After spending pretty much all of January shuttling people and cats to various appointments (the semi-annual Doctor Month celebrations), trying to incorporate new tricks into the established regimen, and reading about newly-discovered medical issues in the news, I’m really glad January has come to a close.
I’ve also come to a possibly faulty conclusion that food labeling is disabling to US this time instead of to the food manufacturers. In the spirit of Glenn Beck, here’s how I got there:
During one recent afternoon nap (after yet another appointment), my head told me that “the more you read labels, the more you NEED to read labels…so stop already!” I raced to the computer immediately for fear of scaring this thought away--I haven't had time for many of these lately.
My head has a habit of talking to me when I’m either in bed or at the kitchen sink—and no, I’m not mentally ill. This is a GOOD voice I hear, and this voice was telling me that maybe it’s time to get back to basics with food—back to the things our parents and grandparents ate that didn’t come with labels, and we can still buy without labels. I’m talking fresh produce, fresh meats, dried beans by the pound, eggs, bottled milk and such.
Since I have a dairy and wheat allergy, I automatically discounted milk, cheese, and bread from my mental assessment. But the rest rang as a somewhat true rendering of what food REALLY mattered, and none of it comes with a label.
Given the recent story about carbs affecting everyone’s cholesterol (when ethnic factors were removed) instead of fat like the doctors preach, I put this to the test. After giving up bread and limiting carbs to no more than 20 grams per serving, my husband and I each lost three pounds in two weeks without physical effort. This got me to thinking that maybe we’re all working too hard at weight loss, and maybe over-thinking about nutrition in general. Maybe this is leading to us working too hard to stay healthy…just maybe. Maybe I owe Dr. Atkins one hell of an apology after denigrating his diet so ruthlessly as “the perfect diet for pancreatic deficits.”
As I sit here in front of the screen, my mind is trying to merge together all the recent lab results of Doctor Month, the health news articles I’ve read this month, my esteem held for the Weston A. Price foundation, current and ongoing food allergies, and ongoing family health issues. Maybe it IS time to back off from reading labels so intently before tossing anything into the cart—I think I’m going blind from it anyway! :)
Shopping for food had never become more of a chore than when I really had to start scrutinizing every last detail of food labels, so in March, I’m going to conduct an experiment and buy only foods that don’t come with a label (that I know are otherwise okay for family consumption given allergies, health issues, and so on). I figure it may take me the month of February to clean out the house of “labeled” foods (via eating), and I can start March with a clean slate. I’ll let you know what happens.
Wednesday, January 31, 2007
Wednesday, January 24, 2007
Green is Making Me See Red (L-O-N-G)
Yeah okay, the Dems took back Congress, but their environmental fanaticism is almost as bad as Islamic Shari’a Law: my way or the highway.
I'll take the highway for $200, Alex.
Everyone from Nancy Pelosi and Charlie Rangel right down to Ed Begley Jr. believes their way IS the right way, and that we ought to spend our way out of a conundrum caused by lack of a decent energy policy—something neither I nor Ed Begley can do anything about.
Now I know why ol’ Ed hasn’t been on TV or in the movies lately—it takes all his energy to run his jury-rigged home. His “new” career has become pedaling for toast on his veranda.
On every channel, in every format, people are making appearances trying to bolster the use of “clean energy” and conservation, pushing conversion to alternative power all the while. They also manage to push INVESTING in these companies to help make the costs for conversion and purchase come down. Isn’t that putting the cart before the horse?
The worst offenders: the scientific community. In order to preserve research funding, the scientists who previously came out AGAINST "global warming" have had to change their tune, especially meteorologists--they are under threat of losing accreditation if they dare to disagree with Dr. Heidi Cullen, head of the American Meteorological Society and a firm believer in human activity as THE culprit (talk about blackmail!). If these guys want to keep their jobs, and keep doing research, then they have to tow the party line...for now.
In reality, it's a shift in the magnetic field that is causing all this weird weather--no amount of environmental restrictions or dogma-swaying is going to change it. Man has never experienced it before, since the last shift happened before we were upright.
As we pretty much know, I’ve railed in the past about how this is all a fluke, a pipe dream, and another Liberal-backed fund raiser in the guise of Utopian living goals. The costs outweigh the benefits, the tax benefits are few and far between (not to mention quickly dwindling), and there is little to no return on investment for a good long time. One size does not fit all situations here.
Environmental zealots seem to think we all share the same living conditions, the same income, the same disposable income level, and that everyone is fit and well enough to do things like climb onto the roof and install solar panels. Judging by the number of motorized wheelchair commercials flooding the airways, I’d say a good number of us are no longer bipeds—or at the very least, dealing with our diabetes from the back of a horse!
If you’re 20-to-30-something and have the spare money, time, property ownership, capability, and desire to make all these conversions to solar, wind, geothermal, fuel cell, etc., then you go right ahead. The rest of us will take the common sense way and unplug a few things instead.
