What do you guys think? Would you consider a raw foods diet if your doctor told you to think about it? Would you be more or less likely to consider eating raw if you had cancer?

Me, I think I’d love to go mostly raw someday, if it’s possible for me to get all my macronutrient requirements met with my finicky taste buds, but I can’t imagine being 100% raw. I really appreciate Carmella’s comment at the end of this post (filled with beautiful photographs!) about how she eats a little cooked food now and then, and doesn’t try to be so rigid with her eating. I love the idea of eating a nutrition-soaked diet, but I don’t like the idea of never being able to eat out with friends, or of forcing my dinner hosts to do anything more complicated than, “No meat please”.

Milk elevates insulin as much as white bread. Constantly elevating plasma insulin levels may lead to insulin resistance, which is at the root of several metabolic diseases such as obesity, type 2 diabetes or hypertension.

Hmmmm. Does that seem odd to you? Being lactose intolerant myself and a vegan groupie, I don’t mean to root for dairy or anything, but this just seems off. Looking for the glycemic index of white bread and milk, I find this:

White Wheat Bread    75(GI)
Milk, full fat                  39(GI)
Milk, skim                     37(GI)

(source)

I posted a comment on Cordain’s blog asking how they arrived at their conclusion. It apparently needs to be approved before it shows up, but I’ll let you know what happens.

In addition to being found in many plastic bottles, Bisphenol A is also found in the epoxy resin liner of most canned fruits and vegetables. The BPA from this lining has been shown to leach into the vegetables in the can. Studies have shown that amount leached is enough to cause breast cancer cells to grow and proliferate in the lab.

I’ll look around and see if I can find more support for this, but for now let’s just take it as one more encouragement to eat whole foods, and to support our local agriculture, and while you’re at it, support the EARTH. That plastic you throw away might literally be going into someone else’s body.

It’s a great show for nutrition buffs, and episode 4 is especially great if you like listening to Aussies pronounce “margarine”.

The link went to an article titled, “The painful truth about trainers: are running shoes a waste of money?”

What I like is that they come to the conclusion that we’re basically better off as barefoot as possible, which as a massage therapist and reflexologist and a many-years member of the Society for Barefoot Living, I completely agree with. Shoes are a freaking menace! That’s my humble opinion. Okay, sure, I like my Chacos in the summer, but I go barefoot as much as I can, and you really do feel the difference after awhile. Your feet and legs get stronger, and your proprioception gets a lot sharper.

Turns out it’s not just us wacko hippies, it’s also endurance athletes:

Then there’s the secretive Tarahumara tribe, the best long-distance runners in the world. These are a people who live in basic conditions in Mexico, often in caves without running water, and run with only strips of old tyre or leather thongs strapped to the bottom of their feet. They are virtually barefoot.

Come race day, the Tarahumara don’t train. They don’t stretch or warm up. They just stroll to the starting line, laughing and bantering, and then go for it, ultra-running for two full days, sometimes covering over 300 miles, non-stop. For the fun of it. One of them recently came first in a prestigious 100-mile race wearing nothing but a toga and sandals. He was 57 years old.

It also turns out that running shoes don’t prevent injury at all – in fact there is no evidence for that claim, and the shoe companies know it.

So, if running shoes don’t make you go faster and don’t stop you from getting hurt, then what, exactly, are you paying for? What are the benefits of all those microchips, thrust enhancers, air cushions, torsion devices and roll bars?

The answer is still a mystery. And for Bowerman’s old mentor, Arthur Lydiard, it all makes sense.

‘We used to run in canvas shoes,’ he said.

‘We didn’t get plantar fasciitis (pain under the heel); we didn’t pronate or supinate (land on the edge of the foot); we might have lost a bit of skin from the rough canvas when we were running marathons, but generally we didn’t have foot problems.

‘Paying several hundred dollars for the latest in hi-tech running shoes is no guarantee you’ll avoid any of these injuries and can even guarantee that you will suffer from them in one form or another. Shoes that let your foot function like you’re barefoot – they’re the shoes for me.’

Researchers began filming barefoot runners……

When he zoomed in, he was startled by what he found. Instead of each foot clomping down as it would in a shoe, it behaved like an animal with a mind of its own – stretching, grasping, seeking the ground with splayed toes, gliding in for a landing like a lake-bound swan.

‘It’s beautiful to watch,’ Pisciotta later told me. ‘That made us start thinking that when you put a shoe on, it starts to take over some of the control.’

Pisciotta immediately deployed his team to gather film of every existing barefoot culture they could find.

