Tag: Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride

Turkey Tracks: Elaine Gottschall’s Muffins

Turkey Tracks:  January 9, 2011

Elaine Gottschall’s Muffins

Since reading about the 1980 USDA food guide that changed the scientifically recommended guidelines for grains from 2 to 3 servings to 9 to 11 servings AND since realizing that my own food allergy problems are related to gut dysfunction, I censor grains in my diet.  I wrote about this USDA debacle in some of my Mainly Tipping Points essays which I have posted on this blog.  Along the way, other reading showed me a whole new way to get a bread-like product with ground nut “flours.”   

In the 1950s, Elaine Gottschall was, at first, a lay person with a seriously ill child when she discovered Dr. Sidney Haas’s work on gut dysfunction in the 1950s.  She adopted his Specific Carbohydrate Diet, now called the GAPS diet (Gut and Psychology Syndrome), and cured her child.  Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride, among others, has discovered the connection with gut dysfunction and neurological disorders, like autism, ADD, ADHD, dyspraxia, dyslexia, depression, and schizophrenia, and is having a lot of success helping those impacted.  Dr. Joseph Mercola has a book called the NO GRAIN DIET.   

Anyway, this nut-muffin or nut bread recipe is from Gottschall’s book BREAKING THE VICIOUS CYCLE.  It’s delicious and very filling.   Two of these muffins hold me for hours. 

Use organic nuts if you can.  AND, you REALLY DO NEED paper muffin cups.  (Don’t use foil as it will be aluminum toxic.)  The recipe makes about a dozen muffins–more if you add bulky items like banana.

2 1/2 cups ground nuts.  (You can buy nuts already ground at co-ops and stores specializing in nutrient-dense whole foods.) 

 1/4 cup melted butter, or yogurt, or small amount of fruit juice, or pure apple butter (enough to moisten well)

1/2 cup (or less) honey

1/2 tsp. baking soda

1/8 tsp. salt

3 eggs

Additions:  1/3 cup dried fruit, and/or grated lemon/orange rind, and/or flavoring (almond, vanilla).  Fresh blueberries are nice.  For a banana version, add two mashed, ripe bananas and an extra egg.  For coconut, add dried/unsweetened coconut for part of the flour.

For nut bread, add one extra egg (4 eggs) and put into well-greased 1-quart baking dish.

Mix all together and bake at 375 degrees for 15-20 minutes. 

Gottschall’s book has many good recipes.  But, she wrote it at a time when we did not know how dangerous artificial sweeteners are.  Don’t use them.  Some of my essays cover artificial sweeteners as well. 

 

Mainely Tipping Points 17: High Fructose Corn Syrup

Mainely Tipping Points 17

High Fructose Corn Syrup

 Despite the food industry’s attempt to tell us so, all food calories do not have the same impact on our bodies.  Nor are all sugars equal.  Most sweeteners are formed from three different sugars (sucrose, glucose, and fructose), and each has a different impact on the body. 

 Sugars are carbohydrates, and, according to Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride in GUT AND PSYCHOLOGY SYNDROME (2004), all carbohydrates are made of tiny molecules, called monosaccharides, or monosugars.  Glucose and fructose are monosugars, so do not need digestion.  They enter the gut directly.  Sucrose is a disaccharides, or double sugar, and it and other double sugars (lactose from milk and maltose from starches) require “quite a bit of” digestive work in a healthy body to reduce them to absorbable monosugars.  Unhealthy bodies harbor these undigested sugars in the gut, and an unfortunate chain of disease begins as these sugars feed “pathogenic bacteria, viruses, Candida and other fungi,” which themselves begin to produce toxic substances that “damage the gut wall and poison the whole body” (79-81).        

Most sweeteners have different sugar compositions.  High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) is typically 42-55 percent fructose and 45-55 percent glucose.  Honey is 50 percent fructose, 44 percent glucose, and 1 percent sucrose.  Only raw sugar is 100 percent sucrose  (“Sugar by Any Other Name,” NUTRITION ACTION HEALTH LETTER, Center for Science in the Public Interest, Jan/Feb 2010, page 4).  But, as Sally Fallon Morell and Rami Nagel explain in WISE TRADITIONS (Spring 2009), the type of fructose in HFCS is not the same as fructose from fruit and our bodies do not know how to process it into energy (“Worse Than We Thought,” 44-52).

Industry creates HFCS from corn starch, which largely comes from genetically modified corn.  For an amusing, but serious explanation of how HFCS is made, take a look at the movie KING CORN (2007).  A not-so-funny fact surfaced recently according to Morell and Nagel :  nearly 50 percent of samples of commercial HFCS contained mercury, which was found also in nearly one-third of “55 brand-name food and beverage products where HFCS is the first- or second-highest labeled ingredient” (47).

