Make baked goods a little healthier

Here we go again - blaming fat, especially the wrong kind of fat, rather than carbs and commercial vegetable oils. An article in today's (11/27/11) Blade claims to tell you how to make baked good healthier, but it's the usual misguided advice.

• Replacing part of the butter with pureed fruit will just make the item higher in carbs, contributing to undesirable blood sugar gyrations.
• Using oil rather than butter is likely to contribute to the insulin resistance that leads to diabetes.
• Replacing whole eggs with egg whites or egg substitutes, just means you miss all the wonderful nutrients in the egg yolk, including choline and vitamin A. Choline deficiency induces metabolic syndrome (indicated by insulin resistance and elevated serum triglycerides and cholesterol) and obesity. And the cholesterol in egg yolks is actually beneficial.
• Using low fat cream cheese or low fat milk just means you are losing the benefits of butterfat - more vitamin A, stable saturated fats that make for a satisfying meal and protect your cells from the undesirable trans fats and excessive highly reactive omega-6 oils.

The easiest way to make baked goods healthier is to use all your good natural fats, but eat a smaller portion. But one caution, smaller portions may signal your body "Oops! Starvation!" and your metabolism slows down - not what you had in mind. A satisfying meal of real food in modest portions, with plenty of good fats, is more likely to keep your body happily perking along in fat-burning mode. So make that rich dessert with quality ingredients, just don't eat as much! And you can probably cut the sugar - with superior ingredients it doesn't need to be super sweet.

Where are the Innovators?

In response to the Editorial on page 37 of the October 10-16, 2011 large print weekly of the NYTimes, titled "Where to Find the Innovators?"(They are always changing the name!) I wrote this response - but was too late to send it.

What do you mean 'Where are the innovators?' There are plenty of innovators but they are being systematically squashed!

There are innovative eco-farmers who are producing super nutritious, tasty and highly productive farm products, using innovative, sophisticated, ecologically friendly, sustainable techniques, but they have been ignored or belittled by conventional agricultural experts.

There are small eco-farmers and their customers who are producing wonderfully nutritious and innovative value added products, but they are crushed by burdensome, irrational, often arbitrarily applied regulations which have little to do with real food safety, but are true job killers. Read famed, truly innovative eco-farmer Joel Salatin's book, Everything I Want To Do is Illegal, to see what innovation killers those regulations can be. (Summary article)

There are unconventional health professionals who are not only curing cancer, but also guiding their patients into how to prevent it and a host of other chronic diseases in the first place, yet they are regularly disparaged as quacks and frauds by establishment medicine and often threatened with loss of their license to practice.

The public has been led to believe that the latest drug is truly innovative, when in fact the really innovative, effective, and relatively low cost non-drug approaches being used by knowledgeable nutritionists face all kinds of regulatory barriers, while the practitioners are attacked by the dietetic police for not having the "proper credentials," or not following proper protocols.

Wall Street's insistence on short term profits is behind much of this - so hurrah for 'Occupy Wall Street'! An end to the collusion between big corporations and government!

Your everlovin' reformed and retired dietitian,
Kris

Phosphorus fertilizer buildup - a solution

A headline on the business page in yesterday's Blade:
Algae food found in 30% of Ohio farmland - Phosphorus linked to outbreaks on lake
"Ohio's six state agency directors learned Wednesday that nearly a third of all Buckeye State farmland is believed to contain too much phosphorus, one of many possible reasons for large annual algae outbreaks in western Lake Erie since 1995."

This is another reason to switch to intelligent organic/ecological farming techniques. Phosphorus from commercial chemical fertilizers is rather quickly bound up into in insoluble form that is unavailable to the plants - hence its accumulation in the soil. To release that bound-up phosphorus requires the biological action of soil microorganisms, especially fungi. Chemical farming tends to kill off the soil life, making the soil more vulnerable to erosion and requiring yet more chemical fertilizers, but sophisticated ecological farming methods encourage and support the soil life, making the bound up phosphorus and other minerals, as well as nitrogen from the air, available for plant utilization.

It's time we face the reality of what our commercial farming methods are doing to the environment. Ecological farming that is well done can be just as productive as conventional methods, while producing higher quality, more profitable crops.

How to Save a Trillion Dollars

From The New York Times Opinion Pages
How to Save a Trillion Dollars
By MARK BITTMAN

Interesting article! Too bad he picks on Ornish as an example of healthy eating. He's headed in the right direction except for his misplaced fat phobia. People are forever misunderstanding the value of natural saturated fats to avoid excess carbs and excess polyunsaturated fats, and spare the essential fatty acids.

