Filed under: Adrenals, Alternative Medicine, Always Learning (Education), Be Healthy!, Biology, Birth, Conventional Food Myths, Diabetes, Disease, Enzymes, Fermentation, Food Science, Get Inspired!, Healing with Food, How to Eat, How to Heal, Illness, Know Your Fats, Lifestyle Incentives, Making Choices, Medicine, Mineral, National Disorders, Obesity, Our Bodies, Processed Foods, Real Food, Research, Seasonal Meals, Stupid Allopaths, Vegetables
It’s always interesting to find older documents and writings that support current hypothesis. Even in the 1950’s, while America was being sold it’s first lot of convenience foods, margarine, curbing calories to keep your girlish feminist figure and anti-fat processed whats-its, there were still a few who spoke out against it, providing knowledge and an easy-to-understand breakdown of the information.
Today we have the wonderful Robert H. Lustig, MD, to provide the straight-talk on sugar, fats and calories, after 60 years of the run-around. Lustig is a current UCSF Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Endocrinology, and in this video below, (in case you haven’t watched it yet) explores the damage caused by sugary foods. It’s the bitter truth. Here, he argues that fructose (too much) and fiber (not enough) appear to be cornerstones of the obesity epidemic through their effects on insulin. I know that the low-carb, primal community might balk at this, but this is why we have Matt Stone. I also think it’s really important to stress individual uniqueness when discussing health. While it’s true that no one does well on a highly processed diet, like Donna Gates says, “we’re like snow-flakes [...] not everyone should be vegetrarian or high fat or low fat, or vegan or raw or macrobiotic,” each person’s body will dictate its own equilibrium when we are willing to support it’s needs. I do recomment you watch this 80-minute video, it’s a great little lecture to watch with your family. Lustig even goes into the biochemsitry of it all in a quick and painless way.
Back in 1958 we had Dr. Richard MacKarness also talking about calorie fallacies and carbohydrates (made available in chapter 2 from his work Eat Fat, Grow Slim): “Before going any further,” he writes, “it is important to be sure of the meaning of some of the words we have been using:
FAT, PROTEIN, CARBOHYDRATE and CALORIE.
Fat, protein and carbohydrate are names for the main chemical classes of which foods are composed. Just as we visualize something like a garden-gate when the question-master in “20-Questions” says that an object is vegetable with mineral attachments, so when someone says that a food is fat and protein most of us might visualize an egg or a steak and when they say fat and carbohydrate, we think of bread and butter or biscuits or cake. Since the rise of dietetics as a branch of popular science, many people have learned enough about the chemical composition of common foods to say roughly how much fat, protein or carbohydrate they contain.
To help you decide exactly about the composition of any particular food, tables of those with high fat and protein and low carbohydrate are given in Appendix B.
The beauty of this method of slimming is that once you have got the hang of the proportions of fat, protein and carbohydrate in the foods you choose to eat, you can afford to ignore calories altogether. For as Banting so wisely said:
Quantity of diet may be safely left to the natural appetite. It is quality only which is essential to abate and cure corpulence.
The much publicized diets with emphasis solely on calories are fallacious. It is excess carbohydrates and not calories only that make a fat man fat. The tiresome business of totting up daily calories, on which most modern reducing diets are based, is a waste of time for an obese person. Because, as Professor Kekwick and Dr. Pawan showed, a fat man may maintain his weight on a low-calorie diet, if it is taken mainly as carbohydrate, but he will lose weight on a much higher calorie diet provided he eats it mainly in the form of fat and protein.
“What is a calorie?”
The calorie is the unit of heat. Just as inches are units of length and pounds or grams are units of weight, calories measure the amount of heat (and therefore energy) a particular food will provide.
- One gram of fat provides 9 calories.
- One gram of protein provides 4 calories.
- One gram of carbohydrate provides 4 calories.
All food, of whatever sort, provided it can be digested and absorbed from the gut, can be used to give heat and energy for muscular movement and the various internal processes of the body.
The steam engine analogy holds good this far:
Fuel → Heat → Movement
Theoretically, the amount of heat (number of calories) that can be provided by any particular bit of food is the same whether it is burnt in a steam engine, the human body or a special laboratory oven called a calorimeter. The one exception to this is protein which is not burnt quite as completely in the body as in the calorimeter.
But in obesity, the kind of food more than the amount determines the extent to which it is burnt or stored as fat. The proportion of calories obtained from carbohydrate is more important than the total calorie intake.
Some people cannot get used to the idea of the body burning food to give itself heat and energy. “Where does the burning take place?” they ask.
Well, of course, there are no flames, but obviously since the body maintains a constant temperature even on a cold day, heat must come from somewhere and combustion of a sort does occur in every cell in the body just as it does in a pile of grass mowings left at the end of the garden.
The most astonishing thing about protoplasm, which is the living basis of every cell, plant, animal or human, is the way in which it is able to carry out, without any apparent effort, chemical processes which could not be performed even in the largest and most modern laboratory. The light flashing at the end of a firefly’s tail involves chemical processes more intricate than those going on in the atomic piles at Harwell.
Dr. Edward Staunton West, Professor of Biochemistry in the University of Oregon Medical School, Portland, U.S.A., emphasises this point in the introduction to the 2nd (1956) edition of his textbook of Biophysical Chemistry, which deals with the chemistry of human metabolism:
“One of the most marvellous things about protoplasm is the efficiency of its chemical processes and the mildness of the conditions under which they take place. Food materials are synthetised and organised into definite kinds of highly complex protoplasmic structures in an aqueous medium of nearly neutral reaction and at body temperature. Carbohydrates and fats are rapidly and completely oxidised, under the same mild conditions, to carbon dioxide and water with the liberation of as much energy as if they had been burned in oxygen at the temperature of an electric furnace. Here in protoplasm we have chemical reactions proceeding quite differently from those commonly observed by the chemist in his test tube. The main reasons for the difference is that the chemical processes of living things are largely controlled by catalytic systems known as enzymes which are highly specific in their actions.”
Nevertheless in spite of the qualitative differences between the chemistry of an engine and of the human body, the same basic reaction takes place whenever or wherever there is combustion with the evolution of heat:
| Basic Equation | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| CARBON + OXYGEN | = | CARBON DIOXIDE + HEAT | ||
| Fuel from food or in fat store |
+ | Air breathed in | = | Air breathed out | + | HEAT via a complex biochemical reaction → energy and movement |
|---|
Here the steam engine analogy with the human body should properly end, but most slimming pundits press on and argue that it is your calorie intake, or total consumption of food, alone which determines whether you gain or lose weight. Fat is often severely restricted because it is the most concentrated source of calories.
Mr. Marvin Small, in his popular pocket book, Reduce with the Low Calorie Diet, 1955 edition, with an introduction by Dr. James R. Wilson, secretary to the Council of Foods and Nutrition of the American Medical Association, writes:
“While it is possible to become overweight from over eating almost any food, no matter how few calories it may contain, it is the high calorie foods which are usually the cause of ‘men running to belly and women to bum,’ as an old English couplet put it. You are on the road to successful dieting when you learn how to satisfy your appetite and appease your hunger with filling low calorie foods, instead of concentrated, high calorie foods.
Why Fat makes Fat
Each gram of fat (about ¼ teaspoonful) contains 9 calories, while each gram of pure protein or carbohydrate contains only 4 calories. An ounce of pure fat contains 255 calories, while an ounce of pure carbohydrate or protein contains less than half — 113 calories . . . an astounding difference! So your first lesson is that when you substitute carbohydrate or protein for the fat in your diet, you cut down the calories.”
Anyone who knows their stuff these days can see that Mr. Small is over-simplifying the matter. He assumes that the body treats all kinds of fuel alike, as a steam engine does, and that once you have over stepped your calorie ration for the day, the excess is laid down as fat whether the fuel is fat, carbohydrate or protein. To him, fat is the most fattening food because its calorie value is greatest.
