Menu for Week #23

Nutrition Paradoxes

You find crazy contradictions in nutrition that, if further examined, can teach us how to live.  Have you heard of the French Paradox?  The French have more than their share of dining pleasure; they enjoy buttery sauces full of the saturated fats we’ve been taught to avoid for the sake of our hearts.  Perversely, they have much less heart disease than we do.  More butter, less heart disease—that’s a paradox worth examining.

Then there’s the Israeli Paradox.  In Israel they avoid the buttery fats for religious reasons.  Instead of saturated fats, they cook with margarine and refined vegetable oils—usually hydrogenated—that for years we were also told to use.  Unfortunately, as opposed to the French, the Jewish citizens of Israel have relatively high rates of heart disease. 

The French enjoy traditional fats and have little heart disease—for the Israelis, it’s the opposite.  They eat modern fats and suffer from heart disease.  This is a complex subject but I feel comfortable eating traditional fats and avoiding modern refined oils.  The Israelis should have stuck with olive oil.

The Calcium Paradox

We’ve been told that calcium is good for our bones.  Americans eat lots more calcium—in dairy products, pills, and plant foods—than most other nations.  Until recently, the beautiful wife’s OB-GYN was pushing her to take calcium pills.  Despite high calcium intake, we have higher rates of osteoporosis.  Worse yet, it’s not just older women.  There’s something wrong with the solutions being sold to us. 

Here’s the flip side of osteoporosis:  People with osteoporosis also usually have a problem called calcification.  Calcification is when your body deposits calcium in the wrong place—in your soft tissue, instead of your bones.  You know about the painful problem of kidney stones and gallstones, but calcium is also part of the plaque that coats and blocks your coronary arteries.  We call that atherosclerosis and it’s a giant problem.

Plaque, it’s reported, consistently contains about 20% calcium, causing the arteries to not only narrow, but to harden and lose flexibility.  Calcification is also a primary cause of heart valve replacement.   

Because heart disease is the #1 cause of premature death in America, shouldn’t reducing calcium-related atherosclerosis be our #1 health priority?

Vitamin K2

I just read the book, Vitamin K2 and the Calcium Paradox.  The book presents information about why our bodies are putting calcium in the wrong place—in our plaque instead of in our bones.  Here’s a brief summary of what I learned:

1. Bones need minerals like calcium, phosphorous, and magnesium.  Because of the modern diet of refined, processed foods, we generally get too much phosphorous and too little magnesium.  So that’s one problem.
2. About everybody knows that vitamin D is important to bone health—it plays a role in building strong bones.  We’ve talked about this here and here.  Most people don’t get enough natural vitamin D so that’s a problem too.
3. Few of us know that vitamin K2 is needed for strong bones—it’s critical to getting the calcium into bone, rather than in our soft tissue.  Basically, K2 is involved in calcium deposition, and its predecessor vitamin K1 is needed for blood clotting.  They’re related, but play different roles.
4. We get K2 from animal products—eggs, butter, cheese, liver, and meat.  The animals get K1 from eating green grass, and bacteria in the animal convert K1 to K2.  So products from pastured animals provide us with K2. 
5. Since the ‘50s, the vitamin K2 content of the American diet has steadily declined because we’ve moved animals from the green pastures into CAFOs (confined animal feeding operations, like feed lots, large hen houses, etc.).  In CAFOs, animals eat grains, industrial waste products, and dried hay but little green grass.  As a result, their level—and our level—of K2 has steadily declined and, consequently, calcification and osteoporosis have increased.

The bottom line:  We need more and better science here, but the author’s conclusion is that our health depends on the health of the animals we eat, and the animal’s health requires a traditional diet rich in green grass.  The book of Genesis tells how God gave man dominion over the animals.  Now, it seems more a partnership—our health depends on how we exercise that dominion.

My goal is to develop sources of pastured milk, eggs, cheese, and meat for our family and to share this information with you.  In the meantime, the author suggests supplementing with vitamin K2 pills.  Eventually we’ll get better guidance from the medical profession on bone health, but based on a recent conversation, that’s a few years away.  This seems a critical subject that we should return to in future posts.

This Week’s Menu

Monday—Mostly Sunday’s leftovers but a healthy meal.

• Roast pork tenderloin.
• Asparagus
• Roasted potato slices
• Green salad

Tuesday

• Artichoke—it was the first of the season and though we steamed it for an hour it never got soft.  Why do some artichokes not cook well?
• Cauliflower—roasted with cheese sauce.

Wednesday—We had two young men for dinner guests so thawed the last of the pork roast.

• Roast pork tenderloin.
• Boiled potatoes with gravy.
• Salad
• Banana Bread

Thursday

• Stuffed bell pepper—I had the stuffing left over from last week.  The beautiful wife was suspicious of bacterial growth and declined the treat.  We have differing views on bacteria in food; I enjoyed her half.
• Salad

Sunday—Our son and his beautiful wife are remodeling their kitchen so we had guests.

• Chuck roast
• Potatoes, onion, and carrots, baked with the roast.
• Corn
• Green salad
• Apple

A Recipe for Muesli

Loving the Swiss

As you’ve likely heard, the beautiful wife is half-Swiss.  The tricky part for me is to figure out just which parts are Swiss.  For example, she’s on the petite side, as the Swiss often are, so give that a check.  On the other hand, while she loves the mountains she doesn’t like to climb them, so that’s a mix.  One thing is uniquely Swiss—she defends her views without getting into wars.   She also loves chocolate, so her mouth must be Swiss.  But now that I think about it, I’ve never heard her yodel.