‘We found pockets of people all over the globe who are still running barefoot, and what you find is that, during propulsion and landing, they have far more range of motion in the foot and engage more of the toe. Their feet flex, spread, splay and grip the surface, meaning you have less pronation and more distribution of pressure.’

All this is making me want to go for a jog in my Vibram Five-Fingers, the weirdest looking shoes I’ve ever owned, but the neatest and most fun to wear. Definitey worth the money! If you’re looking to go barefoot without worrying about stepping in something scary, get a pair of Vibrams.

No pills, not even aspirin, and certainly no supplements ever enter my mouth — everything I need comes from my fish-vegetarian diet, which incorporates 30-40 different kinds of fruit and vegetables every week. Even though I am Chairman and Owner of Dole Food Company, I do most of my own grocery shopping, and even took Oprah on an impromptu trip to Costco, in a day that included bike riding, exercise in the gym, and juicing vegetables in the kitchen. Oprah marveled at how much I eat, and yet never gain a pound. In fact, I expend a lot of energy in my 50-60 minutes of cardio and strength training every day. Plus there’s the fact that fruit and vegetables tend to be lower in calories, but higher in filling fiber and other nutrients that help you feel satisfied. 

I copied and pasted that from the print version of the article, and all those links came with it – they seem to go to nutrition articles on Dole, so I won’t strip them out.

This guy is 86 years old! I want to be like him when I’m 86! Heck, I want to be like him now. I’m 34, and I’m pretty sure this guy’s body is in much better shape than mine. What an inspiration! Check out the article, because there’s also a great chart listing different produce and their benefits. I’ve printed it out to stick on the fridge for ideas.

I was surprised how sickened I was by the menu. I’m not even a vegan yet, I still stray off the path on a fairly regular basis, but I try to mitigate the damage as much as I can, and I actively work toward learning to cook vegan foods so that eventually my diet is animal-free. The idea of serving foie gras and veal, at your wedding…..it just takes such an amazing lack of compassion. Does Salma Hayek have a pet? What if someone force-fed the pet and then ground up its liver for a fancy party? Would she find that disconcerting in any way?

It’s amazing to me how the treatment of animals is something that most people just won’t look at. Foie gras and veal – these things are, for Salma and her ilk, not examples of cruelty, or even food – they’re symbols of class. Her menu was a sign of her new status; who cares about animal cruelty when you’re marrying 16.5 billion dollars? Hell, grind up a few orphans for the wedding! They have so much money they don’t have to care about something as silly as a few ducks or calves. They’re elevated above that, and their food is a way of displaying that.

So if I continue going vegan, will I end up with a bad beard and a burgeoning hip-hop career?

I can’t imagine this is real. It has to be a hoax. As most of you (okay, none of you) know, I’ve been in love with the Phoenix boys since I was a wee girl. And this just seems like something Joaquin would do as a joke. It has to be a joke. Please say it’s a joke.

It is hilarious as all hell, I can tell you that. Almost too painful to watch in spots, but if you’re a fan of David Letterman, and I am, then you will remember why he’s so good at his job. He can make even this look good.

Joan Pick lives in England, is 67 years old, a former scientist and member of Mensa, and runs wherever she needs to go. She hasn’t been in a car in years. She’s been living on raw food for ages, which I’m guessing accounts for her energy and her glow. Look at those rosy cheeks, and that smile! It’s those last two I’m most charmed with – the idea of never getting in a car again feels more limiting than it does eco-friendly, but I understand where she’s coming from. She also uses her cast-iron pans as hand weights for exercise, and she spends a lot of time hula-hooping!

She follows a raw vegetarian diet. “I had done studies of the food industry – the beef industry and the destruction of the rainforest to fuel it,” she says. “I was at a Mensa dinner, with a vegetarian …” She doesn’t continue this thought. “I’ve always been a natural fatty … I had tried every diet in the book, so I decided to try a raw-food vegetarian diet.” When was the last time she ate a cooked meal? “I don’t know, I can’t remember.” Doesn’t she miss it? A nice bowl of soup, a roast dinner? “Of course not. There’s no mess. Have you seen what I eat?” We go into her kitchen, where the cupboards are bare. She opens a large tub full of mixed seeds and nuts, which forms the basis of her diet, along with fruit and wheatgerm. “It’s very easy to live like this. I couldn’t imagine living any other way now,” she says.

Read the whole article here, at the Guardian.