We now know that the calorie value of fat is irrelevant as far as slimming is concerned, and that fat is the least fattening of all foods because in the absence of carbohydrate it (and to a lesser extent, protein) turns the bellows on the body fires in a fat person and enables him to mobilize his stored fat as well as helping him to burn up the food he eats more efficiently.
Compare what happens when Mr. Fatten-Easily eats fat and protein with what happens when he eats carbohydrate.
On a high-fat diet, water accounts for 30% to 50% of the weight lost. (The other 50% to 70% comes from body fat.)
Turning the bellows on the body fires makes all parts, including its largest organ, the skin, work harder. This gives rise to a considerable increase in the insensible loss of water from the skin surface and to a subjective feeling of warmth. Fat people on high-fat diets often remark on this.
Insensible or “dry” perspiration is water which evaporates from the skin without appearing as beads of sweat. It has no smell. We all lose water in this way all the time, but when a fat person’s metabolism is stimulated by a high-fat diet, this insensible perspiration increases in proportion to the rise in the metabolic rate, and contributes to the weight loss.
To go back to the steam engine for a minute: the orthodox view is that a fat man’s engine is stoked by a robot fireman, who swings his shovel at the same pace whether fat, protein or carbohydrate is in the tender. This is true for Mr. Constant-Weight, but as he does not get fat anyway, it is only of academic interest to us. It is certainly not true for Mr. Fatten-Easily, with whom we are concerned. Mr. Constant-Weight has a robot stoker in his engine. The more he eats—of whatever food—the harder his stoker works until any excess is consumed, so he never gets fat. Recent research has shown that Mr. Fatten-Easily’s stoker is profoundly influenced by the kind of fuel he has to shovel. On fat fuel he shovels fast. On protein slightly less fast but on carbohydrate he becomes tired, scarcely moving his shovel at all.
His fire then burns low and his engine gets fat from its inability to use the carbohydrate which is still being loaded into the tender. Mr. Fatten-Easily’s stoker suffers from an inability to deal with carbohydrate, but he can work fast on fat and protein. What is it that causes Mr. Fatten-Easily to be affected by carbohydrate in this way while Mr. Constant-Weight can deal with all foods alike and burn up any excess automatically, like the robot stoker?
The answer to this question has only recently been found and it is one of the keys to obesity. Biochemists and physiologists have discovered that Mr. Fatten-Easily’s inability to deal with carbohydrate is due to a block in the chain of chemical reactions leading from glucose to the release of heat and energy in his body. Glucose is the form in which most carbohydrate is absorbed from the gut. Every bit of starchy or sugary food we eat has to be broken down by our digestive juices to glucose or other simple sugars, before it can be taken out of the gut and into the body for use. Once through the gut wall, the glucose, in solution, is carried in the blood along veins leading to the liver.
What is not wanted for immediate conversion to heat and energy is stored in the liver as a complex sugar called glycogen and further storage can take place by changing glycogen into fat.”
Do you remember this from Lustig’s video?
“In Mr. Constant-Weight these chemical changes go smoothly and are reversible, i.e. the fat can quickly be broken down again to give energy and, by stepping up his internal combustion, Mr. Constant-Weight soon burns up any excess carbohydrate he has eaten, thus keeping his weight steady. The chemical reactions which enable the body to deal with food in this way are extraordinarily complicated and we know that they can go wrong. We also know that they depend on certain hormones and enzymes which some people may lack or be unable to manufacture properly.
It is this lack or deficit which is thought to distinguish the Fatten-Easilies from the Constant-Weights, who can deal with an excess of carbohydrate by fanning their metabolic fires until the surplus is consumed.
Mr. Fatten-Easily’s trouble is thought to be his inability to oxidise pyruvic acid properly—the so called pyruvic acid block . He gets stuck with large quantities of pyruvic acid which is bad for him in two ways:
- He cannot readily use it for energy, so he takes it by a short cut to his fat stores.
- It prevents the mobilization of fat from his fat stores by inhibiting the oxidation of fatty acids.
If a fat man stops eating carbohydrate, he makes little pyruvic acid and removes the stimulus to his “fat organ” to make fat. By eating fat and protein he by-passes his metabolic block. To put it another way: obesity may be regarded as a compensatory overgrowth of the fatty tissues providing for an increased use of fat by a body incapable of using carbohydrate properly.
Feed a fat man fat and protein in place of starch and sugar and he will deal with that quite well, drawing on his stores of body fat in the process. Paradoxically, he will eat fat and grow thinner.
He will also feel well because he will no longer be subjecting his body to starvation and he will be tackling the fundamental cause of his obesity which is not over-eating but a defect in the complex biochemical machinery of his body.”
____________
All of this really had me going back to the importance of the principles discussed in the Body Ecology health methodology.
What do you guys think of all this?
Filed under: Be Healthy!, Celebrations, Cuisine, Food, Get Inspired!, Go Organic!, How to Eat, I Share, gluten free
Or, what I meant to say was, I’m famous in my family for making these; famous, I tell you. Family secret, see, so the only reason I’m offering them up (besides out of the goodness of my heart, of course) is because of Nourished Kitchen’s “Clean Your Plate” Recipe Challenge, and for the month of February, it’s all about the Olive Oil, baby. This will be so much fun, even if you don’t win, chances are, you’ll have dozens of new recipes to try out! I was trying to figure out what to do here… I mean, there’s always salads and dressings, even dukkah. But what would showcase the flavor but not seem overwhelmed by either flavor or obviousness? Plus I really wanted an excuse to link to Shauna’s new gluten-free boule too (see link below), so here goes:
I discovered this recipe by accident when I was asked by a friend to kind of cater her a vegetarian birthday dinner six years ago. I’ve never been a fan of the traditional tomato bruschetta, it was often just cold, and the bread was kind of white and boring and her birthday is in October, and since I was wheat sensitive it was always kind of …” how bad do I wanted to feel in the morning?” sort of question. So, this is what I came up with: a roasted tomato & goat cheese spelt bruschetta appetizer. Just so happens that using really good olive oil really makes this little dish sing.
You’re going to need (using only organic ingredients is always highly, highly recommended):
- 8-15 Roma tomatoes, sliced in half
- other tomatoes if not using the full 15 romas. (I like heirlooms like black russians or even grape tomatoes).*
- 1 oz. Goat cheese
- 12 1/4-inch-thick slices from a whole-grain spelt, sourdough boule. (try it with any rustic grain bread or this gluten free bread. Perfection!!)**
for the marinade:
- 1/4-cup thinly sliced fresh basil + 2 tablespoons
- 1/8-cup other favorite minced herb (tarragon, marjoram, parsley)
- 1-1/2 Tbsp. balsamic vinegar
- 3 Tbsp. extra virgin olive oil
- 3/4-tsp. salt
- 1/4-tsp. black pepper
- 3 cloves garlic, 2 of them pressed
- Parmesan Romano cheese
- 1 tsp sucanat or honey (optional) ***
* These tend to be jucier, so you may need to lengthen the roasting time.
** You want the slices to be about half the width you’d need for a good sandwich.
***Use sweeteners only if your tomatoes are not absolutely primo!
Preheat oven to 400. Line baking sheet with parchment paper. Coat with a little brush of extra virgin olive oil.
In a mixing bowl combine halved tomatoes, with the 1/4-cup basil (and other herbs), vinegar, olive oil, and salt and pepper marinade, let sit 10-15 minutes.
Arrange tomatoes cut side up, in a single layer on baking sheet.
Roast about 45 minutes or until shriveled and sweet.
Cut bread into 1/2-inch slices, drizzle a little olive oil on them and place on the rack in the hot over to toast, for about 4 minutes, total; turning them once. You want them just barely golden brown and subtly crisp. You don’t want them too mush or soft and your don’t want them as hard as a cracker.
Rub hot toast on both sides with the remaining piece of garlic to bring out a luscious layered aroma.
Spread about 1/2-tsp. goat cheese on each toast.
Top with tomato mixture, chiffonade the remaining basil, fresh Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese and that all-important last drizzle of lovely extra virgin olive oil for flavor and sparkle.