What brought Switzerland to mind was a blog comment several months ago from Julie, a girl we knew in her youth, now living in Zurich, Switzerland.  (Look here for a typical dinner menu.) I went back and reread her impressions about the Swiss, world leaders in longevity:

“I was blown away how health conscious the Swiss are . . . fast food is almost nonexistent . . . sugar just isn’t a staple in their diet . . . desserts aren’t even sweetened.  They eat little meat . . . and meat is outrageously expensive (boneless chicken @ $15/lb).”

Bircher Muesli

Well, their approach to health is just one more reason I find the Swiss endearing.  Which, because I was looking for a recipe with grains, brings us to their breakfast cereal, muesli.  Muesli is an uncooked mixture of oats, fruits, nuts, and seeds.  Dr. Maximilian Bircher-Benner (1867-1939), a Swiss nutrition reformer a century ago, invented muesli for patients in his health clinic. 

Dr. Bircher-Benner lived before science had much to say about nutrition, which saved him a lot of confusion.  But he observed the hardy vitality of those who lived in the Alps and ate traditional foods, including dairy foods, rye and oats, wild berries, summer vegetables, with occasional meat.  The native diet led him to invent Bircher muesli.  He also convinced his followers to eschew meat and white breads in favor of fresh vegetables, fruit, nuts, preferably uncooked. 

I found this original recipe for Bircher muesli:

Ingredients:

• 1 T rolled oats, soaked in 2–3 T water, or apple juice
• 1 T lemon juice
• 1 T  cream
• 1 apple, preferably a sour variety, finely grated
• 1 T ground hazelnuts

Directions:

Soak oats in water or apple juice for 2-8 hours.  Before breakfast, combine lemon juice and cream.  Stir in oats, grated apple, and top hazelnuts. 

A Muesli Recipe

I also found a box of imported Familia Swiss Muesli at the local health food store.  It was a little expensive by the box; however, because it’s dense, it’s cheaper per ounce than many packaged cereals.  I liked the taste but it violated our more-fiber-than-sugar rule (14 gm sugar; 4 gm fiber), so I wanted my own recipe. 

Traditional recipes often include rye flakes (a grain common to Switzerland’s difficult terrain) with the oats.  I decided to stick with oats plus flax seeds, to add some omega-3 fat.  (If you soak overnight, the flax seed is soft enough to eat whole, but you can also grind fresh at the time of use.)  Likewise, older Swiss recipes use hazelnuts but I substituted chopped almonds, more common here and rich in vitamin E.  Many add vanilla and a dash of cinnamon.  Fruit typically includes apples and currants in season or dried fruits in winter. 

Because the juice of local fruits is often used with Swiss muesli instead of milk, we tried four forms of liquid, all soaked overnight in the refrigerator.  Test #1 used water, the most common method for oatmeal; #2 used milk, #3 had apple juice, and #4 followed the Bircher recipe of cream with lemon juice, a sort of yogurt.  Before breakfast we added grated apples, raisins and dried mango pieces, and sliced almonds. 

Everyone makes their oatmeal with water but the beautiful wife preferred #2 and #3; #4 was too tart.  I liked them all but I especially liked how muesli is another way to avoid the cost (as well as the sugar and chemical additives) of packaged cereals. 

Skip’s Swiss Muesli (feeds 2 adults)

Ingredients:

• 1/2 C rolled oats
• 2 T flax seed
• 1 C water, milk, or natural juice
• 1 apple, grated
• ¼ C fresh berries, or 2 T raisins or dried fruit
• 3 T chopped almonds, walnuts or pecans
• 1 T coconut flakes (optional)
• Dash of vanilla (1/8 tsp)
• A shake of cinnamon

Directions: 

1. Soak oats and flaxseed with liquid; use the refrigerator if milk.
2. In the morning add grated apple, berries or chopped fruit, nuts, optional coconut, and spices.
3. Voila—you’ve got a healthy breakfast full of whole grain, fruits, and nuts, with lots of natural fiber and no added sugar.  Stir, add milk, cream, or juice, and serve.

The End of Packaged Cereal

Dr. John Harvey Kellogg (1852-1943) was the American equivalent of Dr. Bircher-Benner.  A century ago they were comrades-at-arms in the opening battles of the nutrition reformation.  Kellogg partnered with his brother Will to invent a healthier breakfast cereal, but they broke up over a critical nutrition issue—whether to improve sales by adding sugar.  John left the business and Will’s company became the sugary breakfast behemoth of our day—the Kellogg Company. 

Did I say behemoth?  I should have said dinosaur.  With the Breakfast Compote, our first recipe, and Skip’s Swiss Muesli we now have two healthy options for starting your day.  There are still a few cereals that meet our health rule—more-fiber-than-sugar—but 95% of the packaged cereals are a toxic use of grains and will go the way of the dinosaur in the food reformation.

This morning I read an article on PBS about rampant tooth decay in the villages of El Salvador.  The native foods I remember from living there have been replaced, it turns out, by Food Inc’s products.  They’re drinking soda instead of water, and eating packaged candy and chips instead of mom's tortillas with frijoles.  We’ll come back to this question in a future post—how did the Swiss discover healthy foods while the Salvadorians lost their food traditions?  Forget about the wars that rage—the loss of food traditions is the tragedy of our time.

Please comment:  Share your favorite healthy breakfast.

In Praise of Whole Grains

 

The quick answer:  To optimize value and nutrition, eat a variety of whole grains, (unless you have a tolerance problem).

_____________________________________________________________________________________________

Grains:  Good or Bad?