]]> http://www.grassdirtcorn.com/2008/11/joan-pick/feed/ 0 http://www.grassdirtcorn.com/2008/11/sugar-causes-cancer/ http://www.grassdirtcorn.com/2008/11/sugar-causes-cancer/#comments Wed, 19 Nov 2008 00:44:53 +0000 hollie http://www.grassdirtcorn.com/?p=373 From Natural News: Ten Studies Showing the Link Between Sugar and Increased Cancer Risk

So if sugar causes cancer…..then what’s the name of that creek I’m up? Excrement creek? Crap creek? Yeah.

And you thought what was in your hot dog was scary.....

A North Carolina man found more than just bread when he opened up a bag of hot dog buns. Bruce Van Dyne says “I was cooking dinner and I brought these out and I opened them up.”

An unwelcome condiment on his hot dog bun.

Bruce says “that’s our little friend right there. And that clearly is a mouse.”

The rodent’s parts he says, pretty easy to make out.

Bruce says “I see the little ears. Clearly that’s a tail. I don’t know what that is, part of his leg or something, but that mouse is baked in there.”

And here we thought as long as we got tofu dogs we were doing okay. While I just don’t find much about what falls/dies/get churned into food these days that surprising (just because so much of food production is mechanized), I DO get shocked at what human beings totally fail to notice when they’re packaging things. Didn’t someone have to handle these buns? How do you miss something like this? Maybe the mechanization extends to packaging and no one handled these buns at all.

Isn’t it a shame when BUN HANDLING ISN’T TAKEN SERIOUSLY? I mean, when handling buns, don’t you look at what you’re doing? Don’t you pay attention to what your hands are feeling? I know when I’m touching buns, I make sure I’m doing my job right.

It isn’t just Halloween, I’m this mature all the time.

In still more hilarity, the comments section of the article is pretty great:

I once found a Nacho Cheese Dorito in my Taco Doritos. I was so upset couldn’t sleep for a week. After 2 years of seeing doctors I can eat Doritos again.

Wow! More food for the buck!
There’s bugs, rat hairs, etc. in everything you eat, sorry. Think of it just boosting your immune system.

I totally get that our lives are not as sanitized as we’d prefer, and we’ve all heard about the bugs that are allowed in our food by FDA regulations (in orange juice, five fly eggs or one maggot per 250 milliliters is okay), but I mean, hello, a mouse in a hot dog bun? What’s next? Voles in baguettes? At what point do we give up on food safety and just start baking “extra protein” into every meal? When does the madness end, I ASK YOU?

I hope everyone has had a great Halloween. My kids are asleep (or in a diabetic coma, I’m not sure which), and Greg is sitting in his chair reading election news on his laptop and pulling absentmindedly at his hair, which our son does when he’s tired. I, on the other hand, had a little too much sugar today and will not be going to bed anytime soon. I’m wondering how clean I can get the garage before dawn.

Which leads me to my next update: SUGAR. I did really well with my sugar ban, until today. I count this as a success, since usually I start eating Halloween candy right after my birthday (July 31st), but this year I actually waited until Halloween to have any. And of course once I had one piece, well, that unlocked the caged beast within, and I’m pretty sure the scraps of cardboard littering the kitchen floor was once a box of Pocky. But we’ll really never know.

HAPPY HALLOWEEN EVERYBODY!

As I mentioned before, I read a lot about the raw food movement, mostly the way an armchair tourist reads about France. I don’t really get off my butt and do much with raw foods at all, except to make the occasional dehydrator treat. So I was surprised to see that 20/20 had taken an interest. It didn’t take too long to find the segment on YouTube, although I did have to watch it in two pieces. The first is here, and the second is here. People with better YouTubeFoo than I have might find the whole thing somewhere, if you do, let me know and I’ll update this post.

The raw food community is understandably up in arms. They view eating raw foods as a path to good health,  not a disorder. John Stossel, who narrates the piece (and I assume put the thing together), is not my favorite television host. I suspect he thinks his scornful, authoritative tone of voice is comforting to us hopelessly confused plebians, but in reality (and here I have to quickly decide how “family friendly” I want this blog to be) he just comes off like a pompous ass (there, that’s not too bad, is it?). This piece is no different. He can barely contain his contempt for raw foodists.

The problem is, he confuses the issues, and I know he’s not dumb enough to be doing this by accident, which makes me dislike him even more (assuming that were possible). Just because someone eats raw food doesn’t make them orthorexics. Hallmarks of orthorexia include excessive planning of what to eat, and a concern for not just healthy but high quality food, to the point that your lifestyle makes it hard for you to eat with others. Raw food is known for its prep time; sprouting things, dehydrating things, all this takes a lot of time and can be a real pain to your stomach and your schedule. However, someone choosing to eat a diet that has difficult prep time doesn’t mean they have a disorder.

