Friday, December 26, 2014

can alzheimer's be cured?

Apparently not (see link), but it can be prevented...

as we will increasingly see it is caused by the toxins we breathe, swallow, and absorb through the skin. "Medical science" does not recognize this yet, saying "we do not yet know the cause".

But they say that about all the common modern maladies easily reversed (or at least prevented in case of alzheimer's and cancer) with diet/lifestyle changes: heart disease, type 2 diabetes, immune function disorders (rheumatoid arthritis etc), cancer, the many gastro-intestinal disorders, etc.

How much longer are docs going to be able to tell patients with type 2 diabetes "no cure, medication for the rest of your life" when it is completely reversed in 2 weeks with change of diet? (Malpractice lawyers where are you - ho, still chowing on burgers:)

More nutriblast, less animal based food - did you see the Nutribullet RX yet? Twice as big. finally a Nutribullet worth owniing. Why do i say that? Smoothies are better as a meal "replacement" than as a supplement. Which means CALORIES in addition to NUTRIENTS. We need both TOGETHER to effectively curb appetite for the toxic foods we are conditioned to want.

Teeny smoothies don't make it.

Two Giant Green Smoothies a day, and one "regular" meal at dinner, the more vegan it is the better...

equals transform your life. It's pretty easy really when you think about it. But you need an effective big blender to do it.

Vitamix even better than a Nutribullet RX? (much better actually)

Why blending is better than juicing

Wednesday, October 22, 2014

Science and Engineeering

Seems like an unusual title for a health blog entry, no? Let me explain...

Science and engineering are terms we hear used together frequently, and the reason for that is simple, engineering is basically the use of science to make stuff "that works". Technology is the result of science and engineering, and we are so steeped in technology these days most of it is effectively invisible to us. We take it for granted... until it stops working.

Which leads me to how science and engineering is relevant to health. As we know science is a particular method of obtaining information, with filters in place (the so-called "scientific method") that are intended to eliminate incorrect ideas about how things work. It's a very useful approach and it really really works, without this method for testing "truth" we would not be surrounded these days by sophisticated technology that works.

But it is not the only way by which we arrive at "true information", and this is where engineering comes into the picture. Can you imagine what an engineers job would be like if they had to stop to test every single mechanical function they come across in their work via the rigorous (and very time consuming) scientific method? There are literally thousands of these "functions" in even relatively simple devices, like an air conditioner for example. In an automobile there are hundreds of thousands of these functions.

The difference, one of them, a main difference, between science and engineering is engineers use "anecdotal information" all the time. They do not have to mount extensive randomized double blind studies with controls to trust "mechanical" information that is apparent and obvious. If they did, it's safe to say, we would not have technology at all. The so called "simple machines" (inclined plane, lever, fulcrum, etc) were not arrived at (many years ago) through rigorous scientific method, they were merely observed to be true, and used by every engineer since.

How all this science and engineering stuff affects health is pretty obvious too when we think about it. The problem is basically we have been led to believe all anecdotal information is not to be trusted, because some of it is affected by the so-called placebo effect. And there is truth to that idea, but it is not the whole story, which leads me to my point.

Why aren't we taught that there are appropriate and necessary uses of "anecdotal information"? Is it so we can be made into better consumers of processed foods and the requisite pharmaceuticals "needed" to then "fix" the problems caused by those toxic substances? (Use of toxins to cure effect of toxins... now that makes sense... not!)

Is "science" deliberately misrepresented by food marketeers, in order to obscure the obvious, and sell us addictive (and harmful!) substances, and make us life-long "addicted" consumers of those products? On a related note, I have a book to recommend, "The Pleasure Trap", here's some information about it...    http://www.healthpromoting.com/the-pleasure-trap

Or is it because there is a certain "blindness" in science, an outsized (and inappropriate) level of belief in the idea we arrive at some fundamental and absolute truth about life and the universe through scientific investigation? When people say "science is the new religion" I think this is what they are talking about... we humans seem to have a need for absolute truth, due (Freud said) to our instinctual fear of death, which is another way of saying our deep and strong life force energy. So we "chase" science and mysticism in the pursuit of that "absolute".

