Archive for January, 2012

A Foodatic or Fanatic about Food

Friday, January 27th, 2012

“When you wake up in the morning, Pooh,” said Piglet at last, “what’s the first thing you say to yourself?”

“What’s for breakfast?” said Pooh. “What do you say, Piglet?”

“I say, I wonder what’s going to happen exciting today?” said Piglet.

Pooh nodded thoughtfully.

“It’s the same thing,” he said. (The World of Pooh by A. A. Milne, pp. 147-148)

This is the way I feel every morning when I look forward to my pint of lacto fermented cereal. Afterwards I realize that I have to wait another 24 hours for the repeat performance.

This is more than just a matter of taste. True, I enjoy the taste, but more than taste, I feel the life of that food flowing into me. And this, more than taste, is what I want from breakfast. This makes breakfast an exciting beginning to another day.

It is the power of such breakfasts that make me realize others have to know about such foods. It is such breakfasts that make me into a “foodatic” i.e. a fanatic about food. I have come to realize that it is the food we eat that drives our lives.

Ellis Hein

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Lacto Fermented Beets

Wednesday, January 18th, 2012

Recipe for Making Lacto Fermented Beets

Sally Fallon, in Nourishing Traditions, advises to cut the beets into 1/4 inch cubes and to bake before fermenting. Her rationale is that this helps prevent alcohol production

Using my recipe, you should be able to produce lacto fermented beets using grated, raw beets and still control yeast growth, thus preventing production of alcohol.

Lacto Fermented Text

Lacto Fermented Beets. Enjoy!

  • Wash, peel and grate enough beets to make 6 to 7 cups packed, grated beets.
  • Add one tablespoon Celtic Sea Salt.
  • Add one capsule of Spectrabiotic.
  • Mix together well and let stand for about an hour or until the juices are drawn out of the beets.
  • Spoon a one inch layer into the bottom of a wide mouth pint canning jar.
  • Use the vegetable pounder to pack the beets into the jar.
  • Spoon in another layer and pack again until the jar is filled to within an inch of the top. (I use two sizes of pounders; one 2 1/2 inches diameter and another about 1/1/4 inches diameter. As the juices begin to rise above the vegetables in the jar, I switch to the smaller diameter pounder. I can thus pack the vegetables without making the liquid run over.)
  • Clean off the jar rim and cap tightly with a good lid.
  • Fill a second pint jar. (You can use 1/2 pint jars to make the measure come out right if necessary.)
  • Allow the jars to sit at room temperature for three days. Then refrigerate.
  • The beets can be eaten immediately or allowed to age a little in the refrigerator before being eaten.

A Word About Spectrabiotic

I have not used inoculants other than the Spectrabiotic called for in this recipe. This blend of eight beneficial bacteria are microblended with AFA algae to provide the bacteria with the nutrients for vigorous growth and establishment. This product is excellent as a probiotics supplement and makes very good tasting lacto fermented vegetables. Using Spectrabiotic as an inoculant for lacto fermented vegetables and lacto fermented grains has been my innovation.

Musings

Growing up I couldn’t stand the taste of beets. I don’t know what it is about the beets I grow here in Wyoming, but they don’t taste like the vegetable I was made to eat as a child in Oklahoma. Maybe climate has something to do with it. I am sure PlanetFood has something to do with the much improved flavor. I know it makes my cucumbers and squash far better than the ordinary.

So I have had to laugh at myself. When I first discovered I liked my beets, the reflex of disliking them was so strong I nearly couldn’t force myself to swallow. But the good flavor of these beets (whether raw, cooked into soup, or lacto fermented) has won me over.

Ellis Hein

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Stay Healthy

Wednesday, January 11th, 2012

“Why not just bless it and eat it?” was the response of an older couple to my children’s explanation of why we couldn’t stay healthy and eat foods containing chemical additives, preservatives, pesticide residues, and other toxic or non-food additions. They seemed to think that somehow “blessing” the food would either change its chemical nature or else make us tolerant of what was never intended to be eaten.

Steve Gagné in Energetics of Food says, The truth is, anything that is wholesome and healthy to eat is already blessed by God through nature…

There are many religious people who pray before eating or eat blessed food who also suffer from serious health problems and rationalize their problems as being of the body, and therefore not important in the greater spiritual view. How sad. What a dualistic view of life! The body is not separate from the spirit—it is an expression and celebration of spirit!

The human organism is capable of maintaining health, of rebuilding organs and tissues, and repairing damaged tissue without making a mistake IF certain conditions are met. Failure to meet those conditions or deliberately ignoring those conditions, at best, puts obstacles in the path of your body’s efforts to keep healthy. At worst, we bring on our demise. We like to imagine that because of our advances in medical science and the availability of medical care we are granted license to abuse those conditions with impunity. However, our greatest medical advancement of all time will be when all people, medical doctors included, come to understand that our greatest asset to healthy living is to joyfully live within the conditions of our creaturehood.