We smart ones will reduce our driving as conditions dictate, keep our cars well-maintained, live in smaller homes, carefully scrutinize energy-consuming purchases such as appliances, maintain our homes and yards to use less resources, watch our trash generation, watch our consumption, and compare light bulbs at the hardware store for energy output vs. input. Oh yeah—and we’ll be sure to sleep at night. Our conscience will be clear, I assure you.
You, on the other hand, will most likely have to make some major adjustments in the ways you carry out your Utopian dream lifestyle when you lose your job, marry a non-green spouse, have non-green children, pollute the landscape with your non-green disposable diapers, plastic oversized Fisher-Price toys, and cart the family around in your non-green station wagon…oops, I mean SUV. Later, you’ll fall off your roof from trying to install those solar panels yourself to save money, only to break your back and end up in a motorized wheelchair for the rest of your life. Eventually, Wilford Brimley will become your TV pal, and you’ll end up right back where you started. Oh, and somewhere in there you'll have been transferred to an office clear across the country, and nobody wants to buy your contraption-laden house, which actually LOST market value over time compared to your next-door neighbor's.
To Ed: instead of pedaling to toast your bread, why not just give up bread altogether? Man does not need bread to survive. That rain barrel you installed at the end of your gutter becomes totally unnecessary when you landscape your yard with drought-tolerant plants so the rain can do the job for you. Maybe then you'd have time to go pursue acting jobs--your consumption has clearly shifted from "needs" to "wants" and for the wrong reasons. You're like the Al Gore of conservationists--he has 4 homes and 3 cars, none of which is energy-conscious in any way.
Wouldn’t it have been easier to just bend over and pull the plug on something, or adjust your driving habits, or just make small changes at home, instead of trying to conquer the world and force it into the Shari’a law of liberal environmentalism?
People, if you want MORE of something, try doing LESS of something else. More money comes from less spending, more cooperation comes from less brow-beating, and more faith in your fellow man means less tossing and turning over the planet at night.
We are all aware that there are problems, and we are doing things that you cannot see. There may not be solar panels on the roof, windmills in the backyard, hybrid cars in the driveway, or bike-powered toasters on our balconies, but there are more new trees on our properties, there’s less trash and more recycling bins on the curb, and energy-efficient appliances, bulbs, and thermostats in our homes. There’s also a copy of the bus schedule in some wallets and purses.
Other than that, all I have to say to these zealots is to shut up and plant some more trees. I’m not shelling out for things I cannot use in my everyday life, things I cannot alter, and things I have no control over. The planet will still be here as long as we quit mowing down Mother Nature’s air scrubbers—there’s no need to spend $40,000 to buy salvation on the roads (via a Toyota Pretentious), or $25,000 to erect a single plastic panel shrine to the sun gods, both of which TAKE oil to produce. Exactly where are the savings, especially when the average length of ownership for both items is around 7 years? You can't recoup much return in that amount of time.
And someone please tell me what it is we’re supposed to be saving for? Where WE conserve, China and India only CONSUME, and in greater quantities. How soon we forget that we’re #3 on the oil consumption list, behind India and China. There is such a thing as PLANETARY BALANCE, is there not? I’d really like to know when it kicks in!
I sit here and smirk as California takes more and more drastic steps to clean up air that the jet stream blows in from over-polluted China. I also sit here and smirk as I remember that Italy still sells leaded regular gas, and that the air over there wasn’t even CLOSE to being clean—and this is in liberal Europe.
Environmentalists: do yourselves a favor and get out of your own county once in a while! Stop living in a vacuum and see how others live and conserve—it’s not always necessary to enforce the Shari’a Law of your ideals. Wake up, grow up, and face reality--don YOUR OWN burkhas for a change!
If you need a target, why not try Gene Simmons? He has a great big sprawling mansion for 4 people--talk about a monument to ego!
I'll take the highway for $200, Alex.
Everyone from Nancy Pelosi and Charlie Rangel right down to Ed Begley Jr. believes their way IS the right way, and that we ought to spend our way out of a conundrum caused by lack of a decent energy policy—something neither I nor Ed Begley can do anything about.
Now I know why ol’ Ed hasn’t been on TV or in the movies lately—it takes all his energy to run his jury-rigged home. His “new” career has become pedaling for toast on his veranda.
On every channel, in every format, people are making appearances trying to bolster the use of “clean energy” and conservation, pushing conversion to alternative power all the while. They also manage to push INVESTING in these companies to help make the costs for conversion and purchase come down. Isn’t that putting the cart before the horse?
The worst offenders: the scientific community. In order to preserve research funding, the scientists who previously came out AGAINST "global warming" have had to change their tune, especially meteorologists--they are under threat of losing accreditation if they dare to disagree with Dr. Heidi Cullen, head of the American Meteorological Society and a firm believer in human activity as THE culprit (talk about blackmail!). If these guys want to keep their jobs, and keep doing research, then they have to tow the party line...for now.
In reality, it's a shift in the magnetic field that is causing all this weird weather--no amount of environmental restrictions or dogma-swaying is going to change it. Man has never experienced it before, since the last shift happened before we were upright.
