observations
A few things I’ve noticed while grocery shopping lately:
Storage Bags
“Ziploc” brand bags say clearly on the side or bottom: “Product not formulated with BPA” — I’m impressed. None of the other reclosable bags in the stores I frequent say anything about BPA. Makes me wonder…
Mayonnaise
Have you noticed most mayonnaise is now low-fat? The same old brands are now adding olive oil to their less-than-wonderful Canola and soy oil, but the first ingredient is water. They boldly advertise on the label, “New! Lower in fat!” That means they have to add other things, non-mayonnaisey things, to make it act like mayonnaise.
I’ve made mayonnaise for decades and it’s wonderful stuff! But it is a bunch of oil that has been thickened with eggs and lemon. The oil is good, the eggs are good, the lemon is good. The real thing is good. Add a bit of garlic and it’s perfect! But you don’t ever use water.
So if you’re trying to improve your diet, make your own (recipes abound online) using good eggs, freshly squeezed lemon juice, and olive oil. You’ll be amazed at how your body responds. And for what it’s worth, I don’t add mustard to my mayonnaise recipe.
You can still find good mayonnaise in some stores — try health food stores or store brands at your regular grocery store.
Or you can whip up a batch of oil and lemon juice (equal parts) and use that instead. That’s what submarine sandwiches are famous for.
“Ultra-Pasteurized”
Ever wondered what that meant?
Let’s begin with basic cooking 101. The higher the temperature when cooking proteins, the more degraded and toxic it becomes.
From wikipedia (emphasis added):
Pasteurization of milk … is the main reason for milk’s extended shelf life.
High-temperature, short-time (HTST) pasteurized milk typically has a refrigerated shelf life of two to three weeks.
Ultra-pasteurized milk can last much longer, sometimes two to three months….
Pasteurization typically uses temperatures below boiling, since at very high temperatures, casein micelles will irreversibly aggregate, or “curdle“.
In the HTST [normal, pasteurized milk] process, milk is heated to 161°F.
UHT [ultra-pasteurized] processing takes it to 275°F.
A lot of doctors and nutritionists believe the protein in ultra-pasteurized milk has a much higher link to colon cancer than just about anything else. Mercola’s website has this article.
Ultra-pasteurized milk proteins are added to health drinks and powders, and energy bars. Heated cheese is about the worst thing you can give your colon.
South Carolina has very liberal laws on raw milk. Most health food stores, especially the independent ones, carry raw milk. You can call them to find out their delivery schedule. Raw milk cannot be kept next to the regular milk in some counties, ask if you can’t find it. Resources.
And just about any good health food store carries cheese made from raw milk.
fluoride on foods
Fluoride is used as a pesticide. It used to be used mostly as a roach poison on buildings, but now it’s one of the most popular pesticides used on the fruits and veggies we eat. As fluoride use became more accepted, the FDA was petitioned to raise the allowable contamination limits on our foods. They reason that you throw away the outside of the produce anyway, so you won’t get so much. Unfortunately, romaine lettuce and grapes are a tad difficult to peel.
Grapes are heavily sprayed with fluoride pesticides, and watered with fluoridated water. The more they’re sprayed, the more the ground water is contaminated. They are probably the worst product you can eat when it comes to healing your thyroid.
You don’t eat grapes? Guess again. Most fruit juices are sweetened with grape juice, even if they’re marketed as my favorite — cranberry juice. Many cereals, fruit concoctions, and other processed foods are sweetened with grape juice. And raisins are dried grapes.
Something pretty to look at. :-)
Grains are sprayed with fluoride pesticides, animals are fed grains sprayed with fluoride pesticides, and citrus groves are heavily sprayed with fluoride pesticides.
Though this may sound like a lot of bad news, there is much you can do to avoid fluoride in your foods. First don’t drink anything out of a can or bottle unless you put it in there yourself. Juices and sodas and drinks are bottled with fluoridated water. Eat organic foods as much as possible to avoid all pesticides. And eat better so your body can heal. If your main source of drinking water is fluoridated, use a filter. Make sure it says on the label that it removes most of the chlorine and fluoride.