What about people who love to spend hours in the kitchen making a single dinner, making sure each ingredient is prepared just so? Are they mentally ill? No, because they’re cooking their food. But if they forgo the oven and decide to spend an hour making a raw-food pie that most people think is “weird”? Then suddenly they’re obsessive and have a psychological condition.

The people that were held up as evidence in the piece were suffering from anorexia, not just orthorexia. Take a look around at any raw foods festival: people they are mostly slim, some are a bit plump, but I’ve never seen a skeleton figure the likes of the guy they showed in this piece. But because he chooses to abuse his body through raw foods, he’s somehow an example of all raw foodists (something that upset even him – here’s his video response to the 20/20 piece). They say on the show, “These people all had a history of eating disorders before they found raw foods,” but after that quick mention they never examine the relevance of that history to the case they’re trying to make. It’s ridiculous.

The fact is, people can abuse themselves with all kinds of things. Food is just one. Orthorexia is nothing but a variant of anorexia. Why John Stossel felt he needed to slam raw foodists isn’t something I care to analyze deeply (I’m guessing it’s as simple as ratings – “debunk” shows are popular), but I think it was incredibly poor journalism.

Just kidding.

There’s a whole website and everything, that talks about celebrations going on today, how you can get involved, and how this kicks off Vegetarian Awareness Month. I love Awareness Months. I’d like to plan an entire year of them, centered around issues I think are important, like Why Do Guys Get Pants That Are Sized In Easy-to-Understand Inches Awareness Month, or, People Who Can’t Eat Cheese Because They’ll Be In The Bathroom All Day So Stop Waving Your Fancy Log Of Chevre In Front Of Me Awareness Month.

Right now, at this moment, I’m baking a large pot of baby new potatoes that I picked up from the Ellensburg Farmer’s Market. As you know, potatoes are a vegetable, therefore I think I can count this among my day’s festivities. Don’t ask what I had for breakfast, because while homemade vegan Apple Pie is delicious, I don’t think it counts.

Speaking of vegan, the month of October is also The Vegan Month of Food, or as the Post Punk Kitchen Blog brilliantly refers to it: VEGANMOFO.

During the month of October I’ll be blogging about exclusively vegan foods and recipes, and trying as many vegan things as I can, in an effort to, well, let’s just have out with it shall we? Go vegan. Yes, yes, I don’t like vegetables, I know this, and yes, I have mixed feelings about animals for food (I’ll write more about that later), but I feel like I’m pretending when I say that my goal is to learn to eat moderately. I think moderately, I feel moderately about a lot of issues, but for my own values, and my own health, what I align with is not eating factory-farmed meat. Which is nearly all meat. I already can’t eat dairy, so that’s basically becoming a vegan. There, that wasn’t so hard. I’ve outed myself as a vegan groupie. If veganism was a band, I’d be out there on the concert tour, hauling their amps and speakers around and calling everyone “Sir”.

My goals at the moment are fairly tame. I’m trying to eat vegan most days of the week. So far I’m averaging 4-5 vegan days a week, which is excellent for me. I still need to work a lot on cooking, and learning to find recipes that I’ll make regularly that are both good for me and sustaining (i.e., when reaching for a quick meal, it’d be nice to have some filling leftover casserole or stew, instead of yet another sliced apple or handful of sunflower seeds). During the month of October I’ll try as many new things as I can, and blog about them (with pictures!) on a hopefully near-daily basis.

“The fact that human adults consume huge quantities of dairy products made from milk that was meant for a baby cow just doesn’t make sense,” says PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman. “Everyone knows that ‘the breast is best,’ so Ben & Jerry’s could do consumers and cows a big favor by making the switch to breast milk.”

I get annoyed with PETA for how ridiculous they come across sometimes. My even writing this means they’re getting talked about, which I suppose is what they want. Yet that’s just it; they’re cheap. Any publicity is good publicity. I can’t respect that. Besides, if we’re going to try to accustom people to using someone else’s breastmilk, it’d be nice if there were more easily-accessible breastmilk banks for mothers and babies out there.

In other boob-related news, a restaurant in Switzerland is apparently using 75% breast milk in its recipes. I will admit it; when I was breastfeeding, I tried some out of a bottle once, and it didn’t taste horrible. It tasted like cantaloupe juice. But I never tried baking with it, or making a sauce, not least because I was barely making enough to keep my own kids alive let alone feed an adult. The owner is paying women about $6 for 14oz of breastmilk. I’m trying not to imagine the ad in a home-based business catalog.