My Food Journey Part 1

Since I asked you all to tell what babysteps you have taken, I thought you would want to know what I have changed.

 

Before I go into my changes, I will show you where I came from.  Let me take you back to the beginning.  I was raised on homemade whole wheat bread.  All our pasta was whole wheat.  We had to take cod liver oil and blackstrap molasses.  We ate a lot of wild fish and game—trout, salmon, halibut, caribou, and moose. We had plenty of treats, they were just all sweetened with honey.  There was never a box mix or canned item to be found in the house.  Everything was made from scratch, from the pudding to the pies to the Thanksgiving dinners.  We ate plenty of butter and cream.

 

We ate plenty of everything.  I don’t remember moderation being taught in our home.  I guess the thinking was that most of what we ate was healthy, so what was the reason to limit it. We were a family with high metabolisms.  The limiting only came when the cost was high.  We were a family of six and would occasionally go out to Burger King.  We would share a couple orders of fries and all get waters.  At Christmas time we would get a carton of egg nog and each get a small glass.  I think it was just this combination that resulted in some over indulgence on my part once I reached adulthood.  I remember when I was first married, I bought a carton of egg nog all for myself and then made myself sick because I drank too much of it.  I admit that this is still a weak area for me, overeating.  I am blessed with high metabolism still, but it’s not as high as it was in high school.  J

 

When I was about 9 or 10, my younger sister and brother were found to be allergic to dairy products, so the whole family went on soy.  We had soy milk in the house for the next 10 years or so.  I never liked it too much so I remember choosing to do without whenever milk was called for.  We had tofu and plenty of other soy products, as well.

 

Once I reached my teenage years I was embarrassed when friends would come over and all our food was weird.  Whenever I was away from home, I would seek out the “good” food every chance I got.  I would bring my lunch to school every day and throw it in the trash because I was so embarrassed.  Years later I found out my sister did the same thing!  I went to a small private Christian school with no cafeteria so I would just eat whatever the vending machine had to offer for lunch, a candy bar and can of pop or a bag of microwave popcorn.  We weren’t allowed to leave the campus, but sometimes we would anyway, then I would get fast food for lunch.  Little Caesar’s was a favorite, being right across the street from school.  Loved that Crazy Bread!

 

I started cooking at nine years old.  My mother was often gone, being a midwife.  She called one day and told me to make some meatloaf for dinner.  She told me to write down all the ingredients, dump them into a bowl and mix with my hands.  Then throw it in a pan and bake.  I kept that “recipe” that I had written down for years and years.  I guess that was the beginning of my recipe collection.  It now includes many years worth of cooking magazines, many cookbooks, and various clippings and printouts.  Anyway, I did a lot of cooking for the family while living at home.  Most of the things I learned to cook were from either watching my mom or just having to do it.  This is why it is second nature for me to make everything from scratch.

 

Enter my husband.  When I met him, he subsisted on KoolAid, soda, pizza rolls, ramen noodles, Kraft macaroni and cheese, and Little Debbies.  When we got married I started trying out foods I had never had before.  I worked fulltime so I wanted things that were convenient.  We tried some Hamburger Helper and I can remember regularly making chicken and rice—the dish that calls for a can of Cream of Mushroom Soup.  One of our favorites was a store-bought angel food cake with strawberries (with that strawberry sauce you buy in the tub) and Cool Whip.  I made things from scratch at first, but slowly slipped into buying more and more packaged food items, like spaghetti sauce, granola bars, Yoplait yogurt, instant oatmeal, frozen fries, etc.  I EVEN started buying Crisco for cookies and pie crust!!!!

 

To be continued…

But isn’t it natural?

I mentioned last week that I don’t reach for chips, granola bars, snack mixes, or pretzels when I need a snack.  One of the reasons is that the oil in these products is highly processed.

 

You may ask, though, “Isn’t is natural?  It’s vegetable oil, or it comes from corn, or soybeans, or sunflower seeds, those are natural things?  What can be wrong with that?”

 

Well, I’m glad you asked!  Read on.

 

The oil used in packaged food DOES come from natural things, like corn, soybeans, sunflower seeds, safflower seeds, and rape seeds (canola), to name a few; the problem comes in HOW the oil is extracted.  If you tried to press corn you wouldn’t get much oil.  The same goes for soybeans.  The oil we get from these plants is a modern product, a product of the industrial age.  The ancient presses people used thousands of years ago to extract oil from olives would not give the same results with corn or soybeans.

