Month: September 2012

I love my school district because they spend money where it is directly related to learning and very little money on nice to have things. Here in the suburbs of Chicago, the very hot weather tends to be over by September and not start again until July, so one thing our school lacks is air-conditioning. That means that on the rare 85 degree days in September, the children have a popsicle break to keep cool. At home I do the cheap and easy thing and make our popsicles by taking seasonal fruit (or frozen fruit if there isn’t anything good for popsicles in season) and putting it in a blender, tasting for sweetness, adding sugar or stevia till it tastes good and then freezing the fruit puree in molds. It costs less than store bought, is organic, can be made in any flavor, and actually takes less time than buying popsicles. However, since the school cannot check my home and I might theoretically be eating handfuls of cashews while making the popsicles, they require packaged popsicles. So we buy our own for our son to use on popsicle days. Unfortunately I have yet to discover one completely safe brand. Julie’s Organic Sorbet Pops – The company posts the ingredients on the website in a very easy to read way and all flavors are free of the eight most common...

Now that I have been ranting about the importance of eating organic for a few days, there is an obvious question. Where are you supposed to find this special meat? Organic produce is relatively easy to find. I have organic golden beets and kohlrabi in my refrigerator right now. Yet, while I live near an obscenely large Whole Foods I have only one obvious source for eggs from grass-fed chickens (Vital Farms which sells through Whole Foods), and no regular source of meat from grass-fed chickens or truly humane, free range pork. To solve this dilemma, I got a chest freezer and started visiting the Farmers Markets. I started interviewing the farmers until I found one that I really liked. That is not a simple task. For example, every year I order turkeys from a place called Good Shepherd Ranch in Kansas. They have a turkey-cam. I get to see that the turkeys have a relatively nice turkey life until one day they don’t. They breed rare turkeys instead of broad-breasted whites, and the turkeys are outside eating bugs and grasses. My kind of turkeys. I found Good Shepherd Ranch via Heritage Farms. Heritage Farms sells other meat that I do not like as well including beef cattle that have corn in their diet. So for turkeys, I love them. For other meats, it depends. And the shipping costs...

OK I promise to do a recipe again soon, but this topic has me steamed. This article from Mother Jones outlines the unclear statistics and some of the errors in the data around pesticide exposure. They are also going to do articles on all of the other points I noted such as the better lipid profile and the fact that the evidence around vitamin density is uneven. Glyphosate (aka RoundUp) is its own issue, worthy of its own post. I will do that another day. So short post today. Read Mother Jones at the following address...

One thing that got lost in the whole “Are organic foods really healthier” debate is the issue of GMOs. You may have noticed that I often mention whether or not a product contains GMOs. I do this because I avoid them. Yes that means I have to buy non-GMO certified products or to buy organic. Soy, corn, canola and potato products that are not organic or certified are typically GMO. This is a health risk that the doctors at Stanford did not consider because they couldn’t study it. The robust research on the safety and healthfulness of GMOs has never been published. I avoid GMOs because I don’t think the long term effects that they have on humans and the environment have been sufficiently studied. The few studies that do exist are not reassuring. This article from the International Journal of Biological Sciences summarizes the concerns raised by the results of some of these studies. This is a full article but it is not overly technical. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2952409/?tool=pubmed If Monsanto believes in its product why not do or encourage research to prove its safety? If you compare this to the much vilified aspartame, you will note that you can pull up hundreds of studies on aspartame. By allowing their product to be studied they have proven to me that it does NOT cause cancer or other serious health issues in...

This headline is everywhere this week. It isn’t true and it isn’t what Dr. Bravata said, but it is a fantastic example of how science can be twisted to serve a political or economic goal. Like maybe not getting GMO labeling in California. California is pushing for European style GMO labels. I wonder how many food companies buy ads? I wonder how they feel about the GMO labeling law? I wonder if that could possibly be helping this meta-analysis to be so misinterpreted? The actual paper by the Stanford team is available at the following web address for your perusal. The abstract is free, the paper you would need to purchase and you can read it for 24 hours for about $20. I purchased the paper so I could make sure I had my facts straight. http://annals.org/article.aspx?articleid=1355685 What they actually said is the following 1) The risk of getting antibiotic resistant bacterial contamination is 33% higher if you eat conventional chicken or pork as opposed to organic, however there are not enough studies in this area. 2) The risk that you will be contaminated with pesticides is 81.5% higher in conventional produce. 7% of organic vs 38% of conventional. Two human studies showed significantly lower urinary pesticide levels in children who consumed an organic diet. There were no included studies that provided data on pesticide levels in milk, meat,...

HBO did a four part miniseries called The Weight of The Nation which is a sobering look at the health consequences of overweight and obesity. I spent the better part of yesterday watching it with increasing horror. This documentary is endorsed by the FDA and the USDA. The recommendations are the same ones any decent MD would give you and there is no mention of the havoc created by food allergies, dairy, excessive consumption of feedlot animals or food sensitivities. The Esseltyn diet never comes up. The benefits of short fasts are covered quickly. Which in many ways makes it even more worth watching since people who think veganism or organic food or sugar free eating or avoiding gluten are extreme choices will find little to argue with here. The four 75 minute episodes are all availale on YouTube so you can watch them for free on your phone while commuting or on a laptop or iPad while cleaning up the kitchen at night (which is when I do all my video watching). The basic recommendations around weight loss are excellent, and if you have family members who still doubt the power of food to determine health, this is a great place for them to start. The message is clear and sobering. My son is six and he watched them with me. There are some graphic slides of fatty...