LO Problems
LO problems are simply a lack of good oils.
Maybe your entire fat and oil intake come from fried foods. Or maybe you use olive oil a lot but you cook it. Or maybe you’re trying to lose weight by not eating fat.
LO problems reveal: your body needs good oils.
If you don’t know what LO means, please read Left Lemon System first.
Typical LO situation:
- Most of your problems of pain, weakness, or other complaints are in the green section of Stickman
- Your body type is apple-shaped — you have a rounded chest and shoulders with a narrow pelvis
- You don’t digest oils well or you don’t get enough of the good ones
- You crave simple carbs like pasta and baked goods
- Your eating isn’t balanced according to 30/30/40
- You feel the need for an afternoon nap
- You suffer from depression or fatigue
- You’re low in essential minerals and high in toxic metals
- You frequently have swelling and inflammation
- You tend to get gall stones
- You have cholesterol issues
To get out of this trap:
- Add fresh lemon and good oils to your diet
- Don’t cook with olive oil, put it onto your food after it’s cooked
- Eat avocado, olives, and fatty fish for extra good oils
- Avoid fried foods and hydrogenated oils
- Eat marinated greens frequently
- Eat foods high in calcium: nuts and seeds, dark green veggies, sesame seeds
- Avoid calcium supplements
- Don’t depend on dairy products for calcium — they are highly processed, especially “ultra pasteurized”
The solution for LO people is to add good oils to every meal and clean up your diet
I make a small jar of equal amounts of fresh-squeezed lemon juice and olive oil and keep it on my kitchen counter. Just shake it up and pour some over your meal.
Your liver’s ability to make hormones depends on getting oils into your body. If you think you’re aging too quickly, your liver needs help with good oils. If your skin is having problems, you need more oils.
60% of your brain is made of fat. Wonder why a low-fat diet makes you feel bad? That’s why. And most of the fats in your brain are from something called DHA. DHA can be converted in your body from ALA, but if you’re still eating sugar it could have a hard time doing it.
ALA is found in dark leafy greens, nuts and seeds, and other veggies. If you’re eating Balanced meals, and using the Left Lemon System to troubleshoot, you’ll be getting plenty.
DHA and ALA aren’t in olive oil, but they are in fish. Fatty fish — salmon, herring, and sardines. Two servings weekly are enough to keep you in good health, but if you’re deficient, you might want to double up for a few weeks.
Think about this: if 60% of your brain is fat and you haven’t been eating right, maybe some of your brain functioning problems could be solved by opening a tin of sardines once a week. Lack of good oils have been linked to depression, memory loss, psychosis, Alzheimer’s, and bi-polar disorder.
Read The Skinny on Oils for more information on which oils to use.
The Skinny on Oils
Some days I have a hard time including enough good oils to keep my liver happy. Those usually coincide with the days that I’m grazing in the kitchen — gee, do I think they might be linked?
Carbohydrates keep you going for the first two hours after you eat.
After that it’s up to the fats and oils to provide the energy.
If I didn’t get enough oils with my breakfast, despite an adequate calorie intake, I’ll be hungry just a couple of hours later. But if I eat more, I’ll gain weight because I didn’t need more calories, I needed more oils with my breakfast.
When you have enough oils with your meals, you need less other foods. Oils have a lot of calories, but they are needed for health. And you especially need good oils to lose weight safely.
I try to keep 3-4 different high-quality; cold-pressed oils on hand: coconut, olive, sesame, and avocado. I don’t cook many of my foods, but when I do I use butter and the coconut and sesame oils because they have higher heat tolerance and don’t turn into life-sucking bad oils when heated to a reasonable cooking temperature.
I make marinades or salad dressing with the olive and avocado oils, or add olive oil to other foods.
All foods have some oils in them already.
Sprouts are already balanced with about 30% oils, 30% protein, and 40% carbohydrates. Avocados and olives are rich sources of good oils. So are many nuts and seeds, and some fish.
