Cured Meats

The quick answer:  Besides eating meat sparingly, it’s a good idea to enjoy cured meats as an exception rather than a regular practice.

_______________________________________________________________________

Johanne’s Back

Generals who win great wars are often remembered with statues; not so much for the losing side.  But it’s a special day when an ordinary man who simply lives a good life gets a statue.  Take Johannes Huber, a founder of little Midway, Utah, for example.  Johannes raised apples, wrote poems and hymns, taught choral music, and lived a quiet life.  But we celebrate him as the great-grandfather of the beautiful wife. 

So when we had to cut down an overgrown tree up in Midway, it only seemed proper to carve a statue of Johannes.  We found an exceptional chainsaw artist, John Pettit, now known as the Famous Wood Carver.  Time takes a toll, even of statues, so Johannes has been missing from his perch in our yard for a year or so while repairs were made, but he’s back.  Check him out—7' tall, pretty big for the Swiss.

The Smell of Bacon

Before we condemn cured meats, I must make this disclosure:  I love the smell and taste of bacon.   This summer we had some great BLTs, with juicy tomatoes and fresh spinach on toasted whole wheat bread.  We sometimes have bacon with a Saturday night omelet.  And the beautiful wife makes a delicious spinach and bacon salad.  Like most of you, we enjoy bacon.

We also like ham.  You can enjoy several dinners and a bunch of sandwiches from one of those spiral-cut preserved hams, and then make a great split pea soup with the bone.  (Check our recipe here.)  Sometimes I slice a fresh pineapple to cover the ham and bake it in the oven.  This keeps the ham from drying and the carmelized sugars taste great.  I’d rather not think about life without cured meats.  

Preserved Meats

Here’s the problem:  Like humans, the pathogens—including botulism, Staph aureus, and the listeria family—also enjoy meat.  They can be deadly but there’s a protection tested by time:  preservation with nitrites.  In olden times meat was cured with salt but the salt actually included nitrites.  The nitrites were there because plants—rich in nitrogen, the source of nitrates and nitrites—decayed and were carried by water to the ocean.  The time-tested use of sea salt in preserving meat was largely due to the nitrites.

A century ago nitrites were added to meat without proper limits.  In 1926 the FDA set a nitrite/nitrate limit of 200 parts per million (ppm).  Through continual progress, today the actual content has been significantly reduced.  Still, it should be remembered that nitrite is a toxin—a few grams taken directly can be fatal. 

Pregnant women—some authorities recommend—should avoid, or at least minimize, cured meats.

Nitrites are carcinogens—remember the discovery of nitrosamines in the ‘70s?  Though the exact mechanism is unknown, there does seem to be a cancer risk with nitrates and nitrites.  There is also a greater risk for asthma (short term), hypertension and diabetes.  Risky stuff.

Some preserved meats, like those labeled organic, don’t show nitrites or nitrates on the label, but unless refrigerated they all contain nitrites in some form.  For example, nitrates can be slipped in via nitrogen-rich plants, like celery, shown as added flavors in the ingredient list. 

A 2009 Texas A & M study looked at cured meat around the country, including naturally (sometimes called organically) preserved meats.  Bottom line:  They all include nitrates and/or nitrites—about 37.1 and 4.5 ppm respectively.  Nitrates, by bacterial action, become nitrites.  Nitrite effectiveness can be improved by adding salt or vitamin C, which allows a reduction. 

The Lunch Problem

What about the meat sandwich so common in our lunch bags?  This was a big source of comments when we discussed cured meats a year ago.  Here are some alternative ideas to a steady diet of cured meat sandwiches:

• Tuna fish is probably the healthiest meat choice, unless you like sardine sandwiches.  I like my tuna with a lot of chopped celery, pickle relish, and some chopped green onion.  If you add some dark greens, like spinach, and use whole wheat bread, you’ve got a pretty healthy meal. 
• The soup and salad combos available at most lunch places are a good alternative to the cured meat sandwich.
• Try a boiled egg or (canned) chicken salad sandwich, with emphasis on the salad ingredients. 
• Bring leftovers from home in a microwaveable plastic container—this is probably the best possible lunch value.
• Limit your ham and cheese on rye, or whatever cured meat you prefer, to once a week.  When you have a BLT, add lots of tomato and dark greens.

Healthy Change

Healthy Change #48: Enjoy processed meats as an exception, rather than a regular practice.

This completes our meat-related Healthy Changes for the year.  There's more to talk about, like how to buy affordable pastured meat from healthy animals, but these four changes make a good start:

Healthy Change #9:  Define as a family a “sparing” amount of meat and get most of your protein from plants.  To build support, this Healthy Change required family discussion and agreement.  The basic idea was to get about 1/3 of your protein from meat, the rest from plant sources.

Healthy Change #22: Until better milk is available, drink sparingly, if at all.  Dairy is a big part of our animal product intake and milk is the most common form.  Enjoy milk if you choose, but drink it sparingly.

