Tuesday, July 27, 2010

Soy Is a Con Job

Recently l had occasion to study with and Ayurvedic Indian doctor. In Ayurveda, diet is the keystone of one’s mental and physical health destiny. I prepared him classic Indiana kitcheri and added Edamame to the dish. As he quietly ate, he turned his head towards me, looking into my eyes and said, “Soy is slow suicide,” while gesturing at the green orb with his fork. Truth seekers since the 50’s have been warning us regarding our excessive intake of soy isoflavones.

Soy-a-holics robotically suck down anything made from soybeans, which is not the boulevard to health, especially when soy is GMO. (Genetically Modified Organism) Big Food and Pharma terrorists have trained America to eat Morning Star faux-meat, TVP, Boca Burgers, soy nuts and cheese, Edamame, soy milk, Smart Dogs, and concentrated soy protein pills.

Warnings appeared in the Washington Post: “You have to be ‘soy’ careful: Tofu and similar foods may be beneficial, but some experts fear that too much could be unsafe.” New York Times health columnist Marian Burros published a comment on isoflavone supplements, which provide 50-100 mg isoflavones per capsule: “Against the backdrop of widespread praise, there is growing suspicion that soy, despite its undisputed benefits, may pose some health hazards. Not one of the 18 scientists interviewed for this column was willing to say taking isoflavones was risk free.” The easily swayed FDA totally disregarded studies beginning in 1953 demonstrating adverse effects of soy isoflavones. Book em, Danno!

It’s paradoxical soy protein is aggressively prescribed as treatment for diabetics, considering soy feeding in infancy is linked to diabetes. The American Academy of Pediatrics advised against the use of soy formula due to diabetes risk. Memo: according to our creator, Mom’s milk is eternally best. Unfortunately, some mothers are unable to produce milk for infants; however there are more sensible alternatives to soy. Reviewing feeding histories of 95 diabetic children, twice as many kids with diabetes received soy formula in infancy compared to children in the control group. (Fort, 1986) Again the FDA put their hands over their ears loudly sing-songing, “La-la-la. I caaaan’t hear you.” In 2006 the American Heart Association chimed in to cast their doubts on the magnitude of soy’s benefit in cholesterol busting.

It’s been argued high levels of soy isoflavones genistein and daidzein in Asian diets protect them from breast and prostate cancer in women. Straight up? Soy is linked to increased estrogen in males and increased breast cancer in women. The estrogenic effects are caused by the presence of phytoestrogens and estrogen mimicking compounds found in soy. Because of these estrogenic compounds, infants in particular can be harmfully affected from exposure to soy, including premature development in girls and underdevelopment in boys.

Soy, especially processed versions rather than fermented, promotes hyperthyroidism, thyroid cancer, and infertility. The Weston Price Foundation warns phytic acid, trypsin inhibitors, toxic lysinoalanine and highly cacogenic nitrosamines are all highly present in soy products. http://www.westonprice.org/

Search on-line for the Poisonous Plant Database of the FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition. It’s in black and white: 288 studies since 1953 focused on the toxic properties of soybeans. The FDA possessed this information but chose to ignore it…again. It’s tear-jerking to think of the human suffering that could have been avoided had the FDA listened to their scientific advisors…and their hearts.

Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Locavor-The Next Revolution

The Next Revolution?


Accepting mans’ imperfect humanness, everyone struggles letting go of deep-seated rituals. At the grocery, we instinctively reach for expedient sources of food because life’s too busy to cook. Given we’re a malleable bunch; Americans have become reliant on Big Food to prepare their meals. Consequently we’ve morphed into an aggressive species due to their deviant food-like substances.

For this opulence, there’s a somber mind / body tradeoff. Before Fat Cats created the ethically malnourished Industrial Revolution, American communities, bartered, shared, canned fresh food, constructing supportive, peaceful communities centered on local family farms bursting with sustainable sun-blessed produce, dairy farmers, bee keepers, and livestock fed the preordained celestial menu designed by the generous Universe. Eating food fare shipped from a source 2000 miles away was unthinkable.

One-hundred years ago everyone knew local farmers by their first name, shaking their calloused milking hand as they greeted. An ecologically centered community which knitted itself together with threads of peace and friendship through the sharing of home-made foods simmered with loving energy. There is a full-blown movement in NYC of diverse artisans organizing, sharing, and returning to a pre-industrial revolution mentality. It’s truly rooting here in Indiana; a total disconnect from Big Food and Factory Farms where animals are treated inhumanely, vegetarian cows are turned into cannibals, and food is genetically altered into unholy nothingness.

