Let There Be Light

The quick answer: Last week’s post discussed the importance of getting enough sleep in the dark.  Turning the coin over, this week’s post addresses the benefits of sunshine, or getting full spectrum light.  It’s about more than just vitamin D.

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Thank You

First, my profound thanks for many kind comments left on the birthday post my daughter snuck into this blog.  (It set a record for the most comments.)  I’m deeply moved by your generosity.  I don’t usually get so much attention on birthdays, but this birthday did have a zero in it. 

Second, in response I should acknowledge an unexpected effect from this blog—affection for women I’ve never met.  I admire the many ways you seek to better care for your family; your instinct for building consensus rather than arguing over differences; the way you seek to make the world better; and the kindness you show to each other.  You are a shining light upon a hill.

Sunshine

We discussed the health benefits of sunshine in a prior post on vitamin D.  We’re getting less sunlight now; the daylight hours have been shrinking since the summer solstice, and the sun has been sinking lower in the sky, thus less intense sunlight.  If you live in the southern latitudes of the U.S. this simply means you need a little more time in the sun to maintain your vitamin D.  But if you live in the latitudes of Boston, or Seattle, there isn’t enough sunlight to maintain vitamin D and other strategies are needed, like supplements, or a week on the beach, say Costa Rica. 

Here’s some light information:

• Sunshine is the source of life—it makes every green thing to grow.  We understand the importance of sunshine to plants—but we are just learning the impact on human health. 
• There’s a group of latitude-related chronic diseases—as you move away from the equator, sunlight hours decline and these diseases increase.
• The sunshine spectrum is largely invisible to the human eye, we “see” less than 1% of the radiant energy coming from the sun. The other 99% includes the shorter waves we call ultraviolet, and the longer infrared rays. 
• We know that the ultraviolet B rays (UVB) create vitamin D on exposed skin, but there seem to be other benefits not yet understood.  This may occur with skin contact, or via the eye retina-pineal gland route. 
• My son recently mentioned an example of beneficial light on the skin—a medical start-up uses LED light to treat restless leg syndrome.  Light of a certain wavelength, but in the spectrum of sunshine, is thought to improve vascular nitrous oxide, which is beneficial to vascular health and restless leg.

John Ott (1909-2000)

Ott turned a hobby of time-lapse photography into a career, making movies that showed plants growing up in a moment.  You have likely seen some of his work, or the technology he developed. In the process Ott learned the importance of full spectrum light on plant health.  For example, glass filters out 95% of the UV rays, but plastic only 5%, so plants grew better under plastic than glass.  (For this reason, sunlight passing through glass doesn’t generate vitamin D, you have to open the window.)

Filtering sunlight for color, as often happens, also affects plant health.  (Think of your sunglasses.)  After seeing how plants grew better with full spectrum light, Ott studied the effect of light quality on cell growth, on the health of laboratory animals, and then wondered about the role of full spectrum light on human health.  He helped start a new field—photobiology. 

The nature of light in modern society is remarkably changed from ancient times.  We spend much less time out of doors, and more time indoors under artificial lights. These lights contain just a fragment of the full spectrum.  Incandescent bulbs, for instance, provide little UV energy, are deficient in blue light, and produce mostly infrared light, which we experience as heat.  Fluorescent lights are more energy efficient as they produce little infrared heat.  Energy considerations are driving the spread of compact fluorescent lights as well as LED lighting, which have unknown effects.  It’s another experiment and we’re the guinea pigs.

Ott provided a personal example.  Progression of arthritis in his hip over several years required that he use a cane, which over time caused pain in the cane elbow.  By serendipity he lost his glasses and during the time without glasses, and with exposure to sunlight on a Florida trip, the pain in his elbow, then his hip, gradually disappeared.  It helped, Ott found, if he limited his time under intense studio lights (he had a TV program), or other artificial light in favor of natural sunlight.  Sunglasses, which restrict the light spectrum, were also avoided.  Ott offered the hypothesis that full spectrum light, as opposed to artificial partial spectrum light, affected the body, perhaps through the pineal gland, and was a key factor in his arthritis cure. 

Dr. Ott also studied the effect of full spectrum light on cancer tumor growth, and found encouraging results in limited testing.  Because he came from outside the academic community, and made claims in a field known for quackery—the cure of cancer—Ott could not get research funding and the study of light for the prevention of disease suffered. 

Sunlight and Heart Disease 

It’s well established that sunshine is preventative of heart disease.  With other risk factors considered, there is less heart disease where the sun shines most.  Because vitamin D is made by sunlight, this was presumed to be the difference.  Further studies show the benefit to not be fully explained by vitamin D level, in fact taking vitamin D in pill form was shown to make things worse. 

One scientist, in a blog post titled “Is The Skin a Solar-Powered Battery for the Heart?” offered one theory of how sunshine helps the heart.  When sunshine strikes the skin, vitamin D is produced from subdermal cholesterol.  This vitamin D can then become sulfated, combined with sulfur, which makes it water-soluble, and easily delivered by the blood to the body.  The author notes that the elements of this process have been reduced by our avoidance of dietary cholesterol, the avoidance of sunshine, and the reduction of animal products (meat, eggs, etc.) rich in sulfur. 

The science is incomplete, but if I suffered a latitude-related disease, like joint pain or heart disease, I think I would turn to the source of life, the sun, and get a healthy amount of full spectrum light.

Full Spectrum Light

There are two ways to get full-spectrum light if you must be indoors: 1) convert a window where you spend lots of time from glass to plastic for daytime light, and 2) for night time, buy some full spectrum incandescent or fluorescent light bulbs.  I just ordered some at Amazon.com.  I’ll let you know if I can tell any difference.

A deep thought:  The last two blogs turn us to the light condition present at the Creation:  The greater light that ruled the day, and the lesser light that ruled the night.  Which brings to mind the encomium that followed, "And it was good."  There may have been more wisdom in these words that we have appreciated.

Depression—Before Trying Drugs

There’s a connection between full spectrum light and depression.  The depression spectrum ranges from wintertime blues (seasonal affective disorder, or SAD) to disabling clinical depression.  In the Vitamin D post noted above, a reader endorsed the book The Depression Cure which recommends these six lifestyle changes before considering the use of drugs:

1. Brain food, mainly omega-3 fats, which we discussed here, here and here.  
2. Being proactive (over-thinking can be paralyzing; taking action is stimulating, as in the 52 Healthy Changes).
3. Exercise, the subject of four Healthy Changes.
4. Healthy sleep, discussed here. 
5. Use of full spectrum light, the topic of this blog.
6. Social bonds (the blessing of friends). (Should we have a post on friends?)

A study found the use of light boxes (discussed in this N.Y. Times article) to be as effective as Prozac in treating seasonal affective disorder (SAD), a form of depression.

Healthy Change

Please comment on your experience with natural light and health. Or tell what helped you deal with the blues. Do we need a post on the health impact of friends?

Postscript:  Recent news from the annual meeting of the American Academy of Ophthalmology (AAO) suggested an eye health benefit to children being outdoors.  A meta-analysis of 8 studies involving over 10,000 children four that for each hour spent outdoors there was a 13% decrease in near-sightedness.  Thought he mechanism wasn't discussed, it appears that time in full spectrum light is beneficial to vision.  IT was also noted that the explosion of video game and computer use by children paralleled a sharp rise in near-sightnedness.  So get the kids outdoors to enjoy the daylight and help their eyes.