Healthy Change #35: Include long chain omega-3s (EPA and DHA) in your meal most days.  The brain- and eye-healthy omega-3 fats in the long-chain form are found in animal products, especially cold-water fish.

Please Comment:  Share your best ideas for lunches that don’t depend on cured meats.  When you do use cured meats, get the maximum mileage—for example, use bacon to flavor a spinach-egg salad, or a pot of baked beans.  Got a recipe to share?

Herbs and Spices

The quick answer:  Improve the taste of wholesome foods by mastering the use of spices.

_______________________________________________________________________

Spice Traditions

It’s not necessarily a good thing, but the food companies are quite inventive.  Walk the aisles of your grocery store and you’ll find many new food-like concoctions.  The rate at which new foods appear is a phenomenon of our time.  But there’s one aisle that for millennia is little changed—the spice aisle. 

The spice aisle fascinates me.  It brings to mind caravans of camels treading the ancient trails of the Silk Road.  Most everything in the spice aisle meets our century rule:  Avoid processed food products that haven’t been around at least a century.

There’s a book, The Flavor Bible where the spice affinities of famous chefs have been summarized.  I turn to it when composing recipes.  Want to bake pears for dinner?  The book suggests these complementary flavors:  almonds, blue cheese, cinnamon/cloves, dark chocolate, honey, or orange. 

As a novice cook, spice combinations fascinate me:  You can’t make a bad soup with bay leaf, thyme, and parsley.  Curry (a blend of cumin, coriander, ginger, and turmeric) is the dominant spice mixture for Asian cooking.  The French have their Herbs de Provence (marjoram, basil, rosemary, fennel, sage and savory).  How about our use of vanilla, cinnamon and nutmeg for desserts?  We’re going beyond salt and pepper here. 

The use of spices is one measure of a cook’s skill.  It’s easy to flavor food with sugar, salt, or a hunk of meat.  But it’s the exceptional cook who can create flavors by combining spices.  The goal of this post is to encourage you to expand your use of spices. 

McCormick’s Folly

McCormick won the spice war but they got too greedy.  Walk through the spice aisle of any supermarket and it’s all McCormick.  I suspect their dominance is due to the practice of “slotting fees,” where the stores basically rent their shelf space.  Little guys can’t afford to play this game so the big guys win and when that happens, prices start rising.

But visit Trader Joe’s, Sprouts, or Whole Foods.  You won’t find McCormick.  It’s a new world, there are different brands, and spices are much cheaper.  So buy your spices at the alternate markets.  Or if you want a lot of cinnamon, like 10.7 oz worth, try Costco.  We talked about spices in this aisle visit.

Benefits of Spices

Spices are rich in antioxidants and anti-inflammatory compounds beneficial to health.  The spices with the most proven health benefits include cinnamon, chili peppers, turmeric, garlic, oregano, basil, thyme, and rosemary.  Though the health benefits are not fully researched, it seems a wise thing to include a variety of spices in your diet.  For one thing, they can make vegetables tastier and one of the challenges of healthy eating is to consume more veggies. 

Healthy Change

Please comment:  Share your experience with adding spices to your diet.  Have a favorite spice?  Let us know about what you’re doing.

Nuts To You

The quick answer:  They cost more per pound than most foods but nuts are a nutrition bargain.

_______________________________________________________________________

Walnut Harvest

I apologize that our posts of menus and recipes have been sparse of late (though I did come up with a Bran Nut Muffin Recipe).  We’ve had a few distractions that have kept us moving between home and northern California.

We did manage, however, to stock up on freshly harvested walnuts while up north.  We bought 100 lbs, in the shell.  We ran out of walnuts a few months ago so I bought some at the local health food store.  They were so old and rancid we could hardly eat them.  The fact is that you have to keep walnuts (and most other nuts) refrigerated, especially if they’re out of the shell.  At the health food store it’s best if you sniff the bin (for any rancid odor) before buying nuts.

So I’ve been cracking walnuts in my spare time and stacking them in the freezer.  They make a nice Christmas offering; you can’t buy fresh walnuts in the store.  We’re running out of space so the BW suggested we finally break down and buy a freezer.  I’ve resisted this because we struggle to rotate the stock in the freezer section of our refrigerator.  Is our food discipline up to managing a freezer too?  Maybe it’s time.

Did I mention the walnuts only cost $4/lb if I do the shelling?  They cost much more in the store and aren’t half as good. 

Nut Benefits

One of the premises of Word of Wisdom Living is that it’s cheaper to cook healthy food than buy the prepared (and less healthy) stuff.  If you want to enjoy good health, you must either cook or be on good terms with a cook.  We’ve no problem with occasional take-our when things get crazy, in fact we encourage that one meal a week can be whatever you crave.  But we also believe that people who regularly read this blog are unlikely to want the most toxic stuff—like deep fat fried corndogs.