Grains really are the staff of life—2/3 of the world population would starve without them.  Depending on the region, rice, wheat or corn are popular forms.  Over the last century health enthusiasts have advocated a return to eating grains whole, rejecting the modern refined form for lack of vital nutrients.  (Whole grains are high in nutrients and low in calories; it’s the opposite for refined grains.)  Society has generally ignored this guidance, preferring the sweetness of refined grains, though this is now changing. 

In recent years advocates of the Atkins, or of the Paleo diet, have argued against grains.  In addition, a small, but growing, fraction of the population do not tolerate gluten so must avoid certain grains (wheat, rye, barley, spelt, karmut, triticale, and sometimes oats).   Celiac disease is a potentially fatal form of gluten intolerance.

The Dietary Guidelines for Americans 2010 recommends eating at least three services of whole grains daily.  The Whole Grains Council notes these proven benefits of eating whole grains, vs. refined forms:

• Risk of stroke reduced 30-36%.
• Type 2 diabetes risk reduced 21-30%.
• Heart disease risk reduced by 25-28%
• Better weight control
• Reduced risk of asthma, inflammatory diseases, high blood pressure, and gum disease or tooth loss.

In our home, we eat a variety of whole grains and avoid refined white flour (except for making sauce or the occasional cake).  Here’s a summary of recent posts about grains:

The Whole Darn Grain:  This was the first post on grain and it introduced the “fiber-greater-than-sugar” rule for purchased cereal products.

Are Carbs Good or Bad?  A post influenced by Gary Taubes’ book, Good Calories, Bad Calories, provided ten steps to a lower, and healthier, glycemic index.

The Bread of Life:  We eat our weight in flour each year; for most less than 10% is whole grain.  This post solicited reader’s favorite bread recipes.

A Few Good Women:  The story of May Yates, a food heroine, who fought for whole wheat bread in England. 

Flour and The Hundred Years War:  Discussed the issue of freshness and preservation of whole grain flours and suggested grinding close to time of use.

The Good Breakfast:  This is the easiest meal to make completely healthy.  See the link to Healthy Recipe #1:  Breakfast Compote.

Waking Up In The Bread Aisle:  This popular aisle visit discussed the practice of “slotting fees,” then examined the bread for sale in a typical supermarket and found just 3 of 70 met the fiber health rule. 

Trouble In The Cereal Aisle:  In this post we spend a Friday evening in the cereal aisle and find just 8 of 128 meet our fiber-greater-than-sugar rule.

Healthy Change

Comment:  Whole grains are one of the best food values but we think it best to enjoy a variety.  Please comment on how you include whole grains in the diet of your family, or share a favorite recipe. 

Need a reminder? Download our Healthy Change reminder card. Print and fold, then place in your kitchen or on your bathroom mirror to help you remember the Healthy Change of the week.

Menu for week #22

Think your life is hard? 

Imagine that you had a stroke at the tender age of sixteen that ruined your plans for college, marriage and family, and, after you had learned to walk again, left you with a permanent limp that eventually forced you into a wheelchair.  Worse, your finances require that you turn the family home into a boarding house with you gimping about the kitchen doing the cooking. 

What do you do?  You get a job at a cooking school and, hoping to reverse your fortunes, you write a cookbook. 

Now imagine that no one will publish your book so rather than give up, you fund a small printing out of your own pocket.  This forces you to take all the risk, but also the reward if it’s successful.  Now imagine that your cookbook is a fabulous success that makes you a wealthy woman, and is so popular that 116 years later it’s still in print. 

Who are you?  You’re Fanny Farmer, author of the Fannie Farmer 1896 Cook Book, written for the once-famous Boston Cooking School.

Turning on the stove.

Because I see traditional cookery as a guide to modern health, I’m fascinated with old cookbooks.   So it was a big deal when the Saturday mail brought me a centennial edition of Farmer’s cookbook.  (Offered at a Goodwill Store for twenty-seven cents, plus shipping.)  The first thing that caught my eye was a recipe for white sauce, or béchamel.   It followed our recent recipe closely, with the exception of replacing one cup of milk with some homemade chicken stock.  Actually, mixing stock with milk was one of our experiments so I guess Ms. Farmer would approve.

The next thing I saw was the instruction on how to fire up the stove.  It was pretty complicated, starting with cleaning out yesterday’s ashes from the grate while saving the cinders (partly burnt coal).  Then you place a combination of paper, soft pine, hardwood, cinders, and 2 scoops of coal in the grate..  I forgot to mention closing the front, back, and oven dampers, and opening the chimney flue.  Next you strike a phosphorus-sulphur match, apply it to the paper, and you have a fire.  (The match must have been a recent invention.)  It’s important to adjust dampers and flue as the fire turns from blue to yellow, to keep heat from escaping up the chimney.  Finally, you blacken the stove, polishing as the stove heats, to give the stove a nice look.  (Blackening the stove must have been an old practice, as materials weren’t mentioned.)  All I can say is that turning on the stove has gotten a lot easier.

This Week’s Menu

Monday

• We didn’t have to light a fire in the stove for this meal—we cleaned out the ‘fridge of leftovers from last week and finished off with a green smoothie made with kale—an easy meal topped off with a treat we're trying to add to our dietary.

Tuesday

• Bell peppers stuffed with sausage, mirepoix, and brown rice.  I kind of made this up but I really liked it; the beautiful wife suggested spicier sausage.
• Green salad.

Wednesday 

• Poached salmon (in the freezer from last week).
• Long grain brown rice with sautéed mushrooms.
• Salad with vegetables.