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.

Happy Birthday Skip!

This is Skip's daughter Brooke, hijacking Word of Wisdom Living for a minute to wish my dad a Happy Birthday! You might not be aware of the many hours he puts into this little site: researching questions, trying out recipes, exploring the aisles of the grocery store.. it's almost a full time job for him.

Why does he do it? Because he wants to share what he's learned about nutrition and living well, and because he likes to learn from all of you and your wonderful comments.

The photo above was taken for an article Martha Stewart ran this summer about our family reunion. I know when you see a photo in a magazine, you might assume things are just posed for the camera, but this photo rings true for me. My dad loves to share things. He loves to research and study and read, and make his own conclusions and then share his findings. (Okay, we might not do it with lanterns in the trees and coordinating quilts!)

All my life my dad has tried to teach me things. He's an engineer, so he's always trying to figure out how things work and how they can be done better. Growing up, he was the kind of dad who drew a lot of graphs, who asked a lot of questions, who would never just give me the "easy answer".

In college he would mail me articles he had read in the morning paper. Now he emails links he thinks I need to see and pulls me aside when I come over for dinner to tell me about the interesting story he heard that week.

For all these years it's just been his family who he shared with, and that's why I pushed him to start this blog, to share with a larger audience all the things I've been lucky enough to hear my whole life. I think he's doing a really great job, and I know my family is healthier because of his time and effort.

Happy Birthday Dad.

Leave a comment telling my dad one way this blog has helped you.. I think that would really put a smile on his face!

Making Stock

The short answer:  When a cold wind blows, you snuggle deep into your coat and pull it tight.  During economic storms, stock made from bones warms the soul while guarding both health and wallet.

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Saturated fat—good or bad?

The Danish are in the news this week—for levying a tax on saturated fatty acids (SFA) as part of a plan to improve longevity.  For a generation we’ve been told that SFAs are unhealthy, a cause of heart disease and other ills.  To my knowledge, this has never been proven.  So if the proof isn’t there, why all the attacks on SFAs?  It’s a long story, but once the establishment takes a position, they don’t change until the generation that staked their reputation on it dies. 

If you listen to Mary Enig, PhD, the scientist who doggedly exposed the danger of trans fats, the body needs dietary SFAs.  In her excellent article, “The truth about saturated fats,” Enig notes that from 1910 to 1970 traditional animal fats in our diet declined from 83% to 62% of all fats.  Butter consumption dropped from 18 lbs./yr. to 4 lbs., replaced by vegetable oils.  Yet, heart disease rose from a rare illness to the #1 cause of death during this time.  You do the math.

Enig cites these benefits of dietary SFAs:

1. SFAs constitute 50% of cell membranes so regular intake is essential to cell replacement.
2. SFAs are vital to the absorption of calcium into our bones.
3. SFAs reduce the risk of heart attacks by lowering Lp(a), which is linked to heart disease.  The longer SFAs nourish the heart during times of stress.
4. SFAs enhance the immune system.
5. The essential omega-3 fats are better retained if the diet is rich in SFAs.
6. Some SFAs have important antimicrobial properties; they protect against harmful bacteria in the gut. 

Pundits have noted that Danes eat 4x more margarine than butter (a real problem), and that while SFA consumption has declined their obesity numbers have risen.  Strikingly, no action was taken against sugar (another real problem as blood glucose levels have risen in parallel with obesity), sulfites (Danes love bacon), or refined carbs.  Danes eat a lot of meat, about 8 oz. daily, also a real problem.  One other thing:  Denmark is a delightful country with beautiful architecture and friendly, practical people.  But their politicians seem quixotic, tilting at windmills while missing the weighter matters.

We eat just a little meat, a source of SFAs, but do enjoy butter and whole milk.  Until I hear more, we’ll continue to enjoy saturated fats in moderation.

Tales From The Depression

During the Depression an unusually well qualified couple, John and Leah Widtsoe, wrote an exceptional book on nutrition according to the Mormon Word of Wisdom.  John had earned his PhD in chemistry at the close of the 19^th century in Germany, the birthplace of nutrition science.  He was later a professor, then president of several universities.  Leah was a college graduate, unusual for women of the time, and had gone east to study at the Pratt Institute, a leading school of domestic science.  Their 1937 book, The Word of Wisdom, A Modern Interpretation, sold well (used copies now go for over $100), and is still available in reprint and ebook.

Leah was a formidable woman and an early believer that health came from whole foods.  A sort of pioneer Martha Stewart, she later wrote a book of recipes, How To Be Well, suggesting dietary guidance as good as any heard today:

1. Use only whole grains.
2. Eat fresh fruit year around if possible.  (She also recommended putting fruit rather than sugar on breakfast cereals.)
3. Use meat sparingly.  (Leah suggested one serving of meat and fish weekly with other protein coming from plants.)
4. Use more vegetables, choosing fresh over canned, and regularly eating some uncooked in salads.  (Over-cooked vegetables were common then.)
5. For dessert, eat fruit or simple dishes.  Leah was emphatic: “Rich candy and heavy soda fountain concoctions are out.”  (Allow me a moment of nostalgia here for my high school job as a soda jerk.)

Leah believed family dinner should be fun, as well as nourishing.  The best sauce for dinner, she thought, was “laughter.”  She warned about hidden hunger, an early awareness that though modern food might be filling it was insufficient in vitamins and minerals.  Over time this shortage of vitamins, minerals, fiber, antioxidants and other essentials is thought to be an underlying cause of chronic disease.  So though much remained unknown about nutrition—not so different from today—health could be protected through eating whole foods.

The garbage disposal in modern sinks would be anathema to Leah.  What we put in the disposal, she put into her soup kettle:

“One must never waste good food.  A soup kettle is a wise possession for every family.  In it should go every scrap of meat, bone . . . all clean vegetable parings, outer leaves . . . and all bits of good food [including chicken feet] that should not be wasted.  The basis of the soup of the day should be found here.” 

The wood-burning stove that kept the house—and the soup kettle—warm in winter is gone but Judith Jones’ charming book, The Pleasures of Cooking for One, suggests a modern method:  Place edible scraps in a closable container in the freezer, to be retrieved when you make soup.  If our economy continues to decline as some fear, such Depression wisdom could mean the survival of a household.

Making Stock

The famed French chef Auguste Escoffier claimed that stock was everything in cooking.  Who am I to question the French on food?  The American version of cooking with stock is to open a can of Campbell’s soup—was there a ‘50s casserole recipe that didn’t require a can?  So I looked for stock at Campbell’s website.  They didn’t have anything and suggested I check my spelling.  I resolved to make my own stock.

To make stock you use leftover bones, hopefully with a little meat.  Put the bones in a pot with water (about 6 cups per pound of bones) and add savory vegetables (by tradition, a carrot, a celery stalk, and some onion, all chopped, an aromatic combination known as mirapoix), plus some spices. The traditional spice mix is a bay leaf, thyme, some parsley (a few recipes call for cloves or garlic), plus a few peppercorns).  If you add more meat it’s broth, or to be fancy, consommé.

The beautiful wife brought home some chicken carcasses from a dinner, enough to make five quarts of stock.  (Beef bones, cut up, are also used, or fish bones.)  I cooked the bones for an hour, while I prepared the mirapoix and spices, and cooked everything for another hour.  Some recipes call for longer times, but this chicken had been previously cooked.  I strained it, poured the stock into quart jars, and put them in the refrigerator.  You can refrigerate stock (when chilled it takes a soft Jello-like consistency) for a few days or freeze it a couple of months.