I should add that the biggest barrier to sensible healthy eating government policy is the adverse affect it would have on the ag, food, pharm, & medical industries, which have far too much influence on our politicians and bureaucrats. Otherwise why would they continue to promote a low saturated fat ,high carb diet in spite of all the evidence that saturated fat is not bad and limiting carbs can be very helpful.

The unemployed could be put back to work at satisfying and rewarding work raising the high quality food needed on well managed ecological farms, preparing that food for sale, and doing all the 'green' jobs that need doing to rescue our environment from the edge of disaster. And if we didn't have the worry and expense of rampant disease, we could support the arts, education, and other worthy enterprises that get short shrift these days.

Some have commented that ill health is mostly hereditary - this is only slightly true. Unfortunately unhealthy parents pass on their unhealthy habits to their kids. Actually the holistic doctors and naturopaths would be kept busy helping everyone fine tune their health, helping them recover from the ravages of our present junky food and toxic environment. It is the experience of many people who have changed to a healthier diet and lifestyle to overcome one health problem, that other problems are also resolved - health problems are often linked in ways we don't understand. A truly health body resists cancer, supports a healthy heart, healthy blood sugar, healthy blood pressure, healthy digestion, and has a happy disposition.

Don't tell me you can't afford to buy healthy food - you can't afford not to! You can even start to raise some of that food yourself. The higher the quality the less you'll need or want to eat!

There are links to a variety of healthy eating guides on my website. Just remember, people vary - some do better eating more vegetable, others do better eating more meat (with the fat). Refined carbs and omega-6 polyunsaturated fats need to be limited. And the best news is that high quality healthy food is wonderfully tasty!

Happy Eating!

Kris

A Letter to The Nation on Food and Health Freedom

To The Nation

As a Progressive who for the first time became politically active in 2008, working for the Obama campaign, I’ll have to say I am disappointed not only because Pres. Obama has fallen under the influence of big business interests, but because the Progressive movement seems to have been so silent on some issues which are dear to the hearts of many of us, issues that might be called common sense progressive libertarianism – "get the government off my back".

Example – the Raw Milk Movement, whose only champion in Congress at this point seems to be Ron Paul, while misguided public health authorities do everything in the power to shut down the movement, to the detriment of our health and our freedom. It is outrageous that at this time when there is so much concern about lack of jobs, we have a government agency, the FDA, that is throwing their weight around trying to shut down legitimate farm businesses based on completely unfounded food safety concerns - over and over again.* As a dietitian I am appalled at their arrogance! We can go to the store and buy all kinds of junk foods that are leading us down the path to obesity, diabetes, heart disease and cancer and more and we can't have raw milk cheese (or raw milk for that matter) because we might get sick??? Give me a break! I hear so many stories from raw milk consumers of healing from whole natural foods, but the public health authorities refuse to acknowledge that the benefits might outweigh the risks. Does this reflect the influence of the commercial dairy industry that doesn’t like the competition???

Another, but related, example – there is a comprehensive food safety bill in Congress, fortunately stalled by one Republican senator, which could have the effect of putting many small farms producing excellent artisanal food products out of business, with rules that are only appropriate for big commercial farm/food operations, who are the predominant sources of food poisoning crises. Without the passage of the Tester-Hagan amendment this bill would be a disaster for many farms and food processors that produce some of the healthiest food in this country. Are we looking at the oppressive influence of the giant commercial farm and food industries trying to shut down the competition???

Another example – The USDA Dietary Guidelines, which guide the food planning at millions of institutions about the country, and are currently being updated, are based on politics more than solid science! Luise Light, MS, EdD, in her book, What To Eat, tells the story of how her committee of nutrition experts developed the original Food Guide Pyramid based on their understanding of the science, only to have the guidelines changed by the top guns at USDA for political reasons – and this is happening again in 2010! The result has been the steady deterioration of health in this country and persistent rise in health care costs, as our grocery stores are filled with unhealthy but profitable processed foods. Is this again the aggressive influence of big moneyed interests in the food industry???

