Laguna Beach Walk

There's nothing quite like a Saturday morning drive to the Farmers' Market.  In Laguna there's a tradition of eccentric characters who assume responsibility for greeting people.  The most famous of the Laguna greeters was Eiler Larsen who died in the '70s after years of standing on the corner of Forest Avenue cheerfully greeting perfect strangers.  Eiler, a Danish immigrant, could have been the model for Forest Gump for he once walked across the US on the way to Laguna and having found a town as funky as he was, made it his home.

When I saw this cheerful soul standing on Eiler's corner, hard by Main Beach, I jumped out of my car to take this picture.  With the mission of greeting the world, this was one happy guy.

Main Beach is rich in character.  On the opposite corner I found a young couple passing out invitations to come to Jesus.  Impressed with their sincerity I stopped to talk.  "Do you think you'll get to Heaven?" they asked.  "I'm doing my best," I replied.  I couldn't help but mention that when I was their age, I spent 2-1/2 years as a missionary tromping around Central America.  That got me some respect but I had respect for them also.

Forest Avenue is named for the Eucalyptus trees that once graced the neighborhood.  They were planted in the 1880s as a way to homestead government land.  Only a few have survived but the street was given new life by the charm of the shops and botiques. 

There's a saying, often expressed by people taken aback by the funkiness of Laguna Beach:  "Only in Laguna!"  It's not always a compliment but I love this town and most of the characters in it.  I just started going to the Farmers' Market a few years ago.  It's a great place to walk around on a sunny Saturday morning and you can count on meeting someone you know, or wish you knew.  It's a great little market.

The beautiful wife once sent me to buy a chuck roast.  I came back with one that cost $12/lb.  It seemed a lot to pay but the guy below (with his sweetheart getting him ready for a picture) was a good salesman.  The beef, from an Oregon ranch, is pasture-raised, finished on alfalfa, and then dry aged for 21 days.  We invited the kids over and had it for Sunday dinner.  Best, and healthiest, chuck roast we had ever eaten; worth every penny.  There's a URL for his website in the picture.

Katie, picture below, is a hard working girl and an advocate for "good, healthy food."  She makes an incredible chili.  I once bought a quart (it's not cheap), added a can of beans to it and took it to the church chili contest.  Won the first place ribbon, thanks to Katie.  Katie was pleased when I told her about it. 

On this day I tried to buy some of her beef stock.  She buys bones from a butcher and cooks up big batches.  Unfortunately she was out, but it's on my list to catch her when she has some in stock. You can visit her blog, "How to heal a cowboy."

 

Oh, I almost forgot.  I have a book report on Fat Chance, by Dr. Robert Lustig.  You may know Lustig for his YouTube video on the dangers of fructose, "Sugar, The Bitter Truth".  If you want to understand what the fructose in refined sugar or HFCS does to your body, check the video.  The video ends with a poignant endorsement of the natural fructose in fruit:  "When God makes a poison, He wraps it in the antidote."  So enjoy your fruit.

Lustig makes the point in Fat Chance that the primary factor behind today’s disastrous obesity epidemic is excessive dietary sugar (in all forms) and refined grains.  As noted before, sugar and refined carbs drive insulin levels up and insulin causes fat to be stored in your body, and keeps it there.  So to reduce body fat, you have to keep insulin in a healthy range. Here are highlights from Lustig's thoughts:

#1.  A high insulin level drives the storage and retention of fat.  The three primary causes of high insulin are:  a) any sugary high G.I. meal; b) a history of high G.I. foods (which make you insulin resistant so the pancreas has to pump out even more insulin), and c) persistent excessive stress which increases insulin through the action of cortisol, the stress hormone. 

#2.  So, per #1 above, reducing the sugar in your diet is just one of three possible remedies.  Insulin resistance and protracted stress may also be factors.  How do you know if you have insulin resistance?  It’s not easy to determine but because of the link to visceral fat, your waist circumference is a simple test.  If a guy has a waist over 40”, or a girl over 35“, you’re likely insulin resistance.  Lots of people have it. 

Another check is the waist-to-hip ratio.  If the ratio is greater than 1.0 for men (meaning your waist is bigger than your hips) or .85 for girls you may be packing the dangerous visceral fat around your organs that is linked to insulin resistance.  This is a good reason to consult your doctor. (Percutaneous fat, the stuff around your waist you can grab, is less a worry.)

#3.  I have a little experience with stress, the 3^rd cause of high insulin.  In this difficult economic time there’s plenty of stress to go around.  Stress can be a deep-rooted problem and we’ve talked about it here and here.  The only thing I might add is to get plenty of exercise (besides relieving stress it also turns up your metabolism), stay close to your loved ones, and trust in the good Lord.

#4.  A diet rich in fiber is another way to keep blood glucose levels in a healthy range.  Fiber slows the absorption of sugar so you get a longer benefit of a meal and keep hunger in check.   Fiber has lots of other benefits—more reasons to eat a plant-based diet.

Talking so much about refined sugar and other refined carbs has put a dark cloud over me this week, so I thought a stroll through Laguna would help.  And that’s my report on Saturday morning in Laguna, and Lustig’s book, Fat Chance.