Thursday

• Shrimp cocktail (shrimp from the freezer, sauce by Trader Joe).
• Vegetables au gratin (I steamed eggplant, onion, tomato, and squash, added my classic cheese sauce left over from the cooking experiments, made some cheesy breadcrumbs using the heel of some old homemade bread, and produced a delicious casserole.  I may elevate this to one of my 52 Breakthrough Recipes; the beautiful wife was impressed.) 
• Salad

Friday

• We ate out—pasta, green salad, French bread, chocolate cake—but it was a fundraiser for girl’s summer camp so the wallet took a hit.

Sunday (a lot of work, but it was a family dinner with those darling, above-average grandchildren)

• Pork tenderloin (Costco), baked.
• Skip’s Scalloped Potatoes
• Skip’s Homemade Applesauce
• Asparagus, steamed, with Skip's classic cheese sauce (I added too much salt).
• Cake (you need an occasional treat).

Closing thought:  I notice now that we didn't have any legumes this week.  It's hard to remember everything.  Maybe I'll write a menu form that includes food group goals on the right edge, as a reminder.

Classic Cheese Sauce

A Miner's Daughter

Can I tell a story about my Mom?  Mom was born in the small mining town of Eureka.  Eureka was a good name for a mining town, but it’s pretty much a ghost town now.  Her daddy was a hard rock miner who left school—he had been a promising student—at the age of sixteen to go down into the mines.  He did this because his father, who had also been a miner, died and it fell on him to support the family.  Hard rock mining wasn’t healthy and in Eureka they mined lead.  As a result my Mom’s dad lived a short life—he died of pneumonia at the age of 32, having spent half his life in the darkness of the mines.  His name was Leland Whitehead and I carry his name—my middle name is Leland.

My Mom was just two when her daddy died.  Her mom did the best she could to support the family but times were hard and life was a struggle.  I think that struggle made Mom a strong woman because she’s in her 90s now, cooking, driving, and managing quite well, thank you.  Like her dad, Mom did well in school.  She skipped two grades, won the high school spelling bee as a 13-year old sophomore, and was runner-up in the county contest.  But she followed the pattern of her dad, going to work at the age of 16 to support the family.  She would have done well in college, but higher education just didn’t seem a possibility for a poor Depression kid.

Thinking about this week’s subject, the difficulty of finding healthy milk, brought to mind a story from Mom’s childhood.  There was an Aunt Kate who looked after Mom and her family.  Aunt Kate was like a second mom; they might not have survived the Depression without her.  The only problem, Mom later reminisced, was that when she did something wrong, she heard about it twice—first from her Mom, and then from Aunt Kate. 

Fortunately for them, Aunt Kate had a milk cow that grazed in an unused pasture behind their home.  So despite their poverty, they had the luxury of whole milk from pasture-fed cows—not pasteurized, not homogenized, not even reduced fat.  Mom has a wonderful memory of cream rising in pans of milk in the icebox (this was before refrigerators).  They would take a slice of homemade bread and lay it on the cream until it was well coated.  Then they would sprinkle some sugar on it for a delicious snack. 

But this was a critical inflection point, a rising and a falling, in the American dietary:  Sugar, once a luxury, had become so cheap even the poorest could afford it.  And real milk, available to ordinary folks for millennia, was about to disappear from most people’s pantry.  I wish I had a picture of Mom eating her sugary creamy bread to mark this historic turning point. 

Animal Protein Limit

What goes for milk also goes for dairy:  We’re learning how to buy healthier butter and cheese, but, like meat, we eat dairy products sparingly.  Our goal is to limit animal products to 1/3 of our protein intake, with the other 2/3 coming from plant sources.  We’ll return to this idea—a big change from the MAD—that we first talked about in the post, Protein 101.

In the post cited above—to meet our 1/3 animal protein target—we set a cheese limit of 4 oz. weekly.   (The beautiful wife gets more because she drinks so little milk.)  This caused us to rethink our use of cheese, which led to a new idea:  Though we like cheese as a snack, the best use of our cheese ration is to make vegetables more enjoyable.  The tastiest way to do this is with a cheese sauce—the recipe for this week.

Cheese Sauce Recipe

Leah D. Widtsoe, a formidable woman of the last century and coauthor of the 1937 book The Word of Wisdom: A Modern Interpretation, was a great proponent of whole grains.  But she found one use for refined flour—making sauces.  I usually use whole grains in cooking but in developing my sauce recipe I tried four versions:

1. Sauce made with refined flour, butter, and milk (called béchamel by the French).
2. Repeat #1 but with minced onion added.
3. Sauce made with whole wheat.
4. Sauce made with refined flour and homemade chicken stock (called veloute).

I found that the quickest way to thicken sauce is to use refined flour; whole wheat flour thickens very slowly. The beautiful wife also thought refined flour sauce tasted best, with or without onion.  “You could have added garlic,” she suggested.  In fact we found that all the flavors typically added to white sauce—nutmeg, powdered mustard, red pepper flakes, onion, and garlic—add interest if your palate wants a change.  But a simple sauce flavored with just salt and white pepper tastes really good.  We resolved to save the extra flavors for later, when we craved a new taste experience.

When I saw how much easier it was to make white sauce, or béchamel, with refined flour, I made the mental connection between its introduction and the rise of those rich sauces that characterize French cuisine.  French chefs are said to have a rule about sauce:  A good sauce can be eaten alone.  It’s true—our sauces were delicious. 

