Tag: ” WISE TRADITIONS

Interesting Information: Dangerous Cross Reactivity: Soy/Peanuts

Interesting Information:  August 4, 2012

Dangerous Cross Reactivity:  Soy/Peanuts

This information on cross reactivity is from Kaayla Daniels, writing in WISE TRADITIONS, the journal of the Weston A. Price Foundation, summer 2012.  (Daniel’s book THE WHOLE SOY STORY is the work of someone who has the credentials to read and understand soy studies and the talent to explain the dangers of soy to us in ways we can understand easily, and I will write an essay on it soon.)

Here’s where you can read the article on cross reactivity in full:  http://www.westonaprice.org/soy-alert/the-soy-ling-of-america-second-hand-soy-from-animal-feeds.

The main article is about the amounts of soy showing up in the meat of animals fed a lot of soy and, of course, in eggs.  This has been a worry for me since I read THE WHOLE SOY STORY.  Soy is filled with all kinds of chemicals that are not healthy for people.  And, no, Asians don’t eat all that much soy.  Besides, soy tastes nasty, bitter, and no matter what industry has done, it has not been able to lick this problem or to prove that soy is healthy.  I don’t feed my chickens any soy, so our eggs are soy-free.  If you eat soy, limit it to small amounts of fermented soy:  miso, tempeh, and natto (which you are unlikely to like as it is an acquired taste.)  Tofu is NOT fermented.

The sidebar article, though, is the one I think you should read if you have a peanut allergy or a tree-nut allergy–because you might be subject to a dangerous, if not fatal, allergic reaction to any soy you might eat–and remember that industry is putting soy into everything it can and is padding meat (hamburger, hot dogs, roasted chickens, etc.), so you could eat soy without knowing it.  If you are eating fast food, you most certainly are eating soy.

The title of the sidebar article is “The Odwalla Chocolate Protein Monster:  The Little Known Soy/Peanut Allergy Connection.”

Back in April of this year, four consumers drank Odwalla’s Chocolate Protein Monster and had severe allergic reactions.  The product was recalled.  Contamination from peanuts was ruled out, so experts started looking at cross reactivity as the cause.  Soy and peanuts are members of the grain-legume botanical family, so people allergic to one are, Daniels writes, “often allergic to the other.”  The Odwalla drink contained soy protein.

Daniels writes that “severe reactions to soy were once rare.  Today they are increasingly common, and pose especially high risks to children already afflicted with peanut allergies.”  In 1999, four children in Sweden died of the soy/peanut link.  Other risk factors include “other food allergies, a family history of peanut or soy allergies, a diagnosis of asthma, rhinitis or eczema, and/or a family history of those diseases.”  Researchers “found it took only a tiny, almost indiscernible, amount of soy to create a severe and even life-threatening reaction in susceptible individuals.”  Worse, they found that “severe allergic reactions could happen suddenly and unexpectedly to people with no known soy allergies.”  The Swedish National Food Administration issued warnings.

Daniels laments the fact that Sweden’s warning has “not been publicized much in the U.S.  Indeed, the Soyfoods Association of North America–and even many allergy support groups–recommend soy nut butter and soy nuts for children allergic to peanuts and tree nuts.  As a result, few people have heard of the deadly soy/peanut connection, and numerous adverse reactions have been reported.”

Daniels chronicles several deaths to this cross reaction here in the U.S.

But, why is this severe reaction happening now?

Daniels answers:  “The main reason appears to be the increased number of allergenic proteins found in genetically modified (GMO) soy.”  Apparently, genetic engineering of soy has produced a soy allergen that is “41 percent identical to a known peanut allergen, ara h 3.”  This new allergen is “recognized by 44 percent of peanut allergic individuals.”  And, in the U.S., “90 percent of soy now contains these new proteins, chemicals and allergens.”  (I think almost 100 percent of the soy crop is now GMO–I have to check that fact.)

As soy ingredients are now in “60 percent of processed or packaged foods and nearly 100 percent of fast foods,” writes Daniels, not issuing a warning “is simply irresponsible.”  And, here’s a devastating piece of information:  “Not surprisingly, the reason appears to be the usual principle of profits over people.  According to Robyn O’Brien [AllergyKids website], “`Leading pediatric allergists and researchers have been funded by the agrichemical corporation responsible for engineering these proteins, chemicals and toxins into soy.'”