The Skip Anti-Diet

The quick answer for shedding stubborn fat:  Rather than starving yourself with the diet de jour, learn to eat real food per the W of W.  If stubborn fat persists, adapt Skip’s W of W based Anti-Diet (see below) to your unique needs.

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When the Smoke Cleared

Diets come and go but do you remember the Scarsdale Diet? 

Like many diets, the Scarsdale Diet had its 15 minutes of fame.  The diet was no worse than most, I suppose, but the cardiologist inventor missed most of the glory.  The reason for the missed glory was his sudden death at the hands of his jilted girlfriend, Jean Harris, headmistress of an exclusive girls school. 

The doctor had left her, the newspapers revealed, for someone “younger and blonder.”  Ms. Harris hadn’t meant to kill her cheating lover, she claimed at her trial.  She had come to his home to kill herself and he died of accidental gunshot—in his own bedroom—when he tried to stop her.  The jury, in view of the three neatly placed bullet holes in his chest, didn’t buy her story.

Ms. Harris, after 12 years in prison, retired to a New Hampshire cabin where she gardened and lived quietly until her recent death at the age of 89.  Harris’ death caught my attention because I’ve been thinking of inventing my own diet.  On the remote chance I might have my 15 minutes of fame, I’m doing my best to keep the beautiful wife happy. 

Why We Get Fat

In the recent post titled Please, Whatever You Do, Don’t Resolve To Lose Weight in 2013, the quoted experts said we gain fat not because of the fat we eat, but because of our excessive intake of sugar and refined carbs common to factory foods.  The sugar we consume goes to our blood, raises our insulin level, and the elevated insulin packs the sugar into our cells in the form of triglycerides and then keeps it there. 

So, if you want to carry around less fat—eat less sugar and refined carbs.  This is not just about vanity—eating less sugar reduces our risk of diabetes, heart disease, cancer and other maladies. 

Two Hard Facts About Fat

The above was a simple explanation of a complex process but it omitted two hard facts:

1. Some people, through no fault of their own, are simply more prone to gain fat.  They can gain fat on the same diet that makes others thin as fashion models.
2. Fat, once gained, isn’t easy to shed and the longer you carry it around, the more it wants to stay with you.  Worse, for the very obese, there may be a point of no return.

So it’s understandable that people are driven to try the diet de jour, even though they know about the Word of Wisdom.  As you know, I’m not qualified to offer diet guidance, being neither MD nor PhD,  At WOWL we don’t believe in starvation by diet, instead we advocate eating real foods that are high in nutrients and low in calories.  But if I had eaten the WOWL way and was still struggling to shed persistent fat, I would try what I humbly call—The Skip Anti-Diet.

Skip’s Anti-Diet Diet

There are three stages to Skip’s Anti-Diet: 

Stage 1:  Use one’s best judgment to follow the W of W, guided by the 52 Healthy Changes.  This isn’t easy—the BW and I struggle to live all the changes—but it’s important to keep trying.  Get plenty of exercise also, it will turn up your metabolic furnace.

Stage 2:  If I wanted to lose more fat, I would step up the process this way: 

• Pay particular attention to sugar reduction (only 1 soda per week, buy candy a piece at a time as a treat not a regular snack). 
• Eat only whole grains.  Avoid white (polished) rice, pasta that’s not whole grain (eat your pasta al dente—less cooking reduces the glycemic index (G.I.) and avoid sugary sauces).  Eat only cereal, bread, cookies, or crackers that have more grams of fiber than sugar.  The fiber>sugar rule is important.
• Eat a salad with dinner.  The G.I. of leafy greens and salad ingredients like avocado is zero.  Zero!
• Eat homemade soups.  Soups are economical, filling, and low in insulin-raising calories.  Legumes generally have a low G.I.
• Eat more meat; if you eat two servings of beef and poultry a week, add a serving.  Increase your servings of fish also; I love shrimp or crab salads. 
• Get enough sleep, at least 8 hours, maybe 9—we crave sugary snacks when tired from lack of sleep plus fat is consumed during the last hours of sleep when sugar is low.  Sleep is a fat burner—in the last hours of sleep, when blood sugar is low, a process called ketosis burns fat to give energy to the brain. 

Stage 3:  Ask you doctor if this even lower G.I. diet would work for you and try it for 90 days:

• Drink water exclusively.  No sugary sodas and only a few pure juices. 
• Eat lots of vegetables but no potatoes or other starchy roots (yams are OK, especially with butter or cheese—which have a G.I. of zero). 
• Besides eating salad at dinner, enjoy a salad with soup for lunch.  An EVOO with vinegar dressing is healthy and further reduces G.I.
• Restrict bread and make it whole-wheat sourdough.  Sourdough whole grain breads, especially rye bread, have a low G.I.  I’d eat the little bread I got with butter or cheese or make a tuna or meat sandwich.
• Limit snacks to nuts (nuts have healthy fats and very low G.I.), vegetables like celery (zero G.I.), cheese, and a little fresh fruit.
• Double your meat intake and enjoy eggs and bacon for breakfast a couple of times per week.  (The high-meat Atkins Diet really does work but keep your menu healthy per the W of W.)  Eat grapefruit with breakfast several days a week—foods with acid also reduce G.I.
• Eat a full dinner, early in the evening if possible, but no snacks after dinner.  Go to bed a little hungry. 
• No packaged cereals, candy, cakes, or cookies, with this exception:  Treat yourself to a single dessert each week as a reward for compliance with Stage 3 rules.