Mornay Sauce

For cheese sauce, you simply make a white sauce and stir in your favorite cheese, grated.  With a little practice you can prepare cheese sauce in under 10 minutes.  The French call it mornay sauce.  Ladle your cheese sauce over steamed Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, or almost any vegetable to improve the taste.  Or you can coat a mix of vegetables with the sauce and bake them in a casserole. 

We did this with a mixture of eggplant, yellow squash, onion, and tomato by first steaming the vegetables, then baking 20 minutes in a casserole au gratin.  I made the breadcrumb crust by mixing a cup of buttered toast crumbs with ½ cup grated Parmesan Reggiano cheese.  It's shown in the picture above with a kale salad.  This meal was delicious, totally healthy—we agreed it was good enough for our fancy friends.

We made our cheese sauce using Tillamook cheddar.  (Ratio: The usual mixture is ¼ cup of cheese to a cup of sauce, but you may want more if the cheese has a subtle flavor or you want to thicken the sauce.) If you’re feeling fancy try a mixture of Swiss Gruyere and Parmesan Reggiano. 

If you’re an experienced cook, you don’t need lessons on making mornay.  But a lot of people who want to eat better aren’t trained cooks, so it seemed important to include a cheese sauce in this year's 52 Breakthrough Recipe list.  Here's our recipe:

Ingredients:

• 3 T butter
• 3 rounded T flour
• 2 C whole milk
• ½ tsp salt (but consider the saltiness of the cheese)
• White pepper to taste
• ½ C cheddar cheese, grated

Directions:

1. Heat, but don’t boil, the milk in a medium saucepan.
2. While milk is heating, melt the butter in a small saucepan at medium heat.  When foaming subsides, stir in flour using a wooden spoon.  Let it cook about 1 minute until the paste turns a tan color and a nice aroma develops.  (The time depends on the temperature of the pan.)  If adding onion or garlic, this is a good time.  Chefs frown on onion salt or garlic salt; use the real thing.  Add garlic at the end as overcooking can turn it bitter.   
3. Add the heated milk, stirring with a whisk.  Add the salt and white pepper and any flavor favorites.  Cook about five minutes, whisking frequently, until sauce thickens.
4. Returning to the wooden spoon and lowering the heat, stir in the grated cheese until it’s almost melted and then remove pan from the heat.  Overcooking can make the cheese stringy and tough. 

This is a classic cheese sauce.  I really didn’t introduce anything novel so I can’t append my name to it.  That’s a shame; we’ll just call it Classic Cheese Sauce.

The Milk Wars

The quick answer:  Serious questions have been raised about the healthfulness of modern milk.  Until better milk is available, we drink milk sparingly.
____________________________________________________________________________________________

Comrades-In-Arms

I started this post early on Memorial Day, a time set aside to honor those who have passed, especially those who died at war.  As part of my observation, I reread Stephen Ambrose’s WWII story about Easy Company of the fabled 101^st Airborne, A Band of Brothers. 

Reading Band of Brothers caused me to ask a question:  “What causes more premature death—war or the modern diet?”  Actually, it’s no contest.  In the U.S., far more people die from the modern American diet (MAD).  Worse yet, Food Inc is unconscionably doing its best to spread this diet to the rest of the world. 

I love the Gettysburg Address, especially this line, “Now we are engaged in a great civil war . . . .“  Well, if you are doing something to promote a healthy diet, even if only in your home, you’re a warrior in the greatest war of our time—the battle to reform the modern diet.  The remarkable thing about this war is that the good guys are . . . women, mostly.

Factory Food

The industrialization of food in the last century changed the very nature of what we eat.  The roller mill was combined with bleaching to make sweet, long-lasting, white flour depleted of natural nutrients. Rice was polished from brown to white, likewise reducing nutrients.  A new kind of fat, Crisco, the replacement for lard, and more toxic than we realized, was created by hydrogenation.  Ditto for margarine.

These foods—each heavily marketed to a gullible public—had a few things in common: 

• Value was added in a factory, rather than on a farm. 
• The removal of perishable nutrients greatly extended the shelf life.
• They had a modern color for food—white.
• A traditional commodity was made more profitable by first adulterating and then marketing it as a brand.

This post addresses another traditional food industrialized in a factory:  Milk.

The Industrialization of Milk

Last year, in an excellent post titled The Untold Story of Milk, we reviewed how milk, a traditional food, was industrialized into a form of questionable healthiness.  The main steps in this process:

1. Cheap feed:  Cows traditionally eat grass; a cow needs 1-2 acres of pasture depending on the forage.  In the early 1900s, to save land and money, dairy farms were located next to distilleries and cows were fed the remains of grain used to make liquor and other waste products.  Naturally, unhealthy feed led to unhealthy cows, and diseased milk.
2. Pasteurization:  Rather than maintaining healthy cows to get healthy milk, the decision was made to pasteurize milk, which reduced, but didn’t eliminate, the pathogens.  This heating process changed the nature of milk and has never been fully accepted, for various reasons.
3. Hormones in milk:  During the hard times of the ‘20s and ‘30s, it became common to milk cows deep into the next pregnancy, thus exposing consumers to higher levels of bovine hormones.  In addition, Monsanto introduced synthetic versions of these hormones to improve output, though this practice is mostly discontinued thanks to public criticism.   A researcher has looked at the issue of milk hormones—a suspected risk factor for prostate and breast cancer—you can read more about it here.
4. Homogenization:  Pasteurization also extended the shelf life of milk, which allowed shipping longer distances.  Because cream tended to separate, homogenization was introduced.  Basically, homogenization breaks the fats in milk into fragments, so the fat remains mixed in the milk and doesn’t float to the top.  There are still troubling questions about the healthfulness of these man-made fat fragments.
5. Reduced fat:  In the ‘60s the false idea was advanced that fat was unhealthy so the fat content of milk was reduced.  Because this changed the appearance of the milk, the government allowed milk processors to improve the look with additives like powdered milk and excused them from noting these substances as ingredients. 