Value is always a consideration in our posts but this blog is about one of the more expensive food groups: nuts.  It’s reported that only 5% of Americans regularly eat nuts.  That’s a shame because nuts have a lot of benefits:

• Nuts are rich in antioxidant and anti-inflammatory nutrients.  We talked about these important topics here and here.  A 2005 study found those who eat the most nuts have the lowest level of inflammation markers.  For almonds, the anti-inflammatory effect is as strong as the statin drugs, without all the nasty side effects.  
• Nuts are a good source of essential minerals, like magnesium and selenium.  Americans are widely deficient in magnesium.  The Nurses’ Health Study found women with the highest magnesium serum level had 77% less risk of heart attack than those with the lowest level.  Magnesium is also critical to bone health and prevention of calcification.  Multiple studies evidence that selenium plays an important but undefined role in preventing cancer. .  A 1996 U. of Arizona study, for example, found those taking doses of selenium had 40% less cancer than the placebo (no selenium) group.  Brazil nuts are rich in selenium.
• Nuts make a great non-sugary snack, one that won’t cause you to gain weight.  Though dense in calories (and nutrients), studies show a significant advantage in weight loss for nut eaters.  (Though the nuts are high in calorie-dense fats, they are also very filling which offsets the calorie risk.)

Healthy Change

Please Comment: Our favorite nuts include walnuts (especially in baked goods), almonds (we like them with dark chocolate chips), pecans (they’re good alone, or with apples and dried fruit), Brazil nuts, and cashews.  Do you have a good source, or a favorite recipe to share?  Please comment.

Skip's Bran Nut Muffin Recipe

Food Inc.

In the past century, the food companies (Food Inc) created and promoted recipes for their overly processed products.  The touted convenience of using these factory goods overlooked the bother of buying and storing them in the family pantry.  It’s likely a few of these factory recipes are in your recipe collection.

For example, our favorite bran muffin recipe used two kinds of packaged bran cereal.  It also bothered me that the recipe wasn’t all that healthy—it used white flour and quite a bit of sugar.

So, a couple of weeks ago, as a recipe for the post on Natural Snacks, I decided to compose a totally healthy bran muffin recipe that tasted as good but used wholesome ingredients and minimal sugar.  I thought I’d be done in a couple of days but it wasn’t that easy. 

I learned a few lessons (see below), but here is the recipe that finally won the beautiful wife’s approval.  (For convenience I wrote the recipe to use our cupcake pan, rather than the larger muffin tins.)  The recipe uses ingredients found in most homes.

 

Skip’s Bran Nut Muffins (1 dozen, cupcake size)

Ingredients:

• ¾ C wheat bran
• ¼ C oatmea
• ½ C whole wheat flour
• 1 tsp baking soda
• ½ tsp salt (¼ tsp rounded if butter is salted)
• ½ C raisins, or chopped dates
• 2/3 C walnuts, chopped

__________________________________________

• 1 egg, beaten
• 1 C buttermilk (or make your own by placing 1 T lemon juice or vinegar in measuring cup and add milk to make 1 C; let sit 10 minutes).
• ½ C turbinado sugar (or dark brown sugar, or honey)
• ¼ C butter, melted (1/2 cube) or organic cold-pressed canola oil.
• 1 tsp vanilla

Directions:

1. Turn on oven to 350 F.  Prepare buttermilk if needed.
2. Combine dry ingredients.
3. Combine wet ingredients.  (If you plan to keep the muffins several days, double the fat to maintain moisture.)
4. Stir together just enough to mix. 
5. Place foil muffin liners in cupcake pan.  Fill cups 2/3 full.  (I prefer the foil liners as the paper liners were a little oily on the bottom.)  You can fill the cups fuller to get a “muffin top,” but you’ll want to oil the pan to prevent sticking.
6. Bake immediately, 18-20 minutes or until an inserted toothpick comes out clean.

_______________________________________________________________________

Lessons Learned

I learned a few things in the process of developing this recipe.  For example, it’s not that easy to create a recipe.  My first attempts got terrible reviews from the tasting panel, including this dagger to a cook’s heart: “tastes like cardboard.”

Lesson #1  Leavening:  Baking powder and baking soda both leaven quick breads (by making carbon dioxide bubbles) but I was confused which to use when.  Here’s the rule:  Use baking soda if other ingredients are acidic (buttermilk, yogurt, honey, lemon juice, or vinegar).  The acid activates the baking soda and in turn the baking soda neutralizes the acid.  (Kind of like a good marriage.)  It’s important to note that baking soda starts acting when the ingredients are mixed so you need to bake right away, or include some baking powder.

Baking powder is simply baking soda mixed with an acid producer (cream of tartar), and some cornstarch (extends shelf life by absorbing moisture).  Oven heat activates baking powder.  Use baking powder where you don’t have acid ingredients, or when you plan to bake later.   For example, if you want to refrigerate them overnight and pop them in the oven the next morning, include 1 tsp baking powder.

Lesson #2  Soggy bottoms:  I used a lot of wheat bran in the recipe for the fiber, minerals and antioxidants, but my muffins kept coming out soggy on the bottom.  The problem was the fiber in wheat bran is 80% insoluble.  For a muffin that was moist but not soggy, I needed some soluble fiber.  Oatmeal has the most soluble fiber of any grain and ¼ cup made for a nice bottom.