Please Comment:  The idea here is to maintain a healthy W of W diet but tip it towards a lower G.I. by steadily reducing factory foods in favor of farm foods while adding eggs, milk with cream, cheese and meat to provide low-G.I. replacement calories. The W of W calls for "sparing" use of meat products—allowing flexibility for each person's needs.  The promise of the W of W is one gains "hidden knowledge" which can include how to eat and remain fit. 

I found The Complete Idiot’s Guide to GLycemic Index Weight Loss to be a good resource, if you want to know more.  The BW wife has started an experiment with the Skip Anti-Diet—she looks great, really, but thinks her Levi's are a little tight.  We’re monitoring blood sugar trends and eating the right stuff. We’ll let you know how it works.  Please share what works, or doesn't worki, for you.

Toxic Sugar

The quick answer:  Sugary drinks, whether real or imitation, are a leading cause of chronic disease and premature death.  Pure water is the healthiest drink.

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Two Biggest Diet Problems

The two worst problems with the modern American diet are sugar (in excess) and trans fats (in any quantity).  We’ll address trans fats next week; this post is about the 100 lbs of sugar consumed annually by Americans, much of which goes to our waist.  No one puts that much sugar in their food, they don’t have to—sugar is the #1 additive in processed foods. 

The most toxic source of sugar—whether sucrose (table sugar), corn syrup, or high fructose corn syrup—is soda drinks.  So we start the year with Healthy Change #1:  If you consume sodas or other sugary drinks, limit yourself to one (12 oz.) serving per week. 

I’m not trying to destroy the Coca-Cola or PepsiCo companies—but if they don't offer healthy products they'll destroy themselves.  One other thing:  Healthy Change #1 includes the chemical substitutes used in diet drinks, which simply reinforce our sugar cravings. 

Sugar History

Sugar in the early 1800s was a special occasion treat.  Traditional sweeteners were natural, local, and seasonal: honey in the summer, maple sugar in the winter.  The nation couldn’t overdose on honey—first, there wasn’t enough, and second, honey doesn’t have that effect.

When the Word of Wisdom was revealed in 1833, American consumption of sweeteners stood at 10 lbs per year—about 3 tsp a day.  Now, depending on the data source, we eat 21-30 teaspoons daily.  The AHA recommends no more than 6 tsp (24 grams) daily for women, 9 for men (based on their greater weight).  The AHA guidance seems a wise goal.

In his 1925 book, Food, Health, Vitamins, the pioneer English biochemist, R. H. A. Plimmer made a foreboding but prophetic comment about sugar in America: “The Americans, with their love of candy, are the largest sugar eaters in the world.  Incidentally, cancer and diabetes, two scourges of civilization, have increased proportionately to the sugar consumption.”

Few heeded Plimmer’s warning—our sugar intake continued to increase, as did the incidence of diabetes and cancer.  Add to that list the illness that has since grown to be the #1 cause of death: heart disease.  

Toxic Sugar

In the ‘70s Dr. John Yudkin of England warned of sugar’s toxicity in his book Pure, White and Deadly,” (published in the US as Sweet and Dangerous, now a collectors item).  Yudkin made the link between our sugar intake and heart disease when so-called experts were wrongly blaming saturated fats. 

The science establishment, committed to the Lipid Theory of heart disease, turned on Yudkin with a vengeance and it became politically incorrect to mention Yudkin or his work. Time has shown Yudkin to be right, lipids weren’t the big problem, but a generation was wasted. 

Food Inc’s reduced-fat response to the Lipid Theory had worse consequences:  Traditional saturated fats were replaced with hydrogenated vegetable oils containing transfats, and low-fat foods had extra sugar added to improve the taste.  In this false move, we added both trans fats and sugar do our diet.  We not only didn’t reduce heart disease, we increased the problem of overweight and diabetes. 

Scary Sugar

The author today who has done the most to warn of our sugar addiction and correct the Lipid Theory error is Gary Taubes, author of Good Calories, Bad Calories.  Here are quotes, beginning with Taubes’ closing paragraph from Good Calories, Bad Calories:

“Sugar scares me . . . I’d like to eat it in moderation . . . but I don’t actually know what that means, and I’ve been reporting on this subject and studying it for more than a decade. If sugar just makes us fatter, that’s one thing.  We start gaining weight, we eat less of it.  But we are also talking about things we can’t see — fatty liver, insulin resistance and all that follows.  Officially I’m not supposed to worry because the evidence isn’t conclusive, but I do.”

Dr. Craig Thompson (head of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in N.Y.):  I have eliminated refined sugar from my diet and eat as little as I possibly can.

Dr. Lewis Cantley (director of Harvard Medical Schools cancer center):  Sugar scares me.

Please Comment:  Share your best ways of protecting your family from the effects of our sugar addiction.

Looking Ahead

Where Now?