Infertility and Reduced Fat Diary

The healthfulness of reduced fat milk has not been adequately studied however a 2007 study of 18,555 women in the Nurses’ Health Study II by Harvard researchers, found troubling issues with infertility due to reduced ovulation.  Women who drank two or more servings of low fat dairy foods per day, were 85% more likely to suffer from infertility, compared to women eating low fat dairy just once a week.  Women who consumed no low fat dairy food had an even lower risk  (25% less than the once per week group). 

What To Do

I like milk but until healthier milk is available, I’m mainly drinking water.  I try to limit myself to one quart of whole milk per week.  I’ve tried raw milk and wish it were more available, especially from grass-fed cows.  The beautiful wife avoids milk; she even has the curious habit of putting orange juice on her breakfast compote. 

What would it take to have the healthy milk of our great-grandparents?  One answer is to get your own cow.  Another solution is to have an Amish friend who still farms the olden way.  Otherwise we’ll all have to wait until the government lets enterprising dairymen offer healthy milk from pasture-fed cows.  In the mean time, we follow this Healthy Change:

Need a reminder? Download our Healthy Change reminder card. Print and fold, then place in your kitchen or on your bathroom mirror to help you remember the Healthy Change of the week.

Menu 20 & 21

A Calcium Primer In 472 Words

Before posting the menu, we should comment on the N.Y. Times article, “Taking Calcium May Pose Heart Risks”?  To better understand it, we note two calcium-related diseases:  Osteoporosis (too few minerals like calcium in the bones) and calcification (excess calcium deposited in soft tissue, like coronary arteries and valves).  Americans have high levels of both osteoporosis and calcification.  So we have a problem getting calcium into the right place—our bones rather than the soft tissue—and diet might make the difference. 

Dietary calcium is essential to health; everyone knows that.  Government sources recommend 1000 mg daily for adults under 50; teens and seniors should get more.  The three main sources are:

   1) Plants (nuts, grains, legumes, leafy greens),

   2) Dairy,

   3) Supplements (pills). 

Dairy products are a much-advertised source of calcium, as are supplements.  But after reading the literature, I lean more to plants unless a competent doctor prescribes otherwise. Strong bones involves more than calcium—we also need more magnesium and less of the phosphorous and sodium found in soft drinks and processed foods.  The vitamins D and K are also important.  You get vitamin K in the foods rich in calcium and magnesium.  You can get vitamin D with a little midday exercise in the sun.  And don't forget exercise:  strong bones require strong muscles.

The EPIC Project

It’s known that adequate calcium is associated with reduced hypertension, obesity, and type 2 diabetes, all risk factors for heart disease.  The EPIC project—a large, long-term European study originally directed at cancer—took a closer look at calcium and heart disease.  The data showed that “moderate” calcium intake—820 mg daily from all sources, on average—gave a 30% reduced risk of a heart attack.  That’s good.  No coronary benefit was found for higher doses. 

But researchers were surprised when they took a closer look at the source of calcium.  People who got their calcium mainly from supplements actually had twice the risk of a heart attack.  Here’s a quote from the study author, courtesy of the N. Y. Times:

“Sufficient calcium intake is important, but my recommendation would be to get calcium from food, like low-fat milk and dairy products and mineral water rich in calcium, rather than from supplements,” said Dr. Sabine Rohrmann, an author of the study and a professor with the Institute of Social and Preventive Medicine at the University of Zurich.

This is a provocative study and must be confirmed by further research to earn wide acceptance.  But I like what Dr. Rohrmann said:  Get your calcium from food.  Some scientists caution against too much dairy in the diet, so my plan is to get calcium mainly from plant sources, with a sparing amount of dairy foods.  I may even try those European mineral waters.  This isn't meant as medical advice:  If you have questions about your source of calcium, talk to your doctor.

This Week’s Menu (Actually a combination of two weeks.)

Monday

• Bacon-lettuce-tomato sandwich.  Not the healthiest meal but we felt like a summer meal.
• Sweet potato casserole.  An odd combination but we’re working on a recipe and eating a lot of sweet potatoes. 

Tuesday

• Sushi.  A new Whole Foods store opened up and the beautiful wife had to try their sushi. 
• Sweet potato casserole, one more recipe variation. 
• Dessert:  Green smoothie with kale

Wednesday 

• Sweet potato casserole (yes again, still working on the recipe)
• Salad

Thursday (We had visitors from England so produced a special meal.)

• Poached salmon.
• Wild rice with mushrooms and mirepoix
• Asparagus, steamed.
• Green salad with pears, nuts and goat cheese.
• Dessert was strawberries with ice cream.

Friday

• Leftovers from Thursday.

Sweet Potato Casserole Recipe

Old recipe books can reveal how our dietary went awry in the 20^th century.  Take the New Delineator Recipes, printed in 1930, for example.  The book includes 24 dinner menus, typically a meat dish served with potatoes and two vegetables.  In 10 of the 24 recipes a salad replaces one of the vegetables.  Twenty of the menus include potatoes; two include sweet potatoes.  One big change from the ‘30s to now is that we eat more salads and a lot less of meat and potatoes.  The potatoes we eat now are more often sweet potatoes, rich in carotene and less glycemic.