For millennia, man has contemplated and practiced changing his self-defeating eating patterns, yet sustainment has proved elusive. To transcend today’s food zeitgeist, we’ll need to establish new peaceful relationships with food and eating; learn intuitive eating skills for long term results; results that encourage emotional, spiritual, and physical well being; the root of earthly peace. An unconnected, malnourished mind and sickly body is not the best place to cultivate a peaceful heart. Although most Americans believe the steady diet of violence in the media is leading to a more violent world, in reality it’s the steady diet of heavy metals, food colorings, animal husbandry chemicals, and pesticides that send bullying bosses and wilding teens over the edge.

Because anxious families have discovered how the food they eat was grown, home food preservation is experiencing a genuine revival. Were the barn yard animals handled humanely? Were vegetables genetically altered by a chemist? Discouraged by proliferating dead foods, the energy crises, and a growing awareness of environmental and social impacts of industrial agriculture and the globalization of food production, home gardeners are returning to the sacred traditions of the ancestors, growing, canning and sharing their own food fare. The Industrial Revolution was a major turning point in Earth’s ecology and humans’ relationship with the earth’s environment, dramatically changing all facets of lifestyles from human development, resource wars, food purity, health, longevity, and social conveniences. Like ripples in the proverbial pond, its destructive impact would not hit the shore of the nation’s collective psyche pond until the 1960s counter culture movement.

Change in the way we eat cause changes in others. Without doubt, the sustainable seed of green, Locavorism and a peace-filled community has been re-planted. Over the coming years, Americans will transcend misguided eating behaviors and enter a new era of lucid sustainability and a nonviolent world.

Monday, July 19, 2010

Blueberry's VS. Blueberry 'Poop' Tarts



At my monthly holistic health fair, a sweet gal told me her friend watches my WISH TV segment and reads Anti-Aging in the South Side Times. She claims I’m against everything, which is partially true. My heart is against watching good people, under the cloudy assumption all foods are safe, poison their Temple with processed, GMO and extruded dead food rather than health sustaining Universal Apothecary provided by Creation.

Vacationing with my grand kids in Michigan during blueberry season, a mother at a road-side market was asked by her child, “Can I have blueberries mommy? Mom replied, “No, honey, we have plenty of Blueberry Pop Tarts at home.” Considering, ‘Poop’ Tarts have the nutrition value of road kill, it‘s a heartbreaking commentary on today’s obesity crisis and your loving families health. Remember our State Board of Health’s announcement this will be the first generation of children who will be outlived by their parents? I mean, substituting the ethereal glories of the noble blue orb for a Poop Tart is, well, child abuse; like smoking carcinogenic cigarettes inside the car when kids are on board. Lazy mom and dad role models, listen up; one Blueberry Pop Tart is 212 empty calories; 62 from fat and grease. They contain one-half ounce of immune-system-blunting sugar, diabetes inducing white flour, 7 grams of fat, and one frail gram of fiber. No mortal can improve our Creators gifts, but when one arrogantly tries, the process perpetually renders the once vibrant food lifelessly devoid of the groovy vitamins our Temple requires to remain mentally and physically vigorous; hence our largely preventable pandemic of obesity, diabetes, cancer and heart disease.

Juicy, sweet blueberries are indigenous to the US of A. Native Americans used the berries, leaves and roots for medicinal purposes. Blueberries were used as a fabric dye and combined with meat into a nutritious dried jerky. Recently, Tufts University analyzed 60 fruits and vegetables for their antioxidant capability or ORAC level. Blueberries came out on top, rating highest in their capacity to destroy free radicals called anthocyanidins. Blueberries deactivate free radical that damage the collagen matrix of cells and tissues leading to cataracts, glaucoma, varicose veins, hemorrhoids, peptic ulcers, heart disease and cancer. Researchers found fresh or frozen blueberries protect the brain from oxidative stress and may reduce the effects of age-related conditions such as Alzheimer's disease or dementia. The Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry show that phenolic compounds in blueberries can inhibit colon cancer cell proliferation and programmed cell death. A Poop Tart can’t do that for your holy temple.