In the beginning, my plan was to write a book on the LDS Word of Wisdom.  Books have been written before.  John and Leah Widtsoe, unusually well qualified, wrote an excellent book The Word of Wisdom, A Modern Interpretation, but that was 75 years ago and much has changed. 

A daughter suggested I begin by writing a blog.  A blog, she explained, could be a conversation, a way to share information and learn what people want to know.  So the first post, back on November 19, 2010, was titled, A New Conversation.  The response was good; thanks to a plug on the popular design blog Black Eiffel—over 1000 people visited the blog and 31 made comments to that first post.

We’re starting our 3^rd year now.  The blog has become our mission—a nonprofit service project free of advertisement or gimmicks.  It seems to be working; the number of readers has steadily grown. 

Thanks to your support, this blog is the world’s leading exponent for fully living the Word of Wisdom.  When I say that the BW laughs, but that’s my claim. 

Three Things

There have been two consistent reader requests:  The first is a list of the 52 Healthy Changes.   This month we’ll add this list to the sidebar, with links to each Healthy Change.

A second common request is for recipes.  We started posting recipes last year and we will add a recipe list to the sidebar for easier access.  Because it’s so much work to develop a recipe, we’ll also post recipes suggested by readers but only after we’ve tried the recipe in our home.  So please share your favorite healthy recipe, either in a comment, or by email to skip (at) word of wisdom living (dot) com.

Finally, our growth mainly comes from readers sharing the WOWL URL with their friends.  So to start 2013, would you please spread the word to five more of your friends?  Or even to all of your friends and contacts?  Thanks.

Your Suggestions

So what should we do in 2013?  Please share your thoughts on what is needed to advance the agenda for WOWL. 

Please, Whatever You Do, Don't Resolve to Lose Weight in 2013

The quick answer:  Forget about dieting or fussing over calories.  Just eat a healthy diet of minimally processed (low G.I.) foods and you’ll find your natural weight.

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Resolutions

Each Holiday season we travel to my fancy sister’s home in San Francisco for dinner.  I grew up in the middle of five sisters, though two are technically cousins.  Their life’s journey has taken them to different paths, but I think they’re remarkable women. 

Anyway, my oldest sister, the one I described as “fancy,” always hosts the dinner.  How fancy is she?  Check out her Christmas tree, shown below, with the 2000 or so ornaments she has collected.  I should have had the BW stand beside it, to illustrate the size.    

My sister’s a good cook and dinner always begins with crab salad.  After the crab salad, as other courses arrive, we each report on our resolutions for the past year, and make some for the next year.  We’re in our fourth decade of these dinners and despite what the critics say about resolutions, we always make a few.

Last year several resolved to lose weight.  In reporting on those weight-loss promises, one pointed out that she had succeeded in losing 30 pounds by July but had gained it all back by December.  We groaned in sympathy as she took a ‘zero’ for that resolution.  When she made the same resolution for next year I wanted to shout, “Stop!”  But I kept my peace—so let me explain to you, faithful reader. 

 

Why We Get Fat

For Christmas I was given Gary Taubes’ book, Why We Get Fat.  Like his previous book, Good Calories, Bad Calories, it’s carefully researched and makes sense with what we’ve been saying in Word of Wisdom Living. 

We get fat, Taubes concludes, not because we eat fat, or eat too much in general, or move too little, but because the Glycemic Index (G.I.) of the modern American diet is too high.  Basically, sugar and refined grains, including the cookies, crackers, chips, and candies made from them, have a high G.I.  Real foods, minimally processed, have a lower G.I.

Here’s a basic picture of the vicious cycle that results from a high G.I. diet:

1. The sugar in high G.I. foods is quickly metabolized and rushes into our blood.
2. Because excessive blood sugar is toxic, our body secretes insulin to store that sugar in tissue cells in the form of fat (triglycerides).
3. Insulin also insures that this fat stays in the cells—it’s not available for energy use as long as insulin is elevated.
4. Then, when our blood sugar falls and insulin (which falls slower) keeps this energy locked away, we get crazy hungry for more of these high G.I. foods, especially liquid forms like soda drinks. 
5. Insulin is a potent hormone and after years of excessive insulin our cells try to protect themselves by becoming insulin resistant.  This means the pancreas must secrete even more insulin to drive blood sugar levels down.  Persistently high insulin makes it hard to shed that ugly excess fat.

More Wisdom; Less Guilt

This is the basic story behind the current obesity epidemic:  High G.I. diet leads to high insulin levels in our blood, and to lots of fat stored in our cells.  Because we’re all different, the tendency to add fat varies among us.  One person can starve on the diet that makes another obese.  The thin person may seem lucky, but we all have our challenges and one is to find the diet that works best for us.

Bottom line:  There is no perfect diet—no one diet fits all.  Rather, each person must gain the wisdom to know what foods are best for him or her.  This actually is the promise of the Word of Wisdom, that by living it you will gain knowledge, including wisdom about how to eat and live. I recommend the book, Why We Get Fat to anyone who is unhappy with his, or her, weight and wants more information than this brief summary. 

As you've likely heard, about 2/3 of Americans are overweighbt, and half of the overweight are termed obese.  It's a hard thing to be overweight in a society that worships thinness.  For the overweight, here's an important point:  Get over the guilt.  The modern American diet isn’t your fault.  You did nothing wrong.  If you eat too much and move too little, it’s not gluttony or sloth on your part, it’s a problem with our food culture.  To improve your diet, a good starting point is to lower the G.I. by following the Word of Wisdom.