You can buy stock in the store so the big question is whether the benefit of homemade justifies the trouble.  The store product is a pale version of the stock I made; mine jelled after refrigeration and was very flavorful.  The wife made a tasty soup after the stock was cooked by recovering the mirepoix with some broth. We’ll try our stock in a few recipes, comparing to store-bought stock, and report back.

Benefits of Stock

By tradition, stock will heal whatever ails you.  This may be true; you always hear that chicken soup, made much like stock, is the only remedy proven to relieve the common cold.  Stock is also said to aid digestion.  Science, to my knowledge, hasn’t confirmed these traditions but a warm bowl of soup does provide comfort while your immune system does the healing.  The article, Broth is Beautiful, by Sally Fallow Morrell, lists some benefits of stock:

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. 

Several years ago the beautiful wife had a sore hip joint that persisted for many 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.

Please comment on your experience cooking with stock, whether homemade or store-bought. A reverence for food implies avoidance of waste.  Please share your own ways of reducing waste.

Blessed Sleep

The short answer:  Blame the shortage on Thomas A. Edison, but we need to turn off the lights and get more sleep, 8-9 hours, in the dark.

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Deficiencies

Deficiencies are one irony of modern life.  The Industrial Revolution provides everything money can buy, in fabulous quantities.  Yet we live with debilitating deficiencies—usually undetected—generally unknown to the ancients.  It’s more correct to say insufficiencies, which are less severe than deficiencies.  Deficiencies have near-term consequences; insufficiencies take longer.  Vitamin D deficiency can cause rickets in a relatively short time; an insufficiency of vitamin D requires a longer time to show its effect (osteoporosis, for example).  Chronic insufficiency is a risk factor for the chronic diseases.  Here are ten common insufficiencies (with links to past posts) that harm your health, starting with diet:

1. Vitamins
2. Minerals
3. Fiber
4. Antioxidants
5. Exercise
6. Sunshine
7. Peace (freedom from excessive stress)
8. Order (the converse of chaos)
9. Sleep, the subject of this post
10. Dark

Blame It On Edison

Every invention of man has innate potential for both good and bad. 

Consider the lightbulb.  In 1910, before electrification of our cities, the average American got 9-10 hours of sleep in the dark—a little more in winter when the nights were long, less in the summer.  Now the day has no logical end.  Modern man, consequently, averages less than 7 hours of sleep year around.  Worse, it’s become a virtue to get too little sleep.  Think of these laudatory phrases:  “Burning the midnight oil,” or “pulling an all-nighter,” (to work through the night).  

There are two other effects of the lightbulb:  First, we’ve lost the seasonal rhythm of sleeping more during the long winter nights.   Second, due to light pollution, true darkness no longer exists for many.  Ever get up in the night and count the status lights on your electronic devices?  Does a streetlight, or neighbor’s porch light, shine into your window all night?  What about the nightlights that teach our young to fear the dark?

Sleep Deficiency

In their book Lights Out authors T.S. Wiley and Bent Formby, PhD, make the argument that modern sleep habits are unhealthy, contributing to these problems:

• Hormone deficiency, particularly melatonin (more on this below),
• Depression
• Hypertension
• Overweight and type 2 diabetes
• Heart disease
• Cancer
• Impaired judgment, including risky behavior by teens
• Dementia

It’s About Melatonin

Briefly, melatonin rules the night and dopamine owns the day.  

Melatonin is a master hormone essential to health and is produced while we sleep, most effectively in the dark.  Scientists are still discovering melatonin’s functions, which include the regulation of circadian (daily) rhythm, sleep, energy balance, reproduction, and body weight.  Melatonin is our most potent antioxidant, plays a key role in immune system health, is protective against addictions, and regulates leptin, the hormone that controls appetite.  (Babies, in the first three months, produce melatonin around the clock, thus seem to have their days and nights mixed.)

We have a third eye, the pineal gland, linked to our retinas.  The nightly fall of darkness stimulates the pineal to produce melatonin.  Production peaks at about 3.5 hours of sleep, which then drives the production of other hormones.  Basically, a healthy balance of hormones requires adequate sleep, 8-9 hours depending on the season, in the dark.  The more light in the bedroom, the lower the production of melatonin.

Melatonin deficiency drives compensating habits that over time ravage our health.  These include addictive habits such as caffeine drinks, smoking, drinking, and the use of drugs; constant snacking, especially of sugary foods; and a reliance on high-calorie processsed foods rich in calories but deficient in nutrients. 

Bottom line:  The growth of unhealthy foods over the last century isn’t just because of billions spent on advertising.  We are vulnerable because the advent of electricity and cheap light has separated us from traditional sleeping patterns.  If we are to eat better, we must sleep better.

Losing Fat

It’s known that too little sleep drives sugary snacking, a cause of overweight.  But there is also a benefit of sleep when losing weight.  A 2010 University of Chicago study of dieters found that those who got the least sleep (5.5 hours) lost more non-fat body tissue (mainly muscle) and those who got the most sleep (8.5 hours) were most effective at reducing excess fat.   A prior post, argued that a diet of whole foods combined with exercise was more effective at losing weight than dieting.  To improve weight loss, get plenty of sleep.

Snoring

Snoring, of which you're usually unaware, disturbs your sleep, but it's also bad for the sleep of your spouse.  (Spouses, out of kindness, may be reluctant to mention a snoring problem.  From a health standpoint, it’s better if the snoring spouse knows, and is reminded.)  Snoring can progress to the condition called sleep apnea, a series of oxygen-deprived awakenings during the night, of which most are unaware.  Remedies for snoring include the following:

• If you’re overweight, the first step is to achieve a healthy weight.
• No eating for two hours before bedtime.  (In addition, avoid alcohol, caffeine, or dairy and soy products at dinner.)
• Sleep on your side—the tongue and jaw relax when sleeping on your back and exaggerate snoring.  One remedy is to tape a tennis ball to the back of your pajamas, forcing you to sleep on your side.  If this is difficult, talk to your doctor about a dental appliance that keeps your jaw in position while sleeping.  If you snore while on your side, you have a more serious condition and should see a specialist.
• Strengthen your throat muscles.  All aerobic exercise helps, but you also can join a choir (singing strengthens the throat muscles, as does shouting at the kids), learn to play the didgeridoo (an aboriginal Australian instrument which uniquely strengthens throat muscles), or try the exercises noted here. 
• If all else fails, a doctor may consider the CPAP breathing device, or perhaps surgery.

Healthy Change:  There’s wisdom in that old saying “Early to bed . . .”.  There are health problems from getting too much sleep, though this is not a big problem in America. 

See this report from the National Sleep Foundation for tips on getting better sleep.

Please comment on your sleep experience.  How much sleep do you need?  Have you experienced health issues related to longterm insufficient sleep?  What was your solution? 

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.

Update on Tuesday, October 11, 2011 at 10:03PM by Skip Hellewell

More on sleeping well:  I asked a retired Duke professor who specialized in sleep disorders to add his thoughts to the post "Blessed Sleep."  Here is what he suggested:

1.  Teenagers are especially sensitive to light when sleeping and may thus release insufficient melatonin.  Very important for teens to sleep in the dark.

