The Joy of Shopping Lists

The quick answer:  Use a shopping list to bring order to your life and reduce the chaos—so you have time and energy for life's random delights.

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Order and Chaos

Remember the second time you kissed your dearly beloved?  The first kiss might have been a cautious and tentative venture—an impulsive foray into the unknown.  The second kiss likely followed the first by a fraction of a second but with a lot more, well, gusto.  Life is like that.  Sometimes it’s planned with small, predictable pleasures.  But other times we’re caught unawares and carried away to wondrous places.  Know what I mean?

In the well-lived life we enjoy both:  predictable order and spontaneous joy.  Isn’t this the trick in balancing our lives—to gain the daily benefits of order, yet also be open that “path less traveled”?  I remember the weekday grind of school, homework, and work as a teenager, then the sweet and spontaneous chemistry that just might happen at our Saturday night dances. Remember that night you didn’t want the music to ever end?

Sorry to interrupt your reverie, but this post is about the benefits of a menu-based shopping list.  The menu and shopping list are two key ways of organizing life and freeing you up for those crazy, unplanned Saturday-night-dance delights.

Shopping Lists

Here's a link to a shopping list if you go to several stores (like Costco, a grocery store, and a farmers market or health foods store).  Or if you prefer a list that includes space for menu writing, visit our daughter's blog inchmark.  In a post the grocery list, she shared her approach to meal planning and provided a link to her editable list.  You may be using an iPhone app for a list but if you don’t have a list you like, you’re welcome to try one of these.   

A menu-based shopping list brings big benefits:

#1:  A shopping list is a plan—an antidote to wandering the store aisles wondering what to eat, susceptible to the worst offerings of Food Inc.

#2:  A shopping list saves money—healthy food really is cheaper than the modern American diet, if you take a thoughtful approach to planning. 

#3:  A shopping list saves time—it’s your best way to minimize grocery store runs and streamline meal preparation.   

#4:  A shopping list reduces stress—how many times have you been in that last-minute squeeze to come up with an idea for dinner? 

#5:  A shopping list lets you teach—your family can’t learn by helping if the plan is all in your head.

Please comment:  How do you organize grocery shopping?  Got an app for your iPhone?  Use a printed list you keep in the pantry during the week?  What works best for you?  Please share.

The Sugar War

The quick answer:  If there’s candy in the house, someone will eat it.  Buy your favorite sweets by the piece, not by the bag or box.

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Confession

I don’t eat candy bars.  Usually.  But the kids left us a package of Hershey bars, the larger ones that are sectioned, after making s’mores at a beach bonfire.  “Wouldn’t those Hershey bars be a little healthy,” I kidded myself, “if I ate them with some fresh walnuts?”  The combination tasted so good that I fell off the sugar wagon and ate the whole darn package.

Two days later I had a fast moving sore throat-cold that knocked me down for a week.  Now this isn’t supposed to happen if you’re eating well—that’s been my experience for several years.  So I have this bad feeling that gorging on sugar suppressed my immune defense and made me vulnerable.  So I’m contrite (and coughing) as I write; I knew better.  Ever done that?

A Quick Review on Sugar

The beautiful wife heard that a honeybee only makes 1/12 teaspoon of honey in its lifetime.  Historically, sugar was so scarce before the Industrial Revolution that only a king could gorge on it.  Today everyone can . . . and many do.  Excessive sugar intake is our biggest health problem, leading to diabetes, heart disease, and increased risk for cancer.  This is all well documented.  Here are three excellent researchers who have warned about sugar:

Gary Taubes:  If you want a serious book on the problem of sugar, read Gary Taubes, Good Calories, Bad Calories.  You hear a lot of people who should know better suggest that all calories are equal.  It simply isn’t true.  Eating 500 calories of sugar a day—the American norm—will definitely have a different result than eating 500 calories of fruits and vegetables. 

Bottom line, to expose yourself to overweight, diabetes, heart disease, and cancer, follow the American practice of excessive sugar intake.  Ugh.

David Ludwig, MD, PhD:  Here’s a guy dealing with the sugar problem every day—his specialty is child obesity.  It’s a terrible and growing problem that led to a radical proposal:  Severely obese children should be removed from the care of their parents.  Ludwig is best known for his YouTube video, “Sugar: The Bitter Truth.”  If you haven’t seen it, you should.

John Yudkin, MD, PhD:  He’s gone now but Yudkin was the first scientist to link sugar intake to diabetes and heart disease; others made the connection to cancer.  His 1972 expose of sugar, Pure, White and Deadly, made him famous in England.  The U.S. version is titled Sweet and Dangerous, The new facts about the sugar you eat as a cause of heart disease, diabetes, and other killers.  The title says it all.  (First edition copies of these books are collector items.)