When you put it all in your mouth, you have the nutty earthiness and tang of the spelt sourdough, it crunches nicely under the weight of your teeth, you get the whiff of garlic mingling with the grain and then you get the creamy zingy yumminess of the goat cheese, the mellow sweetness of the herbed tomato, and finally the fruity glaze of the olive oil. This is a great appetizer for 6-8 or 3-6 as a summer lunch with a big salad. Enjoy! And please come back and leave a comment to let me know if you’ve tried them! xo. the LB
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Much of what follows comes from my notes during a One Radio Network (Patrick Timpone) interview about “Curing Tooth Decay,” with Rami Nagle of Los Gatos California (you can find out more about him and his book, here). A supporter of the Weston A. Price and Price-Pottenger Nutrition Foundations (… wait-wait: you have read Nutrition & Physical Degeneration already, haven’t you??! ) here, he provides several important pieces of knowledge explaining why the current theory behind tooth decay is completely faulty and how the relationship between our teeth and what we eat helps us or harms us, greatly. I also need to thank Steven Guyenet of Whole Health Source for his continuing series on Malocclussion: Diseases of Civilization. You should check him out, too. AND while you’re at it, Fight Back Friday’s are always worth the ride, come join in! Note: this is an expanded continuation of a post I did in December. Buckle in, it’s gonna be a long’un.
_______________
The Importance of Fats & Minerals:
While Rami Nagle later segues into a little background on his and his wife’s history in practicing vegetarian and vegan, even high raw vegetarian diets, he begins by discussing his admiration for the traditional wisdom, which Dr. Weston Price preserved in his studies. Price’s work has inspired many, many people (including me) to take a non-vegan approach to nutritional health. Nagle says:
Note the magnificent dental arches and beautiful teeth; tooth decay was almost unknown in many districts.
He only gave us a gateway into a world that really does not exist today in the same way. He took 18,000 pictures. He measured people’s teeth, checked if they had cavities & did nutrient analysis on all the foods they ate. The wisdom of this generational knowledge has, in large part, been lost; his work just shows how tremendously our civilization has strayed from a harmonious lifestyle.
As an example, he talks about Price’s work with the Australian Aborigines (those still living a traditional lifestyle), who for 1000’s of years, had known of no one suffering from cavities or dental decay… well there was one guy: a white dude from Europe. That was it. Wherever a “modern diet” (depleted, processed, canned, or chemically preserved) was practiced, however, on reservations or in the cities, facial & structural abnormalities suddenly became common, & eventually their health completely fell apart.
Cavities are always an indicator of disease in the body. But in the interest of brevity (really follow that link above and read Nutrition & Physical Degeneration for free or check it out at your library), what Price discovered in all of his travels was that the indigenous, “primitive” or isolated cultures who displayed perfect health, no matter their specific food preferences, always had two key things in common:
- They consumed four times more minerals (overall) than current nutrition dictates.
- and more than ten times the amount of fat soluble vitamins (A,D,E & K – whereas, B & C are water soluble)
Many have heard how our modern food stuffs, like white sugar and white flour aren’t exactly healthy (actually, they’re toxic), but few actually understand why this is so. Well, these foods depletes our body of minerals. Two hundred years of industrial food refining has made the problem worse. What few minerals survive the above processes are often removed from the plate, not least through our practice of chopping and boiling food and discarding the water.So we are dealing with a nutrition system here in the west that suffers largely from a net-loss of minerals in the good foods you do eat (due to conventional agricultural methods) and then experience further depletion from common modern “white” foods; a very vicious circle.
Wherever the Aborigines were placed in reservations & fed on the foods of commerce, dental caries were rampant, destroying their beauty, preventing mastica - tion, promoting infections & serious injury to their bodies. Note the contrast between the primitive woman in the upper right & the 3 modernized women.
Three of the great nutritional pioneers of this century, Lady Eve Balfour, founder of the British Soil Association; American dentist and researcher Weston Price, and British medical Dr. Robert McCarrison (later knighted), all spoke at length about the importance of minerals, in soils and the food chain.With roughly 7,000 industrial chemicals in regular use, the demand for unpolluted food and drink cannot be currently met. Less often mentioned by writers on organic produce is that these foods contain more nutrients: vitamins, minerals and trace elements without any need for genetic modification. Well organically-manured soil provides the minerals and trace elements that plants can take up and use (as they cannot make their own), rendering them much stronger to fight disease. The ensuing food from such crops will, as McCarrison stated sixty years ago, provide more complete foods for the humans and animals who eat them.
How Teeth Provide a Looking-Glass into your State of Health:
Nagle then goes on to discuss the crisis reason why he and his family began to eat this more nutrient-dense way: his Daughter. He remarks how during pregnancy they ate a mostly vegetarian diet, but both had been long-time vegans in the past, his wife in particular. As such, when their daughter was born, she ate only organic foods and breast milk. But then one day shortly before her second birthday, they noticed a brown spot on their daughter’s front tooth, the beginnings of a cavity. Concerned, they took her to the dentist, who only confirmed, yup, it’s a cavity. And they were sent home to keep an eye on it. Problems was, over the next few months more and more developed all over her few teeth and … in a short time that first tooth just disintegrated. This got to ‘em. Understandably they were really scared. And he just began to wonder about conventional dentistry, of course, there were treatments for that but what do you do for a 2 year old?? What do you do for that situation?
At the same time, he was also suffering from caries (1-5 of them depending on which dentist he visited.) that “couldn’t be fixed,” as there was not enough tooth left. In conventional dentistry, the only option at that point is to get crowns, which run $2500 each! Three dentist’s visits meant three opinions and this is why he doesn’t endorse visiting any dentist who doesn’t have the capabilities of providing digital x-rays. The old school ones don’t necessarily diagnose accurately, have too many shadows and can lead to unnecessary dental treatments or even surgery.
Deformity patterns produced in the modernized Aborigines of Australia by white men's food. Note the undershot mandible, upper left, pinched nostrils & facial deformity of all four.
Isn’t it interesting, that every time you get older, the amount of cavities increases? Proving that our lifestyle promotes its rate of problems cumulatively. After so many fillings, you move on to crowns and then to root canals ( a major catch-22, because of their 40% success rate, even on teeth which are relatively healthy to begin with) and finally to extraction. So by the time you’re in your 60’s, sometimes 10 teeth have been or needed to be removed. This is not normal, nor is it an indication of a healthy specimen. Lucky for Nagle, (and us) it turns out, that you can turn most anything around with Nutrition (depending on severity of circumstances of course). And you can save most, if not all of, your teeth.
The Flaws of the Current Theory
Today’s dentists explain that the bacteria that live in our mouths and get stuck on our teeth, eat the foods, causing acids which deteriorate them, but this is not entirely true. In point of fact, the foods which cause cavities the worst are those, which the bacteria Cannot and Will Not eat! Processed foods like white flour & white sugar have been stripped of their nutrients, and so the bacteria have no reason to eat them, they will gain nothing by doing so: they don’t have pleasure centers in the brain (wink). Hm. me-thinks there’s a lesson to be learned here … and isn’t amazing how they’ve got us frightened of our own saliva!!
(Did you know that we’re mostly bacteria? And that that’s a good thing?)
The native clans that Price visited didn’t ever brush their teeth, and yet had perfect teeth, even though they’d never brushed their entire lives! Now, how does that happen? Nagle wondered.
Here’s the deal: Your teeth are porous. They are structured with millions of miles of tubes in them, through which a fluid (very similar to what runs through your spine) a dentin fluid, naturally flows outward to perpetually clean your teeth!! See how amazing our bodies are?! BUT, when the body chemistry gets out of balance, like when your health is compromised, your glandular balance changes, and your body switches to a mode where this fluid in your teeth pulls the other way (!!) and starts sucking in whatever is on your teeth… at that point it doesn’t matter what you do on the external: drills, brushing, flossing, scope (ew) … it’s now a totally internal issue. Sure bets your blood could be imbalanced: do you eat sugar? … Or, well white processed things (flour, sugar, common table salt)? Yes? Well… there ya go, chances are your natural chemistry is getting screwed up. How is your hair, your skin, or your nails? What are your lifestyle habits?