 Fructose in fruit, report Morell and Nagel, is “part of a complex that includes fiber, fatty acids, vitamins and minerals.”  The fructose in HFCS is a free, unbound fructose with an important chemical difference.  Most fruit fructose is D-fructose, or levulose, but HFCS fructose is L-fructose, an artificial compound which has “the reversed isomerization and polarity of a refined fructose molecule.”  Thus, the fructose in HFCS is “not recognized in the human Krebs cycle for primary conversion to blood glucose in any significant quantity, and therefore cannot be used for energy utilization.”  Instead, HFCS, like all refined fructose sweeteners” is “primarily converted into triglycerides and adipose tissue (body fat).”  

Indeed, report Morell and Nagel, a new study published in the “Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, “found that obese people who drank a fructose-sweetened beverage with a meal had triglyceride levels almost 200 percent higher than obese people who drank a glucose-sweetened beverage with a meal.”  Chronic, high triglycerides, remind Morell and Nagel, cause increased insulin resistance, inflammation, and heart disease (47).

Nancy Appleton and G. N. Jacobs, in WELL BEING JOURNAL, reported that two published studies (2010) from Princeton University demonstrated that HFCS causes obesity in rats The researchers think that HFCS is more fattening than sugar because it is not bound to anything, which, in turn, allows it to be processed in the liver into fat—substantially abdominal fat—a risk factor for high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes, and cancer.  Sucrose is” metabolized by insulin from the pancreas and is more readily used as an energy source.”  Additionally, HFCS bypasses the body’s ability to create satiety, or feeling full (“High Fructose Corn Syrup and Obesity,” WELL BEING JOURNAL, Sept/Oct. 2010, 9-10).  Morell and Nagel note that since all fructose is metabolized in the liver, the livers of test animals “fed large amounts of fructose develop fatty deposits and cirrhosis, similar to problems that develop in the livers of alcoholics (48).”

Rats aren’t humans.  But epidemiologist Devra Davis in THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE WAR ON CANCER (2007) notes that industry has been very adept at both decrying and promoting animal studies:  “Where animal studies on the causes of cancer exist, industry faults them as not relevant to humans.  Yet when studies of almost identical design are employed to craft novel treatments and therapies, the physiological differences between animals and humans suddenly become insignificant” (xii).  So, Davis argues, dismissing animal studies is a type of reasoning that is both “morally flawed” and “ignores one simple fact:  the same basic structure of DNA is found in all mammals (8)”  Davis writes that she has witnessed in her professional life “the maturing of the science of doubt promotion,” or “the concerted and well-funded effort to identify, magnify and exaggerate doubts about what we could say that we know as a way of delaying actions to change the way the world operates” (xii).  Thus, “treating people like experimental animals in a vast and largely uncontrolled study,” while ignoring data from animal studies showing direct cause-and-effect data, is ”morally indefensible” (8).

Morell and Nagel report that HFCS entered the market in the early 1970s, but the FDA did not grant it GRAS (Generally Recognized as Safe) status until 1996, “after considerable pressure from the industry” (mainly Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill) as negative research begin to emerge.  Nevertheless, “HFCS represents the major change in the American diet over the last forty years” as it has replaced more expensive sugar in most soft drinks and is “increasingly replacing sugar in baked goods, bread, cereals, canned fruits, jams and jellies, dairy desserts and flavored yoghurts.”  This substitution is occurring despite research showing that while refined sugars have “empty, depleting, addictive calories,” HFCS is “actually worse for you” (44-45).

 The Center for Science in the Public Interest (CPSI) notes that industry has added so many sugars to processed foods that “the average American swallows 350 to 475 calories’ worth of added sugars each day,” all of which are empty calories (“Sugar Overload,” NUTRITION ACTION HEALTH LETTER, Jan/Feb 2010, 3-8).  Dr. David A. Kessler, a former FDA commissioner, in THE END OF OVEREATING (2009), focuses on how industry has added sugar, salt, and bad fats to processed foods, which is changing a pattern where “for thousands of years human body weight stayed remarkably stable” (3). 

The HFCS story gets worse.  A team of researchers at the University of California Los Angeles Jonsson Cancer Center released a study on 2 August 2010 revealing that pancreatic tumor cells use fructose to divide and proliferate.  Dr. Anthony Heaney said that tumor cells thrived on glucose, but used fructose to proliferate.  He specifically referred to Americans’ use of refined fructose consumption.  Our use of HFCS has increased 1000 percent between 1970 and 1990 (Maggie Fox, “Cancer Cells Feed on Fructose, Study Finds,” 2 Aug. 2010, Reuters).         