How to lower the G.I. of your diet

In a single sentence, “Eat food as close as practical to the form in which it was first created.”  We’ve addressed this in our Healthy Changes, including these four:

Healthy Change #1:  If you consume sodas or other sugared drinks, limit yourself to one (12 oz.) serving per week.

Healthy Change #4:  Cereal products must be made of whole grains, and have more grams of natural fiber than grams of sugar.

Healthy Change #10:  Your daily bread must be whole grain, with more natural fiber than added sugar.

Healthy Change #27:  Buy candy a piece at a time; never bring a box or bag of candy into the home.

A Wise New Year’s Resolution

If you wish to lose weight and improve your health, don’t go on a starvation diet.  This rarely yields long-term results.  Fasting has benefits but protracted starvation isn’t a good or even doable plan.  In the end, hunger always ends.

Don't even make a resolution to lose weight, please.  But do resolve to reduce the G.I. of what you and your family eat, according to your desire to lose weight. 

Please comment:  Share your weight loss trials.  What works for you?  

About Gluten

Christmas 2012

It was a good Christmas.  We convinced the beautiful wife the iphone 5 she wanted wasn’t happening quite yet.  All her friends had upgraded phones, but not the BW.  Then we hid her new phone in a hollowed out book, wrapped the book extra special, and slipped it under the tree. 

When the BW opened the gift, so obviously a book, and realized it was a book she had already read, it took all of her discipline to give a gracious smile of thanks.  She hides disappointment well; experience is a good teacher.  Just then her ‘book’ began to vibrate and ring.  It’s good when the screams of delight don’t just come from the children.

I’ve been working on a wheat cracker recipe (see below) but the thread of my thoughts keeps returning to the issues around wheat.  Grains are endorsed in the Word of Wisdom as the “staff of life,” especially wheat.  But some people are allergic to wheat, especially the gluten in wheat.  Gluten intolerance—which is hard to diagnose—can lead to celiac disease, a serious condition that attacks the lining of the small intestine.

The problem of gluten intolerance is growing, as noted in a N. Y. Times article.  Blood samples collected 50 years ago but recently tested, showed 0.2% in a group of 9133 had gluten intolerance.  Recent comparison tests found 0.9% intolerant—over a four-fold increase in half a century.  Investigation also revealed reduced longevity for those of the 9133 group that were gluten intolerant.

Gluten 101

So there is a conflict:  The W of W endorses wheat but for some, the gluten in wheat presents a deadly threat.  Every food group has an allergy risk—peanuts, for example, present a serious risk to some.  And while allergies in general have been rising, gluten has been more in the news.

Here are a few facts:

1. Though gluten intolerance is estimated at 1% of the population, most with symptoms (diarrhea, abdominal pain, and weight loss) go undiagnosed.
2. Gluten is mainly found in wheat, but also in grains like rye, barley, and triticale (a cross of wheat and rye).  
3. Gluten has a function—it gives bread the doughy texture and creates the matrix that allows CO2 bubbles to form so bread can rise.
4. Gluten is not just one protein but a family of proteins.  As new grain varieties are developed, new forms of the gluten are discovered—gluten forms that we’ve not had generations for the G.I. tract to adapt.

Why is gluten intolerance increasing?

Like many questions in nutrition, we’re not sure.  But here are possible causes:

1. New hybrids of wheat, some created by GMO or irradiation, have new gluten proteins not seen before.  The human body has not had generation to adapt to these proteins.
2. It’s not just that wheat has changed, but modern roller mill refining produces flour that lacks traditional nutrients found in the germ and bran.  In addition, since the early ‘40s, synthetic forms of some vitamins have been added.
3. The large collection of bacteria in our G.I. tract is essential to digestion and the nature of this biotic colony changes with our diet, or with antibiotics we consume.  The modern American diet causes a different colony than a traditional diet, for example.  I suspect a health diet produces a healthy biotic colony.
4. In the late 19^th century fast-rising yeasts were developed.  In times past natural yeasts were used, as in sourdough breads, which took much longer to ferment.  Today’s fast-rising yeast gives less time for bacteria to break down the gluten during fermentation.

So when I searched for a wheat cracker recipe, in view of reason #4, I looked for a sourdough recipe.  I found one in Sally Fallon’s book, Nourishing Traditions.  Fallon, with Mary Enig, is a big proponent of sprouting, soaking, and fermenting of grains and legumes.  These traditional processes make nutrients more available for digestion, and also help break down glutens.

 

Sourdough Wheat Cracker Recipe

Here is my adaptation of Fallon’s recipe:

Ingredients:

•  2-½ C fresh whole wheat flour
• 1 C plain yogurt
• 1-½ tsp salt
• 1 tsp baking soda
• ¼ C toasted sesame seeds
• 8 T butter, melted
• White flour (to help handle sticky dough)

Directions:

1. Mix freshly ground flour with yogurt and let sit 24 hours in a warm place to ferment.
2. To fermented dough, add salt, baking soda, and 4 T butter.  Mix in food processor until blended.   Add sesame seeds and pulse just enough to blend.
3. Roll out dough on a floured surface until less than 1/8” thick.  Cut into shapes and place on baking pan. (I used my new Silpat matt but the thin cracker was hard to handle.  The BW suggested we need a pasta maker, for thin crackers.)
4. Brush remaining butter over crackers and bake in a warm oven (275 F.) until browned and crispy.  (About an hour for my recipe.)

