The Holistic Kitchen

From Michael Pollan’s Food Rules An Eater’s Manual ¹

1. Eat food.
2. Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.
3. Avoid food products containing ingredients that no ordinary human would keep in the pantry.
4. Avoid food products that contain high-fructose corn syrup.
5. Avoid foods that have some form of sugar (or sweetener) in the top three ingredients.

Sticking to these rules (and they are only the first five, from Pollan’s Food Rules¹)  will go a looong way toward maintaining a healthy (and healing) diet for you and your loved ones!

¹Pollan, Michael.  Food Rules, An Eater’s Manual.  Penguin Books, 2009.  5-13.

If you’ve read Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food, per my recommendation or otherwise, you’ll know this about what is considered FOOD:

1. Don’t eat anything your great grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.
2. Don’t eat anything incapable of rotting.
3. Avoid "food products" that are

 The great thing about liquid nutrition is that you can blend in all sorts of crazy nourishing things and still feel like you’re drinking a fun treat! If you pack a lot of nutrition in, a little bit can be very sustaining for one whose appetite is compromised. AND it allows you to take advantage of raw foods that are easily digested and available for the body to put to work, right away.

What’s the big deal?  Plastic storage containers are so convenient!  Here’s a great blog post by Dr. Garret Wdowin that puts it into "clear" (ahem) perspective:

Read On!

Often times, cancer patients are told by their physicians to be careful how much fruit they consume, due to its sugar content and potential to spike the glucose, resulting in higher levels of insulin growth factor hormones.

According to Jennifer Murray, "Eating a low GL-diet does not mean giving up good-for-you foods such as fruits and vegetables".

Murray further reports:

"Even though many fruits have a moderate to high GL count due to their high sugar content, it’s unlikely that one would eat enough to spike blood sugar levels the way even small amounts of processed carbs will. There are many fruits that are very low in GL and have little impact on blood sugar."

"A low-GL value is considered 10 or less, and one 4-ounce serving of the following fruits all have a GL value of less than 10":

• Fresh apricots
• Avocado
• Blackberries
• Cantaloupe
• Fresh cherries
• Grapefruit
• Grapes
• Honeydew
• Kiwi
• Lemon
• Mandarins
• Nectarines
• Oranges
• Raspberries
• Fresh watermelon

Research in the Linus Pauling Institute at Oregon State University suggests that some natural food compounds, which previously have been studied for their ability to prevent cancer, may be able to play a more significant role in treating it – working side-by-side with the conventional drugs that are now used in chemotherapy.

Article Date: 01 Sep 2009 – 5:00 PDT

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Point of clarification:  Acute inflammation is a natural and necessary part of our immune system to repair tissue and aid healing.

Chronic inflammation, on the other hand, can be considered a nasty beast that confuses your immune response and is definitely harmful to your health!

Where does it come from?

• CHRONIC  CELLULAR STRESS – from toxins,  from a decreased sensitivity to insulin, known as insulin resistance,  yeast overgrowth (candida),  a stagnant colon and/or irregular elimination (yes, I’m talking bowel movements) are among the many sources of chronic cellular stress that lead to chronic inflammation.
• STRESS AS WE KNOW IT– chronic lack of sleep, high stress job, endless worry  and especially persistent anger or depression, all can trigger an overproduction of hormones that stimulate inflammatory response.

Combine this circulating surplus with a trigger of many possible sorts, such as an injury, a virus or cellular damage from oxidation (free radicals) and you have a condition of cellular chaos in which normal checks and balances that are supposed to control activity are turned on their ear. The result is invariably disease of some nature and quite often, cancer. In the case of disease such as cancer, the mechanism that is supposed to “shut off” a healthy inflammatory healing response, simply doesn’t and the result is a chronic ongoing surplus of inflammation.   Add to this , the fact that the chronic inflammation blocks cell death, allowing cancer cells to merrily flourish. So in very simple terms, cancer cells stimulate their own growth from chronic inflammation and are protected from death by it, as well.  To make matters even worse, neighboring immune cells, become confused by this and don’t respond to the fire whistle – they don’t even try to fight the tumor.

The good news:  this process does have a weakness and it can be exploited with readily available whole foods

Using Food to Fight Cancer: An Introduction

Saturday, August 22, 2009

11:00am – 12:00pm

Whole Foods Market, Chandler, Arizona

Free

To RSVP for this event please email sp.chr.marketing@wholefoods.com, or call (480) 821-9447 and ask for Marketing.

I believe that the state of health in this great country boils down to one word and one word only:

CONVENIENCE.

We are a nation that has embraced convenience in our food supply at an ever increasing rate since WWII. In every way, this has had a negative impact on our health. From the way food is grown and packaged to the way we are treated when we’re sick, it’s all for the sake of speed – growing faster, spending less time in the kitchen and getting over the symptoms of illness as quickly as possible.

As a result, our convenient food is loaded with chemicals to preserve it, speed growth, inhibit natural selection, and make sure it looks healthy on the shelf. Then, as if that isn’t bad enough, much of it comes packaged in plastic that has been in the freezer and is tossed in the microwave. Frequently, the types of plastic used in convenience food packaging is not a high grade plastic and in great likelihood may be leaching Bisphenol A (BPA) into our foods both during freezing and heating. The effects of this compound in our food and bodies has been linked to hormonal cancers and insulin resistance, just for starters.

So what’s the answer?

Get back to basics. Slow down. Make time to prepare foods from scratch, using fresh, whole foods. Make it a family activity – quality time together creating foods to enjoy over the next week, stored in glass containers. Make the shopping trip an event too – teaching your kids what to look for in the store and on food labels is an irreplaceable life lesson. The time you spend will pay off in lower healthcare costs!

Don’t know your way around the kitchen? There are plenty of options available today to learn. Get your girlfriends together for a day, batch cook together under the instruction of the one who knows how to cook, divvy it all up and viola! A fun day and meals for the week!

OR you could hire a Personal Chef to do it all for you, for the same cost as dining out in a quality restaurant, without ever leaving home.

The bottom line is that we can help ourselves avoid disease by avoiding convenience! Yes, of course there are tradeoffs. But if you are already ill, your remaining quality of life and chances of survival will be much greater if you go back to an unprocessed, whole foods diet.

Stay tuned – The Holistic Kitchen website is designed to help you learn how.

With healthy regards,

Chef Nancy