Note that soy has not yet been identified officially  in the Odwalla Chocolate Protein Monster case, so Daniels is asking that we all make a “concerted grassroots effort to share this information with as many people as possible.”

PLEASE SHARE THIS INFORMATION ON FACEBOOK OR ELSEWHERE.

PS:  Odwalla drinks are not really a health drink.  Their juices are pasteurized, so all the goodies are killed.  Mostly, you’re just drinking sugar and lots of it.  If you want to drink more veggie juices, get a good juicer.  I wrote about mine here on this blog.  Limit all fruit juices to the barest minimum–the sugar loads are just too great.  There are, surely, better sources of protein than an industry-produced Odwalla drink.

Interesting Information: How Much Sugar Are We Eating Today?

Interesting Information:  August 4, 2012

How Much Sugar Are We Eating Today?

Tim Boyd reviews DVDs in the Weston A. Price Foundation’s journal WISE TRADITIONS.  In the summer 2012 issue, which I’ve just finished reading, he reviewed a DVD by Nancy Appleton, PhD, called SWEET SUICIDE–HOW SUGAR IS DESTROYING THE HEALTH OF OUR SOCIETY, made with help from the Price-Pottenger Nutrition Foundation.  (Pottenger did, among other useful things, the famous study of cat health, based on what they were fed.)

Here’s a revealing quote–which answers the question in the title of this entry:

During George Washington’s time we consumed thirteen pounds per year per person on average.  During George Bush’s time we consumed one hundred fifty pounds per person per year.  The difference in cancer and degenerative disease rates during those times is clear.

Those figures would be AVERAGES–which means some of us are eating way more than 150 pounds!!!!! each year.

And, remember, these figures do NOT include the sugars you’re eating that derive from grains and all carbohydrates.  Remember that two slices of whole wheat toast is the daily limit for a woman in Luise Light’s recommendations for the 1980 USDA food guide (that got erased) AND on the Glycenic Index puts more sugar into your bloodstream than a Mars candy bar or a soda (which has about 16 teaspoons of sugar if I remember correctly)  , according to WHEAT BELLY.

So how much sugar are you eating?

I’m finding that my desire for sugar–even the raw honey I use to sweeten my tea–is drastically decreasing since I cut out wheat and most grains.  For whatever that’s worth…

Interesting Information: “Vaccinations, The Ongoing Debate”

Interesting Information:  July 23, 2012

“Vaccinations, The Ongoing Debate”

Well, here’s a must read for everyone from young parents to grandparents.  Vaccinations are a very charged subject in our society and parents who are looking more deeply and asking questions are being called crazy or ill-informed or irresponsible.

Are they?

Leslie Manookian published this piece in The Weston A. Price Foundation’s journal, Wise Traditions, summer 2012 issue.  Manookian has made a film, THE GREATER GOOD, in which she has attempted to determine where the facts and hard science are with relation to vaccinations.  She notes that the “vaccine debate is a scientific debate,” or should be so, and is not “one between emotional parents and their doctors.”

The tagline from the film is the following:  “If you think you know everything about vaccines…think again.”

The School of Public Health at the University of Alabama, Birmingham, awarded the film its Koroni Award “for a documentary feature addressing an issue of importance to public health.”  The film was featured at the Amsterdam Film Festival, where it was awarded the Cinematic Vision Award.  The film was aired nationally on Current TV and has been shown at film festivals all over the world–where it has been “applauded by lay, medical, and film audiences alike….”

You can read Manookian’s article at http://www.westonaprice.org/childrens-health/vaccinations.

Here are some highlights:

Children today receive 26 doses of 9 vaccines by their first birthday.  In 1983, they received 11 doses of 4 vaccines.

By age 18, children today receive 70 doses of 16 vaccines.  In 1983, they received 23 doses of 8 vaccines.

Big Pharma has an estimated 200 vaccines in development for use across the population.  The CDC recommends an annual flu shot from cradle to grave.  There are many adult booster shots for childhood diseases and new vaccines like the shingles vaccine, which I recall reading only covered about 30 percent? of the potential to get shingles.  Flu shots still contain mercury.  “Many diseases vaccinated against today were considered fairly benign in past decades (flu, chicken pox, mumps, rubella) or quite rare (hepatitis A and B, meningitis).”

