Moving Strongly Forward

Lemon Juice AND Cayenne Pepper Before Breakfast

Ryan and I have splitting a lemon and adding water almost every morning for a couple of years. See Lemon Juice Before Breakfast. A couple years prior to that we were drinking orange juice with cayenne pepper, but that fizzled out. Now Ryan has the brilliant idea to combine the two and really boost the morning detox (the body is naturally detoxing in the morning). Yowza! Talk about a wake me up!

What is the deal with cayenne pepper? It is great for many reasons that you can read about here: Health Benefits of Cayenne Pepper. This article is a bit more direct if you need a quick read: Health Benefits of Cayenne Pepper | Herbs and Spices | Health Benefits.

What do we do? We are using ¼ teaspoon in liquid every morning. Yesterday we put it in our lemon juice water, but it takes too long to drink and burns the throat. Today I put it in a small amount of water and downed it after the lemon juice. Much easier that way. When the warm feeling eventually begins to fade we will up the dose.

Bottoms up!

Running like the Wind and Vibram Running Shoes

It still blows my mind how well I am running. I am a sporadic pretty much non-runner due to a fractured back 14 years ago. The pain is gone now, thanks to food and healing. When stress from Ryan’s layoff hit me last fall, I ran, and it was amazing how easy it was. Surely, I thought, it was adrenalin from the stress. Then I ran again a few months later just because. It was easy again. I was so confused. Before the back fracture, at age 29, I could run 10 miles and bench press 120 pounds. The running was drudgery, but I could do it. I am no slouch now, but not nearly as “fit” as I was then. So why the heck was I running so well??? Better at almost 44 than when I was 29, taking on sizeable hills in North Carolina instead of the flatlands in Florida.

Finally I got a copy of Christopher McDougall’s Born to Run. It turns out that I have naturally been doing things right. I eat right (no processed foods and lots of good fat and healing foods among other things). I was doing 100 squats and 100 lunges during my unchallenging walks to spice them up. As an added bonus, I was too broke to buy new walking/running shoes. It turns out that the flatter and more blown out the shoes the better according to McDougall. What a score!

The past few weeks I have been running once a week (usually on Sunday) just to see if I can hit an off week. There have been no off weeks. Today was phenomenal. Now I am wondering what kind of mileage I really can do. I have no expectations and my wonder and puzzlement remain because I am violating every understanding I have of running. I am much older, I don’t run regularly, the terrain is tougher and I am running better than ever. What do I do with that?! Next week I will plot a five mile run and see what happens.  

Now for the Vibrams Vibram Five Fingers: Discover the Barefooting Alternative. Vibram shoes are a significant part of McDougall’s Born to Run. My husband Ryan spent his birthday money to purchase a pair for me yesterday. They are fabulous! Your feet are so free. My feet are out of shape. Ten minutes yesterday in the grocery store with the Vibrams, and the balls of my feet and my quads were hurting. Today I wore them to an Art Museum event for 3 hours, and my calves were pretty sore. Vibram says to start slowly in these shoes, as our feet are very out of shape due to a lifetime of arch support, pronation correction and other “improvements.” I hope to try a run in them in the next one to two months. They are supposed to be the bomb once you are tough enough.

Back Pain = Bad Food

I was in denial the first couple of days after getting back from camping, but a weekend of bad food knocked me for a loop. In addition to all of the problems I reported in: Unintended Food Experiments - Again!  my back hurt for a week! Sharp pain when I would straighten up after bending over. The pain seemed worse because I have been pain free for a long time, and it blew my mind that the full on pain was back. I reported my joy here when I first realized I was pain free 13 years after fracturing my back: Success and Motivation.

Fortunately, today, one week after the bad food weekend kicked off, I am almost pain free again. Glad it took only a week this time.

What Do Companies Want?

Mark Morford of the San Francisco Chronicle has become my favorite writer. His ability to say it strongly, clearly and colorfully is unmatched. I am glad someone is out there shouting it at the rooftops and is not worried about being PC. Here is the link to Mark’s column How Many Companies Want You Dead?, and here it is in full:

Oh, don't even pretend to be shocked. You know it's true. You know there are simply a huge number of big, sweaty major corporations out there in big, sweaty capitalismland who claim to be in the business of feeding and caring for the human body, but who actually care about as much for your general health and well-being as a Republican cares for his meth dealer's lesbian daughter's organic free-range Vermont wedding.