Please Comment

I got a good gluten education out of my cracker research.  I enjoyed the crackers with cheese but I have to admit that others—even the grandchildren—were less impressed.   It doesn’t appear the BW is converted to homemade crackers, just yet.  Please share your experience with gluten, soaking/sprouting/fermenting, or homemade crackers.  There’s more to learn here.

Crackers

The quick answer:  Supermarkets are full of new products, most of them unhealthy.  But the cracker aisle is little changed since your parents' time.  A few even pass our healthy test.

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Lost in Time

The grocery store spice aisle has a timeless feel.  Spices easily pass the century test (don’t eat processed foods that haven’t been around for a century).  Actually, they could pass a millennium test.  Pause for a moment and I swear you can hear the sounds of camel caravans treading the ancient Silk Roads.  I love the spice aisle.

 

Crackers

This post is about crackers.  After spices, is there another grocery aisle so unchanged by time?  The cracker aisle is full of century-old products like:

• Saltines (or soda cracker, first commercialized in 1800),
• Graham crackers (1829, though the current products are a pale version),
• Ry Krisps (1899),
• Triscuits (1900),
• Cheez-Its (1921, not quite a century), and
• Ritz Crackers (1934, a relative newcomer).  

The cracker aisle is a veritable museum—it’s like exploring the abandoned shed behind your grandmother’s house.  Even the Goldfish cracker (a sort of K ration for toddlers) is 50 years old.  Ditto for the cleverly named Wheat Thin.

Crackers aren’t cheap (you pay 5-10 $/Lb for baked grains) but they’re convenient and they’ve stood the test of time.  So here’s today’s question:  Are any of those crackers healthy?

The Last Aisle Visit

To answer that question, we took our last aisle visit of the year and looked for crackers that featured:

1. Whole grains,
2. Healthy fats (no refined vegetable oils), with
3. More fiber than sugar.

We also looked for short ingredient lists.  The loser in this category was a store brand: Ralph’s Baked Cheddar Cheese Bits, a knock-off of the Cheese-It.  The ingredient list was convoluted and hard to read but I counted 86 ingredients, including bad actors like hydrogenated soybean oil, refined grains, MSG, artificial colors and flavors, and the preservative TBHQ.  Isn’t it strange how the store brands, though cheap, are often the least nutritious?  Just another sign of how the supermarkets—the principle source of food—don’t get nutrition.

What cracker had the shortest ingredient list?  The honor went to Triscuits with just three ingredients:  whole wheat, soybean/palm oil, and salt.  Though I’m not a fan of the new high-oleic soybean oils, or any solvent refined oil, this seemed a fairly healthy cracker.

Best Crackers

Triscuits with just three ingredients (noted above) starting with whole wheat.  Kind of like a crushed shredded wheat biscuit.

Ry-Krisps wheat-free, with whole rye and corn bran, oil (sunflower or safflower), salt, and caraway.  Try them with cheese.

Wasa crackers, from Sweden, the best of the imported crackers, come in rye, wheat, or multi-grain.  The first grain listed is whole and though refined flour is included they do pass the fiber>sugar test.

The beautiful wife likes Wheat Thins.  I do too.  But the grains aren’t all whole and sugar is added so they fail the fiber>sugar test. Did you notce that the “best crackers” list doesn’t include Kashi, famous for their 7-grain mix?  They were once a health pioneer but are now owned by Kellogg’s and have a long ingredient list of refined stuff.

Cracker Recipes

If you want really healthy crackers at a good value, make your own.  Martha Rose Shulman offers some recipes here. 

I tried the Whole Grain Cracker recipe from Nourishing Traditions and will share it in the next post.

Healthy Change

So here’s Healthy Change #49: Crackers must be whole grain with healthy oil and more fiber than sugar.

Comments

Don’t crackers go best with cheese?  Hummus is a healthy choice.  Do you have a recipe for homemade crackers?  Please share your favorites. 

Cured Meats

The quick answer:  Besides eating meat sparingly, it’s a good idea to enjoy cured meats as an exception rather than a regular practice.

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Johanne’s Back

Generals who win great wars are often remembered with statues; not so much for the losing side.  But it’s a special day when an ordinary man who simply lives a good life gets a statue.  Take Johannes Huber, a founder of little Midway, Utah, for example.  Johannes raised apples, wrote poems and hymns, taught choral music, and lived a quiet life.  But we celebrate him as the great-grandfather of the beautiful wife. 

So when we had to cut down an overgrown tree up in Midway, it only seemed proper to carve a statue of Johannes.  We found an exceptional chainsaw artist, John Pettit, now known as the Famous Wood Carver.  Time takes a toll, even of statues, so Johannes has been missing from his perch in our yard for a year or so while repairs were made, but he’s back.  Check him out—7' tall, pretty big for the Swiss.