2.  Blue light drives the circadian rhythm and should be avoided at night.  Even a small amount, for example if your alarm clock has blue numbers, can disrupt the cycle of sleeping and awakening.

3.  Napping is good for many people, especially if they don't sleep well.  Take a nap about 8 hours after arising; sleep at least 15 minutes but not longer than 45 minutes (as this allows you to dip into "slow wave sleep" which causes grogginess when awakening).

4.  Eight hours of sleep is good for most; nine hours is too much for many.  This can vary during the year—the body adapts well to sleeping more in winter and less in summer.

Winning Support

The quick answer:  The ultimate test of mom’s leadership is to overcome the billions spent by Food Inc. to market factory foods and win the family's support for healthy home cooking.

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Managing stress

Eat smarter, look better, live longer—that’s our goal.  Learning to eat wisely in a toxic food environment is the challenge, but there’s more to health than diet.  Four of the Healthy Changes are about exercise.  Others cover the benefits of sunshine (2), fasting, and this week’s topic: stress management.  In the coming weeks we talk about the importance of adequate sleep, best friends, and the blessedness of simplicity.  Our goal is modest:  Discover, with the help of readers, the world’s best health wisdom. 

The last post shared ways to get off the stress escalator.  Chronic stress is a factor in the chronic diseases.  But the worst cut of all is how stress robs you of your beauty (think wrinkles), and contributes to overweight (including compulsive snacking).  You can’t overcome stress by running faster—you have to step off the escalator.  If you don’t do something different, create change, everything stays the same.

The Phases of Change

Think about change in three phases:

Phase 1:  Getting started is hard, so in the beginning there is little benefit for the effort required.  Therefore, it’s easy to become discouraged.

Phase 2:  Resistance is overcome and you get greater benefits for the same effort.  This is the exciting phase—you’re making big progress and it feels great.

Phase 3:  The last part is critical; it’s more about consolidating the change, making it permanent so you don’t lose the benefits.  There’s still fruit to pick, but it’s not low hanging.

You can picture your whole life here:  Phase 1 was childhood (you’re making steady progress but can’t do any of the adult stuff); phase 2 is the high school and college years (maximum growth, lots of fun); and phase 3 is adulthood, which you all understand.

The well-lived life is a series of changes; each change represents some challenge overcome, or beneficial habit acquired.  Think about the menu writing habit:  Phase 1 is the first year; it’s hard to come up with something every week.  Phase 2 is the second year; now you have a binder of old menus and it’s easy.  Phase 3 involves maintaining the habit in subsequent years, with continuous improvement. 

Carcassonne, France

Like most people, we reared our children on a skinny budget.  The kids wore hand-me-downs but seemed happy making do with what they had.  The blessing of this is today, as adults, they’re all good managers of their money.  As the older kids began their college years our finances improved and we were able to afford a few special things, which brings us to Carcassonne, France. 

Carcassonne is an ancient walled city in southern France, near Spain.  We spent an unforgettable night there a few years ago, en route from Barcelona to Provence.  The evening was foggy, and it was eerie to walk the narrow cobblestone alleys; I half expected a knight in armor to come clanking out of the fog.   We ate in a tiny restaurant; the mood was romantic, even if we didn’t know exactly what we ordered.  As we were eating the door opened to admit a tall man in a long black coat, carrying a well-worn guitar case.  I thought of him later as the Basque Johnny Cash.  He took out his guitar and began to play traditional Basque songs, singing in a rugged but melodious voice.  The memory has stayed with us. 

That magical night in Carcassonne came to mind this past weekend.  I was acting as docent for the local historical society; the French accent of a visiting woman caused me to inquire where she was from.  She named a town in the Pyrenees Mountains, near Carcassonne, and said she was Basque.  The lady was older, but had the lean, healthy look of one who has been active and eaten well.  I was immediately curious about her food traditions and asked questions.  “Are you a good cook?” I boldly enquired.  She laughed and told me to ask her daughter, who was standing nearby.  I asked.  “My mother is a fabulous cook,” the daughter rejoined.  “But she never let me have soda drinks growing up.” They turned to each other and laughed.  By now I was a fan of the mother so I directed her to this blog, inviting her to share her experience.  I hope she writes.

Winning Support

The Basque woman taught her daughter healthy food traditions in a way that developed a close bond between them.  We need to talk about how to do this in a more difficult setting: the modern food culture.   To start the discussion, here are a few observations:

Avoid power struggles:  To improve the diet of the family, the first step is to win their support.  Explaining works better than lecturing; inviting is better than demanding.  Imposing change without support is stressful for all parties.  My beautiful wife, in simple, loving ways I don’t fully understand, was masterful at winning the children’s support.  She sidestepped the power struggles you sometimes see between parents and children.  At dinner, they weren’t forced to take food they didn’t want, though they were encouraged to try a bite or two of new foods.  But if they took food, they had to eat it.  Actually, the children’s bigger worry was about being last and getting the small serving.

Share control:  You can win support by sharing control.  When writing menus, for example, let them add their favorite foods.  (Everything doesn’t have to be perfectly healthy.)   When you try new recipes, let them vote on whether to add the new food to the regular menu.  Last weekend we made mac & cheese using different cheese combinations.  It was an experiment and we asked the grandkids to be the judges.  They had a great time and actually choose several combinations over Kraft’s version. 

Walk the talk:  Jenna is one of our readers and she writes the popular lifestyle blog That Wife.  Following Healthy Change #38, “Form, or join, a nutrition and cooking club,”  Jenna arranged the use of a church kitchen to start the Hyde Park Cooking Club.  The purpose of the club:  “Share the things we know about cooking from scratch using real ingredients, to create meals that fuel our bodies in a healthy way, and promote change across our communities.”  The club goes beyond recipe swapping; it’s a force for nutrition reform.  Check out Jenna’s cooking club here.

Have fun:  In recent decades people who should have known better looked down upon the domestic arts, including cooking.  Cooking was falsely portrayed as drudgery and few had the common sense to object.  Food Inc. smelled opportunity and introduced a cornucopia of factory-made processed foods.  The fast food giants introduced hyper-processed foods (think of those chicken nuggets).  Restaurants responded with overly complicated dishes no sensible cook would bother with at home.  There was even a false belief that factories could make food cheaper than we could.  This was patently false—we’ve shown that many times in this blog and the N. Y. Times recently agreed with this article. 

The wisdom of tradition tells us that home cooking, besides being good for both health and budget, is creative, relaxing, and a blessing to the family. 

Please comment:  What has worked for you to win the support of your family for good nutrition?

Finding Peace

The quick answer:  We need a little stress to get out of bed in the morning, but too much stress can put us back into bed, maybe a hospital bed. 

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Ever feel like you’re in an endless war; never finding real peace?  Welcome to the scary world of chronic stress.

Some years ago, our local hospital put on a series of six lectures about stress.  (Notice how just putting the work stress in boldface gives you a little adrenaline bump?)  Each week the docs discussed the effects of stress on their area of specialty, and told what they could do about it.  A cardiologist explained the role of stress in heart disease and then explained a relatively new procedure, coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG).  Because CABG starts with the surgeon cutting your chest apart with a power saw, it made a big impression.  A rheumatologist told how stress-related rheumatoid arthritis ravages the joints and explained how those hips and knees could now be replaced.  Ouch!—another operation with a saw.  A G.I. guy told how stress affected the digestive system, and so on.  It was plenty scary and each week the audience grew. 

