Last time we discuss vitamins for a while – I promise!
Yesterday, in my tiredness, I forgot the most important reason why the vitamin bottle is not the answer, but good food is.
We are hardwired to live with and thrive on the plants and animals of this Earth. For millions of years, through all of Evolution, have we been eating the stuff this Earth provides to us. Only during the last one hundred years we are trying to outsmart Nature and to improve on what the Earth gives us.
The detection that there are chemical substances without which a person would die was a great breakthrough. They called those substances “vitamins” – from Latin “vita”, life.
What chemists did not understand then – and many not even now – is that those are only the most conspicuous chemical compounds we cannot survive without. Many other compounds take longer to get depleted – but depleted they become. Perhaps only after years, but then diseases set in. We hear now a lot about anti-oxidants and polyphenols, but there are certainly others. How do I know? Here is the answer: Whenever population studies are done on people who still live close to the Earth – like the people on the Japanese island of Okinawa – they find that they live longer and have much fewer degenerative diseases, including cancer. One can conclude that they have something in their food which we don’t – and which our bodies miss out.
Replacing with vitamins from a bottle is an extremely crude method to make up for healthy food. As we have discussed, too much of something good in too short time wreaks havoc on a body. And vitamins are only the tip of the iceberg – other compounds are lacking, too. Replacing vitamins makes those deficiencies only more dramatic and increases the imbalance in the body.
Health is not a single substance - health come from the whole. A vitamin bottle has nothing to do with the web of life.
If you think you can’t put a fresh meal every evening on the table because you are working so hard in your job: While I was in medical training and had a new baby (I know – looks like bad planning; l but I loved both and wouldn’t have wanted to miss out on either!), I still put good food on the table (I froze some ion my less busy days, but otherwise my food was self-prepared from fresh ingredients).
Without good food, we die – more or less slowly. I wouldn’t want that for my family. Read More
Blog: On Health. On Writing. On Life. On Everything.
The French Paradox
May 20, 2011
We arrived in Paris on Sebastian Kneipp’s birthday – on the 17th of May and celebrated with a glass of wine. And a lunch consisting of three courses: Onion soup (minus the cheese and the bread), escargots (snails) in garlic, crème brulée. Not terribly healthy – but delicious.
Writing from Paris, of course, I want to talk about the French Paradox.
French people eat more fat (think triple brie and foie gras!), drink more wine (think a smooth Bordeaux!) and smoke more than their US counterparts (think Gauloises!), yet they die less of cardiovascular disease. American scientists dubbed this puzzle the French Paradox – and they have come up with some tentative explanations:
• The French surely are underreporting their cardiac deaths
• The French have their main meal at midday and take more time for it
• The French prefer wine over beer; wine contains healthy resveratrol
• The French don’t snack
• The French eat less trans-fats (frying)
• The French eat less hydrogenated fats (margarine, processed food)
• Perhaps saturated fats are not as bad as we thought
• The French eat less sugar, less HFCS, less white starches
• The French cigarette tobacco is not as adulterated American tobacco
• The whole study might be wrong
American scientists looked for the fat contents, the carbohydrates, the proteins to come up with an answer, missing the big, simple picture: fresh foods. Fresh food contains life-giving molecules beside the three biggies (fats, carbs, proteins). Those molecules are miniscule in weight, but hugely important in how they support health. We are from Nature, and throughout Evolution, we ate whole foods. Only modern “food” production has done away with Nature’s wisdom.
The three biggies were important when people were starving – if you don’t get fat and the other two, all the best polyphenols and anti-oxidants and other small plant molecules will not keep you alive. But now that we have plenty of food (which is a first in history – but don’t forget it is not yet true for every single person in the world), we need to turn to quality of food. Which needs we need to return to real food – the food Nature intends us to eat. And not to make it too difficult: It is mostly vegetables we need to bring back on our tables.