We really need to cultivate some internal awareness, so Feel Out Your Body: it is yours and you KNOW what is happening inside better than anyone. We need to be our own chemists. The fact that we’ve largely forgotten what it’s like to be in touch with our selves is a dilemma of the modern human and a broken world. Absence of self-awareness has structured a mentality… a disease based mentality that has no real interest in empowering health. Look around. It’s everywhere.
… in the meantime: NO MORE WHITE THINGS. No, Really.
Malocclusions: Diseases of Civilization
Here’s an example from the dental literature to motivate you. In 1976, Dr. H. L. Eirew published an interesting paper in the British Dental Journal. He took two 12-year old identical twins, with identical class I malocclusions (crowded incisors), and gave them two different orthodontic treatments. Here’s a picture of both girls before the treatment:
In one, he made more space in her jaws by extracting teeth, a ommon practice in modern orthodontics…In the other, he put in an apparatus that broadened her dental arch, which roughly mimics the natural process of arch growth during childhood and adolescence in children who have proper nourishing diets to build their bodies, bones & teeth. This had profound effects on the girls’ subsequent occlusion and facial structure:
The girl on the left had teeth extracted, while the girl on the right had her arch broadened. Under ideal circumstances, this is what should happen naturally during development. Notice any differences? Notice that we said “mimic” above: the more minerals you have, the bigger the jaw gets, it actually widens and so you get more space between your teeth!! It’s very possible for us to do this even later in life by changing how we eat. Proper teeth spacing helps promote bone growth. Eating proper minerals activates the pituitary gland, which controls growth in the body. By avoiding toxic things, the body will eventually clean out old vaccines and chemicals. Weston Price said when you eat a healthy diet, your bones grow wide and there’s space for all the teeth to come in, the wisdom teeth etc., but when we are deficient in lots of nutrients, like modern diets, our faces don’t develop correctly! After that, the whole body grows out of balance, and we don’t look as beautiful as we could. Improper growth development is something we see all around us. Isn’t it weird how we just take the prevalence of braces as completely normal?! I had them. My brother had them (raised on vegetarian diets) My husband had them (raised on processed foods). That’s easy evidence of a society completely devoid of proper nutrition!
What We Can Do:
Nagle’s daughter is now 5, and even though her cavities were very severe, she has no pain, no swelling, her teeth re-mineralized and got hard again; she can easily chew ice and nuts. They’re severely damaged structurally, but they’re functional. And because of the changes they made as a family, when her baby teeth fall out, she will have strong, nourshed, enriched bones and teeth. He even talks about the differences in child-bearing which his wife experienced after the switch in diet; after the birth of their first daughter, because she was lacking the right kind of nutrients, birth was so depleting that it took upwards of 8 months to a year for her to fully recover. After the birth of their second child last year, after having spent 4 years on a nutrient rich diet, 2 days later she was comfortable up and around and… within 3 weeks, her energy was completely back to normal. Because of this Nagel praises the benefits of high-nutrient child bearing. They went from eating minimal animal proteins (pasturized eggs, butter, milk) to then eating lots of everything: grass fed beef, eggs, dairy, fish, etc. He recommends everyone looking into the works of primal diet advoate, Aajonus Vonderplanitz as well. I also recommend Mark’s Daily Apple.
The rule to get here is that our bodies are severely lacking those fat-soluble catalysts that Price (and others) spoke about to keep our body regenerating.
Dietary recommendations: Take out modern foods that are not designed in the spirit of nature. (Hey, there’s still time! — have you signed up for Nourished Kitchen’s 28-Day Real Food Challenge? Day 1: Steps for Cleaning Up Your Pantry!).
- No white sugar (this includes xylitol and agave nectar, which is 70-90% fructose; that’s just like eating HFCS).
- No white flour.
- No extruded breakfast cereals; these are highly toxic and indigestible.
- No un-fermented soy products (only use: miso, natto, tempeh and tamari or nama shoyu).
You might even want to check out the work of Melvin Page. When tooth cavities are active, it means there is an ratio imbalance between calcium & phosphorus in the blood. Now, what affects this level is the amount of sugar or sweet things (even fruit) in the diet. If our blood sugar is constantly out of balance, tooth decay or gum disease will become “active.” When this happens our body draws on the calcium reserves in the body. So, keeping the body’s natural acid:alkaline balance is important. You will find that everybody deals with this in a unique way. Acid itself, is not the issue, however, the issue is our glands, whose job it is to regulate the levels of minerals in our body. We want to go most of our days with our glands balanced. But for many of us, our current habits have us constantly trying to feed our bodies energy with sugars instead of using fats and proteins. Blueberries and bananas are some of the worst fruits for your teeth. Then, dates.
While the Inuit peoples tend to be able to handle highly acid Ph levels and still maintain robust health with no diseases or cavities (that is: when following their indigenous diets)… a lot of us, from eating modern foods for the past 200 years, have deteriorated our organs to the point that nothing works properly and the mucus layer in our intestines has been extremely compromised. As implicated from all the pictures above, the truth, for better or worse, is written all over our faces.
Nagle goes on to say how we eat protein is very important. Bone broths have gelatin which helps the body digest proteins and meats!!
It’s actually really beneficial to eat raw proteins, for these DO NOT cause acidity. It’s the cooking process which alters the protein, potentially making it toxic. If you really pay attention to traditional societies and how they eat their animal proteins, you will notice: they either eat it raw (oysters on the half-shell, sushi, steak tartare, ceviché, etc.) or they cook it low and slow to give the body access to that gelatin which makes digestion easy and the protein assimilable. For many of us, our poor bodies desperately need protein but simply can’t digest it in the ways we have become accustomed to eating it – so maybe try eating proteins raw (as mentioned above) or in slow cooked stews and roasts, making sure to balance it with lots of vegetable juice or vegetables! This works really well.
Did you know that a raw milk smoothie with raw eggs can save your health!? This is true of raw, i.e. non-pasturized organic grass-fed milk and farm-fresh non-pasturized eggs; if you have access to these in your area (find out, here) then try this out some time. A certain rawmodel has been enjoying it too 
- 1-cup raw milk (+ cream) or kefir.
- 2 raw eggs
- a drop of honey or carob powder.
This really helps to heal the digestive system and the mucus lining in particular. It provides easily assimilable protein and energy. The Masai drink eight cups to a gallon of fermented milk per day. Fermented cod liver oil is also VERY good for proper calcium absorption. It helps the body utilize minerals, and essential vitamins A & D.
Repeat after me:
plant and animals foods are good for me.
Eat Sun foods! Fruits & Vegetables of all kinds that have been grown under that full spectrum sunlight, in healthy soil, are abundant in vitamins and minerals. Other vital minerals that we have problems digesting because our our genetic inability to break down cellulose become transmuted from grass into meat or milk. All that sunshine and the qualities of the verdant earth are taken in by the cow/goat/sheep’s body and creates vital life-giving nutrients. At this time, current medical science still doesn’t know what it is… they think its Vitamin K2, but it would be more accurate to describe it as a certain vitality, a divine substance, “a sacred other,” the life giving nature of the sun in the food, which is preserved by honoring the natural cycle of things in all ways.
Weston Price called “that thing” Activator X; a hormone activating substance, that helps minerals bond properly in the bones. Best ways to get it?
- butter
- cream
- kefir
- yogurt
- cheese
- high vitamin butter oil
Cream is really, really good – but never eat pasteurized cream if you can avoid it. Butter that’s pasteurized is safer, but ultimately any cream or milk when pasteurized becomes really toxic. Meats & fats from grass-fed animals are also integral, and contain the wonderful conjugate linoleic acid (CLA) known for it’s ability to help the body create and maintain lean muscle mass.
To sum up:
- Stop eating non-organic processed and refined foods. People excessively consume white flour products, sweet foods, foods with too much sugar and so forth, you must avoid them completely.
- Replace processed food with nutrient dense whole foods; free range eggs, raw milk, raw butter, grass-fed animal organs, fish and shellfish, good vegetables (juiced or in stews.)