As we pretty much know, I’ve railed in the past about how this is all a fluke, a pipe dream, and another Liberal-backed fund raiser in the guise of Utopian living goals. The costs outweigh the benefits, the tax benefits are few and far between (not to mention quickly dwindling), and there is little to no return on investment for a good long time. One size does not fit all situations here.
Environmental zealots seem to think we all share the same living conditions, the same income, the same disposable income level, and that everyone is fit and well enough to do things like climb onto the roof and install solar panels. Judging by the number of motorized wheelchair commercials flooding the airways, I’d say a good number of us are no longer bipeds—or at the very least, dealing with our diabetes from the back of a horse!
If you’re 20-to-30-something and have the spare money, time, property ownership, capability, and desire to make all these conversions to solar, wind, geothermal, fuel cell, etc., then you go right ahead. The rest of us will take the common sense way and unplug a few things instead.
We smart ones will reduce our driving as conditions dictate, keep our cars well-maintained, live in smaller homes, carefully scrutinize energy-consuming purchases such as appliances, maintain our homes and yards to use less resources, watch our trash generation, watch our consumption, and compare light bulbs at the hardware store for energy output vs. input. Oh yeah—and we’ll be sure to sleep at night. Our conscience will be clear, I assure you.
You, on the other hand, will most likely have to make some major adjustments in the ways you carry out your Utopian dream lifestyle when you lose your job, marry a non-green spouse, have non-green children, pollute the landscape with your non-green disposable diapers, plastic oversized Fisher-Price toys, and cart the family around in your non-green station wagon…oops, I mean SUV. Later, you’ll fall off your roof from trying to install those solar panels yourself to save money, only to break your back and end up in a motorized wheelchair for the rest of your life. Eventually, Wilford Brimley will become your TV pal, and you’ll end up right back where you started. Oh, and somewhere in there you'll have been transferred to an office clear across the country, and nobody wants to buy your contraption-laden house, which actually LOST market value over time compared to your next-door neighbor's.
To Ed: instead of pedaling to toast your bread, why not just give up bread altogether? Man does not need bread to survive. That rain barrel you installed at the end of your gutter becomes totally unnecessary when you landscape your yard with drought-tolerant plants so the rain can do the job for you. Maybe then you'd have time to go pursue acting jobs--your consumption has clearly shifted from "needs" to "wants" and for the wrong reasons. You're like the Al Gore of conservationists--he has 4 homes and 3 cars, none of which is energy-conscious in any way.
Wouldn’t it have been easier to just bend over and pull the plug on something, or adjust your driving habits, or just make small changes at home, instead of trying to conquer the world and force it into the Shari’a law of liberal environmentalism?
People, if you want MORE of something, try doing LESS of something else. More money comes from less spending, more cooperation comes from less brow-beating, and more faith in your fellow man means less tossing and turning over the planet at night.
We are all aware that there are problems, and we are doing things that you cannot see. There may not be solar panels on the roof, windmills in the backyard, hybrid cars in the driveway, or bike-powered toasters on our balconies, but there are more new trees on our properties, there’s less trash and more recycling bins on the curb, and energy-efficient appliances, bulbs, and thermostats in our homes. There’s also a copy of the bus schedule in some wallets and purses.
Other than that, all I have to say to these zealots is to shut up and plant some more trees. I’m not shelling out for things I cannot use in my everyday life, things I cannot alter, and things I have no control over. The planet will still be here as long as we quit mowing down Mother Nature’s air scrubbers—there’s no need to spend $40,000 to buy salvation on the roads (via a Toyota Pretentious), or $25,000 to erect a single plastic panel shrine to the sun gods, both of which TAKE oil to produce. Exactly where are the savings, especially when the average length of ownership for both items is around 7 years? You can't recoup much return in that amount of time.
And someone please tell me what it is we’re supposed to be saving for? Where WE conserve, China and India only CONSUME, and in greater quantities. How soon we forget that we’re #3 on the oil consumption list, behind India and China. There is such a thing as PLANETARY BALANCE, is there not? I’d really like to know when it kicks in!
I sit here and smirk as California takes more and more drastic steps to clean up air that the jet stream blows in from over-polluted China. I also sit here and smirk as I remember that Italy still sells leaded regular gas, and that the air over there wasn’t even CLOSE to being clean—and this is in liberal Europe.
Environmentalists: do yourselves a favor and get out of your own county once in a while! Stop living in a vacuum and see how others live and conserve—it’s not always necessary to enforce the Shari’a Law of your ideals. Wake up, grow up, and face reality--don YOUR OWN burkhas for a change!
If you need a target, why not try Gene Simmons? He has a great big sprawling mansion for 4 people--talk about a monument to ego!
Saturday, January 20, 2007
As the media feeds the grist mill...
I am vindicated once again in a matter of a couple of days: Yahoo Health.
It seems that not only are the Fiber Police in the wrong, but food politics and grain itself are in the wrong. And all this time doctors blamed us for eating the wrong fats...now we all know what REALLY sells those statins!
It seems that not only are the Fiber Police in the wrong, but food politics and grain itself are in the wrong. And all this time doctors blamed us for eating the wrong fats...now we all know what REALLY sells those statins!