Whether or not there is "absolute" loose in this cosmos is not the point of this blog however, it is the much more pedestrian (and central) concern - "how do we achieve and maintain optimum health and energy"...

So yes, we do have to find and rely on those mechanical functions that are blatantly obvious... what works... works. And yes, there is more than one way to skin a cat, body/mind are a single organism (IMHO), which means there is no escaping placebo effect to one degree or another. And that makes finding "what works" not only a process that unfolds over time, but also individual. We can however observe "what works" for whole societies throughout history, and basically trust those anecdotals. What we are seeing looking back over history, and more recently, is processed foods are designed for sales not health, but whole foods create good health (or we wouldn't be here as a species).

That much pretty much everyone can agree on. And IMO it is also safe to say those foods found in the (conducive) climates (that best support life without technological intervention, ie the warm climates) are those foods we are biologically adapted to, and the most basic causes of health and vitality, along with clean air and water.

What all this means to me it eat your fruits and vegetables boys and girls, in as close to their "source state" as possible... if you can pick them right off the tree, or out of your garden, and bring them directly to your mouth, by all means do so. Eat as close to "fresh ripe raw organic plants" as possible, for your health.

Which brings me to one last closing thought, a subject for a future blog... why is it we do not consider fruits as staple foods, when they are half the (fruits and vegetables) health equation?




Monday, August 18, 2014

Ah, the fruit festival is rolling!

Had to miss it this year darn it!

But some good vids are already rolling in, and they give some of the flavor of the event, and the experience.


Monday, August 11, 2014

The Problem of Getting Sufficient Calories to Maintain Energy and Body Weight

Any diet with insufficient calories is going to crash sooner or later (usually sooner). On an insufficient calorie diet people become thin, drawn, and just generally unhealthy. Calories are the nutrient we need every day to get thru the day because they are our immediate source of energy. But the rest, vitamins, minerals, bioflavonoids, essential fatty acids, etc etc... we can get those essential needs met over the course of weeks from a variety of whole foods.

So on a low-fat, whole food, vegan diet the problem is getting enough calories. Most people get most of their calories from fat. Calories in fat are very dense, in other words a small quantity of fat has a lot of calories. This is why, on conventional high-fat diets, if one eats enough to "get full", they will have eaten a lot of calories, too many in fact to easily maintain a healthy body weight.

On a low-fat vegan diet there are two primary sources for "enough" calories, fruits, where the cals come from simple carbohydrates mostly, and starches, where the cals come from complex carbs. (The cals in whole veggies are minimal, but those foods are rich in other essential nutrients.)

Bananas are the potato of the fruit world: they are versatile, cheap, readily available, and rich in calories and other essential nutrients. Depending on ripeness they can have quite a bit of starch (less ripe), and spotted bananas have converted the starch to simple sugar.

Contrary to the current but incorrect meme, insulin resistance is not caused by sugar, it is in fact caused by free floating fat in the bloodstream, which is what happens on standard diets getting most cals from fat. Fat in the blood inhibits the uptake, transport, and delivery of fuel to the cells (fuel is glucose and oxygen in combination), a problem known as insulin resistance. If one insists on continuing with a conventional high-fat diet the only solution to this problem is to reduce carbohydrate consumption to nil, converting the bods primary fuel source to fat, a condition known as ketosis. This is the basis of the so-called Paleo diet, or the earlier Atkins diet. However it's not as efficient or healthy IMHO as simply getting the fat out of the blood to begin with.

Check out this book, a low-fat vegan approach, but less "radical" than the 100% raw Doug Graham version. It uses cooked starches as the base, for sufficient calorie intake.

"The Starch Solution"

Monday, August 4, 2014

"Healthy" Fats

There is a lot of discussion about healthy fats and being sure we have sufficient quantities of them in our daily diets. The so called Paleo diet proponents also suggest a diet with most calories coming from fats, including saturated fats (essentially a variation on the Atkins diet).