Slashing Sugar Intake

To reform our diet, we must slash our sugar intake—this has to be the first step.  IF you want proof, try a 4-week sugar fast and see how much better you feel.  The AHA offers this wise counsel:  Limit sugar intake to 6 tsp (25 grams) daily for women; 9 tsp for men (it’s based on body mass).  The 2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans makes a similar recommendation.  We just need to “do it.”

Healthy Change #1 attacked our biggest source of excess sugar: If you consume sugary drinks, real or diet, limit yourself to one (12 oz.) serving per week.

Healthy Changes #4 & 10 promote whole grains while reducing sugar intake with this wise rule:  Packaged foods must contain more grams of natural fiber than sugar.

Now Healthy Change #15 introduces a new rule based on this observation:  If there’s candy in the house, someone will eat it—probably Mom.  But sometimes it’s Dad, per my confession above.  So here’s the rule: 

 

Please comment:  How do you manage sugar in your life?  How have you gotten past the false belief that artificial sweeteners like those in “diet” drinks—such a sad, pathetic name—are somehow healthier than real food?  Tell about your experience with a "sugar fast."  Or share your sad story of falling off the sugar wagon.

Healthy Eggs

The quick answer:  Eggs—a great source of healthy fats, vitamins, and other nutrients—are back in favor, again. 

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Review

You’ll recall that the 52 Healthy Changes transform our modern American diet (MAD) to a naturally healthy diet.  The oracles that guide this are food tradition, science, and scripture, especially the LDS Word of Wisdom.  Diet reformation is a little like fleeing Babylon to return to Eden.  You can do this in a year.  I once discussed a book with a publisher and they were doubtful people could stay on subject for a year.  “Couldn’t you do a 15-day program?” they asked. 

The 52 Healthy Changes follow 13 repeating themes, so each quarter we add another layer of understanding to those basic themes.  This is a good time to look over the first 13 changes and grade your progress.  You don’t have to be perfect—you just have to care enough about yourself and your family to be willing to make lasting change.

Fats

The first theme turns to one of the most maligned yet essential foods: fats.  In recent decades our society, with Food Inc and the government holding hands, attacked fats as being unhealthy.  Reduced fat, low-fat, and nonfat versions of about every traditional food were produced.  The war against fat was completely wrong and people who should have known better, made recommendations that were actually harmful.  So we present a different proposal:  Enjoy healthy fats—they make everything taste better, you know—and avoid unhealthy manmade fats.

The unhealthiest fats we consume are trans fats and the oxidized fats found in deep fat fryers.  So the 1^st Healthy Change advised to avoid deep fat fried foods.  That’s a big deal—never eating French fries, donuts, fast food fish filets, onion rings, or crusty chicken.  But it’s also a big benefit.

This week’s Healthy Change, the 14^th , advises to eat healthy fats, especially eggs.  You’ll recall that just a few years ago we were being told to avoid eggs.  Silly products were introduced to substitute for eggs.  I say silly because eggs are the source of life for most species.  Now we’re told to forget what was said—it’s OK to eat eggs again.

Omega-3 vs. Omega-6

You hear a lot about these fats so just to review, here are the basic facts:

1. Both omega-3 and omega-6 fats are essential to our health.  In fact the only essential fatty acids are variations of these two fats.  Remember this—your brain is about 60% fat, mostly saturated fat, but about ¼ omega-3. 
2. Omega-3 fat is essential to life but when exposed to oxygen is highly reactive—meaning it quickly turns rancid—so Food Inc. can’t use them in their processed foods.  So processed foods have used different methods—like hydrogenation—to steadily remove omega-3 fats from our diet.  They did this in ignorance at first; it wasn’t by malice in the beginning but the effect was no less harmful.
3. Omega-6 fats, also essential to life, are more stable when exposed to oxygen.  So Food Inc preferred these fats as they allowed a long shelf life.  Refined oils are generally high in omega-6 fats and deficient in omega-3 fats and that’s the basic problem for Americans—getting the ratio right.

Enjoy Eggs

Before we talk about eggs, we should note that omega-3 fats come in two groups: medium-chain and long-chain.  The shorter (medium chain) omega-3 fats are found in green plants, including algae and other sea plants.  We generally don’t get enough omega-3 fat.  That’s almost funny because we live on a green planet full of omega-3.  Two weeks ago our healthy change recommended eating green salads—a source of medium chain omega-3 fat and other nutrients.

The longer chain omega-3 fats are found in animal products.  It makes sense:  the shorter chain omega-3 comes from simple life forms like plants, while the longer chain omega-3 comes from more complex life forms like fish, fowl, and mammals that eat plants.  Consequently, eggs are also a good source of the longer chain omega-3 fats.