- Make sure to eat special foods high in fat-soluble vitamins from the nutrient dense food category, and make sure to eat them in a way in which they are absorbable. That includes eating special foods raw, marinated, in stews, with lots of fat.
- Check to see if what you are doing is working. Pay attention to your teeth, examine your teeth, check for pain or soft spots. See how your teeth and overall health are. If you are getting worse, you are doing something that is out of balance with your body. If the health changes you make are correct for your body, you will notice that your teeth will be stronger and feel better.
When we let go of our food addictions and food substitutes through removing the processed and denatured foods and getting back to high vitamin foods including humanely raised animal foods, and really try to nourish ourselves, we can be free of cavities.
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Native peoples still existing in nature and living lives unobstructed by modern culture reflect a certain harmony. And African tribal proverb asks: what does a lion do in the jungle when he eats his food? He goes and eats the liver. So let us eat the liver, too. Looking at nature and observing the truths present there is very different than basing one’s diet on “ideas.”
Having Gratitude for How Things Work:
There is an innate intelligence to nature: water buffalo travel hundreds of miles while pregnant just to find the most nutrient rich grass – which they just knew was right there in a certain spot. We humans were designed by natures construct as well to derive benefit on that same rhythm!! In some native clans, they would watch the moose eat these rich grasses and algaes all summer, and then eat the glands of the moose for fertility before trying to conceive in the fall so that their children would be born in the spring or summer when food was rich and abundant. Nature gives us animals to share this planet and to nourish us, even though we don’t like killing animals, we actually need them to thrive. Realizing the truth of this means in no way that we should abandon the purity, integrity and ethics that fuels the vegetarian and vegan communities (which is what fueled my food choices as well); we absolutely need to make choices that honor our bodies and the expressions of the entire ecology. In doing so, we will heal ourselves and celebrate our relationship with the nature of life as it unfolds, as it is given.
ox. the LB.
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Back in December I wrote about doshas and a couple of weeks ago, I gave you Dr. John Douillard’s Newsletter recommendations to get a jump on spring cleaning for our insides. What the newsletter did not discuss, but you can find it on his website, is this practice of mono-fasting on kicharee during a prescribed at-home 4-Day Cleanse, including oleation. (oleation describes the process of drinking melted ghee in a systematic increase over a number of days, ending in a colon flush. note! drinking ghee is not indicated if you have gallbladder trouble or difficulty digesting fat) in order to lubricate the system and expunge toxins from the tissues. (Here’s another option) Kicharee is a mixture of split moong beans and basmati rice cooked with spices into a kind of thickish dahl soup.
Practicing oleation is a two-fold body-boon: for in addition to cleansing toxins, you are retraining your metabolism to burn fat for its energy. If you don’t help your body do this in early spring, this sometimes leads to a sluggish, wet, nasty cold season when Kapha energies renew themselves from March into June. Recommendations: prepare to do this so that cleansing day 4 falls on a Friday or Saturday.
***
So, Here I am. It’s day 4. One more day to go. I’m choosing to do an extra (5th) day to transition back, but it’s not unheard of to do this for a full seven either.
For the past four days I have done a (ever so slightly) modified version of Option 2, meaning I have only eaten kicharee 1-2x a day (when hungry) and have included 1/2-cup steamed vegetables (mostly asparagus, cauliflower, peas) to one of those meals per day, tea and warm water. My modification is the use of 1-2 grapefruits with 1 tsp raw honey, (if needed).
1st day:
Oops, we misread the ghee… took 2 Tbsp the first morning instead of 2 tsp. Yikes! Tummy didn’t like that very much. As the day progress, I immediately noticed my very bored tastebuds. Kicharee isn’t the most exciting food, and I knew that — after all it’s not meant to be diverting, it’s for cleansing. (Early afternoon ghee-induced bowel flush.) So while it did provide my body with necessary nutrition, it did not feed my mind’s fixation for food. It was not aesthetically satisfying. I think this is a very good thing, and I was actually surprised that it happened as fast as it did (hello wall!) as it can trigger emotional unstressing… as such, I was kinda irritable by the end of the night.
2nd Day:
4 Tsp ghee first thing in the morning. 2 Bowls kicharee & cilantro with steamed peas and asparagus with a squeeze of lemon, 1.5 grapefruits. Big Jars of dandelion and peppermint tea sweetened with stevia. Day two was much easier day to deal with. Husband & I went walking downtown (got a little chilled, but no harm done), breathed fresh air, came home, I took a long hot shower and lit a fire (which means if you live in a house in Colorado that was built after 1994, you flip a switch, unfortunately) and throughout the night… noticed a strange empty feeling in my body. I wasn’t hungry either. No growling… just space. Watched my mind fixate-fixate-fixate on food while simultaneously witnessing that my body had no desire for anything. Went to bed contemplating theories of emptiness… Had tons of energy, in fact couldn’t fall asleep till after midnight and still slept well. Craving pork belly today for some reason, and I don’t even like pork…
3rd Day:
6tsp ghee. Realized that the emptiness feeling is the “fat-burning” switch. Eureka. Had 1 bowl of kicharee in the middle of the morning. Some tea, 2 grapefruits… and then watched my entire appetite disappear even while I made my husband a chicken dinner with a baked potato and veggies. Feeling quiet mostly and nappy. Hm. Not particularly thirsty either. Started reading some spiritual things, books, blogs. I gave up my using my iPhone for the duration of the fast. I don’t even miss it, at this point, I’m wondering if I even need it.
4th Day:
8 tsp ghee. 3 Capsules of Triphala. The emptiness is still there, but nothing food-related sounds good. Theoretically? Sure. Do I want to go get it-make it-eat it? Uhm, no. Funny enough. Feeling a bit tired, but not low-energy per se. But still not hungry. Had 1 grapefruit so far. Empty but not hungry. Experienced bigger early afternoon ghee-induced bowel flush. I wonder if my lack of hunger is because my body is burning it’s own fat for fuel… as per this principle.
Overall Thoughts & Mental State:
So tomorrow I will begin transitioning back to “other foods.” Funny how at the beginning you think, I don’t know if I can do this for four whole days (snicker, giggle) — but that’s just the head talking. Four days goes by so quick. And while I am experiencing a true fasting side-effect: a non-desire for food… in the back of my mind, I mourn somewhere that it seems deprived of any pleasure, eating that is, meanwhile I am completely apathetic.
Side note: have been putting coconut oil straight onto my skin and face after bathing, my complexion is clear and luminous.
This whole fasting idea… It’s just a really good transition to reawaken the art of listening. I think this is why Lent and Ramadan are so powerful. I know I have written about this before, listening to our bodies, well while it’s not always easy, it’s always nice to return to. I know that I am in no danger of breaking my “fast” on pizza or ice cream. My body actually wants what is coming into season (or what’s good to eat during the month of February). I’m not craving cold things, but warm, light, nourishing things. Beans, Barley, Vegetables and I’ll probably start there tomorrow. And I see a roast chicken in my future sometime before Superbowl Sunday.
Till Then, xo. the LB.
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How to Make Kicharee:
This recipe makes enough to last you for 3 or 4 meals. You can play with the mixture of spices. Many people prefer this recipe when the spices are doubled (or even tripled).
- 1 c Split Yellow Moong Beans **
- ¼ – ½ c Organic White Basmati Rice
- 1 Tbs Fresh Ginger Root, grated
- 1 tsp each Black Mustard Seeds, and Cumin and Turmeric powder
- ½ tsp each Coriander powder, and fennel and fenugreek seeds
- 1 pinch Hing – also called asafetida
- 3 Cloves
- 3 Bay Leaves
- 7-10 c Water
- ½ tsp Salt (rock salt is best) or Bragg’s Liquid Aminos.
- 1 small handful Fresh Chopped Cilantro Leaves
It’s important to get Split Moong Dahl beans because they are easiest to digest and due to their cleansing qualities, they pull toxins from the body. They are available at Asian or Indian grocery stores or through LifeSpa. Different spellings include “mung” and/or “dahl.” Please note that you do NOT want the whole moong dal beans, which are green, or yellow split peas.