However the clinical evidence suggests a low fat vegan diet is highly effective in the context of disease reversal, and very possibly overall health, energy, and longevity. Drs. Esselstyn, Ornish, Bernard, McDougall, Fuhrman and many others not as well known have repeatedly shown and published consistent and decisive reversals of heart disease, diabetes, gastrointestinal disorders, most of the other so-called metabolic disorders, and even cancer in some cases.

These doctors suggest healthy carbs as forming the bulk of caloric intake, as much as 80% of the total, with fats and proteins splitting the remainder at 10% each. They eliminate animal products and refined vegetable oils entirely from the diet, and reduce consumption of high fat plants such as avocado and nuts and seeds to moderate levels.


The two approaches essentially invert carbs and fats in the calo-nutrient ratio, but also incorporate other common sense ideas, most notably perhaps elimination of processed, refined or otherwise fractionated food products, sticking with whole foods nearly exclusively. Both approaches can have beneficial result, pointing to the benefit of a whole foods diet on its own regardless of calo-nutrient ratio, but to the best of my knowledge only the high carb approach is shown to be a consistently successful disease reversal protocol.

Check out the information at this link:

http://nutritionfacts.org/video/more-than-an-apple-a-day-preventing-our-most-common-diseases/

Wednesday, June 18, 2014

Carbs are not the source of Insulin Resistance

You might find this idea interesting - carbs are not the source of insulin resistance, they are the trigger, but only in the context of a high fat diet. The reason why is when we eat fat it ends up in our blood and inhibits the uptake, transmission and delivery of glucose and oxygen to the cells, resulting in elevated blood sugar, resulting in additional insulin, resulting in spikes and crashes in blood sugar levels and nasty metabolic swings. If we reduce our carb intake dramatically the problem goes away, but, the problem also goes away in the context of a high carb diet if we do not eat a lot of fat to begin with.

There's a lot of resistance to this idea, mostly IMO because we are inculturated to think fat is essential. Fat is certainly a more efficient (and profitable) way to distribute calories to society, they are approximately 10x more calorie dense than carbs. Most people also do not know that so called lean meats are about 60% of calories from fat, most likely because that information is not conducive to "good marketing".

Calories are not nutrition per se, but they are fuel in the everyday immediate sense, so conversion efficiency is important - when we eat foods (animal products) that use 30% (or more) of the calories in the food to metabolize the food, we are fueling inefficiently, with long term negative ramifications.

You might find this youtube vid interesting

Monday, June 9, 2014

Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride

I'm revisiting an older Mercola post because of something a friend sent

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2012/03/18/mcbride-and-barringer-interview.aspx

which led me to begin viewing two other vids of Campbell-McBride on youtube (better than the mercola audio interview by far)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=cONYR7vAD-A

http://youtu.be/Z_0NvcJZwa8

I agree with the idea digestion has been damaged by post industrial life styles, and that this problem is corrected most efficiently using the idea "food is medicine". This is IMO at the base of all effective non-medical healing of the maladies of the industrialized world. I would be curious to see if McBrides method is as rapid and complete as Graham's (water fast followed by fruits and vegetables) in healing the variety of life style damaged conditions we see in ourselves and all around us.  My money going in would be on Graham, she in my opinion suffers a typical situational (cultural/industrial) form of myopia in the idea that humans are biologically suited to the modern industrialized "delivery of calories system" (fats as primary source), which is predicated on convenience (distribution and concentration of calories) not health, in my opinion. Sure it's more "efficient" to distribute and consume concentrated calories (fats), but is it healthy?

Which is not to say the multitude of other fractionated processed and refined "foods" are not also responsible for galloping disease, it is an overdetermined problem. So McBride, and the paleo community in general, have it half right IMO by eliminating fractionated/processed/refined foods. But the (health) problem is complex because there is more than one thing causing it. Concentrated calories is also a (mostly unrecognized) culprit. We run most efficiently on fruit and vegetable carbohydrates (when consumed in context of whole fresh ripe raw organic especially). Yes we also burn fat for energy, but it is less efficient than carbs when pushed to be the primary source of fuel. And when it comes to health, it's difficult to argue against the most efficient delivery of fuel and nutrients to the body.