The last lecture was by a psychologist who gave us some ideas about how to manage our stress.  I’ve never seen an audience so eager to hear a message.  I learned three lessons from the seminar:

1. In each stress-related disease, prevention was way better than the treatment.
2. Prevention translated to stress management.
3. Stress management requires a new discipline.  You can’t just do the old stuff faster or more efficiently; you have to step out of the cycle. 

Hans Selye (1907-1982)

Selye made the first modern connection between stress and disease (the ancient doctors had figured it out also).  Selve identified the stages of protracted stress—how we can go from alarm, to resistance (fight or flight), to exhaustion.  Though stress came in many forms, Selye recognized there was a common response in the body (involving the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal glands, or HPA, axis).  From this common response, a variety of diseases could result, unique to the person.  One person gets ulcers, another rheumatoid arthritis; here is high blood pressure, over there, heart disease; this person gets an allergy, while her friend gets an aggressive form of breast cancer.  Beware the pathology of chronic stress.

Here’s another—more scary—effect of stress:  It accelerates aging.  Cortisol is the body’s primary stress hormone and while it makes you run faster, it also causes you to age faster.  We’ve talked about other aging factors before: like elevated blood glucose and insulin from too much sugar, or an excess of free radicals from too little natural food containing antioxidants.  Today we focus on controlling our cortisol, the stress hormone.

Stress and Cancer

Stress increases the risk of cancer, though the pathway remains unknown.  A 2010 study led by Yale’s Dr. Tian Xu found a genetic mechanism for stress-induced cancers.  The risk of cancer in a cell rises if several genes are simultaneously defective.  Working with fruit flies Xu demonstrated that even if the genetic defects were in different cells, stress (caused by wounds) drove intercellular signaling that joined the effects and increased the risk of cancer.  So, though the mechanism is genetic, stress is a factor in cancer.

 The stress of life is a factor in aggressive breast cancers.  Previous studies had shown higher breast cancer rates among socially isolated laboratory rats.  Now a study of cancer patients, just reported, finds tumor aggressiveness in humans linked to stress levels.  More stress means more aggressive cancers.

Stress and Heart Disease

For a generation we wrongly blamed coronary heart disease (CHD) on dietary cholesterol and saturated fat, even though these foods had been part of our diet for generations before the rise of CHD.  Scientists are now recognizing that CHD is multi-factorial—that a variety of ills contribute.  One cause was given more attention by Dr. Malcolm Kendrick in his book, The Great Cholesterol Con.  Kendrick theorizes that stress, perhaps more than poor diet or lack of exercise, is a main cause of CHD.

The World of Stress

Cycles:  There are cycles to stress—daily (like getting to work on time), weekly (Sunday night worry about undone homework), monthly (bill payment), and even annually (tax deadlines, or Holiday worries).  The laws of Nature do not restrict stress: it can be created out of thin air, and in unlimited quantity.  Stress can have a “ratchet effect”, meaning it rises higher and higher, but doesn’t necessarily decrease.   

Ownership:  To manage stress we must take ownership.  If we blame our stress on events, like the economy, or other people, we are also saying it’s out of our control.  For stress management, control is everything.  The stress process is unconscious, but it is not above management.  Stress can be internal—we cause it ourselves, for example, by failing to plan and then being overrun by events.  Stress is also external, a subconscious response to events or people.  An underlying cause of external stress is fear.  Fear has many forms: fear of authority figures, fear of failure, fear of the unknown.  I’ve lived a few years and had my share of worries and I say this with authority:  Our fears rarely happen but can be disabling. 

Fear:  President F. D. Roosevelt spoke of fear in a wise and calming way, saying the only thing to fear was fear itself.  There is a promise in the scriptures that preparation protects from fear.  I remember a proverb from El Salvador where life could be uncertain:  “The prepared man is worth two men.”  In our uncertain economy many worry about their job.  Making the preparations that improve one’s ability to get another job will reduce stress.  Money in the bank reduces stress also.

Planning:  Procrastination, I think, is the most common cause of stress.  The cure lies in planning.  Just making a “to do” list reduces stress.  Ranking the items by importance, A, B, or C, and resolving to do—today—the most important first (often they’re the hardest so get put off) will take a big load off your shoulders.  The good we can do in life is reduced by every procrastination. 

Managing Stress

The key is not to run faster but to step out of the stress cycle.   Here are seven ways:

1. Family: The supporting love of family can be a great comfort.  Who hasn’t come home from work, carrying all the troubles of the day on their shoulders, and found instant relief by getting down and wrestling with the kids?
2. Best friends:  A study of English children found being with their best friend gave the best relief from stress.  Cortisol, the stress hormone produced by the adrenal glands, was most effectively relieved for children by best friends. 
3. Music: The beautiful wife just saw a bumper sticker for the classical music station:  “Less stress, more Strauss.”
4. Exercise:  Strengthening the body helps it to relax and stimulates a similar process for the mind.
5. Worship:  Don’t you find, in the rhythm of church ritual, clarification of what’s really important?  Whatever your faith, the God who orders the universe knows your name and proffers His peace. 
6. Meditation:  Thinking more deeply about whatever troubles you can lead to new insights, and better paths to follow. 
7. Laugh:  Remember Ferris Bueller?  Life goes by pretty fast; if you don’t stop and have a little fun, you just might miss out.

Healthy Change

The 52 Healthy Changes can be unsettling, even add to your stress.  To counter this, we suggested writing weekly menus and shopping lists to protect you from the last minute panic over what to have for dinner. 

Please comment:  Ever been worried sick?  How do you manage the stress in your life?   

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.

Minimoons, Menus, and Making Bread

The quick answer:  For guys who don't cook, the key to good food (and a little dessert) is a happy wife.

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Swing Girls

Sometimes life takes you by surprise and you bump into something that just makes your soul sing.  Like the Swing Girls playing the big band classic, In the Mood.  This is about a dreadful movie, a Japanese comedy, which required a group of high school girls, want-to-be actresses without instrumental training, to play big band music.  The girls were given five months to learn an instrument and the movie was filmed.  End of story, except the girls had fallen in love with the music—in Japan there’s a fascination with American music, past and present.  The girls wanted to prove they really had played, so they put on a single show titled, “Swing Girls’ First & Last Concert.”  You have to love the fresh innocence of these girls, dressed in school uniforms with knee socks, mimicking the hipness of big band musicians, with soloists taking Japanese-style bows after their numbers. See it here. (Yeah, the pianist’s a guy.)   

The French Laundry

Looking back, our best days were when the house was filled with the energy of young children.  Living on a skinny budget, we were fabulously rich with children.  It was tiring, but almost always joyful.  The children are gone now but we're comforted by treasured memories.  From the start the beautiful wife wanted dinnertime to be special and the kids could be a little unruly so for a time we read the book Miss Manners after dinner.  With kids, a lot runs in one ear and out the other, but a few things do stick.  Imagine our pleasure the other day to see a post about dinnertime on the blog “Dinner a Love Story” by one of our daughters.  See it here—she’s improved on what we did.  Mom’s efforts do make a difference; one more way life can make your soul sing.

It’s hard work rearing children.  It works best, they say, if moms get a break, a little R&R, from time to time.  In our busy years we tried to schedule quarterly weekends away from the children, we called them minimoons and it was my job to plan them.  I liked to find the little forgotten corners of history, older towns with romantic B&Bs ensconced in aged mansions.  (Yes, I'll share my list some day.)  We should make this a Healthy Change, that mom can look forward to a scheduled weekend away.  Mom is the cook in most homes, which ties into this week’s subject: cooking. 