No one knows if vaccines are safe because no “large, long-term clinical study comparing the medium or long-term health outcomes of vaccinated and unvaccinated groups of people” has ever been done.

Children are given as many as TEN vaccines in one visit, but there are no safety studies evaluating the safety of simultaneous shots.

No study has been done to evaluate the “different ingredients of human infant vaccines taken individually or in combination.”  This list of ingredients can include, “but is not limited to” the following:  “mercury, aluminum, formaldehyde [a known carcinogen], cells from aborted fetuses, cells from monkey kidneys, chicken embryos, viruses, antibiotics, yeast, polysorbate 80 and detergents.

Most vaccine trial only last a few weeks, so long-term effects are not known.  Worse, Big Pharma is allowed “to use another vaccine or a liquid containing an adjuvant such as aluminum as the placebo”–so the “vaccine producer can say that the vaccines cause no more adverse reactions than a placebo.”

Mercury is still used in the manufacturing process and trace amounts remain.  Aluminum–a “demonstrated neurotoxin”–is used as an adjuvant (a substance added to vaccines to stimulate an immune response–without which the vaccine is useless).  Medical science’s “understanding about their mechanisms of action is still remarkably poor….[but] Experimental research…clearly shows that aluminum adjuvants have a potential to induce serious immunological disorders in humans.”

Much evidence exists now that vaccines are harming children, and Manookian discusses some of those peer-reviewed studies.  She includes the notion that ‘there is in fact peer-reviewed scientific evidence connecting both [mercury and vaccines] to autism.”  She notes that “research has also shown impaired immune function and autoimmune disease in humans following the administration of these same compounds [alluminum].”  Neurological damage, “including motor function deficits, cognitive impairment, and behavioral changes in mice given the aluminum in vaccines.”

What is most disturbing are the behavioral changes in vaccinated children. “Normal” reactions are considered to be “swelling, soreness, tenderness and a lump at the injection site, fever, fussiness, tiredness, and vomiting.”  But “no studies exist to determine what happens to the body’s systems and tissues when a vaccine is given.”  Manookian writes:   “In the making of the film and while conducting screenings, we have come across many parents who said their child had these `normal’ reactions after a round of vaccines but never was quite the same again and went on to develop a learning disability, allergies, ADHD, or another type of chronic disease.”

The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986, signed by Ronald Reagan, “acknowledged tha vaccines can cause injury or death.”  “To date, the program has paid out more than two billion dollars and has about three billion dollars in reserves” as a tax is paid on each vaccine given.

It’s important to realize that “doctors are taught that vaccines are safe and effective; they are not taught how vaccines are studied, the components of vaccines, or the gaps in research.  Doctors are taught that decades of clinical use of vaccines have demonstrated their safety and that vaccine side effects are rare, but there are no large, long-term clinical trials comparing the health and well being of those vaccinated to those unvaccinated to back up these assumptions” (underlining is mine).   IN OTHER WORDS THIS “KNOWING” IS A BELIEF SYSTEM, CREATED BY BIG PHARMA, THAT IS SOLD TO DOCTORS AND PARENTS USING FEAR ABOUT CHILD SAFETY.  THERE IS NOT DATA BEHIND IT.  Plus, Big Pharma has ZERO LIABILITY for vaccines that cause harm.  You cannot sue them for damages.

What about the notion that vaccines have reduced infectious disease?  Bernard Guyer et al published in Pediatrics (December 2000) a history showing that “`nearly 90 percent of the decline in infectious disease mortality among U. S. children occurred before 1940, when few antibiotics or vaccines were available.”  Guyer et al’s consensus was that public health measures (water treatment, food safety. organized solid waste disposal, and public education about hygienic practices) were what made the difference.  “Moreover,” writes Manookian,” disease outbreaks regularly occur in fully vaccinated populations so vaccinations may not be as effective a preventative as generally believed.”

You should look deeper before making any decisions about vaccinations for yourself or your children.   You might be putting them at more danger than any disease they might catch would.

You should know that in California right now your child who is twelve or over can be vaccinated for a sexually transmitted disease by a school nurse without your consent or knowledge–since parents will have “no access to the child’s medical records that pertain to these shots”!!!!  How can that be in a country that touts freedom as its organizing principle???  This is a perfect example of the power of industry to work its will on a population.