Most sweet potato casserole recipes are a sugar disaster.  A healthier sweet potato casserole recipe seemed a simple goal.  I’d simply use the natural sweetness of fruit to reduce the sugar, and substitute pecans for the usual marshmallow topping.  That was two weeks and a dozen batches ago—it wasn’t that easy.  It turns out that when you reduce the sweetness, the flavor become more important.  The beautiful wife confesses to a sweet tooth, so finding a flavor that worked with less sugar required a few experiments.

Traditional flavors for sweet potatoes, according to The Flavor Bible, include pecans, cinnamon, butter, nutmeg, and maple.  Apples and pineapple, as well as raisins, dates, and cranberries—each a natural way to sweeten—are also noted.  Many recipes include orange juice, but for us the orange juice seemed to turn bitter during cooking and the low sugar content made this noticeable. 

So here’s our best effort—it’s the lowest sugar casserole we’ve seen but the natural fruit and flavors give it a great taste.  Most recipes include eggs; this one doesn't.  It goes well with some leftover ham, chicken, or salmon, plus a green salad.

Skip’s Sweet Potato Casserole  (Serves 5-6)

Ingredients:

3-4 medium-large sweet potatoes (about 2½ lb.)

3 apples, green or whatever

8 oz. crushed pineapple, canned or fresh

¼ C butter (1/2 cube), softened

1 tsp vanilla

1 tsp cinnamon

½ tsp salt

¼ tsp maple extract

Dash of fresh nutmeg

_________________________________________

¼ C butter (1/2 cube), softened

¼ C sugar, turbinado or dark brown

1 to 1½ C pecans, roughly chopped

Directions:

1. Fill a pot ½ full of hot water (enough to cover sweet potatoes and apples) and bring to a boil.  While water is heating wash, peel, and quarter the sweet potatoes and apples.   Put the sweet potatoes into the boiling water first and add the apples 10-12 minutes later.  Total cooking time is around 20 minutes; the apples and sweet potatoes should be soft enough to mash, but not mushy.
2. While the pot is boiling, prepare the sauce and the topping.  For the sauce, combine melted butter with the seasonings.  For the topping, cream the butter and sugar, then stir in the pecans.   This is a good time to turn on the oven, 350 F.   (Note: I prefer turbinado, a form of raw sugar, to the store-bought brown sugar because the latter is often just white sugar with a little molasses sprayed on, but either is acceptable.  Maple syrup likely works but it’s a little pricey.)
3. When the sweet potatoes and apples are ready, drain and mash with a potato masher, adding the pineapple.  (Note:  We tried this with both canned crushed pineapple, and with a pineapple we had sliced and saved in the fridge.  Pineapple is a good source of natural sweetness, especially if fully ripe, or brown.  If it’s a little green, you can bring out the sweetness by cooking it a few minutes in a frying pan until slightly browned.)
4. Stir in the sauce.  Pour mixture into a 2 qt. casserole.  Sprinkle with pecan topping.  Bake about 20 minutes until pecans are browned. 

Time:  With a little experience, allow 30 minutes to prepare this dish, excluding the oven time.  You can prepare the salad and supervise the table setting while it bakes.

The Joy of Fasting

The quick answer:  Though we eat to live, fasting can improve our health as well as the quality of of our lives.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________

Scripture

Of the three oracles that inform this blog, one is Scripture.  The other two are Science, and Tradition.  I like the idea of teaming Scripture—discredited in many a laboratory—with Science to create a more profound answer.  In the last post the Genesis account of the Creation led to an intriguing question:  Are the 92 elements of which the earth was formed all essential to health?   Our knowledge of Science is too incomplete to give an answer yet in Genesis 3:19 we’re told “. . . for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.”  I’m led to believe the 92 elements, as found in the soil that grows our food, each play a necessary role.  The very idea inspires reverence for the Creation—and for food in its natural form.

While we turn to Scripture, we avoid religious jargon.  Our hope is people of every belief will feel welcome, and comfortable enough to share their nutrition experience.  That said, we’d like to discuss a religious practice common to many faiths:  fasting.

Fasting

In the Mormon faith, fasting is done monthly.  Typically this means skipping two meals (the money saved is given to a special fund for the poor).  This is done for spiritual, rather than health, reasons but fasting does have health benefits.

The N. Y. Times ran an article last year, “Regular Fasting May Boost Heart Health.”  The article cited a study that found regular fasting among Mormons was associated with a 58% reduction in heart disease.   Other lifestyle factors may contribute, but no medicine, to my knowledge, yields such a benefit. 

The same doctors then took blood samples from people undergoing a 24-hour fast.  Among other benefits, there was a surge of human growth hormone after fasting—a 20-fold increase for men, 13 times for women.  Human growth hormone is released during starvation to promote burning of fat and protect muscle and other lean tissue.  Want to reduce your fat level?  Ask your doctor of fasting is right for you.  Because excess fat is such a problem in our society, I’m surprised this benefit isn’t more discussed.

A recent study by the National Institute on Aging found that weekly fasting protected the brain from the effects of Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and other diseases.  The study suggested two days of minimal calories each week, followed by five days of normal eating.  However you do it, there seems to be a benefit to fasting.