Lesson #3  Texture:  Bran muffins shouldn’t be too crumbly, nor should they be too tough.  It’s the gluten in the wheat flour that makes them stick together.  In recipes that are supposed to crumble, you first combine the flour with the butter (it’s referred to as “cutting in”).  The fat of the butter coats the flour and restricts the effect of the gluten. 

In bran muffin recipes you mix melted butter (or oil) first with the sugar and wet ingredients, them fold it into the flour and dry ingredients with minimal stirring.  This seems to give a good muffin texture.  You can reduce the crumbs by adding 1 T gluten (the protein that holds bread together).  I tried it both ways but got a texture the BW liked without added gluten. 

Lesson #4  Spices:  A few recipes include cinnamon and nutmeg.  We tried it with and without and much preferred the natural bran taste with just vanilla.  Some recipes include a little grated orange peel.  This is easier to do if you use a lot of sugar because it offsets the tartness of the orange peel.  Because we used minimal sugar, we skipped the orange peel but some may prefer it.

Taking Stock

The quick answer:  If you’re not cooking with homemade stock, maybe it’s time to start.  You can’t find a better, or healthier value. 

_______________________________________________________________________

Falling for Soup

The leaves are falling as the evening air turns cooler, so this week the beautiful wife yearned for soup.   We started with my Potato Onion Soup (recipe to follow), and moved on to Split Pea Soup with Ham Bone (I providently had some stashed in the freezer). 

Soups are traditionally made with stock, but when you cook with a bone, you don’t need to add stock.  My Split Pea Soup recipe starts with a ham bone and includes the stock ingredients of mire poix (carrot, celery, and onion) plus the traditional flavors (bay leaves, thyme, parsley). 

Through fall and winter, you can build a simple but delicious meal around a pot of homemade soup.  Anyone can cook delicious soup.  Soup fits perfectly with the values of Word of Wisdom Living:  It makes an inexpensive meal, has only healthy ingredients, is delicious, and makes everyone smile when they enter your kitchen and sniff the fragrance.  It takes a little work to make soup, but if you make extra you can freeze some for that night when you’re too busy to cook.

Taking Stock

Stock is the base for many soups and because you’re likely to have a turkey carcass sitting on your counter after Thanksgiving dinner, this is a good time to talk about making your own stock.  Homemade stock is cheaper than the stuff in the store and tastes lots better.  It’s also way healthier—you get a lot of nutrients out of cooked bones.  We try to keep some in the freezer, from Thanksgiving into the spring.

The famed French chef Auguste Escoffier claimed that stock was everything in cooking.  By tradition, soup made from stock will heal whatever ails you.  Chicken soup is the only remedy proven to shorten the duration of a head cold.  Stock is rich in nutrients and low in calories. 

Stock is rich in minerals from the bone, amino acids, gelatin from the cartilage, and other nutrients.  Gelatin has a long tradition in healing and also serves as a thickener; my stock was surprisingly thick.  The minerals extracted from the bone, mainly calcium, are believed to aid bone building.  In addition to all the nutrients, stock makes sauces, soups, and stews tasty.  For more about stock (broth), see here.

Several years ago the beautiful wife had a sore hip joint that persisted for months.  She finally saw an orthopedic doc who found nothing visibly wrong but suggested that glucosamine and chondroitin supplements were helpful to some.  This wasn’t proven science, the doctor pointed out, but thought it worth a try.  She tried it and within a matter of weeks the pain went away.  Bone broths are natural sources of chondroitin and glucosamine so there may something to the claimed benefit of stock for bone health.

Healthy Change #45

This week’s Healthy Change is simple and delicious (and a recipe is included below):

Please comment:  Got a favorite soup recipe, perhaps a family treasure?  Share your best soup recipe.

Making Stock

It’s ridiculous to put my name on this recipe because people have been making stock from bones since the Stone Age.  But I did.  You can use any kind of bones, but we mostly use cooked poultry.  This recipe is based on the carcass of a Costco rotisserie chicken with most, but not all, meat removed. 

At Thanksgiving, we scale this up to make use of our turkey carcass (crushed or broken to fit the pot), limited only by the size of our biggest pot. 

Skip’s Stock Recipe

Ingredients:

• 1 chicken carcass (try the Costco rotisserie chicken)
• 4 qt. water (Enough to cover the carcass; about 1 qt. per pound of chicken, original weight)
• 1 yellow onion, sliced
• 2 carrots, chopped in ½” slices
• 2 celery stalks, roughly chopped
• 2 bay leaf
• 1 tsp thyme, or equivalent of fresh thyme
• 3-4 sprigs of parsley (optional)

Directions:

1. Place carcass in pot and cover with water.  Bring to a boil and simmer gently 1 hour.
2. While carcass is cooking, prepare mire poix (onion, carrots, celery stalks).  Add to pot when hour is up, along with bay leaf, thyme, and optional parsley.  Cook one more hour.  (Note:  Salt or pepper is not added to stock; it’s best to add seasoning when the stock is made into soup.)
3. Remove and discard the carcass.  Pour the liquid through a strainer to remove cooked ingredients. 
4. Pour the stock into 1-qt. plastic freezer containers, or 1-qt. zip-lock freezer bags.  (I used glass bottles previously but couldn’t keep them from cracking in the freezer.) 
5. Refrigerate if used within 2 days, or freeze up to 2 months.  When stock is refrigerated it will become thick, almost like gelatin. 

