the long-term planning that goes into such an event, always looked forward to those big gatherings. It's nice to dress up, it's nice to see Aunt Jeanne and Uncle Charles again, it's neat to see how much the kids have grown, it's fun to taste all those traditional family recipes again.  It's also just simply wonderful to belong to this big crowd of family and friends. And the ritual of celebrating an annual holiday again and again grounds us in the seasons and in the circularity of natural cycles. I find it truly comforting. Relationships - being with others, sharing a meal, having good conversations - are one of the greatest mood enhancers. A strong network of friends, a good support structure, doing things in community or with friends all do more for your health than doctor's visits and pills. We thrive on relationships, on acceptance, on community, on activities with others.  We love to be cared for, we love to belong.

Of course we need to take turns playing both roles - host and invitee, otherwise it's no fun for everyone else. But as long as it all balances out in the end I take the work of being on the giving end in stride. After all - if I don't give I won't receive. Besides, I actually love having people over, making them feel cared for, choreographing an evening of togetherness to create an environment of mutual enjoyment. It's quite exhilarating to create the backdrop for so much pleasure.   Life doesn't get better than that!