More Practical Dietary Considerations

I have been practicing alternative health care over the last twenty-five plus years and I want to talk about some practical additional points beyond basic diet and just help the individual along who is trying to figure out what to eat and to comment on a variety of additional food items for consideration. There is no single recommendation here that is correct for everybody. These are general considerations for you to evaluate to see if it fits right for your diet and for you to discuss with your individual healthcare practitioner, myself, or some other person that you are working with. So we just wanted to cover a list of do’s, and don’ts and suggestions and possibilities for you to consider.

I will start out with the elimination list. It seems that there is a very strong growing movement urging the elimination of two major food groups from our diet that really should be taken into serious consideration. The list is just growing on some of the dangers in these foods and first, let me just warn you that some of these foods are considered sacred and of course, the first sacred cow is cow’s milk products. I will just generalize and say that probably most things you ever heard about dairy came from the American Dairy Council or from speakers who were somehow influenced by the research that was paid for by this industry, or directly paid for or affiliated with the dairy council, the dairy industry, or who receives stipends or support in one way or another from them. The frequency of disorders being aggravated, affected and caused by dairy products is increasing. I urge you to go on the internet and look up the literature in this area. The next sacred item is wheat! The two most important things that a person who is struggling with a chronic health problem could do for themselves may be elimination of wheat and dairy in the context of a healthy diet. The body of literature in the field of neurology as well as gastroenterology is growing rapidly with papers in mainstream journals around the world citing the damage done by certain grains, especially wheat, rye and corn. And this is again something about which there is an abundance of literature on the internet. I urge you to go there if you have any question about it but the elimination of dairy and wheat which could be a major step forward in someones overall health program.

Of further concern, we have refined carbohydrates, refined sugars, and junk food that everybody knows about in terms of the problems with excessive sweets. Pastas, remember, are wheat. Cakes are wheat and have to be considered as such. Most commercial breads are wheat. So these are foods that are very sacred to a lot of people, but nevertheless when eliminated can begin turning the health situation around. Of course, I shouldn’t need to mention candies in general and foods that you feel addicted to as foods that likely need to be eliminated. If you feel that this is the favorite kind of food that you like and that you could just not do without it, if you have what we refer to as a “craving” for a food, it may be the very thing that is undermining your health. That is a topic of a separate talk, the area of “allergic addiction” in food allergies. If you feel you are addicted to a food or if you don’t feel you are addicted to it and you don’t crave it because you actually have it every day, so there is no craving because you just have it constantly, then this may be a problem to you. The bowl of ice cream every night, the chocolate that you have to have every single day or several times a day, this can be the pattern of consumption that is the red flag to knowing that this is really something that may well be behind your problem and there are ways to followup on that to find out the extent to which is a food is truly damaging. But this is just a preliminary head-ups for you about what to look for in discovering your hidden allergic additions in your diet.

Many soy substitute products can be of concern; just calling that to your attention. The last thing I want to bring up is soy sauce and the reason I bring that up is that the first ingredient on virtually every bottle of soy sauce, would you believe, is wheat. If you are sensitive to wheat or wheat is a problem for you and you are using soy sauce, not even thinking that soy sauce would have wheat in it, you now know.

Switching topics now, I would like to talk about suggestions for desserts and condiments. There is a general rule of thumb in traditional macrobiotic circles that dairy should be reserved for use as a condiment or occasional dessert. And so under that category, one might consider something like yogurts for occasional consumption. Under that same heading would go certain custards and perhaps, on a rare occasion, imported cheeses, goat cheese rarely, sheep cheese rarely may be tolerated by some on an occasional basis. And keep in mind that we have Rice Dream and other substitutes that you can think about for use as desserts if cows products are a problem and you are looking for alternatives.

Moving along, I am just going to talk about sweeteners for a moment. I will talk about the use of occasional honey as a sweetener and in cooking and that this may be acceptable. On the other hand, I get concerned when I hear people talking about the benefits of honey and I see that they are consuming it at a pace that is rather rapid and going through jars of honey on an ongoing basis with the notion that they are feeding their health, when really it appears to be that this feeding the sweet tooth by using honey to satisfy unhandled blood sugar handling problems or as a way of stimulating the system. So honey used appropriately is acceptable, and it can also be abused. We have Stevia sweetener available now. It is a new product in the commercial marketplace, I believe another called Truvia and is available as packets and to my knowledge I am not aware of any downside to it unless you happen to have an individual sensitivity to it, it may be a very acceptable alternative to other sweeteners such as cane sugar packets and certainly we want to avoid aspartame and Splenda which have their own inherent problems. Again I urge you that if you are consuming these, that if you have been fooled by the sucralose name and thinking that it is a relatively benign product or if you don’t know much about aspartame, you want to go on the internet and look at some of the literature explaining why these may be so bad for you. I would certainly consider Stevia your sweetener of preference if you must have one. Again, the stevia sweetener I think is one of the best and easiest choices right now.