Heart Beating; Lungs Pumping

The quick answer:  Aerobic exercise—it's an essential ingredient for good health.

_______________________________________________________________________

Aerobic Exercise

It was an ‘80s thing, aerobics.  This new form of exercise was devised and popularized by Dr. Kenneth Cooper, author of a handful of books on the subject.  He defined it as “A system of exercise . . . to cause marked temporary increase in breathing and heart rate.”  It’s not all that intense—the point of aerobic exercise is to do something you can maintain for, say, 20 minutes. 

You can walk, run, swim, row, jump-rope, or do calisthenics.  (Scratch jump-rope, 20 minutes of that is amazingly hard.)  Essentially you have to engage major muscles, usually the legs.  Just do something enjoyable that sustains increased breathing and heartbeat and do it at least three hours a week.  You can do six 30-minute workouts, or three 1-hour stints.  But get those three hours of elevated respiration and heartbeat.     

Safe Heart Rate (Revised)

What should your heart rate be during exercise?  There are a variety of answers but it’s best to consult your doctor because everyone is different and we vary in our health.  If you’re about to have a heart attack, for example, your doctor can guide you to a safe fitness regimen.   

The Mayo Clinic offers a heart rate calculator for your aerobic exercise.  The calculator is based on two considerations:

• Maximum heart rate (MHR):  Per the AHA, MHR is calculated by subtracting you age from 220.  For a 40-year old, this gives a MHR of 180.  It is not recommended to exceed this rate, rather it is a basis for your target heart rate.
• Target heart rate (THR) depends on the intensity of your workout and your experience.  The Mayo Clinic calculator provides a THR range for your age between 70 to 85% of MHR.   The American College of Sports Medicine suggests ranges of intensity, based on experience:

1. Low intensity workout target heart rate is suggested for beginners—60-70% of MHR.  For the 40-year old, 70% is a 126 heart rate.
2. Medium intensity heart rate, may be used with several weeks of experience—70-80% of MHR.  (The green zone on the Mayo Clinic calculator ranges from 70-85%.)  This is sometimes referred to as the fat-burning zone for aerobic workouts (discussed below).
3. High intensity heart rate, recommended only after six months or more of exercise—80-85% of MHR.  For an experienced 40-year old, the THR, using 85%, could be 153.

The prudent course for the novice, after determining whether to consult with your doctor, is to start cautiously and proceed with patience.  Make your aerobic fitness goal a long distance process rather than a sprint. 

The Big Idea

The big idea behind aerobics was to extend exertion long enough to burn off blood glucose and force the body to free up triglycerides for fuel.  Triglycerides are the main form of fat storage in the body and a high serum triglyceride level is a risk factor for heart disease. 

When we eat too much sugar or refined carbs, the excess calories are converted to triglycerides and stored as fat.  Because our blood sugar will also be high, the body will respond with insulin.  Unfortunately, chronically high insulin locks the fat into the cell.  So the key is to minimize sugar and refined carbs, and exercise in stretches long enough to burn off the glucose, lower the insulin, and release triglycerides for fuel. 

There’s another benefit:  Aerobic exercise also improves the ratio of “good” HDL cholesterol to the “bad” LDL cholesterol.  In fact, we need both forms of cholesterol, but the modern lifestyle has gotten them out of whack and that’s a risk factor for chronic disease.

Any of you who have done aerobic exercise can also attest to the stress reduction benefit.  I have a clear memory from my high school days, of walking out of the locker room after a cross-country workout.  The sun was setting, I was freshly showered, a bunch of endorphins had been triggered, and I had this wonderful feeling of well being that I still remember all these years later.  Its called the "runner's high."

What We Do

In the morning the beautiful wife rises early and walks with her girlfriends.  She wears a pedometer and her daily goal is the 10,000 steps Dr. Cooper popularized.  The girls talk constantly, never run out of things to say, and the BW comes home rejuvenated and full of news. 

About mid day I take my walk.  I go down 125 steps and touch the sand of the beach.  Then I walk back up and hike to the top of a nearby hill, about 700 feet high.  The round trip takes an hour; I get plenty of noontime sunshine, do some push-ups and sit-ups at the hilltop, and come home refreshed.  On alternate days I ride a mountain bike.

Your schedule will be different, especially if you have an armful of kids.  But figure out a way to get regular aerobic exercise for at least 20 minutes, a total of 3 hours a week, and it will transform your health, reduce your stress, and give you vitality.

Healthy Change

We dedicate four of the Healthy Changes to exercise.  They cover the concept, stretching, aerobic, and resistance (weights).  This week we offer Healthy Change #44:

Add aerobic exercises to your workout, three hours a week if possible.