Friday, January 19, 2007
Previous Article Followups
For "the oil pool": India and China seem to be in the midst of a conversion to natural gas, and won't be ramping up with oil. Without the demand from these emerging powerhouses, and without the former demand from us, oil will most certainly sink to $25/barrel with zealous OPEC member countries pumping their hearts out just to make any kind of buck.
For "the grist mill": Tell ME that the gastric bypass crowd gets 35 grams of fiber a day! I looked at a 1500-calorie diabetic diet, and there's no way in hell to get 35 grams of fiber on that diet, let alone someone who isn't diabetic and bypassed. If the 90% "fudge factor" from this article is applied, we get about 4 grams of fiber with rounding. Could this be the REAL amount of fiber we need each day without surrendering ourselves to wholesale food politics and grain-driven obesity?
I think bread, rather than cheese, should be the fear of those British mothers. As we all know, grains rapidly break down into sugar, which gets stored if not used...basic nutritional science. If diabetics are made to cut back drastically on their sugar intake through grain restriction, shouldn't that tell the REST of us something?
It tells me to keep eating my salads with a side of meat, a scrambled egg, or a handful of nuts in them--and not much else.
For "the grist mill": Tell ME that the gastric bypass crowd gets 35 grams of fiber a day! I looked at a 1500-calorie diabetic diet, and there's no way in hell to get 35 grams of fiber on that diet, let alone someone who isn't diabetic and bypassed. If the 90% "fudge factor" from this article is applied, we get about 4 grams of fiber with rounding. Could this be the REAL amount of fiber we need each day without surrendering ourselves to wholesale food politics and grain-driven obesity?
I think bread, rather than cheese, should be the fear of those British mothers. As we all know, grains rapidly break down into sugar, which gets stored if not used...basic nutritional science. If diabetics are made to cut back drastically on their sugar intake through grain restriction, shouldn't that tell the REST of us something?
It tells me to keep eating my salads with a side of meat, a scrambled egg, or a handful of nuts in them--and not much else.
Wednesday, January 17, 2007
Water Aerobics in an Oil Pool
By now, you’ve witnessed the descent of oil prices—again. This time, there is more to it than mere trader dumping…there is the WHY of trader dumping.
This time, it’s geopolitical—Iran and Venezuela—and in a completely contrarian way.
Normally, when a certain country rattles the saber and threatens to take oil off the market, traders freak out, buy like mad, and prices go up in a hurry. Not this time—both Iran and Venezuela have both threatened to nationalize their oil industries and take oil off the market, but Wall Street isn’t buying it.
Wall Street isn’t buying the OPEC cuts promised way back in December either, and for good reason. OPEC promised production cuts and emergency meetings to declare more production cuts, but can’t seem to get its member nations to comply—member nations need money, and oil is all they have to offer the world.
Trader talk is that oil will hit around $25/barrel either late this year or early next year, and that has a lot of selling pressure going. Mutual funds and hedge funds are trying like mad to put a floor in at around $52/barrel, but are having trouble maintaining it for the above reasons.
Meanwhile, member nations are begging OPEC for an emergency meeting to discuss Iran and Venezuela’s plans and effect on the overall oil market—meaning there is a fear that oil prices will be driven up sharply again, like last summer.
Oh contraire! Here’s where we depart from the norm.
Because member nations need money and won’t comply with the OPEC cuts, including Saudi Arabia itself, the market has been flooded with oil, and ship channels are double- and triple-parked with tankers awaiting offloading. Iran and Venezuela taking their oil off the market will have the effect of a REAL OPEC cut, but it won’t happen in our lifetimes simply because Ahmedinajad and Chavez need money too. As powerful and mighty as they might want to appear to the rest of the world, they still have bills to pay--even at
$25/barrel. Sheesh...some people just don't understand basic economics--they hope to return to the hand-over-fist glory days by doing the "Wal-Mart thing" and selling in volume.
Speaking of wanton displays of power, has anyone heard from Kim Jong Il lately?
We are drowning in oil, and will likely continue to drown in oil until this summer, when Hummers will once again emerge from their hibernation garages, airplanes will come out of mothballs, and our skies and roads will be standing room only. Rumor has it that India and China expect to ramp up production once again later this year. I fully expect that car manufacturers in this country will once again open the taps to let dealer incentives and 0% financing flow freely.
It would appear that the oil and housing bubbles have deflated at a good clip, and the stock market bubble is inflating once again. The financial landscape clock will have turned back about 8 years, and I hope the real estate markets continue to follow suit--I missed the last bubble. Thanks to HGTV, TLC, and A&E, I think many more of us will be ready for the next real estate bubble.
This time, it’s geopolitical—Iran and Venezuela—and in a completely contrarian way.
Normally, when a certain country rattles the saber and threatens to take oil off the market, traders freak out, buy like mad, and prices go up in a hurry. Not this time—both Iran and Venezuela have both threatened to nationalize their oil industries and take oil off the market, but Wall Street isn’t buying it.