These, and many others,** are issues of great concern to many of my friends, who are often progressive in their thinking – supporting real health care reform, immigration reform, financial industry reform, etc., but we feel these concerns are not being addressed, and in fact receive little media coverage and would be nearly invisible except for the Internet. There are very personal issues that affect our health and well-being. The article on page 11 of the Nov. 8 issue of The Nation speaks of the lack of a persuasive long-term vision for how to create good jobs, yet a growing source of good, green, sustainable jobs and professions, producing high quality real foods and genuine healing, are being ignored by the media, and in fact undermined at every turn.*** Many of us would love to be part of a powerful progressive movement for change, but our concerns need to be part of that long-term vision! Let’s recruit these advocates for food and health freedom to a powerful progressive movement for change that recognizes that wise government promotes justice, not oppression and profits for big corporations.

* lots more at http://www.ftcldf.org/

** Other instances of inappropriate government control or action:
Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO’s),
Health Freedom issues,
The undue influence of the drug industry

*** EVERYTHING I WANT TO DO IS ILLEGAL: War Stories from the Local Food Front, by Joel Salatin

On "corporate hatred"

I listened to BBC Business Weekly this morning (Sunday) – ‘A glimpse of the future’ during which Lucy Kellaway commented on why corporate hatred is rampant these days.

She identifies emotional response to the credit crunch, executive pay, corporate image building, and the Internet as driving this hatred, but I would add these really important reasons why we "hate" or are very disillusioned with many giant corporations:

• The deliberate efforts to avoid being responsible for the toxic chemicals injected into our environment
• The deliberate efforts to improve drug profits by suppressing low cost natural unpatentable alternatives
• The deliberate efforts of ag giants to spread their questionable and unsustainable technologies around the world
• The deliberate efforts of food giants to spread their nutrient depleted and unhealthy foods around the world
• The deliberate efforts of corporate giants of every stripe to influence political thought to their advantage

Examples:

• US health care reform that protects drug and health insurance companies, and almost guarantees continued escalation of health care costs
• Proposed fresh food safety legislation that threatens to ruin small organic/ecological farms, while paying no attention to the refined, processed foods that are the real source of many of our health problems
• Raw milk wars that have nearly eliminated the easy availability of this ancient healthful food, driving farmers out of business and driving access underground
• Corporate-influenced medical school accreditation guidelines that eliminated the excellent nutrition oriented medical schools of days past, and brainwashed physicians (and the FDA and the media) into thinking that drugs and high tech are the answer to every health problem
• Attacks on doctors who eschew conventional therapies and rely on nutrition and detoxification to bring healing to their patients
• Corporate efforts to demonize anything that threatens to cut into their profits (which seems to cut into media coverage of low cost alternatives of merit).

And in case you are wondering, here is documentation of these serious charges…

Trust Us, We're Experts! How Industry Manipulates Science and Gambles with Your Future, by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber

Doubt Is Their Product – How Industry’s Assault on Science Threatens Your Health, by David Michaels

The Oiling of America by Sally Fallon Morell and Mary Enig, PhD

More on my Blog – ‘Sorry to get political!’
and on my website - Politics and the Environment, Health and Freedom

While there is occasionally an admirable media effort to cover the controversial issues raised above, the need to provide "balance" covering the other side of the story leads to the "experts" spouting official lies and deceptions, while claiming ‘There’s no scientific evidence that XXX is true!’ insisting that the defendants provide "scientific evidence" of their claim because they are relying on mere ‘anecdotal’ evidence.

But I would counter that there is no good, valid scientific evidence that XXX is not true, and I would challenge the ‘experts’ to pursue the leads raised by the anecdotal evidence, though I doubt that there is any money to do this very difficult and often unprofitable research, considering the complications, complexities and near impossibility of doing high quality valid double blind studies of human beings that is their ‘gold standard.’ The anecdotal evidence is often so powerful as to preclude such research ethically.

These are serious issues that affect the entire planet! I would challenge the high quality, supposedly impartial media, like BBC and Public Radio, to be fully aware of and report on the ways in which powerful interests manipulate the science to their advantage, and do some in depth reporting on these justice issues and alternative ways to pursue health.

My thoughts for today. Seems like I've covered some of this same territory before! Is anyone listening?

Kris

Change to mineral rich natural sea salt!

Ordinary table salt is a killer. I just read today in Dr. Bruce West's Health Alert about a doctor in Finland who developed a "therapeutic salt’ that contains less sodium, with added magnesium, potassium, and the amino acid l-lysine hydrochloride. Called Pansalt its use in a Finnish study change resulted in a more than 60% reduction in deaths from coronary heart disease and stroke!

A therapeutic salt that is readily available is Celtic Sea Salt® (www.celticseasalt.com ) or its sister, Hawaiian Salt. Read more about it on my website - Therapeutic Salt