"I swear, white people must have totally different taste buds." Or how to make a brown smoothie.

One of my favorite lines from one of my favorite movies.  (Nothing to Lose -- when Martin Lawrence tries the sour fruity twist.)  I mention it because I think maybe my taste buds have adjusted to my sugar/dairy/wheat-free lifestyle.  Cuz I'm making brown smoothies like there's no tomorrow.  I'm packin' 'em full of vegetables I previously shunned and actually enjoying them.  What up with that?  Just this morning...well, right now, I'm enjoying an olive drab smoothie of red bell pepper, cucumber, celery, kale, Swiss chard, tomato, carrot, onion, ginger, lemon, spirulina, ground flax seed, banana, apple, mango, and raspberry.  Whew!  That's a lot of fruit and veg.  And, while it may look kind of thick and unappealing, it actually tastes quite good.  And there's no getting around how good I feel when I drink these things.  I feel awake and energetic and I think I'm actually starting to crave them!  I went camping last weekend and the first thing I wanted when I got home was a big ol' brown smoothie.  (FYI, they're usually brown because I like red fruits and veg, and (Art101) green + red = brown.)  You can begin to understand why these things are good for you if you read up on nutrition and watch shows like Forks Over Knives and Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead.  Americans eat relatively few vegetables and veggies provide the nutrients our bodies need to function properly.  I thought I was eating "healthy" for 48 years.  And then I started researching and it turns out I wasn't eating healthy.  So I changed my life.  And now at almost-50 I look and feel better than I've ever felt.  I'm down to 98 pounds -- my high school weight.  And I don't have to work out (although I definitely feel more like working out now) or count calories or try to restrict my intake to maintain the weight loss effortlessly.  I haven't ever tried to lose weight since I changed my diet -- it just melts away and stays gone.

I keep trying to share this information with my small world of friends and family, but people are amazingly resistant to this information.  They absolutely do not care that they can lose weight and get healthy and avoid the diseases of Western civilization by changing their diet.  They want to keep eating breads and dairy and sugar and then get a pill (multiple pills, I'm sure at some point) from the doctor to treat the symptoms of their diseases (because there is nothing your doctor can give you to prevent or cure your obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, dementia, etc.).  That just makes no sense to me when you can make yourself healthy for free and stay healthy and never need to battle the bulge or any of the associated illnesses.  But that seems to be the way it is.  People just don't want to know.  Or they don't want to believe -- they write it off as wacky, because it's inconsistent with what we've been told our whole lives and our doctors would have told us, right?  But I'm not giving up -- if you do anything for yourself this year, watch Forks Over Knives and read Why We Get Fat (WWGF is the lay version of Good Calories Bad Calories, which is awesome, but GCBC is over 450 pages of detailed technical discussion, and, let's just admit, he gets a bit repetitive in there).

So, in case anyone else is remotely interested in getting crazy healthy, I thought I'd give you the basics of the brown smoothie in two easy steps.

Let's begin.  

What you need:

Best blender you can afford.  I got some turbo thing that cost about $300 when I got into smoothies.  (A Waring Xtreme commercial blender.)  But you can start with anything, and blenders are as cheap as $15.  Just know that the more powerful the blender, the better the result -- we're chopping up some tough fibrous veggies here and the more you can pulverize those particles, the more palatable it will be.

Every organic veg and fruit you have in the house.  I mean this.  It does not matter what organic vegetables you use, as long as you make at least 40-60% of the smoothie with organic fruit.  The fruits' sweetness will cover all the vegetable flavors and you won't even know that you're eating vegetables.  (Same principle as V8 Fusion.  But better -- your smoothie is made with nothing but organic whole fruits and vegetables, including the fiber, and no preservatives.)  So even if you can't think of a reason to buy cucumbers or some other veg, get them anyway -- you can use them in smoothies.  And there are plenty of vegetables that are sweet by themselves, like carrots and red bell peppers.  I like to include ginger and lemon for flavor, and you could easily add basil and mint and other herbs to give it more flavor.  And herbs like ginger and ginko and other things are good for you.  I basically wind up doing a treasure hunt through the fridge, the freezer, and my backyard garden.  Note that frozen fruits and vegetables are great for this, because they keep well and will make the smoothie cold without the need for ice.  

What to do:

Liquefy.  Yes, just throw it all into the blender with plenty of water (do not use cow's milk - milk isn't good for you -- it's got a lot of lactose (sugar), no more calcium than the veg you're about to consume, and actually draws calcium from your system in order to digest the milk), and add ice if you need to make it colder.  Do not add sugar, or honey or any sweetener.  The fruit has plenty of sugar and the point is to be healthy.  Then blend it until it's as smooth as possible, and drink up.  I find it doesn't store well, because the pulverized plants start to oxidize.  So you'll want to drink it shortly after you make it.

Okay, so this one is actually green!  Don't be put off -- a healthy smoothie can be delicious in any color!

And that's it.  The brown smoothie.  Please drink responsibly.

Reconciling FOK with GCBC.

Okay, I have not blogged in a while, because Connor passed away (RIP sweet doggie), and then I got busy with work again and have been camping and working my way through Taubes' Good Calories, Bad Calories.