Wall Street isn’t buying the OPEC cuts promised way back in December either, and for good reason. OPEC promised production cuts and emergency meetings to declare more production cuts, but can’t seem to get its member nations to comply—member nations need money, and oil is all they have to offer the world.
Trader talk is that oil will hit around $25/barrel either late this year or early next year, and that has a lot of selling pressure going. Mutual funds and hedge funds are trying like mad to put a floor in at around $52/barrel, but are having trouble maintaining it for the above reasons.
Meanwhile, member nations are begging OPEC for an emergency meeting to discuss Iran and Venezuela’s plans and effect on the overall oil market—meaning there is a fear that oil prices will be driven up sharply again, like last summer.
Oh contraire! Here’s where we depart from the norm.
Because member nations need money and won’t comply with the OPEC cuts, including Saudi Arabia itself, the market has been flooded with oil, and ship channels are double- and triple-parked with tankers awaiting offloading. Iran and Venezuela taking their oil off the market will have the effect of a REAL OPEC cut, but it won’t happen in our lifetimes simply because Ahmedinajad and Chavez need money too. As powerful and mighty as they might want to appear to the rest of the world, they still have bills to pay--even at
$25/barrel. Sheesh...some people just don't understand basic economics--they hope to return to the hand-over-fist glory days by doing the "Wal-Mart thing" and selling in volume.
Speaking of wanton displays of power, has anyone heard from Kim Jong Il lately?
We are drowning in oil, and will likely continue to drown in oil until this summer, when Hummers will once again emerge from their hibernation garages, airplanes will come out of mothballs, and our skies and roads will be standing room only. Rumor has it that India and China expect to ramp up production once again later this year. I fully expect that car manufacturers in this country will once again open the taps to let dealer incentives and 0% financing flow freely.
It would appear that the oil and housing bubbles have deflated at a good clip, and the stock market bubble is inflating once again. The financial landscape clock will have turned back about 8 years, and I hope the real estate markets continue to follow suit--I missed the last bubble. Thanks to HGTV, TLC, and A&E, I think many more of us will be ready for the next real estate bubble.
Sunday, January 14, 2007
Food for the Grist Mill
We have been obsessed with bowel habits since before we were a country. Our health was determined by looking into chamber pots as if reading tea leaves: length, width, consistency, and timing all made up a general assessment of what was going on inside.
How rudimentary!
Today, we have the same obsession held most closely by people I will call the Fiber Police—people who are positively adamant that we eat enough fibrous foods to make up a total of 35 grams per day, both soluble and insoluble.
What if you’re wheat and gluten intolerant, as many people are, and cannot eat the whole grain breads and bran-filled cereals that compose the foods containing the most fiber available? Then they tell you to take fiber supplements containing wheat grass and other things an allergic person cannot consume.
With 1 slice of bread containing 1 gram of fiber on average, you’d have to eat whole loaves of bread daily, or bowls of bran cereal at a time to achieve this magic number of 35 grams daily. I thought this was absurd, especially for someone with my food allergies. Surely I’m not going to die because I can’t eat these things…right?
I’m not going to die—I looked it up on Google. First of all, there is a lot of argument for and against that much fiber, and much argument as to what composes soluble and insoluble fiber sources. I wanted to know if grains were necessary at all to achieve some sort of good bowel health, what type of fiber they represent, and if it was really necessary to have both types of fiber in your diet.
Well, since I couldn’t find a definitive answer as to what foods specifically made up each type of fiber, I used this for an answer: if I go every day, I’m fine. The biggest scare from not getting adequate fiber seems to stem from getting backed up, constipated, diverticulotic (see “diverticulosis”), and brewing a good case of bowel cancer as a result.
Here’s the story of fiber, how your body uses it, and what role grains play in it: foods with fiber in them are either digested and turned to water (soluble) or not (insoluble), then go on to either coat your lower intestine (soluble) or sweep out your lower intestine like a broom (insoluble), adding bulk to your bowel movements. Individual doctor websites will tell you that the sweeping action from eating the grains that make up insoluble fiber will do more harm than good, as they act to minutely injure your colon through scraping and immediately putting bacteria and waste into the injury site. This makes perfect sense to me—if you wound yourself, the last thing you want to do is rub fecal matter into it!
Soluble fiber, on the other hand, serves to coat your lower intestine, preventing injury from the sweeping action of “grain brooms”. It also serves to prevent fecal matter from festering, infecting the surrounding tissue, and scraping as it leaves the body.
So what kind of fiber do we really need in our bodies? Well, the widely-held hypothesis is that we need both kinds, and it can be had without stuffing yourself with bran cereals and entire loaves of whole-grain breads.
Certain vegetables of the woody, stringy kind can provide that same type of fiber found in grains, which is good for people like me. Raw celery, broccoli stems, onions (for their rings), mustard greens, collard greens, and other raw plant material will provide me with the insoluble fiber I’m still questioning my need for. In other words, my salads have been fitting the bill for both kinds of fiber, and I didn’t even know it!