HFCS can cause high blood pressure.  A study from the University of Colorado Denver Health Sciences Center recorded the eating habits of over 4,500 adults to determine that amount of HFCS each was consuming.  Those consuming “more than 74 grams of HFCS (the equivalent of 2.5 servings of soft drinks) exhibited `significantly increased risk of developing hypertension.’ “  Indeed, “the study concluded that HFCS consumption can raise blood pressure in adults with no history of hypertension, independently of any other causes” (“High Fructose Corn Syrup = High Blood Pressure, WELL BEING JOURNAL, March/April 2010, 6).   

 Connections are being made between HFCS and gout.  Fructose increases uric acid, and uric acid causes gout.  A study of about 46,000 men who got “at least 12 percent of their calories from fructose” were” twice as likely to be diagnosed with gout” (“Sugar Overload,” NUTRITION ACTION HEALTH LETTER, Jan/Feb 2010, 7). 

 I found much more information showing that HFCS is a dangerous product that is causing humans significant harm.  It’s also likely that industry knows how dangerous it is, but uses it anyway because it is sweet and cheap.  Remember that industry is legally organized to behave this way.  What you can do is to eat nutrient-dense, organic, local foods to maintain your health.

Turkey Tracks: Swimming Through The Heat Wave

Turkey Tracks:  September 4, 2010

Swimming Through the Heat Wave

This week has been sooooooo hot!

I know we’re spoiled in Maine with regard to heat.  When heat and humidity strike, we are wimps.  We wilt, and we wilt fast. 

Our personal strategy is to don swimming suits, drive down to the river (4-5 minutes), swim until we’re cool, go home and keep our swimming suits on until we have to go back to cool off again.  Some people bring chairs and just sit in the water, forming groups of people who visit and laugh and splash water.  Others bring blankets and books and picnic lunches and spend the day.  There always seems to be room for everyone.  You can swim as far as you want upriver, which is a good workout.  Or, you can just get deep, tread water, and visit with a friend you’ve called and said “I’m soooo hot; meet me for a swim.”  I put a picture of Shirttail Point in some posts back, if you want to see our swimming hole.   

The river is glorious.  It’s clean and clear; you can see all the way to the bottom all the time.  The top few inches are warm, but not far down, the water is deliciously cool or, even, cold.   The water feels silky on your skin and leaves it soft and supple.  It does not dry you out like a chlorinated pool.  It’s living water.  I’ve thought a lot about swimming in natural water this summer.  I’m reading more and more about the dangers of all the chemicals we use.  And, how our skin is not a barrier at all, but a tremendous absorber of all these chemicals–which are not mediated by the body, but go right into our bloodstreams.  Our bathing and drinking water, for instance, is loaded with chlorine and fluorides.  Both are deadly for humans.  And, I don’t think anyone really knows how much is too much with repeated exposures.  Or, what the impact is on children who are still developing. 

I’ve just finished Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride’s GUT AND PSYCOLOGY SYNDROME–or, GAPS, which is primarily about the connections between gut health and neurological disorders.   But, it’s also about the connections between gut health and food allergies, which is, apparently, a big part of my food allergy issues.    McBride argues that swimming in chlorinated pools is dangerous on two levels:  immersion in poisoned water and the layer of gas just over the water that we breathe into our lungs when swimming.   I’ve had two bad, foolish exposures to cleaning in an enclosed environment with chlorine, and I know that I injured my lungs both times.  It took months for them to heal.  McBride also argues that we are not getting access to needed bacteria–such as is found in natural water, around pets, on farms, etc., that we need to develop strong immune systems and to populate our guts.   

I love to swim.  I love everything about being in water.  I am a Pisces, after all.  And I come from a family of swimmers.  But, I don’t think that I’m going to swim in any more chlorinated pools.  I don’t like the way they make me feel.  I can never get the chlorine off of me, so I smell it all day.  It dries out my skin and hair terribly.  And, I seem to have a constant running nose and cough when I use a chlorinated pool.  I’ve learned mucus production is a clear sign of a struggling body. 

In the little town in Georgia where my mother grew up, they swam in a pool fed by three artesian wells–so that the pool had new water every 24 hours.  And, we’ve found enzymes for our hot tub that work just fine.  Surely, with all our technological abilities, we can figure out ways to clean water without dumping poisonous chemicals into them.  Meanwhile, I’m going to enjoy swimming in season and finding other ways to exercise off season.

Hurricane Earl backwashed through here this morning, so things have cooled off a little.  I hope we get more swimming time though, before it gets too cold.