Deny it at your peril: It is just sinisterly evident that many corporations -- seemingly far more in quantity and scale than we like to imagine -- would very much like to see you, well, if not completely dead, then surely to suffer, wallow, shake and wobble for as long as you shall barely live.

Why? Because, silly, no matter how you slice it and what sort of optimistic green/organic/progressive wool you like to draw over your eyes, the truth remains: Disease and sickness, obesity and mal-education are still where the real money is. It's just the American way.

Is that too malicious? Too ugly? I'm not so sure. You have but to ponder: Who wants a healthy and calmly educated populace? Who wants people attuned and wise, spiritually secure and inwardly stable? Not the Coca-Cola Corporation. Not Exxon. Not the life insurance industry or Big Tobacco or Big Pharma. Not the Catholic Church. Not Yum! Brands, Pfizer, big agribiz and industrial farms, McDonald's, Kraft Foods, or your local school lunch program. Not most of Congress. Not Fox News or reality TV or the bleating clown car that is the Tea Party. Not fundamentalist Christianity, Mormonism or about 89 percent of Texas.

After all, the smarter and healthier you get, the more you are self-defined, attuned to wisdom and spirit, the less power and influence they have over your life, and the less they can sell you swill and poison, false hope and a sour idea of a bitter, vengeful little God concocted by surly white men in a dank Roman basement sometime around 300 AD.

Let us examine one little example. It comes in the form of a nasty news tidbit that hit my in-box recently, courtesy of a thoughtful and rather horrified reader, in the wake of the greasy fallout over KFC's famously vile Double Down meat abomination thing.

It's a story that reveals a rather unexpected, but not entirely shocking little factoid: It turns out the health and life insurance industries are just hugely invested in the success of the world's fast food companies.

How hugely? According to the study, in 2009 the big health insurance companies owned upwards of $2 billion in stock in the biggest garbage food purveyors in the land. That's a lot of high fructose corn syrup, guar gum, ethoxylated monoglycerides, hormones, antibiotics, pesticides and buckets of greasy, synthetically flavored slop, happily sanctioned and supported by the very companies you would think very much want you to shun those poisons like the pope shuns Ireland.

You may then rightly ask: What the hell are they up to? What sort of nefarious forces are at play? At first glance, maybe you can excuse it as pure capitalism at work. Large corporations often invest in other large corporations, seeking any means to making as much money as possible; principles don't usually factor into it.

In fact, as the nation just witnessed, it is inherently forbidden for ethics to come anywhere within a 100-mile radius of Wall Street. You want to round out your portfolio? Are you seeking some good cash flow and (relative) long-term stability in the market? Invest in the classic cornerstones of capitalism: oil, sweatshops, junk food, pharmaceuticals, weapons manufacturers, industrial slaughterhouses, coal mining and so on, and tell your soul to shut the hell up. Daddy needs a new speedboat and some bullets for the apocalypse.

But that's only part of the picture. It takes no effort at all to peel back one more layer and say that the health insurance industry obviously has a vested interest in keeping you fat and sick and ever at their mercy. After all, they're just hedging their bets.

Much like Big Tobacco's brilliant collusion with Big Pharma, both cheerfully feeding you a slew of lies and misinfo about smoking's terrible addictiveness on the one hand, while turning right around and convincing you of the need for expensive drugs and patches, rehabs and gums on the other in a vicious cycle of shame, victimhood and failed willpower, so do the health and junk food companies work together to make each other mountains of cash, with you as the dumbass hub.

Put it this way: The more successful McDonald's is, the sicker the nation gets, the higher your insurance premiums will skyrocket, the more drugs you will demand, the less willpower you will have, the more you will crave toxic garbage "comfort food," the more you will believe you're a victim, the less control you will have over the your body and your life, the happier these companies will be. And lo, the circle of life continues. Until your heart collapses.

Do not misunderstand. I am not saying these corporations are intentionally, murderously malevolent. I am stopping just short of implying a scenario where despicable corporate meatheads sit around bland boardrooms concocting ways to literally poison and kill you. Well, not entirely, anyway.