Please comment

What do you do for aerobic exercise?  Please share what you’re doing and how it has improved your life.

Natural Snacks

The quick answer:  For nutritious and non-addictive snacks, try real food.  

_______________________________________________________________________

Snacks by Food Inc.

Americans are eating fewer traditional meals and snacking more—a great business opportunity for Food Inc.  Take a look at two popular offerings, a “cookie-cake” by Nabisco, and a cereal bar by Kellogg's:

Starting with Nabisco, their Snackwell’s Devil’s Food contains 23 ingredients beginning with sugar, enriched (was a term ever more misused?) flour, corn syrup, HFCS, and ending with artificial flavors.  A 16-gram serving contains 7 grams of sugar (over half the calories) and zero fiber.   So much for the fiber>sugar rule.  Introduced in the ‘90s during the misguided war on fat, they’re fat free.  Devil’s Food is a pretty good description. 

Kellogg’s Nutri-Grain contains 50 ingredients between the crust and the filling.    The sugar, over 1/3 of calories, comes in five forms: sugar, dextrose, fructose, invert sugar, and corn syrup.  A 37-gram serving contains 11 grams of sugar and 3 grams of fiber—this fails the fiber>sugar rule also.  Though a highly processed food-like product, two of the first three ingredients are whole grains—so it’s not all bad. 

Snackwell cookies and Kellogg’s cereal bars are popular snack products.  Do they meet the criteria of Word of Wisdom Living?  You be the judge.  I would rather eat a homemade bran muffin—depicted below with a rose to suggest naturalness.  (Recipe to follow.)

 

Two Healthy Changes

Two of our Healthy Changes address snacks.  In The Joy of Snacking, we said: Enjoy a healthy mix of snacks by making a daily snack plate.  The genius behind the snack plate (which can also be a brown bag) is premeditation—you organize it when you’re not so glucose deprived you only want candy.  We also suggested some healthy snacks and readers added these to the list:

• Sunflower seeds or popcorn,
• Applesauce (try Skip’s Homemade Applesauce),
• Berries with Greek yogurt,
• Ants on a Log (celery, PB, raisins),
• Mix of almonds, dried cherries (super high in antioxidants), and dark chocolate chips.

But in the coming and going of summer, you can get out of the snack plate habit.  We did.  That’s not necessarily bad—this summer we ate a lot of fruit.  But summer’s over, autumn has started, and it’s time improve our snacking.

Reduce Snacking

There is place in a healthy diet for snacks but the percent of our calories that come from snacks can get out of hand.  Here are three wholesome ways to control between meal craving:

1. A healthy breakfast reduces snacking.  Research shows the snacking impulse begins with breakfast.  Dr. David Ludwig, Harvard researcher and author, found in a study that people eating a healthy, low-G.I. breakfast indulged in 81% less snacking during the day.
2. Exercise reduces snacking.   A study found that workers who took a brisk 15-minute walk before work ate half as many chocolate snacks (from a tray left on their desk) as workers who didn’t exercise.
3. Adequate sleep reduces snacking.  Sleep stabilizes the daily dance of ghrelin (the hunger hormone) and leptin (the fullness hormone) that, if out of order, can cause runaway snacking.

Healthy Change #43

The best snacks are made from real food and mostly come from the home rather than a factory.  There are a few exceptions:  If you like celery, you can improve it with store-bought PB or hummus.  In fact, if you want to meet the USDA goal of 4-5 daily vegetable servings, you need to include a veggie or two in your snacks.  Ditto for fruit. 

Likewise, chocolate chips (I don’t know anyone who makes these at home) go well with dried fruit and nuts.  And yogurt, which most people prefer to buy rather than make, is a treat when added to berries, or granola.  Yogurt also helps to thicken smoothies.

So acknowledging these exceptions, we offer Healthy Change #43 for more wholesome snacking:

Enjoy a healthy mix of homemade snacks.

There’s a wise old maxim about an apple-a-day, but adding an orange and a banana is even healthier.  Ditto for veggies like celery (noted above), carrots, etc.  Seeds and nuts make good snacks too, as do leftovers.  My favorite snack is toasted homemade bread.  The beautiful wife likes Greek yogurt.  These snacks aren’t completely homemade.

But, though PB, hummus, yogurt, butter, and most nuts are factory products, they’re minimally processed.  They have few ingredients, you can pronounce the names of the ingredients, there’s nothing artificial, and they are little changed from their original form.  Eat food as close as practical to the natural form.

Homemade muffins are a favorite autumn and winter snack.  You can make a couple dozen and put them in the freezer for use during the week.  In our next post we’ll share a muffin recipe or two.

Please comment:  Share you favorite autumn and winter snacks.  Got a recipe to share?

What About Prop 37 in California?

The quick answer:  For the first time, Californians can have the right to know if the food they eat has been genetically modified.  That’s the intent of Prop 37.  I’m not a fan of adding new laws, but for this one I plan to vote “yes.”