In addition to omega-3 fats, there are other egg benefits:

• Eggs are a good source of fat-soluble vitamins (K, A, D, and E) plus B complex vitamins like choline and B-12, in which many are deficient.
• Eggs contain two carotenoid nutrients important to the eyes—lutein and zeaxanthin.
• Eggs are a “perfect” protein, meaning they contain all the essential amino acids in the right ratio.
• Finally, eggs offer a good mix of fats.  A typical egg contains 1.8 gm of monounsaturated fat, 1.4 gm saturated fat, plus 1 gm of polyunsaturated (including a healthy ratio of omega-3 and -6 fats)

Healthy Eggs

It’s pretty simple:  healthy chickens make the healthiest eggs.  Unfortunately Food Inc wants to produce the cheapest possible egg.  You can’t blame Food Inc for wanting to be efficient, we need that.  But the better form of efficiency would be to make the healthiest egg at the lowest cost.  Which is what happened in olden times when chickens roamed around the barn, pecking at bugs, greens, and minerals.

The best source of eggs I have found is at the farmers’ market, where there will usually be someone selling free range eggs.  The next best source is eggs high in omega-3 fats.  You’ll see this on the carton label.  Basically they have to get some greens into the diet.  I don’t pay attention to the “cage free” egg claims because you can do this by rearing the chick in a cage and then just removing the door when it starts to lay.  By habit, the chicken may not leave the cage and still doesn’t have outdoor access.

Yesterday our daughter showed us the egg incubator her husband devised.  They live in a city but can have four hens in their yard.  So they’re thinking those four hens could provide plenty of eggs and get rid of bugs and weeds. 

Please comment:  There isn’t a fixed number for eggs in moderation, but some sources suggest six per week.  Please share your experience with the topics of this post, eggs and fertility.  Do you have a source for healthy eggs (from healthy chickens)?  Did you crave eggs when pregnant?

Healthy Sunshine

The quick answer:  Aside from a healthy diet and exercise, the next best thing you can do is get enough sunshine to maintain a healthy serum vitamin D level.  It’s good for your mood and can help prevent a long list of diseases. 

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A Curious Intersection

The last 34 days I pounded out the first draft of a book.  As some of you know we live in Laguna Beach most of the year.  It’s a funky town with a curious history:  It was first settled by homesteaders in the 1870s who were all some kind of Mormon—not the kind that followed Brigham Young to settle the Great Basin, but they did consider themselves Mormon and left a spiritual legacy. 

Artists followed the homesteaders in the early 1900s.  Thanks to its picturesque coves and beaches, Laguna became an art colony important to the painting school known as Early California Impressionism.  These people left a spiritual legacy found in the many art galleries today.  Hollywood people followed the artists when the new Pacific Coast Highway reached town.  Laguna was busy during the Great Depression thanks to a new technology: movies with sound.  The beach you see above was the scene of Errol Flynn’s pirate movie, Captain Blood.

Finally in the ‘50s—with Hollywood movies like Gidget, and the sweet tones of the Beach Boys—the town became known for wave riding.  The rise of surfing and skimboarding (invented locally at Victoria Beach) created a unique culture inspired by the Aloha spirit from Hawaii. 

So I had the idea to write a book for visitors that could explain the spiritual roots of a town settled by such unique people.  And let me assure you—the people here are unique.  But here is the curious intersection between Word of Wisdom Living and life in a beach town:  Vitamin D.  In the picture above the best thing that is happening is the production of vitamin D from the action of sun on the cholesterol in your skin.  So let the sun shine.

About Vitamin D

It’s essential to eat vitamin-rich food because the body can’t produce vitamins, with one exception:  With a little sunshine, the body can make it’s own vitamin D.  Unfortunately, the weathermen and dermatologists have scared us out of getting enough sunshine.  Ever had your vitamin D level tested?

Sufficient D is essential to good health; vitamin D receptors are found in cells all through your body.  The growing list of conditions where vitamin D deficiency is a risk factor includes seasonal affective disorder (SAD), osteoporosis, muscle and joint pain including back pain, certain cancers (breast, ovarian, colorectal, and prostate), obesity and diabetes, stroke or heart attack, G.I. diseases like inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) or Crohn’s disease, and immunological diseases such as MS and Parkinson’s disease.  It’s a long list. 

Vitamin D deficiency increases as you move away from the equator.  In the Sunbelt you can get adequate D year around, though it takes longer in winter.  But if you live above the 40^th latitude parallel, roughly a line through Portland, OR, Salt Lake City, and New York City, you can ski all winter in your bathing suit and not get enough D.

There’s an annual cycle to your vitamin D level.  For most, our D level peaks in the last sunny days of summer, then hits rock bottom as winter turns to spring.  This is the point when you feel the blues, lack energy, or suffer muscle aches.  Because spring just started, your D is likely at its annual low-point (unless you’ve just back from sunbathing here in Laguna Beach). 