But there also seems to be a problem with combining high levels of fats and carbohydrates into one diet - it appears to induce the condition known as insulin resistance, precursor to unhealthy weight gain, diabetes, and heart disease, among many others. So it's kind of a "pick your poison" kind of thing, to be optimally healthy it's either going to be a mostly carbs or mostly fats question. And then you also have to ask the other question, which choice is better overall?

It is true that 100% vegan raw is not sustainable the way it has been practiced, in my humble opinion. Well it's not just my opinion, all one has to do is look for healthy long term 100% raw vegans in the world... it's a small number. But Graham recognized this problem early on and asked the right questions - if a 100% raw vegan diet is truly sustainable (peak health over the long term), it would also have to sustain peak levels of athleticism (not just disease recovery), and robust growth. Graham realized which parameters constitute ideal measures for sustainability, and AFAIK he is the only raw foodist to have analysed the "sustainable raw food diet" problem from that perspective.

We all have inculturated "industrial world" myopia to one extent or other, so it is not surprising that Graham's method (fruits and vegetables almost exclusively) is "a bridge too far" for most citizens of this modern world. And there are many effective ways to address the "damaged digestion" problem, but the question remains open as to which is the most effective method across the broadest population. And as long as industry (medicine, science, pharma, ag) principally control what is formally studied we will not have a satisfying "hard science" answer. As Doug Graham himself said once to me: "you have to find the thing you CAN do".

Monday, April 21, 2014

yeah Bucky, that's what i'm talkin bout:)


Raw 80/10/10 (the fruit based version of 80/10/10) is a more efficient (orchards vs field crops) use of land/water resource (calorie yield per acre) than any other large scale feeding system. Meat production is least efficient, most polluting, and least healthy.

With orchard's much higher yield (calorie/acre) mass organic becomes increasingly viable.

Not only is calorie yield maxed, so is micro nutrient yield (raw fruits and veggies have the highest nutrition yield per calorie, and in correct proportions for optimum human health).

The efficiency numbers are not complicated. Maybe the lead engineering types (brainy boyz) in big ag/chem/pharma/medicine don't see this yet... or maybe they do, and that's why there's so much obfuscation of simple reality:

Global pollution goes way down

Chemical production goes way down

Global health goes way up

Medical/chemical/pharma system shrinks

But da boyz have a vested interest in disease, with the disease delivery system signed sealed and locked in place.

So let's get the word out Bucky:)

Sunday, April 6, 2014

other musings on addiction

I was thinking of my mother a lot yesterday, missing her, our complicated relationship, and how dysfunction/addiction/depression/procrastination are all kind of different aspects of the same thing, some kind of essential loneliness that comes from? Our needs not being met to varying degrees by imperfect human beings, who each have their own essential loneliness and dysfunctional tendencies to deal with and manage as best they can.

The range of dysfunction/function is interesting, from barely alive to dancing thru life with passion and verve. Addiction is a key piece in determining where we live in that range, it's the 'escape mechanism'. And it's so accessible in the form of food choices as to be nearly unnoticeable and inescapable. Food choices are insidious, as we are told most of our lives they are not an issue to be concerned with. 'Anything goes' has been the general sociatial message for food choice in the west, but it is (by far) the easiest way to crash our energy, dull our senses, and induce 'coma'.


Those of us with 'real' addictions, who consume overt toxins (with no redeeming nutrition value) have the same problem, but food may be the least toxic of consumed substances, even if it's 100% fast food greasy.


The most interesting thing about the function/dysfunction scale, and where we live on it, is how changeable it is. When we change our energy levels, our levels of functioning (mood) change simultaneously.


Being in Costa Rica for 7 weeks with FoodNSport illustrated for me very clearly how few of us ever experience eating all we want of the most nutritious (and delicious) foods - and that create no food induced energy fluctuation!


