Archive for the ‘food’ Category
November 15th, 2006
Dear Straight Talk: You must help me. I am newly married to a wonderful man who has two daughters in college who are coming here for Thanksgiving. They are both a bit cool to me and I’m feeling overwhelmed as they are vegetarians. I would like to have them warm to me, but this holiday stacks the odds against me. What should I serve? There are other people attending who aren’t vegetarian.—Nervous omnivore
Dear Nervous: This holiday always gets the intestinal juices flowing doesn’t it? The savvy omnivore warms a vegetarian by serving organic food. Spend the extra money and buy organic potatoes, vegetables, salad dressing, cranberries, etc.—and an organic turkey. Any of the better supermarkets carries all these things. I think you’ll find your step-daughters will eat heartily of the whole meal (minus the turkey). Pray that they eat milk, butter and eggs—but if they don’t, keep smiling and spare some potatoes from the whip. For dessert, make at least one that fits their diet. A special entrée is not necessary, but since it’s Thanksgiving, I suggest gourmet ravioli that you can boil at the last minute and drizzle with olive oil. Relax and enjoy!
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January 4th, 2006
Dear Readers: Last week I wrote about humans having four bodies, a concept I teach in my teen classes. Today, I will continue with gleanings on the remaining three bodies: the mental body, emotional body, and spiritual body.
The mental body: Since it is part of the physical body, if we want our brain to think well, it needs to be fed well. The link between diet and intelligence is a no-brainer.
Likewise, the brain needs mental exercise. Our frontal lobes are the most elite couch potatoes in history. By age 18, the average child has spent more time in front of a TV screen than at school. A recent literacy test of 19,000 college graduates “appalled” researchers in that only 31% could read and extrapolate from a complex text. There hasn’t been this much brain drain since eating lead paint went out of style.
A couch potato is a good analogy for the body, but for the brain, it’s more accurately a bombing range. Kaboom! Boom! Boom! Having difficulty concentrating? It is essential that we get a grip on “infomania”, the abuse of “always-on” technology. A recent study by the Institute of Psychiatry showed that subjects who were “always on” (texting, phoning, emailing, gaming, wired to music, internet, TV) had a drop in IQ more than double that of subjects stoned on pot.
This is your brain on drugs. ADD and ADHD are the tip of the iceberg.
Advice: Use technology wisely. Keep the young as unplugged as possible.
The emotional body: My gleaning in this realm is what I call the “missing parent syndrome”. In working with teens, the most troubled generally have at least one missing parent. It’s one of those sad things you can practically bet on. Missing parents fall in many categories: the parent has died, the parent gave the child up for adoption, the parent left the scene prior to the child’s birth, the parent was there but is now somewhere (you’re pretty sure he’s alive), the parent lives in a known location but rarely makes contact, the parent is chronically ill or disabled, the parent is in prison, the parent is “checked out” due to drugs or alcohol, the parent is almost never home, the parent is sperm #20576 (really, really not home).
Whether the missing parent can be blamed for their absence is beside the point, what matters is they are missing.
Divorce is not the crime Dr. Laura makes it out to be. Indeed, it’s horrible for kids, and should be a last resort, but it’s nowhere close to the chronic trauma of having a missing parent. If, after divorcing, both parents continue to be present in the lives of their children, there is not a missing parent issue.
You want to keep your kids intact? Stay in their lives. Regardless of your faults or how bad you think you screwed up, stay with them—or stay in regular contact with them. No matter what your story is, there’s something about you they need.
The spiritual body: Now recovered, a woman in her early twenties came to me for help with depression and thoughts of suicide. When I asked her why she wanted to take her life she said, “If all there is to life is what you’re ordering at Starbucks and what kind of jeans you’re buying at the mall, what’s the point?” This woman was experiencing a massive spiritual crisis. Among her peers, all she saw was rampant materialism which left her empty and cold.
We are a society of work addicts. Work, spend, sleep; work, spend, sleep. (Try saying that three times real fast…)
There is a reason every culture had their Sabbath or holy day. The spiritual body needs its own day to regenerate and reconnect.