The Vitamin D Solution

The best book I’ve seen on vitamin D is The Vitamin D Solution, written by Dr. Michael Holick, PhD, MD.  Holick suggests a 3-step solution of 1) testing, to know where you are, 2) sensible sunshine, and 3) safe supplementation when sunshine isn’t available. 

The book makes two remarkable statements about vitamin D and cancer:

First, on the benefit of getting sensible sunshine: “vitamin D could be the single most effective medicine in preventing cancer, perhaps even outpacing the benefits of . . . a healthy diet”.  We hear all the time that we should avoid avoid sunshine to prevent skin cancer, which brings us to the second point.

Second, the book quotes Dr. Edward Giovannucci on the benefits of sunshine for vitamin D versus the risk of skin cancer:  sufficient “vitamin D might help prevent 30 deaths for each one caused by skin cancer”.    I like those odds: 30 better outcomes at the risk of one bad outcome.

Testing Our Vitamin D

I recently saw my dermatologist.  She’s a charming woman who cares about her patients.  We talked about the trade-off between getting enough vitamin D the natural way—by sunshine—versus the risk of skin cancer.  The good doctor pointed out that in southern California, you could get sufficient vitamin D with 15 minutes of sunshine on most days.  Of course you have to show a little skin, so I do my workouts outdoors around noontime, wearing shorts and shirts without sleeves (except when it’s cold).  When no one’s around I take off my shirt, but I try to avoid the “pinkness” that’s the first stage of a sunburn. 

About six months ago I had my vitamin D level tested and the level was 43 ng/mL.  Any value over 30 is considered healthy so I was happy with my method.  The beautiful wife walks in the morning with her talking friends so gets less vitamin D.  So she started laying out for a few minutes midday.  We’ve been taught for so long that the sunshine is bad that it was hard for her but she was recently tested for vitamin D and got a good number also.

Depending on where you live, you need to develop a strategy for maintaining adequate vitamin D.  It’s a bigger challenge for those in the northern latitudes so you need to consult your doctor.  And you can always visit Laguna for Spring break.

Please note the term "a little" sunshine, sun that burns or turns the skin pink may be harmful and should be avoided.  (If you live in the northern latitudes, don’t tolerate the sun, or are concerned about your vitamin D, consult your doctor.)

Please comment:  Want to share your experience with vitamin D, or how you tested?  Do you live in the northern latitudes?  If so, what do you do in winter to maintain vitamin D.

The Joy of Salads

The quick answer:  To meet the national goal of 4-5 daily vegetable servings, eat a green salad most days. 

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Food Math

I grew up in a large family where money, of necessity, was carefully managed.  Our folks were hardworking and prudent.  We drove older cars and took local vacations. Mom and Dad kept the wolf from the door.  Our clothes weren’t the latest style but we felt secure.  If we wanted any of those special things that revolve in and out of fashion, we had to earn them ourselves.  So out of my growing up I offer this bit of wisdom:  If money is tight in your home, be grateful.  Your poverty just might force you to buy unprocessed food and cook it yourself. 

Driving home from the grocery store I asked this question:  What do I pay, on average, for a pound of food?  So I weighted the groceries and calculated the cost.  We paid $2.22 per pound.  My horseback estimate of our average cost is $2.50/lb.  In a minute I’ll estimate the annual cost to feed a family of six.

At Word of Wisdom Living we’re cost conscious.  We really believe that it’s cheaper to buy natural food and prepare it yourself, than to buy the modern American diet (MAD) of processed foods.  It takes more time to cook meals from scratch, but that’s how you put the love into your meals.  This extra work requires that all the family participate.  A meal shouldn’t be about mom slaving alone in the kitchen; rather it can be a daily lesson in family teamwork. 

I did a little math for a family of six (two adults, two teens, two children, in total the equivalent of 4.8 adults):

1. The family eats 95 pounds of food a week—all prepared my mom and her team.
2. The family spends $1016 a month for that food.  (This assumes food at $2.50/lb.)
3. The annual cost is $12,191, but you can spend a lot more if you’re not organized. 
4. The key to provident living is to eat more natural foods in season that cost around 1 $/lb. and less meat, dairy, and processed foods that cost 3-8 $/lb. 
5. Two exceptions to #4:  First, enjoy nuts—though they cost more, eat a daily serving.  Second, take the beautiful wife out to dinner now and then. 

A word about natural foods in season:  Last summer I analyzed the produce section of a Smart & Final store.  Of about 100 different produce items, all but two could be purchased for under 1 $/lb.  (Avocados, for example, cost more.)  I was so impressed with this food value that I vowed to mention Smart & Final in a post.  I just did, but not to exclude Sprouts or Whole Foods, TJ’s, produce stores like Growers Direct, or the ubiquitous farmers’ markets. 