Beans and legumes are another source, so instead of stuffing yourself with bread, why not try Mexican food instead? I’d say it was a whole lot more appealing than fiber supplements—just pass on the cheese, and use raw red onion and pinto, kidney, or black soy beans when making your dish. The best part is that only ½ cup of beans makes a serving, and most of us eat more than that per Mexican meal.
I have discovered that there is no need to become a horse or cow to achieve fiber continuity. Now I have to figure out exactly how many grams DOES make me go regularly, because I know I don’t get anywhere near 35 grams of fiber daily—another bone of contention from my corner of the universe.
Who makes up these hopelessly absurd numbers and waves them around as fact and health dogma? Why, the grain industry, of course! It seems as if the medical community just sits and waits for the fax to ring or the e-mail to alert them —no longer doing any actual research or verification themselves. Nutritional benchmarks set by various food industry factions—how convenient! Now you have a better idea of how the Food Guide Pyramid got invented in the first place.
Something else not taken into account: not all of us eat the so-called “typical American diet.” Some of us eat tons of raw fruits and veggies with each meal, and have homemade tacos once or twice weekly. Some of us shun drive-thru windows and restaurant eating all together like it was plague-infested or something. Some of us actually care about what we put into our bodies.
All I know is my magic fiber number is about half the touted 35 grams, and I go just fine at about the same times daily—all without a single bowl of cereal, or a single piece of whole-grain bread.
I’ll leave you with another bone of contention: if we need at least 1200 calories for a starvation diet, what do people with lap bands and gastric bypass operations do? They can only eat tablespoons of food per day before they get full enough to throw up. Oprah, Mike Huckabee, Ted Kennedy, Star Jones-Reynolds, Al Sharpton, Chris Matthews, and other obviously surgically-assisted weight losers seem to still be alive and thriving on their “tablespoon diet.” Tell ME they get 1800 calories and 35 grams of fiber daily--they'd have to devote great quantities of their day doing nothing but eating like birds!
I'm imagining they don't even own a normal-size refrigerator--why would they need one for the amount of food they can now consume? Wouldn't a dorm room-sized one or a hotel room-type bar fridge do for them?
How rudimentary!
Today, we have the same obsession held most closely by people I will call the Fiber Police—people who are positively adamant that we eat enough fibrous foods to make up a total of 35 grams per day, both soluble and insoluble.
With 1 slice of bread containing 1 gram of fiber on average, you’d have to eat whole loaves of bread daily, or bowls of bran cereal at a time to achieve this magic number of 35 grams daily. I thought this was absurd, especially for someone with my food allergies. Surely I’m not going to die because I can’t eat these things…right?
I’m not going to die—I looked it up on Google. First of all, there is a lot of argument for and against that much fiber, and much argument as to what composes soluble and insoluble fiber sources. I wanted to know if grains were necessary at all to achieve some sort of good bowel health, what type of fiber they represent, and if it was really necessary to have both types of fiber in your diet.
Well, since I couldn’t find a definitive answer as to what foods specifically made up each type of fiber, I used this for an answer: if I go every day, I’m fine. The biggest scare from not getting adequate fiber seems to stem from getting backed up, constipated, diverticulotic (see “diverticulosis”), and brewing a good case of bowel cancer as a result.
Here’s the story of fiber, how your body uses it, and what role grains play in it: foods with fiber in them are either digested and turned to water (soluble) or not (insoluble), then go on to either coat your lower intestine (soluble) or sweep out your lower intestine like a broom (insoluble), adding bulk to your bowel movements. Individual doctor websites will tell you that the sweeping action from eating the grains that make up insoluble fiber will do more harm than good, as they act to minutely injure your colon through scraping and immediately putting bacteria and waste into the injury site. This makes perfect sense to me—if you wound yourself, the last thing you want to do is rub fecal matter into it!
Soluble fiber, on the other hand, serves to coat your lower intestine, preventing injury from the sweeping action of “grain brooms”. It also serves to prevent fecal matter from festering, infecting the surrounding tissue, and scraping as it leaves the body.
So what kind of fiber do we really need in our bodies? Well, the widely-held hypothesis is that we need both kinds, and it can be had without stuffing yourself with bran cereals and entire loaves of whole-grain breads.
Certain vegetables of the woody, stringy kind can provide that same type of fiber found in grains, which is good for people like me. Raw celery, broccoli stems, onions (for their rings), mustard greens, collard greens, and other raw plant material will provide me with the insoluble fiber I’m still questioning my need for. In other words, my salads have been fitting the bill for both kinds of fiber, and I didn’t even know it!
Beans and legumes are another source, so instead of stuffing yourself with bread, why not try Mexican food instead? I’d say it was a whole lot more appealing than fiber supplements—just pass on the cheese, and use raw red onion and pinto, kidney, or black soy beans when making your dish. The best part is that only ½ cup of beans makes a serving, and most of us eat more than that per Mexican meal.
I have discovered that there is no need to become a horse or cow to achieve fiber continuity. Now I have to figure out exactly how many grams DOES make me go regularly, because I know I don’t get anywhere near 35 grams of fiber daily—another bone of contention from my corner of the universe.