One minimoon we traveled to Yountville, in California’s wine country.  It wasn’t true then, but today Yountville makes this claim:  “More Michelin stars per person than any place on earth.”  Yountville has some great restaurants, like the French Laundry.  The French Laundry is not only the best restaurant in Yountville, it may be the best restaurant in the world (check it out in Wikipedia).   I’ve been reading The Soul of a Chef and the author describes the workings of the French Laundry’s kitchen—it’s so fascinating I rashly promise the beautiful wife I’d take her there if she wants to go.   It’s a crazy thing to promise, you know, but we really don’t eat out much and it’s important to keep the cook happy.  Hope I can get a reservation.

Recipes

The menu at the French Laundry is so off-the-chart fancy that it caused a fresh insight:  What America needs is not more exotic food, but a few super healthy, cook-in-your-own-kitchen dishes to build a new food culture around.  So that’s our goal for the rest of the year, to find those recipes.  We’ve made a good start with these recipes, presented in past posts:

• Split Pea Soup with Ham Bone; we just took some out of freezer to eat this week.  There’s just two of us so we’ve gotten a half-dozen meals from that ham bone.    
• Skip’s Scalloped Potatoes; this dish is best on the weekend, as it takes longer to prepare, but it’s good for several days as leftovers.
• People love Beth's Vegetarian Enchilada recipe; it’s great for cleaning out the vegetables in the refrigerator, you can use about anything.
• Oven-Roasted Fries were offered when we banned all deep-fried food not cooked in your own oil, including that American icon, French fries.  Some folks use sweet potatoes. 
• Skip’s Breakfast Compote, our most popular recipe, it’s tasty, cheap, and healthy.  This summer we enjoyed it with fresh peaches, a little granola, and sunflower seeds.
• Katie’s Granola, we like this so much we sprinkle it on the Breakfast Compote and use it as a snack.
• Skip’s Homemade Applesauce; I got this recipe from Janet Athey in tiny Midway, Utah and made minor changes, like fresh orange juice.  (Tastes better, plus cheaper, than concentrate.)  Martha Stewart posted the recipe at her site, here.   Try this and you won’t want store-bought anymore. 
• We created a good recipe for Whole Wheat Bread but I actually like the recipe submitted by Nancy O, a charming woman with much cooking wisdom.  It’s found in the comments here, but I’ll repeat it below for easier access.
• We’re working on a recipe for healthy mac & cheese.  In the past this meant low-fat but we’re going for whole-grain pasta, healthy fats (not too much), and secret veggies.  For Sunday dinner we’ll use the grandkids as a taste panel.  Who better to judge mac & cheese than kids?

Readers have submitted their favorite recipes and we’re trying out before we share them.  We’ll also respond to the suggestion that we make the recipes easier to find on the blog (starting with this post). 

Whole Wheat Bread (by Nancy O.)

Mix together:
4 1/2 c. warm water (filtered, or R. O. is good)
2 t. yeast (not tablespoons).
1/3 c. vital wheat gluten
¼ t. vitamin C powder – can crush a 500 mg tablet.
6 cups of freshly ground w.w. flour
Let sit for 10 minutes
Then add:
1/3 c. oil (any healthy oil)
1/3 c. honey (agave works as well)
1 rounded T. salt
4 to 6 cups more w.w. flour (not a super-stiff dough)
Beat in mixer for 6 to 8 minutes or by hand for 10 minutes.
Let sit for 10 minutes.
Form into loaves (4), place in greased bread pan, and let rise until double.
Bake at 350 degrees for 35 to 40 minutes.

Note:  This bread works well with little yeast, the most expensive item in most bread recipes.  You can save again by buying yeast in bulk.   To bring out the wheat flavor, I grind the wheat the day before and soak the 6 cups of flour with half the water overnight.

A Weekly Menu

We’ve been a little shy about sharing menus, first because the summer has been busy, but also because it’s a little like exposing one self in public.  Know what I mean?  Another issue is what works for us may not work for others; it’s unlikely there’s a universal diet that’s optimum for all.  We eat simple two- or three-dish meals based on whole foods, mostly with 30-minute recipes.  We plan five meals a week and also use leftovers; Friday and Saturday we improvise and occasionally eat out.   Some weeks the beautiful wife tries a new recipe.

Day 1:  Macaroni & cheese with broccoli salad.  Yes, mac & cheese for Sunday dinner, but we’re testing recipes on the grandkids.

Day 2:  Split pea soup (from the freezer) and watermelon.  This is so easy, you only have to remember to take the soup out of the freezer in the morning.

Day 3:  Dr. Weil’s Roasted Winter Squash and Apple Soup; the beautiful wife wanted to try this recipe.  You have to try a lot of recipes to find one you’ll keep.

Day 4:  BLT on whole wheat, with cantaloupe.  Another simple summer meal, though it seems more like fall now.  Add some cucumber slices and lots of leafy greens and tomato, so this sandwich is more like a salad.

Day 5:  Baked chicken with rice, and spinach salad.  We’re going to try a recipe suggested by a reader. 

Please comment on your favorite recipe, or interesting ideas or books on cooking you’ve discovered. 

Home Cooking

The quick answer:  After a steady decline in cooking skills, the pendulum is poised to swing the other way.

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We were in Sacramento this past weekend, in our usual gathering place—my Mom’s kitchen—eating bacon-lettuce-tomato sandwiches.  Mom adds cucumber and red onion, thinly sliced, to complete her sandwich.  She likes to cook, and did it for a family that grew to ten children.  Even with the help of daughters, that was a lot of cooking.  She’s a good cook.  A child of the Depression, she practices prudence and thanksgiving.

Some years back she observed with surprise that her friends had all stopped cooking.  They had raised their families and as their husbands retired from work, they resigned from cooking.  What was the result?  They’re all dead but one, who suffers from dementia.  Mom never stopped cooking and she’s still alive, in her 90s, doing everything she did before, though a bit slower. 

Staying Alive

Why do we cook?  We cook to stay alive. That's the first rule of cooking!

If a stranger does your cooking, nutrition gets lost.  The focus will inevitably be on cost.  If Food Inc. is involved, you can add addictive ingredients (the triage of vegetable oil, salt, and sugar, for example).  The great food companies understand the role of addictive ingredients in keeping customers.  Think of McDonald’s, Coca-Cola or PepsiCo.  

A few years ago I was part of a medical device start-up that developed an improved method of treating brain aneurysms.  The success of our venture allowed me to leave the stress of the work-a-day world.  What do I do now?  Whatever moves me, though there must be a purpose.  Because I wasn’t working I felt an obligation to help in the kitchen so I thought I would learn to cook. 

There are schools for teaching cooking to us late learners, I discovered.  The Culinary Institute of America (fondly known as the CIA and based in a former monastery in Hyde Park, New York), claims to be the worlds best, and had a nearby campus in California’s wine country, at St. Helena.  Le Cordon Bleu (the phrase means “blue ribbon”), founded over a century ago in Paris, France, but with branches around the world including San Francisco, also claims to be the best.  (We were living in the Bay Area then.)