The Vegetable Challenge

Of your 15 or so daily servings of food, try to make 4-5 of them vegetables.  That’s the guidance of the 2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans and is congruent with the canonized scripture on diet called the Word of Wisdom.  After a year of observation we’ve learned this:  it’s hard to eat 4-5 daily vegetable servings.    If you exclude French fries and the ketchup they’re dipped in, the average American eats about 1 daily vegetable serving.  Just one!

Here’s the key to reaching 4-5 daily vegetable servings:  Eat a green salad most days.

Green Salad

Growing up, dinner usually included a salad.  We are a variety: Waldorf salad (apples, celery, walnuts); potato salad (a lot of work); carrot and raisin salad (really healthy except for the mayo); macaroni salad with canned shrimp (my favorite); and a relic of that time—Jello salad, usually with a can of fruit cocktail. 

The beautiful wife grew up eating green salads so that became our standard.  Over time the salads were improved by replacing pale iceberg lettuce with dark greens, like spinach, romaine, arugula and broccoli.  That’s the new wisdom for greens:  the darker the better.   Greens cost more in the winter but year around a salad of dark greens is the best nutrition value you can find.  Last night for dinner we enjoyed a super nutrition bargain: the last of the Black Bean Soup with a spinach salad.  Simple, cheap, healthy, and green.

For more on the benefit of greens, check the YouTube lecture by University of Iowa professor Dr. Terry Wahls.  Wahls successfully reversed her MS by turning to a diet of plant foods with lots of greens.  It’s called Minding Your Mitochondria.

Traditional Salad Dressing

Enjoy your salad with a dressing made from healthy oil.  In our view, olive oil is healthy oil but refined soybean oil, commonly used in commercial dressings, isn’t.  In olden times, vinaigrette salad dressing made of olive oil and vinegar (in a 3:1 ratio), plus salt and pepper with any other seasoning, was kept on most tables.  Substituting lemon juice for part of the vinegar improves the taste for some.  If the tartness of vinegar bothers, add a little honey.  Because oil and vinegar don’t mix, the dressing is shaken to create a temporary emulsion when serving. 

There was real food wisdom in the vinaigrette tradition.  Researchers have discovered that some plant nutrients, like carotenoids, are fat-soluble.  These nutrients are more bioavailable if served with a little fat.  So be sure to include a dressing made from healthy oil with your salad.  For a Basic Vinaigrette Recipe, go here. 

Please comment. We talked about cabbage salad in the post, The Joy of Coleslaw, and shared a recipe.  In the next post we’ll share a pattern recipe useful for a variety of salad combinations.  Please share your favorite green salad recipe, or healthy salad dressing.

The Joy of Cooking

The quick answer:  For best health, you have to be a cook or at least be on good terms with a cook.

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The Siren Song

In Greek mythology the daughters of Achelous lured passing sailors to their death by singing their siren song.  It was a song so irresistible seamen would leap into the ocean and succumb to their power—the men's only protection was to cover their ears. 

The poet Walter C. Perry spoke of this:  “Their song, though irresistibly sweet, was no less sad than sweet, and lapped both body and soul in a fatal lethargy, the forerunner of corruption and death.”

So the term “siren song” refers to a message that is both seductive and destructive.  Which brings us to the brilliant advertising campaigns of Food Inc.  These campaigns too are cleverly manipulative, distort the truth, and bring early death.  I see them on TV but listen with amusement and never ever take their propaganda to be wisdom.

Seduction through Convenience

In the last century, as the Industrial Revolution rolled through our food supply, a repeating song for new factory-made food products was “convenience.”  It came in stages but bit-by-bit the art of cooking was reduced to opening packages.  My first job out of college was with P&G, a venerable company that offered food products like Duncan Hines cake mixes.  Later canned frosting was offered.

The packaged cake mix with canned frosting could serve as a metaphor for the adulteration of our food supply.  The box had a very long shelf life, the cake was easy to make and required little skill, and of course it was sweetly unhealthy. 

The directions on the cake mix called for an egg to be added (the yolk emulsifies the water and oil) but it wasn’t really needed as chemical emulsifiers were added at the factory.  The idea was that adding an egg, though not needed, gave the woman making the cake the illusion of “cooking.” 

We laughed at how easily women could be manipulated but out of company loyalty didn’t ponder long the consequences of our corporate philosophy—what was left when you took all the work out of cooking?  Eating one packaged cake won’t kill you but a diet full of such factory-made products will.  That’s one thing we proved in the last century.

The Joy of Cooking

Some years ago my Mom remarked with surprise, how all her friends had stopped cooking.  They had worked long and hard at rearing their children but as their husbands retired from working, the wives retired from cooking.  They ate out, bought “take out,” or pulled factory-made meals from the freezer.  Today you can eat a variety of foods without ever cooking and these women followed that downward path.  What was the result?  All of Mom’s friends have passed away (their husbands typically died first) except one who suffers from dementia. 