Because the truth is, you're just not that important. Your health and well-being are entirely incidental to the larger goal -- which is, of course, making a s--load of money. If these companies think of you at all, it's simply as a means to that end. You're just a bulbous ATM to them. You are, as always, entirely expendable.

Is there any good news? A little. As Michael Pollan pointed out, as flawed as the health care reform package is, come 2014, we will still see a dramatic shift, as heathcos will no longer be able to turn you down for coverage or charge higher rates for pre-existing conditions. This means they will have a far greater vested interest in keeping you healthy by eating better and living a tiny bit smarter.

Of course, it's still for the most part just a thin, ruthless charade. The fact remains: They're all still for-profit industries. Much like how KFC -- and its vile parent company, Yum! Brands -- showed that it could give a dead, hormone-engorged chicken about ethics, corporate responsibility or anyone's overall health, the instant that many of these companies sense any new path toward profit, they won't hesitate to glom onto it.

Does that path just so happen to involve poisoning your blood, crushing your coronary artery, or running right over you in the street? Well gosh. Too bad for you.

No Chicken Pox for Colson

Twenty-one days ago Colson went to a chicken pox party, where he touched the girl’s sores, put his fingers in his mouth, shared a sucker and water with her and just plain hung out. It was our fourth attempt to give him the pox. There is a 10 to 21 day incubation window, and we are at day 21 with no pox. Next we will check his titers via a blood test to see if he is immune. Could he have contracted them and we didn’t even know it?

Unintended Food Experiments - Again!

Just when I think I can’t surprise myself anymore... We went camping last week. The weather was crazy but beautiful, the campground was gorgeous and empty, and Colson, the super hiking seven year old boy who did 6.5 miles the first day, loves to camp.

The food was good (see Recipes section):

Hope’s Baked Oatmeal (aka Grandpa Oatmeal) and hard boiled eggs for breakfast

Applegate Farms turkey or salami with raw cheddar cheese sandwiches and veggies for lunch

Chicken soup with bone broth, free-range beef hamburgers (no buns) and organic chicken hotdogs for dinners with lots of veggies

Oranges, apples, bananas, peanuts, homemade chocolate pudding sweetened with raw honey and super special organic dark and milk chocolates for snacks

Overall it was pretty darn healthy for camping food. So what happened?

As far as I can tell, I wasn’t getting enough fat over the camping trip. The baked oatmeal had hardly any fat. In contrast, I normally start my day with 2/3 cup of whole raw kefir (see Kefir Video and Kefir Tips), a raw egg yolk and 2 TBS coconut oil in a smoothie (see Recipes). On this camping trip I clearly started each day with a fat deficit. The burgers, soup, hotdogs and turkey were all lean. I didn’t eat much cheese. My energy was a bit lower too.

On the way home we were all craving some fat, so we stopped at the grocery store and bought the ever so yummy Ben and Jerry’s ice cream. That seemed to do the trick. By the time we got home I didn’t feel like cooking, so we ordered an excellent pizza from a local restaurant. I scarfed down two pieces, and a little while later was nauseous. Given how I have eaten for almost two years, apparently pizza and ice cream on the same day is a bad idea. By the end of the night, I needed some ginger for the nausea, so I thought I would try the ginger beer that Ryan bought two weeks ago due to his nausea. It turns he is one of the rare people who suffers vertigo from the headphones that he purchased for work and he almost passed out. He didn’t know the headphones could do that and was trying to treat the nausea as quickly as he could while at work, so he bought the ginger beer.

Back to my story. I grabbed the ginger beer, guzzled it down (that was my first pop in more than five years) and felt better. Twenty minutes later, my heart starts to flutter. It flutters into the night. It is the most uncomfortable feeling!! Finally, around midnight, it settles down. Ryan says he thinks I overloaded on sugar, as sugar is NEVER a part of our diet at home and we avoid it like crazy when we are out.

Next day we are off to Colson’s friend’s birthday. Quickly forgetting the lessons of the previous day, I eat a piece of birthday cake. It was a Whole Foods cake, the most delicious cake, so how could I refuse?? Within a half hour the heart flutters are back! Crap! I wasn’t worried this time, as I knew it was the sugar. Colson had better sense than I and he ate only half of his, as he remembered that he was super sick from his Whole Foods birthday cake a couple of weeks ago.