Blueberries were created with a tasty flavonoid called kaempferol. Research calculating flavonoid intake in 66,940 women enrolled in the Nurses’ Health Study between 1984 and 2002 revealed women whose diets provided the most kaempferol had a 40% reduction in risk of ovarian cancer, compared to women eating the least kaempferol-rich foods.



Make a morning smoothie with blueberries, real orange juice, a piece of carrot and banana. What a great way to drink, not chew your daily dose of heavenly medicine that protects your temple from disease. Remember, when you cook blueberries into a pie, jam, or pancakes, all the nutrients and energy are destroyed in the process. Eat ‘em raw by the handful. We brought back a 10 pound box, placed them on sheet pans; put them into the freezer till hard like blue marbles; bagged them in zip-locks then back into the freezer. For breakfast try Kashi Go-Lean cereal, plain yogurt, walnuts, and ground flax seed crowned with a cup of berries; the “Colon Pow!” of your digestive tract

When everything God gives us to remain healthy is right under our nose, it’s tough to grasp why the 44 % of obese Hoosiers continually and tenaciously defend self-destructive, albeit time-honored Midwestern food fare with such eagerness. Armed with nutritional literacy, love of family and steadfastness, you can do it. Your body is your buddy.

Friday, July 16, 2010

Who Put the Squeeze on our Orange Juice?

Orange Juice holds position in the hallowed American pantheon of traditional breakfast foods. Each year 620 million gallons of orange ambrosial cure-all are consumed in the US.
Ads pitching today’s version of the pulpy juice tell us, wink, wink, it’s pure and natural so we blindly buy the citrus au jus for the sentiment. Nevertheless, the majority of your American tradition comes, tell-me-it-ain’t-so, from sunny Brazil and uneasy Mexico. Horney toads! That’s downright un-Patriotic.
As an OJ drinker you’ve been misinformed about what you’re actually drinking. Most folks get ‘juiced’ when they learn big brands marketing their product as “pure and simple” add flavor packs to revitalize it and make it fresh; once more. “From concentrate” and most “not from concentrate” orange juice undergo processes that strip flavor and nutrition. The largest producers of “not from concentrate” or pasteurized orange juice keep juice in million-gallon aseptic storage tanks to ensure a year round supply. Aseptic storage strips the ethereal juice of oxygen, a process known as “deaeration,” so the juice doesn’t oxidize in the “tank farms” where the aging juice sits for as long as a year.
Flavor packs are fabricated from the chemicals that make up orange essence and oil. Flavor and fragrance houses, the same ones making high-end perfume, break down orange essence oils into their constituent chemicals then ‘reassemble’ the individual chemicals in configurations resembling nothing in nature. Delicious Ethyl butyrate is one of the charming chemicals found in high concentrations in flavor packs. Flavor engineers discovered it imparts a fragrance Americans dig and associate with a fresh squeezed. A con job.
Wrong on so many levels, Tropicana reformulated their healthy heart juice adding fish oil, sardines, tilapia, and fish gelatin for the Omega 3 craze. This makes as much sense as lighting yourself on fire and running naked through a Meth Lab. Eating fatty fish, ground flax seeds and walnuts is more rational.
Orange juice is celebrated as a healthy drink but few realized it contains the same amount of sugar as cola. In the world orange juice market, the leading brand is Tropicana, owned by PepsiCo since 1998. In April 2008 the Journal Diabetes Care studied diets of 70,000 women as part of the Nurse's Health Study. They found unlike daily consumption of fresh fruit and vegetables associated with an 18 per cent reduction in the risk of diabetes, consumption of fruit juice even in small daily amounts, was associated with an overall 18 per cent increased risk for diabetes.
Vitamin C and its potent cancer protection, is the most easily destroyed vitamin there is. It is destroyed by exposure to oxygen and heat (above 70 degrees) Processed, pasteurized OJ (145 ยบ) is a pitiable surrogate for fresh, sun-blessed orange juice, squeezed at home from cooperative whole oranges. Pasteurization obliterates most of the juices health sustaining phytonutrients, including anti-cancer nutrients. Heat alters the molecular structure of OJ, creating higher acidity during digestion. Acidity sets the Temple up for cancer and inflammation. And that's not to mention the enormous natural resources used to process, concentrate, transport and reconstitute.
If you’re the sissy who protests pithy parts, for the love of God and your caring family, get over it. You’re a responsible adult now, in charge of your health destiny. That’s where all the nutritional goodness lurks, so ‘orange up’, dudes and dudettes; fresh squeezed OJ tastes deliciously natural and supermarkets do sell it. They charge too much, however. Go back to a pre-industrial revolution mentality. Find family time to juice you own. It’s vastly cheaper and your Temple will definitely groove from the purity, hearty nutrition, and wholeness.
No bottle of self respecting vodka would even want to cozy up to this abomination of Gods gifts to us. If you can’t gather the gumption to squeeze the orange, frozen, unsweetened OJ concentrate contains a lot of vitamin C and was not heated. If half the world does, it, why can’t we?