Mom still cooks, enjoys good health, and lives independently.   But she doesn’t have anyone from her generation to talk to—and for my Mom, that’s a big problem.

The Pendulum Swings

The cooking pendulum has started to swing back towards equilibrium.  I see this in our readers, how they are relearning how to cook more and open packages less.  You’re ahead of the curve, this isn’t happening in every home, but you provide a model for the future that others can emulate.  The good Lord bless you.

Please comment:  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.

The Staff of Life

 

The quick answer:  Enjoy your grains whole (more fiber than sugar) and baked only to a golden brown.

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A Brief History of Eating Like Kings

Over the last century (actually 135 years) the Industrial Revolution rolled through our food supply looking for ways to apply the “factory system” to the most traditional of human activities:  cooking meals. 

The first big change was replacing millstones with steel rollers for grinding grains.  The roller mills, it was discovered, could grind the grain much finer and in stages, allowing the separation of bran, fiber, and germ from the starchy endosperm.  The result was a fine, white (due to chemical bleaching) flour and this revolutionized cooking.  Think of the angel food cake, or Wonder bread.

In times past the tedious process called “bolting,” in which flour was sifted through cloth to separate out the finest grains, could make such fine flour.  This was done for kings.  But now the common man could eat the king’s flour. 

This became a repeating theme in the industrialization of food—making available to ordinary people the food of kings.  In fact this had already started—the precursor to the Industrial Revolution had been the steady mechanization of the sugar industry in the 1800s.  Sugar was becoming cheaper and more available and people who wanted to eat as kings could eat all the sugar they wanted.

Doesn’t eating the king’s food bring to mind the Old Testament story of Daniel?  Unfortunately modern man didn’t have the wisdom of Daniel.

Dr. Denis Burkitt

Dr. Burtkitt (1911-1993) was a British surgeon and devout Christian who served in Africa.  He found the indigenous people to be surprisingly healthy and free of the modern diseases.  Burkitt was an intensely curious person and he determined that the removal of fiber from the modern diet was a contributing factor to the modern pandemic of diabetes, heart disease, and certain cancers.  He wrote a book in 1979 titled, Don’t Forget Fibre in Your Diet.  Of course, being English, he spelled “fiber” differently, but you get the idea.  The natural fiber in food is part of what makes it healthy.

More Fiber Than Sugar

There are so many grain-based processed foods it makes your head spin.  In the supermarket there is the breakfast cereal aisle but also the cookie, cracker, pastry, and pasta aisles.  The processing, better-said “adulteration”, of food has turned the grocery into a modern house of horrors.  Am I being too dramatic?  If you have seen a loved one suffer from the modern diseases you might not think so.

Word of Wisdom Living, and every advocate of better diet and health that I’ve seen, recommends eating grains intact—what we call “whole grains.”  It’s hard to sort this out with packaged foods like breakfast cereal so we introduced the “more fiber than sugar rule.”  There’s some science behind this rule, reflected in government encouragement to eat more fiber and also less sugar.  If you must buy packaged foods, the “fiber>sugar rule” is the best guide.

The Acrylamide Issue

The beautiful wife cautions me against making these post too long so I shoot for 500 words as a reasonable test of your attention span.  I’m there now so I’ll talk about the acrylamide issue in the next post.  Briefly, when you cook grains and other proteins to a dark brown, you generate a toxic byproduct called acrylamide. 

Briefly, the protection against this is to avoid all deep fat fried foods , all charred foods, and to follow a new Golden Rule.  This Golden Rule says to cook or bake proteins until they are just “golden” in color, not brown, or especially dark brown.  We’ll come back to this in the next post.

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.

My Favorite Cookie Recipe

I haven’t posted a recipe for a while so, by way of apology, here’s one of my favorites.  This isn’t one of those guilty pleasures, it’s a hearty, healthy cookie.  Men like them, they’re good for duck hunting.  If you run out of ammo you can throw ‘em at the birds.  If you miss, they’ll fly back to get a bite and you’ll get another chance.

I know what you’re thinking:  This recipe isn’t too different from the one on the Quaker Old Fashioned Oats boxtop.  Maybe not, but it’s definitely healthier.  When I health-up a recipe (and fatuously add my name to something that’s been made for centuries) I start with four things:  Make the flours whole grain; reduce the sugar; use a healthy fat; and add something wholesome. 

This recipe has a little more butter, less flour, and 1/3 less sugar than the Quaker Oats recipe.  I also skip the cinnamon and raisins but add healthy walnuts and chocolate chips.  I don’t actually know how healthy the chocolate chips are but I can vouch for the walnuts.  Hope you like ‘em.  If you have a favorite recipe, won't you please share it?