 

You may be thinking, “God has given men creative minds and those men have come up with some fabulous inventions!”  So what could be wrong with this invention that allows us to extract oil from corn and soybeans?

 

Well, simply the motivation.  If the motive were to help mankind, they would do the proper research and see what effect this new invention had on the oil and on our health.  Unfortunately, the motive was selfish, a way to increase the bottom line.  With this new ability to use these vegetable oils, cakes and cookies had a much longer shelf life, thus opening up a whole market for packaged foods that didn’t exist before.  These items made with the traditional fats like butter, didn’t last nearly as long and therefore could not be mass marketed.

 

When you eat an olive, you know that it’s oily, you don’t think of corn as an oily food.  I heard of a fun experiment for kids once, to take a nut and rub it on paper to see the oil coming from it.  I doubt you could do the same experiment with corn or soybeans.  I know that corn and soybeans aren’t fatty, but I didn’t know for sure how much or little fat they had, so I did a little searching on the Internet and this is what I found.  Corn oil is taken from the germ, one bushel yields 1.55 pounds oil (2.8% by weight).  Soybeans are 90% water, 3% protein, 6% carbohydrate and ONLY .0018% fat!  So you have to grow a LOT of soybeans to produce soybean oil!  (Also known as vegetable oil.)  The yield from olives will vary from year to year depending on many factors (as I’m sure it does from corn and soybeans, as well), but the range is from 10 to 30%!  Also, my package of almonds says that the oil content is 50% (by weight), not sure how much comes out by pressing.  So it seems I was right in saying corn and soybeans are not oily.

 

So how do processors extract oil from things like corn and soybeans and what is the BIG deal?

 

Dr. Don Colbert writes in What Would Jesus Eat? –

“Seeds are heated to high temperatures of approximately 250 degrees Fahrenheit, and then the seed is pressed to expel the oil.  The oil in this process is unavoidably subjected to heat and pressure, which increase the rancidity of the oil.

 

Then, solvents—similar to gasoline—are added to the oil to dissolve the oil out of the grain.  The oil is then heated to more than 300 degrees to evaporate the solvent.

 

In the next step, the oil is degummed, a process that removes most of the nutrients—including minerals such as calcium, magnesium, iron, and copper, as well as chlorophyll, phospholipids, and lecithin.

 

By this time the oil has a yellowish tinge, so it is bleached at high temperatures, which cause more rancidity and more lipid peroxides to form.  The damaged oil is then deodorized at temperatures of more than 500 degrees for thirty minutes to an hour.

 

The end result is an odorless, clear oil that appears sterile and pure, but is in fact full of toxic lipid peroxides that can cause significant free-radical reactions leading to cardiovascular disease and cancer.”  (Emphasis mine.)

 

So we see that the big issue here is that in this process the oil becomes damaged and when we ingest it, it causes havoc.

 

Here is a prime example of something that WAS natural, but was destroyed by man and therefore isn’t healthy for us.  Vegetable oils are in most packaged foods, especially frozen meals, chips, cookies, crackers, and snack cakes, which is one of the reasons why I have placed them near the bottom of The Ladder of Healthy Eating.

 

It is much better for your health to stick with traditional fats, things people have been eating for thousands of years, things that Jesus even ate, things like butter, olive oil, coconut oil, and animal fats.  These fats are very stable and there is plenty of research showing many healthy benefits.  This is why you can make many of the things that you would find in a store, at home, from scratch and they will be healthier.  Things like cookies and cakes.  We obviously don’t want to eat these foods all the time, but if they are made at home with traditional fats, they will be healthier for you.

 

Remember the motto – If God created it, it is healthy; if man has adulterated it, it is unhealthy.  Enjoy whole food and enjoy health!

Snacks

For those just joining us, please read my article entitled, My Motto, it explains my philosophy of eating a whole food diet.  So, what is whole food anyway?  It is simply food in its whole state, the way God created it.  It is when man starts messing with it that it loses its nutritional value.  With this in mind, you might be wondering what there is to snack on.  I don’t reach for a bag of chips because the oil used is highly processed, and that will be detailed in next week’s article.  Neither do I reach for granola bars, pretzels, or snack mixes, these are all far from whole foods (see the Ladder of Healthy Eating).  We just can’t trust packages that tell us their contents are “All Natural”.  See last week’s article for more information.

 

Just because you’re avoiding packaged food doesn’t mean meals and snacks have to be complicated.  I cook dinner most nights, but I grab “fast food” for lunch.  By this I mean things like nuts and raisins, apple, peanut butter and a glass of raw milk, veggies and dip (homemade, see below), tomato slices sprinkled with salt and pepper, homemade pickles or sauerkraut (the store variety are processed), pumpkin seeds, and most days some cheese (I like the raw Cheddar I get from my local dairy).