Spiritual connection comes in many shapes and colors: it can be through nature, church, family, friends, a true love, it could be from service, athletics, music, art, caring for a yard or garden. It can come from rest, prayer, and contemplation.
Be a good workaholic and schedule it in. That’s right. It’s your new job.
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December 28th, 2005
Dear Readers: Shall we talk about food? Now that we’re stuffed from the holidays, resolved to go to the gym and start that diet?
In classes I teach for teens, I explain that humans actually have four bodies. No, not four stomachs! (Despite the obesity crisis, we are not cows!) I’m talking about the four bodies of the human—which the teens figure correctly to be the physical body, the mental body, the emotional body, and the spiritual body.
What has happened to these bodies in the last 50 years? Why is obesity an epidemic? Why is mental illness the largest world-wide human disability (surpassing cancer)? What has happened to emotional commitment, with over a third of all babies in the US born to unmarried women? And what is the meaning of life? (It’s not really designer jeans, is it?)
Like a crumbling pyramid, all four “bodies” of the human need repair and I want to share with you some ideas to take into the New Year.
Since foundations are crucial, let’s start with the physical body, the base of the pyramid. Not only are we obese, but our children are plagued with allergies, asthma, diabetes and high blood pressure. (Can you imagine being a kid with high blood pressure!?)
So, yes, let’s talk about food….. because what we eat is easily responsible for 90% of our problems.
Does anyone have a clue what the ideal human diet is? We are so without a compass that half the population recently bought into the idea of eliminating carbohydrates! I hope that means you’ll have an open mind to what I’m going to say….
I want to share with you the work of Dr. Weston A. Price. Price was a retired dentist, who, in the early 1900s searched the globe for clans of people with perfect teeth. He figured if he could find perfect teeth, he would find perfect health. His idea of perfection was strict. Tooth decay had to be absolutely unheard of, including baby teeth and wisdom teeth. Crowded or crooked teeth had to be equally nonexistent and the slightest overlap or overbite eliminated the group from study.
Price discovered 14 groups of people with perfect teeth. They were of different races and from different environments. As he expected, the groups enjoyed perfect health, mentally and physically. Price studied their eating habits and found that the diets of these groups were equivalent. Some lived in the mountains and some at the sea, but the proportions and food groups were the same. The people even looked the same.
To quote from the Weston A. Price Foundation website at www.westonaprice.org: “Dr. Price’s research demonstrated that humans achieve perfect physical form and perfect health generation after generation only when they consume nutrient-dense whole foods and the vital fat-soluble activators found exclusively in animal fats.”
What I like about Price’s work is that the diet wasn’t fabricated out of “logic” or as an excuse to sell products. It was based on actual observations of real groups of people who enjoyed perfect health. The ideal human diet was a discovery, not an invention.
For nineteen years I’ve raised four kids on this organic whole foods, fat-generous diet and witnesses can attest that none of us have been sick (knock wood), and there exists no surplus fat among us. It’s economical, too, because there aren’t the cravings for expensive junk food and there is little need for medicine.
The book I recommend is “Nourishing Traditions” by Sally Fallon, published by the Weston Price Foundation. It contains an overview of Price’s research plus recipes on how to prepare delicious food in these traditional ways.
Of course, the body needs exercise, too. It’s been proven that a smoker who works-out regularly and strenuously has better health than a non-smoker who sits on his duff all day. That tells you something about the power of smoking. Oops, I mean exercise!
I’m going to throw out an idea to chew on: Why not make exercise one of the pillars of public education? How about four “R’s” instead than three? Readin’, Ritin’, ‘Rithmatic, and Runnin’. If intense, age-appropriate physical education started in kindergarten and continued through high school, not only would everyone think better, but we’d have conditioned a generation of life-long athletes. (I hear the groans of teenagers…. that’s because they haven’t been conditioned.)
Learning and discipline would be so much easier, I wager you could replace two hours of academics with two hours of athletic/dietary education and get higher academic test scores. (Now I hear adults groaning…..) There are charter schools for music, for the arts. I humbly dare a charter school to form based on food and athletics.
In next week’s column, I’ll continue with the rest of the human pyramid: the brain, the emotions, and our connection with mystery.
Happy New Year!
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