One excellent book is Neil Z. Miller’s VACCINES, ARE THEY REALLY SAFE AND EFFECTIVE.”   This book was my first introduction to the idea that vaccines might be really dangerous.

Here’s an article by Dr. Mercola that came in the past few days about how the Merck mumps vaccine is not effective, how they knew it, and how the whole story, which appeared in the WALL STREET JOURNAL, has now been covered up.

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2012/07/23/merck-vaccine-fraud-story-buried.aspx?e_cid=20120723_DNL_artNew_1

Here’s The People’s Chemist, Shane Ellison, on why the whole “herd” protection assumptions are nonsense.  Ellison can be flamboyant, but he’s a pretty solid scientist:      http://thepeopleschemist.com/blog/

I can tell you that if I had young children today I would not vaccinate them.  I’d take our chances, knowing I might lose them.  But, losing a child can happen just as easily with vaccines and with all of the other really dangerous things children do every day.  In the end, you can only protect children so much and overprotection is just as harmful to their development.

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Mainely Tipping Points 34: Part 1: THE CASE AGAINST FLUORIDE

PART 1:  THE CASE AGAINST FLUORIDE

 

Like many of you, I suspect, until very recently I never questioned the safety of fluoridating the general water supply.  Fluoride makes teeth stronger, right?  The government and many health organizations–like the American Dental Association, the American Medical Association, and the American Public Health Association–have scientific studies showing fluoridation is safe, right?  We’ve been fluoridating water for sixty years now with no ill effects, right?

My awareness of the toxicity and danger of fluoride and of the practice of fluoridation came slowly.  In 2006 when I started seriously researching food and health issues, information about fluoride toxicity emerged slowly.  There were some disturbing assessments in the Weston A. Price Foundation’s (WAPF) materials.  A local activist asked me to look deeper because she believed broken bones in children were much more common today due to fluoridation.  The fact that one of my grandchildren had already, at age two, fallen off the back of a sofa onto a thick carpet and broken his arm began to echo in my head.   I agreed fluoride was likely a problem, but I had other research and essays lined up to do first. 

In late June, I started getting ready for my family’s  annual summer visits by stockpiling food and household supplies.  Only, I couldn’t find a toothpaste for the children that didn’t contain fluoride.  Standing in the toothpaste aisles of various local stores, I remembered seeing recent email alerts concerning new information about fluoridation and brain damage in children. 

Because the FDA classifies fluoride as a drug, the FDA requires adult toothpastes to carry the following dire warning:  “Keep out of the reach of children under 6 years of age.  If you swallow more than used for brushing, get medical help or contact a poison control center right away.”  A dose is the size of a pea.      

Toothpastes, including children’s toothpastes, warn users not to swallow.  Have you tried, lately, telling children who are two, three, and four years old not to swallow when the color is luscious and the flavor delicious?

About this time, Tim Boyd reviewed THE CASE AGAINST FLUORIDE:  HOW HAZARDOUS WASTE ENDED UP IN OUR DRINKING WATER AND THE BAD SCIENCE AND POWERFUL POLITICS THAT KEEP IT THERE, by Paul Connett, PhD, James Beck, MD, PhD, and H.S. Micklem, DPhil, in the spring 2011 WAPF’S journal, WISE TRADITIONS (59).  Boyd noted the authors’ statement that the pea-sized dab of toothpaste contains as much fluoride as one glass of fluoridated water.  Boyd asked if adults call the Poison Control Center after drinking the recommended eight glasses of water per day since they would have exceeded EPA’s daily safety dose for fluoride.

Connett et al explain that controlling the concentration of fluoride is not the same thing as controlling the dose of fluoride, which includes not just drinking fluoridated water but the total dose from other sources, like toothpaste, tea, wine, pesticide residues on food, mechanically deboned meat, and food and beverages processed with fluorideated water (207).  With water, the “dose gets larger the more water is drunk; and the larger the dose, the more likely it will cause harm” since fluoride “is…highly toxic” (8-9).  Further, the kidneys only excrete 50 percent of the fluoride ingested; the rest moves mostly into calcifying tissues like the bones and the brain’s pineal gland and concentrates in the kidneys (123).    