I am only half way through Gary Taubes' amazing and thoroughly convincing examination of the scientific evidence against sugars and refined carbohydrates in Good Calories, Bad Calories.  But I have gotten through his conclusion that Keys' theory of saturated fats, particularly fat from red meat, as a cause of atherosclerosis and heart disease, is not supported, and is actually refuted, by scientific study.  And Taubes includes an article on his website criticizing recent claims that meat causes sickness and death.  http://garytaubes.com/  He makes a very convincing argument that these epidemiological studies are merely observational and not supported by scientific proof, leaving room for multiple causes/explanations and confounding factors.  I am so impressed by Gary Taubes work, that I want to believe everything he says -- go meat.

I was, however, also impressed by the information presented in Forks Over Knives.  And there is no getting around that fact that the two are in direct conflict, at least when it comes to eating meat.  So far, here is how I am reconciling the two views in my own mind.

• Forks Over Knives never really proves that meat is bad for our health -- they say that a plant-based diet is healthy, nutritious, and prevents disease, and that we do not NEED meat, not that eating meat has been proven to cause the diseases of civilization.  Maybe I need to watch it again, but that is my recollection.
• Taubes never shows that eating all animal protein, i.e., milk, cheese, butter and other processed dairy products is safe -- his focus is on studies that have shown that animal fat from meat consumption does not cause obesity and heart disease, etc.
• Forks Over Knives does present scientific evidence that eating 20% or more of dairy causes cancer in mice, and that reducing the dairy consumption turns off the cancer growth.  And there is evidence that drinking milk actually draws calcium away from our bones and that milk drinking countries have the highest osteoporosis.
• Dairy, like sugar and other refined carbohydrates, is processed food product not found in nature (Cows and goats do not produce cheese and butter, or even the milks found in today's supermarkets -- only raw whole milk is a natural product, and that's designed by nature only for baby cows and goats.  Ironically, our government is trying to protect us from raw whole milk, by preventing us from getting any!  See Farmageddon.). 
• Dairy, like sugar and other processed food products, has little or no nutritional value -- it is empty calories that must be processed and cannot be used in a positive way in our bodies.
• Meat is a natural whole food (at least to the extent that the animals are raised organically, and not pumped full of unnatural grains, dead animals, hormones and antibiotics).

My conclusion, is that eating meat, at least organic meat, is not dangerous, but that dairy is dangerous.  And I am obviously allergic to dairy.  So, even if dairy didn't hurt the average bear, I will never eat it again.  But I am convinced that dairy is really not good for anyone.  I found the FOK information on the dairy-cancer connection compelling, and the fact that it is a processed food product that does not occur naturally concerns me.  Having learned more about the immune system and how our body identifies foods as nourishment or toxins, I tend to think that dairy is not a good thing.  Forks Over Knives has my vote on dairy. 

So far, Taubes has not addressed dairy or eggs specifically, but has focused on studies that dealt with diets high in saturated fats from eating large amounts of meats.  I'm not done with his enormous book yet, but his work is so compelling and his conclusions re sugar and refined carbs like white wheat flour are so consistent with everything else that I've read and with my own health experience, that I am absolutely convinced that he is correct, and I am more determined than ever to avoid sugar, breads, cakes, and sweets of any and all kinds.  He can take a flyer on the potatoes -- I love my taters and am not convinced that the glucose found naturally in starches does the same damage as fructose from sugars and high-fructose corn syrup.  I'll need more evidence on the tater front.

What about meat?  Well, just because I don't think it is a cause of the diseases of civilization, does not mean that I am going back to eating meat willy nilly.  Having educated myself a bit about the factory farming of meats (see Fresh, for example), I am committed to eating organic, and, if possible, local.  There are so many reasons that we need to do so.  First, factory farms are one of the biggest causes of green house gases and global warming.  Second, the antibiotics, hormones, and other unnatural things that are done/fed to these animals are not good for them or for us.  And third, the treatment of these animals is shocking and shameful and I don't want to have any part of it any more.  Just yesterday the HSUS released more video of workers at a Tyson supplier kicking baby pigs like soccer balls, beating mother pigs, and swinging sick pigs in circles.  And that's when they're not sticking pigs in gestation crates that prevent them from even turning around for their whole lives.  What kind of sick bastards can do that to these lovely animals that wouldn't harm a fly?  So I am committed to buying and eating only organic and humanely raised (hopefully local) meats in future, and I will limit my consumption -- I don't need to kill other animals for my own enjoyment.

In summary:

• sugars and refined carbs = bad.
• dairy products = bad.
• meats = maybe not bad if organic and responsibly raised and consumed

The farther we stray from nature with Frankenfood, the more difficult it is for our bodies to recognize and process what is supposed to be nourishment and fuel.  We have created food products that our bodies were not genetically designed to handle and we are consuming them in massive quantities.  And we are sick.  So we need to get back to whole, organic foods.  Something closer to what early man would have eaten.  As Chiffon margarine told us back in the 70's:  "It's not nice to fool mother nature."  And the more we mess with nature, the more we find out (usually decades later) that we are killing ourselves and our planet.  End of lecture.  But the dissonance was killing me, so I had to get this out for my own sanity.  I couldn't sleep last night trying to decide who was right about meat!