The French are eating real food; Americans are eating plastics masquerading as food. Don’t get me wrong – junk food is inching its way also into the French society. But overall, the French still go to the open market to buy fresh produce and freshly slaughtered chickens and fish. Except for the last item on the list, all the factors may play a role. But the main thing is the freshness of the food. The quality lies in fresh things, grown things – not concocted in the lab and manufactured in bulk.
And by the way, their cigarettes might be a tad healthier – but please don’t start your French new life with Gauloises! Read More
Soaking and Sprouting
August 2, 2010
“Give us our daily bread” is a prayer. If somebody is out there to listen to this prayer, He seems to prefer to listen to First-World supplicants; the Third World does not need to apply, apparently.
World hunger is appalling, but perhaps it is beneficial that not all people get to have their daily bread. Because our staple bread, surprisingly, contains ingredients that might hurt you.
All seeds – including grains, legumes and nuts – contain indigestible parts. It is a survival strategy for seeds: They don’t want to be eaten, they want to germinate and build new life.
About five to ten thousand (depending on where people lived) years ago, the agricultural revolution happened. Suddenly we were eating grains (the other part of the agricultural revolution was coaxing cows into give up their milk for human consumption). When people still were hunters and gatherers, grains barely ever showed up in their meals – grains then were trifling kernels, not worth the effort. Cavemen ate greens, roots, nuts, small fruit (big fruit are the result of modern hybridization), game, fowl and grubs – whatever was available. Not much was available, so famines and starvation were frequent – especially after mankind had successfully hunted to extinction the huge animals that populated the world in prehistoric times: huge deer, woolly mammoths, giants pigs, and so on.
Agriculture was a step forward. It provided more calories, and reliably so. More children could survive; populations slowly increased.
But grains come with a price: They contain antinutrients (such as lectins, phytates, protease inhibitors) that have negative health consequences. These ingredients interfere with the successful uptake of important molecules – mostly minerals, like calcium – and they are harsh on the gastro-intestinal tract. As they are indigestible, eating them can lead to upset stomach, bloating, diarrhea, even colitis.
But things are never easy: Polyphenols and flavonoids are also antinutrients, and we surely want those in our daily fare (though not in overdose).
Antinutrients can be destroyed or at least reduced by cooking, sprouting and fermentation. About fermentation and its benefits we have already talked. We also discussed raw foods-only diets, and that cooking makes more nutritional components available.
Soaking and sprouting is a method still not used widely enough. I can't marvel enough that the simple fact of adding water to a seed will make it easier to digest (be aware that for some people it is not enough to eliminate the digestive problems). Store-bought sprouts in the past have occasional had problems with germs, alfalfa and soy bean sprouts, for instance - a good reason to do it at home. Just keep your (simple) equipment clean. There are a few tricks for different sprouts from amaranth to Brazil nuts, from mung beans to lentils which I don’t want to discuss here – information is easily found on the Internet.
This is my stress-free methods: Soak in clean water overnight. There are plastic jars available at health food stores with sieves of different sized hole, for small and bigger seeds. One can also just (and perhaps healthier without plastics leaching out) use glass jars and paper towels and/or cheese cloth for straining.
Pour off the water next morning, rinse in clean water (repeatedly, if the water is cloudy) and let stand for sprouting (or beginning to sprout). Eat your sprouts during this day. For me it works – without being too meticulous about it. I like sunflower, flax, sesame, almonds. Make sure you start with seeds that have not been irradiated, roasted, salted or processed in any way; organic is preferable. Make sure you don’t let them sprout for too long, they might get bitter. Experiment with different soaking/sprouting times. Anything longer than two, utmost three days can lead to mold – discard it. Always clean jars and sieves thoroughly.
Add sprouted seeds and nuts to bean dishes, leftovers and as snacks.
If you seem to have “allergies” to every single nut or seed there is, try removing antinutrients by soaking and sprouting. After all, yours might not be a real allergy, you might just not be able to digest certain indigestible food ingredients. Which is determined by genetics. Read More