_______________________________________________________________________

David vs Goliath

We refer to the purveyors of the modern American diet (MAD) collectively as Food Inc.  The heavy weights are the GMO giant Monsanto; chemical companies like Dow and DuPont; processors such as Nestle, General Mills, and Kellogg’s; soda companies including Coca-Cola and PepsiCo; plus McDonalds and the motley mammoths of the fast food industry. 

Collectively the Food Inc companies constitute a modern Goliath.  Those who support the food reformation, including yours truly, hope to play the role of David.  You don’t often see David and Goliath in open conflict but it’s happening right now.  I’m talking about the California election battle over Prop 37. 

The purpose of Prop 37 isn’t to ban GMO food.  It simply provides a “right to know” to California consumers.  Basically, foods that include genetically modified ingredients must be labeled as such.  In addition, the term “Natural,” can’t be used with GMO foods.  We’re not the first to want this.  The major industrialized countries require GMO labeling on foods—only the US, where these foods were first invented, allows their use without disclosure to the public.  Besides California, activists in other states are working on similar labeling requirements.

It should be noted that Prop 37 exempts two food groups:  Alcoholic beverages, which are governed by different labeling laws, and meat products, which aren’t yet labeled in most other countries.  Perhaps meat should be labeled too, but animals have a longer lifespan so tracking diet is more complicated. 

Food and the Creation

We’ve noted before that the first chapter of Genesis, between the organization of the world and the formation of Man, is mostly about the creation of our food supply.  It’s mainly about plants, but Man is also given a duty of care over the beasts.

The goal of Word of Wisdom Living is to eat our food—mostly plants but also a little meat—as close as practical to the way it was first created.  We see this as reverence for the Creation.  GMO foods, because they breach the natural barriers between food species, seem the opposite.  Some call them Frankenfoods. 

We won’t know the consequences of genetic modification for some time.  But in the mean time, it would be prudent to follow the Century Rule:  Wait a century before incorporating any newly invented food into your diet. 

The Organic Argument

Food Inc, in an attempt to defeat Prop 37, is pouring money into the fight in California.  That's what Goliaths do.  One of their arguments is that if you don’t want GMO food you can just buy food labeled “organic.”  This is a thoughtless argument because it imposes a heavy cost burden on the average family working to meet a budget.

If you want to know more about the pros and cons of Prop 37, go to this article, for a lively video debate and comments by Mike Pollan.

Please comment:  If you enjoyed some fresh sweet corn this summer, you likely were eating GMO food.  Sweet corn’s the most recent; 25 crops have been approved in the US including most of the papaya grown in Hawaii.  Wouldn’t you rather know what you’re eating?  Share your thoughts on GMO foods.

Protecting Your Family: Proscriptions vs Prescriptions

In a recent post I wondered out loud about the Word of Wisdom, whether the greater benefit might come from the proscriptions or the prescriptions.  By proscriptions I mean the prohibition against tobacco, alcohol, and hot drinks (defined as coffee and tea).  The prescriptions would mean the counsel to build our diet on vegetables, whole grains, fruits, plus a sparing amount of meat.  This basically rules out the modern American Diet (MAD).

The Proscriptions

Because this became an issue—as reflected in reader comments. which I take seriously—I should share my thinking.  I’ve noted before these longevity benefits from things prohibited:

• Tobacco use is linked to about 400K painfully premature deaths each year in the US.  I was in Santa Monica yesterday and drove by the billboard where the current (estimated) death toll is displayed and it appeared we would pass 400K by year-end.  If the number ticks upwards while you’re watching—symbolic of a death—it leaves a sad feeling.  Though the use of cigarettes has declined, the effects are still with us.
• Alcohol has been catastrophic to those addicted and is also the cause of many premature deaths.  I have seen estimates between 40K and 80K in the US, so though lower than tobacco-related deaths, it’s still a plague on our country.
• Coffee/Tea don’t have a specific death toll that I’ve ever seen.  I believe the greater harm is that these hot drinks displace normal meals, like breakfast.  A classic example of poor nutrition is the common practice of having a coffee and pastry for breakfast, rather than eating real food.  Because this gives a short-lived burst of energy, you’ll need more of the same by mid-morning.  The rise of these hot drinks in Europe was associated with the rise of sugar as a dietary staple—a rise that has not yet abated and takes a terrible toll.  It's also a fact that these products were originally produced with slave labor.

In sum, if the prohibitions of the Word of Wisdom had been followed by all in the US, perhaps as many as 500K premature deaths would have been prevented.  This is an incredible benefit.

The Prescriptions

So how many deaths would be prevented if we followed the prescriptions of the Word of Wisdom?  Mike Pollan, in his book In Defense of Food, commented on the pioneering work in the ‘30s of Dr. Weston Price.  Dr. Price, a dentist turned researcher, wanted to identify the cause of a new and fast rising medical problem—tooth decay.  His theory correctly posited that cavities were a result of the modern diet.  He visited indigenous people who ate diets of traditional foods and compared the decay and health of their teeth to those of their cousins who had moved to the cities and were eating modern, refined foods.  Despite the wide variety of natural diets—he visited Eskimos, Polynesians, American Indians, Europeans, etc.—Dr. Weston found about a 100-fold greater incidence of tooth decay and diseased teeth in those eating the modern diet vs. their cousins eating traditional foods.  Tooth decay and malformed teeth (think of the modern need for orthodontics) are one of the first results of the MAD dietary.