The Smell of Bacon

Before we condemn cured meats, I must make this disclosure:  I love the smell and taste of bacon.   This summer we had some great BLTs, with juicy tomatoes and fresh spinach on toasted whole wheat bread.  We sometimes have bacon with a Saturday night omelet.  And the beautiful wife makes a delicious spinach and bacon salad.  Like most of you, we enjoy bacon.

We also like ham.  You can enjoy several dinners and a bunch of sandwiches from one of those spiral-cut preserved hams, and then make a great split pea soup with the bone.  (Check our recipe here.)  Sometimes I slice a fresh pineapple to cover the ham and bake it in the oven.  This keeps the ham from drying and the carmelized sugars taste great.  I’d rather not think about life without cured meats.  

Preserved Meats

Here’s the problem:  Like humans, the pathogens—including botulism, Staph aureus, and the listeria family—also enjoy meat.  They can be deadly but there’s a protection tested by time:  preservation with nitrites.  In olden times meat was cured with salt but the salt actually included nitrites.  The nitrites were there because plants—rich in nitrogen, the source of nitrates and nitrites—decayed and were carried by water to the ocean.  The time-tested use of sea salt in preserving meat was largely due to the nitrites.

A century ago nitrites were added to meat without proper limits.  In 1926 the FDA set a nitrite/nitrate limit of 200 parts per million (ppm).  Through continual progress, today the actual content has been significantly reduced.  Still, it should be remembered that nitrite is a toxin—a few grams taken directly can be fatal. 

Pregnant women—some authorities recommend—should avoid, or at least minimize, cured meats.

Nitrites are carcinogens—remember the discovery of nitrosamines in the ‘70s?  Though the exact mechanism is unknown, there does seem to be a cancer risk with nitrates and nitrites.  There is also a greater risk for asthma (short term), hypertension and diabetes.  Risky stuff.

Some preserved meats, like those labeled organic, don’t show nitrites or nitrates on the label, but unless refrigerated they all contain nitrites in some form.  For example, nitrates can be slipped in via nitrogen-rich plants, like celery, shown as added flavors in the ingredient list. 

A 2009 Texas A & M study looked at cured meat around the country, including naturally (sometimes called organically) preserved meats.  Bottom line:  They all include nitrates and/or nitrites—about 37.1 and 4.5 ppm respectively.  Nitrates, by bacterial action, become nitrites.  Nitrite effectiveness can be improved by adding salt or vitamin C, which allows a reduction. 

The Lunch Problem

What about the meat sandwich so common in our lunch bags?  This was a big source of comments when we discussed cured meats a year ago.  Here are some alternative ideas to a steady diet of cured meat sandwiches:

• Tuna fish is probably the healthiest meat choice, unless you like sardine sandwiches.  I like my tuna with a lot of chopped celery, pickle relish, and some chopped green onion.  If you add some dark greens, like spinach, and use whole wheat bread, you’ve got a pretty healthy meal. 
• The soup and salad combos available at most lunch places are a good alternative to the cured meat sandwich.
• Try a boiled egg or (canned) chicken salad sandwich, with emphasis on the salad ingredients. 
• Bring leftovers from home in a microwaveable plastic container—this is probably the best possible lunch value.
• Limit your ham and cheese on rye, or whatever cured meat you prefer, to once a week.  When you have a BLT, add lots of tomato and dark greens.

Healthy Change

Healthy Change #48: Enjoy processed meats as an exception, rather than a regular practice.

This completes our meat-related Healthy Changes for the year.  There's more to talk about, like how to buy affordable pastured meat from healthy animals, but these four changes make a good start:

Healthy Change #9:  Define as a family a “sparing” amount of meat and get most of your protein from plants.  To build support, this Healthy Change required family discussion and agreement.  The basic idea was to get about 1/3 of your protein from meat, the rest from plant sources.

Healthy Change #22: Until better milk is available, drink sparingly, if at all.  Dairy is a big part of our animal product intake and milk is the most common form.  Enjoy milk if you choose, but drink it sparingly.

Healthy Change #35: Include long chain omega-3s (EPA and DHA) in your meal most days.  The brain- and eye-healthy omega-3 fats in the long-chain form are found in animal products, especially cold-water fish.

Please Comment:  Share your best ideas for lunches that don’t depend on cured meats.  When you do use cured meats, get the maximum mileage—for example, use bacon to flavor a spinach-egg salad, or a pot of baked beans.  Got a recipe to share?

Herbs and Spices

The quick answer:  Improve the taste of wholesome foods by mastering the use of spices.

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Spice Traditions

It’s not necessarily a good thing, but the food companies are quite inventive.  Walk the aisles of your grocery store and you’ll find many new food-like concoctions.  The rate at which new foods appear is a phenomenon of our time.  But there’s one aisle that for millennia is little changed—the spice aisle. 

The spice aisle fascinates me.  It brings to mind caravans of camels treading the ancient trails of the Silk Road.  Most everything in the spice aisle meets our century rule:  Avoid processed food products that haven’t been around at least a century.

