Month: December 2013

Want to Eat Healthier? Watch Food Fight for Free

As the end of the year rolls around I am thinking a lot about New Year’s resolutions and one that is pretty consistent is to eat better each year. The problem is usually staying motivated enough to actually only eat half a piece of gluten and dairy free key lime pie. Tonight I had two pieces. Yes they were allergen free, but no it was not a good idea. I find health and food related documentaries very helpful in staying motivated to do the right thing. Well if they are good ones. Food Fight is a good one. It reminded me of the first time I ever ate fresh spinach. I could not even believe it was related to canned spinach. I was astounded. Then I remember showing my husband the color difference between organic and conventional frozen spinach. They were not even the same color. Recently he tried to eat a non organic apple after years of only eating organics. He could not finish it, it tasted so bad. So if you want to get motivated to believe that healthy food is not only good for you, but also amazingly flavorful and decadent you may want to enjoy the film while it is still free on hulu. Oh and if you think your kids won’t eat it, think again. Two summers ago my son and a bunch of...

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MSG and Glutamic Acid Are Very Different

When I was a child many years ago, everyone was afraid to eat coconut oil because studies showed it did terrible things to your arteries, much more so than other oils. Juice, however, was consumed with abandon since it was made entirely from fruit. Now we know that was all wrong, but why were these myths so long lived? Well, there were studies that showed an absolute link between the consumption coconut oil and heart disease. Problem is that the coconut oil used in the studies was partially hydrogenated. And fruit with its fiber and pectin does not cause the insulin spike that refined, pasteurized juice does. As it turned out, the food was not the issue, the changes made to the food were the issue. So now we come to MSG versus glutamic acid. The difference here is just like the difference between partially hydrogenated coconut oil (which IS bad for you) and extra virgin cold pressed coconut oil which many scientists now believe is good for you. Glutamic acid is so necessary to human life that if you never eat it your body will make it from other proteins. You will, of course, eat it as it is in lots of healthy foods and yes it makes them taste better, but if you never ate it your body would make it anyway as it is critical to...

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Five Healthy Eating Resolutions for 2014 That You Can Keep

Nine years ago, I was ordering hot wings and pepperoni pizza for delivery and washing it all down with diet soda. Despite health problems and a friend who literally died as a result of poor eating, it was a very, very, very, gradual process to go from diet coke and barbecue hot wings with a side of candy to my current diet. So if you are just beginning to explore healthy eating, a great place to start is by avoiding the very worst foods. The problem with most lists is they just tell you what to give up, without any allowance for the fact that you were addicted to the food for a reason. So while, yes this list says to give up chips, its only SOME chips not ALL chips. Yes there are candies that you should not eat, but chocolate is not one of them. So welcome to my realistic list of five manageable changes that could make a really BIG difference in your health Instead of soft drinks and sports / energy drinks, have tea and coffee Whether it is Gatorade, a Slushy drink or diet soda, there is no such thing as a healthy soft drink. Some are just less bad than others. When I see a kid drinking Vitamin Water I always want to grab his mom and ask “Did you read the label?”...

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Gluten-Free Summit Interviews Available for Limited Time

The Gluten-Free Summit aka six days I barely slept, has been over for a while, but the doctor who pulled it together is making some of the very best technical lectures available to the public for FREE for a few weeks. Now these doctors and scientists lack the charm or speaking style of an Alessio Fasano or a Peter H.R. Green. They are researchers, scientists and medical doctors, but they are literally the grandfathers of celiac disease and gluten sensitivity. They are not young men, and they speak their mind with the fearlessness that comes with being past the normal retirement age. These men all imply the same thing. Autoimmune diseases are linked and the problem is at least partially caused by what we are eating. Dr. Schoenfeld has demonstrated how they can tell if someone will get celiac disease years before it occurs…in time to change. His lecture on autoimmune disease is just fascinating and would be of interest to people with disorders like lupus, crohn’s and others. Dr. Umberto Volta was on the team that invented the anti-gliadin test back in Italy. He is now concerned that we are not taking the non-celiac gluten sensitivity seriously. Dr Marsh is THE Dr. Marsh so when you hear Marsh 1 or Marsh 2…he’s the guy who invented the measurement. Dr Aristo Vojdani has been a huge influence on the...

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Gluten-Free Dairy-Free Corn-Free Lemon Christmas Cookies

Every year we need to make lemon cookies for Santa. Apparently Santa only wants lemon cookies and although we have left him other cookies its really a no dice situation. It’s gotta be lemon. I already have a lemon cookie recipe but quite honestly its a pain to make those cookies. These have fewer ingredients, are easier to make, use a cookie cutter which is fun and lets us make shapes from them, and can be decorated. I do every step up to and including cutting out the cookies and then I freeze the dough in cookie shapes. I freeze them a single layer at a time and then when they are frozen I put them in a zipper plastic bag and then just bake them as I need them over the holiday. Otherwise I am pretty sure that I would end up in an asylum. I can’t make all those cookies in the week coming up to the holiday. I just can’t. These are almost a lemon shortbread but not quite. Interestingly I don’t think that they would be as good with wheat flour. Something about the gluten free flour leaves a cookie that is rich and yet crisp. Just like tempura or fried chicken which are much better with rice flour, these too benefit from the gluten-free flour. Ingredients For the cookies 2 cups shortening – I...