Who makes up these hopelessly absurd numbers and waves them around as fact and health dogma? Why, the grain industry, of course! It seems as if the medical community just sits and waits for the fax to ring or the e-mail to alert them —no longer doing any actual research or verification themselves. Nutritional benchmarks set by various food industry factions—how convenient! Now you have a better idea of how the Food Guide Pyramid got invented in the first place.
Something else not taken into account: not all of us eat the so-called “typical American diet.” Some of us eat tons of raw fruits and veggies with each meal, and have homemade tacos once or twice weekly. Some of us shun drive-thru windows and restaurant eating all together like it was plague-infested or something. Some of us actually care about what we put into our bodies.
All I know is my magic fiber number is about half the touted 35 grams, and I go just fine at about the same times daily—all without a single bowl of cereal, or a single piece of whole-grain bread.
I’ll leave you with another bone of contention: if we need at least 1200 calories for a starvation diet, what do people with lap bands and gastric bypass operations do? They can only eat tablespoons of food per day before they get full enough to throw up. Oprah, Mike Huckabee, Ted Kennedy, Star Jones-Reynolds, Al Sharpton, Chris Matthews, and other obviously surgically-assisted weight losers seem to still be alive and thriving on their “tablespoon diet.” Tell ME they get 1800 calories and 35 grams of fiber daily--they'd have to devote great quantities of their day doing nothing but eating like birds!
I'm imagining they don't even own a normal-size refrigerator--why would they need one for the amount of food they can now consume? Wouldn't a dorm room-sized one or a hotel room-type bar fridge do for them?
Monday, January 08, 2007
Traditional Food Preservation, or How to Tell When Your Yogurt Goes Bad
A reader wanting to know how to tell when sourdough bread went bad prompted this article.
I told her that sourdough bread is “sour”—hence, already bad. Not so bad that you can’t eat it, however. Then I launched into a small litany of old ways of food preservation.
Our ancestors soaked, milled, fermented, and cultured their food for many reasons: lack of refrigeration, to remove toxins, and to make food more digestible, among others. Tibetans and Mongol tribes get milk straight from yaks, make yogurt and cheese, and have no access to refrigeration. American Indians, Mexicans, and other grain-based populations ground and soaked their grains before making breads and tortillas. African regions soak, pound, and bake certain other foods to make them palatable and easier to digest. And most interestingly, Eskimos eat mostly meat and fat from bears, whales, and salmon, yet never get a cholesterol problem from it!
It’s not like Eskimos have a place to garden or anything—it makes you wonder about the so-called “nutritional information” and health warnings being handed out on a near-daily basis. It also makes you wonder how we ever arrived at a point where “childhood obesity” has become a serious problem.
In modern times, we Americans processed our foods differently with the advent of mechanization (mills, etc.). Because we had access to refrigeration in one form or another, food preservation became a matter of thrift instead of necessity. Nowadays, we have perfected food freshness with “just-in-time” delivery of supplies, preparing food only for demand and not for supply (outside sales of excess), or having ways to rid ourselves of excess efficiently through online sales, auctions, overstock sales, or outright donations to food-based charity programs.
We have managed to over-produce ourselves into a health quandary.
The old ways of preservation (and I mean ancestral, not familial) did many good things for our systems: helped break down substances for easier digestion, helped remove dangerous toxins and allergens, and added useful bacteria (probiotics) to our systems to further aid in digestion as well as immunity. Modern food processing has stripped away all the benefits of traditional ways in favor of time and money, causing us more harm than good (as some would say)—now we have more food allergies, malnutrition (in spite of additives), indigestion issues, and more dependence on electronic appliances than ever before. It’s no wonder people panic when the power goes out, even for a couple of days—they’d lose their entire stock of frozen or frozen processed food quickly.
Here are some places to read up on traditional methods of food preservation and why we should implement some of them in our own homes: Traditional Diets , Traditional Foodways, Food Preservation Techniques.
The way our weather has been lately, you never know when a freak snowstorm or January tornado is going to hit—when the power goes out in unexpected places, it takes TIME to rebuild the infrastructure. Meanwhile, your entire fridge and freezer contents have been lost, and it makes no sense to go out and buy more with such an unstable power source.
Q: When DOES sourdough bread go bad?
A: When it becomes so rock-hard that you can’t bite into it without breaking a tooth.
Q: When DOES yogurt go bad?
A: I have no idea!
Instead of concentrating on how long food lasts, why not learn to only have the amount you can deal with at one time, leaving “shelf life” issues for someone else to work out? It’s not like we’re in a Depression and HAVE to hoard food, for heaven’s sake!
The habit of hoarding food plays right into the hands of marketers and sales pitches. We have gotten to a place where we no longer need to worry about having ENOUGH—now we need to worry about getting maximum nutrition from our food. This means freshness and proper preparation for service. This also means ALL bread (and bread products) should be sourdough if the flour was soaked overnight, as our ancestors did.