Mr. Pollan’s observation was that the human body can prosper on a wide variety of natural foods but there is one diet that it can’t tolerate for long—the MAD, meaning the modern American diet supplied by Food Inc.  Well, the W of W is an inspired antidote to the MAD; it stands squarely opposed to the over-processed food-like products of Food Inc. 

So what is the estimated US death toll from the MAD?  We can only estimate it by looking at the chronic diseases linked to the MAD.  Here is a summary provided by the CDC:

• CHD (heart disease) 527K deaths per year,
• Cancer 444K,
• Obesity 247K,
• Stroke 121K,
• Diabetes 58K.

If you sum up the toll of premature deaths you get 1,397K—well over a million deaths from just the five leading causes.  Now there are other risk factors for premature death besides the MAD.  Physical inactivity is an important cause—we have four Healthy Changes directed at the need for exercise.  Lack of vitamin D—which mainly comes from the sun—is another factor.  There are also inherited issues that affect our susceptibility.

Conclusion

But here’s the conclusion:  If you want to make a horseback estimate, a reasonable person might find that twice as many lives would be saved—meaning prolonged—by following the prescriptions as by following the prohibitions of the Word of Wisdom. 

Fortunately you don’t have to choose—if you’re wise enough to do one, you’re smart enough to do the other.  The W of W is pretty good medicine and it’s simple enough for the humblest of people to follow.  God does look after those who heed His word. 

Please comment:  Please add your thoughts to this discussion.  Have we missed the most important benefit of the Word of Wisdom by not paying equal attention to the dietary counsel?

Voting With Your Dollars

The quick answer:  The modern American diet (MAD) has been implicated as a risk factor for chronic disease and premature death.  Vote with your dollars.  Avoid Food Inc’s unhealthy food-like products and eat real food. 

_______________________________________________________________________

The Word of Wisdom

The Word of Wisdom, a scripture important to the LDS faith, is generally known for its prohibitions against tobacco, alcohol, coffee and tea.  Mormons and others who avoid these substances are blessed with better health.  Studies have documented a significantly greater longevity.

But the Word of Wisdom offers counsel of even greater value—though less heeded—the guidance to build one’s diet on vegetables, fruits, whole grains, with a sparing amount of meat.  This can be interpreted to mean, “Eat food, mostly plants, as close as practical to the natural form.”  If a person had carefully followed this wise advice they would have been protected from the sad consequences of processed factory foods and (most of) the fast foods of the modern American diet (MAD). 

The Rise of Food Inc.

We often speak of Food Inc.  By this we mean the purveyors of the MAD—the packaged food-like products mainly found in the central, most traveled aisles of the modern supermarket.  It also refers to the highly processed foods offered by fast food and even some chain restaurants. 

If you will allow me to give a very brief history, the Industrial Revolution began in the 18^th century in the textile industry.  This was a marvelous thing for it freed women from the drudgery of making their own cloth, plus the factory processes allowed more colorful fabrics with designer patterns.  In sum, it was a wonderful thing for women.

Then the principles of the Industrial Revolution were applied to every other sector of society.  Think of Henry Ford and automobiles, Thomas Edison with his electrical appliances, or Steve Jobs’ computers and digital devices.  But there was one sad consequence:  Businessmen found a way to profit by altering—better said, adulterating—the very nature of food. 

Basically, you took a cheap commodity; used factory processes to make it sweeter, more refined and convenient; launched an advertising campaign to promote the brand; and you had a profitable business that might last several generations.  Think of Crisco, Jell-O, Velveeta processed cheese, Wonder Bread, or Kraft Mac & Cheese, to name a few.  By doing this, Food Inc has made, and continues to make, a lot of money.

Where Next

In retrospect, the industrialization of food was an enormous mistake.  I have no argument with any particular food processor.  I try not to attack any company.  But I do think that Food Inc should either join the food reformation, or disappear from the planet.  It’s not personal—we’re just trying to make the world a healthier place.  Won’t you join us?

Healthy Change

I fear that Food Inc is bigger and more powerful than the federal government—their influence over the USDA, for example, has been decried by many.  So we shouldn’t look to the government to save us. 

But Food Inc has an Achilles’ heel:  It lives and dies with the daily decisions of the humblest citizen pushing a shopping cart through the grocery store.  If we refuse to buy unhealthy foods, they’ll go the way of the dinosaurs—like Wonder Bread.  It’s that simple. 

The best way to send a message to Food Inc is to use the power of your purse.  So for the good of your family, and of the nation, practice this Healthy Change:

Vote with your dollars: only buy healthy food products.

Please Comment:  Please share your ideas for improving on the unhealthy products of Food Inc.  Or tell of a bad product you replaced with something healthier.