On a totally different topic, I would like to point out that for those of us who are not necessarily the most organically and naturally pure, but want to eat a healthy diet, the use of certain sauces that we usually would use on meat, can be used with certain vegetables and other places in cooking that you may appreciate. Actually if you read the label of Worcestershire sauce and A-1 Steak Sauce, you would be surprised at how clean the label really is in terms of the ingredients. So these are something if you want to move away from a purist point of view, could be part of a relatively clean diet to dress up the food.

Moving on, I just want to talk about mushrooms briefly. It can be a fabulously wonderful food, stimulating and protective to the immune system but there is some warning for those who may be sensitive to yeast or individually to mushroom itself. If these are not issues and you are sure of that, then we encourage you to use mushrooms. Use mushrooms that you are highly confident are suitable for eating. In other words, don’t go out and pick your own mushrooms unless you are truly an expert in the field. Of those that are available in the supermarkets and health food stores, you might want to consider looking at the ones that are not so anatomically perfect and symmetrical as some of the others and often these are richer in nutrients.

Again, another area I would like to talk about is that of having an iodine source. It is well established that there are “goiter belts” around the world. These are areas that medical science has defined as areas that are just endemically relatively deficient in iodine and many regions of the United States are that way. The more land-locked an area is, the more that will tend to be an issue, and an interesting caution on this is for those who are trying to eat healthier and perhaps are using sea salt is that most sea salt may not contain adequate iodine or sufficient iodine at all to provide an adequate daily source. In many areas of the world, sea vegetables like kelp and other seaweeds are used on a daily basis in the cooking process and, of course, this does not happen in much of the western world. So some sort of regular iodine source needs to be kept in mind especially in our world where we use so many chloride cleaning products and fluoride additives to toothpaste and in dental procedures and these chlorides and fluorides can actually, in a electro-chemical way, “beat out” iodine in its proper place in our thyroids and so having adequate iodine around to give it a chance to get in and fulfill its role in our health is very important. The use of kelp powder or other seaweed products on a regular basis can help in that area.

Going on to another topic, I would just like to mention something about butter and that is that butter is obviously from cows, it is a dairy product, however, the inherent difficulties with dairy products, in my experience and understanding, is generally associated with either the proteins or the carbohydrates of the dairy and not necessarily the fat. So the possibility of using a certain amount of butter remains open and reasonably plausible for some people and it can certainly be superior to other butter substitutes. The recent caution, however, that I became aware of and had not thought of previously, is that it is the fat layers of our body and it is fat in general in cows that is going to harbor most of the pesticides and other fat soluble poisons that will permeate and absorb into the fat and avoid the areas of the anatomical physiology that could be, if you will, washed out by water flow or fluid flow as opposed to being retained in fat layers. So when using butter, one really should go out of their way to pay the extra money to buy the organic butter so that you are assured that the butter is not coming laced with things that you wouldn’t want to see hidden biochemically as toxins. Use organic butter, if you are going to use some butter.

The last topic I would like to bring up is the use of kudzu or sometimes kuzu, you will see it labeled arrowroot commercially. This is the root of a plant and it is often used in processed cooking as a thickener. It is used in unprocessed cooking in the natural kitchen as a thickening agent also. It also can be made up as a tea for cleansing. It has adsorbant properties to it meaning that its surface area has an affinity for binding to other substances around it, much like activated charcoal does and it can be used as soothing tea for the intestinal tract and for a thickening when that is required in a distressed intestinal tract. You would mix a teaspoon of this in hot water and add a little sea salt to taste and drink it as you would a thick soup or tea. It can be a cleansing kind of beverage and also used for thickening in routine cooking and has some detoxification effect in that manner also.

With that, I have come to the end of my nutritional tidbits that I would like to give you for today and I hope this helps you think more about your diet with some of the additional choices you have and that it provides some thoughts that are not too limiting, and yet keep you within reasonable parameters to stay healthy.