- Wash split yellow mung beans (dal) and rice together until water runs clear.
- Heat a large pot on medium heat and then add all the spices (except the bay leaves) and dry roast for a few minutes. This dry-roasting will enhance the flavor.
- Add dal and rice and stir again.
- Add water and bay leaves and bring to a boil.
- Boil for 10 minutes.
- Turn heat to low, cover pot and continue to cook until dal and rice become soft (about 30-40 minutes).
- The cilantro leaves can be added just before serving.
- Add salt or Bragg’s to taste.
* For weak digestion, gas or bloating: Before starting to prepare the kicharee, first par boil the split moong dal (cover with water and bring to boil), drain, and rinse. Repeat 2-3 times. OR, soak beans overnight and then drain. Cook as directed.
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This is a continuation (as promised) of the information found in my post two weeks ago about “Our Plastic Life,” speaking specifically about the issues with xenoestrogens and their effects on our health (read that first). All of the educational info found below came from notes I took while listening to a podcast interview with Daniel Vitalis provided by One Radio Network with Patrick Timpone (a free podcast network, runs on donation), so thanks to you Patrick and Thank you Daniel! Today we’ll be talking about Phytoestrogens, the underground plant mafia, they’re covert, they’re everywhere, they’re taking us out, and hardly anyone in the mainstream is even talking about them.
Phytoestrogens are plant estrogens.
Even ten or twenty years ago, we (the modern western world health culture) weren’t really aware of what was actually in plants — even while the ancient cultures knew how to prepare foods in such a way as to avoid them — we’re still mostly talking about fats and carbohydrates, and not really being aware of the complex molecules that make up plant-life ecologies. Today, even when you read about the molecular, phytochemical breakdown of “what’s in it” – you’re still not going to get ALL of it, necessarily.
Scientists do not have a method where they can just put a plant in a machine and get told everything that’s in it. What we’re finding out now is that many plants contain hormones and many of those are identical and/or compatible with our endocrine system.
Turns out, there’s a massive amount of estrogen in plants. Now that would be okay in an environment free of plastics and pesticides and herbicides and all these xenoestrogens we already got going, but given the fact that our bodies are under the most severe estrogen load EVER RECORDED, the idea of eating plants that are really rich in estrogen may NOT be serving us in our hightest good. Unfortunately, that became something championed by earlier health food advocates, like soy. Soy as everyone knows, comes from Asia and in the 70’s and 80’s we were all sold the “look how much soy they’re eating – hey! Look how healthy they are!!” sort of spiel. This interpreted health information was sort of manipulated, in truth they’re not eating more than a tablespoon or so a day and that’s in the company of rich fish head broths and meat products. And it is often — 99% of the time — fermented: nattō, tempeh, miso, and nama shoyu.
In Japan, when a woman would find out her husband was cheating on her… she would start feeding her husband more soy, because it KILLS testicular tissue. It causes a reduction in libido, which is why a lot of Buddhist Monks eat soy, to reduce their desires in order to keep their chastity vows. And that’s been known a long time, but the ad campaigns don’t tell you why it’s been used by the seekers of holy dharma, do they?
Get off the soy train.
So what happened? Well, our crops started failing. Industrial American agriculture hit it’s first major snafu on a large scale in the 70’s and 80’s which began with the Green Revolution (an oxymoron at this point) beginning in the late 40’s to late 60’s. Since then, we’ve had a long-time problem with our dairy and meat foods, not to mention rice, wheat, barely and corn triggering massive allergic responses. We’ve stopped rotating our crops, our farmers are being subsidized to over produce surplus grains at the cost of the land base, which is leading to a complete demineralized and depleted soil. Meanwhile, the world was searching for a new staple crop. Soy was proposed because it was an (almost) complete protein and added nitrogen back into a destroyed land base. This might have been a good thing to replace all these foods that we were now allergic to and because of conventional farming methods, weren’t growing so well anymore (like corn).
And Boy, we bought into it, all of it, didn’t we? Big Time. The soy train was full up and speeding along, I know I was drinking soy milk and eating soy burgers and soy-dogs and vegetarian synthetic foods … not exactly what Asia had in mind, I’m sure. But here we were, pumping so much soy into our bodies and most still don’t know the effects that occur due to the fact that soy is rich in isoflavones, and what are those? They’re estrogens!
Truth is, we made a major mistake with soy and unfortunately A LOT of people have become very acclimated to having soy in their lives. Such that people get really upset when they find out that it causes breast cancer, cervical cancer, testicular cancer, etc. Non fermented soy protein kills testicular and other reproductive tissues – and it causes severe hormonal imbalances.
No one “out there” has any reason to protect you from this, so please become educated about it!! If we look at the soy-eating culture, which is at the very least the whole vegetarian/vegan community at large and we took a look at the people eating the most soy, the feminization is pretty obvious. The lack of — and granted, it’s not really PC to talk about this — but if we look at the male population of soy eaters out there, we will (on average) see a loss of secondary sex characteristics as kind of obvious. Again, I am not talking about sexual self-hood, I am talking about the health of the biological organism… and a high level of health is just NOT generated by soy foods. And yet, even though we can SEE these changes, we still believe to a large degree that these soy products are good for us.
A belief can override what you can see objectively! So, be OBSERVANT! Take a real good look in the grocery stores and see the people eating soy and ask yourself if you think that is the highest expression of our human health potential and genetics or if you start to become aware of this excessive estrogen load becoming more apparent in the physical body, voice, mannerism. You just may begin to notice that feminization runs very deep in that culture.
So, as we become aware that all these highly processed, highly cooked genetically modified foods, are not good for us, we often move towards raw foods and superfoods. But, what happens is we get involved in things like flaxseed, flaxseed crackers, etc. and actually Flax is a real problem. True, it’s very high in Omega-3 but it is, in no way, a stable seed. It becomes rancid VERY quickly, like when you grind it down and then dehydrate it … that’s a rancid oil, that’s a carcinogenic food at that point. That’s not a high quality food, it doesn’t matter if its raw or done below 100 degrees, we’re just not talking about a quality food there. It’s such a delicate oil. Which is why it wasn’t eaten, so much as worn. It’s also known as “linseed” – it’s linen. We have been using it for a LONG time, this is very true, but it was to make fabrics and paint thinners. The oil itself was used therapeutically in cultures, because they could heal certain omega-3 deficiencies. BUT it was never considered a good staple food (similar to soy’s history, which was originally thought of purely as a nitrogen fixer in the soil, but was never meant to be eaten). Flax was only meant to be used short term and therapeutically → but this idea of eating it all the time (as a staple), well there’s a real problem with that: it has about 100x more lignans that ANY other plant.
Lignan is the estrogen property of the plants, and you’ll see on the lable “high acid lignans” on the bottles. Which means “extremely high in estrogen.” So – take a good look around. You can see what’s happening.
Udo Erasmus who wrote the book, Fats That Heal, Fats That Kill looks at flax as a wonder food, and for someone coming off of an intensely SAD American diet, a couple of bottles of flax can be very healing there. But beyond that, we need to use it sparingly. High quality saturated fats (like raw virgin coconut oil creme, or raw dairy kefirs, creams, pastured eggs and yogurts — have you checked out Anthony Anderson, aka Raw Model’s awesome, inspiring post on fatisfication?) are also extremely healing. Other than that, let it go. It would be much better just to eat better foods, like chia seeds. Chia has all the same properties of flax like the Omega 3’s, they’re also a complete protein, however, they have a very long history as a staple food before corn was invented. This was down in Meso-America. Chia is a Mayan word, which means “to strengthen.” It’s traditionally a warrior food and it’s androgenic. It heals the body. It’s also shelf stable for up to 3 years. It can be sprouted and it forms a gel just like flax… and you can still make your crackers.
Problem Foods
Plastic bottled water — and plastics in general — along with soy and flax are the really big things that the health conscious community needs to become aware of. Sunflower seeds and dates are also higher in estrogen than most people realize. Sesame seeds too. But as long as we keep those foods in balance and be conscious to not over eat them, we’ll be just fine. But not everyday and not all of the time.