I go for a run in the late afternoon to burn the sugar out, and by dinner the heart is calmed down. I begin cutting up six varieties of raw cheese that I purchased through a co-op to prepare them for freezer storage. We rarely drink wine (three or four times a year now), but Ryan had purchased some for camping. Wine and cheese go together, right? Ryan pours the wine and we had a great wine and cheese party! Until the flutters come back, stronger than ever. Wine has sugar.

I have been one of the healthiest eaters in America for almost two years, and sugar thrashes me in two days! Amazing. Fortunately, I will rebound quickly. The flutters are gone this morning. It is Ryan’s birthday today and he has declared it a dessert-free day for my sake. Not that I needed him to after my experiences.

Dr. Oz wrote a great article on sugar, and this line sticks with me: “Sugar in your blood is like shards of glass scraping the inner lining of your arteries” (see Weekly Eye Opener – Sugar Conspiracy for more of Dr. Oz’s article). Fortunately, I know how to eat to heal and can quickly move past these last two days. As my always positive doc would say “your body gave you great feedback!” The most amazing idea is that I used to eat much worse every day for 40 years than I have in these last two days, and my body was so polluted and weakened that it couldn’t give me feedback. How much damage did I do? No idea.

I will always be thankful for my health and that the human body is so forgiving!

More on Glutathione from Dr. Mark Hyman, MD

I first learned about glutathione reading Dr. Hyman’s Ultra Mind Solution, and then the power of bone broth really crystallized for me: Broth – Cysteine and Glutathione: Pure, Potent Healing Power. For those who want to know more, Dr. Hyman has posted a great article here: Glutathione: The Mother of All Antioxidants. Be sure to read my post, though, as Dr. Hyman doesn’t discuss broth.

Geez…My Blog is Boring! Now for a More Gifted Writer

I have not read anything with more adjectives than this article: The KFC Double Down -- One Sandwich To Kill You All. I know my limitations, though, and I can’t curse and accuse with the same gusto, so I will continue to write about the food geek things that excite me.

Frightening that KFC was my second job (after Little Caesar’s Pizza), I made this stuff, and I ate it all the time! The fact that I am still here and now pretty darn healthy is a testimony to how much the body wants to heal.

GAPS Diet – Cancer and More Amazing Results

The GAPS Diet (Gut and Psychology Syndrome Diet) can cure or help to cure so much more than the allergies, asthma, eczema and autism spectrum disorders on which it focuses. It has helped my father improve his severely high diabetes scores to the point where they are normal in only three weeks, and it has helped me out of premenopause. The array of health benefits is staggering.

Dr. Tom Cowan, MD, has written an amazing article regarding natural ways to cure cancer, with the GAPS Diet being an important part of the cure. Here is Dr. Cowan’s article:

A Holistic Approach to Cancer | Cancer

 

Here are the first two paragraphs to get you thinking. The part which struck me was the reference to grain, which my family shuns because we closely follow GAPS:

The Disease of Civilization

Let’s begin with a definition of cancer. Cancer is the situation that occurs when a certain type of cell out of the many different types of cells in our body—such as blood cells, pancreas cells, brain cells, liver cells, connective tissue cells—decides to grow in an uncontrolled way, in an excessive way, and at the expense of all the other types of cells in the body.

If you had one word or brief phrase to answer the question, “What causes cancer?” what might it be? You might respond with “emotions,” “toxins,” “fungus,” “stress,” or “bad terrain of the body.” Those are all great answers. But they are not my answer. In my twenty-five years of being a doctor and thinking about food and cancer and health issues for pretty much every day of those twenty-five years, I can say—and I don’t wish to say this in an arrogant way—that I have no doubt in my mind that I know what causes cancer. I have come to the conclusion that I have this one right. My answer in one word is “civilization.”

THE BANE OF CIVILIZATION

I’m not the first person to think this way. That is actually the title of one of my favorite books, a book by Vilhjalmur Stefansson called Cancer: Disease of Civilization? (1960). The idea started some time before Stefansson in a lecture given at a Paris medical society in 1842 by Stanislas Tanchou, a physician and one of Napoleon’s surgeons. At that time France was a primary center of science and medicine in the world. You have to remember where we were in the world at that time: it was the era of scientific discovery and manifest destiny; white people were going to conquer and civilize the world and make it safe for Christianity. Against this political backdrop Tanchou in his lecture claimed he could predict the exact incidence of cancer in all the major European cities over the next fifty years, and it was all dependent on the percentage of grain in their diets.