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New Documentary on Dr. Burzynski – Free on Hulu

One of my hopes for this blog and site was to be a place where people could find the results of research linking diet to disease and cure. It’s not the mainstream way of thinking about these things, yet the amount of evidence that a gluten-free diet helps conditions like Crohn’s and autoimmune forms of arthritis is significant enough that it disturbs me that it is not mentioned to patients as an option. It does not bother me all that much that people choose not to do it, but it really bothers me that they are not informed that it is even an option. But perhaps I am being too naive. There is a lot of Oscar buzz right now about the true story of a man who smuggled AIDS drugs into Texas before they were FDA approved called The Dallas Buyers Club. Here were people dying with no decent options and their right to experiment on themselves when there was no legally approved option was taken away. He was jailed and harrassed until years later when the drugs he had smuggled in became the standard of care. Disturbingly, this is also the case for children and some adults with certain types of brain tumors. These people have no approved options, and just this year an option that had passed phase 2 clinical trials was taken away from them....

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Healthy Gluten-Free Dairy-Free Frozen Dinners

I was on vacation in Florida for a few weeks and while in Florida one shops at a grocery chain called Publix. It is not negotiable. In preparation of our pending three day drive home I went looking for gluten-free dairy-free and corn-free frozen dinners that could be microwaved in our hotel room at night. I know, I crack me up too. Yet there they were. Four different entrees without gluten, dairy, or corn. I was stunned. I was expecting something that had the nutritional profile of the box, so I was stunned to find that Artisan Bistro has several entrees that are gluten-free and also dairy and corn free. As a bonus, most ingredents are organic and the meat or fish is sustainably harvested or raised without hormones or steroids. The salmon is wild caught and the beef is grass-fed. I kid you not. Now, no these are not cheap, and yes they contain enough salt to mummify something. But there are actually two and three digit numbers next to the nutrition facts. These meals and bowls actually contain a signficant amount of actual nutrients. Sure, I would prefer to get a salad, but the truth is that Cracker Barrel says right on their website that people like me shouldn’t eat anything there because they make the biscuits from scratch every day. And don’t even talk to me...

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A Low Sugar, Additive Free, Gluten-Free, Allergen-Free Candy Bar?

At the Gluten-Free Allergen-Free Expo one of the food products we were able to sample and then purchase were new “snack” bars from Enjoy Life. They come in four flavors but I purchased Chocolate Sunbutter, S’mores, and Cinnamon Bun. Enjoy Life is one of my favorite brands as their products are all free of all eight major allergens (wheat-free, dairy-free, nut-free, soy-free, egg-free, peanut-free and of course free of fish and shellfish) and all gluten-free. Personally I like the slightly less sweet sunbutter crunch bars, but these bars all have a drizzle of frosting on the top. They are rich chewy and decadent and I certainly was not thinking that they would be low in sugar. I bought them specifically for those times when we eat out and there is nothing on the dessert menu my son can eat but other people insist on having dessert anyway. These bars have 9, 10 and 11 grams of sugar per bar. That means that these frosted, marshmallowy, chocolatey bars have between 2 and three teaspoons of sugar. One tablespoon or less per bar. Since they taste like candy I thought I better check for other sweeteners. There were none. Compare these numbers to those on supposedly healthy gluten-free bars and you are in for a shock. Many of the other bars have scary amounts of sugar in them. We can eat...

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A Lot of Cavities May Mean Celiac Disease

One of the most annoying myths about celiac disease is that celiacs have gastrointestinal complaints. The truth is that most celiacs do not have these problems. We were lucky. We presented classically and my child was diagnosed within a year. More often, however, celiacs have weird problems like mood swings, short stature, rashes, anemia, depression and surprisingly enough cavities, white spots on the teeth and canker sores. Now, like everything else with this disorder the manifestation can be all over the map. I, for example, have one cavity. One. And I am OLD. That said, I know lots of people who feed their kids well, have kids who brush their teeth and use flouride toothpaste yet, bizarrely, the children have five or six cavities. Apparently those children need to be checked for celiac disease. Interestingly enough there is also an issue with what they call enamel defects in the permanent teeth. What happens there is that the permanent teeth have white spots or unusual ridges whereas the baby teeth were or are perfect. Again, those children need to be checked. As usual, I do NOT want you to trust me. Please check out the following sources below. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19687752 http://celiacdisease.about.com/b/2013/04/24/tooth-enamel-defects-sadly-common-in-celiac-disease-study-finds.htm Although dentists are supposed to check these things and alert patients to the possibility of celiac disease, they may not know about the risk or that the parents need to...

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