Thursday, July 1, 2010

Booze: The Elulsive 5th Food Group

Booze: Satan’s drink or the elusive 5th food groupPublished June 24th, 2010
By Wendell Fowler


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“Give strong drink unto him that is ready to perish, and wine unto those that be of heavy hearts. Let him drink, and forget his poverty, and remember his misery no more.” Proverbs 31: 6-7

Shhay there, you; … hiccup, stagger, did you know that ten, ‘pardon me,’ burp, ten out of four people drink booze?” Today, as a transformed alcohol over-user, I look into the mirror of my past, flinching when in public, I recognize someone’s values’ dissolving into an excessive slurry of ice cubes chilling their fourth Scotch whiskey; “I don’t care about my new shoes, urp, blurp, splat. Taxi!”
Since ancient times, ardent spirits have played roles in religion, economics, sex, politics and all aspects of society. Abe Lincoln, when told General Grant swilled whiskey while leading his troops replied, “Find out the name of the brand so I can give it to my other generals.” Presidents conspired with demon rum, a social lubricant, to procure votes and eager Federal judges interrupted proceedings to partake. G. W. Bush snorted and soused his way through college. Nixon habitually imbibed Scotch and soda, and a snockered LBJ cavorted about his Texas ranch in an open convertible whilst imbibing scotch and soda. Perhaps this is why he insensitively picked up his pet Beagles by the ears and considered it entertainment.
Nurtured by guilt-based fundamentalist religious literalism, I was brainwashed if demon alcohol met my inquisitive lips, I’d go directly to a blistering hell on a razorblade only to kersplash into a vat of stinging alcohol. As a repressed teen it was incumbent to investigate and lay hands upon the proverbial wet paint. Religious repression eternally backfires so I spent the next 20 years rebelling in a boozy stupor. Theologically ironic considering bourbon takes its name from Bourbon County, Kentucky where it was first produced by a happy Baptist minister in 1789. Ask any hotel room service attendant and they’ll attest in-room liquor sales soar when these groups hold conventions; an innocent illustration of our humanness. Protestant groups, Episcopalians, Lutherans, and Presbyterians consider moderate use tolerable but frown upon drunkenness that punches the ticket to eternal agony. Roman Catholics tend to be more accepting of a wee bit of the grape. References to alcohol in Jewish writings are to moderate wine consumption. In much of France, Germany, Scandinavia, and Italy, from childhood, wise people thought of wine as a food, so liquor was not such an enthralling curiosity.
Alcohol as medicine has been recorded throughout history and is mentioned 191 times in the Old and New Testaments. If you drink moderately, there’s ‘proof’ alcohol improves health while tranquilizing your frenetic everyday life.

Moderate drinkers tend to have enhanced health and live longer than those who are either abstainers or booze hounds.

In addition to having fewer heart attacks and strokes, moderate drinkers are less likely to suffer hypertension, high blood pressure, peripheral artery disease, Alzheimer’s disease and the common cold.
Commonsensical consumption appears beneficial in reducing or preventing diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, bone fractures and osteoporosis, kidney stones, digestive ailments, stress and depression, poor cognition and memory, Parkinson’s disease, hepatitis A, pancreatic cancer, macular degeneration, angina pectoris, duodenal ulcer, erectile dysfunction, hearing loss, gallstones, liver disease, Alzheimer’s, the common cold and poor physical condition in elderly.
A Harvard study found the risk of death from all causes to be 21 percent to 28 percent lower among men who drank alcohol moderately compared to teetotalers. Loathe hangovers? Try drinking a glass of alkaline Smart Water every two or three drinks to get fluid into the Temple before the end of the night. When you wake up with a big head and your liver quivers, consider adding Milk Thistle, a restorative liver tonic, to your daily vitamin regimen everyday for a month whilst not drinking. You’ll feel a lot better, even after drinking is resumed; in moderation, of course. Cheers!