Liquorices are very popular in Chinese medicine, and it’s one of THE MOST estrogenic foods running. Let’s be wise to this reality and how our world is changing, how we need to adapt to what’s occurring here and now… this would have been great a few thousand years ago, but today probably NOT the best thing.
Grapefruit is one of those fruits, who through other pathways ,triggers a lot of those estrogenic properties so lets be aware of it, not that we shouldn’t eat grapefruit ever again, it’s really beneficial on so many levels, especially as we’re moving towards springtime but again, let’s just be aware of it and exercise some balance. Be judicious. Let’s initiate some research into the areas of androgenic foods. Foods, which contain more male hormones and support them MEN and WOMEN. It’s on us to discover it!
Hops: it’s the main ingredient in beers. They are the MOST estrogenic foods found in our culture today, in the world, period. Such that, in Germany it was realized a long time ago that the women who picked hops would always have early menstrual cycles. There’s so much estrogen in hops that even handling it with their fingers would cause them to get their menses cycle early.
The very first drug law ever enacted was in Germany in 1516: “The German Beer Purity Act.” Regardless of what we might be thinking about alcohol today, it’s been with us for a very, very long time, and there is a place for it (especially old-school fermented ales, alcohol extractions and tinctures), it’s a natural product and fermentation, as an art, has been occurring in our cultures for thousands upon thousands of years, ubiquitously. But they were meant for medicinal purposes. They were an herbal beverage, and there were 100’s of different herbs being used to brew beer and all of them were all medicinal, like dandelion… which is an excellent nutritive and kidney tonic, and by fermenting, increase those healing properties. People would visit the ale house and see the ale-wife to heal whatever was “ailing them.” The cure? to drink these fermented, pro-biotic rich beverages, which were very low in actual alcohol and very, very medicinal.
Most of the beers being brewed were very psychoactive as well, stimulating the brain centers and funcioning like aphrodesiacs – they were mentally and sexually stimulating. Some were even psychedelic; and this was common and accepted part of society! The Bacchus rituals come from these kinds of wines and beers… and it got to a point where the Catholic Church and their monks achieved a monopoly on the beer houses. And post-reformation the Protestants got a little pissed (no pun intended) and so enacted laws in order to break the monopoly and open up that market; what they came up with was the Beer Purity Act of 1516, thereby making it mandatory for all beers have hops added to them specifically to reduce male sexual impulse, to dull and reduce the libido and because it made people docile and put them to sleep.
Most people know now that, after a few beers people get kind of tired and a little drowsy or groggy – but that IS NOT what beer was traditionally made to do, they were meant to stimulate. But the intention behind hops was to dull the population down. And hey, look at that, it worked. P.S. This isn’t a conspiracy; this is just what’s on record. It’s easy to find, it’s just what actually happened. They wanted to reduce the sexuality and mental stimulation of beers and they pulled that off. Have a look. Now, with our understanding of the estrogenic properties, maybe it’s time to reasses the beer gut. Because, if you’re looking close enough, that’s not a body fat… it’s hard. And there are two male feminized breasts. on top. Those are the tale-tell signs of too much estrogen!
There’s a strange thing still happening in western culture where our commercials and media link up male sexuality and beer drinking…? But the truth is that today’s beers cause erectile dysfunction and makes people pass out… and it feminizes the body over time. Look around, be aware. Reassess that. There’s a HUGE amount of estrogen pollution going on in beer. By the way, excess estrogens are extremely taxing on your liver!
Cleansing protocol and strategies:
We’re changing and altering and degrading our bodies, we need to change direction! This is a new field of research: Androgenic foods. But first, once again, how do we eliminate strong estrogens out of our lives? get rid of the Soy, Flax, Plastic Water, Pesticides, Hebicides, and keep them out of our lives.
EXERCISE. EXERCISE. EXERCISE. This is one of the most important things, it’s anabolic in nature. Every FAT cell in your body produces estrogen!! So, the more body fat you have, the more estrogen you create. In order to reduce it, exercise is essential… Even in those communities (i.e. raw) where it’s taken a back seat for too many years. We need to bring it all back, strength, agility training, and flexibility training.(I heart Yoga). Food’s not everything, it’s a VERY important piece, but it’s not the WHOLE piece.
CRUCIFEROUS VEGETABLES: the mustard family, broccoli, arugula, radishes, strong sulfuric foods block estrogen thereby allowing your body to produce its own testosterone and progesterone in a more balanced way – strong sulfuric foods are very male. Be aware that many of these foods are also high in goitrogens which affect the thyroid, but are safe once they’ve been cooked. And the key to unlocking the minerals and vitamins is fat.
CITRUS All of them are really wonderful and beneficial blockers of estrogen (besides grapefruit), like oranges for instance.
MACA: there are people who live in the Andes and eat 5lbs of maca per week, it balances hormones over time. It’s a really good thing to start bringing into your daily food choices; over time it will be really helpful. Psst! You can always trust information when it’s being corroborated by indigenous use. It is one of the best androgenic and endocrine balancing foods out there.
GINSENG: Now, there’s a difference between American, Chinese and Korean ginsengs. Korean is usually called “red” and white, while native to North America tends to be higher in estrogen. You can get ginseng root or as strained pressed almost translucent pieces achieved through a steaming process. This stuff is amazing!! Remember: you want RED for anabolic purposes. It’s very fiery and strong. In Chinese Medicine, they would call it veyr Yang. It’s highly recommended that you wait till you’re in your upper twenties before ever consider its use. But if you’re in your 40’s or 50’s you’ll want to do it everyday… and by then you can. It’s great. But wait till you’re at the right age. If possible, chew your ginseng.
These testosterone supporting foods contain longevity molecules and affect our ability to thrive. This Applies to MEN and WOMEN especially now because of all the estrogen pollution.
SIBERIAN GINSENG: well, it’s not really a ginseng – eleuthero — a great adaptogen. These kinds of medicines help you deal with all types of stress, these are the hallmarks of androgenic foods. Use it in capsules or as a tincture. It’s a white powder. Add little bits on a daily basis and then take breaks. 3 weeks on, one week off. Then, watch your athletic and lung capacity increase. Similarly, herbals like tribulus are safe for long time use.
TOO MUCH TESTOSTERONE Now here’s the flip y’all: too much testosterone runing freely in the body gets turned into ESTROGEN or is bound into blood globulin. Take Body builders…. their testes shrink, they begin to grow breast tissue… get it? This is due to Oestradiol, an estrogenic compound required for creating your neural filaments. It makes bonding in the brain i.e. it’s the female hormones that network the brain. So it’s really important, but anything out of balance causes problems. Foods that block this are maca, of course, but also the root of the STINGING NETTLE. Not the leaf by itself, but the root; it’s the root that shrinks the prostate. It’s a Male sex tonic. Note: not an aphrodisiac, but a tonic. If you know someone with prostate problems (even cancer)? Use NETTLE ROOT. You can get it from Mountain Rose Herbs. Ground it into a powder, take it in capsules or add it to drinks. It will stop the testosterone from being converted into estrogen.
PINE POLLEN In April & May (or in early spring whenever that comes to your neck of the wood) be on the lookout for yellow pollen, on your windowsills, and cars, etc. That’s Pine Pollen. It’s not produced by the spruce or balsams, but by the tall pines with long, tall needles. Now, betchya didn’t realize that there are male and female cones… the one we think about normally, the spiraling-out pine cones are female and “they open,” while the male is more banana-shaped, and appear closed, they sorta look like an small ear of corn, but when they mature, they crack and release a tremendous amount of pollen. A lot of people are allergic to it but that’s where Daniel Vitalis first got the idea: what if I, he thought, started eating little bits of it in the spring-time, would I get the allergy later in the year…? It’s a very homeopathic question in nature. AND There is no food on the planet more equipped with (human) testosterone, the longevity molecule than pine pollen.