What is this desire to escape, where does it come from?


I think the answer lies in the direction of doing as well as possible with food choices, the goal being to stay in the 20% range of best possible choices all the time (even when socializing and traveling), and better when home in our own kitchen. This step improves both energy and mood tremendously, and it's the first step, the most important.


But to move the body is the secret weapon. The addiction to endorphin and 'healthy' mild euphoria, substituting toxic addiction with 'healthy' addiction (which too can be overdone)... the other major piece of the puzzle lies in that direction...

Tuesday, February 25, 2014

The Boomer Generation and Oral Addiction

Whenever we consume concentrated calories we are veering away from optimal sources of nutrition, and our state of health begins to deteriorate. The optimum diet for anthropoid apes (including humans) is whole, fresh, ripe, raw, organic fruits and vegetables, with occasional nuts and seeds. It's no accident this diet has a very high nutrient to calorie ratio, is very high in water content, and presents a very low "work" load to the digestive system. This diet presents an optimal balance of nutrition, and the highest "energy return" of any we can consume. And health (indeed, even happiness) is all about optimal nutrition and return on energy.

How did we come so far off track as we find ourselves today? Within the last 100 years so called "life-style diseases" have appeared and proliferated at exponential progressions. At the current rate, within a few more years literally everyone will die of one or more of the so called metabolic disorders. How did it happen that virtually no one understands the cause of health?

Animals in nature do not have to understand the cause of health, they are forced by instincts and conditions to hue as closely to that standard as possible. There is no processed food available, no couch, and no television. The only food available is whole, fresh, ripe, raw, and organic, and they have to work hard to get it. We humans on the other hand have been consuming cooked foods with concentrated calories and an increasingly lower nutrient to calorie ratio for 1% of our time on earth. 1% of our total time on the planet is not very long in relative terms, but it might be long enough. And now so many of us find ourselves overweight, sick, and dying prematurely of metabolic disorders, and the numbers continue to grow, as the demographic swept up by metabolic disease progression is ever younger.

I'd like to look at the causes - I believe there are a few. First main problem I think is a "technology era" distrust of nature. We know that nature eventually kills us, and we would like to use technology to delay death as long as possible. Well that is simple survival instinct, but it is ironic in the extreme this impulse has backfired so proficiently. So what if we stopped resisting nature and instead became partners with it, using technology instead to "get out of the way" of nature more efficiently?

This idea takes us directly to the impediments of that goal, the vested interests and industries that have been built around the model of "resistance to nature", and the idea we can do nature better than nature itself. These interests essentially constitute the delivery system for concentrated calories, and the "health care" system that has developed around the challenges of dealing with the consequences. Those two systems might better be called the disease induction and disease management industries, symbiotically connected, and with vested interest in societal disease induction. (So is it any wonder we find ourselves here?)

They are by now the "usual suspects" in the etiology of the "metabolic disease" health crisis: "big agriculture", the chemical companies and "big pharma", the fast food industry, and the medical/hospital/insurance industry, which are collectively generating the largest profit in the history of the planet. And let's be fair, this all began as an attempt to create conveniences that serve modern industrialized societies, and that has been accomplished to a large extent. It is arguably more convenient to consume concentrated calories, because we spend less time eating when foodstuffs are dense, and less time in preparation when foods are packaged. But as we are seeing in the overall, we lose far more in productivity than is gained in time saved. Unfortunately however, the system is now deeply entrenched and seemingly intractable, and leading us collectively over the cliff. What can be done?

On one level we can rest assured that the system as it stands is not sustainable, and will collapse of its own weight at some point, sooner or later. An economic model that generates deteriorating health in an exponential progression is inherently self-destroying. But that fact is not reassuring to individuals concerned with their own health right now. Fortunately, in the near term, demand does create supply, witness the advent and rise of the organic movement - the sole result of an increasing demand for clean foods. The most powerful message we can send to profiteers is to buy organic fruits and vegetables whenever possible.