Is it any wonder why so many of us are popping Prilosec on a regular basis, or have children who waddle instead of run, or why food allergies are surging into prominence? I used to blame GMO foods, but they can't take all the blame any more!
I told her that sourdough bread is “sour”—hence, already bad. Not so bad that you can’t eat it, however. Then I launched into a small litany of old ways of food preservation.
Our ancestors soaked, milled, fermented, and cultured their food for many reasons: lack of refrigeration, to remove toxins, and to make food more digestible, among others. Tibetans and Mongol tribes get milk straight from yaks, make yogurt and cheese, and have no access to refrigeration. American Indians, Mexicans, and other grain-based populations ground and soaked their grains before making breads and tortillas. African regions soak, pound, and bake certain other foods to make them palatable and easier to digest. And most interestingly, Eskimos eat mostly meat and fat from bears, whales, and salmon, yet never get a cholesterol problem from it!
It’s not like Eskimos have a place to garden or anything—it makes you wonder about the so-called “nutritional information” and health warnings being handed out on a near-daily basis. It also makes you wonder how we ever arrived at a point where “childhood obesity” has become a serious problem.
In modern times, we Americans processed our foods differently with the advent of mechanization (mills, etc.). Because we had access to refrigeration in one form or another, food preservation became a matter of thrift instead of necessity. Nowadays, we have perfected food freshness with “just-in-time” delivery of supplies, preparing food only for demand and not for supply (outside sales of excess), or having ways to rid ourselves of excess efficiently through online sales, auctions, overstock sales, or outright donations to food-based charity programs.
We have managed to over-produce ourselves into a health quandary.
The old ways of preservation (and I mean ancestral, not familial) did many good things for our systems: helped break down substances for easier digestion, helped remove dangerous toxins and allergens, and added useful bacteria (probiotics) to our systems to further aid in digestion as well as immunity. Modern food processing has stripped away all the benefits of traditional ways in favor of time and money, causing us more harm than good (as some would say)—now we have more food allergies, malnutrition (in spite of additives), indigestion issues, and more dependence on electronic appliances than ever before. It’s no wonder people panic when the power goes out, even for a couple of days—they’d lose their entire stock of frozen or frozen processed food quickly.
Here are some places to read up on traditional methods of food preservation and why we should implement some of them in our own homes: Traditional Diets , Traditional Foodways, Food Preservation Techniques.
The way our weather has been lately, you never know when a freak snowstorm or January tornado is going to hit—when the power goes out in unexpected places, it takes TIME to rebuild the infrastructure. Meanwhile, your entire fridge and freezer contents have been lost, and it makes no sense to go out and buy more with such an unstable power source.
Q: When DOES sourdough bread go bad?
A: When it becomes so rock-hard that you can’t bite into it without breaking a tooth.
Q: When DOES yogurt go bad?
A: I have no idea!
Instead of concentrating on how long food lasts, why not learn to only have the amount you can deal with at one time, leaving “shelf life” issues for someone else to work out? It’s not like we’re in a Depression and HAVE to hoard food, for heaven’s sake!
The habit of hoarding food plays right into the hands of marketers and sales pitches. We have gotten to a place where we no longer need to worry about having ENOUGH—now we need to worry about getting maximum nutrition from our food. This means freshness and proper preparation for service. This also means ALL bread (and bread products) should be sourdough if the flour was soaked overnight, as our ancestors did.
Is it any wonder why so many of us are popping Prilosec on a regular basis, or have children who waddle instead of run, or why food allergies are surging into prominence? I used to blame GMO foods, but they can't take all the blame any more!
Thursday, January 04, 2007
Book Review: Medicare Meets Mephistopheles
This was another quick delightful read. Written by David A. Hyman and published by the Cato Institute (2006), it is set in the guise of an annual report of the Medicare program from Faithful Minion #666 to Satan. The author feels strongly that this entitlement program in particular will be the undoing of our republic if Satan had his way.
There is no religion in this tome—only devilish humor and a detailed explanation of the Medicare program, and how it became the “third rail” of politics.
The story delivers the reader an honest, scathing view of the history of Medicare, its promises and problems, and how to overcome them once political and personal hurdles have been conquered. Like all other entitlement programs, reality for the voter and recipient must set in somewhere—the prolonged existence and feasibility of these programs is rather shadowy. Uncle Sam cannot keep juggling imaginary balls forever.
If you are into social policy, annual reports, or devilish humor, please give this a read—if only for an hour or so. It’s a short book, but long on description of the Medicare crisis we face now and in the future.
There is no religion in this tome—only devilish humor and a detailed explanation of the Medicare program, and how it became the “third rail” of politics.
The story delivers the reader an honest, scathing view of the history of Medicare, its promises and problems, and how to overcome them once political and personal hurdles have been conquered. Like all other entitlement programs, reality for the voter and recipient must set in somewhere—the prolonged existence and feasibility of these programs is rather shadowy. Uncle Sam cannot keep juggling imaginary balls forever.
If you are into social policy, annual reports, or devilish humor, please give this a read—if only for an hour or so. It’s a short book, but long on description of the Medicare crisis we face now and in the future.
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