There’s a book, The Flavor Bible where the spice affinities of famous chefs have been summarized.  I turn to it when composing recipes.  Want to bake pears for dinner?  The book suggests these complementary flavors:  almonds, blue cheese, cinnamon/cloves, dark chocolate, honey, or orange. 

As a novice cook, spice combinations fascinate me:  You can’t make a bad soup with bay leaf, thyme, and parsley.  Curry (a blend of cumin, coriander, ginger, and turmeric) is the dominant spice mixture for Asian cooking.  The French have their Herbs de Provence (marjoram, basil, rosemary, fennel, sage and savory).  How about our use of vanilla, cinnamon and nutmeg for desserts?  We’re going beyond salt and pepper here. 

The use of spices is one measure of a cook’s skill.  It’s easy to flavor food with sugar, salt, or a hunk of meat.  But it’s the exceptional cook who can create flavors by combining spices.  The goal of this post is to encourage you to expand your use of spices. 

McCormick’s Folly

McCormick won the spice war but they got too greedy.  Walk through the spice aisle of any supermarket and it’s all McCormick.  I suspect their dominance is due to the practice of “slotting fees,” where the stores basically rent their shelf space.  Little guys can’t afford to play this game so the big guys win and when that happens, prices start rising.

But visit Trader Joe’s, Sprouts, or Whole Foods.  You won’t find McCormick.  It’s a new world, there are different brands, and spices are much cheaper.  So buy your spices at the alternate markets.  Or if you want a lot of cinnamon, like 10.7 oz worth, try Costco.  We talked about spices in this aisle visit.

Benefits of Spices

Spices are rich in antioxidants and anti-inflammatory compounds beneficial to health.  The spices with the most proven health benefits include cinnamon, chili peppers, turmeric, garlic, oregano, basil, thyme, and rosemary.  Though the health benefits are not fully researched, it seems a wise thing to include a variety of spices in your diet.  For one thing, they can make vegetables tastier and one of the challenges of healthy eating is to consume more veggies. 

Healthy Change

Please comment:  Share your experience with adding spices to your diet.  Have a favorite spice?  Let us know about what you’re doing.

Nuts To You

The quick answer:  They cost more per pound than most foods but nuts are a nutrition bargain.

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Walnut Harvest

I apologize that our posts of menus and recipes have been sparse of late (though I did come up with a Bran Nut Muffin Recipe).  We’ve had a few distractions that have kept us moving between home and northern California.

We did manage, however, to stock up on freshly harvested walnuts while up north.  We bought 100 lbs, in the shell.  We ran out of walnuts a few months ago so I bought some at the local health food store.  They were so old and rancid we could hardly eat them.  The fact is that you have to keep walnuts (and most other nuts) refrigerated, especially if they’re out of the shell.  At the health food store it’s best if you sniff the bin (for any rancid odor) before buying nuts.

So I’ve been cracking walnuts in my spare time and stacking them in the freezer.  They make a nice Christmas offering; you can’t buy fresh walnuts in the store.  We’re running out of space so the BW suggested we finally break down and buy a freezer.  I’ve resisted this because we struggle to rotate the stock in the freezer section of our refrigerator.  Is our food discipline up to managing a freezer too?  Maybe it’s time.

Did I mention the walnuts only cost $4/lb if I do the shelling?  They cost much more in the store and aren’t half as good. 

Nut Benefits

One of the premises of Word of Wisdom Living is that it’s cheaper to cook healthy food than buy the prepared (and less healthy) stuff.  If you want to enjoy good health, you must either cook or be on good terms with a cook.  We’ve no problem with occasional take-our when things get crazy, in fact we encourage that one meal a week can be whatever you crave.  But we also believe that people who regularly read this blog are unlikely to want the most toxic stuff—like deep fat fried corndogs.

Value is always a consideration in our posts but this blog is about one of the more expensive food groups: nuts.  It’s reported that only 5% of Americans regularly eat nuts.  That’s a shame because nuts have a lot of benefits:

• Nuts are rich in antioxidant and anti-inflammatory nutrients.  We talked about these important topics here and here.  A 2005 study found those who eat the most nuts have the lowest level of inflammation markers.  For almonds, the anti-inflammatory effect is as strong as the statin drugs, without all the nasty side effects.  
• Nuts are a good source of essential minerals, like magnesium and selenium.  Americans are widely deficient in magnesium.  The Nurses’ Health Study found women with the highest magnesium serum level had 77% less risk of heart attack than those with the lowest level.  Magnesium is also critical to bone health and prevention of calcification.  Multiple studies evidence that selenium plays an important but undefined role in preventing cancer. .  A 1996 U. of Arizona study, for example, found those taking doses of selenium had 40% less cancer than the placebo (no selenium) group.  Brazil nuts are rich in selenium.
• Nuts make a great non-sugary snack, one that won’t cause you to gain weight.  Though dense in calories (and nutrients), studies show a significant advantage in weight loss for nut eaters.  (Though the nuts are high in calorie-dense fats, they are also very filling which offsets the calorie risk.)

Healthy Change

Please Comment: Our favorite nuts include walnuts (especially in baked goods), almonds (we like them with dark chocolate chips), pecans (they’re good alone, or with apples and dried fruit), Brazil nuts, and cashews.  Do you have a good source, or a favorite recipe to share?  Please comment.