These conditions are:

  1. Our food must come from nature.
  2. We need to consume nutrient dense foods containing a wealth of minerals, vitamins, antioxidants, amino acids, fatty acids, and more. All this must be in a naturally balanced, interrelated, and easily digested form. One example of such a food is Simplexity Health’s Alpha Sun Algae®.
  3. We need to avoid environmental toxins. We may argue that it is impossible to avoid toxic exposures. Then it is time to change the demands we place on our environment.
  4. Drink plenty of fresh, pure water.
  5. Get plenty of exercise in fresh, pure air.
  6. Get sufficient rest.

There are probably many more items that one could add to the list, but we will start with these six.

Even the “bless it and eat it” people would not propose taking a car trip by driving a straight line to their destination. They exercise care to follow the road to be sure of arriving and to be sure their car is undamaged. These six conditions (plus others that may need to be added) are the road on which to travel to stay healthy to the end of your days.

Ellis Hein

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Nutritional Illusion

Saturday, January 7th, 2012

Nutritional illusions are as effective as sticking your head in the sand when it comes to having a body that functions properly. If only we can control what demands are made upon our systems, maybe no one will notice our deficiencies. However, one author puts it this way:

…We suffer primarily not from our vices or our weaknesses, but from our illusions, we are haunted, not by reality, but by those images we have put in place of reality.

To discover our illusions will not solve the problems of our world. But if we do not discover them we will never discover our real problems. To dispel the ghosts which populate the world of our making will not give us the power to conquer the real enemies of the real world or to remake the real world. But it may help us discover that we cannot make the world in our image. It will liberate us and sharpen our vision. It will clear away the fog so we can face the world we share with all mankind. (Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image or what Happened to the American Dream, 1962, p. 6)

Those words were published 50 years ago. Our sense of reality has not improved in the intervening decades. We live in a state of physical, mental, and spiritual illusion fed by the hype and fantasy of the media on the one hand and by our nutritional illusion on the other hand. It would be one thing if this situation were forced upon us. But the truth is we have chosen to be ruled by our created “reality,” our lie.

Jeremiah described the situation in ancient Israel as, “An appalling and horrible thing has happened in the land; the prophets prophecy falsely, and the priests rule at their direction; my people love to have it so, but what will you do when the end comes?” (Jeremiah 5: 30-31)

All dreams, all illusions, come suddenly to an end. For better or worse our eyes are opened to the reality we have so desperately sought to obscure. We have fed our bodies on the results of convenience and economic gain. We have nourished our souls on the prattle of self serving politicians, preachers, and public figures. Our conception of world relationships is bound up in college sports.

When the god of your making falls from its pedestal, you can either quickly set it back up, hoping no one noticed, or you can realize your error and change.

It may come as a surprise to many people, but the foods you eat can have a profound influence upon the state of your mind and spirit. Also, the things you feed your mind and soul can affect your choices of food. Our liberation from falsehood and the imagined reality of the dream-makers will involve our whole being feeding upon true food (physical food, mental food, and spiritual food, if we can make those divisions).

You can’t escape the world of the illusion by eating the modern artificial and synthetic foods. To return to reality, you need to eat foods that are completely rooted and grounded in nature. You may want to try Earth’s First Food, which offers your body a complete package of nutrients instead of a nutritional illusion.

You may also be interested in the message of the first Quakers. See the New Foundation Fellowship website for more information.

Ellis Hein

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Two Comparisons Featuring AFA Algae

Wednesday, January 4th, 2012

The Big Three: AFA Algae, Spirulina, and Chlorella

Spirulina, Chlorella, and Aphanizomenon flos-aquae ( AFA Algae ) are three species of edible micro algae on the market today. Chart 1 looks at some of the differences among the three, comparing such things as:

  • how it is produced
  • does it come with organic certification
  • what are the effects on the nervous system
  • does the lipid profile contain Omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids
  • does it offer protection from immune cell free radicals
  • does it stimulate mobilization of immune cells
  • does it stimulate macrophage activity
  • what is the phycocyanin content
  • does it help with stem cell growth and protection

Why Be Particular About Which Brand of AFA Algae?

There are many brands of AFA Algae algae on the market. Since they were all harvested from the same lake, does it matter which brand you choose? The information on Chart 2 compares the chlorophyll content of several brands. Chlorophyll is a nutrient that is easily destroyed by over heating, and as such it is a good indicator of the loss of other heat sensitive nutrients.

Ellis Hein

If you are interested in woodturning, see my other blog, Wood Turned Art.

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