Since scientific credentials are hugely important in the debate about fluoridation, do Connett et al have the kind of knowledge needed to assess the toxicity of fluoride? Connett’s PhD is in chemistry from Dartmouth.  He specializes in environmental chemistry and toxicology.  Until his retirement in 2006, he was a full professor at St. Lawrence University.  Additionally, for twenty-five years he’s worked in waste management.  He currently directs the Fluoride Action Network, whose website is a source of valuable information. 

Beck holds two doctorates:  Medicine from the Washington University School of Medicine and Biophysics from the University of California.  He is currently professor emeritus of medical biophysics at the University of Calgary, Canada. 

Micklem’s doctorate is from the University of Oxford.  He publishes mainly in the fields of stem cell biology and immunology.  He is an emeritus professor in the School of Biological Sciences, University of Edinburgh, UK, and has held visiting research fellowships at l’Institut Pasteur in Paris, Stanford University, and New York University School of Medicine.   

Connett et al’s fluoridation history follows the pattern I’ve seen in my research where a handful of determined men with cultural and political power successfully institute a problematic health practice.  Among the most effective men in 1950, when the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) endorsed fluoridation, were Gerald Cox, a researcher at the Mellon Institute whose research was funded by Alcoa aluminum, and Harold Hodge, the chief toxicologist for the U.S. Army’s Manhattan Project, who supervised experiments where uranium and plutonium were injected into unsuspecting hospital patients (80-81).

Connett et al show that in 1950 there were many scientists with grave concerns about putting an untested drug into the public water supply.  From the 1930s onward there was “a considerable amount of scientific literature, particularly from Europe and from the U.S. Department of Agriculture,  that fluoride posed problems to the bone and to the thyroid (83).  These studies were ignored or dismissed. 

The PHS made its momentous decision to validate fluoridation based on two flawed studies, an article by Cox and Hodge, and two ongoing studies whose results were unpublished, so had not yet been subject to peer review (82-83).  It was a rigged process.          

So, once again, industry benefit is part of this history.   At first, the metal industry benefitted, and, now, the phosphate fertilizer industry benefits.  But also there were then and are now many people who believed/believe that fluoridation would help children, especially poor children, have better dental health and who trusted that the organizations to which they looked for scientific truth had actually researched fluoride objectively. 

Astonishingly, Connett et al report that no federal agency accepts responsibility for the safety of fluoridation.   

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has never approved fluoride for ingestion and rates fluoride as an “unapproved drug”—which is why it can mandate the toothpaste warning.  Nor has the FDA subjected fluoride to rigorous randomized clinical trials for either its effectiveness or its long-term safety (270). 

At the Center for Disease Control (CDC), only the Oral Health Division (OHD) is involved with fluoridation, and the OHD is staffed largely by dental personnel.  In 2008, Connett et al note, not one of the 29 staff members had scientific degrees qualifying them to assess the toxicity of fluoride, yet this division aggressively promotes fluoridation throughout the United States (23-24). 

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has an indirect role in that it regulates safe standards for all “contaminants” in drinking water.  In 2002, as it is legally required to do every 10 years, the EPA asked the National Research Council (NRC) to review the current 4 ppm (parts per million) Maximum Contaminant Level (MCL) standard.  The NRC appointed a 12-member panel that, the authors state, was “the most balanced ever appointed in the United States to do any kind of review on fluoride” 137).  This panel issued its 507-page report in March 2006, in which it declared that the seemingly low-level 4 ppm maximum standard was not protective of health (25).

The ADA declared the NRC report irrelevant to water fluoridation on the day it was released—claiming erroneously that the panel only reviewed water fluoridation of 4 ppm.  The panel, in fact, “examined several studies that found adverse effects at levels less than 2 ppm” (138). 

The CDC followed six days later with the same conclusion.  To date, write the authors, the CDC has produced “no comprehensive analysis to support its claim.”  And “it’s hard to believe that in six days Oral Health Division personnel could have read and digested the report, let alone its over 1,100 references” (140).  

Ironically, in 1999, the CDC “finally conceded what many dental researchers had been reporting over the previous two decades:  Fluoride’s predominant mechanism of action was topical, not systemic.  In other words, if fluoride works at all, it does so via direct exposure to the outside of the tooth and not from inside the body” (13).  So, write Connett et al, to continue “the practice of forcing people to ingest fluoride has become even more absurd (269-270).