Unfortunately for this post, before I could enroll I got caught up in writing the memoirs of my father-in-law, a project we finished before his death.  That moved me to write a book about the origins of my own family, trying to save in one book the biographies of ancestors who immigrated to America, beginning with the Mayflower.   I finished just before my own father’s death.  My next book was the history of the LDS Church in the Saddleback Valley where we currently live.  In all this I was moved to save the lessons, the wisdom, learned by these people.  I didn't see the connection then, but it was a necessary preparation for the next topic: nutrition.

In my quest to understand nutrition I began to buy and study books. This was an intense effort; within a year my nutrition library had passed 100 books.  I guess I was influenced by the now-silent voices I had studied because, at a visceral level, I believed food tradition was an important guide to figuring out how to eat and be well today.  Public interest in nutrition started in the ‘20s and ‘30s after the discovery of vitamins and (thanks to amazon.com) you can buy used versions of these early books.  I also followed the modern research.

Through all this, one question repeated:  “Could an ordinary person deduce the healthiest course through the food jungle of our industrial age?” My daughter suggested I start a public conversation with real people by writing a blog and offered her design skills.  As most readers know, we started last January, offering one Healthy Change each week.  As we begin the last quarter of the year, the fall season, our attention turns from nutrients and diseases to cooking.

Learning to Cook

I’m a curious cook, if not a good one.  The beautiful wife follows recipes carefully; I experiment.  With her advantage of experience, it’s not likely I’ll ever be as good a cook.  When she walks into the kitchen she intuitively sniffs the air and knows whether I’m overcooking something, or have the temperature too high.  Sometimes she just sighs.  But I do learn from my experimentation, though it’s not always edible.

Traditionally girls learned the domestic skills from mothers, as boys learned a trade from their fathers.  Life is more complicated now; mom may work and even if she doesn’t many demands compete for her time.  There’s been less focus on teaching cooking.  There’s also less need as you can simply heat convenience food (the Kraft blue box foods are a sad example), eat out, or carry home take-out.  Most grocery stores now include a deli.  For these and other influences, there’s been a historic decline in the cooking skill of the average person.  Funny thing, though cooking skills have declined, the number of (dusty) cookbooks in homes has increased. 

The times are changing and it promises to be a good thing.  Besides a growing interest in nutrition over the last decade, there’s a new interest in cooking skills.  On one level it’s a spectator sport (think of the chefs competing on the TV shows, making exotic 20-ingredient dishes), but practical cooking is getting more attention too.  The magazine Real Simple (life made easier) has a Take Back Dinnertime challenge where they visit struggling moms and teach basic cooking skills that fit the need.  Here are examples from the October issue:

1. A new wife is taught the basic kitchen tools, given a primer on seasonings, and shown how bone-in chicken can be roasted with vegetables for an affordable and nutritious meal.
2. A no-time-to-cook mom is taught to freeze meals in advance, shown dishes made with meatballs, and encouraged to put her children to work helping.
3. A mother of young children with a tiny kitchen learns how to organize her kitchen, dress up frozen vegetables, and appeal to her picky eaters.
4. A mom with teens who wants to kick the take-out habit learns how to make a weekly menu and shopping list.  She also gets tips on using a slow cooker to get a head start on meals.

I applaud Real Simple for this series.  By the way, in the October Martha Stewart Living there’s an excellent article on diet and bone health.  As you likely know, New York magazines, though sold nationally, tend to address the problems of New York people.  Still, though the menus and recipes are sometimes more fancy than practical, you can occasionally find good things. 

The popularity of book clubs among young, hip women of all ages is most interesting.  What if these clubs left fiction and focused on nutrition and cooking?  This would redefine the term “health club” from a subscription gym to a free forum on how to be well.  Each meeting could focus on a cooking skill, and a sample dish could be served, with dessert of course.  What do you think?

Healthy Change

This week we focus on how to improve cooking skills in the home.  As our culture influences the world, perhaps we can one day atone for exporting our fast food by fomenting healthy cooking.  There has been a steady decline in our gross national cooking knowledge in recent generations.  It’s time for the pendulum to swing the other way.

Please comment on what you are doing to advance home cooking, or tell of someone who helped you.  Or share your idea on how to spread the word.

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.

Saving the World

 

The quick answer:  The cure to the global chronic disease epidemic rests on the power of thoughtful and caring people to influence the lifestyle of those they know.

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Stoics and Epicureans

It’s the comments that make this blog work; I’ve said that before.  So it caught my eye that this week’s topic, fasting, drew just three comments.  By comparison, bread, a topic from early in the year when there were fewer readers, drew over fifty.  “Food for thought,” I muttered to myself.

My thought wandered to the Greek philosophers.  Remember the stoics?  Stoics sought harmony with Nature, through the practice of virtue.  Pain and pleasure must be ignored, they reasoned, in the quest for virtue.  If a stoic visits your home, what do you feed him?  Raw carrots, but only after doing the stadium steps until you both drop. 

The stoics’ opposites were the epicureans who, though wary of strong passion, found comfort in life’s pleasures.   Not quite hedonists, they took comfort in true friends, and in the tranquility of a life well lived.  Got an epicurean coming over?  Make a carrot cake and settle down for a comfy visit.

So you’re thinking, “What am I?  Sometimes I want to be stoic, but other times I’m totally epicurean.”  Think about how you bathe.  Do you like a quick shower with cool water to stimulate?  That’s your stoic.  Or does a long bath with a favorite book and a candle burning sound better some times?  Yeah.

The Industrial Revolution

Modern, post-Industrial Revolution society has brought out the epicurean in us all.  Yes, we still work hard, though not physically, but look where we spend our money.  The rise in sugar consumption since WWII is a good measure of our epicurean drift.  Think about the automobile.  The first cars were open to the air and you had to crank them to get started.  Now we’ve powered about everything we can on cars; there’s even one that claims to do its own parallel parking.   I suspect the pendulum has swung about as far as it can.  Blame it on the Industrial Revolution.

In three generations—about a century—the Industrial Revolution changed everything about life in western society.  And we are like people whose house has burned down, picking through the rubble to save what we can.  China is the most interesting country in the world today because they’re rushing through industrialization in just one generation.  It’s a crazy mad dash and as food tradition is thrown aside, chronic disease is on the rise. 

The solution, as always, is conflicted.  Take tobacco, for example.  According to a Reuters’ report, tobacco causes 1 in 3 cases of respiratory disease, 1 in 4 cancers, and 1 in 10 cases of heart disease.  Now that’s a fine business:  tobacco, all diseases considered, kills half its users.  Smoking is rampant in China.  Here’s the conflict:  China National Tobacco is owned by the government and provides 9% of its income.  The U.S. tobacco companies have no qualms about exporting their stuff and the Japanese government, a power in the region, owns half of Japan Tobacco.  There’ll be no mercy shown.

People Helping People

Next week the United Nations convenes a landmark meeting driven by the horrific rise in global chronic disease.   The meeting will focus on four: cancer, cardiovascular, diabetes and respiratory diseases.  (Besides lung cancer, the main respiratory diseases are asthma and emphysema, which when advanced become chronic obstructive respiratory disease, or COPD.)  You can expect to see news story about this meeting.

The intentions of those attending the United Nations conference are good, I suppose, but will they make a difference?  I’m not hopeful.  Food Inc. will be circling the meeting, looking to protect their right to sell food-like products as food. 

Real change comes from the everyday interaction of regular people; we’re social creatures so we like to move together.   We like helping, and sometimes need to be helped.