Skip’s Oatmeal Cookie Recipe

Ingredients:

• 1 C butter (2 sticks), softened
• 3/4 C turbinado sugar (or any raw sugar)—this is half the normal amount but the other flavors compensate
• 2 eggs
• 1 tsp vanilla (I add a little more)
• 1 C whole wheat flour (fresh ground is best)
• ¼ C wheat bran (if you have it, otherwise use wheat germ, or just more flour)
• 1 tsp baking soda
• ½ tsp salt
• 3 C rolled oats (Old Fashioned, not instant oats)
• 1 C chopped fresh walnuts, chopped (I add more of this too)
• 2/3 C semisweet chocolate chips (we prefer the mini size and I divide the 12-oz package to get 3 batches)

Directions:

1. Turn oven on to 350 F (after checking that your children haven’t left any toys inside).
2. In a large bowl cream the butter and sugar; beat in two eggs and vanilla.
3. In a smaller bowl blend dry ingredients (flours, salt, and baking soda).
4. To the large bowl, stir in the dry ingredients, oats, walnuts, and chips.
5. Place rounded tablespoons of dough on a baking pan and flatten with a fork.  (If you do this a lot, get one of those scoops with the device that pops the dough out.)
6. Bake 12 minutes or so, cool, transfer from pan to wire grill for a few minutes to dry a bit.  We bag them into sandwich bags and freeze them for later, taking a bag out each day.  If there are kids around give them a cookie with an apple, orange or banana.

Enjoy Meat—Sparingly

The quick answer:  In the end, our care of animals will say everything about what kind of humans we have become.

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The Devil’s Herd

I love the old West . . . the ranches and barns . . . cattle in the fields . . . the smell of the tackroom . . . even the aroma of corrals . . . all those cowboy values and traditions.  My late Uncle Fred was as good a cowboy as you might meet.  He cussed a little and got to church late but was good to the core.  The picture above is his daughter Peggy—who I got in plenty of mischief with as a child—sitting pretty on a handsome cutting horse.

I love western music too.  A favorite song is Johnny Cash singing Ghost Riders in the Sky.  The song, I think, could be a warning for the exploitation of animals by the food corporations.  It tells of a group of ghost cowboys who had fallen short in their lives and were doomed to endlessly ride the skies, chasing the devil’s stampeding herd.  It closes with this cowboy call to repentance (it helps if you sing):

As the riders loped on by him he heard one call his name
If you want to save your soul from Hell a-riding on our range
Then cowboy change your ways today or with us you will ride
Trying to catch the Devil's herd, across these endless skies

The good Lord gave man dominion over the animals but with that power came a duty of care.  This post is a call to reconsider our relationship with the animals of the world, lest we too wind up chasing the devil’s herd.  Yippie yi yaaaaay.

Fanny Farmer

Fanny Farmer (1837-1915) was a remarkable American woman.  At age 16 she suffered a crippling stroke, sometimes had to use a wheelchair, but gained fame and comfortable wealth by writing the Fanny Farmer 1896 Cook Book, a bestseller still in print.  Ms. Farmer introduced careful measurement (tsp, tbsp, cup) to recipes.  She also taught diet at Harvard Medical School and was director of the Boston Cooking School. 

So Ms. Farmer can be considered a guide to proper dining in the early 1900s.  Her cookbook provided a month of dinner recipes and each recipe started with meat and potatoes.  In America, as the 19^th Century opened, meat was in the center of the plate at every meal.  Though not all that healthy, a meat-based diet was possible then.  It would be catastrophic today, which brings us to our modern problem of chronic disease.

Chronic Disease

Meat is good for us—it’s the only natural source of vitamin B-12 that is essential to our health—but too much meat is problematic.  In the modern American diet (MAD) we eat three or four times more meat than needed.  An Oxford University study of the English diet found that reducing meat intake to three servings weekly—the amount a person might consider “sparing”—would reduce mortality from chronic diseases.  Specifically, they projected these benefits for England:

• 31,000 fewer heart disease deaths each year.
• 9000 fewer deaths from cancer.
• 5000 fewer deaths from stroke.

As America is a much larger country than England, we can expect commensurately bigger benefits.

A Family Council

I like meat.  We enjoy fish, poultry, and red meat.  We’ve found a local source of good pastured beef and enjoy a roast if we have guests for Sunday dinner.  But, following the Word of Wisdom, we eat meat sparingly.  Each person gets to decide what “sparing” means for them but as a rule, guys will want more than women.

So meat is a family issue, one that is best addressed in thoughtful and respectful conversation.  Many homes have the practice of using “family councils” to address important decisions.  Diet issues like the ratio of meat to vegetables qualify as such a decision.  As women tend to outlive men, if you wish to be together for more of those last golden years, it’s really important that guys get serious about healthy eating when they’re young.