Part 2 will address fluoride’s specific toxicity in the body and claims of its efficacy.     

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Interesting Information: Homogenization of Milk and Cheese

Interesting Information:  June 13, 2011

Homogenization of Milk and Cheese

Steve Bemis is a retired corporate attorney who farms hay in Michigan for local farmers.  He is also a founding Board member of the Weston A. Price Foundation’s Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund–which works to insure greater access to local foods, especially raw milk.  In the Spring 2011 WAPF journal WISE TRADITIONS, Bemis poses an interesting theory about the real need for homogenization and pasteurization of milk (http://www.realmilk.com/cheese-is-serious.html).  The real reason, poses Bemis, might be the dairy industry’s incredibly profitable cheese business.

Let’s back up for a moment.  In my lifetime, one’s milk was delivered to the door in glass bottles.  One judged the milk by the cream line at the top of the bottle–clearly visible for all to see.  But, the dairy industry wanted that cream to make other products.  Ice cream, yes, but also cheese.

So, industry begin figuring out ways to get that cream.   How they did it was to, first, convince women that milk had to be pasteurized as real milk was unsafe–a claim never proven scientifically.  Second, they instituted, over time, a process of fractionalizing milk into parts and reconstituting some of the parts back into milk–minus all the cream.  (Whole milk might not have the whole amount of cream that came from the cow.)   Says Bemis:  “Milk, milkfat, skim milk powder and other fractions of milk are processed into cheese, butter, ice cream, yogurt, kefir, and other industrial component which are ubiquitous in processed and ultra-processed foods.”  Third, they successfully got the federal government to police this new terrain.  This is how industry works:  maximize profits any way possible, including gaming the information.

Processed, fractionalized milk was then homogenized, so no one could ever see the cream line again.  And, the glass bottles disappeared.  But, here’s where Bemis gets really interesting.  Once milk is homogenized, it “will go rancid within a matter of hours.”  Thus, the milk has to be pasteurized to keep it from going rancid.   “Hence,” writes Bemis, “once the dairy industry took the homogenizing step to follow the dollars, it had to pasteurize.”  Bemis continues:  “And the industry will have to stick with the gospel of pasteurizing, since their current economic structure requires it.”

Hmmmm….  Pasteurization came AFTER homogenization.  Pasteurization was NEVER about food safety.  It was about maximizing profits, fooling customers, and extending shelf life.

So, if you can’t get the whole, raw, living, healthy REAL milk, try to find a dairy that produces a cream line, even if the milk is pasteurized.  Homogenized milk is really, really processed.

Bemis then turns his attention to the cheese issue.  He asks an important question:  “Is contamination of raw milk a huge red herring keeping our eyes off a far more important reason for pasteurizing milk?”  Cheese is a keystone product for the dairy industry.  Cheese is a billion dollar business.  Cheese is probably why both the USDA and the FDA have launched even more intense, fear-based attacks against raw milk and against artisan cheese makers.

The good news, writes Bemis, is that “raw milk consumption continues to surge; FDA’s interstate ban is under legal attack, and FDA’s dogma is regularly being shown to be inconsistent, illogical and unscientific–an embarrassing and ever-deepening quandary in which the agency finds itself due to its steadfast refusal even to hold a dialogue on the subject.”

As for the USDA, one part of it promotes cheese consumption while another part (the new food guide) says its unhealthy.  How’s that for mixed agendas?  It’s time to locate any kind of government recommendations on how to eat somewhere other than the USDA and to put science back into the process.

Interesting Information: Culturing Dairy Uses Up Its Sugars

Interesting Information:  April 20, 2010

Culturing Dairy Uses Up Its Sugars

Sugar is bad news for human health.

A little sugar does hurt–especially the highly-processed, white, refined sugars.  And, on average, we aren’t eating a “little sugar” daily.  A lot of sugar is hidden in our foods. 

Jen Allbritton, in “Zapping Sugar Cravings:  Hair-Raising Stats on this `White Plague’ and How to Reduce Your Need for Sweets,” in WISE TRADITIONS, Winter 2010, 53-59–the journal of the Weston A. Price Foundation, notes that “our ancestors likely indulged in around one tablespoon (60 calories) of honey per day (when available), which is stunningly low compared to today’s average sugar intake of one cup (774 calories) per day!”   And, I’d add that our ancestors didn’t eat fruit out of season, unless they dried it, and the fruit they ate had not yet been bred to be big and very sweet.  Also, the honey they ate was unheated, raw honey.