It may also help us to understand some of our resistances to more efficient and energy producing lifestyle choices. Let's consider for example those of us in the boomer generation who were bottle fed instead of breast fed. Formula was promoted widely as "better than nature", which in retrospect seems an absurdity until we stop and consider the many similar absurdities we continue to be presented with daily. It's an alluring idea that's rarely true, so first we have to begin to learn to trust nature and our own body "intelligence". And that is a multidimensional learning process of education, reconditioning, and practice.

Formula impeded our development in two ways, first and most obviously, nutritionally. It has been shown in study after study the myriad benefits of breast milk in development and disease resistance. The mistake was made of assuming we knew well enough the composition of mother's milk to make an equal or better version. We now see the chemistry and biology is more complex than we knew, but are we collectively any closer to the idea nature cannot be improved upon? Some of us perhaps, but the vested interests? They cannot allow such a thing when it negates their primary business model.

Well at least after we've destroyed our planet by sucking it dry and polluting it beyond the life sustaining level we can colonize other planets. Herein lies the essential insanity (and hubris) of our species. And why is it again we cannot simply live constructively on this god given paradise of a planet? (Do we really want to go live on some barren rock under an oxygen tent? Really?)

Calling Dr Freud... can I recommend  to you his summation essay for the lay reader? "Civilization and It's Discontents"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization_and_Its_Discontents

And that leads to the second point, one that is not obvious, and possibly as a result more difficult than the first.  Consider: what we learn as infants about survival becomes a deep part of us. Those messages from mother, family, and through them society become nearly intractably associated with survival in the deepest parts of our subconscious. If we had the unfortunate experience for example to learn in our preverbal years that "Twinkies" are food, we are likely going to come to consciousness carrying an unconscious addiction to a toxic combination of substances. What we learn is food in the preverbal years has an abiding effect on our food choices for the remainder of our lives, and in ways we cannot be fully conscious of, in the ways we also cannot remember "learning" language, or walking.

Many of us were also "put down with a bottle", and this practice produced unfortunate emotional distortions around issues of love, self-esteem, and food.

So learning the cause of health, and learning to trust nature and our body intelligence is a two step process for many of us. First we need to learn the basic mechanics of which foods are best suited for our biology, and offer the more efficient returns on nutrition and energy. We need to understand that sustainable energy is the cause of health and happiness, and it comes from the foods that are highest on the nutrient to calorie ratio. We need to understand that conversely, foods that are low on that scale are enervating, as are stimulants, which afford temporary energy but leave us energy depleted and susceptible to disease formation in the long run.

We need to understand how to prepare and eat those foods. This is actually very simple at the basic levels, which would surprise many people. It's as simple as consuming whole, fresh, ripe, raw, organic fruits and vegetables. At the most basic level, all we need do is pick them up and eat them (when they meet the above qualifications they are inherently delicious). So when we understand that the mechanics of the cause of health are actually very simple, what remains to stop us?

It's the associations we made as infants, reinforced over and over through childhood and after, that toxins are food, and therefore necessary for our very survival. We learned that processed, concentrated, heat damaged substances laced with toxic chemicals are necessary for survival - so it's no wonder we're in the health crisis we see all around us. So the second step in the process is to reprogram our early conditioning, which can be done when we are motivated. But it may help to recognize at the outset we are essentially working within the parameters of addiction psychology, an awareness that can be very beneficial to the process.

Last, it's useful also to understand how we can be misled into something like putting an entire generation of infants on formula, because this is essentially how the big vested interests continue to operate. In the case of formula we may see the first example of big pharma kicking back profit to the entire medical profession who prescribed or recommended it to new mothers. All manner of false messages are created and propagated in this way, and are all the more confusing when the agents of such messages are "true believers" in the power of science over nature. Let's not forget that science is a subset of nature (as are all things). And let us be informed, particularly when it comes to the matters of our health.

Wednesday, February 5, 2014

Is there something foreign in our food that wasn't there when we were kids?

Ted talk by food industry analyst Robyn O'Brien in a very succinct presentation on the dangers of GMOs to our health, our economy, and our country.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rixyrCNVVGA