Tanchou’s numbers were all recorded and in time they came exactly true—a certain cancer percentage for Berlin, a certain percentage for Munich, and so on. The cancer incidence all depended on the amount of cereal grains in the diet. This set off a huge furor around the world since the great mission of the age was to civilize every inch of the globe. Here was somebody in a center of civilization who declared that these people who don’t eat grains, who have the more indigenous hunter-gatherer diet, never get cancer.

This provocative idea motivated many thinkers between 1842 to about 1950, as archeologists, anthropologists, medical doctors, missionaries and explorers took up the challenge of answering the question. Whether he knew it or not, Weston Price’s research came as a result of Tanchou’s fundamental question. Price focused on dental health as a kind of proxy to the question, “Is it true that cancer is a disease of civilization?”

Obesity Perceptions

This is a great article by Dr. David Katz: Do We Need A 'Fattitude Adjustment?' It encompasses what I have been telling family and friends for a couple of years. Obesity is not your fault, and you should never blame yourself. It is caused by a processed food industry that has purposefully created highly addictive, illness-causing foods at low cost. You can learn more about this from Dr. David Kessler’s book The End to Overeating. Dr. Kessler was the head of the Food and Drug Administration. Combine addictive foods with all of the medications, stress and health problems that plague almost everyone, and your body is completely out of balance. It is so out of balance that a colony of bad critters that thrives in each person’s gut is demanding that they be fed the addictive foods. The addictive foods aren’t nourishing, and the body craves more foods in its effort to find nutrients. It is a viscous, no win cycle that is killing too many people. It really isn’t your fault.

That said, with knowledge, you can act to break free from the cycle and regain your health. The bottom line is to stop buying processed food and cook your own food. The most important thing I tell my family and friends to add to their diets is bone broth. You can learn how to cook it here: Recipes. It is the best chicken soup or beef vegetable soup I ever ate. It has helped me greatly curb food cravings, rebuild my prematurely weakened bones (osteopenia diagnosis verging on osteroporsis at age 30), regain energy, eat less, reduce inflammation and more. If you want to learn more about the foods that have brought my family great health (Ryan’s ADD now banished, Colson’s seasonal allergies exponentially reduced and mine banished, my premenopause banished, and more) and actually banished our food cravings, then please peruse my blog.

Keep in mind, however, that the real, unprocessed foods that have brought my family to vibrant health are not approved by a dietician or a nutritionist and you should not institute any of my family’s eating habits.

Now for Dr. Katz’s article:

Do We Need a 'Fattitude Adjustment?'

In my public speaking, I routinely note that obesity remains the last bastion of socially acceptable prejudice in our society. I keep waiting for the statement to become obsolete, but it hasn't happened yet.

The very definition of "obesity" in children -- a body mass index at or above the 95th percentile, adjusted for age and sex -- is willfully exclusive, rather than inclusive because we prefer to leave many overweight children out for fear of stigmatization

The official definition places the national prevalence of childhood obesity at around 20 percent. Look around, and ask yourself if you believe it. I don't. I believe it is much higher.

None have done a better job of cultivating awareness of fat bias than my friends and colleagues at Yale University's Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity. This is important work, for we have long placed blamed on victims of epidemic obesity themselves, attacking people with the problem as assiduously, if not more so, than we have attacked the problem itself.

Some of you are doubtless already starting to get dubious about where this column is going, thinking that fatness is a tale of laziness and sloth, that staying lean is simply a matter of personal responsibility. Lest I lose your interest, let's address that now.

If you are among those who think this is all a tale of will power, self control, or personal responsibility, consider that we have rampant obesity among children under age 10, and ask yourself this: is there any evidence to indicate that the current generation of children-under-10 has somehow been endowed with less 'will power' or 'personal responsibility' than every prior generation of under-10-year-olds? Is it even plausible? Are we manufacturing seven-year-olds from some new mold?