I’m a lover of whole, real/raw  milk, and we can buy it in local markets and our coops here in Maine.  Between the chickens, the dogs, and John and me, we go through about 2 gallons a week and 2 pints of heavy cream.  I don’t worry about the fat or protein in the milk, but it also contains sugars.  So, I was very interested to read in Allbritton’s article that culturing milk (yogurt, kefir, pima, etc.) uses up most, if not all, of these milk sugars.  Yeah!!!  We’ll now move toward eating even more of the yogurt I make and keep on hand and drinking less of the milk form.  (Look in the recipe section of this blog to see how easy it is to make your own yogurt–and it’s light years better than anything you buy., most of which as added junk like pectin, seaweed, and dangerous dried milk).  This morning we had big bowls of fresh yogurt topped with a mixture of “crispy” nuts, seeds, dried fruits, bits of chocolate!, and dried coconut.  (See the blog recipes for how to make crispy nuts.)  It’s 1:37, and I’m still not hungry.  Tomorrow or the next day,  I’ll make us yogurt smoothies with added raw egg yolks, unrefined coconut oil (it doesn’t stick to your body), and some of the fruit I froze last summer.     

By the way, Allbritton has a nice chart with the sugar content in some common products.  You know that labels split up the sugars by using separate names for them, right?  If industry didn’t play this kind of game, they’d have to show that sugar is often the first ingredient in a product.  So, note that 6 ounces of 99% fat-free flavored Yoplait yogurt contains 8 teaspoons of sugar !!!  Isn’t that the yogurt that’s advertised on tv as a weight-loss tool?  I don’t think so.  All that sugar is going to have you hunting for more food in short order, especially since there’s no fat to satisfy and sustain hunger.  You’ll end up eating MORE and feeling guilty.  And, if you eat more sugar, it becomes a vicious cycle. 

Much of that 1-cup daily average is not immediately detectable simply because it comes in bits and pieces added into our foods, which is why home-cooking whole, nutrient-dense foods is a good thing.  (Remember that the 1-cup average means that many folks are eating way more than 1 cup of sugar a day.)  And, Allbritton is just dealing with processed sugars, she isn’t dealing with the further sugar load of the increased use of grains, starchy vegetables, and so forth. 

Allbritton points to the work of Nancy Appleton, PhD, who wrote SUICIDE BY SUGAR.  She has a blog:  www.nancyappleton.com where you can find details of how lethal sugar consumption is.  For starters, it both si connected with cancer development and feeds cancer cells.  It disturbs the balance in your body in countless, disease-causing ways.  It causes obesity.  It also contributes to destructive, aggressive, restless behavior.  It is addictive and can, Allbritton writes, “rival cocaine in its addictive strength” (55).   

We mostly confine daily sugar ingestion to honey, which we both love.  I do, occasionally, make a really good cake with loads of butter and our fresh eggs and, hopefully, limited amounts of sugar and white flour.  They are a real treat, but not something either of us craves these days. 

Here’s the link to Allbritton’s article:  http://www.westonaprice.org/childrens-health/2108-zapping-sugar-cravings?qh=YToxNjp7aTowO3M6NzoiemFwcGluZyI7aToxO3M6NDoiemFwcyI7aToyO3M6MzoiemFwIjtpOjM7czo1OiJzdWdhciI7aTo0O3M6ODoic3VnYXJpbmciO2k6NTtzOjY6InN1Z2FycyI7aTo2O3M6Nzoic3VnYXJlZCI7aTo3O3M6Nzoic3VnYXIncyI7aTo4O3M6ODoiY3JhdmluZ3MiO2k6OTtzOjc6ImNyYXZpbmciO2k6MTA7czo1OiJjcmF2ZSI7aToxMTtzOjY6ImNyYXZlZCI7aToxMjtzOjY6ImNyYXZlcyI7aToxMztzOjEzOiJ6YXBwaW5nIHN1Z2FyIjtpOjE0O3M6MjI6InphcHBpbmcgc3VnYXIgY3JhdmluZ3MiO2k6MTU7czoxNDoic3VnYXIgY3JhdmluZ3MiO30%3D