However, if you cook your food you are changing good oils to bad oils, so you’ll need more good oils from other sources to compensate. Avocados and olives help.
Lindsay Naturals canned olives are at Publix in my part of the country — I prefer the green ripe ones, my daughter prefers the black ripe ones. Neither of them are “green” in the usual sense, they just have slightly different flavors. Try a can of each and see which ones you like.
Avoid Canola, corn, and “vegetable” oils.
Corn is not an oily food like olives or avocados are. Neither are most vegetables. So how do they make corn oil or vegetable oil? They use solvents: propolene glycol, alcohol, and other solvents that end with “ol” are used to convert the sugars to fats. And how do they get these solvents out of the oils afterwards? They don’t.
Your body doesn’t know what to do with these solvents so they float around like free radicals. Oils that come through corn oil production — hydrolyzing corn to create a fat that doesn’t exist in nature — are not good oils for your body.
The Good Oils
Coconut oil is touted as being far superior to other oils but I haven’t found it to be so and neither has Dr. Max. Olive oil just seems to make our bodies happier. Sometimes a greener olive oil is better, sometimes a yellow olive oil is better. But olive oil is the least expensive good oil out there and very few people have problems with it unless you buy the cheapest of the cheap. Or if it smells bad — oils go rancid and rancid oils are really bad for you!
I used to rotate between several brands of olive oil but finally settled on Pompeian – it consistently works well for me. Publix frequently puts it on the buy-one-get-one-free sale.
Here’s the key about how much olive oil you need:
The more processed foods you eat…
and cooking a food is processing it…
the more oils you are destroying and therefore…
the more good oils you need to add.
Hormones make the world go ’round
I get more emails about male-enhancement remedies than anything else.
And almost every time I turn on the television I’m bombarded with ads about clinics that want to solve hormonal problems like decreased libido, loss of muscle tone, hot flashes, night sweats, and other unmentionables. What are they selling? A way to force your body to make the hormones you normally would make anyway if you were healthier.
They claim to be natural.
But they only offer a bandage. It doesn’t necessarily solve the problem. But it does keep you coming back.
A few years ago the media was focused on the hazards of HRT — hormone replacement therapy. Women were suffering heart attacks, blood clots, strokes, and even an increase in breast cancer. Unfortunately, it was the same list of problems associated with birth control pills a few decades earlier before they radically decreased the dosage.
We were assured it was okay to use natural progesterone creams or wild yam extract or soy in order to remedy whatever was wrong with our hormones, and now it’s moved into medical clinics where tests are run and “bio-identical” potions prescribed to make sure you have exactly the right amounts of hormones.
“Why Suffer Needlessly?” they ask. They’ll fix your hormone problems… or they’ll prescribe anti-depressants so you won’t feel so bad about having all of those problems.
They tell you natural products are safe.
The truth is, there isn’t much research out there yet to determine if bio-identical hormones are safe or not, but they might be a bit safer. Maybe safer than the old hormones they used to offer that came from pregnant mare’s urine (PREgnant MARes’ urINe = Premarin). Note that hormones from pregnant mares are also natural.
The unfortunate facts:
When you compare the side effects from traditional HRT and the new bio-identical HRT you find that the risks are the same. (See a list of bio-identical hormone side effects here: NaturalHormones.net)
A lack of hormones can cause sarcasm, anger, loss of self-control, urinary problems, male menopause, and problematic female menopause.
A healthy liver makes sure hormones are produced when they’re needed. And your liver needs good oils.
Need to do something about low hormones? Juice a fresh lemon or lime into a small jar with a secure lid. Add an equal amount of olive oil that smells good (if it smells bad it’s either rancid or contaminated in some way). Shake, then pour liberally over your food. It’s more than just a bandage, it’ll help your liver work better.
If you want to make it fancy, try adding a bit of cayenne, garlic, oregano, or grated fresh onion.
Next — The Skinny on Oils.