Pinenuts for Pesto!! Though not as high in testosterone as the pollen, pine nuts are very useful and do contain adrogenic properties. Pine needles are high in vitmain C and the inner pine bark is richly blessed with minerals. Indigenous practice would be to make a kind of oatmeal with the bark. The Chinese have a long history of using this as a sexual tonic. In fact, many of the plants of the forest rely on pine pollen for their growth, for it is this plant hormone which stimulates and initiates all the other plants and animals to awaken and grow in spring. Even the spring RUT is due to the pines. They are the grandfathers of the Forest. So, this spring – go get out there and collect it!! Clip those male cones, bring them home, and let them dry till they crack or tincture them… in other words, create your own phytosteroid, a completely anabolic food which will combat all these estrogen issues. We can begin exudeing the health that we’ve been talking about… !! It’s a WILD FOOD, so collect it is as a food, but relate to it like a superfood, and a tincture is even more effective. So this spring, I know I’ll be collecting pollen, and storing in the freezer or tincturing enough to last until the following season. It’s a FREE , harvestable wonderfood = Very exciting!!
To recap, we need to begin Eliminating this excess estrogen as much as possible by leaving behind damaging foods (like soy and flax just to start), the pesticides, herbicides and plastics, to increase our intake of crucifers (but cook them a little and eat them with fat: avocado, butter, nuts, cream) and maca, oranges, nettle root, etc. these will all increase dietary testosterone. So will eating grass-raised or wild meats (including fish, etc)…
So I know that was long, but are you still with me? Whew! AND THANKS AGAIN to Daniel Vitalis who’s doing all the knowledge footwork here; I’m just a messenger *big smile*
Thanks as well for Kirsten at Food Renegade for giving us the chance to pow-wow @ FightBackFridays! Join IN!!
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We’re taking a little detour today and we’re going to talk about sex. But ultimately, it’s all about health and wellness on the physical and spiritual, so I’m still aligned with my purpose, see?
Thing is, I’m going to jump into the controversy started over here about the nature of circumcision (please check out part i for context). What we’re talking about here ultimately, is called Tantra in the eastern traditions and is the true meaning and practice attributed to the virtue of Chastity in the western christian tradition. This isn’t just about going and reading up on the Kama Sutra either; what most fail to understand about tantra, is that while it is a way to prolong orgasm, the ultimate importance comes from the shared space created from reserving and recycling life-force energies (chi, holy spirit, präna, etc) during the act of coitus. The whole point of tantra is rejuvenation of the body, or the act of transmuting sexual energy into spiritual energy… I realize now that I’m going to have to write a more explanatory post about this soon. Hm. But poor Matt & Daniel were getting somewhat clobbered in the comments about the religious practices of circumcision. Specifically, an anonymous contributor who had this to say:
So I wanted to discuss something about the spiritual meaning of these words. Firstly, let me say that I understand the nature of covenant and being half-Jewish myself, I understand why some would consider this whole idea extremely offensive, but (and this is only my opinion) only if they’re thinking about a literal interpretation of the Torah. So let’s talk Torah, meaning literally “the teachings of light,” i.e The Teaching of the Divine. Note: I have also posted a video below, at the end, which discusses these ideas in terms of esoteric or (gnostic) biblical exegesis but while it has a lot of really good information, like most anything these days, it doesn’t reveal everything that could be made known.
Literalism in spirituality is one of the most popular things going (in all of them, eh?), and I know it’s part of our secular materialist society, which believes only in what they can sensually experience (see, hear, taste, smell, touch) …but unfortunately, it just does not accurately convey the ultimate truth of reality, and it just ain’t all there is to it. Period.
So as I sat there reading the comments, I began wondering how many followers of the Torah or Jewish nation, especially in America, have even read anything beyond the Tanakh, and instead explored the more spiritual books that accompany the philosophical comprehensions — kabbalah for one, or even the use of pardes in exegesis for instance — inherent in an advanced study of their faith? Like, the works of Maimonides or Martin Buber? Or specifically Aryeh Kaplan and his work with the Sefer Yetzirah: The Book of Creation? Or are we, anonymous ones, more concerned with belonging to the ethnic nationality than its long relationship with G-d? if so – that’s fine, fair is fair; you can stop reading now.
A mishnah (vi. 15) declares that the Biblical patriarch Abraham was the recipient of the divine revelation that came to be known as the Sefer Yetzirah or the Book of Formation. So that the rabbis and philosophers of the classical rabbinic era never doubted that Abraham was the author of the book. In Pardes Rimonim, Moses ben Jacob Cordovero (or Ramak) mentions a minority opinion that Akiba may have authored it, and they take this to mean that while Abraham wrote it, Akiba redacted it to its current form. Now, according to modern historians, the origin of the text is hotly debated. Some scholars emphasize its context among various Medieval kabbalistic texts arising after the 10th century CE, while other scholars emphasize the earlier traditions apparently referring to it and its earlier textual features. Some of the core ideas in the book seem to have a Babylonian origin. The historical origin of the Sefer Yetzirah is placed by Reitzenstein in the second century BCE. But Jewish Lore attributes it to Adam, and that “[f]rom Adam it passed over to Noah, and then to Abraham, the friend of God.”
What’s so very interesting is that this book, whether it was given to Adam and passed down or composed between 100 BCE and 900 CE is that its content corresponds to present knowledge of quantum physics and the creation of matter. Pretty f-ing cool if you ask me.
So, what’s my point? YES! my point: what do they mean by circumcision? I’m personally against the practice as it’s been come to be understood and erm, exercised, but here’s some food for thought that I find not only interesting but true, and indicates the veracity of Daniel’s point to begin with about sexuality and conserving life-force (source: Sefer Yetzirah: The Book of Creation by Aryeh Kaplan, pp. 35-38) –
Okay, I hear you saying aloud, what in the H has this to do with the “other” kind of circumcision? I’m just trying to lay a groundwork here for comparison of terms…
This juxtaposition between “circumcision of the tongue” and “circumcision of the membrum” explains that both are symbols of someone using their (ahem) talents wisely and correctly, e.g. for spiritual purposes. A circumcision of speaking or love-making speaks to the act of doing it correctly, that is not wasting seed (which as Daniel & Matt said, contains spinal fluid) unless it be sacrificed for the life of another, i.e. conception. While the mark of circumcision may have become physical, literally a removal of the foreskin, it is meant to be an indication of one capable of practicing proper sexuality. This is also the true meaning behind “natural family planning” and the Catholic maxim to not spill the wasted seed, which never creates life but death instead. Easy fix: don’t spill seed when you do not desire to conceive children, instead practice sexual rejuvenation with your partner, assuring the spiritual health of the marriage!
Such an understanding brings greater awareness to the sacredness of sexuality and why all relgions recommend that it be practiced only between committed individuals and not for selfishness of the material body alone. Likewise, think about those passages in Leviticus, Deuteronomy, Esther, etc. which talk about gentile men in the world being uncircumsized. How such men were viewed when it came to intermarrying and the risk of being cut-off from the Nation begs the question: how should a child of Israel (that is, anybody who has a desire for G-d) practice their sexuality? Should they be like those who knew nothing of the divine body of G-d, like animals in rut, thereby committing the sin of Lust? Or are they to do so with correctness (righteousness) with either spiritually regenerative or spiritually procreative intentions? Something to consider, indeed. Note: this kind of sexual-spiritual regeneration is possible in one of two ways:
Ever wonder why it is the man (often) dies before woman? This is biological spiritual alchemy at its best, in my opinion. You find expressions of this in Buddhism, Yucatan Shamanism, Taoism, Hinduism, Sufism, Christian Monasticism, Hellenism, Gnosticism and Judaism, where it’s often called “The Work of the Chariot”
… didn’t you ever wonder about those spinning wheels Ezekiel was talking about in his visions of G-d?
Look, I don’t mean any disrespect AT ALL; my whole M.O. when it comes to religions and spirituality is to find the common thread or the Primordial Truth that is at the foundation for each of them. For more in depth discussions on the matter, I recommend downloading the books by George W. Carey The Tree of Life Exposed & The Anti-Christ.
Sex: The Secret Gate to Eden
What do you think?