If not, simply extend the thinking to adults who are, as well, much the same as Homo sapiens ever were. It is the modern environment that is as it never was before. It is powerfully obesigenic. Throughout most of human history, calories were relatively scarce and hard to get, and physical activity unavoidable. We have devised a modern environment in which physical activity is scarce and hard to get, and calories are unavoidable.

That assessment, by the way, does not exonerate us of personal responsibility. At the end of the day, how we use our feet and our forks is up to each of us -- and it is up to us to guide our children to salutary use of these master levers of both weight and health as well. But the environment that dictates our options for their use, and that lays before us the paths of least and greater resistance is not of our own devising. To take responsibility, we must be empowered, and the modern environment is mightily disempowering where weight control is concerned.

In most modern buildings, elevators are far more attractive and easier to find than stairs. The message that sends about societal norms and expectations is unmistakable. My wife and I once went for a walk in Houston (one of America's fatter cities, by the way; Houston, indeed, we have a problem!) and got looks from drivers as if we were extraterrestrials. No one walks in Houston! Even our neighborhood in suburban Connecticut lacks sidewalks.

The food supply is even more disempowering. A dizzying array of claims, often misleading at best, undermine the best intentions of even the most health conscious shoppers. Fat reduced, salt reduced, sugar reduced products are not necessarily better for you, because as that one nutrient is adjusted favorably, several others may be adjusted unfavorably. This is common practice, but the package is mum on the topic. Will power cannot help with this; it requires skill power most people don't have.

All of this can, and will, be fixed. It is what I and many others have devoted our careers to. But, don't hold your breath.

In the interim, our attitudes about fatness -- our "fattitudes," if a neologism will do -- are not just problematic. They are between the proverbial rock and hard place.

While I rail routinely against fat bias, I cannot sign up with the "OK at any size" crowd. The anti-bias goals of organizations like the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance are laudable, but the connotations in their entirety are not. Because we cannot and should not simply "accept" fat.

This is not a sudden about-face on my part. It's not hypocrisy. We must stop attacking people burdened by the problem of obesity. But we must NOT stop attacking the problem of obesity. Or, to use gentler terminology, we must not stop acknowledging obesity is a problem, even as we strive to stop blaming people for having the problem.

Why so adamant? Because obesity is, among other things, the reason why what I learned in medical school to call "adult onset" diabetes is now called "type 2." What was, less than a generation ago, a chronic disease of mid-life, is now a pediatric scourge. Epidemic obesity is the reason why a 17-year-old boy in Missouri had a triple coronary bypass. It is the reason we will see more of the same, and worse should current trends persist. And that, simply, is unacceptable; current trends cannot persist.

Fat bias is wrong. So is complacency about a societal plague that is propelling our children toward the chronic diseases of mid-life before ever they reach puberty. Between this rock and that hard place, we must find our way forward.

Colson Allergies and Chicken Pox Update

Eight days ago Colson went to a chicken pox party – our fourth one! Hopefully he gets them this time. If not, I am going to get his titers checked…maybe he has had them and not expressed the symptoms?

Yesterday was the day with the most pollen in the air of any time in history. It was everywhere and we were outside much of the day. Colson sneezed and blew and sneezed. It was the worst day I think he ever had. The pollen was just unbelievable.

This morning Colson woke with swollen eyes and a lump in his throat (which went away in about two hours). The swollen eyes I know to attribute to allergies, but the lumpy throat? Is it chicken pox or is it allergies? It is the only pox-like symptom he has, and while it is a bit early to be getting it, he is within the window. Talk about a frustrating confluence of events!

We missed our Spanish class and park day today, but that's fine because we had an awesome day of homeschooling, and Colson needed to be indoors, not getting coated by yellow pollen. His sneezy, runny nose is much better today.

What to do? Colson is back on GAPS to fight his allergies. Ryan and I went back on GAPS a couple of months ago. I think that boost has helped me be unaffected by all of pollen, where I normally would be a volcanic mess.

Now we just wait and see.

P.S. I do not recommend that anyone seek out a chicken pox party, as seeking chicken pox is contrary to the recommendations of the western medicine establishment. If you do so, it is at your own peril! Further, no one should try to repeat any part of my family’s and friend’s journeys as documented in this blog, because most of our actions are contrary to what most practicing dieticians and nutritionists recommend.