This brings us to a book coming out next month: The Kitchen Counter Cooking School.  This isn’t a plug for the book—I haven’t read it, so don’t know if its any good.  But I like the idea of the book.  The author, Kathleen Flinn, a business world refugee turned chef, trained at Le Cordon Bleu, makes an offer to nine hapless novices—free cooking lessons.  The inspiration comes from a chance supermarket encounter with a woman loading up on processed foods.  (A prior book, The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry, tells of her adventures at the world’s most famous cooking school.)  A true believer in home cooking, Flinn’s underlying question was, “What holds people back from cooking?”  

Think about the math.  If each of the 9 women Flinn taught in turn each taught nine others, and this continued for ten turns, the majority of the world's cooks would have been trained in healthy cooking.  Women can change the world and a good place to start is the art of making dinner.  We need to move faster, the poor Chinese, rocketed into the post-industrial era, need help but so do the people around us.  Next week’s topic is home cooking.  It’ll be fun. 

What can we do to change the food people eat?  Please comment.

Fasting

The quick answer:  Though we eat for health, fasting helps.

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I must start with an apology.  Our blog schedule calls for a Healthy Change post each Monday, and a follow-up post on Thursday.  We do that most of the time but September is a little complicated, so thank you for your patience. 

Modern Medicine

We were in Washington DC this past weekend.  My seat companion on the flight back was a young woman from Lebanon with a charming French accent, just out of med school and starting a residency in internal medicine.  “Aha,” I thought, “a perfect victim for a nutrition discussion—a stomach doctor who grew up eating traditional food.”  Not so much it turned out; she’s a city girl (Beirut) who eats the modern diet, plus the demands of a doctor’s education leave zero time for cooking nutritious food.  Bottom line:  Doctors not only lack serious nutrition training, there’s not even time to practice it.

We talked briefly about the business of medicine.  The big money is made doing procedures like cardiac angiograms, by-pass surgery, prostate butchery, joint replacements, or even breast implants.  Doctors who only see patients must work hard to support their practice, seeing 30 or more each day. The quickest way to get a patient out of the office so the doctor can move on to the next: write a prescription. 

Economic pressures have shaped modern medicine; it’s a consequence of our free market society.  Drug companies now spend billions marketing drugs—especially the ones you take the rest of your life—directly to the public.  How many times have you heard this advice in a TV ad: “Ask your doctor if ____________ is right for you.”  There ought to be a law against it.

Which leads to this thought: Much has been learned and then forgotten in the history of medicine.  Some things are best forgotten but others are worthy of remembrance.  Barbers no longer offer bloodletting but the modern practice of donating blood is beneficial to the donor as well as the recipient.   Here’s another practice that’s not only beneficial but practically free:  fasting. 

Fasting

In the way that the Harvard School of Public Health dominates the study of nutrition (without really leading), the New York Times has staked out a claim on reporting nutrition.  I confess to having issues with the NYT but on this subject, they're the best.  Last April, Tara Parker-Pope wrote a provocative article “Regular Fasting May Boost Heart Health”.  She cited a recent study showing people who fasted regularly (monthly) had a 58% lower risk of heart disease.  No drug currently marketed has such impact! 

A second study by the same people asked 30 patients to make a food fast (water allowed) for 24 hours and researchers followed various metabolic markers.  Benefits included a 20x surge in men (13x in women) of the human growth hormone (HGH), which protects muscle tissue during fasting by triggering burning of fat stores.  This subject deserves more study, but fasting appears beneficial to health.

What is it with the Mormons?

The people in the above studies live in Utah and are Mormon—Mormons fast for 24 hours, typically two meals, each month and give the money saved to the poor.  Have you noticed how Mormons are in the news right now?  Two of the leading Republican presidential candidates are Mormon.  Most every TV reality show includes a Mormon, even though the LDS are just 3% of the US population.  There’s a TV show, Big Love, about polygamy (though real Mormons haven’t practiced this for over a century, it still fascinates).  A hot Broadway play titled Book of Mormon follows two young missionaries in Africa.  Mormons are like the Amish: their unique life fascinates people but there’s also a certain stepping away by some.  According to a recent poll, 1/3 of Americans hold a negative view of Mormons.  Perhaps we’re just too different.

Though the scriptures that guide this blog are mainly biblical, they also include the Word of Wisdom, a Mormon scripture.  This blog isn’t written for Mormons, who're good at avoiding tobacco and alcohol but do poorly at following the prescriptions of their Word of Wisdom.  It’s for anyone and everyone who wants to improve their health and replace the modern diet with a healthier diet—one derived from the sum of science, food tradition, and scriptural wisdom.  Frankly, to my best knowledge, if you believe this to be a wise approach, this is the only blog available.

Here’s the good part: if you’re not Mormon, you can get all their diet and lifestyle wisdom without going to all those meetings and paying tithing.  And you don’t have to do one of those missions, though I must acknowledge that my years tromping about Central America were both the hardest and most transformational period of my youth. 

Therapeutic Fasting

On my recent plane trip I reread the book, Fasting and Eating for Health: A Medical Doctor’s Program for Conquering Disease, by Dr. Joel Fuhrman with foreword by Dr. Neal D. Barnard, president of the Physician’s Committee for Responsible Medicine.  Here are a few points:

• Fuhrman provides research that fasting combined with a plant-based natural diet is more protective of certain chronic diseases than current practices.
• Therapeutic fasting might last from 1-3 weeks, must be done under the supervision of a doctor, requires adequate water, and is stopped before stored nutrients and vitamins are exhausted, which signals the beginning of starvation.  Fasting isn’t starving; it’s a rest for the G.I. tract but also for the immune system.
• The chronic diseases Fuhrman and others treat with fasting and whole diets include overweight and diabetes; vascular disease, including heart disease; autoimmune diseases, like rheumatoid arthritis; and many others.  In Fuhrman’s view, it’s foolish to suffer from these diseases and not discuss fasting with a qualified doctor.
• The natural diet Fuhrman advocates (when not fasting) is similar to the diet of our Healthy Changes, except he’s even more restrictive of meat and dairy.
• Fuhrman reminds how during the World Wars, protracted scarcity of sugar, meat and natural fats forced people to eat more plant foods and there was a drop in mortality from natural causes in the most affected countries, in stark contrast to the mayhem of war raging about them.

Healthy Change

After I read Dr. Fuhrman’s book the first time I went on a three-day water-only fast.  Three days is the longest time Fuhrman suggests fasting without medical supervision and he reminds of the importance of drinking water while fasting.  Here are three things I learned from my fast:

1. It’s true what they say, that your hunger diminishes as the fast progresses.  I also thought it was easier to fast if you had been eating a healthy diet (remembering past fasts).
2. Much of our eating, especially snacking, is done out of boredom rather than hunger.  I kept wandering into the kitchen looking for a snack and realized that I was actually looking for a break, for variety. 
3. There’s a mental benefit to fasting—you’re less distracted by petty issues and see the big picture more clearly.   Fuhrman says people giving up addictions, like smoking, do it more easily if fasting is included.

One other thing—after a fast, good food is more appealing and junk food more repulsive.  As noted, the LDS fast together as preparation for the first Sunday of each month, giving the money saved from the meals skipped to a fund for the poor.  It’s a temporal practice but with a spiritual purpose, and the guidance for this Healthy Change:

Please comment on your experience with fasting, and the benefits thereof.

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.