 

Pumpkin Seeds

Jonny Bowden put pumpkin seeds on his list of The 150 Healthiest Foods on Earth.  This book is not only beautiful, but also full of reliable information.  Jonny Bowden is one to look past flawed studies and bring us the truth about nutrition.

 

I used the recipe out of Nourishing Traditions that calls for soaking the pumpkin seeds (hulled, also called raw pepitas) in salt water for at least 7 hours, I did mine probably 24 on accident, but that’s okay.

 

2 cups pumpkin seeds

1 tablespoon sea salt, dissolved in filtered water

 

Then you dehydrate them in a low oven (150°F) for 12 hours.  You’re aim is not to roast the seeds; you need the temperature to be low enough not to kill the enzymes.  I would imagine that a dehydrator would work great for this.  I put mine in the oven and after a few hours decided I would rather roast them since it was 105°F outside!  So I turned the temp up for about 30 minutes, until they were browned.  I obviously killed the enzymes, but they taste great!  I will try the traditional method when it’s nice and cool outside.  These are easy to get hooked on!

 

I will add a disclaimer for those that have any sort of digestive issues (such as colitis).   You will want to stay away from seeds and grains because they aggravate the condition.  Instead you need healthy fats and probiotics (in the form of supplements and food, like yogurt, homemade sauerkraut, pickles, and more) to heal the gut.  After the gut is healed, foods like grain and seeds can be added back into the diet.  Also, please check out Gut & Psychology Syndrome by Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride.

 

 

Veggie Dip

Don’t buy dip at the store that has all sorts of additives and thickening agents.  This dip is so easy to make, so delicious, and good for you.  My kids eat more veggies now that I let them have unlimited dip.  This is great with all kinds of raw veggies.

 

I have measurements here for one serving, because I usually just make that much for lunch, but it could easily be doubled or tripled for a larger amount.  The key is to taste and adjust the seasonings to your liking.  I don’t have exact measurements for the seasonings; I just shake and taste.

 

¼ cup sour cream (look at the ingredient listing and only buy the kind that lists cream and nothing else)  (I like to culture my own from my raw cream)

dill weed (not seeds), to taste

garlic powder, to taste (I’ve tried raw garlic, but it was so overpowering it burns the mouthL)

salt, to taste – key ingredient, will be bland without

pepper, to taste (I like to use coarse ground)

 

 

Guacamole Dip

I like to dip celery sticks in this instead of chips.

 

1 avocado

ground cumin, to taste (1/4 to ½ tsp is what I use)

salt, to taste

couple squirts of lime juice

2 tablespoons sour cream, optional

 

 

 

 

 

Michael Phelps

I just had to comment on this since everyone else is.  Apparently Michael Phelps eats about 12,000 calories a day.  Not only that, but I heard it is mostly junk food, a lot of it, fast food.  This is a prime example of someone that looks at food as only calories and thinks it doesn’t matter what they eat as long as they are burning it off, which he is most definitely doing swimming five hours a day!  We must realize that food affects us on a cellular level.  It is this kind of eating that results in Multiple Sclerosis, Parkinson’s Disease, Dementia, Alzheimer’s, and much more in old age.  Unfortunately, most that are faced with one of these ailments don’t have any idea how they got it and are hoping that science will find them a cure.

Who Do They Think They’re Fooling?

Dr. Douglass – Nutrition Labels

 

“A new study out of Britain reveals that nine out of 10 regular food items produced specifically for kids have incredibly poor nutritional content. Here’s the kicker, though – 62 percent of the foods with horrifically bad nutritional quality had the nerve to put a nutritional claim on the front of the package.”

 

Unfortunately, they (the marketing gurus) are fooling a lot of us.  I endorse reading labels, but I don’t endorse reading the front of the package.  J  That’s just fluff.  The food giants pay companies to come up with research that endorses the junk they’re selling.  It’s only their bottom line they care about, not our health.  Instead, make your decision based on the ingredient listing on the back.  Don’t be swayed by anything on the front, you can’t trust it as the above article shows.

 

Enough said, I will step down now.  I don’t have the time today to go on and on.  J

One Year

Well, it has been one full year now, since I started this blog.  Now I want to hear from you!  Is there something specific on here that has ministered to you?  Tell us what babysteps you have implemented in your life.  Is there a topic you would like to see covered on here?

 

I’m looking forward to your comments.