Dr. Joel Fuhrman

Dr. Fuhrman writes regularly on nutrition and preventative health.  Fasting is recommended in his book, Fasting and Eating for Health: A Medical Doctor’s Program for Conquering Disease.  I discussed his book in this post.  Dr. Fuhrman recommends that your doctor supervise fasts longer than three days, you should know.  Fuhrman found so many health benefits to fasting that I decided to try a three day fast.  Here is what I learned:

• Much of my eating, mainly snacking, is driven by boredom rather than hunger.  If you want to improve your health, replace snacking with . . ., well, a moment of jump-roping or a Sudoku puzzle.
• After the first day, I wasn’t really hungry.  Hunger diminishes as the fast progresses. 
• Your mental focus improves during fasting—as the physical appetites diminish, you get a better view of what’s important.  Fuhrman notes that people giving up addictions, like smoking, do better if they fast. 

Please comment:  Share your experience with fasting.

Need a reminder? Download our Healthy Change reminder card. Print and fold, then place in your kitchen or on your bathroom mirror to help you remember the Healthy Change of the week.

Vitamins from Food

The quick answer:  as illustrated above, whole foods are the best source of vitamins, but you have to think out of the box to get to that conclusion.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________

Thinking Out Of The Box

It’s a grim subject, but I had to smile at the ad that led with, “Think out of the box.”  I’ll get back to the cause of my smile in a moment, but if you read this blog, you’re definitely an out-of-the-box thinker.  In fact, over breakfast I was recounting a N. Y. Times article as the beautiful wife patiently listened.  I was intrigued by the title: “A Mathematical Challenge to Obesity.” 

An applied mathematician reported on his analysis of our national weight gain and type 2 diabetes problem.  From 1975 to 2005 the average American gained 20 lbs. and weight-related diabetes soared.  The math guy blames this on excess food supply.    

Being an out of the box thinker, I advise the beautiful wife, “He’s got it wrong.  It’s not about the amount of food—it’s about the nature of the food.  We’re eating nutrient-depleted, mildly-addictive factory food rather than natural food.  Natural food fills you up; factory food stimulates appetite."

The beautiful wife sighs, then smiles, but says nothing.  I know what she’s thinking:  Is it really possible all these high-paid experts are wrong and my very own husband—absent-minded, rumpled, and writing for free—has it right? 

Raising six kids was a piece of cake; this is her real burden:  She’s a believing person but has chosen to spend her life with a guy who questions everything.  Take vitamin and supplement pills for example.  Actually, don’t take them, unless prescribed by a doctor who has studied nutrition.

That’s my out-of-the-box position and the subject of this post.  Which leads us back to the opening line and the ad that made me smile.  The think out-of-the-box ad was promoting a service for the end result of what we've discussed so far . . . cremation. 

Dust to Dust

If you took a chemistry class, it’s likely the periodic table of the elements was posted on the wall.   The table was a clever idea.  The earth is made up of just 92 natural elements and the table organizes them into 18 families.  As a struggling student, I spent a lot of time staring at this chart.  It came back to me the other day and I asked two questions:  Does food contain all 92 elements?  Do all the 92 elements have a role in our health?  These are simple questions but the answer could be profound.

Take oxygen:  It’s the most abundant element on earth as well as in our bodies—the average body has about 95 pounds in various forms.  Gold, understandably is less common—you’ve got around .00002 lbs of gold inside your body.  It’s as rare in the body as on earth, but is essential to joint health, transmission of electrical signals, and perhaps fertility.  Male semen contains trace amounts of gold.  Decorum demands I resist the impulse to make a joke.  It’s hard.

Of the minerals, calcium and phosphorous are most abundant in the body.  We hear a lot about eating too much sodium but more important is the balance of sodium to potassium in our food.  Basically, factory food has too much sodium—because salt is the cheapest flavor—but natural food has a healthy ratio. 

Think about the elements in vitamins: Vitamin B-12, aptly named cobalamine, contains cobalt, so this mineral has a critical health function.  Vitamin B-12 is found only in animal products so this is a problem for vegans.  Because the body contains a several-year reserve, deficiency is not immediate but it’s hard to diagnose so is a real threat to health.

Which brings me back to the original questions, asking whether food contains all 92 elements and whether all 92 are important to our health.  Basically this is an incredibly complex question that Science, despite billions spent on research, has just begun to explore and will not answer in our lifetimes.  It’s unknowable—but this doesn’t restrain your humble author.

Here’s an answer with a scriptural underpinning:  My belief in the Creation story, symbolically presented in Genesis, tells me all 92 elements have a purpose and are all important to our health in the proportions delivered by Nature, as in whole foods. 

Natural Vitamins

In last week’s post we advised eating orange fruits and vegetables daily and told how vitamin A is formed in the body from over 50 different carotenoids found in food.  Though not yet proven, it’s possible that each of these carotenoids plays a needed function in the body.  They may play multiple functions as the body processes them through the various stages.  It’s complicated. 

Still, knowing as little as we do, unless your doctor prescribes otherwise, the safest course is to get our vitamins from the natural ingredients, the pre-forms found in food, rather than from factory-made synthetic forms sold in pills.  It’s that simple.  Unless you have a unique medical condition, the best source of vitamins, and minerals, is to eat a variety of natural foods. 

For more, check last year’s post on this subject:  Best Source of Vitamins?  Or read the N. Y. Times article, “The News Keeps Getting Worse for Vitamins.”  In the next post we’ll take a different look, reviewing the essential micronutrients.  Essential means you have to eat them; your body can’t produce the nutrient.  Examples are the 13 vitamins, the 9 essential protein amino acids, and the omega-3 and omega-6 fats.

Need a reminder? Download our Healthy Change reminder card. Print and fold, then place in your kitchen or on your bathroom mirror to help you remember the Healthy Change of the week.