Healthy Change

Please comment:  Share the ways you feature meat in your diet.  Where do you find healthy meat?  How do you use it as a condiment, rather than the main course?  What do you do to show reverence for the Creation of animals?

Healthful Snacks

The quick answer:  There’s nothing wrong with a snack between meals.  Just make sure it’s real food. 

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The 13 Themes

As you know, the 52 Healthy Changes follow 13 themes, which repeat in the quarters of the year and when taken together reform the modern American diet (MAD).  The three oracles of scripture, tradition, and science guide our transformation.  A reader asked to see the themes listed so here they are:

#1   Slash sugar intake

#2   Enjoy healthy fats and shun unhealthy fats;

#3   Organize your diet;

#4   Proper meals;

#5   Exercise;

#6   1^st vegetable topic;

#7   Micronutrients (antioxidants, vitamins, fiber, minerals);

#8   Special topics (snacks, fasting, natural light, spices);

#9   Meat topics;

#10 Whole grains;

#11 Home cooking;

#12 2^nd vegetable topic;

#13 More special topics (sunshine, sleep, stress, probiotics/fermentation)

This is a work in progress so expect these to change with time as new information appears, or to combat some new craziness dreamed up by Food Inc.

Food Inc.=Tobacco Inc.

We believe in and support the free enterprise system.  We really do . . . with one caveat:  We support it as long as the corporations look after our best interests.  Unfortunately when a business gets large, as happens in a big country like America, there’s a tendency for the ruling powers to stop caring about the customers.  This is sadly true with Food Inc.

 I don’t think it has to be that way, but at the moment I can’t think of a large food corporation that really cares about us consumers.  It’s just about the money.  Some fine day in the not-too-distant future, we may look back at their conduct as the low moral point of our time.  

A fascinating article in the N. Y. Times, “The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food,” told of a 1999 gathering of the titans of Food Inc.  The CEOs of Kraft, Nabisco, General Mills, P&G, Coca-Cola and a few others gathered to discuss their role in the rise of obesity that threatens our healthcare system.  One speaker linked the products of Food Inc to the rise of obesity and then did the unthinkable—the one thing no Food Inc CEO wanted to hear—he compared them to the tobacco companies.

The CEOs weren’t ready to hear the message that their crown jewel products were part of our obesity problem, and that they were acting much as the cigarette companies had, so the meeting was a failure.  It was probably their last chance to be good citizens. 

The author of the article, Mike Moss, has a book out this spring, Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us.  The book promises to reveal the clever science used to find the “bliss point” in factory food—the optimal mix of sugar, salt, and fat that can hook us on their products.  It’s troubling, the sophistication and science being used to promote factory made food-like substances of doubtful healthfulness.

Healthy, Affordable Snacks

The goal of this post is to rediscover healthy snacks.  In a prior post we summarized reader’s healthy snacks.  Here are ten ideas for traditional snacks that are wholesome and affordable:

1. Fruit:  Nature wraps some fruits in individual servings, like the apple, banana, orange, and peach.  Purchased in season, they’re a nutritional bargain.  In winter, enjoy dried fruits.
2. Veggies:  Carrot sticks and celery (with PB) are favorites.  But try broccoli, cauliflower, or zucchini with a little hummus.   Important point:  To get your daily five veggie servings, you should get at least one in your snacks.
3. Green Smoothies; easiest way to eat your greens plus you get fruit too.
4. Seeds:  Sunflower seeds are a healthy treat.  Popcorn is a real bargain—put popcorn in a paper bag, staple it closed, and pop it in the microwave.
5. Nuts: Buy them in bulk at harvest, save them in the freezer, and enjoy year around. 
6. Homemade bread:  This is my favorite snack, toasted with butter.  You can bake a loaf for under a buck if you buy yeast in bulk.  Homemade bran muffins make a great snack; put a batch in the freezer.
7. Homemade granola makes a great snack too.  Try Katie’s Granola Recipe.
8. Hard-boiled eggs:  A great treat: boil them on Monday and enjoy all week; pastured eggs are high in omega-3 fats.
9. Cheese, especially with bread or healthy crackers, or in a quesadilla.
10. Sardines:  For essential long-chain omega-3 fats, sardines are the best value.  Our grandparents ate them on crackers; we should rediscover the humble sardine.

Healthy Change:  We used the weekly menu rule to take control of food selection.  To control snacking, prepare a snack plate early in the day. 

Please comment:  When we eat regular, healthy meals, we snack less and make better choices.  You can find healthy store-bought snacks but ours are mostly homemade.  The best snacks are minimally processed—whole food snacks are best; we draw the processing line at granola and trail mix.  Please share your favorite snack ideas.